Kant & Rousseau

I understand Kant. I’ve always been comfortable with him. Kant recognized man’s ignoble, lazy, cowardly, savage nature and urged education, discipline, logic, and long and careful thought before action. He was mildly optimistic. Only a few would “Dare to be wise.” But under the right conditions – a wise prince who allowed freedom of thought and speech, but at the same time insist that the law be obeyed – the number of the enlightened might gradually increase. A system of government based on reason could emerge. The first criteria would be:
                         
“To test whether any particular measure can be agreed upon as a law for a people, we need only ask whether a people could well impose such a law upon itself.”                                  
- An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?"
   
Kant was cautious. The Prince who allowed freedom of thought and speech would also require a strong army to slow down the pace of change. “Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!” Eventually, enlightenment and reason would grow and the population would be truly free.
       
I’ve never been comfortable with Rousseau. He lamented the loss of an innocent savage that never existed. We’ve discovered too many million-year-old skulls smashed in by  rocks to believe that one. He admitted that civilization must be endured, but raged against its complexity, longed for simpler, more honest days. Rousseau’s repeated claims that all was better in the cities of the past rings false to anyone who has read the Iliad or watched a BBC historical drama. We are what we are and always have been - an ape with a big brain.

Emotional, restless, never wholly satisfied with his present condition, he wandered through Europe and through life, conversing with Europe’s best minds, and then breaking  with them over trifles.  Rousseau recognized that something beneath the surface of the mind, something of great value is somehow injured by civilization.  If he could not heal his wounds, perhaps he could expose them with a brutal honesty, refusing to deny that they are there. Honesty that could only be approached by letting the passionate forces that lie beneath escape unrestrained. Manners, politeness, even the formalities required for the arts and for science all led to corruption and deceit. He advised communion with nature and a return to simple life practicing useful skills as a path to virtue. Advice he didn’t himself take.

Think about this – What if you could  spend an hour with a genius who influenced the course of intellectual and political history? Personally, I’d like to spend that hour with Kant. It would be an amiable time well spent. I would share with him that during my thirty-two years as a middle school teacher his imperative that we treat every person as an end in his or her self and no one as a means to an end appeared on my board at least a hundred times, and that do we determine a universal law was often the theme of my lessons.

I wouldn’t want to spent five minutes with Rousseau. Rousseau’s arguments against philosophers, painters, and poets sound petty and whining to my ears. The passage below in which he identifies himself as a common man seems particularly paradoxical. Denying his role as a philosopher and international figure of renown, he gives advice about not taking advice:


As for us, common men to whom heaven has not allotted such great talents and destined for so much glory, let us remain in our obscurity. … What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves? Let us leave to others the care of instructing people about their duties, and limit ourselves to carrying out our own well. We do not need to know any more than this.
- Discourse on the Arts and Sciences


I was an English teacher for thirty-two years. The history of education was influenced very positively by Rousseau’s Emile. I love many parts of the book. You could argue that childhood is far less brutal because of Rousseau’s book. But I wouldn’t want to discuss Emile with him or even share its historical influence. Instead I would want to know why he dropped off five of his babies at the local founding house where only one in three infants survived the first weeks after their arrival. His answer might even inspire me to mention that his thoughts about the social contract may have inspired some of the nastier parts of the the French Revolution and also were used to justify the horrors of Totalitarianism and Fascism in the 20th century.