Rousseau’s 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?
The First Essay
Rousseau maintained the negative and won the prize (1750).
He argued 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.
Like the Spartans, he took success in war as the test of merit, but he admired the ‘noble savage’, whom sophisticated Europeans could defeat in war. He thought that science and virtue are incompatible, and all sciences have an ignoble origin and that 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 Second Essay
He wrote a second essay to elaborate on his earlier ideas, a ‘Discourse on Inequality’ (1754), but 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.
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 privileges authorized by convention.
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.’
The two books increased his fame but brought a storm of condemnation against him.
Theology
In theology he made an innovation which has now been accepted by the great majority of Protestant theologians. Before him, every philosopher from Plato onwards, if he believed in God, offered intellectual arguments in favor of his belief.
‘Ah, Madame!’ Rousseau writes to an aristocratic lady, ‘sometimes in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight over my eyes or in the darkness of the night, I am of opinion that there is no God. But look yonder: the rising of the sun, as it scatters the mists that cover the earth, and lays bare the wondrous glittering scene of nature, disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I find my faith again, and my God, and my belief in Him. I admire and adore Him, and I prostrate myself in His presence.’
On another occasion he says: ‘I believe in God as strongly as I believe any other truth, because believing and not believing are the last things in the world that depend on me.’ This form of argument has the drawback of being private; the fact that Rousseau cannot help believing something affords no ground for another person to believe the same thing.
‘The Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar’, which is an interlude in the fourth book of Emile, is the most explicit and formal statement of Rousseau’s creed. The book is about what the voice of nature tells a virtuous priest, when it begins to speak. Russel is surprised to find that this voice ultimately delivers a hotch-pot of arguments derived from Aristotle, St Augustine, Descartes, and so on.
It is true that they are robbed of precision and logical form; this is supposed to excuse them, and to permit the worthy Vicar to say that he cares nothing for the wisdom of the philosophers.
From this he concludes that conscience is in all circumstances an infallible guide to right action. ‘Thanks be to Heaven,’ he concludes this part of his argument, ‘we are thus freed from all this terrifying apparatus of philosophy; we can be men without being learned; dispensed from wasting our life in the study of morals, we have at less cost a more assured guide in this immense labyrinth of human opinions.’ Our natural feelings, he contends, 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.
Natural religion, according to Rousseau, has no need of a revelation; if men had listened to what God says to the heart, there would have been only one religion in the world. If God has revealed Himself specially to certain men, this can only be known by human testimony, which is fallible. Natural religion has the advantage of being revealed directly to each individual.
To Buddhists, the light of nature does not reveal the existence of God but does proclaim that it is wrong to eat the flesh of animals. But even if the heart said the same thing to all men, that could afford no evidence for the existence of anything outside our own emotions.
No matter how much mankind desires something, no matter how necessary it is to human happiness, there is no reason to assume that it exists. No law of nature guarantees human happiness. Everyone knows that this is true on earth, but Rousseau makes a leap and says that our suffering in this life are an argument for a better life after death.
Yet we should not use this argument in any other context.
Russell prefers the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau. The old arguments at least were honest: if valid, they proved their point; if invalid, it was open to any critic to prove them so.
Originally published at https://unearnedwisdom.com.
