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He defined the Enlightenment as freedom and independence of thought, and took as his motto and counsel Sapere aude— “Dare to know.” He regretted that intellectual liberation was so retarded by the conservatism of the majority.
Every individual (Kant argues) has a conscience, a sense of duty, a consciousness of a commanding moral law. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe … : the starry heavens above, and the moral law within.”
Without free will personality is meaningless; if personality is meaningless, so is life; and if life is meaningless, so is the universe.
Kant recognizes the apparently inescapable logic of determinism; and how can a free choice intervene in an objective world which (he confesses) is apparently governed by mechanical laws?
Behind the mechanisms of the phenomenal world of space and of ideas in time there may be freedom in the spaceless and timeless noumenal world of ultimate outer or inner reality. Our actions and ideas are determined once they enter the world of perceivable physical or mental events; they may still be free in their origin in the unperceivable soul; “in this way freedom and nature … can exist together.”
Kant inverted the usual procedure: instead of deriving the moral sense and code from God (as the theologians had done), he deduced God from the moral sense.
The first Critique had tried to bring all ideas under the a priori universal categories; the second had sought to bring all ethical concepts under a universal a priori moral sense; the third undertook to find a priori principles for our aesthetic judgments—of order, beauty, or sublimity in nature or art.
if we abandon all notion of design in nature we take all moral meaning out of life; life becomes a silly succession of painful births and agonizing deaths, in which, for the individual, the nation, and the race, nothing is certain except defeat. We must believe in some divine design if only to maintain our sanity.
How did the “radical evil in human nature” begin? Not through “original sin”; “surely of all the explanations of the spread and propagation of this evil through all members and generations of our race, the most inept is that which describes it as descending to us as an inheritance from our first parents.”
Moral good is also innate, as evidenced by the universal moral sense; but it is at first only a need, which must be developed by moral instruction and arduous discipline. The best religion is not one that excels in the careful observance of ritual worship but rather one that most influences men toward a moral life.
When a church becomes an institution for compelling belief or worship; when it assumes to itself the sole right to interpret Scripture and define morality; when it forms a priesthood claiming exclusive approaches to God and divine grace; when it makes its worship a magic ritual possessing miraculous powers; when it becomes an arm of the government and an agent of intellectual tyranny;
He distrusted the wild impulses of unchained men,84 and feared universal suffrage as the empowerment of unlettered majorities over progressive minorities and nonconforming individuals.
He was generous, but he was severe in his judgments, and lacked that sense of humor which should save philosophy from taking itself too seriously. His moral sense rose at times to an ethical pedantry that held all pleasures suspect until they had proved themselves virtuous.
God is not a substance existing outside me, but merely a moral relation within me. … The categorical imperative does not assume a substance issuing its commands from on high, conceived therefore as outside me, but is a commandment or a prohibition of my own reason.
the Kantian philosophy, to which Christianity clung so long, in Germany and later in England, as the last, best hope of theism, ended in a bleak conception of God as a useful fiction developed by the human mind to explain the apparent absoluteness of moral commands.
Idealists rejoiced that Kant had made materialism logically impossible by showing mind to be the only reality directly known to us. Mystics were happy that Kant had restricted science to phenomena, had barred it from the noumenal and really real world, and had left this shady realm (whose existence he secretly denied) as the private park of theologians and philosophers.
Obscurity became a fashion in German writing, a coat of arms attesting membership in the ancient order of web weavers.
he offered to philosophy and psychology the most painstaking analysis of the knowledge process that history has ever known.
Goethe was especially averse to the Christian emphasis on sin and contrition;54 he preferred to sin without remorse.
Now the lawlessness of Götz and the tears of Werther seemed to the maturing Goethe signs of an unbalanced mind; “romanticism is a disease,” he said; “classicism is health.”
Goethe saw only the “Apollonian” side of Greek civilization and art—the exaltation of form and restraint; he now almost ignored that “Dionysian” ecstasy which so warmly colored Greek character, religion, and life, and which, in Goethe himself, had spoken through his “daimon” and his loves.
developments confirmed in Goethe the natural turn of the maturing mind from a zest for liberty to a love of order.
He had no enthusiasm for democracy; if ever such a system should actually be practiced it would be the sovereignty of simplicity, ignorance, superstition, and barbarity.
Schiller was just emerging from Sturm und Drang; he was the voice of feeling, sentiment, freedom, romance; Goethe, wooing Greece, was all for reason, restraint, order, and the classic style.
Mephistopheles (who is not Satan but only Satan’s philosopher) is the devil of denial and doubt, to whom all aspiration is nonsense, all beauty a skeleton wearing skin.
Faust does not sell his soul unconditionally; he agrees to go to hell only if Mephistopheles shows him a pleasure so durably satisfying that he will be glad to stay with it forever:
There are happy moments in history behind the drama of tragedy, and beneath the notice of Historians.
“Many people resist acknowledging reality, only because they would collapse if they accepted it.”
Goethe recognized the need many souls have for supernatural support, but he felt no such need until his final years. “He has religion [enough] who has art or science; who has not art or science needs religion.”
“Resolutely pagan” in religion and morals, he had no sense of sin, felt no need of a god dying to atone for him,58 and resented all talk of the cross. He wrote to Lavater, August 9, 1782: “I am no anti-Christian, no un-Christian, but very decidedly a non-Christian. … You accept the Gospel, as it stands, as divine truth. Well, no audible voice from heaven would convince me that a woman bears a child without a man, and that a dead man arises from the grave.
Goethe thought that “the Christian religion is an abortive political revolution that turned moral.”
He admired Luther, and praised the Reformation for breaking the shackles of tradition, but he regretted its relapse into dogma.65 He suspected that Protestantism would suffer for lack of inspiring, habit-forming ceremonies,
As he matured through political office he perceived that human life is a co-operative process; that the individual survives by mutual aid, and that self-seeking actions, though still the basic force, must be limited by the needs of the group.
Reverence libraries as the heritage left by these men. “Contemplating a library, one feels as though in the presence of vast capital silently yielding incalculable interest.”
intellect without character is far worse than character without intellect; “anything that liberates the mind without giving us dominion over ourselves is pernicious.”
Abuses should be reformed, but without violence or precipitancy; revolutions cost more than they are worth, and usually end where they began.
no revolution is the fault of the people, but always the fault of the government.”
He distrusted democracy, for “nothing is worse than active ignorance”;87 and “it is unthinkable that wisdom should ever be popular.”
He opposed freedom of the press on the ground that it subjected society and government to perpetual disturbance by immature and irresponsible writers.
“Viewed from the heights of reason, all life looks like some malignant disease, and the world like a madhouse.”
It was no disaster for Germany that it was not an expanding empire like Britain’s, absorbed in conquest and trade; nor a centralized monarchy like the French, falling apart through the failure of government; nor a despotism like Russia’s, gorging itself with land or stupefying itself with holy water.
Boswell, the most assiduous fornicator in Europe,
whereas in France the nobles were forbidden, in England they were permitted, to engage in commerce or industry; and wealth rooted in land grew through investment in business enterprise;
Since universal education was frowned upon by conservatives as leading to a surplus of scholars and a dearth of manual laborers, very few Englishmen in the eighteenth century saw any evil in children going to work instead of to school.
A few men were delicate enough to condemn such child labor; however, it diminished not because men became more humane but because machines became more complex.
Electorally, England was divided into forty counties (rural districts) and 203 boroughs (townships). Excluded from the franchise were women, paupers, convicted criminals, Roman Catholics, Quakers, Jews, agnostics, and others who could not swear allegiance to the authority and doctrines of the Church of England.
In the counties only those Protestant landowners who paid forty shillings annual tax were entitled to vote for Parliament; these totaled about 160,000. As voting was public, very few voters dared support any candidate other than the one nominated by the principal landlords of the county; hence relatively few voters bothered to vote, and many elections were decided by arrangement among the leaders without any balloting at all.
Even when the franchise was almost universal the election was usually determined by bribery, by violence, or by keeping a refractory voter too intoxicated to vote.
the House of Commons in 1761. Scotland sent forty-five, the counties of England and Wales ninety-four, the boroughs 415, the two universities two each. The House of Lords then contained 224 peers, temporal or spiritual.
The division of members into Tories or Whigs had by 1761 lost nearly all significance; the real division was between supporters and opponents of the current “government,” or ministry, or of the king.
