The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

268 chapter 22him, “with Kant vigorously signaling for him to stop.” He did this notbecause he was angry at Kant’s tardiness, but merely because “it was againstGreen’s maxim” to deviate from any prudent plan. 18 In the play Hippel hashis Green character declare, “I do not get up because I have slept enough,but because it is 6:00 a.m. I go to eat not because I am hungry, but becausethe clock has struck 12:00.” 19The case shows vividly the force of a bourgeois and even a specificallyEnglish and nonconformist version of reason in the Enlightenment. BesidesKant and his English merchant and Smith and his Scottish ones, there isVoltaire, who himself made a fortune in finance before he was thirty—headded to it throughout his life, and died one of the richest commonersin Europe—and the English merchant to whom he dedicated in 1732 hisplay Zaïre.In Hippel’s play an academic character, based it seems on Kant as he wasin 1765, age forty-one, before Green took entire charge, complains that in hisown, nonbourgeois work, prudence and plan cannot rule: “A dissertation . . .is not a bank draft. With such work one cannot keep hours.” Kuehn remarksthat “little by little [Kant] learned to write philosophy like a bank draft,”until in the year before Green’s death he produced The Grounding:Green’s effect on Kant cannot be overestimated....[Kant] gave up playing cardsto please Green. His visits to the theatre became rarer, and late in life they ceasedalmost altogether. Green was completely tone deaf....Kant, “at least in his earlyyears” [wrote a contributor to the memorial lectures for Kant in 1804] “listenedto good music with pleasure.” He gave up that custom as well. ...The elegantMagister [that is, a German academic before his professorship] with a somewhatirregular and unpredictable lifestyle changed into a man of principle with anexceedingly predictable way of life. He became more and more like Green. ...Thedays of the whirlpool of social diversions were coming to an end—not suddenly,but slowly: maxim by maxim....Kant’s view ofmaxims, as necessary for buildingcharacter [“morals themselves remain exposed to corruption of all sorts aslong as this guiding thread is lacking, this ultimate norm”], was, at least in part,indebted to Green’s way of life. It was not an accident that in the lectures onanthropology in which Kant spoke of maxims, he often claimed that the Englishhad the most solid understanding. He himself relied on the judgment of his Englishfriend. 20The Kantian tradition in ethical philosophy, then, begins with a monomaniafor Prudence Only—a prudence worthy of Jeremy Bentham and themodern economists. In a not charming sense it is bourgeois. That such