The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the monomania of immanuel kant 267There was another, personal reason for Kant’s fascination with ethicalmaxims and his increasing rigor in hedging them off from the life world.This was his intimate friendship from age forty-one to age sixty-two withJoseph Green, an English trader in timber, fruit, and spices, a Hull man wholived most of his adult life in Königsberg. Kant had many friends within thebourgeoisie of Königsberg, as did Adam Smith at the same time in Glasgowand Edinburgh. The parallels between Kant/Green and Smith/Hume arestriking; and Mr. Green was in fact a conduit for Humean ideas to Kant. Asthe Kant scholar Lewis White Beck expressed it in his brilliant parody of1979 (an alleged manuscript of Boswell’s account of a [nonexistent] visit tothe Königsberg group in 1785), “Dr. Smith had told me of an English merchanthere resident, a Mr. Green, a man of prudence & virtue.” 14Green was “the most intimate friend Kant ever had.” 15 Like Kant a lifelongbachelor, Green spent every single afternoon and early evening for fullytwenty-one years in Kant’s company, supplying the philosopher withdetailed criticism. The criticism, Kuehn notes, seems to have resulted in acomparative lucidity in Kant’s writing style, lost after Green’s death in 1786.Kant’s writings during the friendship contained “many phrases and idioms . . .that can be traced back to the language of merchants, such as ‘borrowing,’‘capital,’ and so forth.” 16 One might guess that Kant refused offers from theuniversities at Erlangen and Jena in 1769–1770 in part because his specialfriend of by then three years’ standing was attached by business to Königsberg.Kant did mention his “very wide circle of acquaintances and friends”in the letter awkwardly taking back an initial acceptance of the offer fromErlangen. 17 He also declined a call to Halle in 1778.Green’s influence on Kant was psychologically profound and philosophicallyimportant. According to Kuehn, Green’s example transformed Kant’scharacter. Mr. Green was above all a “Man of the Clock,” the title of a comedyin 1765 by the famous progressive Königsberg playwright and memberof their set, one of Kant’s followers and later his benefactor, Theodor Hippel,spoofing Green.Mr. Green was not difficult to spoof. Kuehn recounts that Kant andGreen had arranged one day to take a carriage ride together the next morningat exactly 8:00. Kant was a little late. He had not yet become the ProfessorKant by whose comings and goings one could adjust one’s watch. YetGreen, true to his maxim of following the clock, set off in the carriage anyway.Passing Kant hurrying along the road toward the house, he drove past