Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 12:41:02 PM
Kant and Rousseau – Freedom replaces grace
After the Renaissance-Reformation period the next crucial stage is reached at the time of Kant (1724-1804) and of Rousseau (1712-1778). By this time, the sense of the autonomous, which had derived from Aquinas, is fully developed. The problem was now formulated differently. This shift in the wording of the formulation shows in itself the development of the problem. Whereas men had previously spoken of nature and grace, by this time there was no idea of grace; the word did not fit any longer.
To appreciate the significance of this stage of the formulation of modern man, we must remember that up until this time the schools of philosophy in the West, from the time of the Greeks onward, had three important principles in common.
The first is that they were rationalistic. By this is meant that man begins absolutely and totally from himself, gathers the information concerning the particulars, and formulates the universals.
Second, they all believed in the rational. This word has no relationship to the word ‘rationalism’. They acted upon the basis that man’s aspiration for the validity of reason was well founded. They thought in terms of antithesis. If a certain thing was true, the opposite was not true. In morals, if a thing was right, the opposite was wrong. This is something that goes as far back as you can go in man’s thinking. It is the only way man can think. That is the way God has made us and there is no other way to think. Therefore, the basis of classical logic is that A is not non-A. The understanding of what is involved in this methodology of antithesis, and what is involved in casting it away, is very important in understanding contemporary thought.
The third thing that men had always hoped for in philosophy was that they would be able to construct a unified field of knowledge. At the time of Kant, for example, men were tenaciously hanging on to this hope, despite the pressure against it. They hoped that by means of rationalism plus rationality they would find a complete answer; an answer that would encompass all of thought and all of life. With minor exceptions, this aspiration marked all philosophy up to and including the time of Kant.
By the time of Kant rationalism was now well developed and entrenched; there was no concept of revelation in any area. Consequently the problem was now defined, not in terms of ‘nature and grace’, but of ‘nature and freedom’. This is a titanic change, expressing a secularized version of the problem. Nature has totally devoured grace, and what is left in its place ‘upstairs’ is the word ‘freedom’.
Even though determinism was involved in the lower ‘storey’, there was still an intense longing after human freedom. Previously determinism had almost always been confined to the area of physics, or in other words, to the machine portion of the universe. However, now human freedom was seen as autonomous also. Freedom and nature are both now autonomous. The individual’s freedom is seen not only as freedom without the need of redemption, but as absolute freedom.
The fight to retain freedom is carried on by Rousseau to a high degree. He and those who follow him, in their literature and art, express a casting aside of civilization as that which is restraining man’s freedom. They feel the pressure ‘downstairs’ of man as the machine. Naturalistic science becomes a very heavy weight. So men, who are not really modern men as yet and so have not accepted the fact that they are only machines, begin to hate science. They long for freedom even if the freedom makes no sense, and thus autonomous freedom and the autonomous machine stand facing each other.
Autonomous freedom means a freedom where the individual is the centre of the universe without restraint. Therefore, as man begins to feel the weight of the machine pressing upon him, Rousseau and others swear and curse against the science, which is threatening their human freedom. The freedom that they advocate is autonomous in that it is freedom without limitations. It is freedom that no longer fits into the rational world. It merely hopes that the finite individual man will be free; all that is left is individual self-expression.