Hey, folks, this is part two of a two-part conversation. I suggest you go listen to part one, but if you, for some reason, just want to listen to a conversation in the middle, you can just start here. And I'll give you a little summary. I mean, you don't need to listen to part one.
It's mostly Greg talking, so the back half is going to be more interesting. But we first just sort of introduced our guest, and we talked about how Uso's work, Uso's Juzh Dijon-Zak, situates within Uso's other writings. And we talked about how it's easy to misunderstand Uso, and that this theme of misrepresentation and misunderstanding is a really a core part of what Uso is thinking about in Uso's Juzh Dijon-Zak. We then go into the first of three enigmas that Uso presents in the course of these three dialogues.
We talk about property, and we talk about the second enigma, and then we get into a little bit the new moral system with comparisons to the Ten Commandments to Jesus. And now we'll pick up there where I believe Greg was saying something extremely uninteresting. Well, onto your seats, it's going to be wild. Can you take us through this dialogue a little bit and discuss?
We just talked about the commandments. What's the status of divine providence between Juzh Dijon-Zak and Ur-Ruso and Uso and Uso, by the way, Uso the character is a great beaver in divine providence. Yeah, yeah. But, and he says he talked to Juzh Dijon-Zak about God and the destination of our being and so on, but he doesn't really directly report exactly what Juzh Dijon-Zak said about God.
But in order to explain what natural goodness is, he makes a series of comparisons. So he compares, has a little comparison of Juzh Dijon-Zak with an sort of ordinarily, what we would ordinarily understand to be a virtuous person, also with a wise man, but mainly with the sermon on the month, with Christianity requires. And there are two ways in which he seems to be a good Christian. Uso does report that no one has ever more wholeheartedly endorsed the principle of I will be done.
But it's very unclear what that principle means. One might think that I will be done means you command me to do something, I will do it. Your will is that I do it. But, but it also could be understood that I will be done could be understood as accepting fate.
God has put me in this position, I won't fight against necessity. But we don't get an explanation of that. There are a couple of points where direct quotations or mis- quotations or revisions of the sermon of the Mount. And when I was the first of them I noticed, a site from the site that I will be done, was a place where Juzh Dijon-Zak is shown to disagree with the sermon of the Mount.
In the sort of the Mount Jesus says that you should put your heart in heaven rather than on earth because heaven is where things are that can't rust or mold or fall out of being and so on. And he says that where your treasure is there, your heart is. So your heart is either with earthly things or it's in heaven. The right thing is to have your heart be in heaven.
But Rousseau says that Juzh Dijon-Zak sort of tacitly, he doesn't say he turns it around but he shows him turning around, which is his treasure is where his heart is. So his treasure is entirely internal to him. It's not outside on the earth the way it is for the people that Jesus is criticizing. On the other hand, it's not following what Jesus recommends, putting it in heaven.
So it's something entirely different from that. It's put in sort of a peculiar way in the dialogue that makes it easy to miss that it's different because he doesn't, he never mentions the sermon of the Mount. He just keeps quoting from it and revising the quotes. So then at another point Rousseau says that John Chalk does not forgive those who enter him but he doesn't try to get revenge on them.
He just doesn't think about them. If he can get out of their way so they can't harm him, then he just forgets about them. So another example of his laziness. But he doesn't forgive them.
So he accepts that I will be done part of the Lord's prayer but he doesn't accept the... Forgiving those who trust us against us. Nor does he ask for forgiveness for anything that he does that's wrong. Which again, is the most extended comparison in the dialogues of what natural goodness means by showing what it isn't.
Is this comparison with the sermon on the Mount? In which he could sort of vaguely look like an okay Christian because he accepts that I will be done. But and he is able to quote it, that looks good. But in the end he's something very, very different.
But he's not presented as a terrible sinner because he's different. The word sin does not occur in the dialogues. And so natural goodness. And Alex asked about the question of the question of divine providence in this.
The character Rousseau seems both to accept that God can command things with people but even more importantly that God rewards or compensates the just people who suffer. And so he believes in a divine providence and the following divine commands and believing in divine providence need to go together. That the fact is as Rousseau says about Jean-Jacques, if it came to a case of doing something right that would break his heart, he would lose what was most important to him, he wouldn't be able to do it. But if there is divine providence and a reward for doing the things that break your heart, then maybe somebody could do it.
It would seem. So divine providence and divine commands in the dialogues seem to go together and neither of them has a place in the existence of Jean-Jacques and his natural goodness. I think you could say it is an interesting question as to whether Rousseau more radically rejects the idea of sin based on divine commandments or the idea of redemption based on divine grace. But he rejects both, which is more fundamental is a different question.
He tacitly and even to some extent explicitly rejects both of them in the time. But now we've got an explanation. He's not a monster. What he is, is good, but not virtuous.
He's a new type that we didn't know about until his books came and explained this to us. So which, you know, again, if a monster is something that's sort of unnatural, this would seem to prove that everybody else is a monster, right? And failing to adhere to the standard of natural goodness. Well, and this is sort of Rousseau's view that everyone else is, Jean-Jacques Rousseau occasionally mentions having met some people who are good without being virtuous and so on and so on.
So he's not simply unique. But yeah, that his account of people living in civil society, even good guys, virtuous people are denatured in some sense. And denatured means in some way to be a monster, at least in the extreme case. Yeah.
Let's move on to the third enigma, the third dialogue, which you term, the enigma of conspiracy. And this dialogue's unique, right? Because at this point, the enigma comes from the Frenchman, right, and not with words. And he's at least been persuaded to finally read the works of this monster.
And he comes away thinking, of course, he's a monster, right? It also kind of brings the theme of his persecution, but non-trial to a whole, right? Because in the third, it focuses on the nature of his persecution as ridicule and scorn. And part of this has to do, let me just read a line that you quoted Rousseau's, among the peculiarities that distinguish our century from all others is the methodical and consistent spirit that has guided public opinion for 20 years.
And you point out that now a philosophic sect has organized itself into a body. This sect has formed a somewhat unsteady alliance with the powerful. Together, they exercise a much more consistent domination of public opinion than was possible before. They lead opinion through the dissemination of doctrines, chosen less for their truth than their usefulness in abetting this project of ruling, right?
And you say, in effect, the freshman presents what we know is the enlightenment as an effort of intellectuals to shape previously unruly public opinion, to guarantee their own influence. And it's struck me so much as a description of ideology and the relationship between ideology and modern thought. And I would even say even today's words, we say ideology, the university, right, the way in which so many portions of the academy and departments and thinkers remain captive and are rewarded for flattering certain trendy thoughts, right, that have certain political ramifications. And at this point, as you point out, the freshman really comes into his own.
He shows himself to be not just an average person, but quite thoughtful. So there's a lot of just put there. None of it is a question. It's just a series of interesting things that you put forward for us.
But I guess one question I have, because I think this is still a live question for us, is how does Roussaint cop with this phenomenon? Is he able to? And if he does an offer, does he guidance on how to be genuinely thoughtful in such times where thoughtfulness is captive in this way? Well, are you asking how Roussaint cop with the phenomenon of being persecuted and ridiculed and so on?
I mean, he writes, I mean, I guess you wrote this incomprehensible book. So I guess there's only so much one can do. No, no, no, I should have said before when talking about the second dialogue that the freshman does say that it's sometimes, I mean, sorry, Roussaint says it sometimes Jean-Jacques does start thinking about divine providence rescuing him in the end. But most of the time, no, he's not thinking about that.
So I think it is, you know, the question, this is the question that's much discussed that Roussaint was craziness. Jean-Jacques Roussaint says craziness. And he did go through, after the publication of a meal in the social contract, he was awake into the middle of the night and told that a word was being issued for his arrest, but if he got a coach to leave France, they'd let him out of the country. But if he stayed, he'd be arrested.
And then he went places and got driven out of places sometimes by the government, sometimes by mobs that he went off to England with David Hume, who tried to befriend him, but befriended him in a somewhat awkward way that, you know, Hume, for example, decided that Roussaint was pestered by receiving mail from strangers and so on. And so Hume would just go through all of his mail and read it and just give him the letters that were important for him to read. And Roussaint found out about this, that he didn't like the fact that Hume opened his mail without telling him about it and kept him from seeing letters. And Roussaint told Hume how much money he had and that he wanted to live on that amount of money and that he lived comfortably on that.
Hume thought, well, no, you know, you need to have more money and he must have more money than that. And so he got influential friends to get in touch with bankers around Europe to find out what Roussaint's financial situation was. Now, all of this was done, I think, from you as prospective, in a friendly spirit. But you can understand, if you're being persecuted by governments, driven out by mobs, and your friend starts reading your letters and not letting you see them and investigating your finances behind your back.
Stop it, Alex, stop, go through my mail and my bank information. You hear this? It's not what a friend does. At this point, I should say our third co-host David Barr has a theory that Hume, that Roussaint thought he was going to eat him.
And he would be very upset if I didn't bring this up with you. I would say the same thing. So, yeah, so his craziness. So, you know, I think there are periods of time in which Roussaint himself admits that he was just under such psychological stress that he sort of pracked, that he started believing in conspiracies that were not true and so on.
And he also, you know, he says that the hardest vice to get rid of is vanity and that he had suffered from it before. And so, he periodically arises. So, Roussaint does not, if you look closely at his statements, there's not cresent himself as someone who has simply achieved happiness and simple equanimity. He has some of the time.
He once said in a letter to Malicere, who was the head of the French censorship, that the thing that he was proudest of about himself was that he was as happy as someone in his condition being who he was could be. In other words, he doesn't claim that he was perfectly happy. He claims that given the sort of human being he is and the circumstances in which he finds himself, he is as happy as it's possible to be. So, in that case, you can say that Roussaint's position is that he's publicizing his teaching by writing these books and so on, does bring down all these things upon him.
But it also gives him an understanding which allows him to cope with that to the greatest extent possible. Now, writing the dialogues is meant to be something which is a part of the long-term battle for his reputation and for his doctrine. And you would have to say, since there are only half a dozen people who read the work and like it, it hasn't worked yet so far. My mission is to help him out with this.
And of course, at the end of the dialogues, the Rousseau is insisting, the character Rousseau is insisting, we've got to go public with this. And the Frenchman says, no, we can't go public. There are these powerful people. We can't accomplish anything.
What we can do is go visit Jean-Jacques and be friends with him and counsel with him about what to do. But Roussaint says, oh, but the truth always comes out in history. Over the long term, this will be known. And the Frenchman says, that's just not true.
It's, you know, who knows how, you know, sometimes something comes out. We get something corrected. And I think his account of the enlightenment is these guys are now going to make it harder for the truth to come out because they're so good in enforcing their account of things. So you mentioned something long ago and of course, good in thinking about it.
And so there's this way in which the elephant's autobiographical remarks, I guess he now stands in an exception, but like he's self-consciously affecting this opinion of him that you said people rightly just sort of think that's him. Like this old retired colonel who just likes hunting. So I'm wondering, you know, I've read the confessions and I've read the reveries. I've not really studied the dialogues at all.
And I just, you seem to be arguing that this is an attempt for Jean-Jacques Rousseau to try to set the record straight. Maybe. And that's what you're saying. But I'm just wondering, is there any chance that Rousseau is actually up to here is keeping this alternative version of him alive?
Does it serve his purposes in any way? Like, there's some stories and confessions where I'm like, this just seems made up. And why would he present himself in such an unflattering light? He must know that this will, that people will think he's crazy.
And even here, like the note to Ditto and the Encyclopedia about a monster having two heads. Here, I could help him immediately think, well, as a Rousseau just kind of confirmed that, he's divided himself into two and made himself argue with himself. And like, so I just wonder if, is there anything to the notion that Rousseau is sort of very intentionally actually putting this forward as a not necessarily good defense? Like, like, I'm a teasur defense.
Well, I do think it's easier to see that in the confessions and, in some extent, the reveries because there the emphasis is, you know, the emphasis is on his feelings and the development of his feelings. And so the reputation that we have of Rousseau, among people who loved Rousseau's books, as well as people who hated him, is that this is a man of deep, profound feelings. But he's not really a thinker. You know, there's a very good book on Rousseau by John Sarpensky, in which he said it took Freud to think Rousseau's feelings.
It's a good line that I don't think it's true. But it's, you can see from Rousseau in a way, says with the confessions and the preface of the confessions that he's going to give you the account of his hidden feelings in all the situations of his life. So, yeah, I would say that I've got an idea about my own writing about Rousseau, my first book on the confessions. And so it's on Rousseau's thoughts about his feelings.
My second book is on Rousseau's authorship. And so it's Rousseau's thoughts about his deeds, because for him the most important deeds are his publications. So, of course, that means I have to read a third book, which is Rousseau's thoughts about his thoughts, right? And that's the hard one to do, because he does, I think, deliberately conceal.
I think in the case of the dialogues, the account of natural goodness doesn't really reveal him as being a profound thinker. And we get it very indirectly in the third dialogue, you know, with the Frenchmen who's come back from reading the books. And he says these are very difficult books. You have to read them over and over again.
You have to figure out what the right order to read them is. And the order to read them in is the opposite of the order they were published in. And it's just a lot of work and very hard to understand. And whereas the character Rousseau had felt this immediate kinship with the author, you could say, right?
It'd be easy for him to feel an immediate kinship with the author, because it's him, right? But his way of reading is this intense identification. Here's someone who gets me, right? That's the way he reads him.
And then he goes and meets it. And his view is confirmed by meeting him. Well, you know, unfortunately, we can't go and meet him. And also, I don't know, and certainly when you read the dialogues, you don't feel an immediate identification with this character and say, here's this person saying these things that's really all about me.
I think the confession sometimes does have that effect upon Pete, right? But the dialogues doesn't. It's repellent and I think somewhat deliberately repellent. And in the end, and people tend to miss the Frenchman's intelligence.
He just seems as prominent. But by the end, he's not just sounder in his judgment about providence and the workings of history than Rousseau is. Not necessarily sound at the John Chalkes, because we don't know his opinions about this. But he also worked through the books and really studied them.
And we can do that. We can't go and pay a visit. But he is in a way a sort of hidden model of what Rousseau's readers can do to approach him, whereas they all want to be Rousseau. Oovement.
Immediately, spontaneously, says, this guy is like me. He gives this account of an ideal world in which people communicate immediately by a sort of mark or sign. They don't really even have to talk. And he says, there are people like that in this world, and the author of these books is one of them.
And the Frenchman says, well, I don't know about him, but you certainly seem to be. And so his idea is I want immediate comprehension through a sign. And this is something that Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, who is interested in is a phenomenon. But that's not his, he does think that thinking is hard work.
There is a sort of genius of being able to present a visible image or compose a piece of music which has an immediate effect upon people. But that's not the same thing as thinking is. Thinking is always much more difficult than that. By the way, I have a so in Xenophon story.
I'd love to hear it. I don't know the words. Utterly irrelevant to anything we've been talking about. But since you can't stop thinking about Xenophon.
Right. When before Rousseau became famous, he worked as a sort of research assistant secretary for a wealthy family. And a lot of what he did was take books out of the library and read them and provide summaries and find relevant passages and so on. And somebody has actually gone to the part of the Bibliothec Nacional in Paris, what used to be the King's Library, and found the records of the books that Rousseau took out.
And one of the books that Rousseau was the last person to take out. No one had taken it out since Rousseau until this guy wrote this article in the 1970s or 80s. And what is it? Xenophon.
And he was a bookmark in it. There's a piece of paper, a little piece of paper stuck in a page. So the guy said, you know, maybe this is Rousseau's bookmark. So what is it?
It's a memorabilia, see a dotay. That's the passage that you're interested in. So cool. Interesting.
I want to be a good court assistant. Yeah. He was so offended. He just closed it and put it back.
That's not like Rousseau. I don't know. You mentioned it short on time. We should probably transition to the biographical.
But I just want to say to cap off, that was really interesting. I look forward to your book on Rousseau's thoughts on that, which will be your thorough, exhaustive, and definitive interpretation of the dialogues. Probably definitive, not least because nobody else has tried. But we, you know, a lot of our listeners find this part interesting because it's sort of everybody has a different sort of path into this.
But we thought it'd be interesting to see how you first got interested in political philosophy. Was it a course? Was it something you read when you were young? Was it a teacher?
How did you get into it? And then how do you end up where you are? Okay. Well, when I went to college, I was thinking of being a lawyer, not really having much of an idea of what that meant.
It seemed respectable and lucrative. And I was in a sort of great books program my first year at Yale. My Chancellor, by choice. Well, you know, it was one of these things.
You get accepted and then they send you this. We've got this special program you can apply to. Yeah. And of course, you know, I'll apply to it.
And I got in. And so there were a bunch of courses you could take. So there was a history of art course and a literature course, a philosophy class and a course called history and politics. And my teacher in that class was someone named Marvin Kendrick, who had been student of Strauss at Chicago.
And if you he was the translator of the hero in the the Agra edition of the Ontario book. Right. Right. In fact, my the end of my freshman year, I was at the bookstore looking for I said, I'm going to read one scholarly book over the summer.
And I was looking through political theory section. I came across two books that had really interesting titles. One was Hannah Aaron's on revolution. And the other was on tyranny.
So I thought those both sound pretty interesting. I'm through them. And I opened up the on tyranny in the last page, the index. And it had Marvin Kendrick was the first word on that page.
My teacher. So I said, I'm taking that book home. So so that's what I read for the summer. But in that class, it was a it was a year long class in which we read, you know, really Aristotle, the movie, Machiavelli, Log Hobbes, and so on.
And I found it interesting sort of in a way in which doing a crossword puzzle is interesting. It's intellectually challenging, but I couldn't really see much of the point of it. And then we read Rousseau's discourse on the sciences and the arts, which seemed to me to be about whether it's really good to be studying these things or not. Yeah.
And suddenly the things that I've been reading before that I sort of vaguely understood a few things about suddenly the importance of those things became clear to me. So I got interested in doing more Rousseau and doing more political philosophy because of that. I also had a very good philosophy professor named Merald Westvald, who's a Hegel and Kierkegaard scholar, who I took and I became a philosophy major to lots of courses. The thing with Kendrick did not get tenure shortly after I studied with him.
So I didn't have much chance to study with him afterwards, although I talked to him a lot about what courses I should take and so on. So it was it was, you know, one of the things about Rousseau for me was that he really opened the other books to me. And I could see he was criticizing Hobbes and therefore I had to think about the arguments on the other side and now I could see by making a comparison what each position was. And so that really hooked me very much.
And then I had a bunch of very good teachers when I was an undergraduate, Joseph Hamburger, who was a mill scholar, was very important for me. Victor Garavech, who was at Wesleyan University. I wrote a senior essay on Rousseau and asked Hamburgers just supervise it. He said, well, I don't really know Rousseau well enough to supervise it.
But I have this friend at Wesleyan. That's great. Why don't you talk to him? And I talked to him and I was hitchhiked up to Wesleyan once a week and meet with him for an afternoon and so on.
And Garavech was very good to me. And then my senior year, Thomas Pangal arrived. And so I was able to take one class with him my senior year. So that's my undergraduate curriculum.
So I got sort of interested in Rousseau from that. And both Pangal and Garavech suggested I go to Toronto and study with Bloom. And so I went to Toronto and there were wonderful people. Bloom, Abel Fakanheim, the Hegel scholar in the philosophy department, Walter Burns was there, Clifford Orwin.
And also I should say there were terrific students there. Because one affected Bloom had was that a lot of students would come to study for a year or two and get a master's degree and then go somewhere else or do something else with their life. So there were a lot of people passing through. And I was thinking about this.
And over the time I was, I was there, there were, I think, let's see, there were five people who went on to win the American Political Science Association, Strauss-Brahneys for best dissertation in political philosophy. I was not one of them. But Wayne Ambler was at, was, took a leave from Boston College to be a Toronto for a year. The first year I was there.
He was the first graduate student I met. Someone who's got a Colorado affiliation. Arthur Meltzer, who was a graduate student at Harvard, took a year off and came to Toronto for the year to study with Bloom. And he won the Strauss Prize.
And Ruth Grant, I'm not sure who was there because her husband was a graduate student at Toronto. And then I went to Chicago and wrote her dissertation on Locke and won the Strauss Prize. Steve Ferdy, who actually went all the way through Toronto, and he did it. So that's how many.
Oh, and Joel Schwartz, who was there my first year. He was the second graduate student I met. He wrote a dissertation called Sexual Politics of John. The New Heliwis?
On the New Heliwis, is that right? Well, I thought it's on Gully. Women in Rousseau. It's on everything.
It's actually even on reproduction in plants. But everything, it's a wonderful book. And he won the prize. He left Toronto and became, he went to Harvard and then to University of Michigan.
So it is one of the cases about graduate students is you get to meet people who are interested in the same thing as you are to a much greater degree than you do when you're undergraduate. And I had a really extraordinary group at Toronto. That's really something. Yeah, that's great.
That sounds like a really lovely education and burning into a bunch of really impressive people. You have to have at least one good Bloom story. You can share as a parting. Okay.
Well, I'll tell a gloom at a great gift for figuring out what was good for someone to write about for their dissertation. And he would often tell people, I thought, you know, when you began this session by saying we were going to talk about pause, I thought back to the fact that I was thinking about writing a dissertation on pause. And one day Bloom said to me, I had made some point about a research conversation. He said, when you write your dissertation on those different sessions, you should make sure you put that in.
And I said, what are you talking about? But my story, that's a story. But one of my best friends at graduate school was Henry O'Garrick who taught at St. Lawrence and wrote a wonderful book on Don Quixote.
And the origin of that Henry was born in Cuba and emigrated to the United States and went to Cornell, studied with Bloom a little when he was an undergraduate, Bloom went to Toronto and became to Toronto. And one day Bloom had this conversation about the dissertation with Henry and said, you know, Henry, you're interested in literature and you're very interested in religion and piety. You know, a great book for you to write a dissertation on would be Don Quixote. And Henry said, oh yeah.
And Bloom said, yeah, but there's only one problem. And so what's that? What's the problem, Mr. Bloom?
And Bloom said, you'd have to learn Spanish. And then we said, oh, Mr. Bloom, I already know Spanish. I was born in Cuba.
And Bloom said, ah, that's perfect, Henry. That's perfect. Now we've got to go do it. And so I did it.
That's fantastic. That's right. All right. Well, I guess today has been Christopher Kelly of Boston College.
And thank you for joining us. We'll hope you'll come back sometime and talk to the world of your show with us. And for our listeners, don't forget to like, rate, subscribe us and we'll see you next week. Take care, folks.
Bye bye.