Vox Felicitas XII — A Discourse on Rousseauian Thought

On last week’s episode of Vox Felicitas, I shared some creative writing tips on how to portray goodness — that’s more moral goodness than material goodness (say, an excellently crafted cup of tea). I also briefly touched upon the concept of all characters being the heroes of their own stories, and how the greatest of all time are those with valid, even sympathetic, motivations. To conclude that behemoth of a piece, I made a promise to broach the subject in more detail another time.

Today, however, we’ll be taking a break from creative writing-related topics. In this week’s episode, I’ll be introducing you to another of my great passions: history. This week specifically, we’ll be touching on the history of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss philosopher whose ideals came to shape revolutionary thought throughout the Enlightenment period and beyond. The best way to do this, in my belief, is to showcase a high-scoring essay I wrote at university on the matter. If you thought last week’s treatise on good things was a beastly article to consume, you’ll love this one (or not — don’t judge!), so grab your popcorn...

The Genevan socio-political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) has been referred to using a wide variety of terms by an equally great panoply of people. Among them are “philosophe”, denoting him as an intellectual; “hypocrite”, by such detractors as Edmund Burke and Rousseau’s own arch-nemesis Voltaire; and “famously bipolar” (in regards to his beliefs) by historian Jason Neidleman in his essay Rousseau and the Desire for Communion. However, whether or not he was a figure in distinct opposition to the Enlightenment is one of considerable controversy, and a point that must be assessed for truth.

To achieve this end, it is necessary to study four topics: what Rousseau’s philosophy was, how he applied it, how others did likewise in the context of the Enlightenment, and just what exactly the period of the eighteenth century that we refer to as ‘the Enlightenment’ actually was. In an essay entitled Enlightenment, published in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, modern philosopher William Bristow summarises it in the first paragraph of the work as “characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics; these revolutions swept away the medieval world-view and ushered in our modern western world”. In light of what the period entailed along with the influences that it had upon wider global society, it is safe to presume that the Enlightenment was a radical, near total alteration in thinking amongst the intellectual and (to a somewhat lesser extent) upper classes across Europe, an absolute change in theories and philosophies arguably initiated and inspired by the Renaissance just a century prior.

With the lattermost topic ascertained, it is now necessary to begin with the examination of the foremost in regards to whether Rousseau can be considered an opponent of it. To begin with, there is the matter of the essay that he submitted for the competition instigated by the Academy of Dijon — A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, penned in 1750. Other essays submitted for the competition, answering the question “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?”, praised the Enlightenment and the effects on the people who came to be affected by it. Rousseau, however, was critical; he wrote his work about the destructive effects of arts and sciences on human beings. He used the examples of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Byzantium to demonstrate how the arts fostered “vain curiosity” and brought about the fall of great empires, lamenting that “it is that luxury, profligacy and slavery, have been, in all ages, the scourge of the efforts of our pride to emerge from that happy state of ignorance, in which the wisdom of providence had placed us”.

The Discourse is therefore not merely a warning that indulgence in arts and science ultimately leads up to hedonism and thus the collapse of society, but the first showcase of what he would adhere to and preach for the rest of his life: the detrimental effects of civilisation and reason upon the rest of humanity, and his extensive proto-Romantic ideals of the human race returning to its most natural, primordial state, a “state of nature” where the apparently corruptive ideologies of civilisation are gone. With this information alone, it can be ascertained that Rousseau was a figure who was decidedly opposed to the Enlightenment. After all, the Enlightenment was surely about taking humanity and civilisation away from the barbarisms that arose in the distant past, not making a return to them.

To come to such a conclusion about Rousseau’s Enlightenment credentials with that interpretation alone, however, would be grossly negligent both of just what the Enlightenment was as well as the exact nature of his own philosophies. His description and denigration of society, and especially his advocacy that humanity should return to its most natural state, evoke similarities to the philosophy that would develop into the Romantic movement throughout the 19th century, a movement with great emphasis on past glories, emotion, passion and nature of remarkable similarity to what Rousseau championed. Most particularly, the man himself would propound his views in this regard within two novels: Julie, or the New Heloise, and Emile, or On Education.

The former is an epistolary piece widely interpreted by reviewers such as historian Robert Darnton as a treatise about the virtue of authenticity (in regards to passion) when juxtaposed with rational moral principles. Rousseau, as Bron Taylor describes in his Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, “was a passionate critic of what he perceived to be the artifice, false consciousness, and inequality of modern society” — in short, Julie can be perceived as a guide for the individual towards being more honest and virtuous. The latter has been interpreted as a parenting guide and, like Julie, illustrates the corrupting effects of society versus the “innate human goodness” (to paraphrase the man himself) presented in the natural world, also borrowing some ideas on education from English philosopher John Locke. Emile can be seen as a follow-up to Rousseau’s other seminal essay aside from the Discourse — The Social Contract, widely regarded as the blueprint for the modern representative democracy — and a blueprint for Rousseau’s idea of the ‘perfect’ human being. At first glance, it would appear that his disdain for reason makes him by default an opponent of the Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason.

However, one core aspect of the period that complicates the above conclusion is that it involves a radical departure from medieval thinking — this we can find in Rousseau’s outline of what is termed “the general will” in The Social Contract and the Discourse on Political Economy that he wrote seven years prior. In the latter, Rousseau elaborates upon his ideas on parenting and education that he pioneered in Emile and applies them to the context of a quasi-Platonic system of direct democracy where all citizens must be politically educated. Jonathon Wolff notes in An Introduction to Political Philosophy that Rousseau’s idea of citizenship is that all people, notably even women, “are to be trained to ‘will nothing contrary to the will of society’. This is essential to the health and preservation of the state”. Indeed, Rousseau goes on to advocate the idea that an elective monarchy (such as what was practiced by the Polish Commonwealth in the 17th and early 18th centuries) would be possible and even ideal. The image and radical ideas of how society should be run as he describes stand in near absolute contradiction to the divine right of kings, the medieval doctrine that enunciates that autocratic, absolute monarchy is the ultimate earthly authority — only God is higher and may override the King. When Rousseau’s ideas on politics and democracy are laid out, it would appear that the man was by no means an anti-Enlightenment figure at all, but decidedly pro-Enlightenment: Rousseau was presenting a new system of governance that was by definition against the medieval ways of thinking, which can be argued to be amongst the composition of the very essence of Enlightenment.

So if it cannot be decided whether or not Rousseau was anti-Enlightenment through his “famously bipolar” beliefs and ideas, perhaps it is necessary to evaluate the matter through the impact that he and his philosophies had upon the course of the Enlightenment. The many works that he wrote, and especially his novels, made him a celebrity across enlightening Europe; even the establishment recognised his star power, with Marie Antoinette constructing a small peasant village at Versailles to take Rousseau up on his ideas of getting closer to nature (with mixed results for her popularity and health, of course). Julie in particular would be described by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer as one of the four greatest novels ever written (alongside Tristam Shandy, Don Quixote and Wilhelm Meister). Rousseau himself was widely lauded for his outlook on honesty, especially in the light of how other philosophes were regarded.

Many were known for their arrogance and pretention, particularly in Paris — back in the day, there were plenty of unwritten social rules that determined the status of someone. You had to dress a certain way, talk a certain way, even visit certain establishments and know certain people — even the smallest infraction to this highly elitist quasi-club precluded fame and fortune. Such matters as this made the Enlightenment approachable only to a select demographic of intellectuals, with many ordinary people in not merely France, but Europe as well, having little care for such matters as reason. Rousseau counted himself outside of these assorted cliques, adopting his own route to enlightenment; perhaps this is what made him altogether more approachable than the other philosophes, in addition to his profuse emphasis on the necessity and virtue of honesty. Rousseau, at the first glance, was to be considered a man of principle, someone who could be related to the ordinary folk, heightening his celebrity status. Indeed, this can be considered an argument to label him as a pro-Enlightenment figure, because the popularity of his ideas and himself enabled him to diffuse his concepts across ever greater audiences without running into the controversies that his fellow philosophes did.

Arguably his principle is part of the reason why he was considered the most popular philosophe amongst the Jacobin Club, the cabal that counted amongst its members several of the architects of the French Revolution. More importantly, Maximilien Robespierre wrote a new constitution for revolutionary France, modelled upon Rousseau’s notion of the ‘general will’, and Rousseau also influenced Robespierre’s lieutenant and protégé Louis Antoine de Saint-Just; both would become the masterminds behind the subsequent Reign of Terror. Along with the idea of the general will as demarcated in The Social Contract, Robespierre was intrigued by Rousseau’s conception of the ‘virtuous self’ as depicted in Emile, and was influenced by his works to the point where American historian Roger Kimball describes both Robespierre and Saint-Just as Rousseau’s “spiritual heirs”. In an article entitled Rousseau’s “Virtue”, found in the magazine that he edited (The New Criterion), Kimball points out that Rousseau’s mode of thought was “translated onto the stage of world politics” by the Jacobins, enabled and arguably empowered by the French Revolution that transpired after Rousseau’s death.

More noticeable still is the effects of Rousseauian ideas on the commencement of the Terror and also Robespierre’s ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’ — directly inspired by notions put forward in The Social Contract as well as Rousseau’s own deist religious beliefs, revolving around the idea that God exists in the heart and does not need to be proved. Attendance and commemoration of the ‘Festival of the Supreme Being’, to be first hosted on the eighth of June and then ten days onward — refusal to partake typically resulted in execution. This leads onto an argument that Robespierre used the guillotine in conjunction with the Cult as a method of social engineering, his possible and indeed probable intent being to create a society of ‘Emiles’ — perfect human beings, as stipulated by Rousseau’s titular novel.

Here it cannot be denied that Rousseau and his works had a monumental effect on the course of the Enlightenment throughout Europe, but what is being searched for in this essay is an answer to the question of whether Rousseau was an anti-Enlightenment figure. In evaluating the French Revolution and subsequent Terror, the first conclusion that is reached is that Rousseau bears at least some responsibility for causing the Revolution and the Terror, since his political treatises formed the basis for both of them. The same culpability may be appended to him for the subsequent rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Napoleonic Wars that ravaged the European continent in the first years of the 19th century and the ultimate failure of the French Revolution that brought about the restoration of the monarchy in 1815. In this regard, Rousseau is an anti-Enlightenment figure; his ideas can be considered at least partly responsible for the barbarisms of war and the return of the unfairness and privilege-ridden absolute monarchy to France when the possibility of its final elimination looked likely.

It must, however, be noted that it is rather unfair to blame Rousseau and condemn him as an opponent of the Enlightenment for events that transpired long after his death, thus out of his control — as intelligent a man as he was, Rousseau cannot possibly have predicted that these events would take place in the still distant future. Branding Rousseau as anti-Enlightenment for this reason also neglects the nature of the ideas that led up to these aforementioned events. Robespierre’s ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’ and the Terror itself, tyrannical and arguably insane decisions by the revolutionary government they may have been, were both applications of a series of doctrines that turned medieval notions upside down and enrolled into society a new set of virtues. As has been noted earlier, Rousseau was an advocate of a governmental system that was contradictory in its entirety to the divine right of kings; guillotining Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette cannot be interpreted as anything other than an attempt to realise the end of such absolute monarchy. Likewise, the ‘Emiles’ that Robespierre attempted to forge were still based upon the Rousseauian concepts of the perfect human being, an honest individual who looked to nature, properly (as is defined from Rousseau’s point of view) educated his children and turned away from the corrupting, hedonistic mores of society. With all of that accounted for, perhaps it can be said that the man was pro-Enlightenment, though if he was, his must have been a different route to Enlightenment than many of the other philosophes.

Arguably the same can be said of the man himself. It has already been noted of Rousseau that he was “famously bipolar” by Neidleman; he reminds us that Rousseau exalts “at once the citizen, epitomized by Cato, and the solitary, epitomized by Socrates”. By this he means that Rousseau’s political theory clashes with his proto-Romantic theory — the former recommends a society of virtuous citizens, while the latter demands that man returns to nature and breaks down society as a whole. Here is observed an example of the hypocrisy that Voltaire was so eager to point out: establishing a society, however “virtuous”, is by definition contrary to the notion that society is a force of corruption and the romanticisation of the natural man. Stranger still is Rousseau’s citation of Rome and Sparta (among other nations) as “virtuous” countries after criticising both Rome and ancient Greece, in his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, for falling into the trap of hedonism. This, however, need not signify Rousseau’s perceived hypocrisy: both Rome and Sparta were powerful warrior societies in their heyday, as opposed to the days of their fall — where both had succumbed to what Rousseau refers to as “vain curiosity”. Perhaps, then, he is not as hypocritical as is made out to be, with such assertions being natural for such a controversial figure as him. Nor is he as unvirtuous — an assortment of feminists, beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft and proceeding all the way into the twentieth century, lined up to criticise Rousseau for placing the mother at the centre of the family in his theories, all while apparently forgetting that Rousseau also positioned the father as a key component of raising the family in Emile in particular.

What is undoubtedly hypocritical, however, is — as Voltaire and Burke roundly lambasted him for — his abandonment of his own children that he had with the seamstress Therese Levasseur. It is hypocritical on two accounts. The first is his dishonesty about the affair — though he claimed to Therese at the time that the children needed to be sent to a foundlings’ hospital for the sake of her honour, he admitted in his Confessions that he “trembled at the thought of intrusting them to a family ill brought up, to be still worse educated”. The second is his subsequent championship of theories on education and child rearing while having abandoned his own children as infants, despite proselytising, in Emile, his belief that the father should be intimately involved with child rearing.

The historical accuracy of the Confessions, however, has been a subject of debate; in the tenth volume of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilisation, the truthfulness of the book is dependent upon an allegation made by Rousseau that Baron von Grimm and Diderot conspired to produce a libellous description of his relationship to two of the women that he associated with, salon hostess Louise d’Epinay and one of his love interests, Sophie d’Houdetot. This evokes the possibility, however distinct, that Rousseau may not have been the hypocrite that he has been made out to be by his detractors, and calls into question the reliability of the source. Ergo, it is difficult to consider Rousseau a figure who was against the Enlightenment based upon his perceived hypocrisies, the idea that he may not have adhered to the theories and practices that he championed being complicated by the probability of his not even being such a hypocrite.

My take on the matter pertaining to the extent of Rousseau’s nature as an anti-Enlightenment figure is as follows: I believe that he was not so much an anti-Enlightenment figure as he was a figure who took the Enlightenment along a different route to the other philosophes. His contemporaries, such as Voltaire, Diderot and D’Alembert, largely focused their efforts upon the emphasis of the importance of considering humans as reasoning, rational creatures — Rousseau focused his on elaborating upon the importance of passion and emotion over reason. This does not necessarily mark him or his ideas as in direct opposition to the Enlightenment, since they still established a paradigm that stood in marked distinction to medieval doctrines per our established definition of the Enlightenment period. Arguably, it can be considered that Rousseau was not an anti-Enlightenment figure at all, quite the reverse — as has been previously mentioned, the popularity of Rousseau and his apparently enlightening ideas throughout the second half of the eighteenth century onward enabled them to be diffused, thus furthering the cause of the movement.

In the same light, however, his impact upon the suppression of the Enlightenment cannot be forgotten. If we are to append direct responsibility to Rousseauian thought for bringing about the French Revolution, the Terror and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars, then it can be argued that the man was responsible for bringing it down, thus making him, in the long-run, anti-Enlightenment. However, as I have stated prior, Rousseau simply cannot be held responsible for events that transpired after his demise, outside of his control. It is clear that Rousseau had, when he conceived of the character Emile in his titular novel, no idea that the said Emile would go on to be perceived as the blueprint that Robespierre was aiming to achieve when he instigated his attempt at what might even be called eugenics. Throughout history, ideas that have been conceived are altered based upon a distinct interpretation of that idea; remaining within the general time period, an example lies in the doctrines of contemporary Prussian king Frederick the Great, who observed that strengthening the kingdom was undertaken from militarisation. Likewise, Rousseau’s concept of democracy has been modified and presented in the modern day as a blueprint for the current systems of representative democracy that are in place. With everything in this essay collated and compiled, I therefore come to this conclusion: the extent to which Rousseau was an anti-Enlightenment figure is far too difficult to ascertain, and it cannot be doubted that he contributed more towards the Enlightenment than he did against it.

Thank you all for reading, and I will see you again next week.

~ Harry