Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question

by Richard L. Velkley

Overview

In Being after Rousseau, Richard L. Velkley presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the founder of a modern European tradition of reflection on the relation of philosophy to culture—a reflection that calls both into question. Tracing this tradition from Rousseau to Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, and Martin Heidegger, Velkley shows late modern philosophy as a series of ultimately unsuccessful attempts to resolve the dichotomies between nature and society, culture and civilization, and philosophy and society that Rousseau brought to the fore.

The Rousseauian tradition begins, for Velkley, with Rousseau's criticism of modern political philosophy. Although the German Idealists such as Schelling accepted much of Rousseau's critique, they believed, unlike Rousseau, that human wholeness could be attained at the level of society and history. Heidegger and Nietzsche questioned this claim, but followed both Rousseau and the Idealists in their vision of the philosopher-poet striving to recover an original wholeness that the history of reason has distorted.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226852560
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/01/2002
Edition description:	1
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Richard L. Velkley is an associate professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America. He is the author of Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundation of Kant's Critical Philosophy.

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Being After Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question

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By Richard L. Velkley

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2002 Richard L. Velkley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226852571

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1 - The Tension in the Beautiful: On Culture and Civilization in Rousseau and German Philosophy

I. The distinction between culture and civilization originates in certain modern attempts to define the highest cultivation of the human soul or spirit. Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt, in the age of Idealist philosophy, first announce this distinction to define the idea of a moral culture; later Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler develop it for very different purposes. At the start of this century, the distinction of culture and civilization was of more than academic interest on both sides of the Atlantic. Many Germans with rather uncompromising ambitions used it to express what they supposed made German thought, politics, art, and customs superior to their Western democratic counterparts. The heroism and spirituality of German culture were contrasted with the low commercialism and utilitarianism of civilization in France, Britain, and North America. While this German analysis was rooted more in a combination of national pride and intellectual orthodoxy than in a clear-headed evaluation of the world political situation, it could boast some profound philosophical sources.

Similarly, the academic controversies of our day about theWestern heritage take various stands on "culture" and "civilization" without examining the origins and meanings of this language. This criticism holds especially for the opponents of the so-called "Western canon," who adopt a patently untenable position by claiming to have arrived at a standpoint beyond European traditions of thought. Their constant employment of the terms "culture" and "civilization" in fact betrays their dependence on eighteenth-century European philosophy, and not least, on Rousseau and his German followers. What is more, their critiques of the narrow and oppressive spirit of Western "logocentrism" have striking affinities with the attacks of German Kulturphilosophie early in this century on the "sterile intellectualism" of Western civilization, which attacks ultimately derived from Rousseau via Nietzsche. But the current critiques of Western civilization are most immediately descended from Heidegger, whose profound attempt to move beyond all universalist and rationalist forms of thought is the ultimate outcome, one could say, of the German tradition of reflection on culture. Thus one does not need the present debates to make a case for the importance of this topic. To inquire about how culture was contrasted with civilization in modern efforts to surpass the classical understandings of culture is necessarily rewarding. This inquiry takes us into the innermost essence of the projects of later modern philosophy; at the same time, it brings the pivotal figure of Rousseau to the fore. I turn to the origins of the terms "civilization" and "culture," then to some important moments in the history of the distinction, in order to determine what Rousseau has contributed to, and what we might learn from, this central aspect of recent history and thought.

First a remark on some principles, mostly implicit and requiring full development in another context, that govern the historical reflections of this essay. The modern stress on self-preservation is legislated to abolish the discord arising from the dialectic of reason concerning ultimate ends. Hence modernity's original goal is to achieve a certain kind of justice: the securing of universal foundations for the peaceful pursuit of happiness with no determinate content. The increase of power (mastery of nature) for attaining all possible "subjective" goods takes the place of the final good. Rousseau then observes that the justification of self-preservation does not satisfy the human need for wholeness or erotic fulfillment. His account of eros as the longing for prerational unity is the source of the later distinction between "culture" as the domain of erotic striving and "civilization" as the domain of mere self-preserving justice. Like Nietzsche after him, Rousseau envisions an irreconcilable conflict between eros and justice; thereby he also renews a classical (Platonic) theme. At the same time, he uncovers a fundamental tension in the beautiful that is not solely between prephilosophical and philosophical accounts of the beautiful; it is a tension within the philosophical beautiful itself. (Here again Rousseau recollects a Platonic idea.) This latter tension can be described as the combination of dependence and opposition between philosophical wholeness (erotic knowing, contemplating, or reverie) and the legislation of moral life (justice). Being necessarily drawn to both forms of the beautiful is a condition for the philosopher to approach either one. This is the "contradiction" in philosophical efforts to attain a higher culture or to transcend civilization. Transcendence is accomplished by means of civilization itself: the "cave" cannot be escaped except through taking the "cave" wholly seriously, since one discovers its limits only by seeking (at least "in speech") its unattainable perfection. Or as Nietzsche puts it, "the self-sublimation [Selbstaufhebung] of morality" defines the task of philosophical culture.

II. Only around the year 1800 did our unreflective practice of calling a society a "culture" or "civilization" become an acceptable form of speech. "Civilization" (Fr. civilisation) in this sense has an eighteenth-century origin in the writing of the Marquis de Mirabeau. Napoleon uses it in revolutionary manifestos to describe France's mission: the propagation of the universal rights of man. "Civilization" is thus connected with early modern doctrines of natural rights and human equality, of scientific and technological progress, and their radicalization in the French Revolution. The term conveys the idea of the entire progress of humanity culminating in the modern liberal state and its way of life, seen as inherently civil, polite, and pleasant. The term was from the first universalist in intent and has largely remained so in France, where there has always been resistance to speaking of "civilizations" in the plural. There is but one civilization proper to the human species, and France happens by providential grace to be its spokesman. One should also note the relation of "civilization" to the Latin civitas and therewith to the Greek polis.

The term "culture," which originally meant the culture of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meanings in the writings of eighteenth-century German thinkers, who are on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of modern liberalism and Enlightenment. Thus a contrast between "culture" and "civilization" is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such. Two primary meanings of culture emerge from this period: culture as the folk-spirit having a unique identity, and culture as cultivation of inwardness or free individuality. The first meaning is predominant in our current use of the term "culture," although the second still plays a large role in what we think culture should achieve, namely the full "expression" of the unique or "authentic" self. Clearly there is some considerable tension between the notions, although they are frequently advocated together without any regard for the tension. The common ground of the two notions is the idea, developed most profoundly in Rousseau, that human wholeness is achievable only through the recovery of or approximation to an original prediscursive or prerational natural unity. Rousseau is also the source of the bifurcation in the ways to reach such wholeness: either as the citizen in a society based on the true idea of nature, or as the natural individual who remains apart from the social order. Rousseau emphasizes the incompatibility of these ways of reaching wholeness, and also stresses that the first way, citizenship, is much less natural and hence less satisfactory than the second way, natural freedom. Many central ideas of culture in German thought either confusedly blur or consciously seek to resolve this opposition. The current primary usages of culture as folk-spirit often consist in a blurring of the distinction in which the social order is ascribed attributes of spontaneity, individuality, and organic wholeness, which are attributes Rousseau concedes only to the life of the natural individual or to the earliest and simplest forms of human society. And Rousseau ascribes these attributes to early societies only guardedly. The Rousseauian spirit in current cultural thinking is evident all the same in its frequent preference for primitive or so-called "developing" cultures.

Rousseau has been regarded as the source of a new moral outlook in which the sentiment de l'existence both "puts us in touch with an inner voice" and "connects us to a wider whole." While it is true that one finds the basis for such a moral outlook in Rousseau's writings, especially Emile, it has to be noted that for Rousseau this morality is an artificial construction in crucial respects. The original natural self is premoral, even prerational; its connection with wider wholes can be brought about only through an expansion of reason that compromises the original simplicity and unity of the self. The transition from premoral goodness to social virtue entails a loss. Indeed, social virtue is in Rousseau's account necessary only for an already fallen being that is in danger of further corruption. The German thinkers who follow Rousseau attempt to formulate notions of virtue that lack the defects of artificiality, loss of unity and of wholeness. And these attempts are the heart of their accounts of culture. But as I shall argue, these German efforts are constantly troubled by conflicts between original wholeness and alienating reason. They repeatedly experience the fact that they have not laid Rousseau's ghost to rest, and that the higher unity of natural wholeness and moral rationality that they seek is difficult if not impossible to achieve. This underlying problem will be the chief theme in what follows.

There are two primary forms of the German efforts to show the necessary unity of what Rousseau thought to be only artificially combined: (1) the cosmopolitan notions of culture in early German Idealism that adopt a complementary stance toward liberal commercial civilization and (2) the dialectical notions of culture in later Idealism that seek to reconcile higher rational culture with the particular folk-community having mythic and poetic origins. These efforts are succeeded, first of all in Nietzsche's thought, by the tragic ideas of culture pitting the higher culture of great heroic individuals and folk-spirits against the leveling and antispiritual tendencies of modern civilization. In some sense, these ideas return to Rousseau's view that any harmony between the individual and social life is an artificial compromise, and they seek to recover or expose the sources for an original wholeness that necessarily eludes rational reflection and grounding. Toward the close of this chapter, I will suggest how these proposals relate to "the tension in the beautiful."

III. To understand the origins of these notions one must return to the beginnings of modern philosophy. The career of modern "culture" begins linguistically and to an extent philosophically in the seventeenth century with Samuel Pufendorf 's new application of the Ciceronian notion of cultura animi. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero employs the agricultural term cultura to speak of the cultivation of the soul by philosophy; the term cultura then enters the modern European languages in the Renaissance with this sense. Pufendorf, however, uses cultura to designate collectively the means for overcoming the inconveniences of the state of nature; he speaks of vitae cultura as overcoming the status naturalis. Culture then does not refer to a special education attaining a natural potential of the soul according to teleological conceptions like Cicero's. It rather refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism and, through artifice, become fully human. As in Hobbes's political philosophy, movement away from barbarism replaces movement toward perfection; thereby Pufendorf initiates our way of speaking of the entirety of social life as "culture." This earliest modern notion of culture is based on a nonteleological view of nature, and as universal in application (for culture is not yet connected with a folk-spirit) it reflects the universality of natural right.

In this connection, we must also bear in mind the Baconian inauguration of the project "to extend the power and dominion of the human race over the universe" through the arts and sciences, which Bacon advertises as an ambition "more wholesome and more noble," because seeking the good of the "whole race of man," than political ambitions of producing civil benefits for particular states and peoples. The new project derives support from the judgments of former ages that accorded divine honors to authors of inventions and only heroic honors to founders, legislators, and saviors of cities and empires. Bacon would thus shift the focus of civilization from politics and civic virtue toward scientific and technological progress as the foundation for a universal human community overcoming the divisive forces of sectarianism and love of patria. This account of civilization is crucial to the modern doctrines of culture that retain a universalist character, such as those of Pufendorf, Kant, and von Humboldt.

It is not such a large step from Pufendorf 's view of culture as the universal artificial correcting (or supplementing) of nature, to arguments that such artifice reflects the myths and poetry, as well as the climate and geography, of unique peoples and epochs. In the early modern accounts of human nature, universality and necessity reside in basic inclinations such as self-preservation. Higher constructions of culture that employ reason, which has no end of its own and is only an instrument to satisfy the inclinations, will hence tend to be more particularized. While Vico and Montesquieu offer some anticipations of the notion of culture as unique folk-spirit, it first appears fully articulated in Herder. Only at this time does it become meaningful to speak of culture as European, African, or Asian, and to say that one is a "member of a culture."

Herder's position also reflects, however, his absorption of Rousseau's thought, which is fundamentally an attack on earlier modern notions of nature. Whereas his predecessors stress the harshness and chaos of the natural state, Rousseau claims to find the standard of human wholeness and unity in that state. Accordingly, the idea of the best society must somehow recover or approximate that original wholeness. Hence culture does not attain a higher teleological perfection of our rational nature, and it does not conquer the destructive tendencies of nature; instead it preserves original, even prerational, wholeness. Herder's notion of cultures as natural organisms reflects Rousseau's thought, while transforming it. According to Herder, culture is not simply the overcoming of nature but is itself an expression of nature, a nature that exists in the form of prereflective and predeliberative wholes. Nature qua culture is not centrally defined by legislation and education--as conscious, rational, deliberative acts. The political suffers a demotion relative to the unconscious forces of poetry and myth, since these issue more immediately from the prerational or prediscursive wholeness identical with the character of a folk-spirit and its first expression, language.

Herder's views on the naturalness of culture are surely at odds with what Rousseau says about any form of existence on the social level, which, in Rousseau's view, must always bear the marks of the artificial and antinatural. And at the same time, Rousseau does not grant priority to folk-poetry and myth over political deliberation, especially that of the great founding legislators. He upholds political deliberation in spite of the importance he gives to particular folk traditions and customs in the framing of laws (cf. Considerations on the Government of Poland ). Central to Rousseau's notion of the necessarily antinatural character of social life is his stress on the need for a certain patriotic exclusiveness in the spirit of the healthy political community. It should be noted that Herder introduces the later modern emphasis on the diversity and fundamental equality of all cultures, as flowerings of native folk-spirits. This emphasis on diversity and equality gives an impetus to the replacement of both patriotic exclusiveness and universal rationality with the unrestricted openness of "pluralism"--a stance that tries to combine the advantages of exclusiveness and universalism. Accordingly, Herder regards the various cultures as parts of the progressive unfolding of a common humanity, while he attempts to endorse the incommensurability of differing cultural perspectives and the beauty of their contributions to the whole. Yet the idea of a "common humanity" is originally a Western perspective, and the notion of universal progress implies the superiority of that perspective. For a pluralist, the exclusiveness of non-Western societies is something necessarily defective.

Rousseau does not encounter this last difficulty because he regards a primary attachment to one's own society as the necessary foundation for citizenship at all times and places, and he does not subscribe to Enlightenment doctrines of the progress of the nations toward a common humanity. Cosmopolitan openness for Rousseau is therefore an attitude fitting only for philosophers, who, moreover, cannot be citizens in a genuine sense. Thus in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences Rousseau questions whether progress in civilization addresses the need of society for the moral and civic education of its members. Thereby he sets up the problem that Kant believes he, unlike Rousseau, can solve in a satisfactory way: to reconcile progress and Enlightenment with the moral perfection of the human species. No more than Rousseau does Kant turn to the quasi-natural folk-spirit as the key to this resolution. Kant's much greater sympathy for Rousseau than for Herder is unmistakable: while Rousseau contrasts the rational to the natural in a way that is unacceptable to Kant, Rousseau nonetheless maintains the fundamentally rational (if alienated) character of social life and its origins, unlike Herder. In sum, one can say that the notion of culture as folk-spirit is more remote from classical notions of citizenship than any of the following: the modern idea of civilization, Rousseau's critique of such civilization, and Kant's effort to reconcile modern civilization with Rousseau's critique.



Continues...

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Recalling Origins
1. The Tension in the Beautiful: On Culture and Civilization in Rousseau and German Philosophy
II. The Rift in Being
2. Speech, Imagination, Origins: Rousseau and the Political Animal
3. Freedom, Teleology, and Justification of Reason: On the Philosophical Importance of Kant's Rousseauian Turn
III. Logical Socratism
4. On Kant's Socratism
5. Kant on the Primacy and the Limits of Logic
IV. Poetic Wholeness
6. Moral Finality and the Unity of Homo Sapiens: On Teleology in Kant
7. Realizing Nature in the Self: Schelling on Art and Intellectual Intuition in the System of Transcendental Idealism
V. Being in Retreat
8. The Necessity of Error: Schelling's Autocritique and the History of Philosophy
9. Heidegger's Step behind the Greeks
Notes
Index