METHUSELAH ARCHIVE / PEOPLE / IMMANUEL KANT
Immanuel Kant

IMMANUEL KANT

1724–1804 · Prussian (German)
role:Philosopher, professor at the University of Königsberg
nationality:Prussian (German)
connection:Hufeland sent Kant a copy of his 1797 treatise Die Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (the work later retitled Makrobiotik from its 1805 third edition). Kant responded with an open letter that engaged the longevity project approvingly and extended it to the power of the mind to master morbid feelings by resolution. Hufeland published the letter in his Journal der practischen Arzneykunde, and Kant then collected it as the third part of The Conflict of the Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten, 1798). Kant appears here as an endorser: the foremost philosopher of the age engaged with and lent his name to Hufeland's longevity doctrine, which is part of how the macrobiotic programme accrued intellectual authority. Kant's own addition, that mental resolution can master certain bodily states, is itself a mechanism-only proposition with no controlled-outcome support.
confirmed:yes
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NOTES

Immanuel Kant appears in this case as the most prominent intellectual endorser of Hufeland’s macrobiotic programme. Hufeland sent Kant the treatise; Kant replied in an open letter that treated the project favourably and turned it toward a dietetics of the mind, and Hufeland published the letter in his medical journal before Kant made it the third part of The Conflict of the Faculties (1798). The encounter is documented in the Kant biographical scholarship (the Naragon record) and is the basis for the case’s observation that Hufeland’s doctrine drew authority not only from his elite medical practice but from the leading philosopher of the period. Kant is encoded as an endorser rather than a patient. His own contribution, the claim that resolution can master morbid feelings and so support a long life, is noted as a further mechanism-only proposition: it asserts a mental mechanism without controlled-outcome evidence.