Rousseau and Voltaire

Rosenstock-Huessy’s discussion of Voltaire and Rousseau depends on his prior discussion of the role of inspired literature in the formation of a nation. They are adherents to the revolutionary creed of literary inspiration, the “cult o f an inspired literature.” He compares the two to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for like them the two French writers prevented a simple romanticism. Voltaire and Rousseau “divided their labor, one aiming at the individual, the other at the institutions.”

Pascal sets the background. He had distinguished sublime science (mathematics), provincialism (which had to be combated), and Port Royal (the place of freedom). But by 1750, the enclave of Port Royal was no longer viable. A new house of France was needed. Rousseau provided one by emphasizing the first-person. Pascal thought the I odious, but Rousseau celebrates the I. That is the sign of the revolutionary change brought by Rousseau.

Rousseau celebrated the man of nature, Adam instead of Christ, and thought of himself as the first in a new race of Adams. Like Jefferson, he believed that man and freedom came into being simultaneously. Rosenstock-Huessy thinks this absurd – weak, newborn, old, dependent persons are not free. What interested Rousseau was the freedom to change. Physical life is not free in that sense, but “our creative power of changing our environment, of changing the world, depends on liberty.” Adam as pioneer is most like his Creator, “free and divine.” The “demiurge” of antiquity becomes the “creative genius” of modernity.”

Rousseau’s free man fit the one who already had some ownership: “Man is by no means simply the natural man, but a man on his soil, a man with his tools, a man free in the choice of his activities.” To have choice, one must have opportunity, and Rousseau’s gospel was that “everyone shall get at least one opportunity.”

Rousseau made the prefall Adam more important and interesting than the postfall Adam. And this put passion at the center of his thought, passion that was considered as “innocent and natural as the fire of a volcano or the water of a great cataract.” For the French, philosophy means reflection “on your own passions” and being “sincere enough to apply their force to your creative life.” Philosophy is a natural activity, as one “reflects” on his passions as in a mirror. Spirit comes to be associated more with “clear ideas,” and expressing these clear ideas, arrived at by reflection on one’s passions, one comes to an “inspiration” that can “move the world.”

Not only Adam, not non-European humanity is classified as natural humanity. And Rousseau’s thought, and much classical political and economic thought after him, focuses attention on the natural man in this sense, Robinson Crusoe, for whom production and consumption are the great economic needs, not distribution. When Adam takes center stage, equality joins liberty as a central concern. Rosenstock-Huessy also connects this to the Cartesian spatialization of philosophy, in which time dissolves into space. Descartes wrongly makes time secondary to space, and also identifies the mind and the soul. These are the two great mistakes of the Cartesian system.

Voltaire organized his thought around two postulates, which drew on Descartes: “in order to seek truth it is necessary at least once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, all things” and “we ought to consider false everything that is doubtful.” These postulates are sufficient to “blow up any social order.” Descartes had proposed the need for some kind of shelter to live in during the destruction of the old house of the world. There are three houses for man: the house of perfect knowledge, house of prejudices, an apartment that gives shelter to the man moving from prejudice to knowledge.

Voltaire took these houses from Descartes, but realized more clearly than the latter that the man who doubts everything has already left his old house, and that between the destruction of the old and the erection of the new it’s not enough to borrow a house to live in: “There had to be a certain peculiar formation between old and new, distinctly hostile to the old and unquestionably devoted to the new.” Voltaire literally had a house with two exits, one to Switzerland and the other to France. This halfway house is occupied by readers, especially readers of pamphlets and tracts.

Their goal is to establish a “reasonable world” in place of “the world of miracles, revelations, and saints.” Rosenstock-Huessy says that “we all know” that the world is partly regularly and partly surprising: “We could not take a railroad to go and propose to our sweetheart without this dualism.” But this was inexplicable to Voltaire, and, certain that the old can never be bright nor the new dark, he “sacrificed the Christian dualism of law and love, repetition and surprise, custom and revelation to the fighting monism of an army of enlightenment.” This monism “dominated the whole world between 1789 and 1914 (or 1934), in the form of an attempt to identify the future with progress and the past with darkness.” Monistic man is scientific man, but science is not the Alpha and Omega of life or thought. Enlightenment committed the fallacy of extending logic “to questions wholly removed from a logical approach.” Voltaire’s reduction was an “abuse” of Abelard’s method, and produced a strong reaction in romanticism. Hegel and Marx rediscovered the illogicality of reality, the possibility “that yes and no can both exist.”