Reflection 6593: Kant’s Rousseau and the Vocation of the Human Being

1 Kant and Rousseau

Kant has long been associated with Rousseau. In an April 1768 letter to Hamann, Herder refers to his former teacher as “the great pupil of Rousseau”.^[1] One of his earliest biographers, Ludwig Borowski, claimed that Kant was familiar with all of Rousseau’s works and propagated the famous story, possibly apocryphal, about him missing his daily walk because of Emile.^[2] Hegel framed Kant’s philosophy as a direct result of Rousseau’s.^[3] Perhaps the most dramatic appraisal belongs to Heine. While Robespierre’s guillotine “was nothing but the hand of Jean-Jacques Rousseau”, the Terror was a faint echo of an earlier, more revolutionary event, the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason, “the sword with which deism was executed in Germany”.^[4]

Yet a curious fact remains: Kant says almost nothing about Rousseau in his principal writings. Among the three Critiques, the Groundwork, and The Metaphysics of Morals, there are just a handful of direct references to the Genevan, none of which are of much consequence.^[5] More strongly, the first essay of the Religion appears to reject Rousseau’s view that the human being is by nature good.^[6] Certainly, Rousseau has a more prominent presence in Kant’s published work on the philosophy of history, anthropology, and education.^[7] Furthermore, just because Kant fails to explicitly mention Rousseau in a certain passage or discussion does not mean that he is irrelevant to the matter at hand.^[8] Still, given the profound influence of Rousseau upon Kant alleged by the likes of Herder and Hegel, concrete links to the Genevan are strangely wanting in his work.

The situation drastically changes when we turn to Kant’s unpublished writings. The most significant document is the Remarks (Bemerkungen) written by Kant in his personal copy of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime in the mid-1760s. Excerpts from these notes were first published in 1842.^[9] For the first time, Kant’s own account of Rousseau’s impact on his thinking came to light. “I myself am a researcher by inclination”, he writes,

[…] There was a time when I believed this alone could constitute the honour of humanity and I despised the rabble who knew nothing. Rousseau has set me right. This blinding prejudice vanishes, I learn to honour human beings, and I would feel by far less useful than the common laborer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart a value to all others in order to establish the rights of humanity […].^[10]

Based on this and complementary passages in the Remarks, it has become commonplace to assert that Rousseau instigated a ‘revolution’ in Kant’s philosophical outlook in the mid-1760s.^[11] “I must read Rousseau”, he says, rather insistently, in another fragment, “until the beauty of [his] expressions no longer disturbs me, and only then can I finally examine him with reason”.^[12]

Still, even with these striking, personal expressions of Rousseau’s importance to Kant, the full extent of his Rousseauian revolution was not yet fully comprehensible. It was only in 1942 that the complete text of the Remarks appeared in Volume 20 of the Akademie Ausgabe.^[13] In a series of notes written in Latin that were absent from older editions of the Remarks, Kant provides what amounts to the earliest outlines of the categorical imperative.^[14] As first argued in detail by Josef Schmucker, these passages represent nothing less than “the first essential – and already relatively detailed – formulation of [Kant’s] ‘critical’ ethics”.^[15] But even the intimations of Kant’s signature moral theory do not exhaust the philosophical significance of the Remarks. As Susan Meld Shell and Richard L. Velkley have recently noted, while “Kant’s debt to Rousseau is usually thought to focus on the formulation of volonté générale in The Social Contract […] this narrow focus misses the crucial dimension of Kant’s encounter with questions about nature, reason, desire, freedom, and history, as Rousseau develops them”.^[16]

Even if one grants the complexity of the Remarks, it might still be thought that this document is of primarily biographical interest, for it captures an era of Kant’s intellectual development that is swiftly superseded by the Inaugural Dissertation (1770) and the onset of the ‘critical period’. Once again, it took the arrival of unpublished material to deepen our understanding of the role Rousseau plays in Kant’s work. With the appearance of Kant’s anthropology lectures in Volume 25 of the Akademie Ausgabe in 1997, it has become clear that, from the mid-1770s onwards, Kant used his inquiry ‘What is the human being?’ as the principal occasion for addressing Rousseau’s philosophy.^[17] More specifically, the Anthropology Friedländer (1775/76) contains a new section of the lectures in which a fairly developed version of Kant’s philosophy of history is articulated via an extended discussion of Rousseau.^[18] “The impulse for the expansion of anthropology through the philosophy of history”, as Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark put it, “came originally from Rousseau”.^[19] In the next available transcription, the Pillau (1778/79), this material appears under the heading “Character of the Human Species” and serves as the concluding topic of the lectures.^[20] This sets the precedent for all subsequent iterations of Kant’s Anthropology, including the published text of 1798.^[21]

For about two decades, then, Kant consistently engaged with Rousseau under the aegis of his lectures on anthropology. His interest in the Genevan does not break off or, even subside, with the arrival of the ‘critical’ period in 1770. On the contrary, it runs in parallel to the latter.

2 Reflection 6593: Between the Remarks and the Anthropology Lectures

There is thematic continuity between the Remarks and the “Character of the Human Species” segment of the anthropology lectures. It does not lie, however, with Kant’s account of the necessity and universality of the moral law. Rather, what unifies Kant’s reflections on Rousseau from the mid-1760s to Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is the problem of the final moral end of the human being. In the Remarks, Kant appeals to the popular discourse on the human vocation (die Bestimmung des Menschen) in formulating the issue.^[22] From this point on, he understands the question of the vocation of the human being in fundamentally Rousseauian terms. According to the Philosophical Encyclopedia lecture transcription, the archetype of the philosopher seeks to guide the human being to its moral vocation (Bestimmung). Some of the ancients approximated this paradigm of wisdom, but Rousseau is the sole modern to have approached it.^[23] Likewise, the concluding section of the anthropology frequently invokes the Bestimmung des Menschen, often with the proviso that, at least on earth, the human vocation is achievable only through the historical progression of the species, and not within the lifespan of an individual.^[24]

While the Anthropology Friedländer shows that Kant renewed his interest in Rousseau in the mid-1770s and establishes the origin of his philosophy of history, ambiguities remain. First, it is not clear why Kant altered the initial design of his anthropology lectures, inaugurated in 1772/73, by adding the segment on the character of the species.^[25] Second, the theme of the human vocation serves as a curious point of overlap with Kant’s lectures on ethics in the 1770s. Both the Collins (1774/77) and the Powalski (1777/78) transcriptions conclude with dedicated discussions of the Bestimmung des Menschen.^[26] This conjunction of ethics and anthropology is less surprising once we acknowledge the following: the first evidence of Kant’s detailed engagement with Rousseau is not in the Remarks but in the Moral Philosophy Herder, which stems from 1763–1765.^[27] Similarly, though not mentioned by name, the description of Kant’s lectures on ethics in his Nachricht for the 1765/66 semester bears the clear imprint of Rousseau.^[28] If we are to better understand the place of the Genevan in Kant’s thinking between the mid-1760s and the mid-1770s, we must consider his moral philosophy course.^[29]

Unfortunately, it is here that the available documentation fails us. Though Kant read his lectures on ethics about once per year over the period in question,^[30] there is no transcription of the class between the Herder and the Collins. That leaves the Reflexionen zur Moralphilosophie written by Kant in his copy of one of his course texts, Baumgarten’s Initia.^[31] Compared to the Remarks, however, Rousseau is noticeably absent from the moral philosophy notes. It appears, then, that Kant’s attention to the Genevan does ebb as we approach the threshold of the ‘critical’ era, only to resurge with the expansion of the anthropology lectures in the mid-1770s.

There is, however, an important exception: Reflection 6593.^[32] The latter belongs to the earliest phase (η) of the Reflexionen zur Moralphilosophie, dated to the period 1764–1768 by Erich Adickes. As I will show in the remainder of this essay, Reflection 6593 represents a unique bridge between the Remarks and the accounts of the human vocation found in the ethics and anthropology lectures of the mid-to-late 1770s. Though the note takes up only about a page and a half in the Akademie Ausgabe, it warrants careful contextualization and analysis. Why? A close examination of Reflection 6593, I submit, yields the conclusion that the essential components of Kant’s philosophy of history, and thereby his settled interpretation of Rousseau, are already in place by the end of the 1760s. More specifically, I will argue that the Reflection provides the earliest evidence of Kant’s philosophical conception of history as a progressive, three-stage process that leads to the fulfillment of the moral Bestimmung des Menschen. These three phases are: (a) the state of nature, (b) civil society, and (c) a peaceful union of nations. Kant’s appeal to (c) is especially significant because it establishes his reading of Rousseau’s “Abstract” of St. Pierre’s Perpetual Peace, a point of reference that is absent from the Moral Philosophy Herder and the Remarks. Based on the newly absorbed “Abstract”, in Reflection 6593 Kant positions the advent of a rightful league of nations as the sole means of resolving the Rousseauian contradiction between nature and civil society previously explored in the Herder and the Remarks. Reflection 6593 is thus a crucial ‘missing link’ in our understanding of Kant’s relationship to Rousseau and its role in his philosophical development. It further reinforces the view that Kant’s engagement with Rousseau was not a brief episode but a consistent feature of his thinking from the mid-1760s onwards.

Before I begin my detailed discussion of Reflection 6593, a general note about its structure is required. The Reflection consists of seven points enumerated under the heading “The order of reflection on the human being [Die Ordnung der Betrachtung über den Menschen]”.^[33] On the one hand, (1) through (4) reiterate Rousseauian themes also present in the Moral Philosophy Herder and the Remarks. On the other hand, (5) through (7) extend the standpoint of the first half of the fragment to preliminary formulations of key elements of Kant’s mature political philosophy and philosophy of history, including those that begin to appear in the treatment of the human vocation found in the lectures on ethics and anthropology in the 1770s.

Over the next several sections of this essay, I will provide a sequential outline of the points that make up Reflection 6593. Because much of the Reflection intersects with aspects of the Remarks, I will frequently draw on the latter for interpretive context.

3 Nature versus Civilization: The Problem of the Human Vocation

Kant begins Reflection 6593 by noting (1) the natural indeterminacy [Unbestimmtheit] of the human being in the development of its capacities and inclinations.^[34] This allows for a uniquely changeable human constitution capable of taking on many forms. Despite this mutability and diversity in human nature, Kant considers (2) the possibility of the singular vocation of the human being [die Bestimmung des Menschen] in accordance with its natural final end [ein natürlicher Endzwek].^[35] In doing so, he poses the problem of whether the proper or authentic [eigentlich] condition of the human being consists in either of the following: (a) its primordial simplicity [Einfalt]; or (b) the highest cultivation of its capacities [der höchsten Cultur seiner Vermögen], along with the greatest enjoyment of its desires [größten Genuß seiner Begierden]. He wonders whether the advancement of the sciences is a necessary component of (b).

While there is not yet a direct allusion to Rousseau, the series of considerations raised so far in the Reflection recapitulates the Rousseauian anthropological problematic examined by Kant in the mid-1760s, especially in the Remarks. His line of thought is anchored by the challenge of identifying the vocation of the human being, a task that must confront both: (a) the open-ended, perfectible character of the species that seems to undermine the possibility of a unified human nature, and (b) the divide between the states of nature and civil society brought about by the developmental course of (a). Accordingly, the next two paragraphs examine point (3) the ‘savage’ or natural condition of the human being. Some questions arise: Can the human being remain in the state of nature? What is its relationship to others in this condition? Which human characteristics arise from natural, as opposed to external and contingent causes?

Kant’s interest in these sorts of issues goes back to the Moral Philosophy Herder and continues into the Remarks.^[36] His central concern is Rousseau’s account of the distinction between nature and civilization. “Men are wicked; a sad and continual experience dispenses us from having to prove it”, Rousseau says in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. “Nevertheless, man is naturally good”.^[37] As Kant puts it in the Remarks, while “one can be good without virtue and reasonable without science” in the state of nature,^[38] this condition of primordial innocence and contentment has been gradually effaced by the acquisition of unnatural vices and desires over time, a process that reaches its apex in modern civil society. “The simple human being has little temptation to become vicious”, Kant writes in another passage. “Luxury [Üppigkeit] alone accounts for the great temptation”.^[39] But we cannot simply revert to the original state of nature, which, even if it ever existed, “does not last long”.^[40] It seems, then, that the proper station [Stelle] or post [Posten] of the human being within creation [Schöpfung], that for which it is destined by nature [wozu er bestimmt ist], is forever lost.^[41] Despite the stated importance of a science that teaches [lehret] the human being how to fulfill its assigned role in nature, the basis of such a study is uncertain.^[42] “Everything passes by us in a river”, as Kant puts it. “[…] Where do I find fixed points of nature that the human being can never disarrange, and that can give him signs as to which bank he must head for [?]”^[43]

This task of formulating a specifically human end within the teleological horizon of nature is not entirely novel. Kant’s first pass at the matter is in the concluding part of his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755).^[44] By the mid-1760s, however, Kant’s understanding of the philosophical anthropological question of a final human purpose has been revolutionized by Rousseau. Although the account of the self-alienation of the original goodness of the human being in the second Discourse seems to undermine the possibility of a Bestimmung des Menschen, Kant insists that this is not so. Like a Newton of human nature, he takes Rousseau to have discovered an unseen source of lawful unity and coherence in the human being beneath its seemingly disordered and irregular variations.^[45] For Kant, this is nothing less than a justification of providence, or theodicy, a vindication of the rationality and goodness of creation amidst apparent chaos and purposelessness.^[46]

This association of Rousseau with the topic of divine providence is not to be underestimated. Kant read Rousseau’s response to Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”, the so-called “Letter on Providence”, in early 1760, not long after it was first published.^[47] As many have noted, its successor, the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” in Emile, exerted a decisive influence on Kant.^[48] Rousseau’s basic move in these pieces is to explicitly reformulate the argument of the second Discourse as a solution to the problem of evil. The human being, and not nature, is the cause of evil on earth, for nature is fundamentally good, and the artificial vices and unhappiness that plague the human species are wholly the result of its free perfectibility. “I see everywhere”, as Rousseau tells Voltaire, “that the ills to which nature subjects us are far less cruel than those we add to them. […] I do not see that one can seek the source of moral evil other than in man free, perfected, thereby corrupted”.^[49] If so, the existence of evil in the world does not impugn the general providence of creation. Hence “the whole is good” or “everything is good for the whole”, despite the reality of considerable moral and physical evil for the human being.^[50]

This is further elaborated in the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar”. Even if the human being, and not nature, is responsible for evil, this still allows for a world in which the righteous unjustly suffer at the hands of the wicked. “To complain about God’s not preventing man from doing evil”, as the Vicar responds, “is to complain about His having given him an excellent nature, about His having put in man’s actions the morality which ennobles them, about His having given him the right to virtue”.^[51] The moral essence of the human being, its capacity for complete self-determination through freedom, possesses an unconditional value that exceeds any possible evil brought about by particular misuses of the will. Fortunately, morality also points to a final vindication of divine justice. For the Savoyard Vicar, the natural goodness of the human being is not an inaccessible condition from the past history of the species, but manifests as an innate principle of moral conscience.^[52] As a “[d]ivine instinct […] which makes man like unto God”, conscience is the expression of an intelligible spontaneity of the will that is irreducible to the body and the senses.^[53] If so, the inner experience of moral constraint suggests the existence of an immaterial and immortal soul, which in turn justifies belief in a future state in which God will remedy the evils of this world and happiness will at last be proportionate to virtue.^[54] As the Vicar concludes, “I […] must investigate […] what rules I ought to prescribe for myself in order to fulfill my destiny [destination] on earth according to the intention of Him who put me here”.^[55]

In short, then, the ultimate justification of providence is that it has granted the human being the freedom to fashion an entirely self-given final end. Bestimmung is the term used for this moral destination of the Savoyard Vicar in the German translation of Emile likely used by Kant.^[56] The word also appears in the concluding section of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, in which Kant provides an early articulation of his conception of moral faith.^[57] Yet his understanding of the moral vocation of the human being is not restricted to the domain of religion. As he says in the Remarks, the natural goodness of the human being can be renewed [wiederhergestellt] via a return (Rükkehr) to nature within civil society. This would constitute the perfection of the human being.^[58] If the radically self-transformative power of human freedom is the origin of evil in the world, it can also be the source of its rectification. For Kant, Rousseau’s justification of providence has an immanent dimension, a doctrine of the final moral end of human freedom on earth, and not merely in the beyond. His earliest formulations of the necessity and universality of the moral law in the Remarks thus sit side-by-side with an inchoate philosophical anthropology.

4 Emile: The Synthesis of Nature and Civilization

Point (4) of Reflection 6593 reads as follows: “Emile, or the civilized human being [der Gesittete Mensch]. The art or cultivation of the powers and inclinations that most accord with nature. By this is natural perfection improved”.^[59] A comparable phrase occurs in the Remarks. According to Kant,

If one considers the happiness of the savage it is not in order to return to the woods, but only to see what one has lost while gaining elsewhere. As a result, one would not cling to the enjoyment and use of social luxury with unhappy and unnatural inclinations and would remain a civilized human being of nature [ein gesitteter Mensch der Natur]. This consideration serves as the standard. For nature never makes a human being into a citizen, and his inclinations [and] strivings are merely aimed at the simple condition of life.^[60]

Once again, we find the claim that the human being cannot return to the original state of nature. Instead, the latter serves as a principle of reflection or self-analysis that allows one to exist in civil society without succumbing to its unnatural ills and evils. The result is a synthesis of the seemingly irreconcilable spheres of nature and civilization, a ‘civilized human being of nature’.

The application of a similar formula to Emile in Reflection 6593 is not incidental. According to Rousseau, education is the sole means by which the “double object” of the independence of the natural human being and the collective unity of the citizen “could be joined in a single one by removing the contradictions of man”.^[61] This involves protecting the fragile residue of natural goodness in the young Emile from artificial corruption – Rousseau’s famous negative education – until his so-called “second birth” as a rational “moral being” integrated into society.^[62] Hence Emile is “a savage made to inhabit cities”, that is, a person “raised uniquely for himself” but also “for others”, including “civil relations with his fellow citizens”.^[63] Preparation for citizenship is thus a key component of Emile’s education. This takes place through a lengthy abstract of The Social Contract.^[64] The aim is for Emile to live among his peers as an example of autonomy, one who freely “reign[s] over himself” according to the “public good” and the “common interest”.^[65] For Rousseau, it is not enough that Emile attains the self-mastery of individual virtue in the midst of the vices and temptations of civil society. He must also serve as a model of the rationally self-legislating citizen required for collective political sovereignty.^[66] The Social Contract has thus been described as an account of “the community of Emiles”.^[67]

Kant, in claiming that Emile is ‘natural perfection improved’ by art or cultivation, adopts the same reading of Rousseau. “The main intention of Rousseau”, as he says in the Remarks, “is that education be free and also make a free human being”.^[68] The course of education outlined by the Genevan, he adds, “is the only means to help civil society flourish again”.^[69] Certainly, Kant is critical of aspects of Emile – the device of a tutor devoting himself to the upbringing of a single child for many years is unrealistic and impossible to apply in a school setting.^[70] Nonetheless, the upshot is clear: it is by educating a society of free and equal citizens to the standpoint of rational self-legislation that the seemingly irreparable divide between nature and civil society can be overcome. As Kant will later put it, Rousseau’s principles of education for the human being and the citizen are what enable culture to overcome its unresolved conflict with nature.^[71] This is framed as the point at which perfect art again becomes nature [vollkommene Kunst wieder Natur wird] and the moral vocation [sittliche Bestimmung] of the human species is achieved.^[72]

5 Ideals of Right: The State of Nature and the Perfect Republic

With point (5) of Reflection 6593, Kant shifts to explicitly political terrain by considering the transition from the state of nature to a civil union [Bürgerbund] via the social contract.^[73] He frames the institution of civil society in terms of the principle of right [Recht] as it applies to outer or external [außer] relations among free human beings, that is, the exercise of the will as it pertains to others, and vice versa. “It is right, and not the factum, that is to be considered here with respect to the state of nature,” as he puts it. “It is to be established that it would not be arbitrary to come out of the state of nature, but rather necessary according to the rules of right”.^[74] As other Reflexionen zur Moralphilosophie from phase η show, Kant is already working with a provisional concept of right that defines the legitimate use of the freedom of each in terms of its reciprocal effect on the freedom of all in accordance with universal law.^[75]

This justification of the social contract via the principle of right intersects with another emerging concept at work in phase η of the moral philosophy fragments, that of the ideal [Ideal]. As certain Reflexionen show, Kant understands an ideal as referring to a maximal limit of perfection that serves as the common standard by which a class of objects is subsumed under a general concept.^[76] This is formalized by Kant in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770.^[77] According to Klaus Reich, while Plato’s doctrine of the idea is invoked as the key precedent for Kant’s conception of the ideal in the Dissertation, there is compelling evidence that this interpretation of Plato is heavily mediated by Rousseau’s “On Theatrical Imitation”, a restatement of aspects of the Republic made in preparation for the “Letter to d’Alembert”.^[78] Reich argues that Reflection 6611, which Adickes assigns to phase κ-λ (1769–1770) but which may be from phase η (1764–1768), shows that Kant was acquainted with Rousseau’s piece before writing the Dissertation.^[79] However, as has been pointed out, Reich fails to note that the relevant segment of R 6611 is actually an addition to the original note dated to 1776–1778 at the earliest.^[80] Yet this point is not decisive, for other evidence establishes an association between Plato and Rousseau on the topic of the idea/ideal as early as the mid-to-late 1760s.^[81] So, Reich’s hypothesis is not invalidated by the Reflection 6611 issue, and it remains plausible that “On Theatrical Imitation” played an important role in stimulating the interest in Platonic idealism evident in Kant’s Dissertation.

We will return to Rousseau shortly. First, we need to consider the initial ideal of right examined by Kant in Reflection 6593. This is the ideal of the state of nature that Kant, perhaps surprisingly, identifies with Hobbes. The Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes is an ideal in that it models a maximal condition or limit, namely, a hypothetical scenario of completely unrestricted outer freedom that represents the total negation of right. “With the right of war”, as Kant writes, “all material of right is lost for individual persons”.^[82] As for Hobbes, the claim that the state of nature constitutes a state of war is not a factual or historical argument. Rather, the state of nature is a conceptual ideal meant to model the impossibility of a rightful condition of external freedom beyond the reciprocally obligating terms of the social contract. “Hobbes is completely correct”, reads the Natural Right Feyerabend (1784), “when he says exeundum est e statu naturali”.^[83]

At first glance, this appeal to Hobbes seems to conflict with Kant’s Rousseauian emphasis on the simplicity and natural perfection of the primitive human being earlier in Reflection 6593. However, even in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, a “most horrible state of war” that precipitates the foundation of civil society arises through a process of development that begins from the naturally good condition of the original human being.^[84] If so, the Reflection need not be read as a decisive rejection of Rousseau’s version of the state of nature. In fact, Kant continues to employ Rousseau’s conception of l’homme sauvage.^[85]

Indeed, Rousseau comes back into the picture in point (5) of the fragment. Like the Hobbesian state of nature, the social contract [Der Social Contract] is presented in ideal terms, namely, as das Ideal des Staatsrecht.^[86] Although the Genevan is not directly mentioned, several commentators have taken this ideal of the civil union in Reflection 6593 to refer to The Social Contract.^[87] Still, Kant’s formulation is cryptic and requires detailed analysis.

Let’s start with the term Staatsrecht, which literally translates to ‘state right’ or ‘right of the state’. This has two significations that are each worth mentioning. First, in The Metaphysics of Morals, Staatsrecht denotes the institution of public right [öffentliches Recht] between members of a civil state under a constitution.^[88] In this sense, Staatsrecht refers to civil law or civil right. Kant uses it as the equivalent of bürgerliches Recht,^[89] as well as the various Latin formulations jus civile,^[90] jus publicum civile,^[91] and jus civitatis.^[92] Second, Staatsrecht is used as the translation for droit politique in the German editions of Emile and The Social Contract likely read by Kant.^[93] As Rousseau says in Emile, whereas the study of the positive right [droit positif; Positivrechte] of established governments considers “what is” [ce qui est; was ist], an area mastered by Montesquieu, the science or principles of political right [droit politique; Staatsrecht] found in The Social Contract examine “what ought to be” [ce qui doit être; was sein soll]. While empirical knowledge of positive right cannot be neglected, the normative principles of political right should precede the former in order to provide a model or standard [une échelle; Maßstab] by which to assess the existing laws of each country.^[94] This is precisely the role of the abridgment of The Social Contract in Emile – it gives Rousseau’s pupil a prescriptive guideline by which to evaluate the societies he will encounter on his travels.

That Kant adopts Rousseau’s understanding of the normative paradigm of droit politique in his conception of civil right or the right of a state [Staatsrecht] is indicated by a few Reflexionen zur Rechtsphilosophie assigned to phase ρ (around 1773–1775). The original contract is “the guideline, principium, exemplar of the right of a state [Staatsrecht],” runs one such note, which may also date to as early as 1769. “It must be derived from ideas, not from factis [deeds]”.^[95] “The idea of the social contract”, Kant writes in the preceding Reflexion, “is only the guideline for judgment about right and for instruction for the ruler regarding a possible perfect establishment of the state”.^[96] “The social contract is the rule”, runs another fragment, “[…] and contains the ideal of legislating, governing, and public justice”.^[97]

For Kant, then, the Ideal des Staatsrecht is a perfect model or archetype of the external use of freedom among human beings under law in a civil state. Though it cannot be fully realized in experience, this paradigm of the social contract prescribes a rule or measure by which to assess the rightfulness of existing states. At the same time, it also provides an ideal standard, or asymptotic limit, towards which governments should strive for improvement. In both the Inaugural Dissertation and the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant associates the rational idea of the perfect political state with Plato’s Republic.^[98] He defines the latter as a “constitution providing for the greatest human freedom according to laws that permit the freedom of each to exist together with that of others” in the first Critique.^[99] Even if Kant says that he is extending or updating Plato’s concept of a perfect constitution, this is not the most accurate representation of the spirit of the Republic. But if we follow Reich’s view that Kant’s Plato is “Plato seen […] with the eyes of Rousseau”,^[100] then this description becomes less incomprehensible: the ideal republic is really that of The Social Contract. Accordingly, in the Menschenkunde anthropology transcription from the early 1780s, we find the same definition of the perfect civil constitution as that put forward in the first Critique, this time with the addition of language that clearly evokes Rousseau.^[101]

To return to Reflection 6593, the Ideal des Staatsrecht is given two features. First, it grounds the highest force or authority [die oberste Gewalt] of sovereign power upon public right [öffentliches Recht], and not the reverse (more on this below).^[102] The maximum compatibility of reciprocal freedom in accordance with universal law is thus the sole condition and aim of the exercise of civil coercion. In The Metaphysics of Morals, this is precisely how Kant defines the notion of a pure republic promulgated by the idea of the social contract.^[103] Second, the ideal civil union is framed “according to the rule of equality” and “in abstracto, without looking at the particular nature of the human being”.^[104] This echoes Kant’s claim in the Remarks that a perfect [vollkommene] republic consists in the equal freedom of each relative to all others as members of a unified, sovereign whole.^[105] Accordingly, in an ideal civil constitution, the origin of the rightful limitation of freedom by the state is the equal co-legislation of each citizen for all. As Rousseau puts it in The Social Contract, this solves the problem of how, through the civil union, “each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before”.^[106]

6 Leviathan: The Principle of Security and the Limits of Human Nature

So far, then, Kant’s account of the social contract in Reflection 6593 has outlined a Hobbesian ideal of the state of nature and a Rousseauian ideal of rightful political autonomy. In point (6), Kant introduces a third term between these two extremes, the Leviathan. This is framed as a direct inversion of the ideal civil union: the highest coercive power, sovereign authority, is now the ground of freedom in accordance with public right, and not vice versa. The lawful co-existence of outer freedom for each derives from common submission to “a mortal God” who overpowers all,^[107] and not from the necessity and universality of reciprocal self-legislation.

Elsewhere, Kant calls Hobbes’s conception of sovereignty despotic, “for he believed that wherever power [Gewalt] may reach, it would constitute what is right”.^[108] In Reflection 6593, however, his appraisal of Hobbes is positive. Why? For Kant, the Leviathan is “the condition of society which is in accordance with the nature of human beings. According to the rule of security”.^[109] If The Social Contract abstracts from the specificity of human nature to posit an ideal of republican self-determination, the Leviathan confronts the concrete limitations of human nature by making security the primary principle of civil association.^[110] “I can be either in a state of equality and have the freedom to be unjust and to suffer injustice”, Kant adds, “or in a state of subjection without this freedom” but with the benefit of rightful security.^[111] There is a trade-off, then, between the ideal of equal autonomy for each and the actual implementation of right, for human beings may always harm or injure others in the absence of an external, mutually coercive force. “Right in abstracto is conceivable without the means whereby it can be actualized”, Kant writes in another Reflexion from phase η. “But to consider it in concreto is to consider the security through which the conditions of right can be actualized”.^[112] “[T]he best condition of the social human being in view of his security is the irresistible force that necessitates him to proceed according to this rule of right”, states another note from η. “[…] He does not thereby become better, but tamer”.^[113] As Kant will later put it, the human being is an animal in need of a master, “[f]or he certainly misuses his freedom in regard to others of his kind”.^[114]

Kant’s terse contraposition of the civil unions of The Social Contract and the Leviathan in Reflection 6593 has yielded divergent interpretations in the secondary literature. For Schmucker, the fragment is representative of his position that Kant “largely depends on Rousseau” for his conception of a rightful civil constitution.^[115] Conversely, Werner Busch reads Reflection 6593 as a criticism of Rousseau. “[I]t is not the mere model of a rightful state that makes the state, by virtue of an abstraction, into a rightful state”, he writes. Instead, as for Hobbes, “it is the actual force of the state in concreto” that ensures civil right.^[116]

In a way, both views are correct. Beginning in the 1760s, Kant imputes an excessive enthusiasm [Enthusiasmus] to Rousseau that values moral feeling over principles.^[117] This claim is later sharpened into a criticism of the Genevan. A common refrain in the anthropology lectures from the 1770s is that Rousseau, like Plato and the Abbé St. Pierre, mistakes perfected ideals of reason for possible objects of cognition and can therefore be classified as a kind of intellectual enthusiast [Enthusiast].^[118] Given the association with Plato, these remarks may reflect the unfavorable assessment of the Republic in Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae (“enthusiasmo philosophico”), which has been described as Kant’s main source for his knowledge of Plato.^[119] Reflection 1644, dated from the mid-1760s to the mid-1770s, voices an especially pertinent objection along these lines: “Rousseau […] looked for the greatest perfection in the civil condition without contradicting nature, as well as for the means of arriving at it”, Kant writes, “but he erred in taking this as possible”.^[120] To this extent, then, Busch is on the mark. Because the ideal of Rousseauian political autonomy is beyond the current imperfections of human nature, the subjection of each to an alien highest power is the only secure condition of right in civil society. “Place every person in security concerning his right from your side (to each his own [suum cuique])”, Kant reiterates in a later note (1776–1778), “for one can only say that something is his, and by deed [facto], not merely by right [jure], when he is assured concerning his possession. […] [O]ne must leave the state of nature”.^[121]

Yet this characterization of Rousseau does not mean that his ideals are without any philosophical value for Kant. According to the Anthropology Friedländer, Rousseau is an example of someone whose ideals provide a true archetype [Urbild] that “can serve as a rule and for assessment”, even if “it cannot actually be attained”.^[122] An enthusiast like Rousseau is not a fanatic [Schwärmer], for “fanatics have no correct philosophy, but the enthusiasts indeed do, only they follow their correct concepts with complete affect”.^[123] A noteworthy formulation of this point can be found in the Anthropology Elsner transcription of 1792/93. “One must not insist that something is not possible because it has not yet come into the world”, it reads, “i. e., to subject free human beings to lawful coercion, i. e., the French republic. […] What is rational is also possible, and it is a duty to follow this idea, and to ever strive for its realization”.^[124] In the final analysis, The Social Contract “shows how a civil constitution must be in order to achieve the entire end [Zweck] of the human being”.^[125]. Hence Schmucker is right to read the ideal of Staatsrecht in Reflection 6593 as evidence of the enduring importance of Rousseau for Kant.

One last point from the fragment provides a clue to the future development of Kant’s thinking on these issues and helps to clarify his apparent endorsement of Hobbes over Rousseau.

7 The Ideal of the Right of Nations: Kant’s Cosmopolitan Turn

Kant calls (7) a union of peoples [Völkerbund] the ideal of the right of peoples [das Ideal des Völkerrechts] that provides the completion of societies in view of their outer relations with one another [die Vollendung der Gesellschaften in ansehung äußerer Verhältnisse].^[126] This claim is left without further elaboration.^[127] Nonetheless, it is significant. As has been observed, it appears to be the first indication that Kant had read Rousseau’s “Abstract of Monsieur the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s Plan for Perpetual Peace”.^[128] If so, Reflection 6593 provides the earliest articulation of the link between the theme of the human vocation and the philosophy of history that appears in a more developed form in Kant’s lectures on ethics and anthropology in the mid-1770s. Likewise, it harbingers the cosmopolitan dimension of Kant’s moral and political philosophy.

In my view, the claim that Kant’s reference to an ideal union of peoples indicates knowledge of Rousseau’s “Abstract” is plausible. The text was first published in Amsterdam in 1761 and then re-printed the following year in a collection of Rousseau’s writings.^[129] Though quickly translated into English, a German version of the “Abstract” did not appear until after the outbreak of the First World War.^[130] Like the “Letter on Providence” and “On Theatrical Imitation”, then, Kant would have read Rousseau’s “Abstract” in the original French. Notably, there is no definitive trace of the “Abstract” in either the Moral Philosophy Herder or the Remarks.^[131] To my knowledge, the earliest association of Rousseau with St. Pierre appears in Reflection 488, which is dated to 1764–69 by Adickes.^[132] If the Völkerbund of Reflection 6593 is that of St. Pierre via Rousseau, we can surmise that Kant read the “Abstract” around 1766–68 – that is, during phase η (1764–8) but after the composition of the Remarks.

Two considerations require attention to support this conclusion. First, Kant was aware of St. Pierre and his Project for Perpetual Peace (1713) as early as the 1750s, well before the publication of Rousseau’s “Abstract”. A pair of Reflexionen zur Logik frame St. Pierre’s so-called proposal [Vorschlag] as impossible, like rulers acting in accordance with Christianity (per Bayle), or, yet again, the Platonic republic.^[133] Despite these early allusions, it is not clear whether Kant ever read St. Pierre.^[134] In any case, as we have seen, this charge concerning the fantastical nature of the views of St. Pierre, together with those of Rousseau, is later repeated by Kant. Yet this does not preclude Kant from invoking St. Pierre and Rousseau as the key precedent for his conception of a cosmopolitan federation of peaceful nations.^[135] So while Kant’s characterization of St. Pierre antedates Rousseau’s “Abstract”, his adoption of the theme of paix perpétuelle surely reflects his later encounter with its presentation by the Genevan. Indeed, it has been said of the “Abstract” that “there is much more of Rousseau than of Saint-Pierre in the whole statement”.^[136] This explains why St. Pierre is nearly always mentioned alongside Rousseau in Kant’s output from Reflection 488 onwards.^[137] According to the Anthropology Pillau, Rousseau “shows into which constitution various peoples must enter so that barbaric wars might pass over into friendly disputes”.^[138]

Second, the period from 1766 to 1768 coincides with the inaugural offering of Kant’s lectures on natural law in 1767.^[139] Kant’s textbook for the course, Gottfried Achenwall’s Jus Naturae, concludes with a discussion of the universal law of nations [jus gentium universal], the final segment of which is devoted to the law of international war [jus belli gentium].^[140] Crucially, there is no mention whatsoever of a lawful federation of nations. However, Achenwall does argue that natural law extends to relations between peoples (§ 209) and that the right of war is only given for the sake of achieving peace (§ 278). By the 1780s, we find Kant using this portion of the lectures as an occasion to articulate his own view, refracted through his interpretation of Rousseau, that a union of nations [Völkerbund] constitutes the purpose of humanity [Zweck der Menschheit], a condition defined in terms of “the freedom of each individual state under universal laws. Autonomy”.^[141] While the theme of a Völkerbund is not explicitly addressed in the earlier Reflexionen zur Rechtsphilosophie on the law of nations,^[142] Kant’s classroom treatment of international relations starting in the late 1760s may have spurred him to consider its broader implications for his developing practical philosophy.

What would Kant have found in Rousseau’s “Abstract” that helps to illuminate his invocation of an ideal union of peoples in Reflection 6593? To begin, consider Book V of Emile, which mentions the text near the conclusion of the précis of The Social Contract. The issues raised by St. Pierre, Rousseau writes, “lead us directly to all the questions of public right [droit public; Völkerrecht] which can complete [peuvent achever; vollends können] the clarification of the questions of political right [droit politique; Staatsrecht]”.^[143] For Rousseau, the issue of external relations between nations [droit public] cannot be separated from the normative principles of the internal constitution of the state [droit politique]. This is reiterated at the conclusion of The Social Contract.^[144] Staatsrecht, to use the vocabulary of both the German translation of Emile and Reflection 6593, entails Völkerrecht. The same point occurs in § 43 of The Metaphysics of Morals.^[145]

The full range of Rousseau’s work on subjects like international relations and the right of war only emerges in posthumously published writings. This includes his critical reflections on St. Pierre in the “Judgment of the Plan for Perpetual Peace”. Though alluded to in Emile, this piece did not appear until 1782.^[146] Kant’s knowledge of Rousseau’s droit public/Völkerrecht during the formative years of his philosophy of history was therefore limited to the “Abstract”.^[147] The key claim of the essay is expressed in the following passage, which is worth quoting at length:

It is not necessary to have meditated for very long on the means of perfecting any Government whatsoever to notice the perplexities and obstacles that are born less from its constitution than from its external relations; so that one is constrained to give to its security the majority of the efforts that ought to be devoted to its public order, and to consider putting it in a condition to resist others more than to make it perfect in itself. If the social order were, as is claimed, the work of reason rather than the passions, would it have taken so long to see that […] since each of us is in the civil state with his fellow citizens and in the state of nature with all the rest of the world, we have forestalled private wars only to ignite general ones, which are a thousand times more terrible; and that by uniting ourselves to several men, we really become the enemies of the human race? If there is some way of resolving these dangerous contradictions, this can only be by a form of confederative government, which, uniting Peoples by bonds similar to those which unite individuals, equally subject both of them to the authority of Laws.^[148]

According to this passage, a rational configuration of the civil order is impossible as long as external relations between nations continue to exist in a lawless, unruly condition akin to the state of nature. It is only with the advent of an association of peoples under common laws analogous to the constraint of the civil state that polities will not only avert the calamities of international warfare, but also remove the central obstacle to their further perfection. A peaceful union of nations will allow for the diversion of public resources from the onerous concern of outer security to internal advancements, including, as Rousseau later elaborates, the stimulation of commerce, agriculture and the arts.^[149] In short, the establishment of a lawful league of nations is required to raise existing European society above its currently degraded condition and instigate a process of future development and improvement.

Now, none of this is expressly stated in Kant’s terse gesture in Reflection 6593 to an ideal union of peoples that represents the completion of outer relations between nations. Nonetheless, if it is plausible to take point (7) of the note as evidence of Kant’s reading of Rousseau’s “Abstract”, then the essential elements of his philosophy of history and its basic logic are already in place. The cleft between (a) the reality of the civil condition (the Leviathan) and (b) its ideal of maximum perfection [The Social Contract] can only be mediated by (c) the higher ideal of right provided by a cosmopolitan league of nations (the “Abstract of Perpetual Peace”). This is the argument of Propositions Five through Seven of “Idea for a Universal History” (1784), Kant’s first published statement of his philosophy of history. “The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution”, he writes, “is dependent on the problem of a lawful external relation between states and cannot be solved without the latter”.^[150] Yet this point is already discernible, almost a decade earlier, in the Anthropology Friedländer (1775/76).^[151] Joined to the idea of the historical progression of the human species towards a final moral vocation, (a) through (c) become successive stages of a unified course of teleological development, and not just isolated configurations of right. By framing these issues under the umbrella of the Bestimmung des Menschen, Reflection 6593 provides the crucial precedent for Kant’s treatment of the topic in the 1770s in his lectures on ethics and anthropology.

8 Conclusion

Despite the appearance of eclecticism and paradox, Rousseau often insisted on the systematic unity of his writings.^[152] So did Kant.^[153] The message of the Genevan is not, as Voltaire famously put it, to “walk on all fours”,^[154] but to show that the self-imposed evils of human life can be overcome by the same free, self-transformative essence of human nature that produced them. The program of Emile, The Social Contract and the “Abstract of Perpetual Peace” outlines the historical process by which the human species can correct its errant perfectibility and elevate the presently alienated goodness of its nature to the fulfillment of an intrinsic moral purpose: rational self-determination. The details of Kant’s integration of this philosophical anthropology into the critical framework, which ultimately rests with his conception of teleology and the regulative use of reason, cannot detain us here.^[155] For now, the key point is that Reflection 6593 shows that the core components of Kant’s Rousseauian interpretation of the human vocation, some of which are absent from the Remarks, emerge before 1770. If so, Kant’s position may have deeper roots in his thought than the available evidence of his moral philosophy course permits us to verify.^[156]

Certainly, Rousseau’s optimism, encapsulated by the theodicean maxim of Emile, that “what is, is good”,^[157] is offset by a pessimism that most readers deny to Kant. The providential goodness of the whole does not extend to the moral order, at least in this life.^[158] Accordingly, the theme of historical progress has been identified as nothing less than the essential point of divergence between Kant and Rousseau.^[159] Yet it is the insistence that Rousseau vindicates, and does not imperil, the notion of a human moral end that distinguishes Kant’s reception of the Genevan from that of his contemporaries. In a 1767 review, Moses Mendelssohn praised Isaak Iselin’s Geschichte der Menschheit for providing “the most thorough refutation of Rousseau’s views” to date.^[160] A central claim: Rousseau argues that nature has endowed the human being with a unique capacity of self-perfection, but this same faculty is responsible for drawing the species out of its primordial innocence and subjecting it to a host of unnatural evils. Nature, it seems, is at once purposive and purposeless for the Genevan.^[161] If so, he cannot provide what Iselin identifies as the primary task of philosophy, to prepare the human being for its vocation.^[162]

To my knowledge, there is no definitive evidence that Kant read Mendelssohn’s review or Iselin’s book. Still, his attempt to work out a philosophy of history for the human species in accordance with its moral vocation has been framed as the continuation of a model established by Iselin.^[163] But this much is for sure: Kant was unusual in rejecting the kind of interpretation of Rousseau expressed by Iselin and Mendelssohn.^[164] The final end of the sciences, as he decided in the Remarks, is to find the vocation of the human being – with and through Rousseau.^[165]