Political Ideas in the Romantic Age by Berlin Isaiah Hardy Henry Galston William Cherniss Joshua L

Author:Berlin, Isaiah, Hardy, Henry, Galston, William, Cherniss, Joshua L.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

Liberty [2]

On the one hand we must have absolute liberty: unless man does what he does absolutely freely, it is not he who is acting; there is no action, only mechanical behaviour – the movement of bodies in space as conceived by materialists like La Mettrie – and therefore no praise or blame, no duties, no rights, no morality. On the other hand, there must be rules – the true way of life, the uniquely true answer to each problem as it arises, for there is only one true answer to any problem, and many that are false; and what is true – that is, right – we must do, for that is what duty, that is to say morality, means. The ancient conflict is to be resolved by breeding a race of men who will choose absolutely freely only that which is absolutely right. If there were saints, they would not even be tempted by what is wrong; there would be no conflict, no agony, no choice. But, being human, we must be faced with alternatives and be entitled to praise for our virtue, that is for choosing what is right, choosing it freely, in other words without compulsion either on the part of other human beings or on the part of irresistible natural forces. We must have both freedom and the chains of duty: not chains chosen by others for us – which the poets in the past have too often strewn with flowers, so concealing their true nature – but chains freely chosen by ourselves, and freely imposed by ourselves on ourselves, not imposed upon us from outside. For then we are at once bound and free, we retain unimpaired the spontaneity and fullness of human nature, but instead of sacrificing it on the altar of some jealous divinity exacting obedience from outside, we ourselves, rationally and freely, mould our own nature to the ends which we perceive to be alone the right ends for men. It is as if a man wished to go to prison because he felt at his best there: then he would be at once in jail and free – this is the solution.

Rousseau both enunciates this doctrine and assumes it in his writings of the last decade of his life. He writes with the peculiar quality of a highly consistent monomaniac, possessed by what he regards as a unique discovery – the key which opens all the doors which others before him had vainly tried to open by force or skill, and at times merely passed by. He belongs to that special category of inspired fanatics who have superimposed upon a disordered, imaginative, violently impressionable nature the straitjacket of a rigid logical apparatus, in terms of which they pretend to formulate arguments of a deceptively clear, systematic and rational kind. He is a madman with a system, which set on fire many cool and sober intellects, by clothing his most violent and incendiary feelings in lucidly deductive arguments, apparently deriving his most startling and visionary conclusions by rational methods from commonly accepted truths.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.