Why I admire Jean-Jacques Rousseau Despite his Many Major Faults
By: Kevin Shau
Tags: Politics, Society, Philosophy, Enlightenment, Criticism

Rousseau wearing an Armenian costume (1766), painted by Allan Ramsay

Many intellectuals I have run into have had a rather pessimistic view of the famous Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). From a history professor who saw him as a hypocrite to Jordan Peterson’s damning dismissals, Rousseau seems to be a philosopher to love to hate. There are certainly reasons for this. He abandoned his illegitimate children at foundling hospitals despite being the author of a popular child-rearing book. He wrote personal reflections which were way too personal (and held public readings of these, often embarrassing episodes). He had trouble maintaining friendships and saw conspiracies where they did not exist. His Social Contract has influenced some of the worst dictators of the past two centuries. Despite all of this, Rousseau was one of the most genuinely human philosophers of the Enlightenment. He understood its shortcomings better than most. He appeared to hold in contempt middle class materialism while praising the simplicity of his native Geneva.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau seemed to intuit the problems associated with the excessive materialism of the coming centuries. While he may have gone a little too far in the other direction (the Industrial Revolution made life infinitely better for the average person), the problems associated with excess caused problems all their own. As psychologist Jordan Peterson noted in one of his lectures, leisure is the precondition for existential angst.

“Richness of apparel may proclaim the man of fortune,and elegance the man of taste; but true health and manliness are known by different signs. It is under the homespun of the labourer, and not beneath the gilt and tinsel of the courtier, that we should look for strength and vigour of body.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’ (1750)

One can see a great divide in society — between blue collar values, grounded in practicality, and the superficiality of bourgeois values, grounded in the opinions of others. The most absurd of the latter can be seen in the popular dress of the eighteenth century, known as the ‘macaroni.’

‘The Macaroni’ (1773)

The macaroni has much in common with the Hollywood celebrities and fashion gurus of today — concern with outward appearance and keeping up with trends. The individual pictured in the above satire would not be out of place in the world of Instagram and Facebook.

Generally speaking, as far as the arts go, they tend to become quite effete in later stages of culture. One can see this in the statues from ancient Greece — going from the muscular heroes of old to the fragile androgyny consistent with decadence.

“Thus it is that luxury, profligacy and slavery, have been, in all ages, the scourge of the efforts of our pride to emerge from that happy state of ignorance, in which the wisdom of providence had placed us. That thick veil with which it has covered all its operations seems to be a sufficient proof that it never designed us for such fruitless researches. But is there, indeed, one lesson it has taught us, by which we have rightly profited, or which we have neglected with impunity? Let men learn for once that nature would have preserved them from science, as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child. Let them know that all the secrets she hides are so many evils from which she protects them, and that the very difficulty they find in acquiring knowledge is not the least of her bounty towards them. Men are perverse; but they would have been far worse, if they had had the misfortune to be born learned.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’ (1750)

Rousseau seemed to have gotten the problem more or less right, though his solutions are often a different matter. His advocacy of simple living is probably the best solution one can find in his writings.

Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences for an essay contest (which he won) in 1750, arguing that the arts and sciences corrupt human morality rather than improve it. This is a quite problematic claim, as the arts are a reflection of society (and influence it) while the sciences are tools developed by human beings to understand the world around them. Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning (1999) expands on this, situating the role of the sciences in a larger human-centered perspective.

“The world can be validly construed as a forum of action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however — myth, literature and drama — portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former is the object world-what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter is the world of value-what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action.” — Jordan Peterson, ‘Maps of Meaning’

Rousseau gets quite a bit wrong by asserting that the sciences corrupt humanity because the sciences are tools. One needs morality because morality is that which offers a path forward (through elimination of non-useful information and use of values to determine motion). The abuse of ‘science’ by nineteenth-century intellectuals has more to do with the need for justification of certain prejudices (in many cases) than with the pursuit of knowledge. Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not construe the world in the same manner as Peterson. Indeed, Rousseau often flirts too much with what today would be called social constructivism. He fails to see societies as expressions of human nature across time, instead focusing on creating theoretical impositions on society through his works to counter the excesses of humankind. In short, Rousseau would have done far better as a writer of self-improvement than of politics.

Rousseau’s critique in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences is a valid critique of the superficiality of middle class values. This is something the nineteenth century thinker Benjamin Disraeli would expand upon in his literary works. Indeed, Disraeli’s ‘One-Nation Conservatism’ was conceived of as a union between the working classes and the elites against the decadent bourgeois values.

Rousseau was also spot on in his rejection of excessive study of virtues rather than simply practicing them:

“Before that time the Romans were satisfied with the practice of virtue; they were undone when they began to study it.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’ (1750)

This seems to be an important antecedent to the Genetic Epistemology of Jean Piaget. By studying children playing tag, Piaget observed that children understood the game before they were able to clearly (or uniformly) articulate the rules of the game when asked. This informed his views on the development of human morality and suggested the necessity of the abstract being grounded in the concrete. The problem with so much modern philosophy (particularly of the postmodern variety) is that it does not do this. The emphasis is on increasingly obscure abstractions with no real grounding — essentially a symptom of decadence. Rousseau’s insights were way ahead of his time.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is that critic of Enlightenment sorely needed but also terribly misguided in several of his key writings. His life and works exemplify that ‘crooked timber of humanity’ that Immanuel Kant spoke of, stating that out of such a crooked timber nothing straight could be made. Such is the human condition. Among critics of society, Rousseau ranks at or near the top. He was a genius. But, like many geniuses, not a man who one might like to know and not a man who was right about all or even most of his assertion. Rather, his works contain key insights necessary to keep the excesses of modernity in check.