Kant, Rousseau, and Romanticism

When I was a freshman in college, a philosophy professor of mine (who was actually an historian of philosophy) warned me that academic philosophy was crippled by its steadfast refusal to examine ideas in their full-blooded historical context. I went on to major in philosophy and discovered, to my chagrin, that my professor's warning was spot on. Since then (the late 1970's-early 1980's), there have been modest advances in the field such as the hybrid discipline of the "history and philosophy of science." But rarely are ideas ever adequately embedded in their historical context by academic philosophers, and one can certainly understand why: because ideas, thoroughly historicized, tend to lose their universal validity. Or that is the fear, anyway. But how is it, one must ask, that a loss of universality as such is not compensated for by the corresponding gain in historicity? Take, for example, the case of Immanuel Kant.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has been called the worst written of great books. All of Kant's work is hampered by a difficult style. And this is without question one factor in the difficulty one encounters when reading him. But another factor in my view is the disservice done to Kant by the majority of his interpreters who, with few exceptions, de-contextualize Kant, making his thought even less approachable.

All of Kant's interpreters acknowledge that he was raised in a household of devout Lutheran pietists. And yet, astonishingly, most of those interpreters are unwilling to consider the possibility that Kant's philosophical output ought to be read in the light of his pietistic upbringing. This scholarly refusal appears to reflect an assumption that piety and criticism are entirely incompatible modes. Consequently, the father of "critical philosophy" could not possibly have harbored any pietistic leanings in his thinking. Instead, the regularity of his personal habits are viewed as the vestiges of his pietism and nothing else. This assumption (a prejudice, really) distorts Kant's philosophic project in general but permits him to be placed among the forefront of Enlightenment thinkers--where Enlightenment is to piety what matter is to anti-matter.

Kant's debt to Hume is always celebrated; the fact that he kept a portrait of Rousseau (another contrarian Enlightenment figure) above his desk is rarely mentioned and, when mentioned, almost never commented upon. But Kant, like Rousseau, was not only an Enlightenment figure, he was, as well, a counter-Enlightenment figure: for neither he nor Rousseau were completely at home with the radically secular wings of the European Enlightenment and both--yes, both--are crucial precursors to what would be later known as the Romantic revolution.