Maimon was unkempt. Maimon was dirty. That's what I always protest to W. when he reprimands me for my personal habits. But Maimon was a genius!, W cries. A genius driven out of his home city for daring to philosophise. A beggar-genius, living on alms as he wandered for years, before being offered a position as a tutor.
Was it in those years that Maimon formulated the most decisive criticisms of Kantian thought ever made? Was it then, his begging bowl before him, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in his frozen hands, that the ideas came together that led him, in his final years, when he fell by chance under the protection of a nobleman who realised his worth, he published in a series of books?
Only Maimon understood me, Kant said, after reading the Jewish philosopher's Transcendental Philosophy in manuscript. He died soon after, and among the causes of death was thought to be Maimon's devastating criticisms of his work. How could he, Kant, go on in the wake of Maimon? How, when Maimon had with such great perceptiveness laid bare the fundamental problems that faced his thought?
But Maimon never succeeded in penetrating academic circles, or even the salons of enlightened Berlin Jews. To them he was an Ostjude, his manners rough, his gesticulations wild, and his German atrocious and heavily accented. And he was a difficult man, no doubt about it. He was untamed, and German – his fourth language, or his fifth – did not come easily to him. And he smelt awful, everyone said that.
Maimon stinks! Get him out of here! That's what you'd hear in Berlin salons. And out he went, out onto the frozen streets, out in the snow with The Critique of Pure Reason under his arm. And he was an alcoholic, too. He drank like a madman, W. says. He drank himself to death. In his last years, when he finally found someone who would support him, he drank himself into oblivion even as he wrote, even as book after book poured fouth from his pen.
Is that what's going to happen to me? Am I going to produce a great stream of books in my final years, which can't be far off?, W. says. He's offered me support, and now he's waiting. He brought me in from the cold, and now he's sitting by expectantly. But he thinks he's going to be disappointed.
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