Page 11 - GALIET FREEDOM: Kant and Rousseau IV

mind. Kant and Rousseau, in introducing new ideologies, are seen as the liberators who launch humankind into the possibilities of a new world, a new age.
To better understand Rousseau’s and Kant’s revolutionary writings in relation to freedom, it is important to mention that for Rousseau freedom not only belongs, but it is attainable in the world of “phenomena” (“mundo sensible” – physical world – what we experience) while for Kant freedom is only possible and it can only exist in the world of “noumena” (“mundo intelligible” – intelligible world - what we think – moral world). We know that for Rousseau, in his “Discourse on Inequality,” true freedom can only be found in the pre-social, natural state of man: “nature which never lies (for) everything which comes from her will be true” (Rousseau: 79).
According to Rousseau, natural man, before the institution of property and civil organization, is a true, solitary and uncomplicated wild creature who, because of his inherent self- governing nature, has no need for political regulation. Man acts according to his free will (“the beast chooses and rejects by instinct; man by an act of free will” [Rousseau: 32]), he lives in complete anarchy and he is his own master and sovereign. Rousseau contrasts this healthy and natural state of freedom with the calamity and disease posed by civilization resulting
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