The Autocritique of Enlightenment

Rousseau and the Philosophes

Mark Hulliung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412853644
• eBook ISBN: 9781351305549
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Of all the critiques of the Enlightenment, the most telling may be found in the life and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This searching, long overlooked auto critique receives its first full treatment by Mark Hulliung. Here he restores Rousseau to his historical context, the world of the philosophes, and shows how he employed the arsenal of Voltaire, Diderot, and others to launch a powerful attack on their version of the Enlightenment.

With great intellectual skill and rhetorical force, Rousseau exposed the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the Enlightenment: the psychology of Locke, the genre of philosophical and conjectural history, the latest applications of science to the study of society and politics, and the growing interest in materialist modes of thought. As the century moved on, Hulliung shows, the most advanced philosophes found themselves drawn to conclusions that paralleled Rousseau's an agreement that went unacknowledged at the time. The Enlightenment that emerges here is richer, more nuanced, and more self-critical than the one reflected in many interpretations. By extracting Rousseau from personal entangle-ments that stymied debate in his time and that mislead critics to this day, Hulliung reveals the remarkable and remarkably unacknowledged force of Rousseau's accomplishment. This edition includes a brilliant new introduction by the author.

1

The Virtue of Selfishness

Nothing was more important to Bentham than that we should take our utilitarianism pure, simple, undiluted, without a trace of sentimentality or embarrassment; nothing was more important to the French philosophes than to avoid all-out utilitarianism, despite their constant and enthusiastic recourse to the notions of interest, self-love, and usefulness. Bentham for all intents and purposes would expurgate “virtue” from our moral vocabulary; the consistent refusal of the philosophes to do the same was self-conscious, adamant, and central to their shared intellectual project, that of reconciling interest with virtue, inclination with duty.¹ To many if not all of them an ethic of unalloyed self-interest was morally unworthy; to every one of them such an ethic was exactly what their religious and conservative enemies attributed to them, the better to dispose of the Enlightenment.

Not the least of Rousseau’s many achievements was his brilliant demolition of the treaty between interest and virtue so carefully worked out by the philosophes. That he did so as a true son of the French Enlightenment, not as a pre-Kantian or a preromantic, that he was sympathetic to the concept of self-love and used it constructively as well as destructively, made his critique all the more decisive. After he finished, the most discerning of the philosophes had reason to believe that the reconciliation of interest with virtue was possible only through a much more radical Enlightenment than anything they had foreseen, or through a return to religion—the ultimate avowal of failure.

The Misanthrope Silenced

Kant’s motto for the Enlightenment was Dare to Know; Holbach’s might be stated as Dare to Love Thyself.² Although much of the baron’s work appealed to only one camp within the philosophical movement, his warm endorsement of self-love, of amour de soi or amour-propre, was typical of the philosophes. Their championing of self-love and justification of self-interest were natural outgrowths of a larger campaign to reclaim human nature after centuries of Christian messages of self-abnegation. Saint Augustine had spoken of two cities formed by two loves, “the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.”³ Against Augustine and his disciples at Port Royal, the philosophes wrote to vindicate the city of man, including in their remarks a sustained justification of the propensity of each of the members of the earthly city to express love of self through the pursuit of self-interest. Only by accepting and relishing our nature can we be at home, whole and complete, here and now, in what may be the only city we shall ever inhabit.

Any discussion by a philosophe of self-interest and self-love was almost invariably part of a larger effort to challenge the Church’s presentation of the human condition. So it was with Voltaire’s attempt to refute Pascal’s Pensées at the end of the Lettres philosophiques (1734); the respective orientations of the two authors to self-love was only one facet of a grand quarrel over human nature and human possibilities, a fight in which the representative of the Enlightenment tested himself against a figure of the previous century who remained the most formidable, tenacious, and worthy of opponents.

Ironically, the philosophes were in large measure responsible for rescuing the Pensées from the oblivion to which the religious authorities had consigned it.⁴ Bossuet and Malebranche had ignored Pascal, and Arnauld did his best to offer the world an expurgated and bland edition of the Pensées.⁵ Hence the philosophes remained unaware of, among other things, the biting political jottings in Pascal’s masterpiece. Yet for all the Jansenist revisionism, the philosophes understood quite well that the Pensées were a significant challenge to their account of la condition humaine; they understood because Voltaire focused their attention on the relevant passages that survived the scissors and paste of Port Royal.⁶

“I dare,” wrote Voltaire, “to take the side of humanity against this sublime Misanthrope.”⁷ Why Voltaire and all the philosophes should return incessantly to Pascal⁸ is clear: he could so easily have been their precursor rather than their nemesis. An experimental scientist, Pascal ridiculed Descartes’ a priori dismissal of the possibility of a vacuum; Pascal also understood both the promise and the limitations of l’esprit de géométrie, pursued pioneering studies in the mathematics of probability, and was a leader in applied science, all of which might make him seem the author of an early version of various planks in the program of the philosophes.⁹ What is more, he spoke not as a member of those cloistered at Port Royal but as someone familiar with the mondain, the libertine, and the honnête homme, willing to grant them that happiness is our inevitable and legitimate desire¹⁰ and quite capable of addressing them in their worldly language. In his intended audience as in his scientific method, Pascal’s position is largely indistinguishable from that of the philosophes, which made his assertion that happiness can be found only in capitulation to the “hidden God” especially menacing.

Pascal’s gambit was to end rather than to begin with the doctrine of original sin; without the mystery of original sin, a doctrine incomprehensible and repugnant to reason, we can never understand ourselves¹¹ or find shelter from the storm of human existence. Or so he hoped to prove by alluding to our agitated, divided, perpetually empty and unhappy selves. A hodgepodge of the highest and the lowest, the human self, however abject and debased, is haunted by memories of the wholeness and happiness that characterized it before the Fall.¹² In Christianity, and only in Christianity, we discover “the cause of our weaknesses, the treatment that can cure them, and the means of obtaining such treatment.”¹³

Among the foremost symptoms of our illness are that we can never sit still,¹⁴ cannot find satisfaction in ourselves, and seek to flee from our nothingness, to fill the void within by endlessly chasing after desires which, once fulfilled, immediately yield to successor desires¹⁵ rather than providing the inner peace for which we yearn. Our human condition is one of inconstancy, boredom, and anxiety¹⁶ and is marked by relentless efforts to escape from self-knowledge¹⁷ by means of an implicit strategy of living outside ourselves, passing the time in an unbroken sequence of meaningless diversions. “Nothing could be more wretched than to be … reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.”¹⁸ Absorbed in past or future, never living in the present, our lives end before we have begun to live. “We never actually live, but only hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”¹⁹

Should we turn to our fellow humans in the hope that what we are with them will compensate for how little we are alone? To do so is to forget that “Jesus tore himself away from his disciples to enter upon his agony; we must tear ourselves away from those who are nearest and dearest to us in order to imitate him.”²⁰ It is also to forget that we shall die alone; no one else can do it for us.²¹ Besides, even our most intimate relationships are shallow: the woman a man lives with is no longer the woman he once loved,²² and friendship is based upon not knowing what our friends say about us after we have left the room.²³

How utterly disgusting, then, if such are our intimate ties, must our ordinary social relations be. It is only by mutual deception that the social world of our making, one composed of restless egos, each out for self, can be made bearable.

The nature of self-love and of this human self is to love only self and consider only self … He wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that his faults deserve only their dislike and contempt … He takes every care to hide his faults both from himself and from others … Anyone who has an interest in winning our affection avoids rendering us a service he knows to be unwelcome; … we hate the truth and it is kept from us; … we like being deceived and we are deceived.

There is no place for charity in a world where “man is nothing but disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others.”²⁴

Exceptionally well versed in science, Pascal chose in the Pensées to underscore its limits. Science is incapable, he notes, of telling us right from wrong,²⁵ nor—he tells us in a passage deleted by Port Royal—can it give us reason to feel at home in the infinite, dreadful spaces it depicts as constituting physical reality.²⁶ Both where we have come from and where we are going, genetic and final causes, are outside the reach of physics.²⁷ Even efficient causes come down to a matter of blind, unreasoned conviction or plain habit: “When we see the same effect always recur, we conclude that it is necessarily so by nature, as that there will be a tomorrow, but nature often gives us the lie and does not obey its own rules.”²⁸

Because they think, humans are the glory no less than the refuse of the universe;²⁹ yet scientific reason lets us down in time of need and our everyday reason also fails, defeated in the interminable civil war between reason and the passions.³⁰ “All our reasoning amounts to surrendering to passion,”³¹ and we are left at odds with, and divided against, ourselves. When the skeptic, the mondain, and the libertine have exhausted the alternatives, they will realize that there is no place to go but back to the Church; if they behave long enough as believers, attending mass, genuflecting, sprinkling themselves with holy water, they will believe.³²

Much of Voltaire’s response hinged on showing that what Pascal had portrayed as dire was perfectly harmless and insignificant if placed within the philosophy of John Locke, already treated in an earlier chapter of the Lettres philosophiques, or Letters Concerning the English Nation. Of course, we live outside ourselves since, according to Locke, “ideas can only come from outside …...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition: Revisiting The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes
• Preface
• Cast of Supporting Characters
• Author’s Note on Works Referenced
• Introduction: Rousseau and the Philosophes
• 1 The Virtue of Selfishness
• 2 Philosophical History
• 3 From Criticism to Self-Criticism
• 4 Three Enemies in One Person
• 5 Generation, Degeneration, Regeneration
• 6 Judging Jean-Jacques
• Conclusion: Posterity Gained and Lost
• Index