A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  Not only passionate love, but every friendly relation to others, is only possible, to this way of feeling, in so far as the others can be regarded as a projection of one’s own Self. This is feasible if the others are blood-relations, and the more nearly they are related the more easily it is possible. Hence an emphasis on race, leading, as in the case of the Ptolemys, to endogamy. How this affected Byron, we know; Wagner suggests a similar sentiment in the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde. Nietzsche, though not scandalously, preferred his sister to all other women: “How strongly I feel,” he writes to her, “in all that you say and do, that we belong to the same stock. You understand more of me than others do, because we come of the same parentage. This fits in very well with my ‘philosophy.’”

  The principle of nationality, of which Byron was a protagonist, is an extension of the same “philosophy.” A nation is assumed to be a race, descended from common ancestors, and sharing some kind of “blood-consciousness.” Mazzini, who constantly found fault with the English for their faiure to appreciate Byron, conceived nations as possessed of a mystical individuality, and attributed to them the kind of anarchic greatness that other romantics sought in heroic men. Liberty, for nations, came to be regarded, not only by Mazzini, but by comparatively sober statesmen, as something absolute, which, in practice, made international cooperation impossible.

  Belief in blood and race is naturally associated with anti-Semitism. At the same time, the romantic outlook, partly because it is aristocratic, and partly because it prefers passion to calculation, has a vehement contempt for commerce and finance. It is thus led to proclaim an opposition to capitalism which is quite different from that of the socialist who represents the interest of the proletariat, since it is an opposition based on dislike of economic preoccupations, and strengthened by the suggestion that the capitalist world is governed by Jews. This point of view is expressed by Byron on the rare occasions when he condescends to notice anything so vulgar as economic power:

  Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign

  O’er conquerors, whether royalist or liberal?

  Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain?

  (That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.)

  Who keep the world, both Old and New, in pain

  Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all?

  The shade of Buonaparte’s noble daring?

  Jew Rothschild, and his fellow Christian Baring.

  The verse is perhaps not very musical, but the sentiment is quite of our time, and has been re-echoed by all Byron’s followers.

  The romantic movement, in its essence, aimed at liberating human personality from the fetters of social convention and social morality. In part, these fetters were a mere useless hindrance to desirable forms of activity, for every ancient community has developed rules of behaviour for which there is nothing to be said except that they are traditional. But egoistic passions, when once let loose, are not easily brought again into subjection to the needs of society. Christianity had succeeded, to some extent, in taming the Ego, but economic, political, and intellectual causes stimulated revolt against the Churches, and the romantic movement brought the revolt into the sphere of morals. By encouraging a new lawless Ego it made social cooperation impossible, and left its disciples faced with the alternative of anarchy or despotism. Egoism, at first, made men expect from others a parental tenderness; but when they discovered, with indignation, that others had their own Ego, the disappointed desire for tenderness turned to hatred and violence. Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.

  CHAPTER XIX

  Rousseau

  JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712-1778), though a philosophe in the eighteenth-century French sense, 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 who considered themselves reformers have been divided into two groups. those who followed him and those who followed Locke. Sometimes they cooperated, and many individuals saw no incompatibility. But gradually the incompatibility has become increasingly evident. At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke.

  Rousseau’s biography was related by himself in his Confessions in great detail, but without any slavish regard for truth. He enjoyed making himself out a great sinner, and sometimes exaggerated in this respect; but there is abundant external evidence that he was destitute of all the ordinary virtues. This did not trouble him, because he considered that he always had a warm heart, which, however, never hindered him from base actions towards his best friends. I shall relate only so much of his life as is necessary in order to understand his thought and his influence.

  He was born in Geneva, and educated as an orthodox Calvinist. His father, who was poor, combined the professions of watch-maker and dancing-master; his mother died when he was an infant, and he was brought up by an aunt. He left school at the age of twelve, and was apprenticed to various trades, but hated them all, and at the age of sixteen fled from Geneva to Savoy. Having no means of subsistence, he went to a Catholic priest and represented himself as wishing to be converted. The formal conversion took place at Turin, in an institution for catechumens; the process lasted nine days. He represents his motives as wholly mercenary: “I could not dissemble from myself that the holy deed I was about to do was at bottom the act of a bandit.” But this was written after he had reverted to Protestantism, and there is reason to think that for some years he was a sincerely believing Catholic. In 1742 he testified that a house in which he was living in 1730 had been miraculously saved from a fire by a bishop’s prayers.

  Having been turned out of the institution at Turin with twenty francs in his pocket, he became lackey to a lady named Madame de Vercelli, who died three months later. At her death, he was found to be in possession of a ribbon which had belonged to her, which in fact he had stolen. He asserted that it had been given him by a certain maid, whom he liked; his assertion was believed, and she was punished. His excuse is odd: “Never was wickedness further from me than at this cruel moment; and when I accused the poor girl, it is contradictory and yet it is true that my affection for her was the cause of what I did. She was present to my mind, and I threw the blame from myself on the first object that presented itself.” This is a good example of the way in which, in Rousseau’s ethic, “sensibility” took the place of all the ordinary virtues.

  After this incident, he was befriended by Madame de Warens, a convert from Protestantism like himself, a charming lady who enjoyed a pension from the king of Savoy in consideration of her services to religion. For nine or ten years, most of his time was spent in her house; he called her “maman” even after she became his mistress. For a while he shared her with her factotum; all lived in the greatest amity, and when the factotum died Rousseau felt grief, but consoled himself with the thought: “Well, at any rate I shall get his clothes.”

  During his early years there were various periods which he spent as a vagabond, travelling on foot, and picking up a precarious livelihood as best he could. During one of these interludes, a friend, with whom he was travelling, had an epileptic fit in the streets of Lyons; Rousseau profited by the crowd which gathered to abandon his friend in the middle of the fit. On another occasion he became secretary to a man who represented himself as an archimandrite on the way to the Holy Sepulchre; on yet another, he had an affair with a rich lady, by masquerading as a Scotch Jacobite named Du
dding.

  However, in 1743, through the help of a great lady, he became secretary to the French Ambassador to Venice, a sot named Montaigu, who left the work to Rousseau but neglected to pay his salary. Rousseau did the work well, and the inevitable quarrel was not his fault. He went to Paris to try to obtain justice; everybody admitted that he was in the right, but for a long time nothing was done. The vexations of this delay had something to do with turning Rousseau against the existing form of government in France, although, in the end, he received the arrears of salary that were due to him.

  It was at about this time (1745) that he took up with Thérèse Ie Vasseur, who was a servant at his hotel in Paris. He lived with her for the rest of his life (not to the exclusion of other affairs); he had five children by her, all of whom he took to the Foundling Hospital. No one has ever understood what attracted him to her. She was ugly and ignorant; she could neither read nor write (he taught her to write, but not to read); she did not know the names of the months, and could not add up money. Her mother was grasping and avaricious; the two together used Rousseau and all his friends as sources of income. Rousseau asserts (truly or falsely) that he never had a spark of love for Thérèse; in later years she drank, and ran after stable-boys. Probably he liked the feeling that he was indubitably superior to her, both financially and intellectually, and that she was completely dependent upon him. He was always uncomfortable in the company of the great, and genuinely preferred simple people; in this respect his democratic feeling was wholly sincere. Although he never married her, he treated her almost as a wife, and all the grand ladies who befriended him had to put up with her.

  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 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. Like the Spartans, he took success in war as the test of merit; nevertheless, he admired the “noble savage,” whom sophisticated Europeans could defeat in war. 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 are 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.

  The ideas of the first essay were elaborated in a second, a “Discourse on Inequality” (1754), which, however, failed to win a prize. He held that “man is naturally good, and only by institutions is he made bad”—the antithesis of the doctrine of original sin and salvation through the Church. Like most political theorists of his age, he spoke of a state of nature, though somewhat hypothetically, as “a state which exists no longer, perhaps never existed, probably never will exist, and of which none the less it is necessary to have just ideas, in order to judge well our present state.” Natural law should be deduced from the state of nature, but as long as we are ignorant of natural man it is impossible to determine the law originally prescribed or best suited to him. All we can know is that the wills of those subject to it must be conscious of their submission, and it must come directly from the voice of nature. He does not object to natural inequality, in respect of age, health, intelligence, etc., but only to inequality resulting from privieges authorized by convention.

  The origin of civil society and of the consequent social inequalities is to be found in private property. “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.” He goes on to say that a deplorable revolution introduced metallurgy and agriculture; grain is the symbol of our misfortune. Europe is the unhappiest Continent, because it has the most grain and the most iron. To undo the evil, it is only necessary to abandon civilization, for man is naturally good, and savage man, when he has dined, is at peace with all nature and the friend of all his fellow-creatures (my italics).

  Rousseau sent this essay to Voltaire, who replied (1755): “I have received your new book against the human race, and 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 that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of 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.”

  It is not surprising that Rousseau and Voltaire ultimately quarrelled; the marvel is that they did not quarrel sooner.

  In 1754, having become famous, he was remembered by his native city, and invited to visit it. He accepted, but as only Calvinists could be citizens of Geneva, he had himself reconverted to his original faith. He had already adopted the practice of speaking of himself as a Genevan puritan and republican, and after his reconversion he thought of living in Geneva. He dedicated his Discourse on Inequality to the City Fathers, but they were not pleased; they had no wish to be considered only the equals of ordinary citizens. Their opposition was not the only drawback to life in Geneva; there was another, even more grave, and this was that Voltaire had gone to live there. Voltaire was a writer of plays and an enthusiast for the theatre, but Geneva, on Puritan grounds, forbade all dramatic representations. When Voltaire tried to get the ban removed, Rousseau entered the lists on the Puritan side. Savages never act plays; Plato disapproves of them; the Catholic Church refuses to marry or bury actors; Bossuet calls the drama a “school of concupiscence.” The opportunity for an attack on Voltaire was too good to be lost, and Rousseau made himself the champion of ascetic virtue.

  This was not the first public disagreement of these two eminent men. The first was occasioned by the earthquake of Lisbon (1755), about which Voltaire wrote a poem throwing doubt on the Providential government of the world. Rousseau was indignant. He commented: “Voltaire, in seeming always to believe in God, never really believed in anybody but the devil, since his pretended God is a maleficent Being who according to him finds all his pleasure in working mischief. The absurdity of this doctrine is especially revolting in a man crowned with good things of every sort, and who from the midst of his own happiness tries to fill his fellow-creatures with despair, by the cruel and terrible image of the serious calamities from which he is himself free.”

  Rousseau, for his part, saw no occasion to make such a fuss about the earthquake. It is quite a good thing that a certain number of people should get killed now and then. Besides, the people of Lisbon suffered because they lived in houses seven stories high; if they had been dispersed in the woods, as people ought to be, they would have escaped uninjured.

  The questions of the theology of earthquakes and of the morality of stage plays caused a bitter enmity between Voltaire and Rousseau, in which all the philosophes took sides. Voltaire treated Rousseau as a mischievous madman; Rousseau spoke of Voltaire as “that trumpet; of impiety, that fine genius, and that low soul.” Fine sentiments, however, must find expression, and Rousseau wrote to Voltaire (1760): “I hate you, in fact, since you have so willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you, if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full towards you, there only remain the admiration that we canno
t refuse to your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you that I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine.”

  We come now to the most fruitful period of Rousseau’s life. His novel La nouvelle Héloïse appeared in 1760; Emile and The Social Contract both in 1762. Emile, which is a treatise on education according to “natural” principles, might have been considered harmless by the authorities if it had not contained “The Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” which set forth the principles of natural religion as understood by Rousseau, and was irritating to both Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy. The Social Contract was even more dangerous, for it advocated democracy and denied the divine right of kings. The two books, while they greatly increased his fame, brought upon him a storm of official condemnation. He was obliged to fly from France; Geneva would have none of him *; Bern refused him asylum. At last Frederick the Great took pity on him, and allowed him to live at Motiers, near Neuchatel, which was part of the philosopher-king’s dominions. There he lived for three years; but at the end of that time (1765) the villagers of Motiers, led by the pastor, accused him of poisoning, and tried to murder him. He fled to England, where Hume, in 1762, had proffered his services.

  In England, 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 friendship 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, saying he loved him much, and could live with him all his life in mutual friendship and esteem. But by this time Rousseau, not unnaturally, had come to suffer from the persecution mania which ultimately drove him insane, and he suspected Hume of being the agent of plots against his life. At moments he would realize the absurdity of such suspicions, and would embrace Hume, exclaiming “No, no, Hume is no traitor,” to which Hume (no doubt much embarrassed) replied, “Quoi, mon cher Monsieur!” But in the end his delusions won the day and he fled. His last years were spent in Paris in great poverty, and when he died suicide was suspected.