Rousseau's Dog (19 page)

How then to explain our hitherto unquestioned assumptions about causality and induction? Well, says Hume, when events are constantly connected in time and space, we naturally make the mental leap from one to the other. Thus, we have experienced the temperature from a fire so often that when we place our hand near some flames, custom and habit lead us to anticipate heat. In place of a logical basis for our beliefs, Hume substitutes a psychological one.

His reflections on “personal identity” were equally counterintuitive. You might have the idea that there is some enduring entity—the self—that constitutes the essential “you,” that makes the “you” digesting these words now the same “you” who absorbed the previous paragraph
some moments ago, the same “you” who went to kindergarten and who will eventually age and die. The Rousseau who fell on his knees before a blue periwinkle believed he was the same Rousseau who had picked a periwinkle three decades earlier when out walking with Mme de Warens. But, argues Hume, this notion of identity is illusory. Try to reflect on your “self.” Try to locate this immutable thing that is supposed to make you, you. All you can detect is a disparate bundle of perceptions. In Hume's words: “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, colour or sound etc. I never catch my self, distinct from some such perception.” The various snapshots passing through one's mind are not linked by any invisible film.

In the face of Hume's skeptical juggernaut, we risk a psychological flattening. If all our deepest assumptions about the way the world works are shown to be illusory, to be derived neither from reason nor from the senses, how can we function, how can we force ourselves out of bed in the morning? Indeed, in the
Treatise
Hume confesses that his theoretical musings even have a debilitating impact on their creator, making him morose and lethargic. But he always finds a way to carry on. Fortunately, the human animal, even the Humean animal, can dwell on such reflections for only a short spell. Our instincts overpower our reason: we cannot help but assume the existence of causality and cannot help but rely and act on past experience. As Hume himself put it: “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.” (And, indeed, his deliberations on economics and history take for granted personal identity, consistency in human conduct, and cause and effect in the material world.)

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.

W
HILE
H
UME 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.

W
ERE 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.