Immanuel Kant |
Johann Gottfried Herder: On Immanuel Kant & Rousseau's Influence on Kant
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Johann Gottfried Herder |
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau's stylistic brilliance so impressed Kant that he told himself: "I must read Rousseau until the beauty of his expression does no longer disturb me, and I can then get a rational over-all view." [Cassirer, XI, p. 92] This is the period during which Kant was perhaps most admired by his students, one of whom, the philosopher J. G. Herder, has left us an unforgettable portrait of Kant, the man.
"I have had the good fortune to know a philosopher who was my teacher. He in his most
vigorous manhood had the gay liveliness of a youth which will, I believe, accompany him
into his old age. His forehead, built for thinking, was the seat of indestructible
serenity and joy, talk rich in ideas issued from his lips, joking, humor and wit were
at his disposal, and his teaching lectures were the most amusing concourse. He examined
with as much spirit Leibnitz, Wolff, Baumgarten, and Hume, as he followed the development
of physics, the laws of nature as expounded by Kepler and Newton, and as he responded to
the writings of Rousseau which were then appearing, his Emile and his Heloise,
and every new discovery he assessed, and he always returned to the genuine knowledge of
nature and to the moral value of man. The history of man, of peoples, and of nature,
mathematics, and experience were the founts from which he enlivened his lectures and
his conversation; nothing worth knowing left him indifferent, no cabal, no sect, no
personal gain, no vain ambition had the least attraction for him as contrasted with
the expansion and elucidation of truth. He encouraged and forced one agreeably to think
for oneself. Domineering was alien to his nature. This man whom I name with the greatest
gratitude and respect is Immanuel Kant." And at a later time, Herder again spoke of the
"live teaching" and of the "human philosophy" of Kant. (p. xxii) Kant himself has vividly expressed his admiration for and indebtedness to Rousseau. It is to Rousseau that Kant owed his "belief in the common man." In a marginal note to the essay on the beautiful and sublime, he noted during this period: "I am myself by inclination a seeker after truth. I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless passion to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every forward step. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This blind prejudice vanished; I learned to respect human nature, and I should consider myself far more useless than the ordinary working man if I did not believe that this view could give worth to all others to establish the rights of man." I learned to respect human nature: this central fact constituted the inspiration for that central concern with ethics which stands at the heart of Kant's fully developed system... The re-establishment of ethics as the central human concern is the real core of Kant's philosophy. This, in turn, explains why Kant could become the philosopher of peace par excellence. Rousseau stimulated Kant's thought immeasurably by directing the sharp scalpel of his analysis to the realm of the "inner experience." That is the meaning of Rousseau's challenge to the "age of reason." Stirred by his sensitivity, urged on by his colorful imagination, and sustained by the depth of his feeling, Rousseau revolted against the conceit and self-satisfied smugness of the philosophes and their goddess, reason. One cannot read his Confessions without being struck by this cardinal concern for the "inner man", however much one may object to Rousseau's exhibitionism. (p. xxiii) Along with this insistence upon the "given" of inner experience went the conviction of Rousseau that there must be a peculiar "law" to which the inner life responds, or, at any rate, that is Rousseau's view in Kant's opinion. Kant contrasts him with Newton who discovered the order and regularity, the objective rule in the universe around us, and maintains that Rousseau first "discovered universal human nature beneath the mulitiplicity of adopted human forms, and the hidden law..." This hidden law is the autonomous ethical law in its pure and unalterable validity. The firm establishment of such an autonomous ethic became Kant's primary concern. It is the main task of metaphysics. After having made fun of a lot of metaphysical clap-trap in the Dreams of a Visionary (1766), he puts the elementary question: "What? Is it only good to be virtuous, because there is another world, or will actions be rewarded yonder, because there were good and virtuous in themselves>" Kant's essay, concerned as it is with the doctrines of the Swedenborgians, seems at first sight a strange enterprise for a man of his interests... Only one further comment: the clear recognition of the limits of man's reason highlights the importance of practice, and the essay concludes with quoting Voltaire's Candide: "Let us take care of our happiness, go into the garden and work." (p. xxiv)
— from Carl J. Friedrich (Ed.), The Philosophy of Kant,
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