Sense and Sensibility

No good deed of Hume's went unpunished by Rousseau.

by Gertrude Himmelfarb
The Weekly Standard
03/30/2009, Volume 014, Issue 27
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

The Philosophers' Quarrel
Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding

by Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott
Yale, 264 pp., $27.50

"No man is a hero to his valet," the old adage goes. Nor to his biographer. And eminent men--poets, statesmen, or philosophers--are all the more vulnerable. Their personal lives may be seen as, at best, a distraction from whatever it is that makes them worthy of study.

The Philosophers' Quarrel, the account of a bizarre episode in the lives of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, lends itself to this objection. Yet it raises interesting questions beyond the scope of the book, not only such obvious ones as how the term "Enlightenment" can be used to embrace two such antithetical philosophers and their philosophies, but more general questions about the relation between the personal and the public, between ideas as they are conceived and as they are received, between philosophy as the philosopher understands it and as the historian sees it unfolding in history. Short of such perennial and perhaps insoluble issues, The Philosophers' Quarrel may be read as an "entertainment"--as Graham Greene said of his thrillers to distinguish them from his more serious works--about two characters in a novel that might have been written by Tom Wolfe.

The book opens with a memorable scene in London, on March 18, 1766, when the "quarrel" (a word that hardly does justice to that affair) erupted. Rousseau, a renowned exile from his own country ( mile had been pronounced heretical by the Archbishop of Paris), was living in England courtesy of Hume, who had escorted him from Paris three months earlier and had arranged accommodations for him in London. Now, Rousseau, tiring of London (another corrupt city, he decided, like Paris), was on his way, again through the efforts of Hume, to Wootton Hall, the estate of Hume's friend, Richard Davenport, in the north of England. He was spending the night in Hume's apartment when he realized that Davenport, wanting to spare him some of the expense of the trip, had secretly contributed to the coach fare.

Assuming that Hume knew of this subterfuge, Rousseau burst into the drawing room in a frenzy of indignation and outrage, accusing Hume of deceiving and humiliating him, treating him like a child or a "beggar on alms." Taken aback by the ferocity of the attack, Hume tried, in vain, to engage him in reasonable conversation. Rousseau was implacable until, after almost an hour, he suddenly leaped into Hume's lap, threw his arms around his neck, and covered his face with tears and kisses.

"Is it possible you can ever forgive me, my dear friend?" cried Rousseau. "After all the testimonies of affection I have received from you, I reward you at last with this folly and ill behavior. But I have notwithstanding a heart worthy of your friendship. I love you, I esteem you; and not an instance of your kindness is thrown away upon me." Weeping and overwhelmed by this display of emotion, Hume reassured Rousseau of his love and friendship. "I think no scene of my life," Hume wrote to a friend shortly afterwards, "was ever more affecting."

These, it must be remembered, were not adolescents or protagonists in a rather absurd romantic novel but mature and celebrated men, indeed, leading lights of the Enlightenments in their respective countries. Nor was it a transient episode occasioned by a moment of misunderstanding and misplaced passion, for the "quarrel" went on and assumed much larger dimensions. Nor was it merely a familiar example of that wise maxim, "No good deed goes unpunished," although it was that as well.

The affair had its origins four years earlier when Hume, then living in Paris, heard of Rousseau's plight, thought he was in hiding in Paris (he had, in fact, fled to Switzerland), and offered to find a haven for him in England and a pension from the royal treasury. "Of all the men of letters in Europe, since the death of Montesquieu," Hume wrote him, "you are the person whom I most revere, both for the force of your genius and the greatness of your mind." Rousseau was flattered but politely declined Hume's offer. Three years later, finding himself unwelcome in Switzerland, he accepted it. He was to return to Paris secretly, where he would join Hume before making their way to London.

The two met on December 20, 1765, at the not-very-secret salon of the Countess of Conti. (The authorities turned a blind eye as Rousseau went to the opera, paraded in the Luxembourg Gardens in his peculiar dress--he had taken to wearing an Armenian-like caftan--and was publicly feted and celebrated.) Hume was also much taken with him. "I find him mild, and gentle and modest and good humoured," he reported, much like Socrates, both being "of very amorous complexions," although that too was "much to the advantage of my friend." Several weeks later in London, Hume used much the same words in writing to a French friend: Rousseau was "mild, gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested, and above all endowed with a sensibility of heart in a supreme degree."

"Mild," "gentle," "modest"--that hardly describes the Rousseau who, the following month, created that dramatic scene of denunciation and reconciliation. Hume might have been reminded of another letter he had written earlier: "The philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to Calais without a quarrel; but I think I could live with him all my life in mutual friendship and esteem." Among those philosophers was Baron d'Holbach, who had warned him, on the eve of their departure from Paris: "You do not know your man. I tell you plainly that you are nursing a viper in your bosom."

Hume had occasion to recall those warnings in the months to come, for Rousseau's declarations of remorse and love proved to be short-lived. The quarrel escalated as Rousseau found more reason to accuse Hume of deceit and betrayal. As soon as he arrived at Wootton Hall, referring again to the subterfuge about the coach fare, Rousseau wrote him "to stop playing once and for all these small tricks from which no good can come." To friends in Paris, Rousseau reported on other "sinister" circumstances. Hume "tampered" with his mail by opening letters forwarded to him and not sending others. (Hume had forwarded only a sampling of the letters because Rousseau had complained of the cost of postage.) And Hume was one of the "abettors" in the publication of anonymous letters intended to dishonor him. (The satirical letters were actually written, and were known to have been written, by Horace Walpole and Voltaire, who needed no abetting from Hume to get them published.)

All this time, while Rousseau was berating him personally and reviling him to others, Hume was negotiating, finally successfully, for the royal pension. Rousseau at first accepted it and then, after the Walpole incident, rejected it. What might have been a letter of thanks to Hume was a bitter denunciation. Hume had brought him to England, Rousseau complained, ostensibly to give him asylum, but really to "dishonor" him: "The public loves to be deceived, and you are made to deceive it." Rousseau was reminded of what he had said to Hume during that emotional scene in London: "If you were not the best of men, you must be the blackest." In view of his "secret conduct," Hume must now realize that he was not, indeed, "the best of men"--hence "the blackest." The letter concluded with Rousseau's refusal to have any further contact with Hume or "accept any affair in which you are a mediator, even if it is to my advantage."

David Hume

Bewildered and hurt, Hume replied by professing his "unbounded and uninterrupted" friendship for Rousseau and asking to be told the name of the person who had been maligning him so that he could prove his innocence. Rousseau did write again, in spite of his earlier promise not to do so. That letter--38 folio pages (17 printed pages), carefully written and composed (it went through several heavily revised drafts)--was an even harsher indictment of Hume and, not incidentally, an impassioned testimonial to himself.

Hume had asserted his innocence, but it was Rousseau who portrayed himself as the true innocent. He did not "live in the world," he told Hume, and was ignorant of what went on in it. "I know only what I feel," and in presenting his case against Hume, "I will present the history of the movements of my soul." As in a judicial case, he proposed to speak of Hume in the third person, except that in this case Hume was to be not so much the defendant as the judge against himself.

Hume had asked for the name of his accuser, but the only accuser, Rousseau told him, was Hume himself. In addition to the earlier charges--the private letters opened or not sent, the mere "appearance" of arranging the pension, the "plot" of those anonymous public letters--Rousseau now added other items to his indictment. A portrait of Rousseau Hume had commissioned was "hideous" (especially compared with that of Hume himself); the copy of Julie he had put in Rousseau's London lodgings was, of all his books, "the most tiresome to him"; a theater engagement Hume had arranged (which Rousseau clearly enjoyed, basking in the presence of the King) forced him to miss an appointment with a librarian in the British Museum; and it was because of the machinations of Hume that the English press, which had been initially favorable to him, turned against him. Rousseau also recalled their final meeting in London, when Hume had fixed upon him a "steadfast piercing look, mixed with a sneer," which induced in him "the most inexpressible terror," and was relieved only by "an effusion of tears." "No, no," he remembered saying as he embraced Hume, "David Hume cannot be treacherous. If he be not the best of men, he must be the basest of mankind." To which Hume had responded only with the politest and briefest assertions of innocence.

Even more disturbing was the memory of the four words Hume had uttered when they shared a room one night in an inn on their journey from Paris to London. Rousseau could not tell whether Hume was awake or asleep when he said, "Je tiens J.J. Rousseau"--"I have you, Rousseau." "Not a night indeed passes over my head," Rousseau now wrote, "but I think I hear, 'Rousseau, I have you,' ring in my ears as if he had just pronounced them." Rousseau concluded by challenging Hume to prove his innocence, or not write him again.

In his reply, Hume also recalled that last meeting, especially Rousseau's begging his forgiveness for having so misunderstood his acts of friendship. "The story as I tell it," Hume protested, "is consistent and rational. There is not common sense in your account." Everything he had done was meant to provide for Rousseau's "repose, honor, and fortune," and he regretted that it had all been turned against him. In the margins of Rousseau's letter, he was more specific, noting, after each charge of the indictment, the word "lie," making for a total of a dozen lies. About those four damning words he presumably uttered, awake or asleep, he commented that Rousseau himself did not know whether he was awake or asleep when he heard them. (Hume might also have pointed out that an Englishman, whether awake or asleep, would not be likely to be speaking in French.)

"Adieu, and forever," Hume had concluded his letter. But it was not quite "adieu," because he continued to pursue the matter of the royal pension. In April the following year Rousseau finally, grudgingly, accepted it. By then, however, the matter was moot, because Rousseau and his mistress Thérèse fled from Wootton Hall after her quarrels with the servants had made life there intolerable--and fled from England as well.

So far, these events might have remained private, awaiting perhaps the discovery of their letters in an obscure archive by an enterprising historian. (Hume had sent them to the British Museum, which did not, however, accept them.) In fact, the letters were circulated by the protagonists themselves among their friends--and thus their friends' friends. Rousseau, vowing to keep silent about the "universal plot," the powerful and skillful "league" that had formed against him, sent his last, long letter to his publisher, asking him to show it to others. Hume, suspecting that the letter would be published as a two-shillings pamphlet, and that the affair would feature prominently in the memoir Rousseau was known to be writing, sent the whole correspondence to d'Alembert to publish if he saw fit. (It does not, in fact, appear in Rousseau's Confessions, which was published posthumously and stops short of this period.)

Some of Hume's friends, including Adam Smith who dismissed Rousseau as a "rascal," counseled against publication, but d'Alembert, learning that Rousseau's letter was in possession of his publisher, persuaded Hume that the entire correspondence should be published. The book appeared in France in October 1766, and in England the following month, under the title A Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute Between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau. The "dispute" thus became something of a cause célèbre in both countries, not only among the literati, who knew the disputants personally, but among readers and reviewers of that "Concise and Genuine Account."

The devil is in the details. No abridgment of this affair, no paraphrase of quotations from the letters, can do justice to it. Writing to Davenport the day he received Rousseau's letter, Hume described it as "a perfect frenzy" and worried that his poor friend might find himself "shut up altogether in Bedlam." Voltaire, reading the published account, wrote an open letter to Hume describing Rousseau as "completely mad"--mad in his conduct towards his benefactor, but also mad in his writings, which were those of "an empty ranter spun out in an often unintelligible prose." A modern reader might prefer the word "paranoid." The authors of The Philosophers' Quarrel are more judicious; they only report on the responses of others. And those responses are almost as curious as the affair itself.

Apart from the philosophes who had good reason to think of Rousseau as their enemy, popular opinion in France was overwhelmingly in his favor. This was the author of the bestselling novel of the era, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloise--a man of "sensibility," of "candor, integrity, and sensitivity," in contrast to the insensitive and obtuse Englishman. More surprising was the fact that so many Englishmen shared this view, like the reader who rebuked Hume for not appreciating the "extreme sensibility" with which Rousseau responded to his extreme difficulties, or the fellow Scotsman, writing as "A Friend to Rousseau," who recommended his country (and Hume's) as a fitting home for that "illustrious exile."

Rousseau himself made this identification with Julie explicit when he explained that in his letter to Hume he would do what he had done in Julie. He would write only about his feelings because he knew only what he felt. His feelings, the movements of his "soul," were his warrant of truth. It is also interesting that he should speak of the Julie "letters" (the novel was written in the form of letters) as if they were on a par with the Hume letter, the fictional letters having a sincerity and authenticity lacking in the unfeeling prose of Hume.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The public response to this affair suggests that it was more than a falling-out between two people who happened to be eminent philosophers, although this would have been intriguing enough. What made it more provocative for their contemporaries was the impression that something more was at stake, that the quarrel reflected two very different philosophies, or at least philosophical temperaments that lent themselves to distinctive philosophies. No one argued about the details of the case: Hume's deception about the coach fare to Wootton Hall, or his complicity in the publication of Walpole's or Voltaire's letters, or his ill-will in holding back some of the letters from admirers, or his "horrifying stare" at their last meeting. To the partisans on both sides, the issue was simple: It was a conflict between heart and mind, feeling and reason, sensibility and common sense--between, as one Frenchman put, the creator of Julie and the historian of England.

A philosopher today, who takes both men seriously as philosophers, may dismiss this quarrel as of no importance, a blip in the personal lives of all-too-human men. But to a historian of ideas it may have a larger importance. In any case, it is not the historian who is intruding on their personal lives, making public what should have been private. It is they themselves who brought this affair into the public arena, making it part not only of the historical record but also of the philosophical record. In their charges and countercharges, they gave meaning and legitimacy--moral and philosophical legitimacy--to what might otherwise have been dismissed as eccentricity or perversity. Paranoia may be just paranoia. But sometimes, just sometimes, it may be something else as well. "The personal is political," we have been told of late. By the same token, the personal may be philosophical.

Early in the book, the authors confront the question of the Enlightenment. How can such disparate figures as Rousseau and Hume be comprehended within that singular term? After some agonizing, they dispose of the problem by retaining the term. It is, they decide, "easier to live with the Enlightenment than without it"; as the legacy we live with and as the conceptual framework for scholars, "the Enlightenment is indispensable." Well, perhaps not. A historian, and a philosopher as well, may conclude The Philosophers' Quarrel by appreciating, more than ever, the multiplicity of "Enlightenments" and even "anti-Enlightenments" lurking within that term, the romanticism inspired by a Rousseauean cult of sensibility coexisting uneasily with the rationalism of the philosophes and the skeptical empiricism of Hume.

A historian may also recognize the ambiguities of Rousseau himself--the author of Julie who was also the author of The Social Contract. It was the latter Rousseau who emerged into prominence in the French Revolution--the philosopher to whom statues were erected throughout Paris, whose bust was installed in the Assembly Hall, whose body was transferred to the Pantheon together with a copy of The Social Contract resting on a velvet cushion, and to whom Robespierre paid homage when he ushered in the Reign of Terror (the official name of the new regime) which would realize the "general will" and bring about a complete "regeneration" of man.

This was the Rousseau that Edmund Burke, anticipating the Terror, saw as the evil genius of the Revolution. Burke also saw the relationship between Rousseau the man and Rousseau the philosopher. Reading Rousseau's admission in the Confessions that he had fathered five children, each of whom he had promptly turned over to the foundling hospital, Burke was moved to decry the philosopher who was so wanting in natural parental affection while professing the most exalted ideals. "Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual," "a lover of his kind, but a hatred of his kindred"--this, Burke said, was the "philosophic instructor," the "moral hero" of the Revolution, who counseled the "regeneration" of man while sacrificing the real man, the human being.

It is this Rousseau, the historic Rousseau, who created not only a culture of sensibility but also a philosophy of sensibility, and, more momentously, a politics of sensibility. And it is this Rousseau who remains a challenge to philosophers and historians today, as he was to critics and admirers in his own day.

- Gertrude Himmelfarb is the author of the forthcoming The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (Encounter).