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CHAPTER IX.
ROUSSEAU’S THEORY AS APPLIED TO THE MODERN STATE: KANT, FICHTE, HEGEL.
1. Probably no other philosophical movement has ever focussed in itself so much human nature as the post-Kantian Idealism. It has fallen to the present writer to show elsewhere [1] how the “finding of Greek art,” which it owed to Winckelmann, gave it unrivalled insight into mind as embodied in objects of sense. Here we have to deal with another source of its ideas. As we pointed out in the first chapter, the ethical and political theory of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel springs from the same Evangel of Jean Jacques from which the French Revolution drew its formulae. It would not be true to say that it springs from this alone. Great philosophers know how to fuse the materials they work in; and particularly the modern abstraction of “freedom” was blended, for Hegel, with the idea of concrete life through the tradition of the Greek city, with its affinity for autonomy on the one hand and for beauty on the other. Nevertheless, few lines of affiliation are better established in the history of philosophy than that between Rousseau’s {236} declaration that liberty is the quality of man and the philosophy of Right as it developed from Kant to Hegel.
[1] History of Aesthetic (Sonnenschein).
It has been suggested that the literary intercourse of France, England, and Germany was far closer in the eighteenth century than it is to-day, in spite of the immense mechanical development of communication in the interval. National self-consciousness and the divergent growth of national minds have, it is urged, raised a barrier between peoples, which existed in the last century to a far smaller degree. [1] This question of literary history lies beyond my subject; but at least it seems probable that Rousseau had a power in Germany which no French writer of to-day could possibly exercise outside his own country. His educational influence [2] alone forms a considerable chapter in the history of Pädagogik, and touches closely on philosophy. Our psychologists of childhood are his spiritual descendants, and indeed the question of the development of the human being is closely akin to the question of liberty.
[1] See M. Lévy-Bruhl, “De l’Influence de Jean Jacques Rousseau en Allemagne,” Annales de l’École libre des Sciences Politiques, Juillet, 1897.
[2] Cf. Kant et Fichte et la Problême de l’Education, Duproix, Alcan., 1897; and on Rousseau’s varied initiative, see Amiel, Journal Intime E. tr. I. 202, “J.J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. It was he who founded travelling on foot before Töpffer, reverie before René, literary botany before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de St. Pierre, the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1797, political discussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Rénan, the science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure.”
His literary influence, as the prophet of nature and feeling, and the champion of sentimental {237} religion against the Philosophes, carried everything before it. He struck into the path which had been opened in Germany by the translation of Thomson’s Seasons before 1750, and followed by the Swiss critics and the idyllic poets, who were opponents of the dominant pseudo-classicism. [1] Jacobi, who passed some years of his youth at Geneva, owed his doctrine of feeling as the faculty of religious truth in part at least to Rousseau. Klinger, whose drama, Sturm und Drang, gave its name to the romantic and naturalist revolution, marked by Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and Schiller’s Räuber (1781), was responsible, we are told, in later years, for the surprising judgment that Rousseau (in Emile) is the young man’s best guide through life. [2] Even Schiller and Herder passed through a period of enthusiastic admiration for Rousseau. It is exceedingly significant that Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humanity are addressed expressly to the problem of reconciling the claims of Nature [3] and of the State upon individual man. For, when Schiller suggests that the clue to the required reconciliation between Nature and the State lies in the union of feeling and intelligence which is found in Beauty, we have before us in a single focus three main types of experience, from the fusion of which a new idealism was to emerge.
[1] See author’s History of Aesthetic, p. 214.