Rousseau And Kant - Partners In Crime
by Lindsay Perigo
"Kant is the most evil man in mankind’s history."
That startling statement by Ayn Rand about someone who sometimes spoke like a
classical liberal, and who to this day on this forum is hailed as a
"proto-Objectivist" and "Enlightenment hero" by a supporter
of Rand, has delighted her enemies for its seeming outlandishness, and
perplexed not a few of her admirers. Orthodox Randroids parrot the claim unthinkingly,
as is their wont; rational Objectivists not averse to critical thinking are
prepared to subject it to scrutiny. Some perhaps too readily assume that she
said it in the heat of a moment as heated as only a heated Randian moment can
be. Lest anyone be in any doubt that she meant it, consider the words that
preceded it:
"I’ve chosen a special mission of my own. I’m after a man whom I want to
destroy. He died 167 years ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of
men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in. What man? Immanuel Kant. … You will find that on every
fundamental issue, Kant’s philosophy is the exact opposite of Objectivism. You
may also find it hard to believe that anyone could advocate the things Kant is
advocating. … Do not seek to escape the subject by thinking, ‘Oh, Kant didn’t
mean it!’ He did! Dr. Peikoff’s essay [Kant And Self-Sacrifice] will
help you to understand more fully why I say that no matter how diluted or
disguised, one drop of this kind of intellectual poison is too much for a
culture to absorb with impunity—that the latest depredations of some Washington
ward-heelers are nothing compared to a destroyer of this kind—that Kant is
the most evil man in mankind’s history." (Italics mine.)
That of which all trace must be wiped out is, of course, the idea that the
reality we perceive is not the real one, which is forever concealed from
us—while at the same time we must act with dutiful obedience to commandments
that we somehow know emanate from the real reality; we must never act
out of personal inclination, and the best way to be sure we don’t act
out of personal inclination is to act out of personal disinclination.
What is so bad about this, that it should trump the advocacy of mass murder or
erection of concentration camps in the most-evil-man-in-history stakes?
According to Rand, that it leads to mass murder and concentration camps,
of course.
Two things are problematic here. First, such a judgement assumes a
deterministic link between one man’s ideas and the acceptance and actioning of
those ideas by other men. It exonerates the latter—or at least
attenuates the blame that is their due—while excessively demonising the former,
as if to say: "Hitler couldn’t help it. Once Kant’s ideas were unleashed
into the mainstream, Hitler was inevitable. It was all Kant’s fault."
Well, no one was forced—by Kant at least—to accept Kant's ideas. Are we to
treat those who did accept them (whether realising from whom they came
or not), and put them into practice, as helpless, blameless automatons? Now that
wouldn’t be very Objectivist, would it?
Second, the judgement assumes that such an outcome was what Kant desired. It
wasn’t. As far as we can tell, in his epistemology he thought he was
reconciling empiricism and rationalism–assuredly a more benign project than
laying the foundation for concentration camps. In his ethics he thought
he was offering a prescription for universal peace (though it’s also true that
he believed that much violent sacrifice in war, out of duty, would be necessary
to attain such a state). So the question is, regardless of his purportedly
benign intent, is there still some reason we are entitled to say that he was
actually rotten, to the point of being the most rotten man ever?
Certainly, Rand doesn’t shrink from such a pronouncement:
"The widespread fear and/or resentment of morality—the feeling that
morality is an enemy, a musty realm of suffering and senseless boredom—is not
the product of mystic, ascetic or Christian codes as such, but a monument to
the ugliest repository of hatred for life, man and reason: the soul of Immanuel
Kant."
Now we get a crucial clue as to what Rand considered it took to be adjudged
"the most evil person in mankind’s history"—and why she could bestow
that award on someone who never murdered, never stole, never coerced, never
defrauded (in fact specifically forbade such things as being contrary to his
universifiability principle). For her, that dishonour is synonymous with, or at
minimum subsumes, the ugliest soul in history—as evidenced by his
"hatred for life, man and reason"; it relates to what she inferred
was going on inside Kant’s head and heart, something so bad that no amount of
talk about peace and harmony, no accidental cross-over into liberalism, could camouflage
or redeem it.
To be sure, a devout religionist who attributes to man a "radical, innate
evil" is likely to harbour an ugly soul, especially when his own antidote
culminates in something like this:
"It is a duty to preserve one’s life, and moreover everyone has a direct
inclination to do so. But for that reason the often anxious care which most men
take of it has no intrinsic worth, and the maxim of doing so has no moral
import. They preserve their lives according to duty, but not from duty. But if adversities
and hopeless sorrow completely take away the relish for life, if an unfortunate
man, strong in soul, is indignant rather than despondent or dejected over his
fate and wished for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it and
from neither inclination nor fear but from duty—then his maxim has a moral
import."
This is indeed revolting, and suggests a singular nastiness on the part of its
proponent. To say, however, that he is the most evil person in history requires
one to spell out all one’s criteria, and the extent to which those
criteria take in thought, deed, motive and consequence, the extent to which
"psychologising" is permissible, etc.—and then to compare him with
other contenders. Rand never did that.
In any event, my present purpose is not to undertake that exercise,
which I believe to be pointless and incapable of resolution, but to concur with
Rand to this extent—that we are fully entitled to treat Kant’s teachings as
essentially and seminally vicious irrespective of comparisons—and then to throw
the spotlight on an idol of Kant whose teachings were uniformly vicious
and whom we may regard as being right up there in the history's villains
stakes. I refer, of course, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). We may see him
as Kant’s inspiration and partner-in-crime.
Rousseau eschewed conventional morality and replaced it with amoralism in his
personal life. He was a liar, a cheat, and a whim-worshipper writ large. He
once stole a ribbon from his then-patroness and allowed a maid to take the
blame and be punished. When a friend with whom he was taking a walk had an
epileptic fit, he took advantage of the crowd that then gathered to abandon his
friend and disappear from the scene. In his writings he glorified as
irreducible and admirable primaries the impulses of the "Noble
Savage" to whose way of life humanity ought to repair—at least to the
extent feasible given the enormity of humanity’s backsliding from its original
"noble savagery."
According to Rousseau, the rot set in when man began to reason instead of
listening to his heart. Reason enabled man to produce more than was needed for
his bare survival, giving rise to such corruptions as science and the arts, and
that woeful monstrosity, the printing press. Worse, reason spawned the notion
of that ultimate abomination, private property: "The first man who, having
enclosed a piece of land, bethought himself of saying, ‘This is mine,’ and
found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil
society." Salvation lay in forcibly overthrowing the existing order and
abandoning the civilisation that reason had wrought. People en masse
should repair to their passions–raw, unbridled, unchecked, unexamined—only the
collective had the right to tame them. All people should participate in the
selection of rulers, but once those rulers were elected their authority should
be untrammelled—a mark of the Noble Savage was his attunement and obedience to
the "general will" as embodied in the chosen rulers. A crucial task
of the rulers was to enforce religious belief, whose truth would be apparent in
the hearts of men once the barrier of reason had been removed. Those who
dissented should be exiled or executed:
"While the state can compel no one to believe, it can banish, not for
impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and
justice, and of sacrificing, his life to his duty [italics mine.
Unsurprisingly, a picture of Rousseau hung in Kant’s study, directly above his
desk]. If, after having publicly recognised these dogmas, a person acts as if
he does not believe them, he should be put to death."
Rousseau’s antipode, Voltaire, ridiculed him thus:
"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for
it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One
longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that
habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming
it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages in Canada, because the maladies
to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war
is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made
the savages nearly as bad as ourselves."
While one has to dig a little to trace the influence of Kant on subsequent
history, in Rousseau one sees it directly, right on the surface. He was the
hero of Robespierre, perpetrator of the Reign of Terror just a few years after
Rousseau's death. He was the pin-up boy of later French intellectuals who in
turn influenced the likes of Pol Pot, whose "killing fields" were in
part a giant agrarian mortuary for intellectuals banished to the countryside in
a murderous orgy of anti-reason. As Bryan Magee observes:
"With Rousseau the individual has no rights at all to deviate from the
general will, so this democracy is compatible with a complete absence of
personal freedom. Here was the first formulation in Western philosophy of some
of the basic ideas underlying the great totalitarian movements of the 20th
century, Communism and Fascism—which likewise claimed to represent the people,
and to have mass support, and even to be democratic, while denying individual
rights; and which also allotted a key role to charismatic leaders; and which
waged both hot and cold war against the Anglo-Saxon democracies who based
themselves on Lockean principles."
Magee might have added to Communism and Fascism the modern Green movement,
whose democratic/totalitarian Gaia-worship and anti-industrial
Back-to-Nature-ism could hardly replicate Rousseau more exactly.
For Rousseau, passion trumps reason and ought to be indulged blindly. For
Objectivism, and Enlightenment thought generally, passion is born of reason,
reason informs passion; passion is reason’s expression, fulfilment and
reward. Objectivists looking to promote a renaissance of Enlightenment values
may legitimately identify Kant’s teachings as pernicious; let us not, however,
overlook the influence of his partner-in-crime, Rousseau.
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For a much fuller account of the influence of both Rousseau and Kant, the
reader is referred to Stephen Hicks’ illuminating, thought-provoking and
generally excellent work, Explaining Postmodernism—Skepticism and Socialism
from Rousseau to Foucault.