The Rousseauian Mind

Eve Grace, Christopher Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429665226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is a major figure in Western Philosophy and is one of the most widely read and studied political philosophers of all time. His writings range from abstract works such as On the Social Contract to literary masterpieces such as The Reveries of the Solitary Walker as well as immensely popular novels and operas.

The Rousseauian Mind provides a comprehensive survey of his work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising over forty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook covers:

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• The predecessors and contemporaries to Rousseau's work

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• The major texts of the 'system'

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• Autobiographical texts including Confessions, Reveries of the Solitary Walker and Dialogues

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• Rousseau's political science

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• The successors to Rousseau's work

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• Rousseau applied today.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, Rousseau's work is central to the study of political philosophy, the Enlightenment, French studies, the history of philosophy and political theory.

Part I

Predecessors and contemporaries

1
Rousseau’s Socratic ‘sentimentalism’

Eve Grace

In his last word on his own philosophy in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau distinguishes himself sharply from ‘modern philosophers,’ who ‘hardly resembled the ancient ones’ (R, 21). But to what degree and in what sense Rousseau returns to ancient philosophy, if at all, remains an open question.

Rousseau does declare war upon modern philosophy in the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts under the banner of ancient virtue. He presents his praise of the ancients there, however, as a strictly prudential or political matter: if he insists that the entire project of producing material and moral progress through widespread enlightenment is actually corrupting and self-contradictory, it is in order to make the case that it destroys the civic virtue needed for the long-term welfare of societies (FD, 15; PN, 192–195). If he there invokes Socrates – the very epitome, not of republican virtue, but of the philosophic life – it is apparently to make the case that philosophy is no better than ignorance, and indeed far worse than ignorance, for it comes at the cost of innumerable errors and evils. The First Discourse ends with the declaration that ‘true philosophy’ is within everyone’s reach, and bids us only ‘return into oneself and listen to the voice of one’s conscience in the silence of the passions’ (FD, 22). In order truly to philosophize, then, one need only be morally sincere; that is, one can dispense with philosophy altogether.

Unlike the modern philosophers whom Rousseau excoriates, Socrates – who has come down to posterity with the claim that he ‘knows that he knows nothing’ – suffers from no arrogant illusions about the worth of our ‘sterile speculations’; if the man who so single-mindedly pursued knowledge ended his quest empty-handed, what are our prospects? ‘This reflection alone should rebuff, from the outset, any man who would seriously seek to educate himself by the study of Philosophy’ (FD, 13). The Socratic precept which Rousseau constantly bids us follow is ‘Know thyself’ (FD, 4; SD, 12; ML, 183; cf. Phaedrus 229e-230a). Following this precept means relentlessly seeking clarity about our own good, which implies understanding the limits of our own reason. Rousseau states that this above all distinguishes him from his ‘more learned’ contemporaries: he incessantly sought ‘to know the nature and destination of my being in a more interested and careful manner than I have found any other man seek to do’ – he sought his own good more carefully, in other words, than even a Socrates himself (R, 18; cf. E, 325; SD, 27; cf. e.g. Gorgias 467c-468b; Republic 344d-345b, 347d). In the midst of the firestorm he caused by speaking ‘ill of the Sciences,’ he remarked: ‘It cost Socrates his life to say precisely the same things I am saying’ (Obs, 52; FR, 111**). Rousseau, then, clearly points to a kinship with Socrates, and it is a resemblance that a number of his contemporaries were not slow to trace (Trousson 1967: 67–103).

Yet to what degree is Rousseau ‘Socratic’? The new Orpheus, the pied piper of feeling, bids us give credence to our sentiments as the only sure source of guidance, whereas for Socrates, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ (Apology 38a). In the First Discourse, the learned Rousseau denigrates all the achievements of human learning, philosophy, the arts, and the sciences; he ventures to prefer barbarism to civilization, and the ‘automaton of the Valais’ who vegetates through life to a philosopher who would seek to live it wide awake; in the Second Discourse, he sets out to demonstrate that the progress of reason, and hence the coming into being of humanity, is something that a thoughtful person would be compelled upon reflection to lament (SD, 20; FD, 12–13, 19–21; LV, 111). He denounces what is often held to be our distinctive faculty in terms so uncompromising as to lead him ‘almost’ to declare that the ‘man who meditates is a depraved animal’ (SD, 23). Moreover, he presents the peak of his own activity as losing himself in an imaginary empyrean; he replaces the wakefulness of philosophic contemplation by ‘reverie,’ not to say a kind of stupor hostile to thought (LMA, 579; R, 61–62, 45–47, 11–12). Rousseau, in short, flatly declares that Socrates is wrong: not the examined life, but the unexamined one is the only one worth living.

In a letter to that paradigm of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau declares that philosophy needs to think through the limitations of what he calls a ‘proof of demonstration,’ which in fact leads to nothing more than ‘probabilities’; instead, philosophy should take its bearings from what he calls a ‘proof of sentiment’ (LV, 117–118). Against what has been called Socrates’s ‘hypertrophy of the logical faculty,’ Rousseau insists first and last on sentiment, on feeling: ‘does one dare to take the side of instinct against reason? That is precisely what I ask’ (Nietzsche 1976: 475; FR, 126). When, despite this seemingly insurmountable difference, Rousseau speaks in unison with Socrates, he does so because Socrates – ‘first’ among ‘wise men’ – calls into question the authority of reason (FD, 9–10, 21). For Socrates’s matchless dedication to the task of submitting all claims to the relentless scrutiny of reason led him, as Rousseau led his Savoyard vicar, to recognize that reason is unable finally to pronounce on any matter. Reason therefore must recuse itself in favour of sentiment, or the ‘science of simple souls’ (FD, 22; E, 427–429).

Now, Rousseau tells us that the First Discourse is only a corollary of his fundamental principles, which he spells out ‘with the greatest boldness’ in the Second Discourse (C, 341).

The question of the First Discourse, as he states it, was whether intellectual progress has tended to purify or corrupt morals. The key issue regarding the progress of science in that work, as Rousseau again makes clear in his Final Reply, is not the goodness of science per se, but its effects on popular mores (Obs, 37–38; PN, 194–195). There is an historical rule as inflexible as the law of gravity by which the moon governs the tides, Rousseau declares, according to which the development of intellectual sophistication coincides with the corrosion of civic morals and the loss of political liberty. For the social conditions required for the pursuit of learning, and what science and philosophy teach, is either useless for moral behaviour, or pernicious to it. Chief among the difficulties to which Rousseau points is that, although the scientific approach based on hypothetical materialism claims in principle that it cannot finally pronounce on the question of the fundamental order of nature, the modern philosophers who adopt it take for granted in practice the truth of atheistic materialism, spawning the ‘dangerous dreams’ of a Hobbes who teaches that men are wolves who can ‘devour one another with a clear conscience’ (FD, 20–21). This relentless reductionism of human beings, as it gains a public hearing, saps morality by transforming it into a form of utilitarian calculation for the sake of one’s own power, pleasure, and preservation, and the common good into a battle between factions (E, 479*; GM, 79; D, 241–242; PN, 193).

The modern philosophers Rousseau attacks secretly mock moral virtue and doubt that love of virtue actually exists (FD, 6–7, 14). Their ‘interior doctrine,’ the real morality which careful attention shows follows from their teachings, is a ‘cruel’ one, good ‘only for attack’ in an unrelenting war of interests (R, 26; D, 95, 239; Obs 45*; C, 393). Rousseau therefore rips off the deceptive moral drapery with which modern philosophers cover over the real import of their teachings. Yet, in contrast, Rousseau drapes Socrates with a veil of decency: he is ‘noble’ not because of the exemplary rigor and clarity of his thought, but because he left behind him ‘no other precept than the example and memory of his virtue’ (FD, 10). Rousseau thus makes Socrates a greater friend of moral virtue than Rousseau thinks he actually is. For he elsewhere directly states that, were it not for the manner of Socrates’s death, there would have been nothing to distinguish him from any other sophist (Hero, 10).

Rousseau must beautify the portrait of Socrates presented in Plato’s Apology: in his defence speech against the charge that he commits an injury to the public, Socrates himself very clearly reveals the rift between virtue and reasoning, between public opinion and philosophy. In the latter part of his speech, Socrates famously characterizes himself as a ‘gadfly,’ a moral preacher who exhorts everyone to care for virtue above money, reputation, and even life itself. Yet the rest of the Apology strikingly calls into question Socrates’s noble and extravagant claims for virtue as the one thing needful for happiness (Apology 28b-30d). For in the first part of his speech, Socrates does not conclude, as is commonly believed, that he ‘knows nothing,’ but that he ‘knows nothing noble and good’ (Apology 21d; FD, 10). Socrates presents virtue – that which is both noble and good – as central to his thought, but also as an irresolvable problem.

Socrates takes very seriously the phenomenon of love of what is noble or beautiful, which longs for a resplendent happiness through selfless devotion, as does Rousseau (e.g. Republic 357a-362d). The greatest sign that the self we love cannot so simply be understood in materialist terms is that it can seek to cast aside pleasure and even life for something that is clearly not those things. Human beings are observably moved to admire qualities of character that seem to have little to do with utility; for what is ‘going to one’s death for one’s interest’ (E, 452)? The reductionist materialism Rousseau ascribes to modern philosophy fails to explain a powerful part of human nature, love of the beautiful, which ‘[w]hatever the philosophers may say of it,’ is a sentiment ‘as natural to the human heart as the love of self … and serves as principle to [the] conscience’ (A, 267; ML, 190).

Rousseau too, however, insists just as forcefully on the degree to which human beings seek their own good or are moved by self-love; he therefore does not think that the demands of the conscience can be defended solely on the basis of nature (e.g. E, 455, 479–482; SC, 222–223; GM, 79). Reason shows us again and again that we are divided between the love of the beautiful, which inspires us to forget ourselves, and a longing for happiness, with no clear answer as to how what is noble is also good. Even his just and pious Savoyard vicar, who speaks with such fervour about the beauty and power of our moral sentiments, insists on the primacy of our own happiness. ‘Virtue, they say, is love of order. But can and should this love win out in me over that of my own wellbeing? Let them give me a clear and sufficient reason for preferring it’ (E, 455; J, 295). Respect for justice often demands that we overcome ourselves, that we respect the claims of equality, that we submit our own interest to the demands of right. These demands come with costs, often painful, even unendurable costs and make it impossible to believe that an easy harmony exists between a duty to justice and our own happiness (e.g. E, 389*; GM, 78–80; SC, 150–151; R, 34). For Rousseau, the conflicts that erupt between our deepest sense of moral obligation and our dearest personal affections and interests in reality force the issue of where our truest obligation, and our welfare, truly lies. In Rousseau’s considered view, then, no matter how clearly we might hear the conscience, we have no choice but to ascertain by what right it commands us (cf. e.g. Republic 354c). Rousseau, no less insistently than Socrates, puts the problem of virtue at the very centre of his thought.

Socrates’s cross-examinations show that people are entirely unable to explain what they long for, or to defend the most fundamental articles of their moral beliefs. To follow Socrates in the Platonic dialogues in an attempt to gain knowledge about virtue is to end in aporia and even scepticism. Although Socrates – unlike Rousseau’s modern contemporaries – treats the human concern for virtue most seriously, he also imperils it by making love of virtue depend on our capacity rationally to defend it, and then showing how difficult that is to do. For as we have seen, reasoning drives an ever-deeper wedge of doubt between justice and happiness. Unrelenting Socratic analysis of opinion would lead precisely to the ‘pyrrhonism’ that Rousseau so forcefully decries as destructive of morals (FD, 6; cf. Cleitophon 410e). There is therefore a fundamental antagonism between Socratic philosophy and moral hopes that are critical to love of virtue. Rousseau seems to think that Socrates made that antagonism much too clear; he was ‘too much of an Enlightener’ (Orwin 1998: 180).

In the First Discourse, then, Rousseau reflects only one face of Socrates’s self-presentation and hides the other; he presents Socrates as the gadfly, and thus loudly takes the side of Athens and of Socrates’s accusers on behalf of the many decent human beings who find the very question ‘why be just?’ objectionable. For the situation Rousseau faces is radically different from that of Socrates. A public opinion on behalf of enlightenment is gradually being established, and the triumph of rationalism seems imminent (D, 238–239). Materialistic philosophy is waging a battle to the death with Christianity: the task in Rousseau’s view, therefore, is now to save the ‘trunk,’ that is, the moral core, of Christian doctrine, at the expense of its theological ‘branches’ (E, 477; B, 47; LM, 227). Modern philosophers, who have a naïve faith in the power of rationalism and in the harmony between intellectual and moral progress, do not even see the necessity of this task (PN, 193). Thus, Rousseau defends a ‘science of simple souls,’ grounded upon innate moral sentiments which, as such, are and always will be impervious to the debunking of either ancient or modern reductionism.

The need to protect moral and civic virtue from rationalism is so critical that Rousseau would have no choice but to present reasoning as not only baneful but futile in the First Discourse, even if he did not think it were. In that work, therefore, Rousseau seeks to puncture our aspirations to know, or rather to be those who know. Despite the arresting tribute to the grandeur of the pursuit of knowledge with which Rousseau begins this work, he seeks in it to show that ‘our sciences’ are as ‘vain in the object they have in view’ as they are ‘dangerous in the effects they produce’ (FD, 13).

In other works, however, Rousseau persists in a thoroughgoing critique of the pursuit of knowledge. In his view, we remain in a position of almost invincible ignorance with regard to the metaphysical questions that philosophy seeks to answer. Not only are our senses insufficient and prone to error in furnishing material to our reason, but seemingly insurmountable difficulties present themselves against every position (ML, 182–187; FD, 13; E, 412–414, 427–428; R, 22). ‘What do we see, what do we know, what exists? We are only running after shadows that escape us. Some slight spectres, some vain phantoms flit before our eyes and we believe we are seeing the eternal chain of beings’ (ML, 189). The pursuit of ‘science itself,’ that is, the attempt to know things by their ‘nature’ rather than ‘by relations connected with [our] interest,’ is a ‘bottomless sea … without shores, full of reefs. You will never get away.’ Therefore, to engage in the accumulation of knowledge without first rooting it in a clear conception of what is good for human beings is to end up like a child gathering shells on the shore who, ‘overwhelmed by their multitude and not knowing anymore which to choose … ends by throwing them all away and returning empty-handed’ (E, 316, 310–311; FD, 13).^1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Abbreviations in references
• Introduction
• Part I Predecessors and contemporaries
• Part II The major texts of the ‘system’
• Part III Autobiographical texts
• Part IV Nature, reason, and society
• Part V Squaring the circle: Rousseau’s political science
• Part VI In conversation with successors
• Part VII Rousseau applied today
• Index