The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (29 page)

Rousseau would spend much of the rest of his life as an intellectual and emotional vagabond—always seeking a
maman.
He seemed to have an uncanny appeal for women—especially married women. When he met Madame de Warens, who had left her husband, she soon became Rousseau’s mistress and his patron. He earned his living as a tutor to a prominent family before going to Paris to publish his new scheme of musical notation.

After a brief tour in Venice as secretary to the French ambassador, with whom he quarreled, he returned to Paris. There he became friendly with Denis Diderot, and wrote the articles on music for the
Encyclopédie.
There, too, he was enamored of Thérèse Le Vasseur, a chambermaid at his hotel. The children he had by her were all sent to a foundling home, a not unusual procedure in those days in Paris. When he returned briefly to Geneva in 1754, he returned also to Calvinism. Instead of settling in Paris, he went to Montmorency, where Madame d’Epinay had lent him her country house, and there he devoted himself to writing. When his books were condemned by the Parlement of Paris, he fled again to Switzerland, then to England where he enjoyed the friendship and patronage of the philosopher David Hume. But when Rousseau’s paranoia led him to suspect Hume of a plot against his life, he returned to France in 1767. To protect himself against these imagined “conspirators,” he took an assumed name, “Renon.” He wrote a plan to reform the government of Poland, he married Thérèse Le Vasseur, and he wrote the
Confessions,
which would be his most durable and widely read work. He died in 1778. His remains were moved to the Pantheon in Paris during the Revolution.

* * *

Rousseau’s intellectual life was a saga of conflict between a need for discipline and a demand for freedom. He curiously resolved this conflict in his political theory,
The Social Contract
(1762), which would become a sacred text of the French Revolution of 1789. This populist dogma made the “General Will” of the people inalienable, indivisible, and infallible (pedantically distinguished from “the will of all”). So he designed a populist totalitarianism that has appealed to revolutionaries ever since, often with disastrous consequences.

With little information about man in the state of nature, which he idealized, Rousseau focused his lifelong polemic on the evils of civilization, of which he thought he had enough personal knowledge. He first secured public notice by his winning essay in the competition of the Dijon Academy (1750) on the question “Has the Restoration of the Arts and Sciences had a purifying effect upon morals?” And this essay was well designed to shock. The arts, literature, and the sciences, he argued, “fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them down. They stifle in men’s breasts that sense of original liberty, for which they seem to have been born; cause them to love their own slavery, and so make of them what is called a civilized people. . . . It is not through stupidity that the people have preferred other activities to those of the mind . . . useless thinkers were lavish in their own praises, and stigmatized other nations contemptuously as barbarians. . . . The arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices. . . . Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity and even moral philosophy of human pride.”

Rousseau rounded off his indictment of civilization by a “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” which disposed of any evils he had not yet attributed to enlightenment—surprisingly dedicated (with explicit sycophancy) to the Republic of Geneva. He seemed not to regret the destined power of women to govern men. But he is eloquent on the countless other inequalities born of civil society—of property and the power to govern. “Man,” he concludes, is “subject to very few evils not of his own creation.” “Man is naturally good but in Society finds profit in the misfortunes of his neighbor.” Contrary to vulgar prejudice, Rousseau explains, man was not miserable in a state of nature, but was in better health than he would ever be in civilized society. He needed no medicine, for he had not yet suffered the weakness that all animals show when they are domesticated. He was free, healthy, honest, and happy, for he had not yet multiplied his needs or begun to suffer the inequality of civil society.

Rousseau’s nostalgia for the state of nature, the foundation of his political philosophy, also shaped his philosophy of education. He explained at the opening of his
Émile
(1762):

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another’s fruit. He confuses and confounds time, places, and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horses, and his slaves. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master’s taste like the trees in his garden.

For Rousseau, then, education would have to be a way not of instilling the ideals of civilization but rather of liberating the young from civilization and its evils.

Much of the program he described in his didactic novel
Émile
is what he calls “negative education,” an antidote and inoculation against the pervasive evils of civilization. It has come to be called “The Child’s Charter”—a basis for modern child psychology. And it would be the prospectus and statement of principles for “progressive education” in the United States, led by John Dewey (1859-1952), who conceived it as a way of bringing democracy into the classroom (
The School and Society,
1899;
Democracy and Education,
1916). The movement attended to the child’s physical and emotional as well as his intellectual development, favored “learning by doing,” and encouraged experimental and independent thinking. The teacher, then, aimed not at instilling a body of knowledge but at developing the pupil’s own skill at learning from experience.

In
Émile
the child was to be kept from books—except one,
Robinson Crusoe,
which Rousseau called “the happiest treatise of natural education.” “Children begin by being helped, end by being served,” he warned. They become masters, using their tears as prayers. The teacher must guide without seeming to, must never use corporal punishment, but must provide situations in which the child can learn for himself. The teacher, too, must know the stages of a child’s development and introduce subjects only when the child is emotionally prepared. At the age of twelve the pupil must learn a useful trade. “Émile must work like a peasant and think like a philosopher in order not to be as lazy as a savage.” Not until the age of eighteen should Émile turn to moral science and religion, and then he can choose his religion. For “at an age when all is mystery there can be no mysteries properly speaking.” The child must have compassion, “love those who have it, but fly from the pious believers.” But also shun the philosophers (“angry wolves”), who are “ardent missionaries of atheism and very imperious dogmatics who will not endure without fury that one might think differently from them.”

Just as Voltaire sought a common vision for all mankind, to be fulfilled in “civilization,” of which the France of Louis XIV had provided a model, so Rousseau, having witnessed the varied spectacle of war and civilization in the enlightened Europe of his day, envisioned a liberated mankind. It was only civilization—the arts and sciences and institutions—that separated men from one another and set them at war in pursuit of the unnecessary. If men would only somehow return to their natural bliss they would be free to fulfill their human possibilities. But what were these possibilities? Was there any way of knowing? Rousseau was made the paradoxical patron of the guillotine of Reason of the French Revolution to come. But he was also godfather of the liberated romantic imagination about to create a rich and fantastic new legacy of arts and literature.

Among the surprising consequences of Rousseau’s vagabond life and encyclopedic writing was the role assigned to him in the early twentieth century as the archenemy of the New Humanism. This American movement in the 1920s, of which Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) was the popular spokesman, made the human elements of experience, embodied in the ancient classical tradition, the source of meaning, and opposed the appeal to nature or the supernatural. In his
Rousseau and Romanticism
(1919) Babbitt described Rousseau’s role as apostle of the wild, romantic spirit. The New Humanists urged instead a seeking spirit of restraint and proportion. They saw freedom as the “liberation from outer constraints and subjection to inner law.”

Jefferson’s American Quest

In a happy coincidence Voltaire’s Age of Enlightenment in Europe, which celebrated and explored the still-unfulfilled possibilities of civilization, saw a vast and fertile continent sparsely settled and little explored in America. This New World challenged Western Seekers to find new meanings in nature and in society, and stirred spokesmen for New World ways of seeking. Perhaps the most eloquent and effective of these was Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). A leader of the Virginia planter aristocracy, and not entirely exempt from its attitudes, he gave enduring voice to the American quest for new forms of self-government. The American War for Independence drew on the constitution and laws of the mother country to justify the colonies’ independence.

Jefferson the lawyer had expounded the right of the colonies to seek their own form of government in his
Summary View of the Rights of British America
(1774). And when the Continental Congress voted independence, Jefferson led the committee drafting its declaration. The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, became a manifesto in the next centuries for the communal seeking of people across the world. The document, with wide appeal despite its form as a legal indictment, declared that “the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The crucial phrases that made this a credo for revolutionaries in later generations first affirmed the “self-evident” truths of man’s “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Then it declared the revolutionary communal right of Seekers: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

The Declaration of Independence was thus dual—both a classic declaration of the ends of government and a declaration of the communal right to seek forms of a government better suited to those ends. It proclaimed the right of “the people” to carry on their search. To this political quest Jefferson committed himself and his political partisans in the new nation.

And an auspicious time it was, too, for exploring the experience of a New World. Benjamin Franklin, in his circular letter of 1743 gathering the American Philosophical Society, reminded Americans that the time was ripe for a communal seeking of all that could be learned from nature and from earlier settlers in the New World. “The first Drudgery of Settling new colonies, which confines the attention of People to mere Necessaries, is now pretty well over,” Franklin observed, “and there are many in every Province in Circumstances that set them at Ease, and afford Leisure to cultivate the finer Arts, and improve the common Stock of Knowledge.” Jefferson would become president and guiding spirit (1797-1815) of the Society during the most creative years.

The “American Philosophical Society, held at Philadelphia, for promoting useful Knowledge” had been consciously modeled on the Royal Society of London. But its scope, its publications, and its discussions were shaped by the novel openness of the New World and the host of unfamiliar phenomena in nature and among the native peoples. Never before in Western culture had people at a distance from the ancient centers so effectively organized to seek the meaning of their whole environment. The Society brought together a galaxy of asking minds, which included the astronomer and inventive genius David Rittenhouse (1732-1796); the pioneer psychologist and physician Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813); the great American botanist of the age Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815); the chemist and philosopher of revolution Joseph Priestley (1733-1804); the artist, museum founder and amateur archaeologist Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827); and a variety of other scientists and political philosophers. The transactions of the Society reveal a lively openness to a novel environment.

Just as the Declaration of Independence announced that Americans would find their own political way in the New World, Jefferson’s
Notes on the State of Virginia
would reveal a similar spirit at work on nature and all society. This, Jefferson’s only full-length book, was written in answer to the Secretary of the French Legation in Philadelphia, the Marquis de Barbé Marbois, who had posed twenty-three questions that Jefferson answered in detail. Too little read nowadays, it is a remarkably compendious and readable survey of Jefferson’s Virginia—from the geography, mines and minerals, the forests and agricultural products, to the institutions, peculiarities of the Indians, plantation life and slavery, the history and laws, manners and customs of the colony, the manufactures, taxation, standard of living, and commerce.

The book was an unexcelled prospectus of the promise of this New World. And it provided Jefferson the Seeker with the opportunity to reflect on the meanings of the American experience. In answering Query XIX about manufactures in the colony, after describing the self-sufficiency of plantation life and the relative insignificance of commerce compared with that in the urban life of Europe, he observes:

In Europe the lands are either cultivated, or locked up against the cultivator. Manufacture must therefore be resorted to of necessity not of choice, to support the surplus of their people. But we have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. . . . Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who, not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.