Rousseau's Dog (35 page)

Smith published his remarks, though there is some debate over whether the economist toned them down, removing some of his friend's more strident anti-Christian sentiments. Nonetheless, he quotes Hume
saying, “Have a little patience, good Charon: I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.” It was provocative enough to raise hackles. Boswell wished Dr. Johnson would “knock Hume's and Smith's heads together, and make vain and ostentatious infidelity exceedingly ridiculous.” Both Johnson and Burke thought Hume's courage in the face of death was a mask; that his real agenda was to display his virtuous life and tranquil death as evidence that morality had nothing to do with religious faith. Johnson scoffed that Hume was “a man who has so much conceit as to tell all mankind that they have been bubbled [deceived] for ages, and he is the wise man who sees better than they.”

O
UR
two protagonists shared one noteworthy devotee. In 1762, with Rousseau in Môtiers and Hume about to move to Paris, in the isolated Prussian city of Königsberg, a thirty-eight-year-old lecturer devoured Rousseau's works as they were published. According to one anecdote, the fastidious Immanuel Kant, whose daily routine was so rigid and undeviating that people set their watches by him, became so absorbed in
Émile
that he bewildered his neighbors by forgetting to take his usual post-lunch constitutional. Kant was alert to the seductive dangers of Rousseau's language: he worried that its beauty detracted from his ideas; to penetrate these ideas he read and reread him. Rousseau understood, he thought, the paradox of autonomy—that freedom meant conformity to a rule. As he was writing his own masterpiece, the
Critique of Pure Reason,
he had a single portrait in his house—of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

As for Hume, Kant said the Scot had “woken him from his dogmatic slumber.” Kant's preoccupation with cause and effect, which he thought the basis of all scientific knowledge, was provoked by Hume's skeptical
reflections. Unable to accept Hume's skepticism about causation, he sought to demonstrate how a proposition such as “every event has a cause” could be known a priori (i.e., could be known independent of experience), even though it was a synthetic proposition (not true or false by virtue of its terms). “Water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius” is a synthetic proposition. “All bachelors are unmarried” is an analytic one, true by definition.

W
ITH THE EXCEPTION
of Nietzsche, probably no philosopher's posthumous reputation has fluctuated quite so dramatically as Rousseau's. The
Confessions
was initially decried—pompous and obscene being the general judgment. Yet within a decade, sentiment was already becoming more positive. The work is now established as a literary masterpiece.

Rousseau's political legacy has been much more contentious. Although he himself was no advocate of rebellion, his name became inextricably bound up with the French Revolution. Its makers on all sides drew on his works to justify their actions, most famously Robespierre, who ideologically embraced Rousseau (along with such Romans as Cato) and executed with zeal his understanding of “the general will of the people”—in his own phrase
une volonté une,
“one single will.” Nevertheless, two years before Robespierre grasped power, Edmund Burke had responded to the revolutionaries' worship of Rousseau with a brilliant and farsighted diatribe,
A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly.
“Everyone knows that there is a great dispute among leaders [of the National Assembly] which of them is the best resemblance to Rousseau.” The truth was, he said, they all resembled him. And Burke accused them of adopting the worst of Rousseau's vices, vanity, “that makes the whole man false.” “We have had the great professor and founder of
the philosophy of vanity
in England. … He left no doubt
in my mind that he entertained no principle to influence his heart or guide his understanding but vanity. With that he was possessed to a degree little short of madness.”

Rousseau's constant influence on later generations is indubitable (though not always positive). He can be seen as father of the Romantic movement (and even a great-grandfather of the Green movement). The Romantics were inspired by his confirmation of the worth of each and every one of us, however ordinary, by his emphasis on equality, on knowledge of the inner self, and on a spiritual connection with nature, as well as by his imagination and the depth of his feelings.

In 1816, Byron and Percy Shelley went on a pilgrimage to Lake Geneva, carrying with them
Héloïse.
Shelley described Rousseau as “a sublime genius.” Mary Shelley had studied Rousseau, and his writings inspired
Frankenstein:
the monster becomes corrupted by his association with society. Schiller, Stendhal (for whom Rousseau was “the noblest soul and the greatest genius that ever was”), de Tocqueville, and Schopenhauer were all admirers. To Hazlitt, he was a new Prometheus. Lytton Strachey said of the
Confessions
that it “started the vast current in literature and sentiment which is still flowing.” A youthful Leo Tolstoy took to wearing a medal on which was engraved Rousseau's portrait; he read all of Rousseau's works, but was captivated in particular by
Héloïse, Émile,
and the
Confessions.

I
N THE TWENTIETH
century, Rousseau was charged with offering intellectual justification for totalitarianism. But if his posthumous reputation has ridden helter-skelter—one moment as a benevolent patron of equality and liberty, the next the warped mastermind of tyranny—Hume's has steadily climbed, though with the occasional hiatus. In America, the influence of his less theoretical writings (his essays and
History
) should not be overlooked. Among the United States' founding fathers, for instance, James Madison was
a staunch disciple, his version of federalism traceable to Hume's thinking. Many American luminaries consumed Hume's
History
—including Samuel Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Rush (though Thomas Jefferson despised the work, labeling Hume a “conceited Scotchman”).

In the nineteenth century, the historian began to make way for the philosopher. Hume's
History
ceased to be the standard text, superseded by, among others, Thomas Macaulay's. Meanwhile, the
Treatise,
the book that fell “dead born,” came to be recognized as an enduring masterpiece. By the twentieth century, Hume's standing as one of the most significant thinkers of all time became firmly entrenched: there remains ongoing engagement with his skeptical conundrums, which still fascinate and unsettle, tease and bewitch. His philosophical style is hailed as an exemplar of clarity and a model of ingenuity. Bertrand Russell, an empiricist in the Humean tradition, acknowledged Hume's supreme importance in his A
History of Western Philosophy.
The Vienna Circle, which for a time before World War II dominated the world of philosophy, was a legatee of the eighteenth-century Scot. This group of mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers dismissed much of aesthetics, morality, and religion as meaningless metaphysics; to be meaningful, propositions had either to be verifiable through experience or true by definition. Two centuries earlier, Hume had famously concluded his
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

Members of the Circle grappled with Hume's conundrum about induction, as did the Viennese-born Professor Sir Karl Popper. In his
book about Hume, the philosopher Sir Freddie Ayer could confidently assert that Hume was the greatest of all British philosophers. Beyond the confined world of academic philosophy, Albert Einstein revered Hume, giving credit to the philosopher for transforming his powers of critical reasoning and ultimately with being a catalyst in his discovery of the theory of relativity. In a 1915 letter to the founder of the Vienna Circle, Moritz Schlick, Einstein revealed that just before his fundamental insight, he studied Hume's treatise “with eagerness and admiration.”

22

A
T THE END
of his long tribute to “our most excellent, and never-to-be-forgotten friend,” Adam Smith put David Hume forward as the
exemplar of as “perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” If so, why, in the quarrel with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, did Hume act so far out of character?

The answer must begin with Paris. Paris was the one arena where Hume had been an unmitigated triumph. In Paris, he had been treated with “perfect veneration,” esteemed by the
philosophes,
swooned over by salon hostesses. After a career marked by official hostility, qualified success, and outright disappointment, France was the country in which he had been embraced and acclaimed, and not just for his work but for his character. He was
le bon David,
decent, honest, virtuous, just, wise. When Mme de Boufflers, the woman who led the field in passionate reverence for Hume, begged him to save this persecuted and distressed author, Rousseau, how could
le bon David
possibly let her down? Hume's early, effulgent letters of love for Rousseau are quite out of keeping with his normal plain, direct style: he was visualizing himself through the gaze of others (an instance of what Rousseau would call
amour propre
).

Nonetheless, a single man with no dependents and few obligations, Hume had neither wanted nor expected to chaperone Rousseau to safety. Perhaps, if Rousseau had traveled to England without him, as Hume intended, the Scot would have absented himself entirely, just as he had from Mme de Boufflers on her visit to England. No clinging devotee then, no clinging exile now. And, indeed, it was not just the bothersome Rousseau; with Le Vasseur and Sultan in tow, Hume suddenly acquired responsibility for a family. He had also passed from being the celebrated Mr. Hume to being the escort for the celebrated John James Rousseau, and in the city where this Scotsman was always uncomfortable and would never receive his due.

There is evidence that Hume's attitude to Rousseau was already colored by scorn. After all, he was probably the author of the central quip in the King of Prussia letter, and even before Rousseau's departure to
Wootton, he had delivered several cutting dissections of his character. There was more than a hint of animosity in all this, attended by the thought that Rousseau's character—his professed desire for solitude, his primitive existence, his “illness,” his “virtue”—was a bundle of affectations. That might explain, for example, Hume's investigation into Rousseau's finances and the evident desire to expose the simple man of feeling as a fraud. Hume's letter urging Mme de Boufflers to contact Rousseau's banker showed his motivation clearly enough: “For, even if the fact should prove against him, which is very improbable, I should only regard it as one weakness more, and do not make my good opinion of him to depend on a single incident.”

This is why, of all those who read Rousseau's letter delaying the pension, Hume alone took it as a rejection, and on that basis rushed to tell his friends how Rousseau was unaccountable, blamable, extravagant. He condemned Rousseau's extreme sensibility. Rousseau was exhibiting a selfish disregard toward those who had helped him: to Hume, Rousseau's behavior had provided confirmation of his true nature.

Imagine, then, Hume's state of mind as he opened a letter from Rousseau, anticipating a salute for his extra efforts over the pension. Instead, he was confronted by the 341 words of the mortifying charge leveled by the man to whom he had devoted so much time, and for whom he had,
au fond,
so little time. Moreover, his French coterie had been proved right. Hume's foolish raptures over Rousseau had been shown up for the froth they were. Worst of all, these charges might soon be reproduced in the exile's memoirs, set out with a rhetorical flair that readers would find impossible to resist. But Rousseau had perpetrated something still more provocative. Hume had been hunting for proof that Rousseau was a fraud. Suddenly the quarry had put
Hume
's virtue in question.
Lye, lye lye,
scribbled the Scot frantically in the margin of the ensuing full indictment, simultaneously incensed and terrified.
Lye, lye lye.