Philosophically, he subjected the idea of a rational foundation for morality to a parallel diagnosis. Hume knocks us down, and then lifts us up. First the overthrow: reason, said Hume, cannot tell us how we ought to act—it is “perfectly inert.” That the world is a certain way furnishes no logical reason to act in a certain way. It is not inconsistent, or incoherent, or false both to recognize that there are starving children in the world and to deny that we have an obligation to feed them. Logic is an inappropriate tool for dissecting morality, like taking a carving knife to water. To quote another of his famous statements, “’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
If reason does not prop up our moral values, what does sustain them? Hume derived his moral principles from an examination of human nature. According to Hume, our behavior is dictated by sentiment. We are naturally a mixture of various passions, such as selfishness and altruism (his word for the latter was “sympathy”). We are born neither utterly selfish nor wholly selfless. Sympathy awards us with a glow of warmth when we perform a virtuous act and instills a nagging sense of unease, if we are responsible for a vicious one.
Although Hume, on occasion, hints at the beneficial spin-offs arising out of our innate sympathy, he maintains that it is futile to ask why we have this instinct. For Hume, it is simply a truth, and that is that. “It is needless to push our researches so far as to ask, why we have humanity or a fellow-feeling with others. It is sufficient, that this is experienced to be a principle of human nature.” All this was neatly encapsulated in Hume’s aphorism that “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.”
These were revolutionary claims whose implications were revolutionary in another sense: Hume dragged man down toward his fellow animals. Human judgments about the world were really akin to instincts, and Hume pointed out how such instincts are to be found in “brute beasts” as well as “the most ignorant and stupid peasants.” “The experimental reasoning itself, which we possess in common with beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends, is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power.” Dogs can be trained through a system of rewards and punishments, in which they act on the basis of past experience. It is clear that they are not engaging in any process of complex reasoning here, Hume argues. What happens is that animals behave instinctively and mechanistically just as humans do.
WHILE HUME THE historian is now studied principally for his philosophy, Rousseau the novelist is these days studied mainly for his political theory—for what he says about the relationship between government and citizens; for his radicalism, his egalitarianism, his understanding of liberty; for his (to some) notorious concept of the general will; and for his distinctive vision of the state of nature, linked to his posthumous reputation as a pre-Romantic.
Rousseau wrote a great deal about the state of nature: a primitive if unspecified period in which humans interacted with one another before the creation of political institutions (a notion deployed by political theorists for a multiplicity of purposes). Sometimes he seemed to use the phrase as though it were a depiction of a historical reality, at other times as though it were just a useful theoretical tool. But he gave the concept a unique twist. For unlike Thomas Hobbes’s pessimistic vision of chaos and uncertainty, his was not a picture of violent anarchy. Quite the opposite, in fact: it was of a tranquil idyll in which man was free and self-sufficient and had an entirely fitting regard for his own well-being—amour de soi—but combined this with an instinctive sympathy for others.
What had happened to corrupt this primitive state? The rot set in with the invention of property. Property had bred inequality, conflict, and war. Property had spawned an obsessive and invidious compulsion to compare oneself to others, leading to greed and jealousy, “a black inclination to harm one another.” Property had transmuted the clean, simple, and natural quality of amour de soi into an ugly self-satisfaction, an inflated self-conceit, amour propre. Whereas with amour de soi we possessed an honest and direct self-knowledge and self-love, now our image of ourselves came back through the gaze of others: it was like staring into an ugly distorting mirror. “Nature has made everything in the best way possible; but we want to do better still, and we spoil everything,” said Rousseau. Voltaire found the idea of a primitive world less alluring. After reading The Origin of Inequality Among Men, he playfully but bitingly told its author that he was “seized with a desire to walk on all fours.”
In any case, by the time that Rousseau went into exile, he had relinquished the prelapsarian vision of man in a state of nature and had come to believe that this creature was stunted and unfulfilled: maybe free, maybe happy, maybe self-sufficient, but not fully developed. In the state of nature, men were not conscious of morality; only by becoming conscious could they become virtuous. It was by participating in political society that man could live out his potential and be elevated to a level above the rest of the animal kingdom, above the life of creatures controlled by base instinct.
His image of the ideal political society in no sense resembled the despotic governance of eighteenth-century France or the enlightened despotism of his supporter, Frederick the Great of Prussia. His task was to show how we could reclaim our freedom—and how freedom and the law could be compatible.
He sought to reconcile them through his concept of the general will. The general will is the will of the community, but it is not calculated by any mathematical summation of individual preferences. It is, rather, what is good for the community generally: the general will emerges through the coalescing of individuals into an organic whole. The niceties of how the general will is to work in practice remain opaque in Rousseau’s theory, but since we are a part of the collective, the execution of the general will is good for each of us.
That argument, later critics claimed, carries ominous overtones. In a phrase that has sent a chill down many spines, Rousseau talks of us being “forced to be free”—the origin of the common charge that his ideas were a precursor of totalitarianism. If a person were compelled to obey the general will, he would be forced into observing both the common good and what was objectively best for him. Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx would pick up on these themes. Kant, heavily influenced by Rousseau, came to believe that autonomy rested in complying with the rules of reason; Marx employed the notion of false consciousness (a state in which we are unaware of our real interests).
Rousseau’s theoretical writings were intertwined with his need for independence and yearning for innocent solitude. A leitmotif in his work was the importance of men not being reliant on others. Dependence was the root of evil; not being dependent meant being free. It was modern man’s downfall that to survive and thrive, he had come to rely on the contributions of others. Although Rousseau lived in a pre-industrialized world, the theme of man’s alienation from property and from the fruits of his labor would be echoed a century later in Marx. Rousseau even fulminates against money in the Confessions—”good for nothing in itself”—and claims he always regarded it with “more horror than pleasure.”
Rousseau’s bold prescription for how children should be nurtured and educated to lead their lives fully can be found in Émile. Initially, the infant is to be unconstricted. In this period of “negative education,” there is a recommendation that the child be deprived of all books, bar one: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which provides a master class in survival and self-sufficiency. By bringing up the boy Émile outside the community, his tutor will enable the child to learn to know his own will, and not to be prey to popular opinion and the values of “the conventional world.” (Among many passages acutely discomforting to a twenty-first-century Western outlook, Rousseau proclaimed that girls were not like boys, since “dependence is a state natural to women.”)
Unlike Hume’s, Rousseau’s work and life were inextricably intermingled. For Rousseau, the state of happiness, as explained in the Confessions, was “the absence of all that make me conscious of my
dependent position.” And, in a letter to de Malesherbes in 1762, he describes the perfect day with friends as one in which “no image of servitude and dependence troubled the good will” within the group.
Rousseau’s unease about receiving presents and assistance from others was a recurring theme in his life. He routinely rejected offerings of both money and goods—sometimes gracefully, more often tersely. In 1751, he threatened to break off one relationship unless the friend withdrew his present of coffee beans: “take back your coffee or never see me again.” And when Mme d’Épinay offered to supplement his income, Rousseau replied that her proposal struck a chill to his heart: she was degrading him—in his words, “making a valet of a friend.” However, life was not theory: though the imaginary Émile is taught self-sufficiency, Rousseau’s adherence to this ideal was somewhat less rigid. Thus, while irascibly spurning offers of free accommodation, he was willing to pay a nominal or below-market rent. By doing so, he could convince himself that his integrity remained intact.
WERE THERE ANY scholarly topics Rousseau and Hume could settle down to discuss? Any shared cultural terrain where they could relish each other’s company, even when disagreeing? Any prospect of intellectual consensus on that long post chaise ride to Calais, or once settled in Buckingham Street, or at the grocer’s shop in Chiswick?
Although the correspondence between Hume and Rousseau (some two dozen letters in all) is of interest in charting the rise and precipitous collapse in their relationship, what is absent from the letters is equally fascinating—these two giants praise each other effusively, they talk logistics, they pass information, they fall out. There is no dialogue or engagement about ideas. To some extent this may have been because they profoundly disagreed even where they dealt with the same issues.
Thus, in economics, Rousseau was a protectionist, Hume (like Adam Smith) a strong opponent of barriers to international trade.
In politics, Rousseau’s theoretical political program would have required root-and-branch transformation. Hume’s instincts were essentially conservative: he advocated careful, slow, piecemeal reform, and was concerned about violent interference with Britain’s intricate pragmatism and delicate constitutional balance. (Of course, in freedom of expression and tolerance, British parliamentary government was far removed from the oppressive despotism of Louis XV or from Genevan oligarchy.) Hume even believed that the order and deference of a social hierarchy provided much-needed stability.
As for human nature, Rousseau maintained it had altered over time, that man was born good but had fallen, while Hume regarded it as more or less constant. Indeed, that was precisely why the Scot believed it was possible to learn lessons from history—for example, from Europe’s depressing catalog of wars and revolutions. This belief is expressed most explicitly in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. “It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations.” Yet his conduct again parted company from his theory. As we know, he disregarded the cautions about Rousseau given by his friends, ignoring their evidence of his past behavior. His own work highlights how imprudent a policy this was.
Were a man, whom I know to be honest and opulent and with whom I live in intimate friendship, to come into my house, where I am surrounded with my servants, I rest assured that he is not to stab me before he leaves it in order to rob me of my silver standish; and I no more suspect this event than the falling of the house itself, which is new, and solidly built and founded.—But he may have been seized with a sudden and unknown frenzy.—So may a sudden earthquake arise, and shake and tumble my house about my ears.
However, it is their reflections about how and where man should live, and about the arts and luxury, that most sharply expose the fundamental contradictions of their brief union. Rousseau glorified nature. His state of nature was one of bliss. But beyond the theory, his autobiographical writings are full of exaltations of nature itself. Of panoramic views, a walk in the country, open air, he writes in the Confessions: “all this sets my soul free, gives me greater boldness of thought, throws me, so to speak, into the immensity of things.” The isolated rural life suited his ascetic self-image. Luxury made men soft. Frugality and the good life were inseparable. Hence his distress at what he believed was Diderot’s deliberate stab in proclaiming that only the evil man lives alone. Rousseau associated the black vapors of the city with blackness in men’s hearts.
While Rousseau’s stance on the theater and the organized arts was highly ambiguous, Hume unequivocally promoted the benefits of civilization. He was convivial, a city lover (though preferably Edinburgh over London). His identification with the city was part of a wider urban cosmopolitanism. “A perfect solitude,” he regarded (in the Treatise) as “perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer.” The Scot was an advocate of refined tastes, “the study of beauties” such as poetry, music, and art as well as science. These kept us off the streets, mentally challenged us, and even made us more social and gregarious. Science and the arts elevated the human spirit. Thus enriched, he wrote in one essay, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” people would never be “contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-citizens in that distant manner, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations.” That last phrase, had he been acquainted with it, would surely have angered Rousseau as much as had Diderot’s.
City life, said Hume, was good for us. We humans were unusual beings, conspicuous among animals for our combination of physical vulnerability and exacting physical needs. Being puny creatures, he thought, and yet having to be clothed, kept warm, sheltered, and fed, we have had to adapt and cooperate to survive. Only through organization and social activity have humans come to flourish. For humans, cooperation is natural. Hume concurred with his old friend Adam Smith’s maxim about one of the distinguishing characteristics of the human race: “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.” Of course, in Marischal’s words, Rousseau’s attitude to simple acts of generosity made him “more savage than any savage of North America.”
AT FIRST GLANCE, our two antagonists did at least share one basic position. Both assailed established religion in their homelands and both were hurt in consequence. Both railed against superstition, both shared a dislike of Catholicism.
Hume’s assault on religion was the more intellectually rigorous and sustained, but barely rattled the foundations of the established churches in Scotland and England. In France and Switzerland, Rousseau’s challenge was seen by the authorities as highly threatening. Hume’s career suffered but Rousseau’s life was endangered. The stones that smashed through Rousseau’s windows in Môtiers were missiles that, in effect, had the blessing of the priesthood.
Yet even their critiques of religion were very different: different in argument, different in motivation. Rousseau’s religious views had pleased nobody—neither Christians nor the atheists and deists. (Deism held that knowledge of God was possible only through reason. Those who believe God set the universe off but then left it alone are also often called deists.) To the philosophes, split between a minority who were deists and the majority who were outright atheists, Rousseau’s conviction that God existed, his professed love of God, his belief in God’s goodness, his certainty that there was an afterlife and that the soul was immortal—all this was risible. Deeply suspect, too, was his attitude toward the beauty of nature. He saw God in mountains and valleys, in brooks and waterfalls, in thunder and sunshine, in flowers and trees. “Atheists,” he once said, “do not like the country.”
There were also instrumental grounds that justified religion: it was useful, he believed, in promoting patriotic and civic values. But this was not the case for the institutions of religion. By teaching men that salvation lay in the next life rather than this one, these institutions actually undermined the state.
This was not the only point on which he crit
icized the Christian church (particularly the Catholic Church) as misguided. And when we read the “Savoyard Vicar” section in Émile, it is obvious why its passages were regarded as so egregiously blasphemous. Thus, Rousseau thought the direct route to God was through introspection, through the examination of the heart, the pursuit of what he called the “inner light,” through reason. It was not through the clergy and their overblown rituals, nor through Scripture. Priests should be excluded from a child’s upbringing. They had no special claim to religious truth—if anything, they were obstacles to its discovery.
As for Hume, he did not intend to cause umbrage—”I would not offend the Godly”—and he amended his History to make its relatively bland remarks on religion blander still, though his view was that the church had played a corrupting role in British life. Nonetheless, the comments he did make landed him in trouble, as we have seen, stalling his career. He wrote to Blair to complain. “Is a man to be called a drunkard, because he has been seen fuddled once in his lifetime?”
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