Sense and Sensibility, Part II

Russell skims over the novels Émile and La Nouvelle Héloise. (At one point I was interested in reading them, but abandoned the former and never started the latter after concluding that they were too tiresome.) He does remark on the furore which Émile unleashed and go into unimpressed detail about the "Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar" ("Although it professes to be what the voice of nature has proclaimed to a virtuous priest [. . .] the reader finds with surprise that the voice of nature, when it begins to speak, is uttering a hotch-pot of arguments derived from Aristotle, St Augustine, Descartes, and so on. ").

But in connection with the "Confession" he credits Rousseau with originating the practice of "proving" God's existence not through intellectual but emotional arguments, which is really a significant contribution. What infuriates me about such "proof" is that it is subjective, so it is unjustifiable to persuade others who of course have different experiences and feelings and needs into accepting one's own theology. Besides, because it is unverifiable I think one should honestly acknowledge one's religion as a hypothesis instead of as the universal truth. But this criticism only really applies to proselytizing. As long as religion keeps us happy and more self-aware and nicer to be around than might otherwise be the case, as long as we freely recognize that it is just a hypothesis, and as long as we keep our grubby little paws away from the souls of our fellow humans, grounding it in emotion is fine by me.

Then I was a little horrified but greatly amused by Russell's tangent — in his rebuttal of the idea that the heart is infallibly a benevolent and worthy guide of human conduct— about the reasoning that the unhappiness of earthly existence is a guarantee of future bliss. In a scarcely respectful analogy he argues indignantly, "If you had bought ten dozen eggs from a man, and the first dozen were all rotten, you would not infer that the remaining nine dozen must be of surpassing excellence; yet that is the kind of reasoning that 'the heart' encourages as a consolation for our sufferings here below."

As for the Social Contract, the summary reminds me pleasantly of PoliSci 100 (we didn't read Rousseau specifically, but the questions and concepts and historical parallels are familiar), but the kind of liberty it espouses is clearly not much to my taste and it sounds tedious. Unfortunately it is hugely relevant to the Revolution.

So I might read portions of the Discours after all because what I've seen of Robespierre's speeches is so directly influenced by it (though Robespierre seems more disingenuous and coldly clever), but I'm mostly convinced that I dodged a tedious bullet by not doing so yet. Either way the Social Contract should come first.

***

I should probably say something about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I can't remember it (due, no doubt, to the fact that we had moved from Berlin to West Germany proper by then) and have no valuable insight to contribute on the subject. What I will say is that the consciousness of the previous existence of the Wall thoroughly fascinated me whenever we visited Berlin after we moved away in 1989. For one thing, I may remember little about living here as a baby and probably imbue what I do remember with greater meaning than is just; but when we glimpsed the Brandenburg Gate while driving past in 1996, I think that I felt a spontaneous, genuine, and profound sense of awe for its forlorn but liberated exposedness and for the fact that one can freely pass through it. Apparently the Wall had loomed vaguely in my consciousness even at the age of three or four without my realizing it until much later when it felt strange that it was gone.