Reviews for Rousseau, Kant, Goethe

The average rating for Rousseau, Kant, Goethe based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-01 00:00:00 Debra Dufek The Exalted Web of Luminous Thinking: Two Strands to Illustrate the Whole Rousseau & Kant To Cassirer, Rousseau was an ebullient and ever-changing Proteus, who could not be comprehended by anyone who was too near to him. Kant was far enough away to delineate the essence of Rousseau's thought. And this accident was to have far ranging consequences for the age. Despite their widely varying temperaments and approaches to philosophy, Cassirer depicts them as united in their ultimate goal ' freedom: to identify and then illustrate its true meaning and importance. Rousseau is the first to identify this noble goal and he proclaimed it with great exuberance and with not a little of incoherence! He had to be the forceful voice that cleared the way of existing ossified thought. This could only be done with a passionate voice and skilled rhetoric that he possessed in great abundance. Tranquil thinking could not have accomplished this thunderous opening of new doors that was the enlightenment. Cassirer says that Rousseau never learned to speak the language of "clear and distinct ideas'. He never systematized his thoughts or created a system that even made an attempt at avoiding contradictions. Internal constancy of clarity of approach is not to be found in him. Only the energy and excitement associated with the discover of a new realm of thought to be explored. The task of systematizing this was taken up by the meticulous Kant. In his architectonic construction he created a system that brought clarity, definiteness and structure to these new thoughts, partly by himself but with enough influence of Rousseau. In the process of systematizing this new impulse to freedom, Kant had to call into question the very edifice of reason itself and build it up again from new foundations. Only then, Cassirer tells us, could he do justice to Rousseau prophetic vision! Kant & Goethe Apparently, Goethe himself has told us that when he occasionally became involved in conversation about the Kantian philosophy and advanced his own idea of it, the Kantians present would shake their heads! "It happened more than once that one or another confessed with smiling surprise: it was to be sure an analogue of the Kantian position, but a strange one." Cassirer shows us how Goethe was influenced by Kant (via Shelling) but always tended to run in a different direction from Kantians in his thought. With his poetic bent, he seemed to be always at a tangent to Kant. Again two widely different personalities, approaches and even fields of actions, and yet Cassirer shows us how they converge back to the idea of freedom to man and passionate opposition of Dogma parading as Reason. It is a much hazier analogue between Kant and Goethe than with Kant and Rousseau, but Cassirer concedes that more than such an analogue we may not seek in Goethe. He belonged to no philosophical school,and he swore by the words of no master. And yet only by seeing how he drew inspiration from Kant can we see how he could be linked to Rousseau, someone perhaps closer to him in spirit, in the luminous web of thoughts that was being woven in that enlightened time. And withe these two links, Cassirer invites us to imagine the unwritten essay connecting Goethe and Rousseau and all he other thinkers whose thoughts sparked off each other and enhanced the luminous web until it was one blinding fire which could illuminate the darkest corners of the mind. And in Cassirer's formulation much of that glorious light was sustained by Kant, since he provided the system and structure that could hold it all together. Someone like Rousseau would not have been able to sustain such widely differing speculations to be hung on his intellectual production. Kant provided the strength that would ensure that others could hang their thoughts on him or carry of parts of him and still be sure that the whole edifice would endure. That is how strongly it had been constructed. These two essays are only examples, just two sample strands ' so that we can use them to imagine the rest of the interconnections, and Kant's real contribution to modern thought, and in the process … … understand and appreciate how the great artists of the classical period formed in their minds different ideas of Kant. In the essay Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert, one of the finest characterizations of the eighteenth century, Goethe says that no scholar was able to reject with impunity the great philosophical movement begun by Kant, to oppose it, or to despise it. This holds not only for the scholars but also for the artists. Very few of them remained wholly untouched by Kantian ideas. But each of them saw Kant in a new and different light and in his own perspective. Profound philosophical ideas work not only in their own circle. They become sources of intellectual light, which send out their beams in all directions. But what becomes of these beams depends not only on the character of the source of light, but also on the mirror they encounter and by which they are reflected. The manner of this reflection was different for Schiller, for Goethe,for Beethoven. For Schiller the study of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment was guiding and crucial. Goethe came to Kant by way of Critique of Teleological Judgement; Beethoven was seized and carried away by the Critique of Practical Reason. They all read the same Kant -- and yet for each of them he was new and different, because he stimulated and made effective in them different productive forces, forces of an intellectual, moral, and artistic character.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-02 00:00:00 Jeffery Michaels 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.