Patrick Frierson
Rousseau
Angaben zur Person
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
was born in the Calvinist city-state of
Kant's biographers tell a legend that Kant, who never interrupted his daily routine, gave up his daily walk in order to continue his study of Rousseau's Emile. The only picture in Kant's otherwise sparsely decorated home was a portrait of Rousseau that he hung over his writing desk. Rousseau’s influence helped give rise to important Kantian themes such as the dignity of common humanity, the importance of autonomy, the centality of virtue, and the nature of proper theodicy.
Bedeutung für die Kantische Philosophie
Kant may have
been introduced to Rousseau’s writings by Hamaan, who
mentions Rousseau in a letter in December of 1959 (10: 30) or by Lessing, who wrote a review of Rousseau's first Discourse in 1951. Rousseau’s popularity in
Kant’s clearest statements of his overall approach to Rousseau’s corpus, however, come later, in his Anthropologie (1798) and Mutmaßlicher Anfang (1786). As Kant explains in Anthropologie (his discussion in Mutmaßlicher Anfang is similar):
[Rousseau’s] drei Schriften [the first and second Discourses and Julie] von dem Schaden, den 1. der Ausgang aus der Natur in die Cultur unserer Gattung durch Schwächung unserer Kraft, 2. die Civilisirung durch Ungleichheit und wechselseitige Unterdrückung, 3. die vermeinte Moralisirung durch naturwidrige Erziehung und Mißbildung der Denkungsart angerichtet hat: - diese drei Schriften, sage ich, welche den Naturzustand gleich als einen Stand der Unschuld vorstellig machten (dahin wieder zurückzukehren der Thorwächter eines Paradieses mit feurigem Schwert verhindert), sollten nur seinem Socialcontract, seinem Emile und seinem Savoyardischen Vicar zum Leitfaden dienen, aus dem Irrsal der Übel sich heraus zu finden, womit sich unsere Gattung durch ihre eigene Schuld umgeben hat. - Rousseau wollte im Grunde nicht, daß der Mensch wiederum in den Naturzustand zurück gehen, sondern von der Stufe, auf der er jetzt steht, dahin zurück sehen sollte. (7: 326-7, cf. 8:116)
For Kant, Rousseau’s early texts lay out a series of problems with society, while his later texts offer solutions to these problems. In particular, the first and second Discourses show how culture and civilization give rise to vice and inequality, and Julie shows how bad social structures and “unnatural education” can distort human beings. In all three works, however, and especially in Julie, Rousseau looks forward to the possibility of moving forward, rather than (as he suggests his “adversaries” might read him) to “return to live in forests with the Bears” (OC 3: 207). In the Social Contract, and especially in Emile, Kant found Rousseau’s most detailed suggestions about how this movement forward might work. In those works, Rousseau emphasized the importance of virtue, autonomy, and even a natural theology reminiscent of Kant’s later philosophy of religion, all in the context of showing how an individual human being (in Emile) or a whole society (in The Social Contract) can move forward from vice and inequality to equality, justice, humanity, and morality.
Rousseau’s most important influence on Kant lies in the Kant’s respect for common human beings, and with this his commitment to the primacy of the practical. In Kant’s Bemerkungen, one finds the clearest statement of the influence of Rousseau on the young Kant, an influence that is rightly deemed a “Rousseauian turn” in his thought. This influence runs deep, but the essential revolution is captured in the following remark:
I myself am a
researcher from inclination. I feel the
entire thirst for knowledge and the eager unrest to go further in it as well as
the satisfaction with every acquisition.
There was a time when I believed that this alone could compose the honor
of mankind and I despised the rabble that knew of
nothing. Rousseau brought me
around. This blinding preference
vanished, I learned to honor human beings and I would think myself less useful
than the common laborer if I did not believe that this consideration of
everything else could impart worth in establishing the rights of mankind (20:
44, Rischmüller p. 38)
This shift marks Rousseau’s most important influence on Kant’s thought, a renewed appreciation for “human beings” and the dignity of even a “common laborer,” and a fundamental reorientation towards practical philosophy. Although Kant continues to work extensively in metaphysics and epistemology, a practical emphasis affects his work from 1964 on. This practical emphasis involves humanity’s ultimate end, in that Rousseau taught Kant that the ultimate vocation of man must lie not in culture, civilization, knowledge, or happiness, but must be specifically moral. As Rousseau cries out, “Conscience! . . . without you I sense nothing in me that raises me above the beasts” (OC 4:600, 603), so Kant insists that the only thing “good without qualification . . . [is] a good will” (4: 393, cf. 5:435, 20:168).
Not only did Rousseau help Kant to see the importance of virtue, Rousseau also helped Kant to reflect on the nature of virtue in four key ways. First, Rousseau helped Kant turn away from moral sentimentalism and towards the conviction that morality is rooted in human reason. After his engagement with Rousseau, Kant gradually shifts towards the importance of reason rather than sentiment as the foundation of morals. By the time of the GMS, Kant insists that only those “actions [done] not from inclination but from duty” have moral worth (4:398, cf. 5:71-2). Although Rousseau often praises sentiment and sometimes even disparages reason in ethics, he also insists that conscience involves rising above one’s passions and appetites (OC 4:585-98, 818-9; OC 3:30). In that respect, he helped push Kant to an ethic grounded in pure reason. Rousseau’s claim that “as soon as reason makes one know [the good], conscience leads him to love it” (OC 3:600) even resembles Kant’s connection between purely rational recognition of the authority of the moral law and quasi-sentimental motivation by respect.
Second, Rousseau’s emphasis on autonomy became a centerpiece of Kant’s moral philosophy. This emphasis is clearest in Rousseau’s Social Contract, where civil liberty is based on the political autonomy of submitting oneself to a general will of which one is a part (OC 3:380) and virtue is a “moral liberty, which . . . makes him truly master of himself” (OC 3:365). In Emile, autonomy reappears in a pedagogical and ethical context, and the “Profession of Faith” describes in detail Rousseau’s account of the connection between autonomy, self-governance for the sake of virtue, and metaphysical freedom of the will.
Third, Rousseau explicates his
conception of autonomy in terms of an absence of contradiction, an idea which
would have important implications for Kant’s development of his notion of the
categorical imperative. In Emile, the role of contradiction in the
individual case is particularly clear.
Rousseau explains that one who seeks to follow the “sentiments of
nature” in civil society is “always in
contradiction with himself, always floating between his wishes and his duties” (OC 4:249-51). The
contradictions on which Rousseau focuses are between natural impulses and
duties of civil society, so Rousseau does not explicitly think of duty itself as
an absence of contradiction, although he does explain it in terms of “ordering
oneself in relation to the whole” (OC 4:602). But Rousseau’s emphasis on freeing oneself
from contradiction in inclinations appears prominently in Kant’s reflections in
the 1760’s, and Kant gradually develops the notion of the categorical
imperative from an interest in freeing a person from self-contradiction (cf.
20:67, 91-3, 112, 145, 161-2).
Finally,
central to Rousseau’s ethical theory is the distinction between amour de soi, an entirely appropriate sort of concern for the self,
and amour propre, a concern for the self that seeks
to predominate over others and arises from comparison with others. Like Rousseau, Kant (cf. 5:73, 6: 36)
emphasizes that self-love (a mere concern for the self, similar to
Rousseau’s amour de soi) is not a threat to morality,
but self-conceit (like Rousseau’s amour propre)
is.
Rousseau also has a significant influence on Kant’s philosophy of religion. In his Profession of Faith, Rousseau articulates several “dogmas,” or articles of faith, including the existence of God (OC 3:577-9), the intelligence of God (OC 3:581-2), and the freedom, immateriality, and immortality of human beings (OC 3:583-7). With the exception of immateriality, Kant appropriates these fundamental dogmas as his own fundamental “postulates of pure practical reason” (5: 107ff.). Unlike Rousseau, who takes the core principles of natural theology as theoretical dogmas with ethical implications, Kant treats them as postulates established on the basis of our ethical duties. At least as important as these dogmas, Rousseau lays out a middle-ground approach to religion that Kant will later adopt in his own work: “no religion is exempt from the duties of morality [and] nothing is truly essential other than these duties. . . . Dare to acknowledge God among the philosophers; dare to preach humanity to the intolerant” (OC 3:634). Kant, like Rousseau, emphasizes moral religion while downplaying specifically historical aspects of faith. Finally, Kant largely adopts Rousseau’s theodicy, insisting that “in accordance with . . . Rousseau, God is justified” (20:58-9). In particular, Rousseau is correct that “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil” (OC 4:245; cf. 6:33, 35).
In addition to his influence on
Kant’s views about die Bestimmung des Menschen, his ethical theory, and his philosophy of
religion, Rousseau also had significant influences on many other areas of
Kant’s thought. Like Rousseau, Kant sees
society as holding particular dangers for ethical life (6:93-4) and criticizes
luxury from both moral and pragmatic considerations (7:250; 20:6, 45, 135, 151),
but unlike Rousseau, Kant insists on an important positive role for manners
(cf. 6:473, 7:151-2). Like Rousseau,
Kant sees an important role for a republican civil constitution in human
development, and even adopts some key Rousseauian
insights in his description of that constitution (cf. especially MSR, Geschichte, Fakultäten,
and, for an explicit connection to Rousseau, 25:847). Kant’s views about
education were heavily influenced by Rousseau, as is evident from comparing his
lectures on pedagogy (9:439-99) with Rousseau’s Emile. In his Bemerkungen, Kant
“wishes that Rousseau had shown how schools could originate out of” the program
articulated in Emile” (20:29), and
throughout the 1770s he supported the Dessau Philanthropin, a school that was seeking to implement just
such a project (cf. Zammito 2002, Munzel
1999). Finally, it must
be noted with some regret that Kant’s views on the nature and status of
women are heavily influenced by a largely uncritical appropriation of some of
Rousseau’s suggestions in Julie and
the last chapter of Emile (cf. Kant’s
Beobachtungen, Bemerkungen, and Anthropologie).
Despite Rousseau’s influence on Kant, there are important differences between the two. Kant is systematic in a way that Rousseau is not, and Kant lacks Rousseau’s elegance of expression. In his own reflections, Kant notes, “I must read Rousseau until the beauty of expression no longer interferes with me and then I can examine him with reason for the first time” (20:30), not a problem that one typically has with Kant himself! More importantly, Kant emphasizes that “Rousseau [p]roceeds synthetically and starts from natural humans, I proceed analytically and start from civilized humans” (20:14). Unlike Rousseau, Kant is not particularly interested in just-so stories about humans independent of the social influences that form them into moral beings. This methodological difference makes a difference in content. For example, even while admiring and largely accepting Rousseau’s theodicy, Kant cannot wholly agree with Rousseau that “man is by nature good.” While Kant agrees that there is in man a natural predisposition to good, he also insists on “a radical innate evil in human nature” (6:32), an innate evil that is nonetheless chosen and partly due to social influence.
There are other important differences in substance. Kant puts a clearer priority on reason over sentiment than Rousseau, and he has no tolerance for the eudaimonism that infects even Rousseau’s purest paeans to virtue. With respect to religion, we have already noted that Kant reinterprets Rousseau’s natural theology in terms of postulates and insists upon radical evil as inextricably tied to human nature. In terms of metaphysics and epistemology, the differences are equally profound. Though both thinkers share a commitment to the dignity of ordinary human cognition, Rousseau’s epistemology is rudimentary and largely rooted in sentimental conviction, while Kant’s is worked out in detail (in both his logic and his Critical philosophy) and emphasizes the importance of a priori cognition.
Bibliographische Angaben
G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The “Critical” Link of Morality, Anthropology, and Reflective Judgment, University of Chicago Press: 1999.
Marie Rischmüller, (ed.), Bemerkungen in den "Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen", Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag: 1991.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, hrsg. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Bibliotèque de la Pléiade: 1959.
John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, University of Chicago Press: 2002.
Literatur
Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau Kant Goethe, Princeton: 1946.
Claude Piché, “Rousseau et Kant,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’etranger 180 (1990): 625-35.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, hrsg. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Bibliotèque de la Pléiade: 1959.
Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason, University of Chicago Press: 1989.