3.5—Rousseau (13 min video)

Transcript

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For this last lecture of this lesson, we’re going to take a look at just one character, and that is perhaps one of the most famous of all the philosophers of the Enlightenment period, certainly one of the most modern, is the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

His dates are 1712 to 1778 and he is considered and was actually called the father of the French Revolution, a topic we’ll look at later, by Louis XVI, the king who experienced it, Napoleon who rose to power because of it, and Edmund Burke who kind of saw it with a great deal of concern from across the English Channel over in Great Britain.

It’s also interesting, Paul Johnson said that he was the father of things like the cold bath, systematic exercise, and sport as being something that character forms people.

How true that is, I don’t know, but just curious things about Rousseau, who was someone who took at least physical exercise and certain health habits very, very seriously. Paul Johnson also says that Rousseau was modern in all of his affections, in all of his thinking and so forth. ultimately had a certain distrust of reason. He of course was an Enlightenment thinker and saw a great value there, but he tended to focus a little bit less on reason than others and focused more on the power of the human heart and inwardly looked at feelings and emotions and desires that come from within.

He argued that ultimately society was the problem with mankind. He said that man’s breath is fatal to his fellow man.” Now this is gonna be curious as we unpack his ideas of the state, but with Rousseau he had a certain admiration and a certain appreciation of what he called the “noble savage.” This is a time when European powers had sailed all around the world, had encountered all kinds of people groups, including sometimes these cutoff tribes in the middle of jungles or on islands in vastly different places or far away places in the world and saw people living with the same technologies they had used for hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years.

And so Rousseau looked at that noble savage as kind of the ideal way for man to live, kind of living apart from society, living apart from law, out in the jungle.

And so he had a certain sympathy for that, but of course he also didn’t really believe that was accessible or workable or even reasonable for man in modernity. Rousseau himself was Swiss-born. Even though he spent much of his time in France, he actually came from a family that subscribed to the teachings of John Calvin, so they were a Reformational Protestant Bible-believing family.

His mother, however, died shortly after birth and his father turned out to be often an absentee father who was often away and who when was around was often described as abusive.

In fact he was so abusive and the home was so dysfunctional that Rousseau’s older brother ran away from home when Rousseau was still a boy. He later on wrote about how he despised pretty much all fathers and this also affected of course his relationship or even his concept of God the father and and tended to only have affection for his mother, who, as I mentioned to you, died when he was so young that he never really knew.

Rousseau himself had trouble with regular life. For example, he kept, unsuccessfully that is, kept some 13 different jobs, all of which he was fired from. He did have some success at being a music copier, someone who would copy great works of composition for other musicians, but preferred to spend his time writing and preferred, like Voltaire, to be another gentleman of the bedroom, meaning he preferred to spend his time chasing women that were not his wife and were often the wives of others.

Probably his most long-lasting relationship was with a laundress, a woman who was ten years younger than him, who had kind of this what was considered a low job at the time of doing other people’s laundry, and he made her agree that she would stay with him and understand that he would never leave her so long as she was with him, but he would also never marry her.

For Rousseau, the whole idea of marriage and family was something that smacked of the old world order, something that just smelled too much of Christianity for him.

And so he was someone who wanted to do things in a totally unique and different way. It’s not really unique, it’s just kind of the nature of sin that we see with him. all the same he was someone who openly mocked her in front of others for her lack of education, for her low job status and low birth status, and often made comments to her that he kept her around only for his own pleasure.

So he wasn’t exactly the kindest of lovers or boyfriends to his mistress. He eventually rose to fame when he was actually decided to enter a competition writing an essay. It was an essay that was supposed to be upon how science and art had helped advance morals. And Rousseau won the competition because his essay said that they really don’t. He said that nature is what is superior, arguing for his whole concept of the noble savage. As a result of this, he won great fame. He published other works such as Letters of Two Lovers, which was about an adulterous couple that had an affair that did end up having a bad, tragic ending to it, like so many of those stories actually do, both in literature and in real life.

The thing is that Rousseau tends to not condemn the sin of adultery. He tends to kind of highlight and tantalize the feelings of people who actually read it. In fact, he told young ladies throughout Paris and France not to read it, which itself was kind of a hint go ahead, read it, just don’t say that I told you to. Anyway, he heavily criticized the church and often found himself at odds with the church and saw it kind of as an enemy of all things that he believed would be true and good.

He also got into trouble often for exposing himself in public or doing lewd and rather crude things in public that land you in jail even to the current day.

It was said that he was obsessed with himself. In fact, Paul Johnson writes about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and just quotes several things that Rousseau said about himself. “The person who can love me as I can love is still to be born. No one ever had more talent for loving. I was born to be the best friend that ever existed. I would leave this life with apprehension if I I knew a better man than me. Show me a better man than me, a heart more loving, more tender, more sensitive. Posterity will honor me because it is my due. I rejoice in myself. My consolation lies in my self-esteem. If there were a single enlightened government in Europe, it would have erected statues to me. So we have kind of an interesting character here the end of our discussion of the Enlightenment, one who brings the elevation of the human mind and human reason to its natural end and that is self-absorption or self-centeredness.

That’s really what we see with Rousseau. But of course his self-absorption is not what made him so influential. Even though he was often considered boorish by many and was known for his bad manners and even known for the fact that he made enemies with everybody from David Hume to Dinis Diderot to Francois Voltaire.

In fact he wrote a 25 page letter to David Hume arguing about how awful Hume and his writing was and how amazing Rousseau and his writing was in opposition to that.

But perhaps one of the things that made him most famous was his confessions in which he confessed his various sins of life ultimately meant to show his goodness and his actual best qualities.

It’s very different from say the Confessions of Augustine who focuses on his absolute need of Christ. Rousseau’s confessions tend to focus upon how he’s still just a good guy who sometimes has just made bad mistakes. It was said that he fathered some five different children all of which when they were born he left upon the doorsteps of orphanages and then later actually wrote down what their likelihood was because he knew the stats of the day which he recorded said that only about 5% of all the infants left at orphanages actually survived to adulthood and of those 5% he said most of them became beggars and criminals.

His whole point of this was that he couldn’t be distracted by something as trivial as the family or as children in his point of view from his great work of writing and his great work of advancing the Enlightenment to new levels that had ever seen before.

Perhaps what’s most interesting though about Rousseau is that Rousseau really elevated the whole idea of the state. In fact, I have several things I want to share with you, recorded also by Paul Johnson, that are helpful in understanding Rousseau’s influence on things like the French Revolution, which saw an elevation of the state in a whole new manner. For one, we have to understand how he viewed the state. Rousseau was famous for saying, quote, “The people making laws for itself cannot be unjust. The general will is always righteous.” So the way he viewed the state was he viewed it strictly democratically. That essentially the majority of people, society we might call it, the greater good you might even call it, they decide what is right based upon sheer number of voting.

Whatever they decide is true, that must actually be true. That was his version of the state. But he goes on. He says, “Make man one, and you will make him as happy as he can be.” So he’s kind of thinking along the lines, at least initially, of Cominius, who said you must address the whole man. You must actually make him one. You must unify everything from religion to his physical characteristics to his world around him to the intellect and knowledge and so forth. But Rousseau goes on, he says, “Give man all to the state or leave him all to himself. But if you divide his heart, you will tear him in two.” In other words, either man must be a noble savage, he must kind of live a life of anarchy out in the jungle somewhere, or if we’re going to keep the technology and the civilization and the cities that we have, then man must be given entirely to the state. He actually argued that this should happen from a young age. He said, “You must plant the social law, quote, ‘the social law on the bottom of man’s heart.’ Social men by their natures and citizens by their inclinations, they will be one, they will be good, they will be happy, and their happiness will be that of the republic.

” He argued the only way to do this was to control the opinions of people. He said, quote, “Those who control a people’s opinions control its actions.” He said ultimately the state’s job was to quote, “It was to train people to consider themselves “only in their relationship to the body of the state.” It’s quite fascinating that he moves from this idea of the noble savage that man can either be happy when he’s completely on his own, and if he doesn’t have that, he must completely surrender himself to an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-wise, and hopefully all-nurturing government. really is the beginning of the parent or nanny state. Something that Rousseau began to hypothesize of and began to spread ideas of. But the whole point of this lecture is ideas have consequences. That’s why Rousseau is the father of the French Revolution. That’s why Maximilien Robespierre, perhaps one of the most famous and also infamous characters of the French Revolution, saw Rousseau as his great inspiration. But of course, that’s another story.