Rousseau, Kant, Goethe

Cassirer's two essays on Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe are large in everything but size. Read sympathetically, and with an eye to current interpretations of the eighteenth-century mind, they are immensely enlightening, both in what they say and what they imply. The Enlightenment has long been hounded by misreadings, and two of the most persistent have been the assertions that the philosopher were a narrow, tight group of French men of letters with few real intellectual connections abroad, and that their doctrinaire radicalism was in sharp conflict with other prominent currents of thought, including German Classicism. Ernst Cassirer's two essays confront these two misreadings directly. The first, "Kant and Rousseau," illuminates the cosmopolitan range of the Enlightenment by laying bare the connections between two very dissimilar figures. The second, "Goethe and the Kantian Philosophy," explores the expansion of the Enlightenment in another direction: Aufklaerung and Classicism appear not as antitheses but as complementary intellectual forces. These are the two explicit themes of this book: for Kant, Rousseau was the Newton of the moral world ; for Goethe, Kant was the supreme philosopher of form and experience.