THAN TO SERVE AND OBEY THEM.”
A Treatise of Human Nature
Rousseau ran away from home at 16 and escaped to France, where he came under the protection of Madame de Warens.
She persuaded him to convert to Catholicism and became his lover. He made his living as a tutor, musician, and writer, fi rstly in Lyon and, after 1742, in Paris. There he lived with a woman and fathered fi ve illegitimate children, all of whom were handed over to an orphanage. He met the philosophes (see box, below) and contributed to Diderot’s Encyclopédie. In 1750 his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts won the Academy of Dijon prize. His subsequent Discourse on the Origin of Inequality developed his ideas on the corrupting infl uence of society. In 1762 he published Emile, in which his
educational theory is expounded, and outlined his political theory in The Social Contract. These works invited persecution and his books were burned in his native Geneva. This seems to have precipitated some kind of paranoid breakdown in the late 1760s from which Rousseau never fully recovered. He entered an unsettled period, staying at one point with David Hume (see pp.290–1) in England.
But his paranoid accusations against Hume led to his return to Paris. There he wrote a searingly frank
autobiography, the Confessions.
Like Hobbes (see p.275) before him, Rousseau’s political philosophy in The Social Contract begins by imagining human beings in a “state of nature,” in order to describe the origins of social organization. Unlike Hobbes’s, his image of human nature is a romantic one. He paints man’s mythical original state as one in which humans are in unity with nature and exhibit natural sympathy for one another. It is society that represents the origin of oppression and inequality as the development of reason corrupts and stifl es our natural sentiments of pity.
Rousseau envisages a different manner in which society might be organized, believing that as people
begin to see the benefi ts of cooperation, they might willingly give up their natural rights in order to submit to the “general will” of society. The general will is not
ESSENTIAL TEXTS Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind;
Emile or Education; The Social Contract.
LIFE AND WORKS
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
b 1712–1778 n Switzerland
Rousseau is known as the fi rst philosopher of Romanticism and for his Social Contract, in which he argues that human beings are innately good but have their behavior corrupted by society. He also produced plays, poetry, and music as well as one of the great autobiographies of European literature.
KEY IDEAS
Rousseau was among a number of France’s most outstanding writers and thinkers, including Voltaire and Montesquieu, to contribute to the great Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot (pictured).
This 20-year project, a landmark of the Enlightenment, resulted in
an extraordinary compendium of knowledge and learning, and the group of French intellectuals who compiled it became known as the philosophes.
THE PHILOSOPHES OF PARIS
It is only once the “noble savage,” idealized in Paul Gauguin’s painting Eiaha Ohipa (Not Working), falls from the original, innocent state of nature that their problems begin.
SEE ALSO The social contract (p.165) • Rights (pp.168–9) • The communitarian challenge (pp.172–3)
simply an aggregate of each individual’s will, but, rather, the will for the common good of society as a whole. Freedom within such a society, for Rousseau, is not a matter of being permitted to do whatever one pleases, for satisfying one’s desires is no kind of freedom but a kind of slavery to the passions. Rather, genuine freedom involves living according to social rules expressive of the general will, of
which one is an active, contributory participant. For this reason, if we are not prepared to bend to the general will, we may have to be “forced to be free,” since the general will represents what we really want, even if we don’t realize this.
Rousseau argued for direct rather than representative democracy: that is, a system in which each citizen has a direct say in the running of the affairs of state, since direct participation is necessary for one to identify one’s own will with the general will.
EDUCATIONAL THEORY Rousseau’s conviction that society is a corrupting infl uence on the natural state of man is of a piece with his educational theory. While admitting himself to be a
poor father, he had strong views on child- rearing, believing that there is a natural way in which human beings develop and learn, and education ought to operate by facilitating this natural process rather than working aggressively against it, as with traditional educational approaches.
He also emphasized the importance of physical health, which to him was just as signifi cant as intellectual development.
“ MAN IS BORN FREE, YET EVERYWHERE HE IS IN CHAINS. ”
The Social Contract 1, ch. 1
“Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many
a philosophic wreck.”
Attributed to Immanuel Kant
ithou ean
wn with many k.”
s a d hthouse, str philosophic
“M sho
o Imm
Kant spent his entire life in the town of his birth, Kửnigsberg, the then capital of East Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia), never traveling more than a day’s journey from home. He enrolled at Kửnigsberg University in 1740, where his principal philosophical studies concerned Leibniz (see pp.284–5).
After graduating, Kant became a private tutor before obtaining a lectureship at the university in 1755, teaching a range of subjects including physics,
anthropology, and geography, as well as philosophy. At age 45, he was appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics.
WEIGHTY WORDS
Kant published his inaugural dissertation in defense of his appointment, but then nothing followed for 11 years.
However, by his own account, his encounter with the philosophy of Hume (see pp.290–1) had awakened him from a “dogmatic slumber,” and during these years he was working on his revolutionary Critique of Pure Reason, fi nally published in 1781. The book is long and diffi cult, which may explain the fact that it did not receive much attention at the time. Kant’s disappointment at its reception led him, in 1783, to summarize its ideas in the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. His fi rst work of moral philosophy, the Groundwork, was published in 1785.
Meanwhile, his reputation was growing, and it gradually reached the point where he became concerned by the direction being taken by those who claimed to be infl uenced by his philosophy, namely early proponents of what would come to be known as German Idealism.
Although Kant never traveled far and was said to lead such a regimented routine that people could set their clocks by him, he was not a solemn fi gure. In reality he enjoyed a rich social life and was known for his brilliant lectures.
Immanuel Kant was one of the most infl uential European philosophers since the Ancient Greeks.
KANT 295
LIFE AND WORKS
Immanuel Kant
b 1724–1804 n Germany
Kant characterized his work as a bridge between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century, and his revolution in epistemology and metaphysics is perhaps the most important philosophical development of modern times. But his infl uence in the areas of philosophy of religion, ethics,
and aesthetics has been equally profound.
ESSENTIAL TEXTS Critique of Pure Reason;
Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics;
Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals;
Critique of Practical Reason; Critique of Judgment.
The problem that Kant fi rst set himself was to fi nd out how to make positive discoveries about what lies beyond human experience. He was spurred into action by Hume’s sceptical insistence that
substantive knowledge about the world requires sensory experience—that it is impossible to extend our knowledge by the use of reason alone. If correct, this theory restricts the bounds of human knowledge.
In particular, it makes knowledge of the existence of material substances, cause and effect, and the self impossible.
To overcome this diffi culty, Kant attempts to show that we can discover signifi cant truths about reality “a priori”
(or through pure reason; see p.66), by examining the conditions of possibility for our experience. Rather than ask the traditional question of whether our knowledge accurately refl ects reality, Kant asks how reality refl ects our cognition. He had come to recognize that what we know is determined by the nature of our sensory and cognitive apparatus. In other words, while human knowledge starts with
experience, it requires ordering by the human mind. And it is possible, using reason, to describe the structure that experience must take and so discover universal truths about our world.
So what is this structure? Kant noted that all our experience of the world is spatio-temporal: space and time are the a priori conditions of sense-experience, and are the necessary structure imposed on experience by us. Kant also attempts to isolate general categories of thought that enable us to organize the material of sense. These categories include substance
—that things are made of material stuff—
and cause and effect—that events are related in lawlike ways—and are necessary conditions for the possibility of knowledge.
Like space and time, these are features of the world as it appears to minds, not as it is in itself. In this way Kant overcomes Hume’s scepticism by showing that we can KEY IDEAS
Reason tells the sighted that oxygen is there despite it being invisible. How does this apply to those who have been blind since birth? Kant argues that our sensory apparatus determines how we know about the world.
KANT 297
acquire knowledge of the world as it appears to us. However, this means we cannot have knowledge of the world beyond appearances. The real world—
what Kant calls “noumena”—may not be spatio-temporal, contain substances, or obey laws of cause and effect;
indeed, we can say nothing defi nite about it. And since we can only apply reason to the universe as it appears—
to “phenomena”—we cannot use it to discuss the universe as a whole or what lies beyond it. This led Kant to outlaw much traditional metaphysical speculation—the existence of God, the cause of the universe and whether it has limits in space and time, the immortality of the soul—
since such issues cannot be resolved by appeal to real experience.
ETHICS
If science is about the apparent world that obeys causal laws, then what of human beings? Are our actions determined by physical laws? Kant believed it was evident from experience that we are free, so we must be more than phenomenal beings. It
must be our noumenal self that is the source of free will and allows for moral agency. For Kant, only agents who can deliberate rationally about their choices can be said to be free. We cannot expect our duties to be delivered by any higher authority, or imposed by our emotions: we must discover them for ourselves through the autonomous use of our reason. Only reason is universal and can make universal demands on our behavior. Thus what makes an action truly moral is that it is motivated by a rational acceptance of duty, not any other motive such as self- interest, guilt, or even compassion.
A moral duty is an unconditional or
“categorical” demand on our behavior.
It does not require us to do something because of what we may gain; it says we should do it simply because we have a duty to do it. Kant contrasts such categorical imperatives, which are genuinely moral, with hypothetical imperatives, which are not. Hypothetical imperatives require us to do something
in order to reach some other goal. For Kant, only an imperative that truly has universal application (that is right in all equivalent circumstances) can be moral. Our duty must be always to act in such a way as we would will all others to act too. For Kant this is equivalent to saying that we should always treat others as ends in themselves and never as means to our ends—that is, we should respect others’ goals rather than ever use them as a way of obtaining our own ends.