A feast fit for a philosopher
It was Immanuel Kant’s 301st birthday on Tuesday. While the celebrations may not have been quite as widespread as during the ‘Kant Year’ of 2024, the occasion was still marked by many people around the world because it always is — in a wonderful tradition called ‘Bohnenmahl’ or ‘Bean Feast’.
Kant was a world-renowned philosopher who ensured that his home town of Königsberg would forever be associated with his name. But by all accounts he was also a very nice man who cultivated long and enduring friendships. When he died on 12th February 1804, his friends and admirers decided to hold an annual gathering in his honour on his birthday, 22 April.
The first one took place the following year in Kant’s former home in Königsberg where the same 25 people came together that had attended the philosopher’s last birthday in 1803. They had been invited by William Motherby, son of Kant’s friend Robert Motherby. This was the beginning of ‘The Friends of Kant Society’ which continues to exist to this day.
A few years later, this society introduced a new tradition. When dessert is served at the annual Kant meal, one of the slices of cake contains a large, silver bean. The person who finds it (hopefully with their fork rather than their teeth) is the designated speaker at the next Kant meal. Hence the Friends of Kant also became known as the Bean Society.
The tradition has survived to this day, despite the fact that Königsberg was destroyed in the Second World War and is now the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. I was honoured to have received an invitation to this year’s Bean Feast in Berlin but unfortunately couldn’t make it. So I have in turn invited Gerfried Horst, the current chairman of the Friends of Kant and a Königsberg enthusiast to write a few words.
I hope you’ll enjoy this last (for now) in my trio of ZEITGEIST guest pieces.
‘All happy together notwithstanding what happened in the world’ — Why the Friends of Kant endure
By Gerfried Horst
Do you know a philosopher who drafted rules for enjoying animated meals together; a German professor whose best friends were English merchants; whose hometown is now part of Russia and whose birthday is still, more than two centuries after his death, being celebrated every year with a memorial meal? It is Immanuel Kant. He was born in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, on 22 April 1724.
The only major city Kant ever saw in his life was Königsberg, and he never left East Prussia. Kant was professor of logic and metaphysics at Königsberg University. In 1781 he published the work that made him world famous, his Critique of Pure Reason.
In a footnote to the preface of his work Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View Kant explained his special attachment to Königsberg and why he never felt the need to leave it:
A large city such as Königsberg on the river Pregel, which is the centre of a kingdom, in which the provincial councils of the government are located, which has a university (for cultivation of the Sciences) and which has also the right location for maritime commerce - a city which, by way of rivers, has the advantages of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighbouring and distant lands of different languages and customs, can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening one’s knowledge of human beings as well as of the world, where this knowledge can be acquired without even traveling.
Kant‘s best friends were the English merchants Joseph Green and Robert Motherby both of whom were born in Hull,Yorkshire and died in Königsberg. According to Kant‘s biographer R. B. Jachmann, Kant discussed every single sentence of his Critique of Pure Reason with Joseph Green before publishing his groundbreaking work.
An engraved drinking glass bears witness to this friendship. Its English inscription reads as follows:
Secrecy in love and sincerity
In friendship
Emanuel Kant M.A.
Anthony Schorn
Joseph Green
Robert Motherby
All happy together notwithstanding what happened in the world
August of 30th 1763
Joseph P… (?)
John Chappol
Charles Staniforth
Kant enjoyed eating in good company, in fact he believed that eating alone was not good for a philosopher.
A painting by Emil Doerstling called ‘Kant and his table companions’ shows Kant in his home (in a fictional scene, Kant’s table could only sit six people) with Robert Motherby sitting next to Kant on his left (Joseph Green, who died in 1786, is not represented in this painting which depicts a scene after Green’s death).
In his Anthropology Kant described how a banquet should proceed:
At a full table the conversation usually goes through three stages: 1) narration, 2) arguing and 3) jesting. - A. The first stage concerns the news of the day … — B. When this first appetite has been satisfied, the party becomes even livelier, for … it is difficult to avoid diversity of judgment over one and the same object that has been brought up, and … a dispute arises which stirs up the appetite for food and drink …. — C. But because arguing is always a kind of work …, it eventually becomes tiresome …: thus the conversation sinks naturally to the mere play of wit …. And so the meal ends with laughter, which, if it is loud and good-natured, has actually been determined by nature to help the stomach in the digestive process through the movement of the diaphragm and intestines, thus promoting physical wellbeing.
After Kant’s death on 12 February 1804, Robert Motherby’s son William, whom Kant had seen grow up and for whom he had been a fatherly friend, invited Kant‘s other friends for a solemn memorial lunch on 22 April 1805 in Kant’s former home, to remember ‘his value as a human being and a friend.’ That was the founding date of the Königsberg Society of Friends of Kant and the tradition of a Kant memorial meal (later called ‘Bean Feast’ because of a silver bean hid in the dessert to determine the speaker at the following Kant memorial meal) on every 22 April continued until the destruction of Königsberg in the Second World War. Surviving members of the Society renewed the tradition in 1947 in West Germany.
Königsberg was annexed by the Soviet Union and renamed ‘Kaliningrad’. After the break-up of the Soviet Union the region of Kaliningrad became an exclave of Russia (bordering on Lithuania in the north and Poland in the south) and was opened to visitors from abroad – there was opportunity to celebrate Kant’s birthday in his hometown again!
With the Society of the Friends of Kant being reluctant to organise Kant memorial meals in Kaliningrad, the new society ‘Friends of Kant and Königsberg’ was set up on my initiative (together with descendants of personal friends of Kant and other Kant aficionados from various countries) with a view to organise a German-Russian Bean Feast each year on Kant‘s birthday in his home town.
These yearly events which turned out to be very popular were discontinued with Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and it is not foreseeable when they will be resumed again.
The tercentenary of Kant’s birthday on 22 April 2024 was celebrated in Berlin and thereafter in Hull and in Jarnołtowo/Poland, the former Gross Arnsdorf in East Prussia, where a wall painting was unveiled to commemorate Kant’s presence there in 1750-1754.
Late in life Kant published a treatise entitled Toward perpetual peace – A philosophical project. In its last paragraph Kant explained that perpetual peace ‘is no empty idea but a task that, gradually solved, comes steadily closer to its goal …’. We are working on it and invite people of good will worldwide to join us.
Gerfried Horst is Chairman of FRIENDS OF KANT AND KÖNIGSBERG
Everyday is a school day , had no idea of the connection with the silver bean 👍
Probably best not to visit Russia at the moment, bean or no bean.