Reflections of an Aryan woman, 16

But Kant—so independent and so strong in the field of criticism of knowledge—had a moral teacher, apart from the Christian teaching of his family: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose influence was still being felt throughout Europe at that time.

I can hardly imagine two men more different from each other than Rousseau, the perpetual wanderer, whose life was somewhat disordered, to say the least, and the meticulous Herr Professor Immanuel Kant, whose days and years were all alike, passing according to a rigorous schedule where there was not the slightest room for the unexpected or the whimsical.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau never misses an opportunity in his works to exalt ‘reason’ as well as ‘virtue’. But he seems to have had no rules of conduct other than his fantasy, or his impulses, with the result that the story of his life gives an impression of inconsistency, not to say imbalance. A poet rather than a thinker, he dreamed his existence; he did not live it—and especially not according to fixed principles.

The love he professed, whenever he could—on paper—for children, didn’t prevent him from putting his five children, one after the other, in the Assistance Publique on the pretext that the woman who had given them to him, Thérèse Levasseur, would have been incapable of bringing them up in the spirit he would have liked. And this abandonment, repeated five times, didn’t prevent him from writing a book about the education of children, and—what is worse—didn’t prevent the public from taking him seriously! He was taken seriously because, while believing himself to be highly original, he reflected the trends of his time, above all the revolt of the individual against Tradition in the name of ‘reason’.

It is not surprising that the enemy spirits of the visible traditional authorities, that is to say of kings and the clergy, should have chosen him enthusiastically as their guide, and placed the French Revolution, which they were organising, under his sign. It seems, at first sight, less natural that Kant should have been so strongly influenced by him.

But Kant was a man of his time, a time when Rousseau had seduced the European intelligentsia, partly by his poetic prose and paradoxes, partly by certain clichés, which come up everywhere in his work: the words ‘reason’, ‘conscience’ and ‘virtue’. It was these clichés that gave Kant’s limited imagination the opportunity for all the flight of which he was capable, and that gave the German philosopher the form of his morality.

The content of this morality—as indeed that of Rousseau himself and all the ‘philosophers’ of the 18th century and, before them, that of Descartes, the true spiritual father of the French Revolution—is drawn from the old foundation of Christian ethics, centred on the dogma of the ‘dignity’ of man, the only being created ‘in the image of God’, out of respect for this privileged being [red by Editor].

In other words, with meticulous honesty and quite Prussian application and perseverance, Kant tried to establish as a system the common humanitarian morality in Europe, because of Christian morality, which Rousseau had glorified in sentimental effusions: that morality which Nietzsche was one day to have the honour of demolishing with his pen, and which we were later destined to negate, by action.

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Editor’s note: By ‘later’ she probably meant during the Third Reich. Unlike the Nazis, American white nationalists continue to subscribe to Christian ethics, including atheists. Incidentally, why ‘Rousseau’s babble was utter nonsense’, as Revilo Oliver wrote, can be seen: here.

Does my audience begin to tell the difference between a common white nationalist and a priestess (or priest) of the 14 words?