ABSTRACT
Kant considered Rousseau to be a genius, and to ‘follow after’ a genius meant to abstract a rule from the genius’s writing and to test one’s own talent against it. I show how Kant went about this. First, I show that the rule Kant abstracted from Rousseau’s writing was the rule of ‘scandal’ or of the ‘labyrinth.’ This rule means that the human condition is such that humans are attracted to that which repels them and repelled by that which attracts them in ways that easily lead to deeper and deeper entanglements as one struggles for freedom. One has to make the reader aware of the scandal by invoking it in the text. Kant does this in both ‘Prefaces’ to the Critique of Pure Reason, in which he both echoes and critiques arguments made in Rousseau’s famous ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.’
