SELF-TORTURING SOPHIST, APOSTLE OF AFFLICTION

This is the beginning of my series on l’enfant terrible Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1712-1778). The title of this entry is taken from Byron’s Childe Harold. Here is a fuller quote:

The self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau,

The apostle of affliction, he who threw

Enchantment over passion, and from woe

Wrung overwhelming eloquence.

***

In life he was a rather despicable man, a conman, a fraud, a dirty rotten scoundrel, although unlike Michael Caine’s sane and giftless character, a mad one and a genius. In his infamous Confessions he proudly flaunts his sins, most probably grossly exaggerated by him anyway, such as stealing a ribbon from his employer and falsely accusing a certain maid with whom he was in love of giving it to him. After this sad ugliness, he took himself a wealthy mistress, off whom he was now living in a ménage à trois, with another man. And all this under the guise of an incorrigible romantic which was bought even by the sensible Hume, who was however of two minds about him writing these two letters at the same time to two different addressees, and surely not disingenuously, but sincerely meaning what he says in each of them:

He is surely the blackest and most atrocious villain, beyond comparison, that now exists in the world; and I am heartily ashamed of anything I ever wrote in his favor. (To Hugh Blair, July 1, 1766)

And this one to Rousseau himself, written on the very next day that is July 2, 1766: Of all men of letters in Europe, since the death of Montesquieu, you are the person whom I most revere, both for the force of your genius and the greatness of your mind.

Once I have touched upon the relationship of David Hume and Rousseau, I must own up to the promise that I made in the last Hume entry, to give it some extra attention. I shall do that by quoting my excellent source Russell yet again:

Rousseau’s two most controversial books, Emile and Du Contrat Social, both appeared in 1762. These two books, while they greatly increased his fame, brought upon him a storm of official condemnation. He was obliged to flee from France, Geneva would have none of him; Bern refused him asylum. At last, Friedrich the Great took pity on him and allowed him to live at Motiers near Neuchatel, which was part of the king’s dominions. There he lived for three years, when the villagers, led by the pastor, accused him of poisoning, and tried to murder him. He fled to England, where Hume had proffered his services. At first all went well. He had a great social success, and George III granted him a pension. He saw Burke almost daily, but their relationship soon cooled to the point, where Burke said: “He entertained no principle, either to influence his heart, or guide his understanding, but vanity.” Hume was longest faithful, but by this time, Rousseau, suffering from the persecution mania, suspected Hume of plotting against his life, and fled from England. His last years were spent in Paris in great poverty, and when he died, suicide was suspected.

After the breach, Hume said: “He has only felt during the whole course of his life, and, in this respect, his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of; but it gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and he turned out in this situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements.” This is the kindest summary of his character that is in any degree compatible with the truth.

Rousseau’s relationship with Voltaire, although continuing for a short time, understandably, also ended in a quarrel. When Rousseau sent him his Discourse on Inequality Voltaire replied in his customary sardonic manner: “I have received your new book against the human race, and I thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk on all fours. But as I have lost this habit for more than sixty years I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages in Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned, render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves.” Eventually, the hostility between these two became so bitter that the whole philosophical community noticed and took sides in it, Voltaire treating the other as a mischievous madman, and Rousseau replying that “Voltaire… never believed in anybody but the devil,” and that he was “a low soul.”

Nietzsche, too, expresses conflicting opinions of Rousseau, but, like Hume, even in reprobation, Rousseau to him is an extraordinary man, and, certainly, a genius, even in his “passionate idiocies and half-truths.” He picks him as one of the eight geniuses on his journey to Hades, in (#408) of his Vermischte Meiningen und Sprüche: “I too have been in the underworld to speak with a few of the dead. Four pairs did not deny themselves to my sacrifice --- Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. On these eight I fix my eyes and see their eyes fixed on me. May the living forgive me that occasionally they appear to me as shades, while those men seem so alive to me.”

Well, I was not there, to judge him as a person, which is probably for the best, as I would have surely been terribly biased against him anyway. But now, well over two centuries after his death, his personal life does not make as much difference as his intellectual legacy, and it will be only the latter, which we are going to judge throughout the rest of the Rousseau series. But from the way other geniuses have treated Rousseau, despite all his lunacies and lies, it becomes demonstrable already that Rousseau was still one of the most extraordinary geniuses of all time.