Kant, Rousseau and enlightenment

[Institution101]

Hey
This is my first philosophical essay (even though I've been studying philosophy alone for some time). Can you give feedback?

Is Rousseau a figure of the enlightenment according to Kant’s definition? In his essay What is Enlightenment, Immanuel writes “Have courage to use your own mind! That is the motto of enlightenment”. To think without any outside guidance is the most important achievement this epoch has permitted us –people from all nations, as a consequence of the gradually increasing freedom that is taking over, are thinking for themselves rather than using their reason to fulfill other people’s goals. Formerly, other people thought for them, and even when they did it themselves, he writes, “these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them” as to argue that, to that day, people couldn’t think outside of a prescribed path that has been determined by outside forces. Laws rendered some ideas illegal, the clearest example for that being heresy and Lèse-majesté crimes. Nevertheless, Kant writes, “the public use of one's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind.”. There is no enlightenment nor free thinking without the complete, unrestrained freedom to reason.
However, Rousseau would argue, it is a paradox to affirm that we need freedom to reason for ourselves, as reason and freedom can’t coexist. To think clearly we must have abstract thoughts – it is impossible to reason without them. Reason requires logic to derive a conclusion based on one or more premises, and there is no non-abstract (or physical) counterpart to that derivation. For example, concluding that if I drop something it will fall requires two abstract ideas – a premise that things fall and, more importantly, an abstract idea of a connection between that idea and the object I dropped. There is no physical counterpart to a conclusion, so we have to first be able to abstract in order to conclude and reason. And, Rousseau argues “beings perfectly abstract are perceivable in the same manner, or are only conceivable by the assistance of speech” – abstractions are only possible with speech, as he illustrates with the example of a triangle: there is no way to have an abstract idea of a triangle without its verbal description, because if we imagine a triangle it is no longer a general, abstract triangle but one specifically. Being sure that language is necessary to abstract, and therefore, reason; what is the condition for language to exist?
Any communicational model requires the existence of a sender and a receiver of a said message encoded in a common code – in our case, a language. So, two people must be together in order to speak – that is a somewhat intuitive idea. So we must agree that, when people were savages, as there was no reason to associate with each other because of the abundance of resources according to Rousseau, there was no room to develop a language – he affirms that the creation of language requires time, which must be spent with the same person so they understand each other (as communication is the main point of language, and the only a primitive person would need, there was no other reason for a language than intelligibility). As he writes, at that time “the same persons scarcely met twice in their whole lives”. Therefore, there can be no complex language among savages – only maybe the “cry of nature” Rousseau talks about. So a language can only develop, as he argues, when societies appear from mutual need and people start seeing each other more often. Thus, society is necessary for language and, consequently, reason.
Our original question was: is Rousseau a figure of the enlightenment according Kant’s definition? Well, enlightenment to Immanuel is to think for ourselves, a feat that requires freedom. But reason, as Rousseau argues, can only exist in a society – and as in a society we are constantly comparing ourselves to each other, falsifying ourselves and changing our actions in order to achieve our peer’s approval and social superiority, hence we are not free – our desire to be accepted and superior among our group are the leading-strings Kant missed. We can’t be free in a society, and we can’t reason without the existence of one. So not only Rousseau is not a figure of the enlightenment but no one can be: it is a contradiction to be free and reason at the same time. Unfortunately, Kant’s definition of enlightenment is problematic, and no thinker will ever fit its terms nor think without any constrain.

[Philodim]

"For long before man began methodically to question Nature, he interrogated his own isolated Reason, already practiced, in a measure by common experience ; because Reason is always present, while the laws of Nature generally require to be laboriously sought out. And so metaphysics floated to the surface like foam, and like foam, too, no sooner was it gathered up than it dissolved, while another mass of it appeared upon the scene which some were always found eager to grasp ; while others, instead of seeking to penetrate the cause of the phenomenon in question, thought themselves wise in laughing at the futile exertions of the former".