To Exonerate God, Rousseau Must Make Man Depraved

Professor Alan Kors explains that the young Rousseau did not trust the Paris philosophes. He met with them in the cafes but did not like their deism. He had known and argued with atheists. The philosophes seemed to him to seize upon deism to argue that God did not exist—perhaps created the world, but was nowhere to be found in it. To Rousseau, that sounded like atheism.

Deism emphatically was not Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy. He argued for God’s existence as the logically indispensable immaterial force that conveyed motion to material existence, which Newton had showed was dead matter responding only to the laws of mechanics. And given that we know the immaterial world is ordered in all respects, we know that the “immaterial force” that created it is intelligent. We see that nature benefits mankind, so the “immaterial force” also cares for us, is “good.” “God” is not simply another name for the material world. Nor merely the mechanic, the designer, that set the world in motion, then vanished forever. 

Professor Kors urges one additional step toward understanding Rousseau the militant deist. He grasped that the French Enlightenment’s challenge to God’s existence was the “argument from evil.” Although he did not originate it, Voltaire, at the beginnings of the Enlightenment, made that argument famous across Europe in his novel Candide, which had drowned, in a tidal wave of satire, of laughter, the argument that God created “the best of all possible worlds” for man.

Rousseau was too much the realist to see any hope of protecting deism by arguing that the world’s evil was an illusion. Instead, the thesis that drives Rousseau’s philosophy is that a good God created nature for man’s benefit and gave man the supreme gift of reason with free will, the ability to choose the good or to default on that choice. 

“Natural man” at the beginning, in a benevolent nature, is happy. The abundance of nature, the human capacity for vigorous activity, makes men healthy and able to provide for their “natural” needs. Their relative social isolation—pursuing their own ends joined mostly only with family—leaves them free of ills of social status, seeking advantage over others, seeking power, the weakness of luxury and indulgence, the laziness and decadence of excessive wealth. But man by his reason chooses at some point—perhaps some emergency, some devastating natural event—to abandon this natural life for society, “civilization,” and government in search of protection for his power, wealth, and luxury. In exchange for protection, he yields his liberty forever, and gradually men work, plot, and connive to use power over others. Enjoyment of arts is perverted and science and technology are misused. This is mankind’s self-inflicted tragedy. He chooses evil, not good. He abandons all that God gave him as natural man in the natural world. And he brings on all the ailments that we observe in our world—ailments for which we blame God. 

Having defended deism at the cost of declaring the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason and science entirely misplaced, declaring Enlightenment optimism about man and the future utterly unfounded, how will Rousseau become the hero of philosophy—and mankind?

Social Contract and Emile

Voltaire  published two classics of philosophy in less than two years. The Social Contract explains how the development of natural man should have worked and what it should have produced. In briefest essence, natural individuals coming together should have entered a contract. Its sole condition should be that no individual, by joining and remaining in society, will give up any natural freedom or choice. (To violate the rights of other individuals is not a natural freedom and so prevented and punished by the civic order.)  Little else in terms of individual morality and civic virtue is required—enforced—and in every case only by universal consent. But how can consent be universal? Here, Rousseau introduces his famous concept of the “general will.” 

Under the social contract, all individuals relinquish all freedom to the state. Entirely. When that has happened, the individual can pursue his happiness only by pursing the happiness of the whole society and then sharing in it. It is just like pooling our money in a corporation. Now, we cannot profit unless the corporation profits; we work only for the corporation because our reward comes from its profits.

We have created a “general will.” Each of us now wills the same thing: to care for all as the only means to achieve happiness. This will is not—emphatically—the sum of individual wills; private interest has no role or legitimacy. The only political authority, the only sovereign, is the general will. By the general will, we are subject only to ourselves, our true, natural, moral selves. In Rousseau’s infamous phrase, we are “forced to be free.” Because we are unchained from our artificial social “power” and the power of others. Specifically, Rousseau writes: “In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it includes the undertakings, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free...”

Finally, the general will must assert itself directly and universally. (Rousseau has the early Greek city states in mind.) Society cannot work if it is large enough to require that we be represented. There must be no factions, no rich and powerful; those are separate, divergent wills.

Because Rousseau is linked with the French Revolution (its leaders certainly tried to do so), it is significant that he rejected “revolution” as a pathway to his ideal. Indeed, at mankind’s present state of development no full “reparation” of the “tragedy,” the long degradation of natural man, was possible. Rousseau thought partial reparation was possible. One route was greater understanding of the true natural man and society, the proper society and government, and that Rousseau sought in The Social Contract and other writings. The other route was education. Rousseau set forth at length (as usual) what would be required. Emile, published the same year as The Social Contract, is in its way as a great a classic.

Emile is fiction in the sense that the boy who comes of age in the story, Emile, is not a real person and his “education” is related as a story. Emile’s education has the sole (although complex) goal of recreating the proper development of the “natural man.” Emile is to become natural man in a depraved civilization (Rousseau’s own day). His education is elaborately described, illustrated, and dramatized, but reduces to five steps (presented in five “books”) in Emile’s development. In this sense, it is highly prescriptive. There is a pedagogy for each stage.

Emile and The Social Contract, published when Rousseau was about 40, brought him fame, immortality—and catastrophe. Emile was condemned and burned in Paris and both Emile and The Social Contract were condemned in Rousseau’s home, Geneva, as religious heterodoxy.  (Kors writes that “he pays a terrible price for his deism.” He wanders Europe without a place to stay, driven out of Paris and Switzerland, taken in by various admirers but living a solitary life.)

Rousseau fled Paris in 1763 to avoid arrest and lived for some time in a jurisdiction then under Prussia's control. He wrote a reply to his condemnation by Swiss authorities, advocating religious and other freedom in Geneva. Then a mob drove him out of his home and he sought refuge in Switzerland, but soon the government in Berne ordered him out of its territory. He travelled to England to seek refuge at the invitation of David Hume (in 1766).

In his often emotional way, he tearfully thanked Hume for being one of his few friends. But the stay quickly soured. Rousseau became wrongly convinced that Hume was at the center of a plot against him. Moving to Staffordshire, he worked on his Confessions, in which we see evidence of increasing paranoia in his treatment of Hume, Diderot, and others.

He returned to France in 1767 to marry Thérèse Levasseur. He then wandered about France under an assumed name and lived with a succession of friends. In 1770, he was at last permitted to return to Paris, where he devoted much of the rest of his life to writing his autobiography, Confessions, but other confessional statements, as well.

He did renew his earlier study of botany and influenced that science to some degree. He continued, too, in music, meeting and corresponding with the operatic composer, Christoph Gluck. Sadly, accounts that Rousseau left of his life in later years reflect growing distress, almost frenzy, continued paranoia, and obsession with his place in history.

He died on July 2, 1778, at age 66, at Ermenonville, a village near Paris, where he and his wife had spent six months as guests at a castle. His final writing was Reveries of A Solitary Walker. He is reported to have died of a stroke, which doctors attributed to repeated falls that may have begun with an accident in Paris when a Great Dane bowled him over. From all reports, the final months of his life may have been more serene, spent in part collecting botanical specimens. He was buried on a small, wooded island in a lake near the village.

In 1794, French revolutionaries transferred his remains to their Parisian Pantheon of Heroes.

In the aftermath of the Revolution, Edmund Burke, above all, but many others, pinned the blame for the Terror on the French philosophes. Recently, writers on the Enlightenment such as Peter Gay have called that a misconception. Perhaps, but it is difficult to exculpate Rousseau’s ideas (of course, he died before the Revolution). Stephen Hicks points out that Robespierre and the extremists, including the Jacobins, who gained control in the third and last stage of the Revolution—the Terror—revered Rousseau and referred to his ideas such as the general will to justify their actions.

According to Craig Nelson, Rousseau, who coined the phrase “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite,” had turned against all his friends among the philosophes; “the highly admired theorist on parenting…[had] abandoned all his children; the deist…[had] proclaimed that all other deists were infidels... Rousseau [had begun] his theories firmly in the Enlightenment tradition, and then…[taken] revenge on the Voltaire-Newton-Locke axis with such notions as ‘The man who thinks is a depraved animal.’ …Rousseau would insist on the free play of any and all emotions, a trend that became known as ‘sensibility’…”

Nelson adds: “French journalists and politicians would become masters of visceral oratory, always striving to leave their public weeping or enraged…. In so many ways Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a profound effect on French history, especially he would inspire, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, an army of zealous acolytes, notably a young lawyer of Artois…Maximillien Francois Marie Isidore de Robespierre…”

Rousseau influenced German philosophers most and longest of any non-German intellectual. That is not difficult to explain, Hicks points out; Rousseau was the first philosophe to launch a full-frontal attack on the Enlightenment ideas of his French colleagues in Paris. Rousseau’s extreme collectivism and insistence on the indispensable necessity of religion to the state impressed Immanuel Kant. As a Lutheran pietist committed to ascetic simplicity, Kant had no picture or painting in his house—with the exception of a painting over his desk of Rousseau. Other reports have him mesmerized by the writings of Rousseau. Rousseau was the favorite reading at Tubingen Seminary of the young Georg Hegel (1770-1831), spearhead of the extreme anti-realist, irrationalist, state-worshipping strand of the counter-Enlightenment.

The proverbial bottom line?  Those who view Rousseau as a standard-issue French philosophe—certainly not formulating his views with one eye on rescuing religion in the Age of Enlightenment—must think again. The argument made by Prof. Kors is difficult to ignore. It begins with Rousseau’s fervent belief in the deist God, his perception that deism was slipping toward atheism, and his conviction that the fatal weakness was the seemingly irrefutable argument-from-evil.

And so, he erected his philosophy upon a view of man as created good by good God, but depraved by striving for superiority (competition), aggrandizement (luxury, super-refinement), and dominance (power). Rousseau could have stopped, having rescued God’s reputation. But he understood men would not long abide with a philosophy concluding with their perpetual self-inflected evil. And so, Rousseau goes on to fabricate an elaborate and highly-improbable utopia to redeem them. In this sense, Rousseau launches the anti-Enlightenment with the same goal as Kant, who was honest enough to reveal his bottom line: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”

Rousseau might have admitted:  I had to make man’s striving for more than his natural state into the source of all evil in order to save God from blame for evil.