A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Modern Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

Rousseau (1712–1778).[51] Rousseau began at the point where Voltaire left off. He was under the influence of Voltaire at the first and received from Voltaire his original productive impulse. But the concrete right of individuals, and not their abstract intellectual freedom, was what appealed to Rousseau. Strict moderation and literary freedom were too negative, half-hearted, for a reformer of Rousseau’s type. Public opinion was not to be found in Versailles, as Voltaire thought, but in the streets of Paris. The Revolutionthen came to a head, and we find the schools of Voltaire and Rousseau locking horns. Voltaire’s theory of moderation was represented in the Constituent Assembly and the upper and middle classes, while Rousseau’s radicalism was introduced in the Convention and fully expounded in the sections of the Commune of Paris which attacked the Convention. History shows how impossible the aim of each school was, and how the contest had to be fought over again in the nineteenth century.

Rousseau lived a wandering and adventurous life, full of hallucinations and self-created trouble. He made many friends, only to quarrel with them. He was half insane, and his career inspires both disgust and admiration. His numerous works fill twenty-two volumes, the most important ones being two prize essays published in 1750 and 1773, which represent the negative side of his doctrine; Héloïse, 1761; Emile, 1762; Le Contrat Social, 1762; and his Confessions, which contain his constructive thought.

Rousseau was at first a contributor to the Encyclopædia, but at heart he cared nothing for the diffusion of knowledge and art. He did not understand the comprehensive intellectual ambition of Diderot; he resented the utilitarianism of Helvetius and the materialism of Holbach. When he wrote his prize essay in 1750, he suddenly perceived how absurd the intellectual Enlightenment was amid the distressing social state of France. He turned against both the existing order and the would-be intellectual reformers. The temporal order of things was to him awry. Study, knowledge, and cultivation were to him only a gloss over the deep-lying degradation. Society, as it is constructed, is artificial, and all organization is a tyranny. God exists, and Heis good. Man was good until civilization and art invaded his simplicity, corrupted his virtues, and transformed him into a suffering and a sinful being. Rousseau’s call was that of anarchism. It was a condemnation of the entire past. Sweep all the so-called civilization away, and level inequalities. Go back to nature; and in the simplicity of that idyllic state let children grow up undirected except by their own uncorrupted instinct,—that “immortal and celestial voice.”

In an age tired of oppression and corruption Rousseau struck a sympathetic chord which made the intellectual Enlightenment sound false. His contemporaries did not inquire into the motives of the mean lunatic. They did not then see that he was a doctrinaire holding up an unpractical ideal in contrast with their present state. He alone in all France was the one to appeal to man’s self-respect. He alone appealed to the only motives that will result in action,—the human emotions. His plea was for every Frenchman, and his words for the unfortunate were given with such eloquence that the fortunate were compelled to listen. They were a majestic language of wide compassion and sympathy. He saw in the French monarchy the greatest misery for the greatest number, and no one of its supporters appeared to the people so generous and true as he. His influence not only upon his own time but upon the nineteenth century was extraordinary, and some have said that he is the greatest modern. At all events he sounded the keynote of our own civilization, especially in art, literature, and education; for he showed the fundamental correlation between Nature and the passions. Rousseau taught a sentimental deism, in which sentiment is the essential part.

The Revolution was the natural consummation of the Enlightenment in France. The immediate issues out of which it grew were the practical ones of finance, legislation, economics, and policy. The growth in the physical sciences (beginning 1760), in the study of political science, in the theory of government, as well as the financial distress of the French government, the success of the American Revolution, the advance of the French middle class to a position of power, the foolish and half-hearted measures of the French statesmen—all these were factors that at the end brought on the crisis. Yet the words of Rousseau, falling on fruitful soil, were the real cause. In the years immediately preceding the Revolution there was a world-wide agitation, an enthusiasm for nature, an exaltation of man, and a contempt for the age and for the society then existing. There was a vague presentiment of impending change, which most people were prepared to welcome. Thinkers were full of illusions. Even such despots as Frederick the Great, Catherine of Russia, and Joseph of Austria affected a radicalism, and Spain, Portugal, and Tuscany, as well as England, France, and Germany, were moved with great humanitarian sentiments. The debate was universal as to the condition of the human race. Rousseau was the eloquent expression of this world-wide movement.

The German Enlightenment (1740–1781). As the Enlightenment in France, so the Enlightenment in Germany had its introductory period. The history of Germany from the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1648) to the publication of Kant’s Critique (1781), or 133 years, is divided into two periods at the year 1740, when Frederick the Great was crowned. The period from 1740 to 1781, or forty-one years, is the GermanEnlightenment. The period from 1648 to 1740, or ninety-two years, is introductory to the Enlightenment, and, as in France, a period of absolutism.

The Introductory Period (1648–1740). Absolutism. The spirit of absolutism, both politically and intellectually, dominated Germany from the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1648) to the crowning of Frederick the Great (1740). Absolutism dominated Germany and France a full one hundred years. There are some differences between the two countries, however. It began and ended in Germany about thirty-five years later than in France. Again, in France it grew in splendor from the efforts of Richelieu and Louis XIII (1610) to the great protective idea of Louis XIV, who for seventy-two years ruled as absolute political and intellectual dictator. In Germany, on the other hand, it was a spectre hovering over a disintegrating and decaying nation once known as the Holy Roman Empire, but since the Thirty Years’ War only a collection of states under a nominal central government. The idea of absolutism prevailed none the less, for within the several states each monarch was dictator as to the religious, intellectual, and political opinions of his subjects.

Politically and socially the Holy Roman Empire was in striking contrast to the power and splendor of contemporaneous France. The Thirty Years’ War had left the empire absolutely desolate. The land was impoverished, the nation disrupted, and the population reduced from seventeen millions before the war to five millions after the war. The war had been a generation long and it had degraded the nation. It had settled nothing. It left the people poor and the princes absolute within their respective states. The upper classeseverywhere, except at Weimar, had become profligate. The universities were reduced to a position below what they were in the Renaissance. The prince of each state established the religion for his state, so that practically no religious liberty had been gained. Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics were exhausted, but were still antagonistic. There was no moral activity among the Orthodox; often they set their own immorality up to prove the absolutism of their respective dogma. The war left Germany politically prostrate and intellectually stagnant.

In the years that follow the Thirty Years’ War it is possible to detect movements that are the beginnings of the Enlightenment. It is an important point that Germany was resuscitated from sources that lay within her own civilization. The French Enlightenment and the intellectual freedom of modern France were due largely to the influence of foreign ideas from England. The seeds of the German intellectual revival were developed on her own soil. Those beginnings are (1) the rise of Prussia; (2) the early German literature; (3) the Pietistic movement; (4) the transformation of Leibnitz’s rationalism.

1. The rise of the little electorate of Brandenburg to the powerful kingdom of Prussia in 1740 was the political basis of the Enlightenment that followed. No state had suffered more during the Thirty Years’ War. The entire population was reduced to less than a million, and Berlin, the capital, had only three hundred citizens. The government was as harshly absolute as elsewhere. The rights of the citizens were entirely taken away by the three princes who ruled over Prussia between 1648 and 1740. But a powerful kingdomwas built up, with a strong and patriotic army. It extended its dominions and was a refuge for Protestants, who fled to it in large numbers. It came to be feared by all the German states, and in the latter part of this period it had to be reckoned with in the councils of Europe. Itself an absolutism, it was the vigorous political body that alone could destroy the traditional absolutism of the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire. Puffendorf declared that the old Empire with its feeble sovereignties was a monster. It was a monster spectre—a stubborn political idea that hovered over Europe. Frederick the Great’s mission in the next period was to destroy it.