“What Kant prized in Rousseau,” writes historian Ernst Cassirer, “was the fact that he had distinguished more clearly than others between the mask that man wears [in commercial society] and his actual visage.”26 Kant, of course, realized that Rousseau’s picture of the noble savage was an ideal construct: “This wish for a return to an age of simplicity and innocence,” Kant concluded, “is futile.” We are what we are, as modern human beings.
