History of Modern Philosophy Rousseau's Conflict with the Illumination byFalckenberg, Richard
The Genevese, Jean Jacques Rousseau[1] (1712-78), stands in a similar
relation of opposition to the French Illumination as the Scottish School to
the English, and Herder and Jacobi to the German. He points us away from
the cold sophistical inferences of the understanding to the immediate
conviction of feeling; from the imaginations of science to the unerring
voice of the heart and the conscience; from the artificial conditions of
culture to healthy nature. The vaunted Illumination is not the lever of
progress, but the source of all degeneration; morality does not rest on the
shrewd calculation of self-interest, but on original social and sympathetic
instincts (love for the good is just as natural to the human heart as
self-love; enthusiasm for virtue has nothing to do with our interest; what
would it mean to give up one's life for the sake of advantage?); the truths
of religion are not objects of thought, but of pious feeling.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Brockerhoff, Leipsic, 1863-74; L. Moreau, Paris, 1870.]
Rousseau commenced his career as an author with the Discourse on the
Sciences and the Arts 1750 (the discussion of a prize question, crowned
by the Academy of Dijon), which he describes as entirely pernicious, and
the Discourse on the Origin and the Bases of the Inequality among Men
1753. By nature man is innocent and good, becoming evil only in society.
Reflection, civilization, and egoism are unnatural. In the happy state of
nature pity and innocent self-love (amour de soi ruled, and the
latter was first corrupted by the reason into the artificial feeling of
selfishness (amour propre in the course of social development--thinking
man is a degenerate animal. Property has divided men into rich and poor;
the magistracy, into strong and weak; arbitrary power, into masters and
slaves. Wealth generated luxury with its artificial delights of science and
the theater, which make us more unhappy and evil than we otherwise are;
science, the child of vice, becomes in turn the mother of new vices. All
nature, all that is characteristic, all that is good, has disappeared with
advancing culture; the only relief from the universal degeneracy is to be
hoped for from a return to nature on the part of the individual and society
alike--from education and a state conformed to nature. The novel Emile is
devoted to the pedagogical, and the Social Contract, or the Principles of
Political Law to the political problem. Both appeared in 1762, followed
two years later by the Letters from the Mountain a defense against the
attacks of the clergy. In these later writings Rousseau's naturalistic
hatred of reason appears essentially softened.
Social order is a sacred right, which forms the basis of all others. It
does not proceed, however, from nature--no man has natural power over his
fellows, and might confers no right--consequently it rests on a contract.
Not, however, on a contract between ruler and people. The act by which the
people chooses a king is preceded by the act in virtue of which it is a
people. In the social contract each devotes himself with his powers and his
goods to the community, in order to gain the protection of the latter.
With this act the spiritual body politic comes into being, and attains its
unity, its ego, its will. The sum of the members is called the people; each
member, as a participant in the sovereignty, citizen, and, as bound to
obedience to the law, subject. The individual loses his natural freedom,
receiving in exchange the liberty of a citizen, which is limited by the
general will, and, in addition, property rights in all that he possesses,
equality before the law, and moral freedom, which first really makes him
master of himself. The impulse of mere desire is slavery, obedience to
self-imposed law, freedom. The sovereign is the people, law the general
popular will directed to the common good, the supreme goods, "freedom and
equality," the chief objects of legislation. The lawgiving power is the
moral will of the body politic, the government (magistracy, prince) its
executive physical power; the former is its heart, the latter its brain.
Rousseau calls the government the middle term between the head of the state
and the individual, or between the citizen as lawgiver and as subject--the
sovereign (the people) commands, the government executes, the subject
obeys. The act by which the people submits itself to its head is not a
contract, but merely a mandate; whenever it chooses it can limit, alter, or
entirely recall the delegated power. In order to security against illegal
encroachments on the part of the government, Rousseau recommends regular
assemblies of the people, in which, under suspension of governmental
authority, the confirmation, abrogation, or alteration of the constitution
shall be determined upon. Even the establishment of the articles of social
belief falls to the sovereign people. The essential difference between
Rousseau's theory of the state and that of Locke and Montesquieu consists
in his rejection of the division of powers and of representation by
delegates, hence in its unlimited democratic character. A generation after
it was given to the world, the French Revolution made the attempt to
translate it into practice. "The masses carried out what Rousseau himself
had thought, it is true, but never willed" (Windelband).
Rousseau's theory of education is closely allied to Locke's (cf. above),
whose leading idea--the development of individuality--was entirely in
harmony with the subjectivism of the philosopher of feeling. Posterity has
not found it a difficult task to free the sound kernel therein from the
husks of exaggeration and idiosyncrasy which surrounded it. Among the
latter belong the preference of bodily over intellectual development, and
the unlimited faith in the goodness of human nature. Exercise the body, the
organs, the senses of the pupil, and keep his soul unemployed as long as
possible; for the first, take care only that his mind be kept free from
error and his heart from vice. In order to secure complete freedom from
disturbance in this development, it is advisable to isolate the child from
society, nay, even from the family, and to bring him up in retirement under
the guidance of a private tutor.
As the Swiss republican spoke in Rousseau's politics, so his religious
theories[1] betray the Genevan Calvinist. "The Savoyard Vicar's Profession
of Faith" (in Emile proclaims deism as a religion of feeling. The
rational proofs brought forward for the existence of God--from the motion
of matter in itself at rest, and from the finality of the world--are only
designed, as he declares by letter, to confute the materialists, and derive
their impregnability entirely from the inner evidence of feeling, which
amid the vacillation of the reason pro And con gives the final
decision.
If we limit our inquiry to that which is alone of importance for us, and
rely on the evidence of feeling, it cannot be doubted that I myself exist
and feel; that there exists an external world which affects me; that
thought, comparison or judgment concerning relations is different from
sensation or the perception of objects--for the latter is a passive,
but the former an active process; that I myself produce the activity of
attention or consideration; that, consequently, I am not merely a sensitive
or passive, but also an active or intelligent being. The freedom of my
thought and action guarantees to me the immateriality of my soul, and is
that which distinguishes me from the brute. The life of the soul after
the decay of the body is assured to me by the fact that in this world the
wicked triumphs, while the good are oppressed. The favored position which
man occupies in the scale of beings--he is able to look over the universe
and to reverence its author, to recognize order and beauty, to love the
good and to do it; and shall he, then, compare himself to the brute?--fills
me with emotion and gratitude to the benevolent Creator, who existed before
all things, and who will exist when they all shall have vanished away,
to whom all truths are one single idea, all places a point, all times a
moment. The how of freedom, of eternity, of creation, of the action of
my will upon matter, etc., is, indeed, incomprehensible to me, but that
these are so, my feeling makes me certain. The worthiest employment of
my reason is to annihilate itself before God. "The more I strive to
contemplate his infinite essence the less do I conceive it. But it is, and
that suffices me. The less I conceive it, the more I adore."
In the depths of my heart I find the rules for my conduct engraved by
nature in ineffaceable characters. Everything is good that I feel to be so.
The conscience is the most enlightened of all philosophers, and as safe
a guide for the soul as instinct for the body. The infallibility of its
judgment is evidenced by the agreement of different peoples; amid the
surprising differences of manners you will everywhere find the same ideas
of justice, the same notions of good and evil. Show me a land where it is
a crime to keep one's word, to be merciful, benevolent, magnanimous, where
the upright man is despised and the faithless honored! Conscience enjoins
the limitation of our desires to the degree to which we are capable of
satisfying them, but not their complete suppression--all passions are good
when we control them, all evil when they control us.
In the second part of the "Profession du Foi du Vicaire Savoyard" Rousseau
turns from his attacks on sensationalism, materialism, atheism, and the
morality of interest, to the criticism of revelation. Why, in addition to
natural religion, with its three fundamental doctrines, God, freedom, and
immortality, should other special doctrines be necessary, which rather
confuse than clear up our ideas of the Great Being, which exact from us
the acceptance of absurdities, and make men proud, intolerant, and
cruel--whereas God requires from us no other service than that of the
heart? Every religion is good in which men serve God in a befitting manner.
If God had prescribed one single religion for us, he would have provided
it with infallible marks of its unique authenticity. The authority of the
fathers and the priesthood is not decisive, for every religion claims to be
revealed and alone true; the Mohammedan has the same right as the Christian
to adhere to the religion of his fathers. Since all revelation comes down
to us by human tradition, reason alone can be the judge of its divinity.
The careful examination of the documents, which are written in ancient
languages, would require an amount of learning which could not possibly be
a condition of salvation and acceptance with God. Miracles and prophecy are
not conclusive, for how are we to distinguish the true among them from
the false? If we turn from the external to the internal criteria of the
doctrines themselves, even here no decision can be reached between the
reasons pro And con(the author puts the former into the mouth of a
believer, and the latter into that of a rationalist); even if the former
outweighed the latter, the difficulty would still remain of reconciling it
with God's goodness and justice that the gospel has not reached so many of
mankind, and of explaining how those to whom the divinity of Christ is
now proclaimed can convince themselves of it, while his contemporaries
misjudged and crucified him. In my opinion, I am incapable of fathoming the
truth of the Christian religion and its value to those who confess it. The
investigation of the reason ends in "reverential doubt": I neither accept
revelation nor reject it, but I reject the obligation to accept it. My
heart, however, judges otherwise than the reflection of my intellect; for
this the sacred majesty and exalted simplicity of the Scriptures are a most
cogent proof that they are more than human, and that He whose history they
contain is more than man. The touching grace and profound wisdom of his
words, the gentleness of his conduct, the loftiness of his maxims, his
mastery over his passions, abundantly prove that he was neither an
enthusiast nor an ambitious sectary. Socrates lived and died like a
philosopher, Jesus like a God. The virtues of justice, patriotism, and
moderation taught by Socrates, had been exercised by the great men of
Greece before he inculcated them. But whence could Jesus derive in his time
and country that lofty morality which he alone taught and exemplified?
Things of this sort are not invented. The inventor of such deeds would
be more wonderful than the doer of them. Thus again, in the question of
revealed religion, the voice of the heart triumphs over the doubts of the
reason, as, in the question of natural religion, it had done over the
objections of opponents. It is true, however, that this enthusiasm is
paid not to the current Christianity of the priests, but to I the real
Christianity of the gospel.
Rousseau was the conscience of France, which rebelled against the negations
and the bald emptiness of the materialistic and atheistic doctrines. By
vindicating with fervid eloquence the participation of the whole man in
the highest questions, in opposition to the one-sided illumination of the
understanding, he became a pre-Kantian defender of the faith of practical
reason. His emphatic summons aroused a loud and lasting echo, especially in
Germany, in the hearts of Goethe, Kant, and Fichte.