Hume and Rousseau

‘You are nursing a viper to your bosom’ was the warning given to David Hume about Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Baron d’Holbach. Although ignored by Hume, it was to prove prescient of his ultimate experience of Rousseau who charged Hume himself with either being the ‘best’ of men or the ‘blackest’. This was in response to Hume’s attempts to aid Rousseau in escaping the Continent to the freedom of Britain and a royal pension. Both men’s anticipations of each other were invalidated by the other’s behaviour. Behaviour which itself came from their own experience and understandings of the world, which formed the basis of their philosophies which are incommensurable and still stand today as opposing influences towards action.
Their falling out, a very public affair, divided their contemporaries. A perceptive and entertaining account of it is given in ‘The Philosopher’s Quarrel’ by Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott. It highlights how philosophy was not so much an academic discipline but a way of thinking about the world and ultimately a way of living in it for both men. This is something too readily forgotten today, yet the fundamental questions of philosophy articulated by Kant, who claimed to have been awoken from his ‘dogmatic slumber’ by Hume, are still of vital importance today. These concern what it is to be a person, what we can hope for, how we know and what we ought to do in the light of the answers to these questions. Rousseau and Hume answered them very differently.
For Rousseau we are born good, it is society that is corrupt and corrupting of an essential goodness that can be rediscovered in nature and solitude, where we can know and be sure of our own hearts, through our own feeling. As a critique of reason and society it captured many other hearts in a Romantic Idealism and it still has a powerful appeal today. Where to believe in our essential goodness can exculpate us of responsibility, allowing us to blame society and where we can place all the wickedness, evil and badness of the world, there and on others. Set against this is a Humean perspective of us being inevitably social, of needing others and recognising our limits, including the limits of our reason, which as Hume famously noted is the ‘slave of our passions’. Reason can though help us, educate us in living, allowing us to recognise the limits of our own understanding and to push it further in understanding others. It is this capacity, to understand others, that is at the heart of being human forming the potential bonds of attachments that can see us through life. Hume having flirted with solitude, and the melancholy that comes with it, was integrated into the social world, attached to it with good friends by the time he died. Rousseau convinced in his own rightness of feeling that he was good, lived in a narrowing world of Jean-Jacques, unable to reconstrue, condemned to self-righteousness and loneliness. He had excluded himself from society in the name of his own goodness, he though, did not complain.