Wasianski reported: "already in 1799, when it [his weakness] was still hardly noticeable, he said . . . in my presence: 'My Gentlemen, I am old and weak, and you must consider me as a child.'" Jachmann, of course, had already noticed the "weakness" three years earlier. At another occasion, Kant explained:
My gentlemen, I am not afraid of death; I will know how to die. I assure you before God that, should I feel in the coming night that I would fold my hands and say "God be praised." But if an evil demon was on my back and was to whisper in my ear: 'You have made human beings unhappy,' then it would be different.
Kant felt he had done no such thing. He was content—ready to die. In fact, he looked forward to dying. Given the choice between life or death, he would have chosen death. Yet he felt the choice was one that had not been given to him. He repeatedly said to friends during his final years that he went to bed every night hoping it was his last. Since his brother, who was more than eleven years younger than he was, had died in 1799, he might have felt that this hope was justified.
Yet his wish was not to be fulfilled for a long time. He had to wait another five years—slowly declining month by month. All his biographers talk about his increasing weakness. Already in 1798, he hardly ever went out for a dinner invitation in the evening, and his walks became shorter. Yet what his biographers describe as "weakness" (Schwäche) was not so much the frailty of his body, but his diminishing mental abilities. There is indeed something tragic about the way in which one of the greatest minds who ever lived was reduced to complete helplessness. Nothing, except great physical pain, was spared him during the final years.
(Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 414 [brackets and ellipsis in original; endnotes omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 