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Adrastus Versus Diogenes Frederick the Great and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Self- Love

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Adrastus Versus Diogenes Frederick the Great and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Self- Love Pre-proofed version: the final one appears in Avi Lifschitz (ed.), Engaging with Rousseau: Reaction and Interpretation from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 17-32 http://www.cambridge.org/9781107146327 2 Adrastus versus Diogenes Frederick the Great and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on self- love Avi Lifschitz A portrait of Frederick the Great adorned Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s study at Montmorency. It stood on his desk, accompanied by the epithet: ‘He thinks as a philosopher, and behaves like a king’ (Il pense en philosophe, et se conduit en Roi). Yet before Rousseau’s guests could be duly impressed by this potentially laudatory sentence, most of them were treated to the complementary rhyming line, inscribed on the back of Frederick’s portrait: ‘Glory, self-interest – that is his God, his law’ (La gloire, l’intérêt, voilà son Dieu, sa loi).1 This couplet, which Rousseau feared would cost him a desired asylum in Prussian-ruled Neuchâtel, testifies to the crucial role of self-regarding notions in the largely unconsummated intellectual relationship between the Genevan author and the Prussian king. By contrast to the widely advertised collaboration between Frederick the Great and Voltaire, the king’s attitude towards Rousseau has not been the focus of much scholarly attention.2 Indeed, in this case one can find neither a close alliance nor an enduring mutual appreciation. Yet several of Frederick’s philosophical works and his correspondence betray Helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter were provided by audiences at a conference on Frederick the Great and the Republic of Letters at Jesus College, Oxford, in July 2012 (organised by Katrin Kohl and Thomas Biskup) and at the fellows’ seminar at Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study (November 2014). 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence (The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 5), ed. Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters, and Peter D. Stillman (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), Book 12, 496; OC I, 592–593. 2 Emil du Bois-Reymond saw them in the late nineteenth as paragons of an outdated Gallo-Roman classicism (Frederick) and a new form of Romantic literature (Rousseau): Du Bois-Reymond, Über das Nationalgefühl; Friedrich II. und Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Berlin: Dümmler, 1879), 33–86. A recent essay by Jörn Sack, Friedrich der Grosse und Jean-Jacuqes Rousseau – Eine verfehlte Beziehung und die Folgen (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2011), erects a largely conjectural edifice on the basis of the few known facts, while misrepresenting Rousseau as a founding father of parliamentary liberalism. 1 a long-lasting preoccupation with the themes discussed by Rousseau in the 1750s. The Genevan, for his part, had already become captivated by Frederick’s public persona in his youth.3 Both Frederick and Rousseau were, moreover, among the most effective masters of public self-fashioning in the eighteenth century. Though our protagonists never met one another, their mutual fascination reached its peak in 1762 in their indirect correspondence through George Keith, the Jacobite governor of Neuchâtel on Frederick’s behalf, when Rousseau sought refuge in the Prussian enclave. Thereafter, well into the 1770s, Frederick continued to tackle the themes that had preoccupied Rousseau. He was acquainted with the renowned discourses Rousseau wrote for the Academy of Dijon, although there is no conclusive evidence of the king’s sustained engagement with Rousseau’s later works. To a large extent, Frederick’s interest in Rousseau’s works fits the more general pattern of his involvement with contemporary French philosophy. After the end of the Seven Years War, his interest in and enthusiasm for contemporary French authors gradually waned. Given Frederick’s engagement with the main themes of Rousseau’s early career, this chapter focuses on the problematic notion of self-love, or amour propre. Self-love is not only a major theme in the Discourse on Inequality (Second Discourse, 1755), but also in the preceding Discourse on the Arts and the Sciences (First Discourse, 1750), where Rousseau traced the origins of different scholarly pursuits back to hubris and the desire for self- promotion.4 The notion of self-love, with its background in various strands of ancient and early modern Epicureanism and Stoicism, is particularly salient in Frederick’s correspondence with George Keith and in the king’s essays on the topics highlighted in Rousseau’s discourses: the Essay on Self-Love as an Ethical Principle (1770) and Discourse on the Usefulness of the Sciences and the Arts within a State (1772). These items are closely linked to what Frederick saw as the defining features of human nature and the sort of happiness available to human beings in this world. Over the last generation self-love, or amour propre, has increasingly come to the fore as the unifying thread running through Rousseau’s different works, mainly due to a new approach to this thorny term (suggested in Nicholas Dent’s 1988 interpretation of Rousseau and elaborated in Frederick Neuhouser’s more recent book of 2008).5 Self-love is indeed a key term in Rousseau’s various writings, linked as it is to the origins of social interaction especially through the wish for mutual recognition. Traditionally, it had been common to emphasise Rousseau’s strict distinction in the Discourse on Inequality between amour de soi-même, a benign care of the self or basic self-preservation – which he deemed one of the essential characteristics of the man of nature – and the inflamed, socially generated amour propre, seen as an excessive drive for recognition and domination. According to the Discourse on Inequality, while the former was a natural instinct leading both animals and human beings to care for their self-preservation, ‘amour propre is only a 3 Rousseau, Confessions, Book 5, 179; OC I, 214. 4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Sciences and Arts’, in DI, 1–28; here 16; ‘Discours sur les sciences et les arts’, in OC III, 1–30 (17–18). 5 N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau: An Introduction to His Psychological, Social and Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), esp. 52–56, 143–145; Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For an overview of the changing views on the unifying core of Rousseau’s philosophy, see particularly the contributions to this volume by Axel Honneth (Chapter 11), Christopher Brooke (Chapter 8), and Céline Spector (Chapter 9). 2 relative sentiment, factitious, and born in society, which inclines every individual to set greater store by himself than by anyone else, inspires men with all the evils they do one another, and is the genuine source of honour’.6 Since Rousseau’s state of nature is pre- social and pre-political, self-love in its negative guise could not have been present there. As he noted more rhetorically towards the end of the Discourse on Inequality: ‘The Savage lives within himself; sociable man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the mind of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment’.7 Indeed, self-love as the constant need for recognition by others, a competitive zero-sum game, had already been recognised by Hobbes as a major characteristic of human beings in the absence of natural sociability.8 Yet, as Dent has suggested, one can distinguish not only between amour de soi- même and amour propre in Rousseau’s works, but also between two different kinds of amour propre itself: its basic form as a natural need for recognition which accords others the acknowledgement one seeks for oneself, and its corrupt version, consisting in a malignant desire for preference over others. Following Dent, Neuhouser examined Rousseau’s use of self-love in its positive version, especially in Emile (1762), by contrast to its inflamed appearance in the Discourse on Inequality. These changes in Rousseau’s use of the term amour propre have also been highlighted by Christopher Brooke, who has argued that Rousseau’s initial Epicurean approach to self-love in the Discourse on Inequality was tempered by Stoic impulses in later works, most manifestly in Emile.9 Drawing on this new interpretative framework concerning self-love, I shall try to situate Frederick’s views on the interaction between the care of the self and the common good against the background of Rousseau’s works, and conclude with a discussion of the synthesis between Epicureanism and Stoicism that underlay much of the king’s œuvre. The Môtiers triangle: Rousseau, Keith, Frederick The distant relationship between Rousseau and Frederick the Great intensified in 1762 when Rousseau asked for Frederick’s protection in Môtiers, within the territory of Neuchâtel. Following the uproar, censure, and official ban provoked by his publications of 6 Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men’, in DI, 111–222, here 218 (Note XV); ‘Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes’, in OC III, 109–223 (219). 7 Rousseau, DI, 187; OC III, 193. 8 On this notion in Hobbes see, recently, Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); István Hont, Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, ed. Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 6–12. 9 Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 183–202. See also John Rawls’s view that amour propre, prior to its corruption, made it possible to reconcile self-interest and justice: Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed.
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