The existence of Immanuel Kant’s mid-day dinner diaries (Mittagsbüchlein) that he kept as an old man to aid his failing memory will come as news to many readers, while for others it will ring a distant bell, but I suspect very few have read these late writings of Kant’s. They are mentioned in the Kant literature from the very beginning of Kant literature, but only occasionally have they been used or quoted and they are otherwise buried in scholarly footnotes to other parts of Kant’s often forbidding body of Nachlaß. They were initially excluded from the Academy edition (23: 514) and only fragments have been published. A study of these texts will not likely alter anyone’s reading of Kant’s philosophical writings, but they do offer biographical insight into his last years, and it is remarkable that such a distinctive collection of texts from Kant’s Nachlaß has, until now, evaded the light of proper scholarship.

Werner Stark’s 2024 edition of two of these diaries (Holzboog/a-b) consists of three parts. First, a detailed introduction to aspects of Kant’s last years that bear on the diaries in general. Of particular interest is an extended account (pp. 22–8) of the pharmacist Karl Gottfried Hagen, a former student and later university colleague of Kant’s who belonged to Kant’s table guests of the decade prior to these diaries and who converted Kant to Lavoisier’s new chemistry. Second, the two diaries are presented (pp. 70–121) with each page consisting of a photograph of a diary page and its transcription arranged to the side and below, approximating the placement of the text in the original. Third, these eighty days of diary entries are contextualised with about 100 pages of excerpts from six eyewitnesses to Kant’s life: William Motherby – the likely author (pp. 132–3, 161–2) of an anonymous memoir in Die Freimüthige (Anonymous Reference von Kotzebue and Merkel1804) as well as of the ‘18^th Letter’ in Jachmann’s Kant biography (Jachmann Reference Jachmann1804: 199–220), J. G. Hasse (Reference Hasse1804), J. D. Metzger (Reference Metzger1804), R. B. Jachmann (Reference Jachmann1804), E. A. C. Wasianski (Reference Wasianski1804), and F. T. Rink (Reference Rink1805). Here, one finds numerous connections between Kant’s diary entries and the memoirs of his friends. The volume closes with an essay by Kurt Röttgers on eating and Kant’s dinner parties, which were the occasion for the Mittagsbüchlein.

Five diaries are extant, one exists as a handwritten copy, and a seventh was published in Degering (Reference Degering1926), with fragments of two additional diaries in Wasianski (Reference Wasianski1804) (along with fragments from still extant diaries published in two volumes of Nachlaß – Ak. vols. 15 and 22 – and in Mecklenburg Reference Mecklenburg1970). So, we have content from nine diaries altogether: two represented by a single fragment each, plus seven complete diaries, two of which are now transcribed and published by Stark in the present book, with the remaining five due to be published in the coming year in vol. 23.2 of the Academy edition of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, edited by Fabian Burt, Michael Hackl, and Maja Schepelmann.

A table of these diaries (shown here) is based on a similar table in Stark (p. 47) and supplemented with additional information from Fabian Burt. The last two (8 and 9) refer to the now-lost diaries quoted by Wasianski.

One unresolved mystery here is a three-day overlap between BBAW-2 and Holzboog/b; the two diaries list the same dinner guests for those days, but different food.

A tenth diary was mentioned by its owner, Garlieb Merkel (1769–1859), in two of his own writings, but that provided few details: only that a mouse was living in Kant’s desk (Pult) and that he needed a buckle; cf. Merkel (Reference Merkel, von Kotzebue and Merkel1827: 758; Reference Merkel1839–40, 2: viii) and Stark’s discussion (pp. 45–6). If this is the same mouse appearing among the pages of the Opus postumum – ‘Den 22sten April trat in mein 79stes Jahr … Von der Maus die am Bureau nagt’ (22: 134) – then the Merkel diary could plausibly date from April 1802 (directly after the L 59 diary).

The backstory to these diaries involves Kant’s morning pipe, his dinner parties, and the mental decline he suffered over the last few years of his life. The pipe and the dinner parties had been going on for a while: Kant began each morning in his study with a pipeful of tobacco and a cup of weak tea, and with the installation of a kitchen in his house in the spring of 1787, he began to eat at home, inviting one to five guests – but usually two – for his one o’clock dinner. Those simple, three-course meals provided the occasion for a conversation that sometimes lasted hours and at which Kant was the master of ceremonies. According to Wasianski, ‘Kant used to say that one should be able to begin a conversation with roast veal and end with comets, without breaking the connection’ (Czygan Reference Czygan1892: 126). His reputation for group conversational skills had always been high, but, by 1800, Kant was making notes to himself on odd scraps of paper (Memorienzettel) to help keep those dinner parties straight – who drank red wine, who drank white, favourite foods of different guests, and which topics to discuss.

Meanwhile, the walls of Kant’s study had turned grey from the smoke of his morning pipe – Scheffner writes of wiping away the soot with his finger during a conversation with Kant and Hippel (Scheffner Reference Scheffner1816: 36–7) – and so a fresh coat of whitewash was desired, which involved clearing out the room along with its clutter of loose papers, many of which were sheets and scraps with these Memorienzettel. This was in August 1802 and was recorded by Wasianski, Kant’s closest friend during his last decade of life:

To help bring order back into these dinners – what for Kant was a signal part of his day – Wasianski assembled little sextodecimo booklets – a printer’s sheet folded in half four times, cut and sewn into little booklets of a dozen or so sheets and with two daily entries to a page.

Because Wasianski described making these diaries immediately after his account of the whitewashing, one might conclude that this was also when he first made them – but actually Kant had been using them for nearly a year, the oldest known diary beginning on 15 November 1801, the very time when Kant was handing over all his domestic and financial affairs to Wasianski (Reference Wasianski1804: 78–9) – see the quote that opens Stark’s study (pp. 1–2). At least since 1799, Kant had been jotting down notes of this nature, interspersed on sheets of what would later be called his Opus postumum (much of this is collected in Buchenau and Lehmann (Reference Buchenau and Lehmann1925: 49–75)) and on loose scraps of paper. Jachmann tells us that, by 1800, Kant was making ‘notes (Gedankenzettel) for recording the travellers visiting him. On these small sheets of paper, he finally wrote down every little thing that he had been told by others or that had occurred to him’ (Jachmann Reference Jachmann1804: 196; quoted on p. 175).

And by the next year (1801), he was having trouble remembering much of anything – stopping in the middle of a sentence after losing his way – ‘the power of the greatest thinker gradually diminished to the point of complete mental impotence’ (Jachmann Reference Jachmann1804: 197; quoted on p. 175). Hasse’s report is similar: ‘from 1801 on his mental strength was noticeably decreased and his thoughts no longer as orderly as usual; yet bright insights were not unusual, like flashes of lightning passing through his head, that showed his uncommon acumen and were worthy of attention’ (Hasse Reference Hasse1804: 8). This fits the observations collected at the end of this book: Kant’s cognitive faculties are in steep decline, but every so often a gear slides into place and some bright insight emerges.

Now to the Holzboog diaries. At some point, they were bound together in what appeared to be the correct order, with the collection of March/April entries followed by the November/December entries, and the pages were numbered (1–43) in the top outer corners. Eventually, someone compared the various day/date combinations with calendars from 1802 and 1803, noticed the mistake, and the diaries were rebound in the correct order, now with the pages running 23–43, 1–22. The text in these diaries is written in both ink and pencil. Wasianski wrote many of the words in ink, and Kant appears to have written all of the words in pencil. The entries get longer over time, some of which is a result of Wasianski’s contributions. Each diary covers 40 days, but the second has more than twice as many words.

Because the original manuscript is directly available on the page, Stark was able to keep his transcription lightly marked, allowing for a less-encumbered reading (pp. 52, 67–8). The words in italics are in Kant’s hand (although there are exceptions to this), while the rest are Wasianski’s. Words crossed out in the manuscript have a dotted underline in the transcription. Underlined words and vertical and angled lines in the manuscript, deleting entire passages, are left unmarked in the transcription, and words inserted in the manuscript are placed in <wedges>.

Much of the text is organisational in function: Wasianski begins each entry with the date and day (e.g. ‘den 28 November Sontag’) followed by the invited guests (it had long been Kant’s practice to invite his dinner guests the same morning, even though most of them had standing invitations for certain days). The food to be served was listed directly after the guests, and occasionally a guest’s name would be replaced with another. Each page has two daily entries, and Wasianski probably wrote in the dates and guests when he made each booklet. Many of Kant’s additions concern the food and wine preferred by each guest, but many topics of conversation show up in the diaries as well, often just a word or short phrase, written down before dinner as a reminder of what to discuss, and some were perhaps written later as a record of what had been said or done – for instance, on Sunday, 27 March, ‘Heute kommen meine Verwandte ihre Pensionen abzuholen’ is changed to the past tense (‘abgeholt’) and, on 14 December, Kant wrote that ‘Herr Stadt-Rat Buck hat mir gedankt’. One of the longer entries consists of several verses from a Latin drinking song (pp. 56–7). There are notes on Kant’s financial matters (pp. 59–61) and certain of his publications (pp. 61–2). Kant’s love of snuff is marked by several references to the Bolongaro (p. 62) and St Omer (p. 66) brands of tobacco, just as the mentions of galvanism point to his firm belief at the time that electricity in the upper atmosphere was adversely affecting his health (Jachmann Reference Jachmann1804: 159, 206–7; Wasianski Reference Wasianski1804: 49–51; Rink Reference Rink1805: 109–11).

Kant’s various physical ailments make a regular appearance on the roster of dinner-time topics, but some were also important topics of the day – such as the theories of Gall and Mesmer, or Jenner’s work on smallpox – with Kant tailoring his guest list to match his interests. Kant favoured younger men to dine with him, and prominent here was a group of four young physicians (p. 51): William Motherby, C. G. Reusch, H. E. C. Laubmeyer, and C. J. H. Elsner (a fifth would have been J. B. Jachmann, had he not already left Königsberg in 1801). All were former students of Kant’s, and three were sons of old friends: merchant Robert Motherby, professor of physics Carl Daniel Reusch, and professor of medicine Christoph Friedrich Elsner. The young Motherby had studied medicine in Edinburgh and Berlin, and Reusch in Berlin and Vienna; both returned to Königsberg in 1800 and are mentioned in the Holzboog diaries 31 times between the two of them. Reusch brought news of Gall from Vienna (p. 162), and Motherby brought news of Jenner (p. 162). The diaries as a whole cover the period when Jenner’s new method of vaccination against smallpox (first tested in 1796) was being introduced in Europe. Motherby learned of it while in Edinburgh, brought a sample of the vaccine back to Königsberg, and opened a clinic – and it was Motherby who changed Kant’s mind regarding the safety of Jenner’s vaccination (pp. 162–9), as opposed to the much older method of inoculation or variolation brought from the Levant by Lady Montague in the 1720s.

Along with these explorations of specific topics, Stark offers three take-aways (pp. 219–21) from his study of the diaries and the accounts by Kant’s colleagues: (1) from at least the summer of 1802, Kant was no longer able to organise his daily and weekly schedule, but (2) rumours to the contrary, neither was he wholly lost to the world, although (3) the evidence of Kant’s declining cognitive abilities during these final years supports the conclusion of earlier scholars (pp. 13–14) that Kant could not have been responsible for later editions of his works, such as the second edition of the Tugendlehre (1803).