Rousseau And Kant's Notes

General will comes with unified purpose.

It’s very hard to convince these individuals of a general will.

So, he turns to the legislator.

He goes back to the notion of a law giver. Like sovereigns and founders.

Set up the institutions so that we’re educated to see the general will.

We have to have the general will but also the particular wills.

(If the law giver is something like Machiavelli’s prince)

Virtu is to recognize opportunities.

Hobbes doesn’t believe in virtu or fortuna.

Rousseau wants us to look at the past rationally.

Machiavelli thinks that you can acquire all knowledge from the past. Past oriented. But now with Rousseau, you get a new mindset of the past. It changes the ethos of the western world.

The past is going to be looked at as a collective histories.

Histories is made up discreet events. Unique events. Events that can’t be duplicated.

We see our history as progress.

Liberate the yolk of the past because we’re technically part of the past in the future. We should surpass the ancients and not that they are better than us. How can the beginning be so great. The beginning is never so great. The future won’t be a repetition of the past. It’ll be something different and better.

Page 41, introduction to Kent.

I don’t care how you envision the freedom of will because the actions come from will are embodied in the material will. The world of phenomenon. The cause and effect. These actions are determined by natural will. We can understand them.

Freely will actions.

Since we can look at them from natural laws maybe we can find some regular pattern to them. If you look at large enough scale, all of human history, you can find that it is regulated through a natural law, the natural progression.

Progress is an idea.

We’re looking for a development for human capacity. Read history as a progression. Let’s see if humans develop in the past. So we can see that we’re the product of a long development.

It will be easier to find human development if we’re conscious of it. Nature is pushing us in a certain direction. We’re unconscious of that.

Other animals are instinctual therefore easier to study. We have free will and we don’t follow prearrange plans so how are we going to find order to it.

We might have surpassed the people in the past and we didn’t even know it.

The only way out for the philosopher is to understand history and pushed forward by nature that moves us forward and develops us.

To get away from supernatural. Just focus on the natural part. Look at nature only.

First proposition (theory of progress):

- Everything has an end

- Determined by nature

- All things in nature tend towards the end

- Most important

Second proposition

- uniquely our capacity requires society and human interaction

- we can’t be true human beings without other human beings

- the problem with human beings is that no one individuals can develop wholly outside of the society or inside the society because it takes generations to change

- we have to generational change

- we don’t know what human beings are capable of

- we know what individuals are capable of at a certain time

So far what’s going can contribute to the nature’s plan. All we know is that human beings are developing their natural capacities.

It’s weird that it’s going behind our backs because we’re rational animals and we can choose.

What Kant is getting at is that there’s a history built around nature going behind our backs.