Hey everybody, welcome back to The New Thinker. If you hear my voice, that means David Barr is once again, died of some obesity-induced illness. But that's okay. The two better parts of The New Thinker.
I'd say we're two thirds, but we're really about 95% of us. Yeah. Or you go my weight or intellectual capacity? Clearly not my weight.
We're not. Okay. All right. Yeah.
But we have as our third today, somebody far superior to David Barr. Yes. Would you like to introduce our guest? Our guest tonight is Professor Christopher Kelly of Boston College.
He's I mean, if you've studied Rousseau in United States of America, 99.9% chance you've studied his works. He's done the collected writings of Rousseau with the University of New England Press, the University Press of England, which is 13 volumes. He did that with Rogers Masters. And so I mean, especially if you're looking to get off the beaten path and look at things like his writings on music or discourse on the virtues of a hero, that's the kind of stuff that you can find there that you can find somewhere else.
And so there's beautiful volumes if you guys have a chance to pick them up. And he's also written a number of books on Rousseau, including let's see, Rousseau's his own glory life, 1987, Rousseau in mind. That was recently in 2019. He had that with Eve Grace, the challenger Rousseau.
He had that in 2013 also with Eve Grace. In 2003, he wrote a book called Rousseau's Author, Constrating on Life to the Truth. Just all kinds of stuff. He's one of the eminence Rousseau's colleagues.
We're lucky to have him on the show. And we're going to discuss actually hobbies with him because, you know, no, I'm kidding. We're doing Rousseau, of course. And we're going to do Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, one of Rousseau's three biographies and a dizzingly confusing biography at that, it seems.
So welcome, Professor Kelly. It's truly an honor and pleasure to have you on the show. I'm glad to be here, Greg. Thank you.
Of course. I guess the good place to start is you're interested in this work. Aside from the fact, that's probably the only thing by Rousseau you haven't written on yet. I mean, it's not a popular work.
It's a difficult, challenging work. As you point out, you give us a piece you wrote on this. That was very helpful. So you point out a lot of people look at it and say, oh, yeah, he was insane at the end of his life.
I mean, I guess that's some of the reasons it's understudied. But why? What are some of the challenges and what is the work like him? And why are you interested in working on it?
Okay. I've been working on it actually for quite a long time, although I haven't published a lot on it. But when Roger Masters and I started the Collected Writing Series, we decided we wanted that to be Volume One for a number of reasons. One that hadn't been translated.
It seems strange to think that there would be something by Rousseau, a long work that had never been translated into English. But as you indicated, it's a very strange work. It wasn't published during his lifetime. It was published in the first big, collected writings of Rousseau a few years after his death that one small part of it had been published in England, in French a few years before that.
But it's a very strange work. The strangest for someone reading it in English were trying to translate it into English. It begins with a title because you don't know whether the term jouge or judge is a noun or a verb. So it could be Rousseau judge of Jean-Jacques, which is the way we elected to do it and most people do it, or it could be Rousseau judges about Jean-Jacques, which in some ways is more accurate.
I don't think there's an enormous difference between the two ways of translating it. But it's three dialogues. And the dialogues are between two characters, one of whom is named Rousseau, who one would expect is Jean-Jacques himself the author of this book, but he isn't. Rousseau is the author of the book, explains that this is himself as he would have been if he had read his books, not written them.
So he's a reader. He's not a writer. And then the other participant of the dialogues is someone identified only as the Frenchman, a Frenchman. And so we've got them talking about this author Jean-Jacques, who's the author of the books.
And Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a foreigner who seems to have recently arrived in France, has read Jean-Jacques books and loved them. And he finds out from his friend, the Frenchman, that this fellow Jean-Jacques is a monster, a criminal, a terrible human being. And so the book's very strange because we've got this split of the author Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Jacques. And then in the middle of the dialogues, almost the exact middle if you're interested in those things, the second dialogue Rousseau gives an account of having paid a visit.
Jean-Jacques, because he wants to find out whether he is the monster he's described as being. And he finds out that Jean-Jacques is writing a book. And the book is a dialogue about his reputation and how people should read him. In other words, it's the book you're reading.
So it's very jarring to come across this. It's something a little bit like it happens in Don Quixote. It's not unprecedented. And I suppose you could say that this splitting of the character and having a person named Rousseau, who's not Jean-Jacques Rousseau and so on, in some ways is a little bit like Plato's Theatetus, where you have Socrates talking to someone who looks like him but younger and also talking to someone else who's got the name Socrates but isn't Socrates.
And they're somehow discussing the question of knowledge and the sameness and difference. And so Rousseau's not unprecedented in this. It reminds me a little bit of Plato's hippiest major, right, where Socrates is getting beaten. By a guy who's the son of Staphronus, so he's got the same, you would say, last name or a patronemic, right?
And there's some tension between the two. And just the idea of philosophy is a kind of silent conversation of the soul with itself, which you find in Theatetus and the Sophist. It strikes me as very socratic and it's just larger structure. Well, of course it's a dialogue too.
So it did write some other dialogues, but it's unusual for him to write dialogues. And so it's a product in that sense. Now you can say from what I said, this sounds kind of interesting, right? But when it first got published, it was a little bit over halfway through the long Earth comes flat of Rousseau.
And so you might not get to it unless you read right from the beginning or if you started looking for things that you hadn't read before, you could read considerations on the government of Poland, you could read the confessions, you could read the reveries, all of which became well known works right away. But Rousseau, Judge John Schock, got a bad reputation even among people who hadn't read it. So when Herr the German sinker, who was a great fan of Rousseau, heard about this book, he wrote a letter to a friend insisting that it was not written by Rousseau. It was written by somebody else who was one of his enemies who was trying to make him look crazy.
It couldn't have been written by Rousseau. And of course this does sort of reflect the book. And there seem to have been very few people who read it, who did not reach the conclusion that the author of this was crazy. It's a very strange work.
It's very repellent in some respects. And it's quite obsessional on this question of the relationship between an author's reputation and the way in which people will read his books. I mean, I know that this is something that you could be interested in. So thinking about xenophones, who got a reputation as a monster and also even being in a criminal, but it's sort of a retired English army colonel who likes to go hunting and not a serious person, somewhat comical and so on.
And we know that we read books because somehow we've heard about the author and know that this is important and so on. But Rousseau really takes this to a very extreme degree in his discussion of it. So you mentioned that's kind of interesting, obviously I mentioned that. He's not an unlike Plato actually does include a lot of autobiographical information in his works across several works even.
And so I'm just wondering before we turn to our next point, if could you speak about, I mean it's fair to speak about this is kind of autobiographical. And so how would you situate this with the other works of Rousseau that are commonly thought of as being autobiographical? We mentioned the reveries and confessions. And so how does this fit in amongst those?
And in a way I would say the bad literary fortune of this work comes from the fact that it was originally lumped with the autobiographies and continues to be. So the confessions is an autobiography in a sense that anyone would recognize as an autobiography. So beginning with his account of his family and then his birth and so on. So it's an autobiography before the word even existed.
And the reveries is clearly a very intimate work. And it's got details about Rousseau's life, stories about what he's been doing and so on. And in that respect is clearly autobiographical. The dialogues is approaches his person rather indirectly from the outside.
And it's a dialogue that doesn't really talk about much about the details of his life. It doesn't give an account of his life and so on. On the other hand, if you don't call it an autobiographical work, what do you call it? It's a very strange literary genre.
I mean, it's got in one of the manuscripts the subtitle dialogues. So you can call it dialogues by Rousseau. And sometimes it's a shorthand as referred to as the dialogues. And people know what you're talking about who are Rousseau scholars, if you say the dialogues.
So it's a peculiar work. It's literary form is unusual for Rousseau. And that also I think accounts for why people have it quite known what to make of it. I could mention that the first it was there was sort of a pirate edition taken out of the collected writings right away.
But the first time it actually ever got published in French as a standalone book where you could just buy that copy was in 1962 and it was an introduction by Michel Foucault. So it's not this isn't just a question of anglophone scholarship. I will mention however that before Roger and I published it, it was published twice in Japanese translation. It's not, of course, naturally.
Yes. Yeah, right. So I'll ask a question and I'll try and pivot. So in a way, it almost seems like Rousseau has contributed to folks misunderstanding him with these odd biographies that he's written about himself.
And yet, as you point out, he is greatly misunderstood. And that people misunderstands him seems to be part of his motivation, right? At least it seems in the dialogues. And so there's this epigraph that he keeps coming back to across multiple works.
I'll butcher the line, but hick barbaras, soom. So such it is amongst barbarians or something like this. So the idea that Rousseau is misunderstood because he's sort of around people who don't understand him, even at different phases of his life when he's around different kinds of people. How did this meaning of this quote change over his life, but how did it sort of make constant form, I suppose?
Yeah. Okay. The whole quotation which he uses is, cheer I am the barbarian because no one understands me. And this is from Ovid, the Tricia.
And so the story is Ovid, you know, one of the premier Latin poets and one of the premier poets of all time, for reasons that we don't know got exiled from Rome by Augustus. And he was sent off to the northern side of the Black Sea where the Gethes lived. And they didn't speak Latin there and he didn't know their language. And so he wrote poetic letters back to Rome about his experience living there and also urging his friends to try to intervene with the emperor to get him to be allowed to return back to Rome.
It didn't work. He ended up dying there. There are many places in Bulgaria that claim to be the site of Ovid's grave. But so the idea is here's, you know, the most sophisticated writer in Rome.
So a civilized person, if ever there was one. The author of the Metamorphoses. And he's off somewhere where he's essentially unable to communicate with anyone who's around him. They're barbarians, but they can talk with each other.
So he's in the, so he's, so his, his, he's saying is here, I'm the barbarian. Look at from Rome, I'm the sophisticated civilized person among these barbarians. But when they look at me, I'm someone who just, you know, battles away with a language they don't understand. So the Rousseau read Ovid at a very early age, the Metamorphoses.
But later he got very fascinated with this one particular line. And the first time it pops up is in a letter he wrote when he was in his 20s, he wrote a letter to a friend of his who they did reading groups together and he had borrowed some, some pamphlet critiquing Pope and Leibniz. And Rousseau wrote a very excellent response to this. And he closes the letter saying to his friend here, I'm the barbarian because I want to understand this line from Ovid.
And you look at it and he's living out in, in what's now the far eastern part of France in the provinces. At that point, it was the Kingdom of Sardinia, Savoy, Savoy. And he's, you know, this bright guy who's surrounded by yokels who don't appreciate him and longs to be in the big city. This is what I hear from Greg all the time.
He's stuck out in Ashland, Ohio. He's forced to work out with these rubes, he calls them. And he pretends to belong with them. And he's like, every time I just want to be in a restaurant.
And then he says, well, you know, this is the story of half of Balzak's novels. It's the story of half of Flaubert's novels. It's send all his novels. It's the story of every young guy who thinks he's smarter than his neighbors and knows that if only he could get to New York, he'd be a great success.
So, and Rousseau then used this as the epigraph to a small collection of poetry he'd written. Probably also not the first young guy in the provinces who got some small publisher to put together a collection of poetry, which no one bought. So then Rousseau goes off to Paris and he's there and then in Venice. Do we have that book of poems?
Is that excellent? Is it in the collective volumes that you guys did? Some of the poems are, you know. How about that?
Okay, fine. Sorry, let me get it out. And so, he's living in Paris. He goes to Venice, you know, two very sophisticated places.
And he's struggling. He writes a couple of minor things to get published. Nobody's heard of him. And then there's the famous story about his friend Diderot's in jail for a book he wrote.
And so, he's on his way to visit him in jail and reads the question from the Academy of Dichon as to whether the restoration of the science and the arts has tended to purify morals. And so, he says, I read that question and I saw another universe and became another man. He's suddenly, you know, thinking about a lot of things, but he's been somewhat confused. And suddenly everything made sense to him.
And he wrote the essay, won the competition, became famous when it was appeared because everybody in Europe who was a learned person decided they had to attack him. Well, in the discourse, he uses the epigraph. I think we don't have the one he actually sent into the academy. We, that got lost.
But on the title page of the published version that he published, he uses that epigraph. But of course, now he's someone living in Paris writing for a learned French audience of sophisticated people. And so suddenly everything's been reversed. Now he's saying, well, they're really the barbarians on the sophisticated person, but because they can't understand me, they think I'm a barbarian.
So here, this is Alex, by the way, this is how Alex actually goes to Paris and all kinds of other fancy places. The roles are reversed. I'm at home among the simple folk in the proper right, right, right. The desires don't extend beyond their powers, but live in happy simplicity.
That's another good thing. Good for the natural man. And the argument of the first this forces very much that the French don't understand themselves and they will not understand the argument that's being given to that. And I think that this is the history of Rousseau's writings that he knows, you know, he, to some extent, it's deliberate.
But he knows sometimes with some anguish and sometimes very playfully that people are not likely to understand really what he's arguing. He in response to one of the critics of the first discourse wrote a little pamphlet and he said, he starts talking about how the person completely misrepresents his argument. He doesn't understand what he said. And people will say, I should have been clearer.
And he said, but nobody says when a painter does an exhibition of his paintings that he needs to set up an oculus with an eye examination to fit people's glasses before they go in to the exhibition. Well, you know, I think the dialogues is in a way Rousseau's late attempt to fit to decide who's got the proper vision to read his works and to fit them with glasses so that they can. I should do this next time. I should do this next time.
I can go to the team. So let's, should we go into the work a little bit? Yeah. You know, it's a long work and you attempt in the essay gave us to try to show the way to the unity of the work by showing how this there's this consistent theme of the question of misrepresentation and misrepresentation of show is misunderstanding, right?
Which is funny because it's a hard work to understand about how it's hard to be understood. So doesn't seem to have done in many favors, if that is mentioned. But one way in which Rousseau does help in clearing things up in which you use as a focus for your paper is the fact that each dialogue has as part of it a the examination of an enigma and that examination in each case links to a core part of Rousseau's thought. So I thought we could spend a little time on each enigma and what it shows us about Rousseau's thought when you wrestle with the parts of it.
So the first one you call in the first I'll be called enigma of the monster, right? The author of Rousseau's prior works is a reputed criminal. This is according to the common understanding of the average Frenchman, right? But this leads to the main figure Rousseau who's reading, who hasn't read these works, it leads him to say, no, this has to be played, drives to write it.
And it leads him to ultimately when he realizes that he hasn't been actually tried to assert a great principle concerning how to judge another man's guilt or innocence. So what is this though? How does it bring this principle to light? What role does this principle play in this work?
But really in all of his shows works, this is in effect derived from his larger corpus. The statement of their being an enigma that needs to be explained comes at the point where the character Rousseau, I'll try to say it in the name of the dollar, I'll try to use it for the character and say, Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the author. But I'm sure I won't be able to maintain that because nobody can. But the character Rousseau has heard from his friend that Jean-Jacques is a monster, that he's a criminal, and that there is irrefutable proof that this is true.
And Rousseau says, OK, I believe that. This is terrible. But he also gives an account of why this is upsetting to him, which is that the books move him so much. And he gives a sort of autobiography of himself showing why these books are particularly moving to someone like him.
And so he, while saying that he believes that Jean-Jacques is a monster because everyone says he isn't, there's this proof and so on, he then insists that the author of the books isn't a monster. And the Frenchman quite rightly is confused by this, right? Because how can you say you're persuaded by me that he is a monster, but you're saying that he isn't a monster. And Rousseau's explanation is, in the first place, that these books couldn't have been written by a monster.
So therefore, this character Jean-Jacques who was claiming to be their author is a plagiarist. He's stolen somebody else's books that are great books and claimed to be the author of. Now, the Frenchman is quite reasonably skeptical about this. And of course, I should say the Frenchman hasn't read the books because why would you read books written by a criminal and a monster and an awful person?
So he hasn't read the books. So he doesn't really believe they could be that great. And in exploring this question of the plagiarism and so on, it emerges from the Frenchman that Jean-Jacques has never actually been convicted of a crime. It's just that everyone knows that he's guilty and circulate the word that he's guilty so people will stay away from him.
But they want to avoid the scandal that would come of giving publicity to this awful person. So you could say there's a social media mob that has attacked Jean-Jacques and destroyed his reputation and they have all sorts of evidence to say that they're right, but Rousseau is suddenly relieved because he realizes that Jean-Jacques has never been allowed to defend himself. So he makes a big point out of this. And the point is in a way on the question of the difference between being persuaded of something and being convinced of it.
You're persuaded if you believe that it's true. You're convinced if you can rationally demonstrate that it's true. But of course, convinced also means to have conviction. And so a conviction in a law court requires that the evidence be presented and both sides have their say and so on.
And so he insists that this is a fundamental principle of justice without which societies cannot exist and the human race indeed cannot continue to exist unless people accept this principle that the accused person has to be heard. So once he knows that Jean-Jacques hasn't been heard, he thinks that a further investigation is necessary. Now, the reason this principle I think is in its particular form is so distinctively Jean-Jacques Rousseau in is that it's not something he discusses in the social contract where you might expect him to discuss it, but it does follow the pattern of arguments that he gives in the social contract and elsewhere. I'll give an example from Emil.
Emil is Rousseau's fictional boy that's being brought up having this good education. And part of the education is he plants a garden and he grows beings and he has sweated over these beings. And so Rousseau says that he really, he has mixed his labor with them, he's put his own being into them. And so these are his because they're him.
And one day he comes and finds that the beings have been ripped up and he investigates and finds out that his father's gardener has done this, Roe vair the gardener. And he accuses him, so how dare you rip up my beans that I labored on? You know, I've got a locky in claim to this. He's never read Locke, right?
But he knows, he knows from his gut that if you have labored on something, it's yours. But Robert says, but you ripped up my melons in order to plant those beans. Those things that you thought were weeds that you whipped up were melons that I was going to give to you. And it was, I got there first and mixed my labor with it.
So we've got the right of the first occupant. And Emil says, well, I've got to go get some land on that. And they, and Roe vair says, well, too bad because all the land's taken now. And Emil is ready to go to war over this.
So we see this demonstrated that there's something to the claim that mixing your labor was something makes it yours. But even in Locke, we see that Locke says as long as there's enough and is good for everyone else. So once all the land has been taken, what about that? We're just going to have to have a war.
And so the tutor ends up engineering an agreement between Emil and Roe vair that Emil will get a little corner of the garden. Roe vair will get the rest of it. And of course, Emil will get to eat the melons in the end. And so it's crucial that this part of the education, given something sweet to eat.
But so Rousseau's doctrine of property is that while there is a sort of persuasion that something is yours, if you got there first, or a persuasion that something is yours because you labored on it, it's not really yours in a social context unless there's an agreement that's being abided by all parties. So consent is the basis of property, not labor, not first possession, not being the one who can use it best being the one who needs it most and so on. It's an agreement. And something like this is I think the argument in the first of the dialogues that we can have all sorts of proofs, pieces of evidence that someone is guilty.
But within the context of a civil society, we need to have a set of agreed to procedures which allow for conviction, not just persuasion. And the only procedure that makes any sense is for the person being charged to be able to have a say. So it's a sort of formal principle, just the way Rousseau's understanding of property is a formal principle. And it's something which turns a sort of, you could say, a common sense understanding of guilt and innocence into a legal understanding of guilt and innocence.
It's something which makes it into a law. This is why it's so important. So that's the, I think, an instance that we can see repeatedly in Rousseau's thought, but one that his character, at least, insists is of even more fundamental importance than the other examples that Jean-Jacques Rousseau has given. So there's a natural segue between the first and the second enigma to me.
The first dialogue, the first enigma, the first dialogue is that Rousseau thinks that the author is a monster. And then the second enigma, the second dialogue has to do with natural goodness. And the connection, I think, is the following. You write that, as on page 10 of the essay, you send us, a monster is not only wicked, but is characterized by a wickedness that has no natural explanation.
And then you point to the fact that Diderot and D'Elaine Baire talk about monsters as a sort of departures from natural currencies. And sort of give an example of a two-headed animal, something like this. So one of my questions, I suppose, or the way he transitions the second is, so yes, of course, we have to hear Rousseau out. There is this great principle that someone should be able to defend himself.
But it still doesn't remove the notion that the author is monstrous in some way. And so it seems like the second dialogue really gets to the heart of the defense and that has to do with man's natural goodness, or I suppose in this particular case, the author's natural goodness. So anything you'd like to, yeah, please. I think that's exactly right.
In a way, you can see a resemblance between this and Plato's apology. Right. So Socrates presents himself as, you know, he's never been involved in the law courts. He's just a good guy.
But he also knows he has to explain why he has such a bad reputation. And so he has the Arasloff and E story and then so on. So we've got this person who leads a way of life that is very peculiar and that other people can't understand. And that some of them, particularly people of high intellectual authority, find themselves threatened by that this way of life poses a challenge to them.
And so first of all, it's something that defies natural explanation to the average person. Why would somebody lead this life that has got him into so much trouble? And he doesn't do things the way other people do. And then there are his enemies who want to give him a bad reputation because his existence is a threat to them.
So we've got this, but behind this, there is a genuine peculiarity. There's something that needs to be explained. And so no one can explain him as just being your garden variety thief because there's nothing in his life that's that. So if there's no natural explanation for his behavior, that's what the Frenchman thinks.
That's why monsters are the culmination of these insults that are held to him. He's so repellent because he's wicked in a way that has no natural motive to it in the way that a bank robber, why do you rub banks? Well, because that's where the money is. It's good to have money.
Everybody can understand that. So Jean-Jacques is peculiar. And coming back from the visit with him, and I should say at the end of the first dialogue, Rousseau says, I'm going to go visit Jean-Jacques. And the Frenchman says, I'm going to read the books.
So the second dialogue is the account of the visit and the third dialogue is the account of the reading. So coming back from the visit, Rousseau says that he's met with Jean-Jacques and he is found that he is not virtuous, but that he's also not a monster. And the Frenchman's sort of common sense of thinking is, well, you know, either you're virtuous or you're vicious. If you're not virtuous, then he's vicious.
So maybe not a monster, but a criminal. But there's something, you know, there's a, again, there's an enigma here. How can someone be not wicked, but also be not virtuous? And the answer to that in the dialogue and is the principle that's famous in Rousseau from the Second Discourse and from Aemile, which is man is naturally good.
And the man who is naturally good, who's described that way here, is Jean-Jacques. So the second dialogue is an exploration of what it means for someone to be good, who is not virtuous. You know, can those be separate things? And Rousseau, the character, suggests that we need a new moral teaching, which is given to us by Jean-Jacques, in order to understand this, how there can be goodness without virtue or how goodness and virtue cannot be identical to each other.
You know, you could say it's a different version of an issue one sees with the monotonic dialogue about, you know, genuine virtue or philosophic virtue versus demonic virtue or vulgar virtue and so on. But you sort of doesn't put it as one sort of virtue versus another sort of virtue, but goodness and virtue. So he changes the terms of the discussion. And one of the small things that Jean-Jacques seems to, I just did a picture of it, I have it correct, is that he is sort of naturally inclined to goodness, but he lacks some kind of tough faculty to make the hard decisions or to stick by it or something like this.
He doesn't have the chops or something like this. That's right in a sense, although I think that still leaves a bit of a confusion over goodness and virtue because what goodness turns out to me, well, let me jump out of the dialogues and go to the second discourse where it says he's proven that human beings are naturally good. And what goodness seems to mean in the second discourse can be seen from its opposites. The opposite is people are wicked and miserable, but that's by what society has done to them.
So goodness means not wicked. It still remains to see how that's different from virtue is because that's also not wicked. But goodness also means not unhappy. Life is good for you.
The experience of being alive is a good experience. And something we saw in Aristotle agree about, but we saw places a long more weight on this. So in the case of Jean-Jacques getting back to the dialogues, his goodness consists of the fact that one, he has no particular disposition to harm anyone else. Right.
So he could say he does good to his friends and harm to no one, although he doesn't seem to have any friends. You have a great line on this. You say he does no harm, not an answer to a commandment from a divine voice, but because he's too lazy to be concerned about others. So it's not a concern that that that pulls you inwards, right?
So in the second discourse, this would be, you know, look, if you want to survive, you want self-preservation, this is the way you want to enjoy your existence. And so the sentiment of your existence, a kind of self-concern that draws you within and away from others, it's a kind of selfishness, but not like a material selfishness, right? You know, in a way, this is a botanic question, because if you, since virtue, as Rousseau presents it, is not so much a general term that applies to a variety of different virtues, or one might ask whether that's true or not, right, from a prosonic perspective. But the question is justice.
And is justice good? It's clearly good for the people to whom you're being just, except for the bad people you're punishing, but is it good for you? And so Jean-Jacques is someone who is, first of all, has no disposition to harm other people. But a part of the reasoning is no disposition to harm other people is because he is so totally focused on his own good.
He just wants to be happy. So he, as you quoted me, he's saying, right, he's too lazy to be concerned with other people, because that it's trouble to be concerned with other people. It's trouble to be a tyrant. It's trouble to be a good ruler.
It's trouble. It's a bother, right? So he is... I'll give a piece of candy to a kid you happen to pass on the road, right?
It's in the reveries. Yeah, well, got coin in that case. But yeah, forgive it like a candy even better, because his father wouldn't take it from him. So, yeah, so Jean-Jacques is someone who is intransitantly devoted to his own good.
Now where his weakness comes in, which I can refer to a while ago, is that he's not always capable of getting it. He knows what it is. He's never sidetracked away from it the way most people are. Most people are sidetracked away from it by trying to get the means to get what's good, and then they forget about the good and pursue only the means for the rest of their life, whether that be saddest or money or whatever.
So, Jean-Jacques never forgets that, but that doesn't mean that he's strong enough to be able always to achieve his good. So he's both strong and weak. He's strong in that he's single-mindedly devoted to the good. But the good is not the same thing as justice.
Right? It incidentally means that he tends not to be unjust. Right? Just as you can say in the Republic, when Socrates is defending justice or philosophers, they don't rob the temples and pick people's pockets, and that's the proof they're just.
Well, that's a sort of low bar for justice, you could not say. And Jean-Jacques meets that bar, but he's not capable or interested in something stronger, a stronger sense of justice than that. That's where his laziness comes in. But also, you mentioned in that same remark about the importance of a divine commandment.
Commandment to be just is something that means nothing to him. Right? He's kind of lazy this Jean-Jacques, and yet he still has some notion of developing an entirely new moral system. This is one of the parts of your paper that I found the most interesting I just didn't expect to see this in Rousseau, where Rousseau clarifies this new moral system by comparing Jean-Jacques way of life and the way of life that Jesus counsels us to live, especially in the Sermon on Mount.
Wow, Greg, that's a really good point. Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom. I'm sorry for the sarcastic voice, but our listeners at home, they can't tell or see Chris Kelly rolling his eyes and everything Greg says. Anyways, we're getting a little far along.
We still got a lot to talk about, so we're going to stop here, but listen to the rest next time on The New Thinkery.