Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith

A Philosophical Encounter

Charles L Griswold

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367884994
• eBook ISBN: 9781315436555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are giants of eighteenth century thought. The heated controversy provoked by their competing visions of human nature and society still resonates today. Smith himself reviewed Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, and his perceptive remarks raise an intriguing question: what would a conversation between these two great thinkers look like?

In this outstanding book Charles Griswold analyzes, compares and evaluates some of the key ways in which Rousseau and Smith address what could be termed "the question of the self". Both thinkers discuss what we are by nature (in particular, whether we are sociable or not), who we have become, whether we can know ourselves or each other, how best to articulate the human condition, what it would mean to be free, and whether there is anything that can be done to remedy our deeply imperfect condition. In the course of examining their rich and contrasting views, Griswold puts Rousseau and Smith in dialogue by imagining what they might say in reply to one another. Griswold's wide-ranging exploration includes discussion of issues such as narcissism, self-falsification, sympathy, the scope of philosophy, and the relation between liberty, religion and civic order.

A superb exploration of two major philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith: A Philosophical Encounter is essential reading for students and scholars of these two figures, eighteenth century philosophy, the Enlightenment, moral philosophy, and the history of ideas. It will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as political theory, economics, and religion.

1
Narcissism, self-knowledge, and social critique

From Rousseau’s Preface to Narcissus to Adam Smith

I didn’t know what he was playing up to—if he was playing up to anything at all—and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

Joseph Conrad¹

Introduction

In the wake of his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts Rousseau engaged in a number of spirited exchanges with his critics. Among the most famous of his apologetics is the Preface to Narcissus. In the Confessions Rousseau notes that he counts the Preface among his “good writings,” and adds that “I began [in the Preface] to put my principles in open view a little more than I had done until then.”² In presenting this defense and explanation of the argument of the First Discourse in a preface not just to a play but a play whose subject is narcissism, he generated several complex interpretive questions.³ My purpose in this chapter is to explore two of them and thereby to delve into several substantive issues involving self-love and self-knowledge that will occupy us in succeeding chapters as well. Of course, self-love and narcissism are not identical, but they are related. Narcissism in the sense discussed here turns out to be connected to another important theme of this study—that of illusion (using this term broadly enough for the moment to include delusion, deception, and self-deception). Self-love and illusion are not only central topics in both Rousseau and in Smith, they evidently have an important bearing on the nature and possibility of self-knowledge.⁴

Our first interpretive question (with which I begin in Section 1, and to which I return in Sections 3 and 4) concerns the relation between the Preface and the play which it prefaces. At first sight, Rousseau’s decision to join them seems quite strange, if not arbitrary. Not only was the play composed years earlier (see below for the details), the Preface appears to be concerned primarily with the themes of the First Discourse, and thus with social and political issues, whereas the play seems concerned principally with something quite different: the nature of an individual’s self-love and love of another in the context of a comedy about a family and its servants. In the Preface itself, moreover, little of substance seems made of the relation between the two pieces.⁵ And yet the act of attaching the two pieces to each other suggests this question: might there be a deep connection between the social critique of the First Discourse, as articulated in the Preface, and the play’s portrayal of narcissism? The question should be read in both directions, as it were: for the Preface may illuminate our reading of the play just as the play may illuminate our reading of the Preface.

The second interpretive question (explored in Section 2) concerns a different level of intertextuality, and it too leads into substantive issues. The original story of Narcissus is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I put aside ancient variants of the story). Rousseau transforms the story in very interesting ways while preserving an insight of capital importance concerning the role of a certain kind of projective illusion. I shall explore aspects of this appropriation.

The topic of narcissism is multifaceted, and in Section 3 I briefly comment on several passages from Rousseau’s Emile, Freud, and Adam Phillips that help to flesh out the connection between idealization, narcissism, illusion, and social critique. All this also bears on the problem of Rousseau’s self-presentation in the Preface, which I pursue further in Section 4. The theatrical or performative character of his self-presentation is, along with its sheer hermeneutic complexity, remarkable. But what is its point in relation to the substantive themes presented in this context? The question leads back to the problem of the nature, possibility, and indeed desirability of self-knowledge. In the concluding section of this chapter I begin to explore the dialectic between Rousseau and Smith about these issues.

Section 1 The Preface and its relation to Narcissus

So that what is at issue here is not my play, but myself.

Rousseau, Preface to Narcissus⁶

Rousseau begins the Preface with a falsehood: “I wrote this Play at the age of eighteen” (Preface, 92.1/OC II, 959), which would place it at 1730–1. In fact, as he confesses in the Confessions Bk. III, (CW V, 100/OC I, 120), he “lied by several years.” The play apparently went through various drafts early on, and it seems that in 1742–3 Rousseau showed it to Marivaux, who agreed to “touch it up” (Conf. Bk. VII, in CW V, 241/OC I, 287).⁷ While it was drafted prior to the publication of the First Discourse (1751), when Rousseau was in his twenties, it was published, along with the Preface, in 1753—after the First Discourse and two years before the publication of the Second Discourse. It was performed in Paris in 1752. Even after the First Discourse, he composed an opera entitled The Village Soothsayer (performed in 1752). His decision to publish Narcissus is consistent with that continued commitment to literary creation. And yet in the Preface he defends the First Discourse’s critique of the arts, letters, sciences, and philosophy, and in the later Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater (1758) he extends the critique still further. And so we seem to have an ongoing battle within Rousseau’s own work between the criticism of the arts and letters, on the one hand, and his production thereof, on the other (if Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) and Emile (1762) are counted, then this battle continued considerably beyond the publication of the First Discourse).

By attaching the Preface to a dramatic production and then publishing them together, Rousseau throws the seeming contradiction in the face of his critics.⁸ The chief focus of the Preface, as announced in the first ten paragraphs, is precisely to rebut the charge of inconsistency between Rousseau’s word and deed. So Rousseau puts his self-presentation, the coherence of his public position as well as the question of his motivations, on center stage—and this not only for other spectators but also for himself. Rousseau represents his decision to have the play presented to the public as an occasion for self-knowledge: it is to instruct him as to whether or not he cares about the opinions of the public and thus whether he deserves his own esteem (Preface, 92.2 and 104–5.38–9/OC II, 959 and 973). Apart from the opening lines quoted at the start of this paper, Rousseau refers to his play only twice more in the Preface, the last time in order to condemn its quality and implicitly to praise his own honesty in acknowledging that fact (Preface, 105.39/OC II, 973). But this, once again, occurs in the very act of publishing the play under his own name.

We may confidently assert that Rousseau is in fact concerned with the reception of his work from the start of his career as author to its end.⁹ Consequently, we are left unsure as to what to trust in Rousseau’s self-presentation here and how to relate it to the theme of honest self-examination as well as to social critique (some of which targets deception and (self-)falsification, as we know from the Preface (100.28/OC II, 968)). The opening paragraphs of the Preface—not to mention Rousseau’s publishing the play along with the Preface—express an uneasy dialectic between claims to independence (in the form, say, of alleged indifference to the public’s reception of one’s work) and dependence (in the form, say, of a determined, repeated defense of one’s work). Rousseau leaves unarticulated here the connection between showing himself that his self-esteem is warranted, on the one hand, and addressing his arguments to an audience, on the other. It seems clear that he cannot achieve what he considers to be the proper relation to himself, the proper self-appraisal and perhaps self-endorsement, without defending himself in print (inter alia, against charges of inconsistency between his words and deeds)—in the present case, by publishing a play whose topic is, appropriately, self-love and its relation to love of others.¹⁰

To return to the inconsistency charge, the Preface offers three replies:

1. even if accurate, the charge does not prove that his principles are false, just that he has not acted in accordance with them (Preface, 94.8/OC II, 962);
2. even if there is an inconsistency between condemning arts and letters and authoring them, when he wrote the sorts of pieces his First Discourse and the Preface are condemning he had not yet articulated the principles in question (Preface, 95.9/OC II, 963);
3. there is no inconsistency.

The first two responses would be quite weak. The first would not show that the principles in question are true, and the second would leave the inconsistency charge intact (and it is, in any case, not historically accurate since he later composed other works of a literary nature). So it does not surprise that the bulk of the Preface is devoted to showing (3). What is the argument for (3)?

It will be recalled that the Preface offers several arguments explaining why arts, letters, and science do not purify morals but instead both express and contribute to their corruption.¹¹ People succumb to the “craving for distinction” (Preface, 97.20/OC II, 965); as a result, they forsake virtue for the appearance thereof. A “taste for letters, philosophy, and the fine arts softens bodies and souls” (Preface, 98.23/OC II, 966). Further, philosophy leads to unsociableness by prizing the theoretical over the practical life. The philosopher becomes not only prideful but also contemptuous of others: his “amour propre grows in direct proportion to his indifference to the rest of the universe” (Preface, 99.25/OC II, 967). This is the sole occurrence in the body of the Preface of a term that will become crucial in the Second Discourse and beyond (it was not used in the First Discourse); “amour propre” here means something like pride.¹² This is followed by “the most arresting and the most cruel” of the “truths” he has articulated: the interdependence of crucial elements of “our century’s politics”—the arts, sciences, commerce, letters, and such that its defenders believe tighten the social bonds through self-interest—has a terrible unintended consequence. Then follows the passage to which I have already referred to the effect that modern society requires deception, manipulation, and in some sense (self-)falsification (Preface, 100.27–8/OC II, 968).

How does any of this prepare for the third answer to the inconsistency charge? Rousseau is clear that there is no going back to some purer condition by eliminating the arts, sciences, letters, and philosophy (Preface, 103.35/OC II, 971–2). Yet the judgment (asserted in the Preface, 101.30/OC II, 969) that the thesis that human beings are not by nature bad is “highly consoling and useful” suggests that more than simply preventing further moral decline is to be hoped for. An analogy is drawn from medicine: as a drug may treat the disease that “injudicious use” of the drug created, so the arts and sciences (Preface, 103.35/OC II, 972; see also the note to 105.41/OC II, 974)—and letters, and presumably philosophy as well—may have a sort of homeopathic medicinal value in this non-ideal world. What this homeopathy means is rather sparsely articulated here: arts, “spectacles,” sciences, and so forth can “distract men’s wickedness” (Preface, 104.36/OC II, 972); they provide the “public semblance” of virtue, which is at least better than vice; and “a certain admiration for what is fine … keeps what is good from being entirely forgotten” (Preface, 103.35 and footnote/OC II, 972 and footnote).¹³

The homeopathic medicine would not work in mitigating social corruption unless a taste for the sciences, arts, letters, and philosophy, were among the causes of moral and social corruption. But then it is difficult to understand why the remedy doesn’t make the illness even worse. Certainly, Rousseau cannot be saying that every instance of the arts, letters, and so forth is defensible once a society is no longer simply virtuous; but then which of them—if any—meet the bill?

It is not at all clear that Narcissus falls into the narrow genre of homeopathically useful remedies. While certainly affording room for mirth, it is also transgressive in some ways; moreover, some of the questions it raises are perplexing and deep (so too with other of Rousseau’s literary and philosophical productions). It is worth noting that Rousseau does not explicitly say that Narcissus falls into the category of homeopathic remedies. Moreover, we are entitled to ask if works such as the First Discourse and Preface have a homeopathically useful function (recalling that the former won a prize that guaranteed it enormous attention). The answer there too is unclear. Given the sweep of Rousseau’s critique in the First Discourse and Preface—with arts, fine arts, letters, science, and philosophy all in his sights—would not all of his writings, as well as most of his other writings or productions (consider the concluding two paragraphs of the Preface), be subject to the homeopathic medicine test (be such as to “distract men’s wickedness” and so forth)? Rousseau implies that they pass the test (Preface, 104.37/OC II, 972–3); do they? This is a self-referential problem wort...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• 1 Narcissism, self-knowledge, and social critique: from Rousseau’s Preface to Narcissus to Adam Smith
• 2 Genealogical narrative, self-knowledge, and the scope of philosophy
• 3 Sociability, pitié, and sympathy
• 4 “To be” and “to appear”: self-falsification, exchange, and freedom
• 5 Liberty, civil religion, and “sentiments of sociability”
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index