Welcome everyone to this very special session of the ACCC 2021 Conference, Crisis and Consolation, Global Education in the Time of COVID-19. I am Charlie Thomas, Executive Director of ACCC, and I am so glad, really thrilled to welcome Alex Brieu, Greg McBrayer, and David Barr, who are the guys of the new thinker, which is a podcast that I've been listening to, talking regularly since it started. They may be the only brief account of when they got started, it's a new endeavor and a fantastic one. They're looking at and talking about what we could call cortex and bringing in people to talk to them about them, experts and interested folks and having this conversation in new media.
And so this is a new thing for ACCC, and I imagine for many of you to sort of be here in the podcasting world. But good conversations happen in the podcasting world, and these three guys are having some of the best of them in my opinion. So thanks, David, Greg and Alex for doing this. I'm going to hand it over to you and recede to the margins.
Thanks for having us, Charlie. I appreciate it. I'm David Barr, one of the co-hosts. I work at the Claremont Institute.
I'm the head of communications. And we have a member of the one of the Duck Dynasty cast, Greg McBrayer, who moonlights as a professor at Ashland University, how are you, Greg? Howdy, howdy, howdy, doing great. Coming into life from the World Headquarters and Nice People, also Grandpa's, Geezbar.
Yeah, and I'm happy that you're wearing a sports jacket, but you haven't shaved your beard. Yeah, I'm actually supposed to be recording a video, I'm re-recording a part of a video that we did for Ashbrook where I work. And I was going to shave and they're like, no, no, we need to re-record the first five minutes. So it'd be really weird if I didn't have a beard in the first five minutes of an hour-long video.
Yeah, yeah. And well, the video is also how to, it's like one of those scared straight videos to keep children powerful. The draws the system. Right?
Yeah. Keep them out of Appalachia, I think. Yeah, yeah. And stop moving your mic.
What are you doing? Stop moving your mic. How are you doing, Alex? Come on.
How are you doing, Alex? Good. Good. Good.
Where are you calling in from? I'm in Boulder, Colorado. Where do you teach? What's talking about?
University of Colorado, Boulder. I teach in the Herps program, which is a sort of great books program, but it's specifically targeted at engineering students. They're the only ones who can enroll in the course. And our courses are different extents meant to reflect issues on science and society.
So Alex, I had a question about that, not to put you on the spot. This has been bouncing around my head. But if you're paradoxically, if you're successful at your endeavor, teaching and gripping the souls of your students with the love of the humanities and the great books, wouldn't they then depart from the engineering programs? Aren't you a kind of like weird mole?
Aren't you working against what the engineering school is trying to do? I use engineers. I mean, if you're really successful. I mean, yeah, it's sort of peristhetical.
I guess you're blind, right? It's, but it's, I think the way we sell it is, we'll make them well-rounded. Yeah. The question is whether that's possible, I guess.
But that's a discussion for off mic where my colleagues can't hear us. Yeah. So let's talk about the genesis of the show. I think most people that are listening in know a little bit, they understand our backgrounds, but how did we meet?
I met you at St. John's when we were graduate students. I've told this story on the show before, but Alex, we would sit next to one another in class and he would wear this, this shirt that said a stoic on the stoopy though, and he would sit next to me. And whenever I would talk, he would go like this, just to really underscore how stupid I am.
And that's how we became close. And I was thinking, not watching. He just shook his shirt. And so, and I had met Greg as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland where we, Charles Butterworth was a professor, was a graduate student.
And then the three of us became such close friends that I officiated, Alex's wedding, and E-mine. And neither became either of my weddings. Yeah. But you have so many of them, Greg.
It's hard to come. Just wait six months a year. You'll have another. So we should go on to that one either.
I hope we don't get a punch card in my stay at the 11th, will be free. But so we should talk a little bit about why we started this. I was personally, I was talking with some friends about starting some kind of online publication or something. It turned out to be too much work.
I thought about hosting panels. And then I think one of you suggested, because we text all the time about books and we're joking that we have similar interests, we have good conversations, we think at least. And then we're also just friends. So it's all friendly, and it has a kind of model of conversation.
And we thought there's no real podcast out there that is thinking about the great books that has good quality conversation, people who know about what they're talking about. Yeah, not the partially examined life. Just to be clear, we could call our participants are going to drop. They're very popular.
They're right. You were personal philosophy. So they're wise. So you should listen.
Can I add one small bit to that? I think about the text being very important for us getting off the ground. One of the things about the text that I think we really thought people might enjoy this, and Alex, I don't know how much, but the way we constantly fluctuate between high and low in our texts, I thought we thought people might enjoy that. Plato's forms one minute.
David's rich dating life in college the next. That's sort of thing. Which is why we were, and then what's the title of our podcast? Right.
Yeah, good point. The new thing, great, which is modeled out by and low. Right. Not dearest often is our personal hero.
Yeah. So that's what we decided to do. And it's, it's been a lot of fun. And I think it's, it's great.
I think the feedback has been really, it's always encouraging because you kind of just record them and send it out in the ether. And then you see that people are downloading it, but getting feedback is always great. And Charlie, and we're the number four podcast in Estonia right now, number four educational podcast in Estonia. Yeah.
And Estonia is a hotbed of education. Can I add one more thing also, another part of our project is to record. We've started to do more interviews. And part of what we wish to do is capture the voices and approaches to these texts that we love, especially from older generation of professors who are in their 70s and 80s.
And so we're trying to have as many of that, many of these folks from that generation on as possible. And that's kind of just, I don't know, like the historical side of what we're doing to ensure that that they're great. The models of scholarship wax and wane, and they can become forgotten easily in a generation or two. And so we wish for somebody like Michael Davis's voice, never to be forgotten, same with Butterworth, etc.
So that's part of what we're trying to do also. And also David, you've had some bad news from your doctors lately. So we want to keep a record of you. I appreciate that.
So should we go into why we chose Rousseau for this? David's wife for this conference. I don't know. I didn't select it.
Well, this is a wonderful, it's a wonderful thing. Crisis and consolation, liberal education in the time of COVID-19. And I think we're all doing a lot of stuff on Zoom, right? And I think the, I think the one of the things that's interesting about Rousseau's first discourse, it is really the first deep attack on on modernity, right?
From within modernity and trying to talk about whether in a time that promotes technology, anything like, well, he has a number of angles. But one of the things he talks about is education, right? Whether education, good civic education is possible. And I think we've all been struggling with this to a different extent.
And in a way, Greg was just writing a paper on this and we were having conversations about this. But one of the things Greg pointed out was that, you know, you can talk about how bad Zoom education is, but we get to get together weekly and talk here and produce something that's sent out and people who maybe don't have access to reading groups and things like that can listen to that. And also, education continues, right? Say what you will about Zoom.
You can still go to class if you want to. Obviously Zoom fatigue is a real thing. But, and so I think there's, it's not, it's very easy to say, I like books and, you know, and I don't like screens and go that way. But it is a mixed bag.
And I think one of the good things about Risto is, even as he attacks the sciences and the, you know, the growth of interest in them, he also is, I think in some ways, grateful to it. It does give him these, one way to put it is the very sort of institutions that he attacks, like the Academy of DeJohn setting up a prize, he is the very means for his message to get out. And so I think he was dealing with a version of the same problem that we still deal with today. So I think it's a pretty appropriate choice in that respect.
Should we talk about the translation? But David, can you tell us, I was going to ask David if you tell us who Risto is for the list? We all know this is what's great about Alex, stop moving your mic. Jake's going to have to blast that out.
Shame on you. Anyway, sorry David, go ahead. I lost my train of thought. Who is Risto?
You had some interesting things. He's born in 1712, right? I know that this is what I was going to say that we're also pleased to be at ACTC because it's, you know, like unlike apps that we would have to go into this whole biographical foray into his background. I don't know what to say other than he is, aside from Nietzsche, one of the more, you know, one of the most enchanting philosophers, I think, to read rhetorically extremely powerful.
And his books, if you range over the history of, I mean, Range over Risto's works. And I think that Christopher Kelly from Boston College through Dartmouth Press is assembled, all of them. They're wonderful. He's written on everything from botany to musical notation.
He's written the Emil, which is a kind of novel, but not really. He works like the social contract in the discourses. He wrote the most widely read and highest selling novel of the 18th century, the Julie, which is an epistolary novel of all things. And forgetting he wrote three autobiographical works.
The Confessions is his best known, but then he has one called Rousseau judge of Jean Jacques. I think I got that right. And then his final work, which is one of my most favorites, the reveries. So his mind, he's an auto-didact, right?
So you learn from reading his confessions, which incidentally I should say that Rousseau is a bit of a fabulous, it's hard to tell what he's invented and what's true. But the story goes, at least in his telling that, he was this young man in in Geneva. And at the time, the city gates would close every night. And anybody else outside the gates would get walked out of the city and Rousseau's master used to beat him.
I don't know. He wasn't a cobbler. I don't know what the hell he did. But do you remember Alex?
What what anyway? So he was a princess somewhere. Watchmaking? Was it watchmaking?
Was it watchmaking? I don't know. That's not his name is Nick McCookockrocks. Maybe he's making chocolate, but let's say chocolate.
Yeah. Yeah. If he was in finance. So he's outside of the city gates, they close.
And Rousseau's like, well, I don't want to catch him beating. So I'll just, you know, do some Dharma bums thing and just go on the road. And he does that. And he has a series of adventures.
And he's like, yeah, I only brought Blue Tark. But then along the way, he teaches himself everything that he knows, which is an incredible like his mind. There are very few thinkers whose minds I'll sometimes daydream about inhabiting them. You know, and Rousseau's I can't fathom what it's like.
And so anyway, and he's chased around here up. He becomes famous. The first discourse kinds of kicks it off. He writes the meal and that gets him in hot water.
And he's persecuted throughout Europe. His books are burned. What is it about the meal that gets him into trouble? I don't know.
It's not a confession of faith at the start. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's the religious constant, which is this, it comes out, yes, this profession of faith there. I think there are four books within the meal. He has this interlude called the profession of faith in Saviard Vicar and of the Saviard Vicar.
Go on, Greg, you wanted to say something. Just waggle your beard when you want to talk instead of your hand. No, okay, just a there or five, there are five books. Yeah, it's been there.
So anyway, so he's persecuted throughout Europe. David Hume takes him in. This is scholarship that I uncovered in a rare manuscript that I own that David Hume Rousseau is a famous letter and he accuses Hume of being in league with his persecutors. I found a letter that my family owns that David Hume actually tried to eat Rousseau and Rousseau was sleeping.
You've all seen pictures or portraits of Hume, he had a prosperous look about him. And anyway, so he tried to literally consume Rousseau and some Strauss and scholars will say that's not true, but I have the letter so that's a brief biography that I capture. Yeah, on the you made a comment and passing about how you can't tell what's invented. Just a little episode about him wandering outside the city gates, right, and they closed and he's outside.
They have to close it because it keeps it safe, so he's living a risky life. It's a very rich metaphor in his autobiography, which makes you think that a bit of it might be invented. Obviously much of it is true. And but the way in which he constructs or tells the stories often sort of rich and the confessions is right a book about the education of a philosopher in a way and how happens to us.
I don't I also like to add one more thing that Rousseau does and toward the end when we open this up to panels, somebody that knows Rousseau well will correct me. He strikes me as the only philosopher who makes extensive use of imagery within his books, his frontispieces, but then within the meal, each of the four or five books has its own image. In the first discourse, there's an image, second discourse, the julis throughout these plates and he has them meticulously. He supervised the creation of these images and you know, there's a famous frontispie in Hobbes and I think maybe there are a few things in Bacon, I can't remember, but not to the extent that Rousseau makes use of images and this is unique.
So the way that he engages with the different way of putting this is I think the way that Rousseau engages with the reader is something worth discussing. So maybe that's a good place to transition to the first discourse itself. So before we move on to structure, just have a frontispiece as David noted. I think it's important to touch on what led to this first work.
Yeah, Greg is right, we should talk about the translations we prefer. I like Victor Garavages translation, but there's also the Masters Translational translation and the Scott translation which I think I like to Scott one because that's all of them in one. Yeah, so Rousseau was apparently this again, so he talks about it a few times once in the Confessions, once in Rousseau's, Jean-Jacques and then he has a letter to M'elchair from 1762. They're all kind of overlap and tell basically the same story.
Basically what was happening is he would visit he'd be visiting Diderot during the summer and he's in prison in Vincennes. And as he's going there, he would walk pretty quickly and he describes getting exhausted from the heat and fatigue and just kind of falling over into place. And so he decides I should bring some reading to kind of moderate myself. And so he brings I think some, it's called the Mercury, I don't know it's a newspaper or some kind of journal.
And he's reading it and he sees the question proposed by the Academy of Dijon. The Academy of Dijon poses this question. Rousseau answers it in the first discourse, right? So this is him encountering the question which he would answer with and then win the prize for in writing this book.
Let's get to that in a second. This is what he says in the Confessions. He says, at the moment of that reading, I saw another universe and I became another man. Although I have a lively remembrance of the impression I received from it, its details have escaped me since I set them down in one of my four letters to Monsieur de Macheau.
What I do recall very distinctly on this occasion is that when I arrived at Vincennes, I was in an agitation that boarded on Delirium. All the rest of my life in his fortunes was the inevitable effect of that instant evaporation. So he blames the first discourse for ruining his life. And in a later edition, that's with some replies to critics, Rousseau echoes the sentiment that this really ruined his life, that fame ruined him.
In writing in research, which was published posthumously with his written in 1776, he says the following says, an unfortunate question from an academy that he read. He's speaking as another person about himself. In the Mercurist, I suddenly made the scales fall from his eyes and scrambled this chaos in his head, showed him another universe, a true golden age societies of simple, wise, happy men and fulfilled in hopes all his visions, the destruction of the prejudices that had subjugated him, even him, or from which at that moment he believed he saw all the vices and miseries of the human. And he says in the letter he echoes it again and uses this phrase multiple times, opening another universe, ruining his life, right?
All of that sort of stuff. So this is a really rewarding thing. He credits what he learned during this walk when he was just reflecting a flood of thoughts came to him and he credits this with giving him really the seed of all of his writing afterward, particularly of the second discourse on inequality and the amule, the book on education. So this is really a sort of almost revelatory moment for him or a paradigm shifting moment.
With all this funny stuff happens to him on walks. I guess he walking one day in a huge massive bolt him over and cracks open his skull and then there are reports in the papers that he had died. Well, he tried to jump over it. That's possible.
I love watching on Instagram people falling down and getting knocked over and stuff and for it to be resale would be really pleasant. Greg was going to say something. What's wrong with you? You were too are proof that advances in learning leads to vice.
You are living in bodyments that Rousseau is correct on this one. Is this the rustic spread in animal husbandry? I was just going to say it's strange that he traces the writing of the first discourse. It's strange that he traces his misery to this.
And so far as it was originally published, it seems to me anonymously. It's just attributed to an anonymous A citizen of Geneva, which maybe we'll talk a little bit more about that. But I just had a small point before we get into an overground overview of the text. Yeah, so he was published in 1751 anonymously, right?
And he just identifies him as a citizen of the south of the city of Geneva. I then found later in 1751 another edition still identifying himself as a citizen of Geneva, but some of his contained responses and the people responding identifying as Rousseau. So it was anonymous, but it didn't last that long in terms. And that's very successful.
Just like these days on the Twitter, all these anonymous accounts don't expect to stay anonymous for a long time. Well, you know, the second discourse, he affixes his name to the second discourse. Right. But he, I mean, he published it anonymously, but he showed it to did around to other people as well, asking what they thought.
So I think, you know, the intelligentsia must have known who it was, you know, all the French philosopher. Can I once more small point on this is that this by a citizen of Geneva, he affixes to several of his writings, but not all. And at one point, he says he affixes them to the works that he thinks would bring pride to Geneva. So if one we're interested in pursuing this resource scholarship, there's a way of dividing some of his texts, those of which he affixes to the citizen of Geneva, and those that he leaves it off.
That's interesting. Okay, so the structure of the work. Let's talk about that a little bit. Again, so there's a title page which identifies the discourse as follows that it's called the discourse on the arts and sciences or or the sciences and arts are, but really the title is discourse which won the prize of the Academy of Dijon in the years 1750 on this question proposed by that same Academy, whether the restoration of the sciences and the arts is contributed to the purification of morals by a citizen of Geneva.
So you can see that we call it the first discourse because he wrote well, two main ones, but four at the beginning of his career. And but it's just presented as a discourse that won a prize, right? That's an in response to a particular question. After that, there is a short preface there.
He praises the question. He reflects on how his answer will put him at odds with his time. And then he notes that he's made some changes, specifically he's added some notes to the text. And he also said he's made some.
We can't prove that incidentally. We don't have the original version. Yeah. And also that he made some changes that will be easily recognized, but not so easily because people debate about this, you know, what they actually are.
He says it might have upset the Academy. And Alex, you're missing at least in the the John T. Scott edition that I have, there's a notice that comes prior to the press. That was a leader edition after he had gotten fame for it in an edition that was published with his some of his critics.
Yeah, in 1763. Yeah, maybe like 13 years later. I was small point on this discourse where he says, this is paragraph five in the garbage. I'm sensible to the difficulty of making what I have to say conform to the tribunal before which I appear.
How shall I dare to blame the sciences before one of the most learned associations of Europe, praise ignorance and accelerated academy and reconciled law? I'm going to be blamed. I mean, at this point, it's been published after he's won the prize. And so all this you guys will hate me for this is affect, right?
I mean, he won the prize. Like there's a certain amount of, I mean, we'll talk about David's going to leave us through a little discussion about his rhetoric later, but some of this seems feint. He's not as brave or courageous. Even the question even seems to imply this expecting answer of no, they don't actually coincide progress in science and arts and morality.
So I mean, do you guys agree with that? Or do you guys, what do you make of this? Oh, gosh, you'll be mad at me for saying that it doesn't lead to progress. Yeah, I think that's a good point.
I mean, the question as phrased does not talk about corruption. It talks about purification, but it therefore implicitly nods towards the possibility of corruption, though, without explicitly stating it. So obviously, there's some doubt, right, in the air, right, some sense that the proliferation of the arts and sciences has not redounded all to the good. And so there is a bit of it, I think a lot, and this gets to a bigger question that I think we should return to throughout as we go through this.
Rousseau, on the one hand, is attacking the sciences, but he's doing it in the context of the sciences. And one way in which I'll put this, I mean, this is a good way to continue on to the rest of the structure of the discourse, is he's trying to, on the one hand, side with the sciences or speak to fellow scientific reminded men on the one hand, but also trying to inject a dose of humility and to give good arguments for that, right, to try to present arguments on behalf of that humility. So after this preface, there's the discourse, and it has two main parts following what Greg just read from, which is a kind of introduction of three paragraphs, so it's not really identified as that, right. Now the two parts are roughly equivalent in length, the 12 pages each in this edition.
It's really hard. I struggle every time I try to identify why the two parts are different. The way that I like to distinguish them is to, is to understand that sort of central to what Rousseau is doing is dividing science into two forms, a humble version of science, whose main figure is Socrates, and Socrates features very prominently in the first part, and then a sort of vain contemporary science, and the contemporary practice of the sciences is especially pronounced in the second part. So now this is not a neat division, it's not like the first part is treating humble science, the second part of vain science.
They're both treating both, but in a way, the humility of science is more in the foreground of part one, and the vanity of science is more in the foreground of part two. That's one way to think about it. And his identification with Socrates is right at the outset. Yeah, oh, he said, oh, no, I'm just a decent man who knows nothing.
You know, and yeah, an honest man who knows nothing and steams himself nonetheless for it. Another way to distinguish the two is if you go to the end of the first part, Rousseau says the following is though he's shifting. He says, let us, this is on page 15 in the grave, if any of you have that, he says, let us therefore consider the sciences and the arts in themselves. Let us see what must result from their progress, and let us no longer hesitate to grant all the points where reasoning shall be found to agree with the historical inferences.
This is maybe a little bit reaching a bit, but what I think I'm going to be saying is I'm going to give arguments about what necessarily results from the progress of the sciences. I'm not going to aduce as much historical evidence, he does aduce some, but I'm just going to assume that history is going to follow this rational process that I'm going to articulate. He echoes this in the first paragraph of the second part. He says regardless of whether when consults the annals of the world or supplements uncertain chronicles with philosophic inquiries, we'll not find that human knowledge has an origin that corresponds to the idea one likes to conceive regarding it.
What he's saying there is, look, you can look into history or you can make philosophic inquiries in addition to these uncertain chronicles. You'll come to the same conclusion. Implying that he thinks he's arrived at a rational understanding of how the sciences develop necessarily over time, which is I think a big claim. This claim is obviously way more pronounced in the second discourse on the origins of inequality where he gives a historical account of where the sciences come from, but I think he's arriving at a little bit of that here.
This is a really, I think, important new philosophic concept. The idea that history could be rational and obviously this extends through other thinkers, but that's another way to distinguish that. He's really come to this view that history has a kind of logic to it. Now he's going to explore that more abstractly.
Did you want to say just before we start off in Ernest Alex, did you want to situate Rousseau in this chain of being with the philosophers? Yeah. I mean, one thing. Just quickly.
I mean, yeah. So I think one thing he does is he critiques Cartesian rationalism. The idea that reason is sort of innate to human beings and we can understand the world rationally. He actually says, no reason is a development, a later development in human history out of a kind of faculty of ability to perfect ourselves to get more and more precise in our faculties.
That's a huge move. A similar move he does is relative to people like Hobbes and Locke and Machiavelli, where self-preservation and survival is the most important thing. He says, well, that's only true if existence is enjoyable, right? If you like to be, and therefore the most important thing is not preserving yourself, but enjoying your existence.
So he talks about enjoying the sentiment of your existence or communing with your conscience. So these are, he really in a couple of ways, really questioned some of the basic premises of early modern thought and arrives at some very new, but in a way, deeply embedded ideas in the history of thought, and therefore gives us later thinkers who are concerned more with history and with culture, you know, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc. So speak your truth, Greg. Speak your truth.
I will. I will. I feel emboldened today. Just one small point on the sweet sentiment existence that you mentioned, Alice.
It's not, you know, a lot of, if they haven't knew that was coming at some point. If readers or listeners are new to Rousseau, they may not be aware of this. It's big in the autobiography that David mentioned earlier, the Rivers of Saltry Walker. So I'm just going to give the example he gives as to what he means by the sweet sentiment of existence.
He gives the example of floating down the river in a boat, lying on your back, sort of quasi-away, quasi-sleep, like kind of falling asleep, but still awake enough to be aware that you're alive. And anyone who's ever experienced something like that, I think this conception of human flourishing has its basis in Rousseau. He's the one that gives an articulation of this idea that just being alive is kind of, and I think you can see a lot of contemporary sort of common expressions of this, right? Like just like be happy like these bumper stickers that people have and this kind of stuff.
I suspect that that's what it means. But yeah. Being in the moment, when he describes it in the second discourse, he says, right, natural man is so in the moment he sells his bed in the morning of the morning and then has no more to sleep at night. And he says, time just kind of ceases to happen and just enjoys the fact that they are, right?
And it's, I think, a remarkable observation that self-preservation is ultimately has the end of enjoying your existence because from there, you start to realize all the busy bodies of modern life trying to mass money to preserve themselves. They're missing the point in a way. And you see this again to go back to your point, Greg, that you can reject there for all the busy life of accruing property and stuff and try to live a bohemian, woodsy life. It does any hangout on an island?
Greg has this beard. He wakes up in the morning, he forgets to shave, he keeps going through his life and he's happy. Yeah. So it doesn't rustle.
It's the cine. Well, that's just one version of your biography that we could keep in mind a clean sense of state. No, I know, Charlie said David, I don't get jokes, but to bring the NC 17 levels down to an R.T.G 13, please. Oh, R.
Okay. So doesn't he did live on island? He raised bunnies and was studying plants. I think he mentioned them.
Yeah. And he discovered new, did he discover new species? Sure. That sounds right to me.
Are you taking a joke for yourself? No, not at all. I thought I went. Yeah.
So on the point of humble science, again, the figure is Socrates. I think Greg had a couple of good thoughts here. Sure. So what David mentioned that in the first discourse, Rousseau, I would say Rousseau kind of presents himself as a Socrates character.
He at least co-ops Socrates in the apology and presents himself as undertaking the same kind of program as Socrates as a critic of learning and the sciences and arts. But there's some problems with that that I'm not entirely sure I'm on board with. So he has Socrates praise ignorance and take the side of ignorance against science, arts, learning. It's true that Socrates sort of brags in a way about his ignorance.
But when Socrates is bragging about his ignorance in the apology, he does seem to imply that he wishes he did have knowledge, he wishes he had wisdom. And he also, by the way, can he confess his little light or that he does possess wisdom? All be girly in the wisdom, whatever that might mean. And I guess my point is that I think that Rousseau, I think consciously is distorting Socrates to fit in his account of what he's doing in first discourse, just a few other small points.
I detect in the first discourse, I think I might get this from Stereus, I can't remember. But the idea that in this dovetails into what Alex was just saying that Rousseau seems to be blaming modern science, the enlightenment, but praising, and this is a little bit beneath the surface, praising a different kind of science. And so the question is, what is that kind of science? If Socrates is a figure that lurks in the background, then it would seem that Rousseau is praising an ancient understanding of science versus a modern understanding of science, which would mean that the ancients didn't think you could popularize science, you were vulgarizing science if you made it popular.
And so the distinction between ancient science, one distinction between ancient and modern science is ancient science to recognize that science could have a pernicious effect on the public morality. And so he buries it in that way. Now, there's an interesting exception here that I'm hoping Alex can help me to make sense of. And I think I do have some indication for what's going on.
Rousseau praises several modern scientists, including especially Bacon, who were all kinds of scientific works, as well as the number of tragedies and comedies and histories. And we know, so then the question would be, why does he praise Bacon? We didn't laugh at that, Alex. Yeah, I didn't know.
I was a subtle modern son. He wrote, yeah. I was looking for the passage because he was about to- No, no. It's on page 27, the greatest.
Yeah, no, no. I got it. Yeah. Well, so one small point there, though, sorry.
One small point in this, and I'll let you respond. I hate it. I would have Bacon in Shakespeare, I guess, get depressed. It's gonna ruin my day.
Yeah, we actually never let him say. He never listens to me. I know. That's the real issue here.
I know. Just don't doubt when I talk. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't like it. I'm quitting. Oh, wow. Not right now.
Well, we have a number of participants. Let's get Tom Cleveland in here. I'll see you later, Greg. He's pretty smart.
He can do so much better than me. Yeah, he has a lot. He's good. So on his way.
I mean, I want to make a talk about a letter we got from the Shakespeare people. Whenever we bring up the Bacon to Shakespeare, which we have textual evidence for, we invariably pissed off a letter from Shakespeare lovers. That's the story. I think I had another secret family letter.
No. So on the- Well, sadly, one small point, one small point before I'm the Bacon real quick. So questions, why does he praise Bacon if Bacon is like the modern scientist? And I wonder if it's because Bacon doesn't still subscribe to the idea that science is the privilege of the elite.
We did the episode on the New Atlantis. And even though Bacon does want to popularize science, in some regards, he still thinks that it should still be to a great extent hidden from most people. Right? The scientists sort of rule secretly.
It seems so. Yeah. At least part of it. And he proposes that on page 27, he said, let learned men of the first rank find honorable asylum in there, the King's courts.
Right? Like kings, therefore, not to sign a million to their councils, the people most capable of counseling them well. Now, so to go back to Socrates on this point, he really adapts Socrates' speech from the apology, right? His famous divine mission.
He goes to the politicians and to the poets, then to the artisans. And he makes some crucial changes. One is he leaves out the politicians. He's changing my line.
He's changing my line here. What's that? You steal on it. Oh, you can go through this.
This is on the Bacon point. That's why I bring it. So he leaves out the politician and he changes the artisans to artists. So that's just poets and artists, right?
Yeah, didn't great. Come up with that. I didn't come up with it, but I was supposed to talk about it. He's always stealing the good line.
You told me to talk about Bacon. I'm quitting again. Second quitting. Why don't you talk about this and then I'll- Lovers, coral.
A lover's killing us before us. I'm just kidding. Keep going. Keep going.
Okay. So he leaves out politicians and he suppresses the critique of artisans. And I think the reason for that is he wants the scientists to be with the courts of the kings on the one hand. And he wants these faux artists who shouldn't be there to go be artisans, right?
And so he's appropriating Socrates in a way that's, I think he's more akin to Bacon in certain respects, or maybe he thinks the Baconian solution is the best possible now, though he has to be. You may be great. No, I just have a- I'm glad that you actually left this office. I have a slightly different interpretation of it.
So I took him to be democratizing Socrates. In other words, that it's not a critique of the manual artisans anymore, like it was in any apology. So he's removing a democratic critique that Socrates made to bring Socrates more in line with resos and politics, which is much more democratic than Socrates is. But I grant this Baconian thing to be going on as well.
Yeah. And I think that's in keeping with it. Stick to your- he has this really funny line on page 26 on the grave, which he says. Someone who he's holding- I worked before this episode.
I just got a tweet notification from you. Yeah. I was publicizing it to people. While we're- I got two more people to join our group.
I'm trying to keep- Hey, listen, Greg, all I can say is Alex may be tweeting while we're recording this episode. You may be doing something else, like Tubin. That's not right. Someone who his whole life long will remain a bad verusifier or a theory or geometry might perhaps have become a great clothier.
Oh, Stephanie's disapproving of your joke. Good. So I think the- I think what he's suggesting- I think this Greg's point about democratizing Socrates is exactly right. He hides the radical equality of Socrates' critique.
That's not to say that he doesn't agree with the Socratic critique. In fact, he's a very critical vanity. Yeah, he sees vanity, right? Wanting the approval of your fellow citizens to be very important to political life, right?
So he himself thinks, you know, one should rise above this if one's going to be a scientist, right, or an artist. One shouldn't be so concerned with fame and celebrity, right? Yet one, he has to sort of make this invective against it so that he can encourage people who are inclined to vanity to stick to just satisfying fellow citizens by being good citizens to one another and then encourage people who are scientifically minded to actually go down that path. I think his ultimate thesis then would be something like the passion that's essential to good political life is corrupting when it comes to science and science is corrupting when it comes to science.
So the observation will be Socratic. I think basically Socratic, yet he's trying to deal with his modern institutions, so it's slightly varied. Just on that point. I mean, we can joke and I really enjoy Rousseau before I enjoy being Rousseau.
And on this question, I can't help. I'm largely persuaded by Rousseau. I mean, I think the progress in the arts and sciences tends to undermine civic virtue, tends to undermine individualism, tends to undermine freedom. This sort of various ways he goes through the difference accounts of virtue.
I mean, this is persuasive to me. I mean, the Romans were more impressive before they became civilized. He sort of traces the rise and fall of civilizations and it strikes me as eminently plausible. And we're at another moment today.
Sorry, Greg. I didn't mean that. I mean, exactly. Look at you guys.
Who could you defend us from? Neither of you could. No, but it's- I don't flitterati. But I mean, like, the Greeks, right?
He says, like, before it was long before they became sophisticated that they twice repulsed the Persians on the doorsteps and once in Greece, right? So it's like, look, and then they became learned and then they fell. The same thing he goes through several examples of this, right? Yeah, one, there's a passage.
This is early in part one. This is P.J. in the Gravage for those who have it. He kind of details what one of the things that happens, which I always find really interesting.
He says, today when subtler inquiries and a more refined taste have reduced the art of pleasing to principles, a violent deceiving uniformity prevails in our morals and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mold. Constantly politeness demands, propriety commands constantly when follows custom, never one's own genius, when no longer dares to appear what one is. And under this perpetual constraint, the men who make up the herd that is called society will place in similar circumstances, all act in similar ways, unless more powerful voters incline them differently. One will fuss and never really know with whom one is dealing.
I love this idea of reducing the art of pleasing to principles, right? It leads to uniformity, politeness, for example, always saying please and thank you. If everybody does that, you never actually know where you stand with someone and the way that you make somebody happy. So if I want to make Greg happy, I get him some nice, you know, pine-cented beard wax.
And if I want to make David happy, I get him, some Chipotle and think like that. You have to know the person with whom you're dealing. And so, you know, I just had a baby and I got five of the same stuffed bunny rabbits. Nobody cared what you needed or something like that, to just kind of go towards the uniform thing.
I love this because people are writing discourses on morals and you have to act this way. This is what it means to be a good person. Everybody does the same and all sort of genuine human interaction between individuals is lost in the process. This is what happens when literature or arguments, which are necessarily generic, come into the into political communities where human interactions can be very individual and circumstantial.
I just love that that criticism the officer. One thing that I we have in the run to show that David and I have touched on and talked about a lot is and this is related to his I'm a learned man critiquing learning is Rousseau's the way he derives the philosophical right the the class of self-style philosophers in France. I sort of, I've been working on this this petty thesis that I have and David seems to be somewhat amenable to it that it varies times historically. The name of whatever the activity of philosophy is whatever name it goes by sometimes falls into disrepute and so the philosophers will sometimes go by different names.
And so here we are we've all granted that Rousseau as a philosopher and yet here he is openly mocking the people who call themselves philosophers. And we've talked about this before. I think we recorded our episode on the Agricola. I mentioned that I wonder if some Roman historians because philosophy had come to be completely legally forbidden if they just put the title of historian on himself.
In other words, they were doing philosophy under another name just like Rousseau is doing here. I actually even Socrates himself, right? The soffoy, the wise men got bad names. And so perhaps even the term philosopher might already be in a sort of changing of the name of what it is that these people do.
And so with the ubiquity of how many people call themselves philosopher nowadays, I wonder how meaningful the term is. And so just thinking about even again here, this idea that there are people who attach to themselves all the coupes monde of learning and wisdom and they don't actually have learning or wisdom of virtue. And I think that's another indication of here. I think Rousseau does see him.
He's throwing himself in linguist Socrates. He must see himself as a philosopher, even if he despises the Phillips of it. And at what point he says, I forget the quote, it's something about genuine philosophy blah blah blah blah. So he does seem to distinguish the philosophers from the genuine philosophers.
Yeah, there's great tangible evidence of this. If you go to Paris and you see Rudivoltaire, it says under the people that's named after what kind of person they were, artists or whatever, it says Phil itself under Rousseau says he was our author or writer or something like that. You would prefer that way. Yeah, I think you would prefer that way.
Yeah, I'm sure you would have. No. Yeah. And so he talks about distinguishing the title, this is I think early in part one, distinguishing the title of philosopher from genuine philosophy, which I think is related to this point about bacon, right?
That bacon is a rare exception to these people. In part two, he gives, and this is maybe more along the lines of how this work is a seed for his later studies. He critiques the contemporary landscape, social landscape, on a number of points. First, he talks about civic virtue, right?
The military virtue is in decline, right? And he gives credit to warriors, but he says it's nothing like what the Romans had. But he ultimately says this is because of a decline in education. And he talks about the models, the sort of aberrations that are put in statues and writing and in painting, right?
And in general, then he moves on it to the people who make these things, right, the so-called wise, and he criticizes them too. So if you really just lay this out, he's critical of its effect on politics, specifically the military, he's critical of its effect on education, and he's critical of its effect on philosophy. When you start asking, well, where does Rousseau treat these issues and try to propose solutions? We're talking the social contracts, his work on politics, the amule, and the confessions, his works on education and philosophic education, the reveries, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, all of a sudden so many of his works come into the fold.
And you can really see that Rousseau is here laying the grounds sort of laying out the problem in such a way that he's given himself a massive task ahead of him. And this is in line with a remark, Rousseau makes somewhere, I forgot to look this up, where he says I'm a systematic thinker. By the way, when you hear a systematic thinker, you think of Kant. Yeah, Kant or Hegel or something like that.
But with no system of whatever, I think there's a book by Kelly on the Confessions. I don't know if it has the word system in the title. Sorry, I didn't mean interrupt. And really quick, since I interrupted you, there's a St.
John's Tutor named Jeff Black, who has a commentary on the first discourse. I helped him with the footnotes. I didn't do any thinking. I just typed them in a computer.
But I thought I would throw that out there because it's a very fine book for anybody that's interested in a book-length treatment. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, no, no. Yeah, so he doesn't look like a systematic thinker because he writes dialogues, novels, epistolary exchanges, treatises, social contract is a treatise, but it's like self-consciously fragmentary.
It's not complete. These are literary as a sort of array of literary genres. They run the gamut. And this, how can this be systematic?
And yet, when you look at the problems, despite the literary form, when you look at the problems, they are really all sort of, there is a thread that runs through most, if not all of his thought, the problem of vanity. So you're saying Alex to start here for anybody interested in Rousseau? I think here in the second discourse, yeah, here's the problem. The second discourse gives you the depiction of happiness everywhere else is saying, where can we be happy?
How can we be happy in the contemporary world? And you don't get a lot of very good answers. I always thought that the meal, I thought I read somewhere where he says the meal contains the whole of my thought. But I obviously can't remember the meal since I said it only had four books instead of five.
Maybe I can, we should go ahead and go ahead and go to talk about podcasting. Yeah, we should say that as Greg moves on, just to our listeners, start filling on their Q&A with some questions. So that went ready for it. We have something.
They don't have to do with the questions, don't need to pertain to Rousseau. And if you want to come up and talk, we can make you a participant too. If you'd like to know what kind of oils Alex uses in the morning on his bald head, that's a fair question. Go on, Greg.
I just one question that tries to bridge Rousseau and the podcast, and then I have some podcast questions for you guys, unless we see some stuff on the Q&A. What would Rousseau think of the new thingery? What? Well, I think he has a line in here.
He says, I think it touches on David. He says, Richard Peril, may herald a man of great wealth and its elegance, a man of taste. The health and robust man is recognized by other signs. Strength and vigor of body will be found under the rustic habit of a husband and not under the guilty of a courtier.
A peril no less alien to virtue, which is the strength and vigor of the soul. The good man is the athlete who delights in fighting naked. He despises all those vile ornaments of David, which would hinder his use of his strength, and most of which were invented, only to conceal some deformity. That hit me like a stiletto on the side.
I think that Rousseau is funny. He's funny. He's very funny philosopher and he's tricky. One thing we did talk about, but I think anybody, all of our participants here have read him, sure.
Rousseau has all these little tricks in his writing. For instance, in the second discourse, he tells you upfront, like, yeah, well, I've included all these notes. I stuck them at the end. They're not worth reading.
In fact, I wouldn't even read that. It's not going to enhance the text. One of course, if you read the footnotes and notes rather than you, you marry them with what's going on in the text, it's something else entirely is going on. He was a trickster.
His confession is very funny. Even through his pain, he makes light of a lot of it. I think he would like the new thinkery, but he's just way too smart. I don't know that he would say, he probably tells us to stop doing hour-long episodes.
The other thing is, this is one thing I want to say to anybody that knows Rousseau well, and maybe when we have Christopher Kelly on the show, I can ask him. Time and again, it seems that Rousseau, at least he asserts, I don't know whether to take seriously or not, that Plutarch was his touchstone throughout life. We're not any other thinker. I've yet to see anybody write anything on Rousseau's relationship to Plutarch.
He pops up everywhere, rather to expand this further, Rousseau's relationship to Roman thinkers. I know that the Greeks are in the background, Plutarch was in the background, but Rome really at least on the surface. I'd like to see something written on that, but again, I don't know the scholarship well, so if somebody knows about it, let me know. You want to talk about podcasting?
I don't want to talk about podcasting for some moment, maybe we should just go with you anyway, but what do you guys like about doing it? Why do we do this? Obviously besides the wealth, the fame, obviously. I like chatting with you guys.
I like getting to interview people, not otherwise, or have a reason to just annoy for an hour and to ask them questions. I think it's just, it's really easy to let weeks and months go by without engaging in a substantive way, especially if you're sort of alone and you're busy with teaching. And so getting to have these conversations to me is just, that's the end in itself in that respect. You're muted there, David.
Well, technical difficulties. It was something we were doing anyway, via text and on the phone, we talk all the time. The texts are actually did. So I mean, the show, we premium content subscribers only.
But one thing I will say is that, again, as I look at some of the people listening in right now, this community that's that the show is engendered is gratifying to me. I didn't know to put him on the spot Tom Cleveland at all. I knew he was a friend of Alex's, but now he's like a friend of the show. I think it's really nice.
There are people that I feel like I can reject, people that I feel like I can just email or talk about books if I wanted to or other things. And that's, that's nice. And in a way impossible prior to rather increasing more difficult prior to the internet. And again, the older, the big, big thing for me is capturing the voice of this older generation that unless a young people help preserve memories and conversations, it just, it just goes away.
It goes, how nice it would have been to have been or deady on the show, for instance. I wouldn't have said a word. He would have made fun of all of us, which, and Alex in particular, but it doesn't matter. We could, we could force him to do, but anyway, so that kind of stuff.
So if anybody has suggestions on folks to have on. And then finally, last thing I say is just like an up and coming rapper, I really appreciate our Twitter beefs. So far, the partially examined life hasn't answered anything that we've, any of our salvos, but I think they're afraid. I think so too.
Yeah. I didn't know what a podcast was when you guys asked me to do it. So I just said, yes, because I thought it was like, I didn't know what I know. I thought like, Greg, it's a radio show on a computer.
He said, what's a computer? So he was about four steps behind. He said that had been using that. We've got a lot of questions for so questions.
Let's do it. Let's go. Do you want to do you want to have people be panelists? Yeah.
Just if you want to be a panelist in the chat, I'm going to tell, should we get should we go on order with flags? Sure. Sure. I'll just bring it up.
I'm going to bring them all up. Nice. Tom's happy to come on. Hey, listen, listen, listen, listen, don't let Tom on because I'm worried that you'll all recognize that he's superior to me and that you'll replace me.
But yeah, Tom, I always need to have a possible need to have a question. I don't need that question. So we'll go to Vianne on. Yes, David, I'm out.
I will. That's a very good suggestion. Before we read the video, I would love him. I just came off the streets.
There's one question about the podcast. Somebody just asking a simple question. I think it's something to listen to. Do you have to have the video?
Do you just have that for our benefit today? Yeah, this is actually, we're probably going to release the video. Sorry, Sam. But we do always see each other.
That's what Sam looks like normally pre-gandemic. I've answered this. And then we always do video each other because that's I think important for talk. It's first.
The reason we do videos, there's no other form when we're recording, frankly, and then for for cues. So it helps to see one another. We'd like to touch each other and be in person, but going. I actually have a little David doll that I touched when you talk.
Let's get a flag. Flag first? Yeah, he's the first one. What's the deal with this list of people's corrupted by arts and sciences and those uncorrupted cities?
Oh, flag, that's your own question. Yeah, well, I wasn't sure if you wanted me to do this. But yeah, my question is that I actually taught this book this semester. And we the students were puzzled by this list of people.
He goes through to test his general proposition, right, about the arts and sciences corrupting these people's. And then also has a list of people's that remain uncorrupted and good that then presumably we should imitate. It includes the Persians, the Germans, the Scythians. And so I just wondered what you guys make of this list.
I know you guys have read Herodotus and the Scythians seem to be a bizarre people too and vote. So just curious about your thoughts about that list of people's. And before we answer before Alex or Greg, flag, what's the name of your new podcast? Speaking seriously, I'd like to promote it for you.
Oh, my podcast, which isn't started yet is called the enduring interest podcast about kind of forgotten books. Thank you. Thank you. I'll take it.