Western philosophy
History of Western philosophy from its development among the ancient
Greeks to the present.
Modern philosophy
Modern philosophy » The Enlightenment » Nonepistemological movements
in the Enlightenment » Social and political philosophy
Apart from epistemology, the most significant philosophical
contributions of the Enlightenment were made in the fields of social and
political philosophy. The Two Treatises of Civil Government (1690) by
Locke and The Social Contract (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78)
proposed justifications of political association grounded in the newer
political requirements of the age. The Renaissance political
philosophies of Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes had presupposed or
defended the absolute power of kings and rulers. But the Enlightenment
theories of Locke and Rousseau championed the freedom and equality of
citizens. It was a natural historical transformation. The 16th and 17th
centuries were the age of absolutism; the chief problem of politics was
that of maintaining internal order, and political theory was conducted
in the language of national sovereignty. But the 18th century was the
age of the democratic revolutions; the chief political problem was that
of securing freedom and revolting against injustice, and political
theory was expressed in the idiom of natural and inalienable rights.
Locke’s political philosophy explicitly denied the divine right of
kings and the absolute power of the sovereign. Instead, he insisted on a
natural and universal right to freedom and equality. The state of nature
in which human beings originally lived was not, as Hobbes imagined,
intolerable, though it did have certain inconveniences. Therefore,
people banded together to form society—as Aristotle taught, “not simply
to live, but to live well.” Political power, Locke argued, can never be
exercised apart from its ultimate purpose, which is the common good, for
the political contract is undertaken in order to preserve life, liberty,
and property.
Locke thus stated one of the fundamental principles of political
liberalism: that there can be no subjection to power without
consent—though once political society has been founded, citizens are
obligated to accept the decisions of a majority of their number. Such
decisions are made on behalf of the majority by the legislature, though
the ultimate power of choosing the legislature rests with the people;
and even the powers of the legislature are not absolute, because the law
of nature remains as a permanent standard and as a principle of
protection against arbitrary authority.
Rousseau’s more radical political doctrines were built upon Lockean
foundations. For him, too, the convention of the social contract formed
the basis of all legitimate political authority, though his conception
of citizenship was much more organic and much less individualistic than
Locke’s. The surrender of natural liberty for civil liberty means that
all individual rights (among them property rights) become subordinate to
the general will. For Rousseau the state is a moral person whose life is
the union of its members, whose laws are acts of the general will, and
whose end is the liberty and equality of its citizens. It follows that
when any government usurps the power of the people, the social contract
is broken; and not only are the citizens no longer compelled to obey,
but they also have an obligation to rebel. Rousseau’s defiant
collectivism was clearly a revolt against Locke’s systematic
individualism; for Rousseau the fundamental category was not “natural
person” but “citizen.” Nevertheless, however much they differed, in
these two social theorists of the Enlightenment is to be found the germ
of all modern liberalism: its faith in representative democracy, in
civil liberties, and in the basic dignity of human beings.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Swiss-born French philosopher
born June 28, 1712, Geneva, Switz.
died July 2, 1778, Ermenonville, France
Main
Swiss-born philosopher, writer, and political theorist whose
treatises and novels inspired the leaders of the French
Revolution and the Romantic generation.
Rousseau was the least academic of modern philosophers
and in many ways was the most influential. His thought
marked the end of the Age of Reason. He propelled political
and ethical thinking into new channels. His reforms
revolutionized taste, first in music, then in the other
arts. He had a profound impact on people’s way of life; he
taught parents to take a new interest in their children and
to educate them differently; he furthered the expression of
emotion rather than polite restraint in friendship and love.
He introduced the cult of religious sentiment among people
who had discarded religious dogma. He opened men’s eyes to
the beauties of nature, and he made liberty an object of
almost universal aspiration.
Formative years
Rousseau’s mother died in childbirth and he was brought up
by his father, who taught him to believe that the city of
his birth was a republic as splendid as Sparta or ancient
Rome. Rousseau senior had an equally glorious image of his
own importance; after marrying above his modest station as a
watchmaker, he got into trouble with the civil authorities
by brandishing the sword that his upper-class pretentions
prompted him to wear, and he had to leave Geneva to avoid
imprisonment. Rousseau, the son, then lived for six years as
a poor relation in his mother’s family, patronized and
humiliated, until he, too, at the age of 16, fled from
Geneva to live the life of an adventurer and a Roman
Catholic convert in the kingdoms of Sardinia and France.
Rousseau was fortunate in finding in the province of
Savoy a benefactress named the Baronne de Warens, who
provided him with a refuge in her home and employed him as
her steward. She also furthered his education to such a
degree that the boy who had arrived on her doorstep as a
stammering apprentice who had never been to school developed
into a philosopher, a man of letters, and a musician.
Mme de Warens, who thus transformed the adventurer into a
philosopher, was herself an adventuress—a Swiss convert to
Catholicism who had stripped her husband of his money before
fleeing to Savoy with the gardener’s son to set herself up
as a Catholic missionary specializing in the conversion of
young male Protestants. Her morals distressed Rousseau, even
when he became her lover. But she was a woman of taste,
intelligence, and energy, who brought out in Rousseau just
the talents that were needed to conquer Paris at a time when
Voltaire had made radical ideas fashionable.
Rousseau reached Paris when he was 30 and was lucky
enough to meet another young man from the provinces seeking
literary fame in the capital, Denis Diderot. The two soon
became immensely successful as the centre of a group of
intellectuals—or “Philosophes”—who gathered round the great
French Encyclopédie, of which Diderot was appointed editor.
The Encyclopédie was an important organ of radical and
anticlerical opinion, and its contributors were as much
reforming and even iconoclastic pamphleteers as they were
philosophers. Rousseau, the most original of them all in his
thinking and the most forceful and eloquent in his style of
writing, was soon the most conspicuous. He wrote music as
well as prose, and one of his operas, Le Devin du village
(1752; The Cunning-Man), attracted so much admiration from
the king and the court that he might have enjoyed an easy
life as a fashionable composer, but something in his
Calvinist blood rejected this type of worldly glory. Indeed,
at the age of 37 Rousseau had what he called an
“illumination” while walking to Vincennes to visit Diderot,
who had been imprisoned there because of his irreligious
writings. In the Confessions, which he wrote late in life,
Rousseau says that it came to him then in a “terrible flash”
that modern progress had corrupted instead of improved men.
He went on to write his first important work, a prize essay
for the Academy of Dijon entitled Discours sur les sciences
et les arts (1750; A Discourse on the Sciences and the
Arts), in which he argues that the history of man’s life on
earth has been a history of decay.
This Discourse is by no means Rousseau’s best piece of
writing, but its central theme was to inform almost
everything else he wrote. Throughout his life he kept
returning to the thought that man is good by nature but has
been corrupted by society and civilization. He did not mean
to suggest that society and civilization were inherently bad
but rather that both had taken a wrong direction and become
more harmful as they had become more sophisticated. This
idea in itself was not unfamiliar when Rousseau published
his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. Many Roman
Catholic writers deplored the direction that European
culture had taken since the Middle Ages. They shared the
hostility toward progress that Rousseau had expressed. What
they did not share was his belief that man was naturally
good. It was, however, just this belief in man’s natural
goodness that Rousseau made the cornerstone of his argument.
Rousseau may well have received the inspiration for this
belief from Mme de Warens; for although that unusual woman
had become a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church, she
retained—and transmitted to Rousseau—much of the sentimental
optimism about human purity that she had herself absorbed as
a child from the mystical Protestant Pietists who were her
teachers in the canton of Bern. At all events, the idea of
man’s natural goodness, as Rousseau developed it, set him
apart from both conservatives and radicals. Even so, for
several years after the publication of his first Discourse,
he remained a close collaborator in Diderot’s essentially
progressive enterprise, the Encyclopédie, and an active
contributor to its pages. His speciality there was music,
and it was in this sphere that he first established his
influence as reformer.
Controversy with Rameau
The arrival of an Italian opera company in Paris in 1752 to
perform works of opera buffa by Pergolesi, Scarlatti, Vinci,
Leo, and other such composers suddenly divided the French
music-loving public into two excited camps, supporters of
the new Italian opera and supporters of the traditional
French opera. The Philosophes of the
Encyclopédie—d’Alembert, Diderot, and d’Holbach among
them—entered the fray as champions of Italian music, but
Rousseau, who had arranged for the publication of
Pergolesi’s music in Paris and who knew more about the
subject than most Frenchmen after the months he had spent
visiting the opera houses of Venice during his time as
secretary to the French ambassador to the doge in 1743–44,
emerged as the most forceful and effective combatant. He was
the only one to direct his fire squarely at the leading
living exponent of French operatic music, Jean-Philippe
Rameau.
Rousseau and Rameau must at that time have seemed
unevenly matched in a controversy about music. Rameau,
already in his 70th year, was not only a prolific and
successful composer but was also, as the author of the
celebrated Traité de l’harmonie (1722; Treatise on Harmony)
and other technical works, Europe’s leading musicologist.
Rousseau, by contrast, was 30 years younger, a newcomer to
music, with no professional training and only one successful
opera to his credit. His scheme for a new notation for music
had been rejected by the Academy of Sciences, and most of
his musical entries for Diderot’s Encyclopédie were as yet
unpublished. Yet the dispute was not only musical but also
philosophical, and Rameau was confronted with a more
formidable adversary than he had realized. Rousseau built
his case for the superiority of Italian music over French on
the principle that melody must have priority over harmony,
whereas Rameau based his on the assertion that harmony must
have priority over melody. By pleading for melody, Rousseau
introduced what later came to be recognized as a
characteristic idea of Romanticism, namely, that in art the
free expression of the creative spirit is more important
than strict adhesion to formal rules and traditional
procedures. By pleading for harmony, Rameau reaffirmed the
first principle of French Classicism, namely, that
conformity to rationally intelligible rules is a necessary
condition of art, the aim of which is to impose order on the
chaos of human experience.
In music, Rousseau was a liberator. He argued for freedom
in music, and he pointed to the Italian composers as models
to be followed. In doing so he had more success than Rameau;
he changed people’s attitudes. Gluck, who succeeded Rameau
as the most important operatic composer in France,
acknowledged his debt to Rousseau’s teaching, and Mozart
based the text for his one-act operetta Bastien und
Bastienne on Rousseau’s Devin du village. European music had
taken a new direction. But Rousseau himself composed no more
operas. Despite the success of Le Devin du village, or
rather because of its success, Rousseau felt that, as a
moralist who had decided to make a break with worldly
values, he could not allow himself to go on working for the
theatre. He decided to devote his energies henceforth to
literature and philosophy.
Major works of political philosophy
As part of what Rousseau called his “reform,” or improvement
of his own character, he began to look back at some of the
austere principles that he had learned as a child in the
Calvinist republic of Geneva. Indeed he decided to return to
that city, repudiate his Catholicism, and seek readmission
to the Protestant church. He had in the meantime acquired a
mistress, an illiterate laundry maid named Thérèse
Levasseur. To the surprise of his friends, he took her with
him to Geneva, presenting her as a nurse. Although her
presence caused some murmurings, Rousseau was readmitted
easily to the Calvinist communion, his literary fame having
made him very welcome to a city that prided itself as much
on its culture as on its morals.
Rousseau had by this time completed a second Discourse in
response to a question set by the Academy of Dijon: “What is
the origin of the inequality among men and is it justified
by natural law?” In response to this challenge he produced a
masterpiece of speculative anthropology. The argument
follows on that of his first Discourse by developing the
proposition that natural man is good and then tracing the
successive stages by which man has descended from primitive
innocence to corrupt sophistication.
Rousseau begins his Discours sur l’origine de l’inegalité
(1755; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality) by
distinguishing two kinds of inequality, natural and
artificial, the first arising from differences in strength,
intelligence, and so forth, the second from the conventions
that govern societies. It is the inequalities of the latter
sort that he sets out to explain. Adopting what he thought
the properly “scientific” method of investigating origins,
he attempts to reconstruct the earliest phases of man’s
experience of life on earth. He suggests that original man
was not a social being but entirely solitary, and to this
extent he agrees with Hobbes’s account of the state of
nature. But in contrast to the English pessimist’s view that
the life of man in such a condition must have been “poor,
nasty, brutish and short,” Rousseau claims that original
man, while admittedly solitary, was healthy, happy, good,
and free. The vices of men, he argues, date from the time
when men formed societies.
Rousseau thus exonerates nature and blames society for
the emergence of vices. He says that passions that generate
vices hardly exist in the state of nature but begin to
develop as soon as men form societies. Rousseau goes on to
suggest that societies started when men built their first
huts, a development that facilitated cohabitation of males
and females; this in turn produced the habit of living as a
family and associating with neighbours. This “nascent
society,” as Rousseau calls it, was good while it lasted; it
was indeed the “golden age” of human history. Only it did
not endure. With the tender passion of love there was also
born the destructive passion of jealousy. Neighbours started
to compare their abilities and achievements with one
another, and this “marked the first step towards inequality
and at the same time towards vice.” Men started to demand
consideration and respect; their innocent self-love turned
into culpable pride, as each man wanted to be better than
everyone else.
The introduction of property marked a further step toward
inequality since it made it necessary for men to institute
law and government in order to protect property. Rousseau
laments the “fatal” concept of property in one of his more
eloquent passages, describing the “horrors” that have
resulted from men’s departure from a condition in which the
earth belonged to no one. These passages in his second
Discourse excited later revolutionaries such as Marx and
Lenin, but Rousseau himself did not think that the past
could be undone in any way; there was no point in men
dreaming of a return to the golden age.
Civil society, as Rousseau describes it, comes into being
to serve two purposes: to provide peace for everyone and to
ensure the right to property for anyone lucky enough to have
possessions. It is thus of some advantage to everyone, but
mostly to the advantage of the rich, since it transforms
their de facto ownership into rightful ownership and keeps
the poor dispossessed. It is a somewhat fraudulent social
contract that introduces government since the poor get so
much less out of it than do the rich. Even so, the rich are
no happier in civil society than are the poor because social
man is never satisfied. Society leads men to hate one
another to the extent that their interests conflict, and the
best they are able to do is to hide their hostility behind a
mask of courtesy. Thus Rousseau regards the inequality
between men not as a separate problem but as one of the
features of the long process by which men become alienated
from nature and from innocence.
In the dedication Rousseau wrote for the Discourse, in
order to present it to the republic of Geneva, he
nevertheless praises that city-state for having achieved the
ideal balance between “the equality which nature established
among men and the inequality which they have instituted
among themselves.” The arrangement he discerned in Geneva
was one in which the best men were chosen by the citizens
and put in the highest positions of authority. Like Plato,
Rousseau always believed that a just society was one in
which everyone was in his right place. And having written
the Discourse to explain how men had lost their liberty in
the past, he went on to write another book, Du Contrat
social (1762; The Social Contract), to suggest how they
might recover their liberty in the future. Again Geneva was
the model; not Geneva as it had become in 1754 when Rousseau
returned there to recover his rights as a citizen, but
Geneva as it had once been; i.e., Geneva as Calvin had
designed it.
The Social Contract begins with the sensational opening
sentence: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in
chains,” and proceeds to argue that men need not be in
chains. If a civil society, or state, could be based on a
genuine social contract, as opposed to the fraudulent social
contract depicted in the Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality, men would receive in exchange for their
independence a better kind of freedom, namely true
political, or republican, liberty. Such liberty is to be
found in obedience to a self-imposed law.
Rousseau’s definition of political liberty raises an
obvious problem. For while it can be readily agreed that an
individual is free if he obeys only rules he prescribes for
himself, this is so because an individual is a person with a
single will. A society, by contrast, is a set of persons
with a set of individual wills, and conflict between
separate wills is a fact of universal experience. Rousseau’s
response to the problem is to define his civil society as an
artificial person united by a general will, or volonté
générale. The social contract that brings society into being
is a pledge, and the society remains in being as a pledged
group. Rousseau’s republic is a creation of the general
will—of a will that never falters in each and every member
to further the public, common, or national interest—even
though it may conflict at times with personal interest.
Rousseau sounds very much like Hobbes when he says that
under the pact by which men enter civil society everyone
totally alienates himself and all his rights to the whole
community. Rousseau, however, represents this act as a form
of exchange of rights whereby men give up natural rights in
return for civil rights. The bargain is a good one because
what men surrender are rights of dubious value, whose
realization depends solely on an individual man’s own might,
and what they obtain in return are rights that are both
legitimate and enforced by the collective force of the
community.
There is no more haunting paragraph in The Social
Contract than that in which Rousseau speaks of “forcing a
man to be free.” But it would be wrong to interpret these
words in the manner of those critics who see Rousseau as a
prophet of modern totalitarianism. He does not claim that a
whole society can be forced to be free but only that an
occasional individual, who is enslaved by his passions to
the extent of disobeying the law, can be restored by force
to obedience to the voice of the general will that exists
inside of him. The man who is coerced by society for a
breach of the law is, in Rousseau’s view, being brought back
to an awareness of his own true interests.
For Rousseau there is a radical dichotomy between true
law and actual law. Actual law, which he describes in the
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, simply protects the
status quo. True law, as described in The Social Contract,
is just law, and what ensures its being just is that it is
made by the people in its collective capacity as sovereign
and obeyed by the same people in their individual capacities
as subjects. Rousseau is confident that such laws could not
be unjust because it is inconceivable that any people would
make unjust laws for itself.
Rousseau is, however, troubled by the fact that the
majority of a people does not necessarily represent its most
intelligent citizens. Indeed, he agrees with Plato that most
people are stupid. Thus the general will, while always
morally sound, is sometimes mistaken. Hence Rousseau
suggests the people need a lawgiver—a great mind like Solon
or Lycurgus or Calvin—to draw up a constitution and system
of laws. He even suggests that such lawgivers need to claim
divine inspiration in order to persuade the dim-witted
multitude to accept and endorse the laws it is offered.
This suggestion echoes a similar proposal by Machiavelli,
a political theorist Rousseau greatly admired and whose love
of republican government he shared. An even more
conspicuously Machiavellian influence can be discerned in
Rousseau’s chapter on civil religion, where he argues that
Christianity, despite its truth, is useless as a republican
religion on the grounds that it is directed to the unseen
world and does nothing to teach citizens the virtues that
are needed in the service of the state, namely, courage,
virility, and patriotism. Rousseau does not go so far as
Machiavelli in proposing a revival of pagan cults, but he
does propose a civil religion with minimal theological
content designed to fortify and not impede (as Christianity
impedes) the cultivation of martial virtues. It is
understandable that the authorities of Geneva, profoundly
convinced that the national church of their little republic
was at the same time a truly Christian church and a nursery
of patriotism, reacted angrily against this chapter in
Rousseau’s Social Contract.
By the year 1762, however, when The Social Contract was
published, Rousseau had given up any thought of settling in
Geneva. After recovering his citizen’s rights in 1754, he
had returned to Paris and the company of his friends around
the Encyclopédie. But he became increasingly ill at ease in
such worldly society and began to quarrel with his fellow
Philosophes. An article for the Encyclopédie on the subject
of Geneva, written by d’Alembert at Voltaire’s instigation,
upset Rousseau partly by suggesting that the pastors of the
city had lapsed from Calvinist severity into unitarian
laxity and partly by proposing that a theatre should be
erected there. Rousseau hastened into print with a defense
of the Calvinist orthodoxy of the pastors and with an
elaborate attack on the theatre as an institution that could
only do harm to an innocent community such as Geneva.
Years of seclusion and exile
By the time his Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles
(1758; Letter to Monsieur d’Alembert on the Theatre)
appeared in print, Rousseau had already left Paris to pursue
a life closer to nature on the country estate of his friend
Mme d’Épinay near Montmorency. When the hospitality of Mme
d’Épinay proved to entail much the same social round as that
of Paris, Rousseau retreated to a nearby cottage, called
Montlouis, under the protection of the Maréchal de
Luxembourg. But even this highly placed friend could not
save him in 1762 when his treatise on education, Émile, was
published and scandalized the pious Jansenists of the French
Parlements even as The Social Contract scandalized the
Calvinists of Geneva. In Paris, as in Geneva, they ordered
the book to be burned and the author arrested; all the
Maréchal de Luxembourg could do was to provide a carriage
for Rousseau to escape from France. After formally
renouncing his Genevan citizenship in 1763, Rousseau became
a fugitive, spending the rest of his life moving from one
refuge to another.
The years at Montmorency had been the most productive of
his literary career; besides The Social Contract and Émile,
Julie: ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie: or, The New
Eloise) came out within 12 months, all three works of
seminal importance. The New Eloise, being a novel, escaped
the censorship to which the other two works were subject;
indeed of all his books it proved to be the most widely read
and the most universally praised in his lifetime. It
develops the Romanticism that had already informed his
writings on music and perhaps did more than any other single
work of literature to influence the spirit of its age. It
made the author at least as many friends among the reading
public—and especially among educated women—as The Social
Contract and Émile made enemies among magistrates and
priests. If it did not exempt him from persecution, at least
it ensured that his persecution was observed, and admiring
femmes du monde intervened from time to time to help him so
that Rousseau was never, unlike Voltaire and Diderot,
actually imprisoned.
The theme of The New Eloise provides a striking contrast
to that of The Social Contract. It is about people finding
happiness in domestic as distinct from public life, in the
family as opposed to the state. The central character,
Saint-Preux, is a middle-class preceptor who falls in love
with his upper-class pupil, Julie. She returns his love and
yields to his advances, but the difference between their
classes makes marriage between them impossible. Baron
d’Étange, Julie’s father, has indeed promised her to a
fellow nobleman named Wolmar. As a dutiful daughter, Julie
marries Wolmar and Saint-Preux goes off on a voyage around
the world with an English aristocrat, Bomston, from whom he
acquires a certain stoicism. Julie succeeds in forgetting
her feelings for Saint-Preux and finds happiness as wife,
mother, and chatelaine. Some six years later Saint-Preux
returns from his travels and is engaged as tutor to the
Wolmar children. All live together in harmony, and there are
only faint echoes of the old affair between Saint-Preux and
Julie. The little community, dominated by Julie, illustrates
one of Rousseau’s political principles: that while men
should rule the world in public life, women should rule men
in private life. At the end of The New Eloise, when Julie
has made herself ill in an attempt to rescue one of her
children from drowning, she comes face-to-face with a truth
about herself: that her love for Saint-Preux has never died.
The novel was clearly inspired by Rousseau’s own curious
relationship—at once passionate and platonic—with Sophie
d’Houdetot, a noblewoman who lived near him at Montmorency.
He himself asserted in the Confessions (1781–88) that he was
led to write the book by “a desire for loving, which I had
never been able to satisfy and by which I felt myself
devoured.” Saint-Preux’s experience of love forbidden by the
laws of class reflects Rousseau’s own experience; and yet it
cannot be said that The New Eloise is an attack on those
laws, which seem, on the contrary, to be given the status
almost of laws of nature. The members of the Wolmar
household are depicted as finding happiness in living
according to an aristocratic ideal. They appreciate the
routines of country life and enjoy the beauties of the Swiss
and Savoyard Alps. But despite such an endorsement of the
social order, the novel was revolutionary; its very free
expression of emotions and its extreme sensibility deeply
moved its large readership and profoundly influenced
literary developments.
Émile is a book that seems to appeal alternately to the
republican ethic of The Social Contract and the aristocratic
ethic of The New Eloise. It is also halfway between a novel
and a didactic essay. Described by the author as a treatise
on education, it is not about schooling but about the
upbringing of a rich man’s son by a tutor who is given
unlimited authority over him. At the same time the book sets
out to explore the possibilities of an education for
republican citizenship. The basic argument of the book, as
Rousseau himself expressed it, is that vice and error, which
are alien to a child’s original nature, are introduced by
external agencies, so that the work of a tutor must always
be directed to counteracting those forces by manipulating
pressures that will work with nature and not against it.
Rousseau devotes many pages to explaining the methods the
tutor must use. These methods involve a noticeable measure
of deceit, and although corporal punishment is forbidden,
mental cruelty is not.
Whereas The Social Contract is concerned with the
problems of achieving freedom, Émile is concerned with
achieving happiness and wisdom. In this different context
religion plays a different role. Instead of a civil
religion, Rousseau here outlines a personal religion, which
proves to be a kind of simplified Christianity, involving
neither revelation nor the familiar dogmas of the church. In
the guise of La Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard (1765;
The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar) Rousseau sets
out what may fairly be regarded as his own religious views,
since that book confirms what he says on the subject in his
private correspondence. Rousseau could never entertain
doubts about God’s existence or about the immortality of the
soul. He felt, moreover, a strong emotional drive toward the
worship of God, whose presence he felt most forcefully in
nature, especially in mountains and forests untouched by the
hand of man. He also attached great importance to
conscience, the “divine voice of the soul in man,” opposing
this both to the bloodless categories of rationalistic
ethics and to the cold tablets of biblical authority.
This minimal creed put Rousseau at odds with the orthodox
adherents of the churches and with the openly atheistic
Philosophes of Paris, so that despite the enthusiasm that
some of his writings, and especially The New Eloise, excited
in the reading public, he felt himself increasingly
isolated, tormented, and pursued. After he had been expelled
from France, he was chased from canton to canton in
Switzerland. He reacted to the suppression of The Social
Contract in Geneva by indicting the regime of that
city-state in a pamphlet entitled Lettres écrites de la
montagne (1764; Letters Written from the Mountain). No
longer, as in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, was
Geneva depicted as a model republic but as one that had been
taken over by “twenty-five despots”; the subjects of the
king of England were said to be free men by comparison with
the victims of Genevan tryranny.
It was in England that Rousseau found refuge after he had
been banished from the canton of Bern. The Scottish
philosopher David Hume took him there and secured the offer
of a pension from King George III; but once in England,
Rousseau became aware that certain British intellectuals
were making fun of him, and he suspected Hume of
participating in the mockery. Various symptoms of paranoia
began to manifest themselves in Rousseau, and he returned to
France incognito. Believing that Thérèse was the only person
he could rely on, he finally married her in 1768, when he
was 56 years old.
The last decade
In the remaining 10 years of his life Rousseau produced
primarily autobiographical writings, mostly intended to
justify himself against the accusations of his adversaries.
The most important was his Confessions, modeled on the work
of the same title by St. Augustine and achieving something
of the same classic status. He also wrote Rousseau juge de
Jean-Jacques (1780; “Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques”) to
reply to specific charges by his enemies and Les Rêveries du
promeneur solitaire (1782; Reveries of the Solitary Walker),
one of the most moving of his books, in which the intense
passion of his earlier writings gives way to a gentle
lyricism and serenity. And indeed, Rousseau does seem to
have recovered his peace of mind in his last years, when he
was once again afforded refuge on the estates of great
French noblemen, first the Prince de Conti and then the
Marquis de Girardin, in whose park at Ermenonville he died.
Maurice Cranston
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Modern philosophy » The Enlightenment » Nonepistemological movements
in the Enlightenment » Professionalization of philosophy
In his Éléments de philosophie (1759; “Elements of Philosophy”),
d’Alembert wrote:
Our century is the century of philosophy par excellence. If one
considers without bias the present state of our knowledge, one cannot
deny that philosophy among us has shown progress.
D’Alembert was calling attention to the self-examination for which
the 18th century is famous, and he was undoubtedly referring to the
activities of mathematicians (like himself), jurists, economists, and
amateur moralists rather than to those of narrow philosophical
specialists. But the 18th century was clearly the “century of philosophy
par excellence” in a more technical sense also, for it was the period in
which philosophizing first began to pass from the hands of gentlemen and
amateurs into those of true professionals. The chief sign of this shift
was the return of reputable philosophy to the universities.
This transformation first occurred in Germany and is mainly
associated with the University of Halle (founded 1694). During the time
of the generation between Leibniz and Kant, the philosophical climate
changed profoundly. The best representative of this change was Christian
Wolff (1679–1754), who taught philosophy at Halle. Kant called Wolff
“the real originator of the spirit of thoroughness in Germany,” and
Wolff was indeed a pioneer in techniques that transformed philosophy
into a professional discipline: the self-conscious adoption of a
systematic approach and the creation of a specialized philosophical
vocabulary. Wolff carefully distinguished the various fields of
philosophy, wrote textbooks in each of them, which were used in the
German universities for many years, and created many of the specialized
philosophical terms that have survived to the present day.
The German Enlightenment was the first modern period to produce
specialists in philosophy. In England philosophizing in the universities
did not become serious until well after the time of Hume, but already
philosophical fields had been sufficiently distinguished to be
represented by distinct professorships. The titles professor of mental
philosophy, professor of moral philosophy, and professor of metaphysical
philosophy, as they arose at Oxford and Cambridge, were the product of
the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Two additional features of the German Enlightenment are relevant:
(1)
the founding of the first professional journals and
(2) the increasing
concern of philosophy with its own history.
The learned journal, like
the scientific society, was an innovation of the 17th century. But what
had begun as a general intellectual endeavour became in 18th-century
Germany a specifically philosophical enterprise. Journals were published
in great numbers: e.g., Acta Philosophorum (Halle, 1715–26), Der
philosophische Büchersaal (Leipzig, 1741–44; “The Philosophical Book
Room”), and the short-lived Neues philosophisches Magazin (Leipzig,
1789–91), devoted exclusively to the philosophy of Kant.
More interesting still is the publication of voluminous German
histories of philosophy after 1740, among them Johann Brucker’s The
History of Philosophy, 6 vol. (1742–67); Johann Buhle’s Lehrbuch der
Geschichte der Philosophie, 8 vol. (1796–1804; “Textbook on the History
of Philosophy”); Dietrich Tiedemann’s Geist der spekulativen Philosophie
von Thales bis Berkeley, 6 vol. (1791–97; “The Spirit of Speculative
Philosophy from Thales to Berkeley”); and Gottlieb Tennemann’s
Geschichte der Philosophie, 11 vol. (1789–1819; excerpted in A Manual of
the History of Philosophy).
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Jean Le Rond d’Alembert
French mathematician and philosopher
born , Nov. 17, 1717, Paris, France
died Oct. 29, 1783, Paris
Main
French mathematician, philosopher, and writer, who achieved
fame as a mathematician and scientist before acquiring a
considerable reputation as a contributor to and editor of
the famous Encyclopédie.
Early life
The illegitimate son of a famous hostess, Mme de Tencin, and
one of her lovers, the chevalier Destouches-Canon,
d’Alembert was abandoned on the steps of the Parisian church
of Saint-Jean-le-Rond, from which he derived his Christian
name. Although Mme de Tencin never recognized her son,
Destouches eventually sought out the child and entrusted him
to a glazier’s wife, whom d’Alembert always treated as his
mother. Through his father’s influence, he was admitted to a
prestigious Jansenist school, enrolling first as
Jean-Baptiste Daremberg and subsequently changing his name,
perhaps for reasons of euphony, to d’Alembert. Although
Destouches never disclosed his identity as father of the
child, he left his son an annuity of 1,200 livres.
D’Alembert’s teachers at first hoped to train him for
theology, being perhaps encouraged by a commentary he wrote
on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, but they inspired in him
only a lifelong aversion to the subject. He spent two years
studying law and became an advocate in 1738, although he
never practiced. After taking up medicine for a year, he
finally devoted himself to mathematics—“the only
occupation,” he said later, “which really interested me.”
Apart from some private lessons, d’Alembert was almost
entirely self-taught.
Mathematics
In 1739 he read his first paper to the Academy of Sciences,
of which he became a member in 1741. In 1743, at the age of
26, he published his important Traité de dynamique, a
fundamental treatise on dynamics containing the famous
“d’Alembert’s principle,” which states that Newton’s third
law of motion (for every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction) is true for bodies that are free to move
as well as for bodies rigidly fixed. Other mathematical
works followed very rapidly; in 1744 he applied his
principle to the theory of equilibrium and motion of fluids,
in his Traité de l’équilibre et du mouvement des fluides.
This discovery was followed by the development of partial
differential equations, a branch of the theory of calculus,
the first papers on which were published in his Réflexions
sur la cause générale des vents (1747). It won him a prize
at the Berlin Academy, to which he was elected the same
year. In 1747 he applied his new calculus to the problem of
vibrating strings, in his Recherches sur les cordes
vibrantes; in 1749 he furnished a method of applying his
principles to the motion of any body of a given shape; and
in 1749 he found an explanation of the precession of the
equinoxes (a gradual change in the position of the Earth’s
orbit), determined its characteristics, and explained the
phenomenon of the nutation (nodding) of the Earth’s axis, in
Recherches sur la précession des équinoxes et sur la
nutation de l’axe de la terre. In 1752 he published Essai
d’une nouvelle théorie de la résistance des fluides, an
essay containing various original ideas and new
observations. In it he considered air as an incompressible
elastic fluid composed of small particles and, carrying over
from the principles of solid body mechanics the view that
resistance is related to loss of momentum on impact of
moving bodies, he produced the surprising result that the
resistance of the particles was zero. D’Alembert was himself
dissatisfied with the result; the conclusion is known as
“d’Alembert’s paradox” and is not accepted by modern
physicists. In the Memoirs of the Berlin Academy he
published findings of his research on integral
calculus—which devises relationships of variables by means
of rates of change of their numerical value—a branch of
mathematical science that is greatly indebted to him. In his
Recherches sur différents points importants du système du
monde (1754–56) he perfected the solution of the problem of
the perturbations (variations of orbit) of the planets that
he had presented to the academy some years before. From 1761
to 1780 he published eight volumes of his Opuscules
mathématiques.
The Encyclopédie
Meanwhile, d’Alembert began an active social life and
frequented well-known salons, where he acquired a
considerable reputation as a witty conversationalist and
mimic. Like his fellow Philosophes—those thinkers, writers,
and scientists who believed in the sovereignty of reason and
nature (as opposed to authority and revelation) and rebelled
against old dogmas and institutions—he turned to the
improvement of society. A rationalist thinker in the
free-thinking tradition, he opposed religion and stood for
tolerance and free discussion; in politics the Philosophes
sought a liberal monarchy with an “enlightened” king who
would supplant the old aristocracy with a new, intellectual
aristocracy. Believing in man’s need to rely on his own
powers, they promulgated a new social morality to replace
Christian ethics. Science, the only real source of
knowledge, had to be popularized for the benefit of the
people, and it was in this tradition that he became
associated with the Encyclopédie about 1746. When the
original idea of a translation into French of Ephraim
Chambers’ English Cyclopædia was replaced by that of a new
work under the general editorship of the Philosophe Denis
Diderot, d’Alembert was made editor of the mathematical and
scientific articles. In fact, he not only helped with the
general editorship and contributed articles on other
subjects but also tried to secure support for the enterprise
in influential circles. He wrote the Discours préliminaire
that introduced the first volume of the work in 1751. This
was a remarkable attempt to present a unified view of
contemporary knowledge, tracing the development and
interrelationship of its various branches and showing how
they formed coherent parts of a single structure; the second
section of the Discours was devoted to the intellectual
history of Europe from the time of the Renaissance. In 1752
d’Alembert wrote a preface to Volume III, which was a
vigorous rejoinder to the Encyclopédie’s critics, while an
Éloge de Montesquieu, which served as the preface to Volume
V (1755), skillfully but somewhat disingenuously presented
Montesquieu as one of the Encyclopédie’s supporters.
Montesquieu had, in fact, refused an invitation to write the
articles “Democracy” and “Despotism,” and the promised
article on “Taste” remained unfinished at his death in 1755.
In 1756 d’Alembert went to stay with Voltaire at Geneva,
where he also collected information for an Encyclopédie
article, “Genève,” which praised the doctrines and practices
of the Genevan pastors. When it appeared in 1757, it aroused
angry protests in Geneva because it affirmed that many of
the ministers no longer believed in Christ’s divinity and
also advocated (probably at Voltaire’s instigation) the
establishment of a theatre. This article prompted Rousseau,
who had contributed the articles on music to the
Encyclopédie, to argue in his Lettre à d’Alembert sur les
spectacles (1758) that the theatre is invariably a
corrupting influence. D’Alembert himself replied with an
incisive but not unfriendly Lettre à J.-J. Rousseau, citoyen
de Genève. Gradually discouraged by the growing difficulties
of the enterprise, d’Alembert gave up his share of the
editorship at the beginning of 1758, thereafter limiting his
commitment to the production of mathematical and scientific
articles.
Later literary, scientific, and philosophical work
His earlier literary and philosophical activity, however,
led to the publication of his Mélanges de littérature,
d’histoire et de philosophie (1753). This work contained the
impressive Essai sur les gens de lettres, which exhorted
writers to pursue “liberty, truth and poverty” and also
urged aristocratic patrons to respect the talents and
independence of such writers.
Largely as a result of the persistent campaigning of Mme
du Deffand, a prominent hostess to writers and scientists,
d’Alembert was elected to the French Academy in 1754; he
proved himself to be a zealous member, working hard to
enhance the dignity of the institution in the eyes of the
public and striving steadfastly for the election of members
sympathetic to the cause of the Philosophes. His personal
position became even more influential in 1772 when he was
made permanent secretary. One of his functions was the
continuation of the Histoire des membres de l’Académie; this
involved writing the biographies of all the members who had
died between 1700 and 1772. He paid tribute to his
predecessors by means of Éloges that were delivered at
public sessions of the academy. Though of limited literary
value, they throw interesting light on his attitude toward
many contemporary problems and also reveal his desire to
establish a link between the Academy and the public.
From 1752 onward, Frederick II of Prussia repeatedly
tried to persuade d’Alembert to become president of the
Berlin Academy, but the philosopher contented himself with a
brief visit to the King at the Rhine village of Wesel in
1755 and a longer stay at Potsdam in 1763. For many years he
gave the King advice on the running of the academy and the
appointment of new members. In 1762 another monarch, the
empress Catherine II of Russia, invited d’Alembert to become
tutor to her son, the grand duke Paul; this offer also was
refused. Apart from fearing the harmful effects of foreign
residence upon his health and personal position, d’Alembert
did not wish to be separated from the intellectual life of
Paris.
Although as a skeptic, d’Alembert willingly supported the
Philosophes’ hostility to Christianity, he was too cautious
to become openly aggressive. The expulsion of the Jesuits
from France, however, prompted him to publish “by a
disinterested author,” at first anonymously, and then in his
own name, Sur la destruction des Jésuites en France (1765;
An Account of the Destruction of the Jesuits in France,
1766). He there tried to show that the Jesuits, in spite of
their qualities as scholars and educators, had destroyed
themselves through their inordinate love of power.
During these years d’Alembert’s interests included
musical theory. His Éléments de musique of 1752 was an
attempt to expound the principles of the composer
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), who had consolidated
contemporary musical development into a harmonic system that
dominated Western music until about 1900. In 1754 d’Alembert
published an essay expressing his thoughts on music in
general—and French music in particular—entitled Réflexions
sur la musique en général et sur la musique française en
particulier. He also published in his mathematical opuscules
treatises on acoustics, the physics of sound, and he
contributed several articles on music to the Encyclopédie.
In 1765 a serious illness compelled him to leave his
foster-mother’s house, and he eventually went to live in the
house of Julie de Lespinasse, with whom he fell in love. He
was the leading intellectual figure in her salon, which
became an important recruiting centre for the French
Academy. Although they may have been intimate for a short
time, d’Alembert soon had to be satisfied with the role of
steadfast friend. He discovered the extent of her passionate
involvement with other men only after Julie’s death in 1776.
He transferred his home to an apartment at the Louvre—to
which he was entitled as secretary to the Academy—where he
died.
Assessment
Posterity has not confirmed the judgment of those
contemporaries who placed d’Alembert’s reputation next to
Voltaire’s. In spite of his original contributions to the
mathematical sciences, intellectual timidity prevented his
literary and philosophical work from attaining true
greatness. Nevertheless, his scientific background enabled
him to elaborate a philosophy of science that, inspired by
the rationalist ideal of the ultimate unity of all
knowledge, established “principles” making possible the
interconnection of the various branches of science.
Moreover, d’Alembert was a typical 18th-century Philosophe,
for in both his life and his work he tried to invest the
name with dignity and serious meaning. In his personal life
he was simple and frugal, never seeking wealth and
dispensing charity whenever possible, always watchful of his
integrity and independence, and constantly using his
influence, both at home and abroad, to encourage the advance
of “enlightenment.”
Ronald Grimsley
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Christian, baron von Wolff
German philosopher
Wolff also spelled Wolf
born Jan. 24, 1679, Breslau, Silesia [now Wrocław, Pol.]
died April 9, 1754, Halle, Prussia [now in Germany]
Main
philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who worked in many
subjects but who is best known as the German spokesman of
the Enlightenment, the 18th-century philosophical movement
characterized by Rationalism.
Wolff was educated at the universities of Breslau, Jena,
and Leipzig and was a pupil of the philosopher and
mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. On the
recommendation of Leibniz he was appointed professor of
mathematics at the University of Halle in 1707, but he was
banished in 1723 as a result of theological disputes with
Pietists, who were followers of the German movement for an
increase of piety in Lutheran churches. He became professor
of mathematics and philosophy at the University of Marburg,
Hesse (1723–40), and, as science adviser to Peter the Great
(1716–25), he helped found the St. Petersburg Academy of
Sciences in Russia. After returning to the University of
Halle, at the request of the king of Prussia, Frederick II
the Great, he became chancellor (1741–54).
Wolff wrote numerous works in philosophy, theology,
psychology, botany, and physics. His series of essays all
beginning under the title Vernünftige Gedanken (“Rational
Ideas”) covered many subjects and expounded Leibniz’s
theories in popular form. Wolff emphasized that every
occurrence must have an adequate reason for happening or
there arises the impossible alternative that something might
come out of nothing. He applied the rational thought of the
Anglo-French Enlightenment and of Leibniz and René Descartes
in the development of his own philosophical system, the
Wolffian philosophy. Rationalism and mathematical
methodology formed the essence of this system, which was an
important force in the development of German philosophical
thought.
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Modern philosophy » The Enlightenment » Critical examination of reason
in Kant
All these developments led directly to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant,
the greatest philosopher of the modern period, whose works mark the true
culmination of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Historically
speaking, Kant’s great contribution was to elucidate both the sensory
and the a priori elements in knowledge and thus to bridge the gap
between the extreme rationalism of Leibniz and the extreme empiricism of
Hume. But in addition to the brilliant content of his philosophical
doctrines, Kant was responsible for three crucial philosophical
innovations: (1) a new definition of philosophy, (2) a new conception of
philosophical method, and (3) a new structural model for the writing of
philosophy.
Kant conceived of reason as being at the very heart of the
philosophical enterprise. Philosophy’s sole task, in his view, is to
determine what reason can and cannot do. Philosophy, he said, “is the
science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of human
reason”; its true aim is both constructive (“to outline the system of
all knowledge arising from pure reason”) and critical (“to expose the
illusions of a reason that forgets its limits”). Philosophy is thus a
calling of great dignity, for its aim is wisdom, and its practitioners
are themselves “lawgivers of reason.” But in order for philosophy to be
“the science of the highest maxims of reason,” the philosopher must be
able to determine the source, the extent, and the validity of human
knowledge and the ultimate limits of reason. And these tasks require a
special philosophical method.
Sometimes Kant called this the “transcendental method,” but more
often the “critical method.” His purpose was to reject the dogmatic
assumptions of the rationalist school, and his wish was to return to the
semiskeptical position with which Descartes had begun before his
dogmatic pretensions to certainty took hold. Kant’s method was to
conduct a critical examination of the powers of a priori reason—an
inquiry into what reason can achieve when all experience is removed. His
method was based on a doctrine that he himself called “a Copernican
revolution” in philosophy (by analogy with the shift from geocentrism to
heliocentrism in cosmology): the assumption that objects must conform to
human knowledge—or to the human apparatus of knowing—rather than that
human knowledge must conform to objects. The question then became: What
is the exact nature of this knowing apparatus?
Unlike Descartes, Kant could not question that knowledge exists. No
one raised in the Enlightenment could doubt, for example, that
mathematics and Newtonian physics were real. Kant’s methodological
question was rather: How is mathematical and physical knowledge
possible? How must human knowledge be structured in order to make these
sciences secure? The attempt to answer these questions was the task of
Kant’s great work Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
Kant’s aim was to examine reason not merely in one of its domains but
in each of its employments according to the threefold structure of the
human mind that he had inherited from Wolff. Thus the critical
examination of reason in thinking (science) is undertaken in the
Critique of Pure Reason, that of reason in willing (ethics) in the
Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and that of reason in feeling
(aesthetics) in the Critique of Judgment (1790).
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Immanuel Kant
German philosopher
born April 22, 1724, Königsberg, Prussia [now
Kaliningrad, Russia]
died February 12, 1804, Königsberg
Main
German philosopher whose comprehensive and systematic work
in the theory of knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics greatly
influenced all subsequent philosophy, especially the various
schools of Kantianism and Idealism.
Kant was the foremost thinker of the Enlightenment and
one of the greatest philosophers of all time. In him were
subsumed new trends that had begun with the Rationalism
(stressing reason) of René Descartes and the Empiricism
(stressing experience) of Francis Bacon. He thus inaugurated
a new era in the development of philosophical thought.
Background and early years
Kant lived in the remote province where he was born for his
entire life. His father, a saddler, was, according to Kant,
a descendant of a Scottish immigrant, although scholars have
found no basis for this claim; his mother, an uneducated
German woman, was remarkable for her character and natural
intelligence. Both parents were devoted followers of the
Pietist branch of the Lutheran Church, which taught that
religion belongs to the inner life expressed in simplicity
and obedience to moral law. The influence of their pastor
made it possible for Kant—the fourth of nine children, but
the eldest surviving child—to obtain an education.
At the age of eight Kant entered the Pietist school that
his pastor directed. This was a Latin school, and it was
presumably during the eight and a half years he was there
that Kant acquired his lifelong love for the Latin classics,
especially for the naturalistic poet Lucretius. In 1740 he
enrolled in the University of Königsberg as a theological
student. But, although he attended courses in theology and
even preached on a few occasions, he was principally
attracted to mathematics and physics. Aided by a young
professor who had studied Christian Wolff, a systematizer of
Rationalist philosophy, and who was also an enthusiast for
the science of Sir Isaac Newton, Kant began reading the work
of the English physicist and, in 1744, started his first
book, dealing with a problem concerning kinetic forces.
Though by that time he had decided to pursue an academic
career, the death of his father in 1746 and his failure to
obtain the post of undertutor in one of the schools attached
to the university compelled him to withdraw and seek a means
of supporting himself.
Background and early years » Tutor and Privatdozent
He found employment as a family tutor and, during the nine
years that he gave to it, worked for three different
families. With them he was introduced to the influential
society of the city, acquired social grace, and made his
farthest travels from his native city—some 60 miles (96
kilometres) away to the town of Arnsdorf. In 1755, aided by
the kindness of a friend, he was able to complete his degree
at the university and take up the position of Privatdozent,
or lecturer.
Three dissertations that he presented on obtaining this
post indicate the interest and direction of his thought at
this time. In one, De Igne (On Fire), he argued that bodies
operate on one another through the medium of a uniformly
diffused elastic and subtle matter that is the underlying
substance of both heat and light. His first teaching was in
mathematics and physics, and he was never to lose his
interest in scientific developments. That it was more than
an amateur interest is shown by his publication within the
next few years of several scientific works dealing with the
different races of men, the nature of winds, the causes of
earthquakes, and the general theory of the heavens.
At this period Newtonian physics was important to Kant as
much for its philosophical implications as for its
scientific content. A second dissertation, the Monodologia
physica (1756), contrasted the Newtonian methods of thinking
with those employed in the philosophy then prevailing in
German universities. This was the philosophy of Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, a universal scholar, as systematized and
popularized by Wolff and by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten,
author of a widely used text, the Metaphysica (1739).
Leibniz’ works as they are now known were not fully
available to these writers; and the Leibnizian philosophy
that they presented was extravagantly Rationalistic,
abstract, and cut-and-dried. It nevertheless remained a
powerful force, and the main efforts of independent thinkers
in Germany at the time were devoted to examining Leibniz’s
ideas.
In a third dissertation, Principiorum Primorum
Cognitionis Metaphysicae Nova Dilucidato (1755), on the
first principles of metaphysics, Kant analyzed especially
the principle of sufficient reason, which, in Wolff’s
formulation, asserts that for everything there is a
sufficient reason why it should be rather than not be.
Although critical, Kant was cautious and still a long way
from challenging the assumptions of Leibnizian metaphysics.
During the 15 years that he spent as a Privatdozent,
Kant’s renown as a teacher and writer steadily increased.
Soon he was lecturing on many subjects other than physics
and mathematics—including logic, metaphysics, and moral
philosophy. He even lectured on fireworks and fortifications
and every summer for 30 years taught a popular course on
physical geography. He enjoyed great success as a lecturer;
his lecturing style, which differed markedly from that of
his books, was humorous and vivid, enlivened by many
examples from his reading in English and French literature,
and in travel and geography, science and philosophy.
Although he twice failed to obtain a professorship at
Königsberg, he refused to accept offers that would have
taken him elsewhere—including the professorship of poetry at
Berlin that would have brought greater prestige. He
preferred the peace and quiet of his native city in which to
develop and mature his own philosophy.
Background and early years » Critic of Leibnizian
Rationalism
During the 1760s he became increasingly critical of
Leibnizianism. According to one of his students, Kant was
then attacking Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten, was a
declared follower of Newton, and expressed great admiration
for the moral philosophy of the Romanticist Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.
His principal work of this period was Untersuchung über
die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie
und der Moral (1764; “An Inquiry into the Distinctness of
the Fundamental Principles of Natural Theology and Morals”).
In this work he attacked the claim of Leibnizian philosophy
that philosophy should model itself on mathematics and aim
at constructing a chain of demonstrated truths based on
self-evident premises. Kant argued that mathematics proceeds
from definitions that are arbitrary, by means of operations
that are clearly and sharply defined, upon concepts that can
be exhibited in concrete form. In contrast with this method,
he argued that philosophy must begin with concepts that are
already given, “though confusedly or insufficiently
determined,” so that philosophers cannot begin with
definitions without thereby shutting themselves up within a
circle of words. Philosophy cannot, like mathematics,
proceed synthetically; it must analyze and clarify. The
importance of the moral order, which he had learned from
Rousseau, reinforced the conviction received from his study
of Newton that a synthetic philosophy is empty and false.
Besides attacking the methods of the Leibnizians, he also
began criticizing their leading ideas. In an essay Versuch,
den Begriff der negativen Grössen in die Weltweisheit
ein-zuführen (1763), he argued that physical opposition as
encountered in things cannot be reduced to logical
contradiction, in which the same predicate is both affirmed
and denied, and, hence, that it is pointless to reduce
causality to the logical relation of antecedent and
consequent. In an essay of the same year, Der einzig
mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseyns
Gottes, he sharply criticized the Leibnizian concept of
Being by charging that the so-called ontological argument,
which would prove the existence of God by logic alone, is
fallacious because it confuses existential with attributive
statements: existence, he declared, is not a predicate of
attribution. Moreover, with regard to the nature of space,
Kant sided with Newton in his confrontation with Leibniz.
Leibniz’ view that space is “an order of co-existences” and
that spatial differences can be stated in conceptual terms,
he concluded to be untenable.
Some indication of a possible alternative of Kant’s own
to the Leibnizian position can be gathered from his curious
Träume eines Geistersehers erläutert durch Träume der
Metaphysik (1766). This work is an examination of the whole
notion of a world of spirits, in the context of an inquiry
into the spiritualist claims of Emanuel Swedenborg, a
scientist and biblical scholar. Kant’s position at first
seems to have been completely skeptical, and the influence
of the Scottish Skeptic David Hume is more apparent here
than in any previous work; it was Hume, he later claimed,
who first awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers. Yet Kant was
not so much arguing that the notion of a world of spirits is
illusory as insisting that men have no insight into the
nature of such a world, a conclusion that has devastating
implications for metaphysics as the Leibnizians conceived
it. Metaphysicians can dream as well as spiritualists, but
this is not to say that their dreams are necessarily empty;
there are already hints that moral experience can give
content to the ideal of an “intelligible world.” Rousseau
thus acted upon Kant here as a counterinfluence to Hume.
Background and early years » Early years of the
professorship at Königsberg
Finally, in 1770, after serving for 15 years as a
Privatdozent, Kant was appointed to the chair of logic and
metaphysics, a position in which he remained active until a
few years before his death. In this period—usually called
his critical period, because in it he wrote his great
Critiques—he published an astounding series of original
works on a wide variety of topics, in which he elaborated
and expounded his philosophy.
The Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 that he delivered on
assuming his new position already contained many of the
important elements of his mature philosophy. As indicated in
its title, De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et
Principiis: Dissertatio, the implicit dualism of the Träume
is made explicit; and it is made so on the basis of a wholly
un-Leibnizian interpretation of the distinction between
sense and understanding. Sense is not, as Leibniz had
supposed, a confused form of thinking but a source of
knowledge in its own right, although the objects so known
are still only “appearances”—the term that Leibniz also
used. They are appearances because all sensing is
conditioned by the presence, in sensibility, of the forms of
time and space, which are not objective characteristics or
frameworks of things but “pure intuitions.” But though all
knowledge of things sensible is thus of phenomena, it does
not follow that nothing is known of things as they are in
themselves. Certainly, man has no intuition, or direct
insight, into an intelligible world; but the presence in him
of certain “pure intellectual concepts, such as those of
possibility, existence, necessity, substance, cause, enables
him to have some descriptive knowledge of it. By means of
these concepts he can arrive at an exemplar that provides
him with “the common measure of all other things as far as
real.” This exemplar gives man an idea of perfection for
both the theoretical and practical orders: in the first, it
is that of the Supreme Being, God; in the latter, that of
moral perfection.
After the Dissertation, Kant published virtually nothing
for 11 years. Yet, in submitting the Dissertation to a
friend at the time of its publication, he wrote:
About a year since I attained that concept which I do not
fear ever to be obliged to alter, though I may have to widen
it, and by which all sorts of metaphysical questions can be
tested in accordance with entirely safe and easy criteria,
and a sure decision reached as to whether they are soluble
or insoluble.
Period of the three “critiques”
In 1781 the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (spelled “Critik” in
the first edition; Critique of Pure Reason) was published,
followed for the next nine years by great and original works
that in a short time brought a revolution in philosophical
thought and established the new direction in which it was to
go in the years to come.
Period of the three “critiques” » The Critique of Pure
Reason
The Critique of Pure Reason was the result of some 10 years
of thinking and meditation. Yet, even so, Kant published the
first edition only reluctantly after many postponements; for
although convinced of the truth of its doctrine, he was
uncertain and doubtful about its exposition. His misgivings
proved well-founded, and Kant complained that interpreters
and critics of the work were badly misunderstanding it. To
correct these wrong interpretations of his thought he wrote
the Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als
Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (1783) and brought out a
second and revised edition of the first “critique” in 1787.
Controversy still continues regarding the merits of the two
editions: readers with a preference for an Idealistic
interpretation usually prefer the first edition, whereas
those with a Realistic view adhere to the second. But with
regard to difficulty and ease of reading and understanding,
it is generally agreed that there is little to choose
between them. Anyone on first opening either book finds it
overwhelmingly difficult and impenetrably obscure.
The cause for this difficulty can be traced in part to
the works that Kant took as his models for philosophical
writing. He was the first great modern philosopher to spend
all of his time and efforts as a university professor of the
subject. Regulations required that in all lecturing a
certain set of books be used, with the result that all of
Kant’s teaching in philosophy had been based on such
handbooks as those of Wolff and Baumgarten, which abounded
in technical jargon, artificial and schematic divisions, and
great claims to completeness. Following their example, Kant
accordingly provided a highly artificial, rigid, and by no
means immediately illuminating scaffolding for all three of
his Critiques.
The Critique of Pure Reason, after an introduction, is
divided into two parts, of very different lengths: A
“Transcendental Doctrine of Elements,” running to almost 400
pages in a typical edition, followed by a “Transcendental
Doctrine of Method,” which reaches scarcely 80 pages. The “.
. . Elements” deals with the sources of human knowledge,
whereas the “. . . Method” draws up a methodology for the
use of “pure reason” and its a priori ideas. Both are
“transcendental,” in that they are presumed to analyze the
roots of all knowledge and the conditions of all possible
experience. The “Elements” is divided, in turn, into a
“Transcendental Aesthetic,” a “Transcendental Analytic,” and
a “Transcendental Dialectic.”
The simplest way of describing the contents of the
Critique is to say that it is a treatise about metaphysics:
it seeks to show the impossibility of one sort of
metaphysics and to lay the foundations for another. The
Leibnizian metaphysics, the object of his attack, is
criticized for assuming that the human mind can arrive, by
pure thought, at truths about entities, which, by their very
nature, can never be objects of experience, such as God,
human freedom, and immortality. Kant maintained, however,
that the mind has no such power and that the vaunted
metaphysics is thus a sham.
As Kant saw it, the problem of metaphysics, as indeed of
any science, is to explain how, on the one hand, its
principles can be necessary and universal (such being a
condition for any knowledge that is scientific) and yet, on
the other hand, involve also a knowledge of the real and so
provide the investigator with the possibility of more
knowledge than is analytically contained in what he already
knows; i.e., than is implicit in the meaning alone. To meet
these two conditions, Kant maintained, knowledge must rest
on judgments that are a priori, for it is only as they are
separate from the contingencies of experience that they
could be necessary and yet also synthetic; i.e., so that the
predicate term contains something more than is analytically
contained in the subject. Thus, for example, the proposition
that all bodies are extended is not synthetic but analytic
because the notion of extension is contained in the very
notion of body; whereas the proposition that all bodies are
heavy is synthetic because weight supposes, in addition to
the notion of body, that of bodies in relation to one
another. Hence, the basic problem, as Kant formulated it, is
to determine “How [i.e., under what conditions] are
synthetic a priori judgments possible?”
This problem arises, according to Kant, in three fields,
viz., in mathematics, physics, and metaphysics; and the
three main divisions of the first part of the Critique deal
respectively with these. In the “Transcendental Aesthetic,”
Kant argued that mathematics necessarily deals with space
and time and then claimed that these are both a priori forms
of human sensibility that condition whatever is apprehended
through the senses. In the “Transcendental Analytic,” the
most crucial as well as the most difficult part of the book,
he maintained that physics is a priori and synthetic because
in its ordering of experience it uses concepts of a special
sort. These concepts—“categories,” he called them—are not so
much read out of experience as read into it and, hence, are
a priori, or pure, as opposed to empirical. But they differ
from empirical concepts in something more than their origin:
their whole role in knowledge is different; for, whereas
empirical concepts serve to correlate particular experiences
and so to bring out in a detailed way how experience is
ordered, the categories have the function of prescribing the
general form that this detailed order must take. They
belong, as it were, to the very framework of knowledge. But
although they are indispensable for objective knowledge, the
sole knowledge that the categories can yield is of objects
of possible experience; they yield valid and real knowledge
only when they are ordering what is given through sense in
space and time.
In the “Transcendental Dialectic” Kant turned to
consideration of a priori synthetic judgments in
metaphysics. Here, he claimed, the situation is just the
reverse from what it was in mathematics and physics.
Metaphysics cuts itself off from sense experience in
attempting to go beyond it and, for this very reason, fails
to attain a single true a priori synthetic judgment. To
justify this claim, Kant analyzed the use that metaphysics
makes of the concept of the unconditioned. Reason, according
to Kant, seeks for the unconditioned or absolute in three
distinct spheres: (1) in philosophical psychology it seeks
for an absolute subject of knowledge; (2) in the sphere of
cosmology, it seeks for an absolute beginning of things in
time, for an absolute limit to them in space, and for an
absolute limit to their divisibility; and (3) in the sphere
of theology, it seeks for an absolute condition for all
things. In each case, Kant claimed to show that the attempt
is doomed to failure by leading to an antinomy in which
equally good reasons can be given for both the affirmative
and the negative position. The metaphysical “sciences” of
rational psychology, rational cosmology, and natural
theology, familiar to Kant from the text of Baumgarten, on
which he had to comment in his lectures, thus turn out to be
without foundation.
With this work, Kant proudly asserted that he had
accomplished a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Just as
the founder of modern astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus, had
explained the apparent movements of the stars by ascribing
them partly to the movement of the observers, so Kant had
accounted for the application of the mind’s a priori
principles to objects by demonstrating that the objects
conform to the mind: in knowing, it is not the mind that
conforms to things but instead things that conform to the
mind.
Period of the three “critiques” » The Critique of Practical
Reason
Because of his insistence on the need for an empirical
component in knowledge and his antipathy to speculative
metaphysics, Kant is sometimes presented as a Positivist
before his time; and his attack upon metaphysics was held by
many in his own day to bring both religion and morality down
with it. Such, however, was certainly far from Kant’s
intention. Not only did he propose to put metaphysics “on
the sure path of science,” he was prepared also to say that
he “inevitably” believed in the existence of God and in a
future life. It is also true that his original conception of
his critical philosophy anticipated the preparation of a
critique of moral philosophy. The Kritik der praktischen
Vernunft (1788, spelled “Critik” and “practischen”; Critique
of Practical Reason), the result of this intention, is the
standard source book for his ethical doctrines. The earlier
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785) is a shorter
and, despite its title, more readily comprehensible
treatment of the same general topic. Both differ from Die
Metaphysik der Sitten (1797) in that they deal with pure
ethics and try to elucidate basic principles; whereas the
later work is concerned with applying what they establish in
the concrete, a process that involved the consideration of
virtues and vices and the foundations of law and politics.
There are many points of similarity between Kant’s ethics
and his epistemology, or theory of knowledge. He used the
same scaffolding for both—a “Doctrine of Elements,”
including an “Analytic” and a “Dialectic,” followed by a
“Methodology”; but the second Critique is far shorter and
much less complicated. Just as the distinction between sense
and intelligence was fundamental for the former, so is that
between the inclinations and moral reason for the latter.
And just as the nature of the human cognitive situation was
elucidated in the first Critique by reference to the
hypothetical notion of an intuitive understanding, so is
that of the human moral situation clarified by reference to
the notion of a “holy will.” For a will of this kind there
would be no distinction between reason and inclination; a
being possessed of a holy will would always act as it ought.
It would not, however, have the concepts of duty and moral
obligation, which enter only when reason and desire find
themselves opposed. In the case of human beings, the
opposition is continuous, for man is at the same time both
flesh and spirit; it is here that the influence of Kant’s
religious background is most prominent. Hence, the moral
life is a continuing struggle in which morality appears to
the potential delinquent in the form of a law that demands
to be obeyed for its own sake—a law, however, the commands
of which are not issued by some alien authority but
represent the voice of reason, which the moral subject can
recognize as his own.
In the “Dialectic,” Kant took up again the ideas of God,
freedom, and immortality. Dismissed in the first Critique as
objects that men can never know because they transcend human
sense experience, he now argued that they are essential
postulates for the moral life. Though not reachable in
metaphysics, they are absolutely essential for moral
philosophy.
Kant is often described as an ethical Rationalist, and
the description is not wholly inappropriate. He never
espoused, however, the radical Rationalism of some of his
contemporaries nor of more recent philosophers for whom
reason is held to have direct insight into a world of values
or the power to intuit the rightness of this or that moral
principle. Thus, practical, like theoretical, reason was for
him formal rather than material—a framework of formative
principles rather than a content of actual rules. This is
why he put such stress on his first formulation of the
categorical imperative: “Act only on that maxim through
which you can at the same time will that it should become a
universal law.” Lacking any insight into the moral realm,
men can only ask themselves whether what they are proposing
to do has the formal character of law—the character, namely,
of being the same for all persons similarly circumstanced.
Period of the three “critiques” » The Critique of Judgment
The Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790: spelled “Critik”)—one of
the most original and instructive of all of Kant’s
writings—was not foreseen in his original conception of the
critical philosophy. Thus it is perhaps best regarded as a
series of appendixes to the other two Critiques. The work
falls into two main parts, called respectively “Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment” and “Critique of Teleological Judgment.”
In the first of these, after an introduction in which he
discussed “logical purposiveness,” he analyzed the notion of
“aesthetic purposiveness” in judgments that ascribe beauty
to something. Such a judgment, according to him, unlike a
mere expression of taste, lays claim to general validity;
yet it cannot be said to be cognitive because it rests on
feeling, not on argument. The explanation lies in the fact
that, when a person contemplates an object and finds it
beautiful, there is a certain harmony between his
imagination and his understanding, of which he is aware from
the immediate delight that he takes in the object.
Imagination grasps the object and yet is not restricted to
any definite concept; whereas a person imputes the delight
that he feels to others because it springs from the free
play of his cognitive faculties, which are the same in all
men.
In the second part, Kant turned to consider teleology in
nature as it is posed by the existence in organic bodies of
things of which the parts are reciprocally means and ends to
each other. In dealing with these bodies, one cannot be
content with merely mechanical principles. Yet if mechanism
is abandoned and the notion of a purpose or end of nature is
taken literally, this seems to imply that the things to
which it applies must be the work of some supernatural
designer; but this would mean a passing from the sensible to
the suprasensible, a step proved in the first Critique to be
impossible. Kant answered this objection by admitting that
teleological language cannot be avoided in taking account of
natural phenomena; but it must be understood as meaning only
that organisms must be thought of “as if” they were the
product of design, and that is by no means the same as
saying that they are deliberately produced.
Last years
The critical philosophy was soon being taught in every
important German-speaking university, and young men flocked
to Königsberg as a shrine of philosophy. In some cases, the
Prussian government even undertook the expense of their
support. Kant came to be consulted as an oracle on all kinds
of questions, including such subjects as the lawfulness of
vaccination. Such homage did not interrupt Kant’s regular
habits. Scarcely five feet tall, with a deformed chest, and
suffering from weak health, he maintained throughout his
life a severe regimen. It was arranged with such regularity
that people set their clocks according to his daily walk
along the street named for him, “The Philosopher’s Walk.”
Until old age prevented him, he is said to have missed this
regular appearance only on the occasion when Rousseau’s
Émile so engrossed him that for several days he stayed at
home.
With the publication of the third Critique, Kant’s main
philosophical work was done. From 1790 his health began to
decline seriously. He still had many literary projects but
found it impossible to write more than a few hours a day.
The writings that he then completed consist partly of an
elaboration of subjects not previously treated in any
detail, partly of replies to criticisms and to the
clarification of misunderstandings. With the publication in
1793 of his work Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der
blossen Vernunft, Kant became involved in a dispute with
Prussian authorities on the right to express religious
opinions. The book was found to be altogether too
Rationalistic for orthordox taste; he was charged with
misusing his philosophy to the “distortion and depreciation
of many leading and fundamental doctrines of sacred
Scripture and Christianity” and was required by the
government not to lecture or write anything further on
religious subjects. Kant agreed but privately interpreted
the ban as a personal promise to the King, from which he
felt himself to be released on the latter’s death in 1797.
At any rate, he returned to the forbidden subject in his
last major essay, Der Streit der Fakultäten (1798; “The
Conflict of the Faculties”).
The large work at which he laboured until his death—the
fragments of which fill the two final volumes of the great
Berlin edition of his works—was evidently intended to be a
major contribution to his critical philosophy. What remains,
however, is not so much an unfinished work as a series of
notes for a work that was never written. Its original title
was Übergang von den metaphysische Anfangsgründe der
Naturwissenschaft zur Physik (“Transition from the
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to Physics”),
and it may have been his intention to carry further the
argument advanced in the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der
Naturwissenschaft (1786) by showing that it is possible to
construct a priori not merely the general outline of a
science of nature but a good many of its details as well.
But judging from the extant fragments, however numerous they
are, it remains conjectural whether its completion would
have constituted a major addition to his philosophy and its
reputation.
After a gradual decline that was painful to his friends
as well as to himself, Kant died in Königsberg, February 12,
1804. His last words were “Es ist gut” (“It is good”). His
tomb in the cathedral was inscribed with the words (in
German) “The starry heavens above me and the moral law
within me,” the two things that he declared in the
conclusion of the second Critique “fill the mind with ever
new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the
more steadily we reflect on.”
Otto Allen Bird
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Modern philosophy » The Enlightenment » Literary forms
The literary form of Enlightenment philosophizing was simple and
straightforward. Except for an occasional reversion to the dialogue
form, as in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous
(1713) and in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), it
consisted of inquiries, discourses, treatises, dissertations, and
essays, generally well written in clear, relatively nontechnical prose.
But Kant not only introduced a formidable technical philosophical
terminology into his works but was, in fact, the originator of a new
philosophical form—the “critique” or “critical examination”—that had its
own special architectonics. Each of Kant’s three critiques is divided
into the same three parts:
(1) an “analytic,” or analysis of reason’s
right functioning,
(2) a “dialectic,” or logic of error, showing the
pitfalls into which a careless reason falls, and
(3) a “methodology,” an
arrangement of rules for practice.
It is a form that was unique to Kant,
but it raised certain problems of “oppositional” thinking, to which
19th-century philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur
Schopenhauer, and Søren Kierkegaard were subsequently to turn.
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