Socratic Deformation
This review of Rousseau’s Dog is odd.
How silly can clever men be? For anyone on more than nodding acquaintance with university professors, the answer is clear: ‘very silly indeed’. For the fortunate majority denied first-hand experience, this account of the relationship between two of the wisest fools in Christendom will fill the gap.
Well, of course, clever university professors can be extremely silly, especially moderately clever ones who think they’re more than moderately clever, as moderately clever university professors often do, on account of spending several hours every week looking at the upturned faces of dear little undergraduates who know less than they do (see ‘Socratic deformation’ in The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense). But some are sillier than others, and not all are silly. Let’s not get carried away here. Just because clever people can be silly, it doesn’t follow that Hume was as silly as Rousseau.
There are plenty more such good moments in this wonderfully readable account of two very silly men.
That’s a silly concluding sentence on this subject; it’s a lot sillier than anything Hume ever wrote. (Yes, I have; every word.)
Carole Angier is much better. Much less, one might say, silly.
…our authors seek to discover what really happened between Rousseau and Hume, and to adjudicate between them. The debate, as they present it, is between sense and sensibility, rationality and feeling, and they come down on the side of feeling. In the case of Hume, the opposition is simplified. But if, like me, you choose sense, you’ll want to argue with E and E on almost every page.
I do choose sense. Feeling (of course; obviously; indisputably) is essential, but it needs to be checked by rationality. Rousseau wasn’t always terribly good at that, and he certainly wasn’t always generous. Hume was immensely generous to Rousseau, and Rousseau was immensely ungrateful and vindictive in return. There is no contest between the two of them.
It’s the accepted view of Hume they want to challenge: le bon David, universally admired for his decency and serenity. They certainly show that, about these events at least, he was far from serene; and not always decent either…we’d probably all agree that he behaved badly in publicly attacking poor, tormented Rousseau, instead of maintaining a charitable silence. They show that Hume was human. But they go much further than this. They always find the best possible explanation for Rousseau, and the worst possible one for Hume.
The trouble is…wanting to challenge an accepted view is an agenda like any other, and it can cause one to distort the evidence just as any other agenda can. It’s yet another distortion-device that one needs to be careful about.
Rousseau’s Dog traduces and misinterprets Hume like this throughout. He grounded his moral philosophy on the human capacity for altruism and fellow-feeling, and he practised both in his life. He failed with Rousseau, but so did everyone else. E and E suggest that the encounter with brilliant, unbalanced Rousseau made Hume temporarily unbalanced himself. I fear the same has happened to them.
Funny that it didn’t occur to them that there might have been a reason that Hume was universally admired for his decency and serenity and that people ended up fleeing from Rousseau. Maybe they’re rather silly clever people too.
It is worth noting, for my own satisfaction if no-one else’s, that the ‘Tim Blanning’ who wrote the rather trite review you disparage is Professor TCW Blanning of the University of Cambridge.
Personally, I always thought him a bit of an ass, too.
Ha – that’s funny.
What’s his field?
Hume, the man who said that reason is and should be the slave of the passions, represents sense?
Rousseau’s personal acquaintance with Hume, coming at a time when Rousseau was dealing with fits of madness and organized opposition to him in France, obviously started one of those wild and awful mismatches that punctuated Rousseau’s career. But it is hard not to see in Emile the Humean subject brought to life, beginning with education by way of an association of experiences (remember Emile’s broken window? the lesson he learns from experience is much in the vein that Hume talks about, in the Treatise, when he claims that one experiment can alter one’s understanding because ‘that tho’ we are here suppos’d to have had only one experiment of a particular effect, yet we have many millions to convince us of this principle; that like objects placed in like circumstances, will always produce like effects; and as this principle has established itself by a sufficient custom, it bestows an evidence and firmness on any opinion, to which it can be apply’d.’) Rousseau drew the conclusion that an education based on teaching reason before experience was upside down – which is close in spirit to Hume’s metaphysics, even though Hume’s conservative politics would probably not have countenanced this form of education being adopted on a nation wide basis. Although Hume’s Toryism was not his philosophical opinion — his perfect commonwealth, a limited monarchy with a parliament like Cromwell’s, isn’t so different from Rousseau’s idea of a Republic.
It is simply a canard that the Enlightenment was all about Reason – the Age of Reason was such because it gave a just place to sentiment, which is why it isn’t the age of Rationality; indeed, sensibility was — at least according to James Buchan – forged as a fashionable attitude in Edinburgh.
C18 history of course! Military/political history up to Napoleon, to be more precise. Which is to say, he knows a lot about the context of the things he dismisses so blithely….
Oh, and on the other point, roger, all true, but Rousseau was still a tosser you wouldn’t want around… And the ‘organised opposition’ was as much as anything else a co-ordinated despair at his fits of madness…
Sure, Hume represents sense. Hume is Elinor Dashwood and Rousseau is Marianne. Discuss.
But seriously. There is that thing he said in the Letters…
“For the purposes of life and conduct, and society, a little good sense is surely better than all this genius, and a little good humour than this extreme sensibility.”