[2] The Manichean doctrine.
“Pope’s doctrine” is no doubt his Leibnitzian optimism, founded on a supposed insight into man’s true place in creation. [1] Rousseau’s {243} “discovery,” which Kant here connects with this doctrine, must be his assertion of man’s natural goodness and freedom, which he tends to forfeit by departing in civilisation from the place assigned him by nature. It is clear that Rousseau’s impeachment of literature and civilisation had at this time made a considerable impression upon Kant. It is all the more interesting to see Kant retracing, on a very different scale, the development which Rousseau had initiated, from natural to social and ethical freedom.
[1] See passage cited from Kant, just above.
I subjoin two passages from the Philosophy of Right (1796), which exhibit this later development, still in its connection with Rousseau’s phraseology.
“The innate Right is one only.—Freedom (independence of the constraining will of another), in as far as it can co-exist with the freedom of every other according to a universal law, is this unique original right, belonging to every human being by reason of his humanity.” [1]
[1] Kant’s Werke (Rosenkrantz), ix. 42.
An indication of the embodiment of this freedom in the State may be given as follows:
“All those three powers in the State (Sovereignty or the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial), are offices; and, as essential, and necessarily proceeding from the idea of a State in general with reference to the establishment (Constitution) of one, are offices of State. They contain the relation of a universal supreme Power (which, considered according to laws of freedom, can be no other than the united people), to the crowd of individuals which compose it qua the governed; that is, of the ruler (imperans) to the {244} subject (subditus). The act whereby the people constitutes itself into a State, or strictly speaking only the idea of that Act, according to which idea alone the justice of the Act can be conceived, [1] is the original contract, [2] according to which all (omnes et singuli) of the people surrender their external freedom, in order at once to receive it back again as members of a commonwealth, that is, of the people regarded as a State (universi). And one cannot say, The State, or man in the State, has sacrificed a part of its innate outward freedom for a certain end; but rather, he has totally abandoned his wild lawless freedom in order to find his entire freedom again undiminished in a lawful dependence, that is, in a condition of right or law; (undiminished), because this dependence springs from his own legislative will.” [3]
[1] The italics are mine.
[2] Kant’s italics.