KANT MADE SIMPLE. PART II.

Part II of 2. For Part I see my yesterday’s posting.

Despite his cold and pedantic historical image, Kant was a warm-hearted and intensely humane person. One of my favorite Kantian maxims that I used to love to quote on frequent occasions, is that the most dreadful thing on earth is when one man’s will is subjugated by another. To him also belong such gems as: If a man makes himself a worm, he must not complain when he is stepped on; or this: Always recognize that human individuals are ends, never use them as means to your end; and, oddly, this: Two things awe me most: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me. The subject of an indwelling moral law is embedded in his theory of the categorical imperative. Here is Russell again, to explain:

The essence of morality is to be derived from the concept of law; for, although everything in nature acts in accordance with laws, only a rational being has the power of acting according to the idea of a law, that is, by Will. The idea of an objective principle, in so far as it is compelling to the will, is called a command of the reason, and the formula of the command is called an imperative. There are two sorts of imperative: the hypothetical imperative, which says, You must do so-and-so if you wish to achieve such-and-such an end; and the categorical imperative, which says that a certain kind of action is objectively necessary, without a regard to any end. (I think I may already have mentioned this elsewhere, but, in my young years, I equated Kant’s categorical imperative to the indwelling Holy Spirit.) The categorical imperative is synthetic and a priori. Its character is deduced by Kant from the concept of Law: “If I think of a categorical imperative, I know at once what it contains. For, as the imperative contains, besides the Law, only the necessity of the maxim to be in accordance with this law, but the Law contains no condition by which it is limited, nothing remains over but the generality of a law in general to which the maxim of the actions is to be conformable and which conforming alone presents the imperative as necessary. Therefore the categorical imperative is a single one and in fact this: Act only according to a maxim by which you can at the same time will that it shall become a general law.” (Here is a maxim which strikes a familiar chord, as we are reminded of Jesus’ “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” Matthew 7:12.)

Of all human motivations, Kant valued the motive of duty above all. If one acts not from duty, his action has no moral value. Unless an action has a pure intent behind it, it’s worthless. As we see, the normal distinction between the ends and the means is of no special importance to Kant. Dismissive of the means aspect of our action, he does not believe that the end result is the most important aspect of an action, either. It is how one feels at the time of performing the action, which determines the action’s value.

He also has an intense appreciation of the concept of human dignity, as some of his already quoted adages ought to have shown. Here is a direct quotation on the subject: “Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price, can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity.” (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals)

Kant’s political philosophy, that is, his explicit preference for peace over war, and for human freedom over enslavement, culminates in his 1795 treatise on Perpetual Peace, where, in Russell’s summation, his vigor and freshness of mind in old age are shown… In this work he advocates a federation of free States, bound together by a covenant forbidding war, which only an international government can prevent. (A precursor of the United Nations idea, he is, lamentably, given little credit for this historical achievement, particularly, in America, where very few people have any appreciation for him!) The civil constitution of the component States should be “republican,” but he defines this word as meaning that the executive and the legislative are separated. He does not mean that there should be no king; in fact, he argues that it is easiest to get a perfect government under a monarchy. Writing under the impact of the Reign of Terror, he is suspicious of democracy (understandably). “The ‘whole people,’ so called, who carry their measures, are really not all, but only a majority: so that here the universal will is in contradiction with itself and with the principles of freedom.”

Kant was a great man, by any standard. He is, however, difficult to read, unless one is strongly motivated to read him. There is an added irony in this entry’s title: he is made simple not by simplifying his metaphysics, but by talking about some other, non-esoteric parts of his philosophy, that are not as difficult to understand. Generally speaking, the purpose of this entry is to provide a boost for the reader’s motivation to read him, by appealing to such parts of Kant’s legacy that are the easiest to understand and appreciate on their face value, without having to dig into his esoteric constructions, where, without such a motivation, the reader can easily get lost and frustrated in his effort to learn more about the genius of Immanuel Kant.

KANT MADE SIMPLE. PART I.

Coming now to philosophy proper, which became Kant’s preoccupation in his later years, and on account of which he achieved everlasting fame (as I said before, I wish he were better honored as a great scientist and a humanitarian political philosopher), it is so impossibly complicated to start with, so heavily complicated in fact, that, had it been easier to read and comprehend, its fatal flaws could instantly have been exposed.

This reminds me of a little personal experience, when, as a student of Moscow University, I was defending my solution to a humongous mathematical problem, to the scourge of all students, Yuri Shikhanovich, who loved torturing his victims with such impossibly difficult problems, until, after many hours, even days, they would finally recognize their pathetic worthlessness, and accept a passing grade from him as a gift from heaven. In my case, I managed, through my inspired solution, to complicate the problem to such an extent, that Shikhanovich was no longer able to follow my line, and, as soon as I presented him with my shaky and thoroughly illegitimate quod erat demonstrandum, he nervously awarded me with the extreme rarity, an A, and dismissed me with an honest admission that, even if my solution was wrong, as he strongly suspected, I still get the top mark from him for its construction.

I think that this personal anecdote goes straight to the heart of Kant’s philosophy, making its complicated appraisal plain and simple. To use Shikhanovich’s words, as a general theory, it must have been false, but it deserved the highest praise for its construction!

So, here is my general comment on Kant, on other great philosophers, and on philosophy in general.--- The greatness of the greatest philosophers, like Kant, is not in their success at creating valid general theories, in which task they all somehow tend to fail rather miserably, but in asking the right questions that go into the depth of concepts.

Nietzsche argues, in Mixed Opinions and Maxims (201).

 

“Philosophers’ error. The philosopher supposes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure; but posterity finds its value in the stone which he used for building and which is used many more times after that, for building better. Thus, it finds value in the fact that the structure can be destroyed and nevertheless retains value as building material.”

Which coincides with my thought expressed on numerous occasions, including the one above, about Kant, that the greatness of philosophers is not in building general theories and not in answering general questions, but in creating a world of inquiry (remember that in every created world the truth resides not according to fact, but only according to the method, and remains to be the truth as long as it stays within its boundaries and does not intrude into any other created reality), where general questions can be raised to be answered in specific applications by the contemporaries or by the succeeding generations. Here is by the way a new turn to the old thought of mine: concepts are questions and answers are applications!

Another line of thinking is the difference between original thinkers and scientists, which was developed in my comments on one of the larger sections of Nietzsche’s Jenseits. Free thinkers are always more random, less knowledgeable, and extremely disorganized. The other kind have excellent grades in wherever the free thinkers have failed, but Nietzsche brands them as mediocre minds and mediocre spirits.

Needless to say, we will be taking a closer look at Kant’s bogus, but priceless, epistemological labor, in our very next entry, and at his peculiar treatment of space and time, in the one after that, but for the remainder of the present entry we shall deal with such aspects of his philosophy, which do not even need to be “made simple” because they are simple enough to understand and appreciate. They are Kant’s ethics and political philosophy.

End of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.

KANT THE SCIENTIST

This is the opening entry of the Kant series.

***

In his introductory paragraph to Kant’s philosophy, Bertrand Russell writes: “Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate, but it would be foolish not to recognize his great importance.”

And so is he known to the majority of posterity: as a philosopher. But not only that. He was also a great and insightful scientist, and in order for us to understand the Kantian phenomenon better, before we approach his philosophy, we must not be forgetful of the fact that, in his younger years, Kant’s main preoccupation was, indeed, science, rather than philosophy. Continuing with Russell’s narrative, “After the earthquake of Lisbon (in 1755), he wrote on the theory of earthquakes.” (He applied himself to the study of everything known about earthquakes with great diligence, and although his seismology was faulty, it was noted afterwards that Kant’s work represented the very first attempt at a German scientific geography, and certainly the beginning of modern seismology.) He wrote a treatise on wind and a short essay on the question whether the west wind in Europe is moist because it has crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Physical geography was a subject in which he took great interest.

Russell does not say that Kant at this time is responsible for an important astronomical discovery, namely, the discovery of the retardation of the rotation of the Earth, for which he won the Berlin Academy Prize in 1754. Even more importantly, from this, Kant concluded that time (space and time, Die Undinge, were his favorite subjects of philosophical interest, further developed during his philosophical phase later in life) is not a thing in itself, determined from experience, objects, motion, and change, but rather an illusion of the human mind, which preconditions possible experience. Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), the British mathematical physicist and engineer, wrote, in 1897, that “Kant pointed out, in the middle of the last century, what had not previously been discovered by mathematicians or physical astronomers: that the frictional resistance against tidal currents on the earth’s surface must cause a diminution of the earth’s rotational speed. This immense discovery in Natural Philosophy seems to have attracted little attention,-- indeed to have passed quite unnoticed, -- among mathematicians, and astronomers, and naturalists, until about 1840, when the doctrine of energy began to be taken to heart.”

According to the English biologist Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895) “The sort of geological speculation, to which I am referring (geological aetiology, in short) was created as a science by that famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant, when, in 1755, he wrote his General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies; or, an Attempt to Account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the Universe, upon Newtonian Principles.” (Thomas H. Huxley, 1869).

Kant’s scientific genius flourishes in his remarkable scientific paper General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels 1755) where he presents his innovative Nebular hypothesis, asserting by deduction that the Solar System was formed from a large cloud of gas (that is, a nebula). He also makes the correct conclusion that the Milky Way is a large disk of stars, formed from a spinning cloud of gas. His soaring fancy does not stop there, further arguing that all other nebulae may also be similarly large and distant disks of stars. Paying tribute to Kant the Scientist, modern scientists concur in their highest opinion of Kant’s scientific speculations, opening new horizons for astronomy, and for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and extragalactic realms.

…I keep wondering why so many students of philosophy look at Kant exclusively as a philosopher, ignoring his great contributions to solid science and also to political philosophy, where his preference for peace over war and the idea of peaceful coexistence among nations (see my next entry) cannot fail to cause admiration among those who know. Hopefully, my Kant series here can make a difference among those who do not know.

ROUSSEAU PHILOSOPHIZES

 

The following is, as always, just a fancy selection of Rousseau quotes which I feel like commenting on… If the good reader finds some of my comments weird, what else can you expect in the company of Rousseau? ---

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

This is probably the most famous of all Rousseau’s phrases, and I already quoted it before. Born free means to me being born with a free mind and a free will, and somehow losing them both along the path of life.

“What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?”

Rather sentimental, but emotionally true: unconditional kindness is indeed the greatest wisdom. It makes life worth living.

“I may not be better than other people, but at least I am different.”

Being different is a precious quality of human life, as long as it does not turn us into grotesque freaks of nature… On the other hand, who is the judge of that?

“God made me and broke the mold.”

This is a repetition of sorts of the previous quote, but I cannot omit it, as it comes frequently quoted without attribution.

“Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and, far from commanding, we are forced to obey it.”

This is a variation of the familiar theme of passions being superior to reason.

“He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in performance of it.”

I am tempted to parallel this with “easy come, easy go, regarding broken promises.” A striking parallel!

“It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”

Brutal, but true. Poverty is a foul social ill; no society that institutionalizes it can think of itself as noble. On the other hand, poverty may be an honest pledge of a philosopher, but in “normal” people it coarsens the heart and leads to intense social conflicts. It is for this reason in particular that I prefer the idea of socialism to the idea of capitalism. Don’t get me wrong, the practice of socialism may have deep flaws, but it is the socialist idea, not the capitalist idea, which betters the soul of a nation.

“All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.”

Most excellent psychology! I can perfectly relate to this… Overestimating the goodness of our fellows, we are bound to be visited by misfortune. On the other hand, underestimating the occasional goodness of humanity, we are bound to have no visitors at all, except natural ailments and eventually death…

 “Liberty is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself.”

This is perhaps a very sensible definition of liberty: one either obeys the law or starts a revolution, in which latter case Rousseau’s definition describes sensible liberty the day after…

“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”

Three cheers for irrational creativity that breaks the bars of our rational prison cells! No rationality can properly perceive the boundless, and it takes pure and undiluted irrationality to have a clear sense of eternity.

“True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not mind; this short life counts for too little in their eyes.”

Come to think of it, most people are slaves to something, there is no need to single out “true Christians.” In fact, “true freedom” is the rarest of all commodities… On the other hand…

So what is America’s “freedom, freedom!” sloganeering supposed to mean? That America is not a Christian nation? As if her addiction to capitalism were not enough… Mind you, we are not talking about the reality of freedom here, but about the perception of freedom as something good.

“I have suffered too much in this world not to hope for another.”

Couldn’t we rephrase this as : I have suffered too much in this world to hope for another…? Suffering calls for eternal rest, rather than for exchanging one world for another. “Tired with all this, for restful death I cry…”

This is the end of this entry and of the Rousseau series as a whole.

 

BORN FREE, YET EVERYWHERE IN CHAINS

Rousseau’s political philosophy comes out of his ethics and theology, and it can be somehow gleaned from the fact that he prefers Sparta to Athens.

His magnum opus on political philosophy, Le Contrat Social, starts with the famous phrase: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” This may suggest that he, like Locke, is a friend of liberty, whereas this is not so. There is yet another precious thing, which Rousseau values much higher than liberty, and it is equality. It is right here that he and Locke, with the latter’s obsession with the sanctity of private property, definitely part their ways for good.

Rousseau is a total totalitarian in his political philosophy. The chains on man are the chains of a bourgeois civilization, so to speak. “The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone and remain as free as before. This is the fundamental problem, which the Social Contract provides the solution of.” The secret here is that the personal will of every citizen is in complete harmony with, in fact, an integral part of, the total will of the community, that is, the general will.

There is no doubt that man’s return into his natural state, his liberation from the chains of a class society, where the rich and powerful oppress and exploit the poor and powerless, thus denying them freedom, can only be achieved in a totalitarian paradise, where the general will of one and all is the sole master.

And now, the culmination of Rousseau’s political doctrine, his concept of the general will. This will is not at all identical with the majority will or any minority will for that matter. It would be best described as the collective will of the community, or to put it in more familiar terms, the Will of the State. Rousseau is not exceptionally clear with this explanation: “If when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand total of their small differences would always give the general will, and the decision would always be good.” In illustrating the meaning of the general will, I much prefer Bertrand Russell’s comparison to terrestrial gravitation: "Every particle in the earth attracts every other particle in the universe toward itself; the air above us attracts us upward, while the ground beneath us attracts us downward. But all these ‘selfish’ attractions cancel each other out, in so far as they are divergent, and what remains is the resultant attraction towards the center of the earth. This might be fancifully conceived as the act of the earth as a community and as the expression of its general will."

Rousseau’s elaboration of the concept of general will makes him--- have you guessed it?--- a dyed-in-the-wool totalitarian! The essence of his Social Contract is “the total alienation of each associate together with all his rights to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each member gives of himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.” Now, absolute is absolute! “If individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature (here he uses the term “state of nature” in Hobbes’s sense, and by no means in Locke’s!) would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.” Needless to say, there is no liberty anywhere here, and the doctrine of the rights of man has been cancelled. In fact, none of them are even needed anymore, as the role of the Sovereign in this Commonwealth is now played by the whole community, of which each member is a part. “All for one, one for all,” so to speak.

…Having been intimately familiar with the Soviet system’s self-justification in its golden days, I maintain that the Soviet totalitarian rationale closely resembles Rousseau’s reasoning, but I painfully guess that no established Western politician has ever tried to rationalize totalitarianism away from the propaganda's gross and coarse simplification, putting it under the magnifying lens of the curious reason and judging its merits and demerits, with the advantage of a cool sensible head, or, even more preferably, as an advocatus diaboli. Had they desired to do that, or, more accurately, had they been capable of doing so, Jean Jacque Rousseau would have been a priceless asset for their endeavor.

MEDDLING WITH GOD'S WORK

This is not the first time that I am reminded of Pushkin’s “Genius and evil, two things incompatible.” What, then is our judgment on Rousseau? Perhaps he was just mad and not evil after all?… Perhaps his sins ought to be forgiven to him, for reasons of insanity?..

***

Rousseau-the-philosopher cannot be properly understood without taking a glimpse of Rousseau-the-person (which is exactly the reason why we needed a separate personal entry, the previous one, to lead us into his twisted inner world which, I may venture to say, we most probably have not been able to either understand or penetrate anyway). But having done that part, we now suddenly find, that at least according to our good old friend Bertrand Russell, Rousseau may not have been a bona fide philosopher in the first place. On the other hand, he is a philosopher all right in at least three senses, namely in the way any Russian Intelligent would recognize him; in the way the French use the word philosophe; and, judging by the interest our dear friend Nietzsche had in him, who else could he be, but a philosopher?!

So, here is Russell’s peculiar introductory summary, which contains some familiar names of later times that he either connects directly to Rousseau, or, via Locke, contra Rousseau:

Jean Jacque Rousseau, 1712-19778, though a philosophe in the eighteenth-century French sense (not only, as we have previously observed), was not what would now be called a “philosopher.” Nevertheless, he had a powerful influence on philosophy, as on literature, and taste, and manners, and politics. Whatever may be our opinion of his merits as a thinker, we must recognize his immense importance as a social force. This importance came mainly from his appeal to the heart, and to what, in his day, was called “sensibility.” He is the father of the romantic movement, the initiator of systems of thought which infer non-human facts from human emotions, and the inventor of the political philosophy of pseudo-democratic dictatorships, as opposed to traditional absolute monarchies. Ever since his time, those considering themselves reformers have been divided into two groups, of those who followed him, and those who followed Locke. Sometimes they cooperated, and many individuals saw no incompatibility. But, gradually, the incompatibility became increasingly evident. At the present time (at the time of Russell’s writing in the early 1940’s), Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill of Locke. (Russell is prudently cautious in not venturing to place Stalin with either group. Stalin was a product of the peculiarly Russian strain, much-much closer to Rousseau than to Locke, but in many ways eclectic, while in many other ways uniquely Russian.)

Rousseau’s morality is blended with theology, and it constitutes an unbeatable theory, the only reason for it to be unbeatable being that he elevates it above reason and rationality, making it a “matter of the heart”--- ergo, non-negotiable. It is in just this sense that I agree with Russell that Rousseau is not a philosopher: he uses the authority of God to push his ethical doctrine of man’s pristine natural state being corrupted by the evils of civilization. At this point, I find it best to follow Russell’s narrative (after all, many of these entries have been stock entries, at least in some parts, awaiting radical revision in a later phase of work):

His first literary success came to him rather late in life. The Academy of Dijon offered a prize for the best essay on the question have the arts and sciences conferred benefits on mankind? Rousseau maintained the negative, and won the prize (1750). He contended that science, letters, and the arts are the worst enemies of morals, and, by creating wants, are the sources of slavery; for how can chains be imposed on those who go naked, like the American savages? As might be expected, he is for Sparta and against Athens. He had read Plutarch’s Lives at the age of seven, and been much influenced by them; he admired particularly the life of Lycurgus. Science and virtue he held are incompatible, and all sciences have an ignoble origin. Astronomy comes from the superstition of astrology, eloquence, from ambition; geometry, from avarice, physics, from vain curiosity, and even ethics has its source in human pride. Education and the art of printing ought to be deplored; everything that distinguishes civilized man from the untutored barbarian is evil. Having won the prize and achieved sudden fame by this essay, Rousseau took to living according to its maxims. He adopted the simple life, and sold his watch, saying that he would no longer need to know the time.

Thus, the starting point of his ethics, as well as of his political thinking as a whole, is contained in one short sentence from his Émile: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” The original state of man is God’s state, and it is good, which makes him sound a lot like John Locke, but only on this initial encounter. He associates human civilization with the original sin of man meddling with God’s work (man’s vainglorious reason being the culprit), which as we know has little connection with the lengths to which Locke had been prepared to go.

The full summary of his ethics boils down to the recognition that “our natural feelings lead us to serve the common interest, while our reason urges selfishness. We have therefore only to follow feeling, rather than reason, in order to be virtuous.”

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.