RR
THE NEW YORK TIMES OF BOOKS.
Great Minds Behaving Badly
THE author of the screed was a "scribbler" and a "scoundrel," a "toad" and a "lizard" with a "viper's tongue," a "crooked mind" with a "heart of filth," a "rascal," a "cowardly knave," a "hound." That, at any rate, was how Voltaire once saw fit to bash a literary rival, the journalist Elie Fréron. His words remind us that the age of Enlightenment was not always so enlightened. In the 18th century, the republic of letters could get ugly.
David Edmonds and John Eidinow have chosen a fitting arena in which to exercise their skills as analysts of intellectual combat. In "Wittgenstein's Poker" (2001) and "Bobby Fischer Goes to War" (2004), the authors perfected the genre of the cerebral celebrity death match. Now they have turned their attention to two of the 18th century's best minds, pitting the Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau against the Scotsman David Hume.
Rousseau and Hume are a study in contrasts. Rousseau, the man of feeling, penned some of the century's most affecting prose, moving readers to tears with his poignant accounts of his own and others' suffering in works like "The Confessions" and "La Nouvelle Héloïse." But for all his fame he was in many respects at odds with his age, spurning society while arguing that modern civilization had corrupted our souls. He yearned for a better world and in his writings — and his relationships — was often radically hostile to the one he actually inhabited. "Everything exterior to me is henceforth foreign to me," he wrote toward the end of his life. "I am alone on this earth as if on a strange planet onto which I have fallen."
Hume was a temperamental conservative — rational, gregarious, self-contained. As a historian and essayist, he endeavored to show, like his close friend Adam Smith, that modern commercial society rendered human beings freer and more decent. Although his revolutionary work in philosophy demonstrated the uncertainty of all knowledge, including knowledge of God, Hume resisted despair. When his thoughts got him down, he famously wrote, "I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends," and all would be well.
It would seem that when Rousseau and Hume first met in December 1765, the field was set for an intellectual Götterdämmerung. But as Edmonds and Eidinow point out, there was very little "dialogue or engagement about ideas" between the men. Rather than wage war in the lofty heights of thought, Hume and Rousseau contended on all-too-human terrain. At bottom, this is a tale of great minds behaving badly.
The details are complicated, but the basic story is clear enough. Thanks to writings deemed offensive to religion and morality, Rousseau had been forced to flee France, and then Switzerland, where an angry mob had stoned his house near Neuchâtel. Enter Hume, who was just finishing a stint as the secretary to the British ambassador to France. Lionized in Paris as le bon David, Hume found adulation at every turn, above all in the literary salons, where elegant ladies treated the portly philosopher with an indulgence he had never known. When friends intervened on Rousseau's behalf, Hume vowed to find him asylum in Great Britain.
After only a cursory correspondence and the briefest of meetings, the two men crossed the channel together in January. At first all seemed well. Rousseau was toasted in London as a celebrity refugee, and Hume tried to secure him suitable lodging as well as a pension from the king. Soon, however, the relationship soured. When a scurrilous satire of Rousseau's morose wallowing made the rounds, the thin-skinned author suspected Hume's involvement. Soon he was accusing le bon David of participating in a European-wide plot to blacken his name.
Outraged, Hume struck back in uncharacteristically strong terms, accusing Rousseau of "monstrous ingratitude, ferocity and frenzy," and denouncing him as a "scoundrel." Rousseau dashed off a lengthy indictment, multiplying the charges, and within months Hume had published a detailed and self-serving defense.
Historians have long seen this tawdry episode as the result of Rousseau's much-documented paranoia, tending to excuse Hume as an innocent victim. Without denying the howling "dog" (as they put it) of Rousseau's delusions, Edmonds and Eidinow seek to complicate the story. In vivid prose and with a flare for literary detective work, they show that Hume not only knew of the satire against Rousseau early on, but was present at its creation.
Moreover, while Rousseau was in his charge and utterly dependent on his good faith, Hume was making illicit inquiries into Rousseau's finances, withholding and perhaps opening his letters. The "prolonged aggression" of Hume's "counterattack," the authors conclude, "was surely fueled by the knowledge that he was not guiltless: he had contributed to his charge's discomfiture and had acted behind his back."
Edmonds and Eidinow restore some balance to this legendary fight, prompting renewed sympathy for the unstable and unfortunate Rousseau. How pathetic it seems that the only being with whom he could find the peace of true friendship in England was his other dog, Sultan, whose tail wags throughout this tale.
And yet the authors' depiction of what they call the "unremitting brutality" of Hume's response to the affair is slightly strained. In fact, Hume's brutality was not all that brutal by the standards of the time. Consider that when Voltaire wanted to carry out a literary hit on Rousseau, he accused the "syphilitic" philosopher of killing the mother of his mistress. That is brutal. Hume's published account of his dispute with Rousseau and his occasionally bitchy letters about him to his friends are mild by comparison, and on the whole understandable. Rousseau, after all, had the paranoid's gift for pulling his acquaintances into the mud: it was a recurrent pattern in his life, as his most recent (and sympathetic) biographer, Leo Damrosch, beautifully shows. Tellingly, Damrosch largely exonerates Hume in this affair. Edmonds and Eidinow's well-crafted book notwithstanding, Hume remains for the most part le bon David.
