FREEDOM AND LEGISLATION OF RATIONAL WILL. ROUSSEAU AND KANT

Rousseau gives an account of the development of law wherein the constitution of the state is derived from the droits de l'humanite principle. In other words, he seeks and finds the original act which encompasses equality and freedom and from which the two result, and which is simultaneously the constitutive act of the community. In his philosophical doctrine of the state, and in contrast with his ethics, he discovered a new field of human obligations in and of themselves, where the principle according to which they are judged is not the ethical sentiment, but reason, as that which realizes that the obligations are justified. This means that the typical anthropological foundation of equality demanded by Rousseau's ethics proves to be insufficient with regard to the highest principles of the state doctrine. Thus Rousseau's foundation of equality in the form of a peculiar philosophy of freedom, which stands in opposition to his ethics, is of a purely rational character, since only pure reason is the source of cognition regarding conditions that justify coercive power over people, and it is, in turn, clearly opposed to the source of knowledge of good and evil, namely sensitivity and sentiments. This also clarifies Rousseau's view that ethical freedom is possible solely within the state and that only a citizen of the state can have freedom. But belief in the possibility of freedom within the state does not originate from some sort of adoration of the state: it results from his non-abandonment of the ethics of sentimentality, with simultaneous recognition of the validity of the freedom concept gained in the sphere of the legislative state. In Kant's understanding, the basic goal of Rousseau's political thought was to establish and ensure inalienable natural rights of individuums, which are symbolized in the substance of the general will. One may therefore conclude that they both tried to establish a new metaphysics of law, but this does not mean that Rousseau can be considered a direct predecessor of Kant's metaphysics of ethics and his critique of practical reason.