The 1700s Book

One way of looking at writers who really appeal us is that they share attitudes that the reader can build on; in a paraphrase of Emerson's, they speak the thoughts that we were not strong enough to bring to fruition. Kant admitted that Rousseau was pivotal to his development, that the latter was one of those thinkers who had indeed brought him out of his dogmatic slumbers. Cassirer asks how this can be so in this case. They were in their own descriptions of themselves polar opposites: Rousseau the wanderer to the end of his life, Kant renown for never leaving his little university town. Kant was known as the 'the clock' in his city for the regularity of his habits, Rousseau threw his watch away so as not be encumbered by schedules. These two thinkers provide images for rigid thought versus unbridled passion. It is perhaps to Kant's credit that he was so touched by an opposing current of thought that he encorporated them so deeply in his own. I believe that the dogma Kant overcame by reading Rousseau was a youthful contempt for any sentiment not educated, intellectual, refined. Rousseau had shown him that the most intellectual society of the time, that of Paris in the 1700's, was a tournament of masks driven by vanity. If there was an ideal to which we should be drawn, it was the precivilized human being with his great personal autonomy. Kant was democratized by Rousseau. The aim of education was not intellectual refinement, it was the possible enhancer of the one attribute that made us human and with which every human being is born: the drive for personal autonomy.

One of the remarks made by Cassirer struck me as most appropriate: Rousseau, who had made his mark by lecturing on the vanities of civilization and the decline of happiness within that scene, should have been the one who denounced the optimism in human reason that marked the era, not as it turns out,Voltaire. Instead, Rousseau wrote a response to Voltaire complaining that the latter's pessimism was incapacitating to him;he could not accept it. I myself have found this hard to reconcile with the rest of Rousseau, but I think it might be a respone to one mechanistic attitude being refuted by another in the case of Voltaire. The Enlightenment thinkers were sceptical about tradional authorities and optimistic about disciplined human reason bringing mankind to a new level of well being. Voltaire was just aiming the same scepticsm at a too extreme optimism. Certainly his personal ambitions and basic commitments were in line with the philosophs. Rousseau's were not. Society as it was so arranged necessarily brought unhappiness. Only in literally escaping society by living outside the city could Rousseau hope to pursue the only ambition that mattered: something like the personal freedom that he set up as an ideal with precivilized man. Kant was able to crystallize Rousseau's intense ambition and make it less dependent on the vagaries of Jean-Jacque's own life. In fact, one of Kant's achievemnts might be said to be the clarification of Rousseau's response to Voltaire, that life did have value. Rousseau could never quite take the argument out of the sphere of happiness, and it took Kant to put the capper on Rousseau's reply to Voltaire. Kant wrote in the Critique of Judgment: "It is easy to decide what value life holds for us, if its worth is measured merely by our enjoyments...It is less than nothing; for who would wish to begin life anew under the same conditions or even according to a new self-made plan (but one consistnet with the course of nature)". Cassirer adds "The diminution of happiness can not lessen the the value of existence, for this does not consist in what happens to a person, but in what a person does. Our deeds, not our outward fate, give life its meaning. For Kant this meaning cannot be impaired by any suffering, and no pessimistic argument can touch it. No matter how low we may estimate the value of human existence in terms of what man receives and enjoys, there remains the value that a free personality creates for itself."

Accepting this as a truly noble and compelling description of what it means to be a human, perhaps the question remains of how much happiness, basic well-being, must a person have in order to have the time and energy to strive to be a free personality. It occurs to me that it comes as almost an axiom that one hopes for happiness for others more than oneself. I can feel my desire for autonomy but I can only encourage it in others by providing for their basic means of growth.