Self indulgence as a philosophical stance.

A philosopher for the Facebook generation

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote hundreds of pages about himself – this is what is tragi-comic about him – yet he had no self-knowledge

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Photo: ALAMY

By Theodore Dalrymple

6:30PM BST 30 Jun 2012

"Here I am, then, alone in the world, with no longer a brother, neighbor, or friend, but only myself, for company. The most sociable and loving of humans has been banished from society by unanimous agreement."

Thus wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the beginning of his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, his last work. It might be said to be the founding document of the age of self-pity: has anyone come after him so lacking in compassion that he feels not pity for himself?

The tercentenary of Rousseau’s birth has just passed. He was born in Geneva (remember this when someone asks you with sarcasm to name three great Swiss) on June 28 1712, the son of a watchmaker, and died at Erménonville, France on July 2 1778. In his 68 years of life he became one of the most influential, which is not necessarily to say one of the best or clearest, thinkers of all time. His trajectory was truly remarkable, and his work still arouses passionate controversy. For example, was he a libertarian or an incipient totalitarian? No one is neutral about Rousseau. I don’t think I have ever heard anyone say of him “well, on the one hand, but on the other…”

His initial passion was music, and his first publication a new system of musical notation which he presented to the French Academy of Sciences. He then published a Dissertation on Modern Music, contributed articles on music to Diderot’s great Encyclopedia and composed an opera, The Village Soothsayer that was actually performed at the Paris opera.

But of course it is for his philosophical ideas that he is principally remembered, revered and reviled. Whether his profound influence upon history and society was the result of the truth of what he said, or of its convenience for the people who followed him, may be questioned.

When someone reads the opening words of The Social Contract, for example, namely that Man is born free and everywhere is in chains, does he think, “Gosh, that is true, I never thought of that before!” or does he think, “I wish I were free of all the irritating restraints on my behavior that prevent me from doing exactly as I choose”?

Rousseau was so contradictory that what we take from him depends almost as much on us as on him. He is a kind of lightning conductor for our desires. Democrats see in his concept of “the general will” the notion of popular sovereignty; aspiring dictators see in it something they believe that they embody, a semi-mystical entity that is independent of any individual’s will, much less that of the numerical majority, and of which he is merely the inspired mouthpiece, as it were.

Rousseau was genuinely revolutionary in the way in which he overturned the notion of Original Sin. For most thinkers before him the question was how Man was to be made good, given his bad or imperfect nature; for Rousseau the question was how Man became bad, given his natural goodness (his answer was society). He did not believe in a return to Nature, exactly, but sought the political means to restore Man to his natural goodness. Personally, I think Rousseau was disastrously mistaken in this; in my opinion, the limitation of the bad in Man is infinitely more important and less sinister politically than the search for the good. When you have limited the bad, the good can take care of itself.

Rousseau was also the unwitting founder of the psychology of the Real Me that is to say of the inner core of each of us that remains immaculate and without sin, however the external person actually behaves. The inner core, the Real Me, is good; what might be called the Epiphenomenal Me, that is to say the one that loses his temper, tells lies, eats too much, etc, is the result of external influences upon him. In this way a monster of depravity may preserve a high opinion of himself and continue his depravity; nothing he can do can deprive him of the natural goodness first espied by Rousseau.

Jean-Jacques was also, in his way, the philosophical progenitor of Facebook, of the notion that we should live our lives in the open, hiding nothing, for concealment is both the symptom and the cause of insincerity, which was one of J-J’s bugbears. He begins his Confessions in a self-congratulatory way: “Here is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly after nature and in all her truth, that exists and probably ever will exist.” The portrait is extremely interesting because Rousseau, whatever his faults, was an extremely interesting man. Who would not be amused by Rousseau’s account of how he became aware as a child of the sexual pleasure to be had by being beaten by a woman? He continues: “To be at the knees of an imperious mistress, to obey her orders, to have to ask her pardon, was for me a very sweet pleasure…”

The problem is that while all men are born equal, they are not all born equally interesting; so the confessional mode does not suit everyone. Besides, and this is what is tragi-comic about him, Rousseau wrote many hundreds of pages about himself but had no self-knowledge. He quarreled with virtually everybody he ever knew; he even managed to reduce the philosopher David Hume, one of the most equable human beings in the history of the world, known in Paris as le bon David, to absolute fury. Yet never once did Rousseau think, “Maybe it’s not them, maybe it’s me.”

Thus this most fascinating man was the originator of the most characteristic of our modern vices – self-expression without self-examination.

Dr. Dalrymple on David Horowitz's latest.

When I was a College Commie David Horowitz's Ramparts Magazine was a monthly stalwart. I only found out about his neo-conservatism later on when I came across his writings about the Second Thoughts Conference and his book Destructive Generation which spoke directly to me and my own political journey. In this review of David's latest book, A Point in Time Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, another favorite commentator, takes up the question of facing death, the meaning of impermanence and how close can reason take us to God.
JimG33

Theodore Dalrymple
Here and After
Political warrior David Horowitz reflects on life and death.
4 November 2011

A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next, by David Horowitz (Regnery, 128 pp., $24.95)
Death is every life’s inevitable denouement, but La Rochefoucauld told us that we can no more stare it in the face than we can stare at the sun. For the most part, we continue our daily round in a state of presumed immortality, and because we are so unfamiliar nowadays with death—it having been carefully put out of our sight by a host of professionals—we treat it as an unwarranted intrusion into our affairs rather than as an existential limit to our brief earthly sojourn. For many, death has become anomalous rather than inevitable, something to protest against rather than accept. For them, the concept of a good death is entirely alien or antipathetic.

David Horowitz tries to stare his own death in the face. Now 71, he has had cancer of the prostate, and he has diabetes and angina; his diplomatic immunity from death, which we all grant ourselves, has been unmistakably withdrawn. His short new book, which it is both necessary and a pleasure to read in one sitting, is a meditation on the meaning of life, sub specie aeternitatis.

Horowitz begins by reflecting on the nature and character of his dogs, whom he takes for regular walks. Perhaps those who don’t love dogs will think this an odd way to begin a book on the meaning of life, but it seems entirely natural and fitting. Indeed, I was struck by how Horowitz’s meditations paralleled mine, occasioned by my relationship, and walks, with my own dog—a relationship intense and happy, at least on my side and, if I don’t delude myself, on his also. The dog, of course, has no intimation of his own mortality, while the owner’s pleasure in the animal’s company is increasingly tinged with a melancholy awareness of his swiftly approaching dissolution. Yet the dog maintains his passionate interest in the little world around him, his small-scale curiosity in his immediate environment. In the face of the physical immensity of the universe and the temporal vastness that both preceded and will follow his oblivion, is a man in any fundamentally different situation?

As far as we know, we are the only creatures to demand of their existence a transcendent meaning. This can be supplied by various means, most commonly religious belief. Horowitz is unable to accept belief in a personal God, but wishes he could and, unlike many in his position, does not scorn those who do. He is decidedly not the village atheist.

More than most, however, he has reason to know that politics can also give, or at any rate appear to give, transcendent meaning to life. The secular religion of Marxism was particularly adept at supplying this meaning, though nationalist struggles could do the same. To believe that one was a soldier in history’s army, marching toward the predestined final victory when mankind would become terminally happy, and that one’s participation would help bring forward that consummation, was to know that one did not live in vain. Even personal suffering can be lessened by adherence to a political cause: either such suffering is experienced as a consequence of the struggle, or it is at least ameliorated by an acceptance of its pettiness by comparison with the greater goal.

Horowitz offers brief but moving glimpses of his father, a true believer in the ability of Marxism (in what he considered its indubitably correct form) not only to interpret the world but to change it. The preposterous intellectual grandiosity of this belief contrasted comically, and sadly, with Horowitz senior’s position in the world. His son’s depiction has an elegiac quality, portraying the tragicomedy of a man who thought he had penetrated to the heart of existence’s mystery but was really quite weak. Though he embraced a doctrine that had done untold evil in the world, he himself was a gentle soul. His son writes in sorrow, not anger.

The author has reason to know better than most the religious nature of the revolutionary creed. In 1971, when still under the influence of leftism, he edited a book of essays dedicated to the life and work of the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher. Like Horowitz’s father, Deutscher kept his faith in the immaculate conception of the October Revolution, a revolution that was, alas, subsequently to be corrupted—just as Rousseau thought naturally innocent mankind was corrupted by society. One of the essays in this book, by the Economist’s former Paris correspondent, Daniel Singer, contains the following passage:

Could one trust the statement of a Komintern ready to distort in such a fashion? Isaac was driven to question all authorized versions, to go back to the October revolution, to study the conflicts that followed Lenin’s death. The German heresy thus led him logically to an understanding and rejection of the Stalinist system.

The religious nature of Deutscher’s belief in revolutionary Marxism could hardly have been clearer. Authorized versions give rise to, or at least are the precondition of, heresies. Deutscher went back to the October Revolution, and to Lenin’s words, as Muslim fundamentalists go back to the Koran, for a source of undoubted and indisputable truth. Inside every heretic, it seems, a dogmatist is trying to get out.

Horowitz has put the pseudo-transcendence of a purpose immanent in history completely behind him so completely that he can now write about it calmly and without rancor. His masters are now Marcus Aurelius, the stoic Roman emperor, whom he likes to quote, and Dostoyevsky, who was among the first to grasp the significance of the perverted religious longings of the revolutionary intelligentsia, and the hell on earth to which they would inevitably lead. But the temptations of ideology are always present: Dostoyevsky, so aware of the dangers of the revolutionary intelligentsia, himself subscribed in entries in A Writer’s Diary to an ideology at least as absurd: that of Slavophile millenarianism. It is wrong to oppose one ideology with another, but it is by no means easy to escape the trap of doing so.

If neither formal religious belief nor secular religions like Marxism gives meaning to Horowitz’s life, what does? In large measure, it is his work: a lifetime spent in the crucible of political thought and struggle, first on the left, and then, over the last quarter century or so, as a devout conservative. It is vain to suppose, of course, that any human achievement, even the highest, could possibly be of a duration that would entitle it to the word “eternal.” No literary fame, for example, has so far lasted longer than 3,000 years—not even the blinking of the universe’s eyelid. But we humans must live on a human scale and measure things accordingly. The journalist, while he writes his latest article, thinks it of the greatest significance, though he knows perfectly well that it will be forgotten the day after tomorrow, if indeed it is read or noticed at all. Often I have thought to myself, as I write articles, “If only I can be spared until I have finished it,” though I am aware that even I will have forgotten its content by the week after next.

Significance and importance, however, are not natural qualities found inhering in objects or events. Only the appraising mind can impart such meaning. That is why, in my view, the neurosciences are doomed to failure, at least in their more ambitious claims. A mysterious metaphysical realm exists beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated of scanners, even if we cannot specify exactly where that realm is or how it came to be. The physiologist Moleschott, in the nineteenth century, declared that the brain secreted thought like the liver secreted bile; those neuroscientists who tell us that we are about to empty life of its mystery will come to seem as ridiculous, as absurdly presumptuous, as Moleschott seems to us now.

Horowitz tackles these problems in an indirect and gentle fashion. When he talks of the meaning that his work gives to his life, he is not saying to all his readers “Go and do likewise,” because it is clearly not given to everyone to do so (and thank goodness—a world composed of only one kind of person would be unbearable). The satisfaction of work is not, or at least should not be, proportional to the amount of notice it receives in the world. Perhaps the worst effect of celebrity culture is that it makes fame the measure of all things, and thus devalues or renders impossible not only satisfaction from useful but unglamorous labour, but precisely the kinds of pleasures and deep consolations that are to be had from walking a dog.

David Horowitz’s book is a small but important contribution to the revival of the art of dying well, an art from which most of us, both the living and the dying, would benefit. And to die well, we must know first what we have lived for.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.