Sense and Sensibility, Part I

This was written when I should have been sleeping, which should explain any logical or other peculiarities. If corrections are necessary I'll probably make them, silently, later.

One of the stumbling-blocks in my research about Brittany and the French Revolution is that I have deemed it necessary to read the relevant works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but after repeatedly starting the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (catchy title, by the way) it's evident that I won't finish it anytime soon. It's a bit embarrassing because Rousseau's sentences are hardly labyrinthine or lapidary and their meaning is not so knotty, but still. So yesterday I decided to approach the matter differently and read the chapter on Rousseau in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. While Russell is not the most even-handed commentator, his skill at capturing the gist of things is undeniable and, due to the succinct, lucid, and entertaining manner in which he does so, I knew that I would probably understand and remember the key points of Rousseau's works and life best by reading him.

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As it turns out, Russell's take on Rousseau is entertaining even by his standards, and I was both interested and laughing while reading it. First and foremost Russell emphatically states that the Swiss philosophe was by no means one of the great philosophers, and that his ideas must be examined rather for the sake of their influence in politics and culture than for their soundness and worth. (Which is pretty much what Papa unenthusiastically said when I asked him about Rousseau a week or two ago.) So the British philosopher despatches the subject by providing a scathing overview of Rousseau's life, character, Discours, and Confessions, clearly giving his irritation free rein, and by only providing a serious summary of The Social Contract.

A major contribution of Rousseau, particularly in the light of the Romantic movement, is his preoccupation with sensibility in the 18th-century sense and his very idealized views of man in relation to nature ("noble savage," etc.). Already in the previous chapter on Romanticism Russell gives the cult of sensibility short shrift, and points out its inherent egotism and hypocrisy. He drily defines "la sensibilité" as

a proneness to emotion, and more particularly to the emotion of sympathy. To be thoroughly satisfactory, the emotion must be direct and violent and quite uninformed by thought. The man of sensibility would be moved to tears by the sight of a single destitute peasant family, but would be cold to well-thought-out schemes for ameliorating the lot of peasants as a class.

His incredibly concise elucidations of Rousseau's life tend to illustrate the point. Whilst professing a great capacity to fine feeling, Rousseau in fact displayed only the loosest conception of morality, and was quite ready to lie, steal, take mistresses, betray friends, and behave however he wished without thought for the wellbeing of others. Besides Rousseau did not invent the cult of sensibility.

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Nowadays I think most of us know this concept of sensibility through Jane Austen. And since Marianne Dashwood is selfish, rude, and blind to the harm she does to herself and others during her pursuit of the fashionable ideas of natural and refined feeling, it is evident that Austen saw the same general flaws in the trend. But there are many other critics even among her contemporary colleagues. Despite her reputation as the author of Gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe is one of them; in Mysteries of Udolpho Emily St. Aubert's gentle but preachy father warns her about the dangers of thoughtlessly indulging in feeling, however fine, and altogether her heroines are fairly quiet and restrained. I admittedly don't have much use for the cult of sensibility either, because it is (or was) so often artificial, unfairly demanding of the people who were forced to put up with the outpourings and histrionics of its devotees, and unhealthy. In my view noble feeling is much lovelier when it is unselfconscious and unadorned, and it enriches life especially when it is mostly kept sacrosanct and private. But perhaps that's a miserly way of proceeding.

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But, to return to Rousseau, while summarizing the Discours Russell quotes a very funny passage (which I've given below in the original French) out of a letter which Voltaire sent to Rousseau after reading the work:

J'ai reçu, monsieur, votre nouveau livre contre le genre humain, je vous en remercie. [...] On n'a jamais employé tant d'esprit à vouloir nous rendre bêtes ; il prend envie de marcher à quatre pattes quand on lit votre ouvrage. Cependant, comme il y a plus de soixante ans que j'en ai perdu l'habitude, je sens malheureusement qu'il m'est impossible de la reprendre et je laisse cette allure naturelle à ceux qui en sont plus dignes que vous et moi.

(In the History it is translated as, "I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it." In the quotation above the last sentence goes on a while longer to say, approximately, "and I leave that natural [bearing?] to those who are worthier of it than you or I.")