Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  When the work was completed in 1776, Rousseau was desperate to forestall any attempt by his foes to suppress it. On February 24, he tried to place the manuscript on the high altar of Notre Dame, as though seeking sanctuary for it. The plan went awry: the gate dividing the choir from the nave was shut. According to an early biographer, Henry Grey Graham, Rousseau then “wildly rushed from the church feeling God had joined with man in the conspiracy against him and wandered till darkness and fatigue drove him home.”

  However, this disturbed state was not to endure. In his last years, Rousseau again achieved a degree of equanimity. Reveries of a Solitary Walker, composed between 1776 and 1778, reveal a man who seems, finally, at ease with himself, no longer raging at an unjust world or the corrupt and vain philosophes. His portrayals of nature, seen afresh as transcendental and sublime, have had a profound impact on novelists and poets. The thinker who had read the truth of his and Hume’s character from his heart now conceded in the Reveries that “the real and basic motives of most of my actions are not as clear to me as I had long supposed.”

  England was not forgotten. Despite the rawness of his experiences there, Rousseau continued to remain in touch with his friends from Wootton. In 1769, he had sent the Duchess of Portland seeds and plants. And three years later, on April 17, 1772, he wrote to her again, this time to thank her for news of Miss Dewes’s forthcoming marriage. “I rejoice therein with all my heart, and I rejoice both for her who is so well suited to make a good man happy and to be happy herself and for her worthy uncle whom the happy outcome of this marriage will bless with joy in his latter days.”

  IN MAY 1778, Rousseau and Thérèse, his wife, retired to a cottage on an aristocratic estate in Ermenonville, north of the capital (belonging to the last in his long line of patrician benefactors, the Marquis de Girardin). There Rousseau died on July 2. Although the surgeons determined the cause had been apoplexy, rumors abounded that he had taken his own life. This seems unlikely: there is no record of Rousseau’s ever having contemplated suicide, even when the restless dog in his shadow growled most menacingly.

  He was buried on an islet in a lake in Ermenonville. But five years after the Revolution, the French National Assembly determined that his remains should lie in a place of honor in Paris. On October 9, 1794, to the strains of his own music, Rousseau’s body was disinterred and began the journey to the city on which he had turned his back in life. Crowds paid tribute at every village. A great torchlit procession greeted him in the capital. There, on the morning of October 11, the coffin was placed in the Panthéon in the heart of revolutionary Paris and, in a curious irony, positioned next to the body of his archenemy, Voltaire. Thérèse, who outlived Rousseau by twenty-three years, was on hand to witness her husband’s nationalization: to the revolutionaries, her husband had come to embody the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

  AS FOR le bon David, until illness consumed him, his final years were comfortable, uneventful, and, unlike Rousseau’s, almost totally unproductive.

  On his fifty-seventh birthday, April 26, 1768, he wrote to Mme de Boufflers to inform her that Conway was leaving the secretary of state’s office, and so, therefore, was he. Subsequent letters to France explained his decision not to return to Paris: the king, who had granted him a pension, was expecting him to continue with his History. But to l’Idole du Temple he gave another reason. He had a “strong desire of enjoying” her society, but “the truth is, I have, and ever had a prodigious reluctance to change my place of abode.” There had been a report in the newspapers that he would be going over to France “in his former station.” The story, he said, had no basis in fact.

  The Rousseau episode, which Hume still believed had threatened to ruin his name, ate away at him, and he kept a vigilant eye on news of his adversary. Having discovered that Rousseau had taken flight from Conti’s château, he was unable to resist another attack. Rousseau, he wrote to Mme de Boufflers, “is surely the most singular and most incomprehensible, and at the same time the most unhappy man that ever was born.” She told Hume untruthfully, perhaps to spare him embarrassment, that she had had no dealings with Rousseau since their row.

  By the summer of 1769, Hume was back in Edinburgh for what was, effectively, the start of his retirement. It was a period of quiet contentment: he had his health, a revenue of £1,000 a year, “and though somewhat stricken in years … the prospect of enjoying long my ease and of seeing my reputation increase.” He entertained regularly and lavishly, delighting in his (as he saw them) superb cooking skills. He claimed to Sir Gilbert Elliot that his sheep-head broth was so delicious that one of his guests spoke about it “for eight days after.”

  He described himself as having “done with all ambition,” but he still wanted to polish his History, regarded then as the real jewel of all his works. Much of his spare time was devoted to revising it. In 1770, new editions came out. In his own words to Elliot, the thrust of the changes had been to “soften or expunge many villainous, seditious Whig strokes.” The early editions had been “too full of … foolish English prejudices.” Meanwhile, there was the constant hospitality: Benjamin Franklin paid a visit in 1771.

  In 1772, Hume moved to a new, small house (“a large house for an author”), whose construction he had supervised. Oddly, on display in his parlor were Allan Ramsay’s portraits of both himself and Rousseau. Hume had “totally and finally retired from the world,” he insisted to Mme de Boufflers, and “with a resolution never more to appear on the scene in any shape. This purpose arose, not from discontent, but from satiety. I have now no object but to sit down and think, and die in peace.”

  Dying in peace would require tremendous fortitude. In the spring of 1775, he was affected by a bowel disorder. He could not know it, but he had cancer of the intestines. On February 8, 1776, he confessed to Adam Smith that he had lost five stone. He had aches and diarrhea. Smith’s classic Wealth of Nations appeared in March, and Hume wrote to congratulate him. The weight of expectation for Smith’s book had made Hume nervous, but after reading it, he was “much relieved.” Still, he remained skeptical of its winning a wide readership.

  The cancer was coursing through his body. By the middle of 1776, he was so thin that he needed a cushion to sit. He wrote his short autobiography, My Own Life, in April 1776 and appointed Smith his literary executor with instructions to publish Dialogues on Natural Religion, which he had been reluctant to expose to the public for fear of disturbance to his quiet life. “I consider an observation of [the seventeenth-century author, the Duc de la] Rochefoucauld, that a wind, though it extinguishes a candle, blows up a fire.” He told Smith that if he lived a few years longer, “I shall publish them myself.” After Smith balked at assuming responsibility for the explosive text, Hume added a codicil leaving his manuscripts and instructions to publish with Strahan.

  He had no doubt that death was near. His physician updated Smith on the historian’s health: “which is so bad that I am quite melancholy upon it, and as I hear that you intend a visit to this country soon, I wish, if possible, to hasten your coming that he may have the comfort of your company so much the sooner. He has been declining several years, and this in a slow and gradual manner, until about twelve month ago, since when the progress of his disorder has been more rapid.”

  On July 4, 1776, the thirteen American colonies made their unanimous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia; it was also the day of Hume’s last dinner party. Three days later Boswell, who was contemplating writing Hume’s biography, came to see him. The formerly gros David was “lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance.” But what disturbed Boswell more was Hume’s stubborn refusal, even in his final days, to take solace in God and concede the possibility of an afterlife. Worse still, Hume was disdainful of believers, remarking that “when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal.” Boswell did not think he was joking.

  On August 12, 1776, Hume dispatched his last revisions to Strahan.

  Please to make
with your pen the following correction. In the second volume of my philosophical pieces, p. 245 1.1 and 2, erase these words, that there is such a sentiment in human nature as benevolence. This, Dear Sir, is the last correction I shall probably trouble you with: For Dr. Black has promised me, that all shall be over with me in a very little time: This promise he makes by his power of prediction, not that of prescription. And indeed I consider it as good news: For of late, within these few weeks, my infirmities have so multiplied, that my life has become rather a burden to me. Adieu, then, my good and old friend. P.S. In the same page 1.4, instead of possession of it read sentiment of benevolence.

  He still had to bid adieu to the woman in Paris to whom he had been so close, Mme de Boufflers. Her lover, the Prince of Conti, died on August 2, and in receipt of this sad news, Hume summoned the strength to commiserate. On August 20, he sent his final letter, in simple and direct language, eschewing his former elaborate courtesies.

  My reflection carried me immediately to your situation in this melancholy incident. … Pray write me some particulars; but in such terms that you need not care, in case of decease, into whose hands your letter may fall. … I see death approach gradually, without any anxiety or regret. I salute you, with great affection and regard, for the last time. David Hume.

  He died five days later, at around 4 P.M., and was buried in the nearby Old Carlton cemetery (Robert Adam designed his classical cylindrical mausoleum). Not long before his death, he had told Adam Smith that he had been reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, and that among all the excuses made to avoid stepping into Charon’s boat, he could find none that fitted him. “I could not well imagine what excuse I could make to Charon in order to obtain a little delay. I have done everything of consequence which I ever meant to do; and I could at no time expect to leave my relations and friends in a better situation than that in which I am now likely to leave them. I therefore have all reason to die contented.”

  Smith published his remarks, though there is some debate over whether the economist toned them down, removing some of his friend’s more strident anti-Christian sentiments. Nonetheless, he quotes Hume saying, “Have a little patience, good Charon: I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.” It was provocative enough to raise hackles. Boswell wished Dr. Johnson would “knock Hume’s and Smith’s heads together, and make vain and ostentatious infidelity exceedingly ridiculous.” Both Johnson and Burke thought Hume’s courage in the face of death was a mask; that his real agenda was to display his virtuous life and tranquil death as evidence that morality had nothing to do with religious faith. Johnson scoffed that Hume was “a man who has so much conceit as to tell all mankind that they have been bubbled [deceived] for ages, and he is the wise man who sees better than they.”

  OUR two protagonists shared one noteworthy devotee. In 1762, with Rousseau in Môtiers and Hume about to move to Paris, in the isolated Prussian city of Königsberg, a thirty-eight-year-old lecturer devoured Rousseau’s works as they were published. According to one anecdote, the fastidious Immanuel Kant, whose daily routine was so rigid and undeviating that people set their watches by him, became so absorbed in Émile that he bewildered his neighbors by forgetting to take his usual post-lunch constitutional. Kant was alert to the seductive dangers of Rousseau’s language: he worried that its beauty detracted from his ideas; to penetrate these ideas he read and reread him. Rousseau understood, he thought, the paradox of autonomy—that freedom meant conformity to a rule. As he was writing his own masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason, he had a single portrait in his house—of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  As for Hume, Kant said the Scot had “woken him from his dogmatic slumber.” Kant’s preoccupation with cause and effect, which he thought the basis of all scientific knowledge, was provoked by Hume’s skeptical reflections. Unable to accept Hume’s skepticism about causation, he sought to demonstrate how a proposition such as “every event has a cause” could be known a priori (i.e., could be known independent of experience), even though it was a synthetic proposition (not true or false by virtue of its terms). “Water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius” is a synthetic proposition. “All bachelors are unmarried” is an analytic one, true by definition.

  WITH THE EXCEPTION of Nietzsche, probably no philosopher’s posthumous reputation has fluctuated quite so dramatically as Rousseau’s. The Confessions was initially decried—pompous and obscene being the general judgment. Yet within a decade, sentiment was already becoming more positive. The work is now established as a literary masterpiece.

  Rousseau’s political legacy has been much more contentious. Although he himself was no advocate of rebellion, his name became inextricably bound up with the French Revolution. Its makers on all sides drew on his works to justify their actions, most famously Robespierre, who ideologically embraced Rousseau (along with such Romans as Cato) and executed with zeal his understanding of “the general will of the people”—in his own phrase une volonté une, “one single will.” Nevertheless, two years before Robespierre grasped power, Edmund Burke had responded to the revolutionaries’ worship of Rousseau with a brilliant and farsighted diatribe, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. “Everyone knows that there is a great dispute among leaders [of the National Assembly] which of them is the best resemblance to Rousseau.” The truth was, he said, they all resembled him. And Burke accused them of adopting the worst of Rousseau’s vices, vanity, “that makes the whole man false.” “We have had the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England. … He left no doubt in my mind that he entertained no principle to influence his heart or guide his understanding but vanity. With that he was possessed to a degree little short of madness.”

  Rousseau’s constant influence on later generations is indubitable (though not always positive). He can be seen as father of the Romantic movement (and even a great-grandfather of the Green movement). The Romantics were inspired by his confirmation of the worth of each and every one of us, however ordinary, by his emphasis on equality, on knowledge of the inner self, and on a spiritual connection with nature, as well as by his imagination and the depth of his feelings.

  In 1816, Byron and Percy Shelley went on a pilgrimage to Lake Geneva, carrying with them Héloïse. Shelley described Rousseau as “a sublime genius.” Mary Shelley had studied Rousseau, and his writings inspired Frankenstein: the monster becomes corrupted by his association with society. Schiller, Stendhal (for whom Rousseau was “the noblest soul and the greatest genius that ever was”), de Tocqueville, and Schopenhauer were all admirers. To Hazlitt, he was a new Prometheus. Lytton Strachey said of the Confessions that it “started the vast current in literature and sentiment which is still flowing.” A youthful Leo Tolstoy took to wearing a medal on which was engraved Rousseau’s portrait; he read all of Rousseau’s works, but was captivated in particular by Héloïse, Émile, and the Confessions.

  IN THE TWENTIETH century, Rousseau was charged with offering intellectual justification for totalitarianism. But if his posthumous reputation has ridden helter-skelter—one moment as a benevolent patron of equality and liberty, the next the warped mastermind of tyranny—Hume’s has steadily climbed, though with the occasional hiatus. In America, the influence of his less theoretical writings (his essays and History) should not be overlooked. Among the United States’ founding fathers, for instance, James Madison was a staunch disciple, his version of federalism traceable to Hume’s thinking. Many American luminaries consumed Hume’s History—including Samuel Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Rush (though Thomas Jefferson despised the work, labeling Hume a “conceited Scotchman”).

  In the nineteenth century, the historian began to make way for the philosopher. Hume’s History ceased to be the standard text, superseded by, among others, Thomas Macaulay’s. Meanwhile, the Treatise, the book that fell “dead born,” came to be recognized as an
enduring masterpiece. By the twentieth century, Hume’s standing as one of the most significant thinkers of all time became firmly entrenched: there remains ongoing engagement with his skeptical conundrums, which still fascinate and unsettle, tease and bewitch. His philosophical style is hailed as an exemplar of clarity and a model of ingenuity. Bertrand Russell, an empiricist in the Humean tradition, acknowledged Hume’s supreme importance in his A History of Western Philosophy. The Vienna Circle, which for a time before World War II dominated the world of philosophy, was a legatee of the eighteenth-century Scot. This group of mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers dismissed much of aesthetics, morality, and religion as meaningless metaphysics; to be meaningful, propositions had either to be verifiable through experience or true by definition. Two centuries earlier, Hume had famously concluded his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

  If we take in our hand any volume: of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance: let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

  Members of the Circle grappled with Hume’s conundrum about induction, as did the Viennese-born Professor Sir Karl Popper. In his book about Hume, the philosopher Sir Freddie Ayer could confidently assert that Hume was the greatest of all British philosophers. Beyond the confined world of academic philosophy, Albert Einstein revered Hume, giving credit to the philosopher for transforming his powers of critical reasoning and ultimately with being a catalyst in his discovery of the theory of relativity. In a 1915 letter to the founder of the Vienna Circle, Moritz Schlick, Einstein revealed that just before his fundamental insight, he studied Hume’s treatise “with eagerness and admiration.”