PEL Special: Combat & Classics #11 on Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences”

2:35 Brian: Hello and welcome to the Combat and Classics Podcast. I'm Brian Wilson from Dallas, Texas.

2:41 Lise: I'm Lise Van Boxel in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

2:44 Jeff: Jeff Black in Annapolis, Maryland.

2:46 Dylan: I'm Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

2:49 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

2:52 Brian: So today we've got a crossover episode between the folks at Partially Examined Life and us over here at Combat Classics. We got Wes and Dylan joining us for the first Discourse of Jean Jacques Rousseau on the arts and sciences. And Jeff is going to give us a brief summary of the reading and start us off with an opening question.

3:14 Jeff: Yeah, thanks, Brian. So let me set the stage here. It's the summer of 1749, and it's Paris. It's a really hot summer. Jean Jacques Rousseau is walking through Paris, headed towards Vincennes, which is a suburb on the outskirts of Paris. His friend Denis Diderot is in prison there for writing something he shouldn't have written, the Pensées Philosophiques. And Rousseau is really eager to see Denis Diderot. So he's walking quickly, but it's very hot, so he's worried that if he walks too quickly, he's just going to get tired out. So he brought a magazine with him to read.

The magazine was called the Mercury. And inside the magazine he finds a prize question posed by the Academy of Dijon asking, has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals? And Rousseau would later say, when he saw that question, he saw another universe and became another man. And he lost 15 minutes of his life somehow. And when he came to, he was sitting by the side of the road, his shirt was soaked with tears, and he immediately grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote one section of what would become the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, the First Discourse.

And in that discourse, he answered the Academy's question by arguing that our souls have been corrupted in proportion to the advancement of our sciences and arts, to perfection. So the Academy didn't ask him anything about moral corruption. They wanted to know about moral purity. They were really excited about the sciences and the arts. But Rousseau, as is typical for him, decided to take this in another direction. He said, no, not only no to the purification question. Corruption, moral corruption, is the result of the sciences and the arts. And so I just wanted to start with that.

What is moral corruption? Why is it a bad thing? Name sounds bad, but why exactly is it bad?

5:13 Brian: I think that was the tough part for me, is trying to frame the ideal citizen and what the ideal citizen's morality looks like, because he kind of drops that in the end about being a good citizen, but he doesn't really Define it.

5:24 Lise: I don't think one of the major themes that seems to emerge is a sort of disparity between what you are and what you appear to be. It's sort of hypocrisy that seems to lie at the center of what he means by corruption.

5:39 Dylan: A certain duplicity, inauthenticity being not what you are, what you were.

5:45 Lise: Maybe covering over what you are so that you're two faced would be a modern way of putting it.

5:50 Jeff: Yeah, yeah, that fits pretty well with the negative connotation of corruption. But he talks about things like politeness as evidence of this hypocrisy or being two faced. And I guess I'd like to hear a little bit more as a polite person myself, why being polite is a bad thing.

6:06 Dylan: He indicts everything about social convention in one fell swoop, except for some kind of narrow band of old virtue, which I don't feel like he ever really identifies what that means, except that it's anything that was old enough to be Spartan, like. Right. Like for instance, it's not clear to me that the Spartans weren't polite, except maybe impolite in a way that was kind of. They weren't polite in a frilly way. Right. And maybe it was polite in a respectful way or something like that. But the distinct about what those things are wasn't so clear to me.

And to me, when I hear him use the word polite, I hear that kind of condescending politeness that is two faced. The way Lise is talking about the version would be like you see in a movie, somebody's talking to another character and you can tell they're going to stab them in the back the next moment. Right. It's that kind of politeness, the politeness that doesn't reveal anything about you or whatever. And it's also the kind of thing that people in the Midwest, they talk about the authenticity of being in Chicago or the Midwest, that they're just nicer and they mean that kind of niceness that is genuine politeness, not two faced politeness.

That's what they mean by that. That's what, when they talk about what drives them crazy about going to someplace like New York is that it's not that way.

7:22 Wes: Well, is there a politeness that's not two faced? Maybe that's a related question.

7:26 Jeff: Yeah, he does put a lot of weight on that degree of politeness. Let's just put it that way for now. Where you can't trust anyone if your society gets to the point where everybody's nice to you, but everybody's scheming against you. That's clearly bad, but it would be a question. And maybe this is what Wes is driving at, whether that's different in kind from the good politeness or only different in degree. And all kinds of politeness have something problematic that Rousseau is driving at.

7:54 Lise: So if we go to the seed of Jeff's question, when he restated just what's wrong with all politeness, one could dig a little deeper beyond the two facedness of the kind of hypocrisy you see in the French court or dangerous liaisons. And say politeness is based on a certain pretext that you care as much for the other person, or ideally more so, than you do for yourself. And that Rousseau, I think, thinks is at this point not possible. But that's what I think the crux of politeness means, at least in the modern era.

8:27 Wes: Yeah, so he says on page four of my edition, which is the Hackett so how sweet it would be to live among us if outer appearances were always the likeness of the heart's dispositions, if decency were virtue, decency in his pejorative sense, if our maxim served as our rules, if true philosophy were inseparable from the title of philosopher. The implication here is that we have all sorts of thoughts and feelings that we hide socially on a daily basis. You know, they would be implied. Things to say we don't like, we're annoyed by someone. Of course, we hold that back.

He contrasts that to a more ideal kind of rustic, proletarian or less refined folk kind of way of doing things. So before art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak an affected language, our mores were more rustic but natural. And differences in behavior heralded at first glance, differences in of character. So we get an image of people who are simpler, more easily readable, easier to interpret, who show their emotions more readily, unlike the refined upper classes. And that's kind of a stereotypical distinction between upper and lower classes.

And then he gets into the idea that refinement basically turns us into phonies and conformists, which in turn leads to people being mutually suspicious, hating each other, envying each other, and that leads to vice. So I think that's the initial line of thought. He has a few, many other attacks, of course.

9:58 Jeff: And one important piece of this is that the rustic who betrays what he is is not a naive hick, right, an artless hick, but is actually proud of the naked body under the clothes, right? So that person wants to be seen for what they Are warts. And all, as it were, got nothing to hide. So maybe part of the critique of politeness is we're ashamed of ourselves.

10:24 Lise: There's how one views oneself. And then just to pick up on Wes's point, the complication that emerges, which we've sort of touched on, but it's worth saying explicitly, is that the difference between friends and enemies becomes obscured in societies where people are actually more physically capable and more overt in their actions. It's clear to see who your friends and enemies are and people are proud of declaring them and proud of themselves to build on what Jeff says. And in the more sophisticated societies, the politeness covers over that distinction, which means you never really have true friends or you're never really sure that you do. And as Jeff said, that is because of a sort of self shame of showing what you are. You're actually ugly.

11:06 Dylan: Yeah.

11:06 Jeff: I think one way to wreck a dinner party would be to say, so who are your enemies?

11:11 Brian: Right.

11:11 Jeff: Why don't we go around the table and just say who our enemies are?

11:15 Wes: All of you?

11:16 Brian: Yeah, exactly.

11:18 Jeff: Wouldn't everybody want to say, what are you talking about? I don't have any enemies. What kind of person do you think I am? But could that be true?

11:26 Lise: We could have the complement to that. It would be sort of uncomfortable too, if you had a fairly large dinner party and you said, so who's your best friend?

11:33 Brian: Right.

11:34 Lise: Whereas I suspect there might have been a time where people wouldn't have been embarrassed about that because they would understand what friendship is and realize there might be different types of degrees. But there's a pretext now that, well, of course we're all best friends, which is not possible.

11:47 Jeff: This is certainly a big chunk of Rousseau's argument, and as Wes was pointing out, it's kind of the opening salvo. Right. The first few pages of the discourse talk about our morals and the politeness of the French or Europeans of Rousseau's time. But then he moves on to this argument has a different ground after he states his thesis and he says this or kind of implies this very strange thing. If you have corrupt morals, you'll be conquered. Right. And there's a fairly long list of peoples who had corrupt morals and then were conquered by barbarian peoples with pure morals. So presumably the argument is not that you're going to be conquered because you're too polite.

12:25 Wes: Right.

12:25 Jeff: You know, something like Canadians. What do Canadians say when they're being invaded? Oh, I'm sorry, right. You know, so what's the connection there? This seems like another Thrust in the argument about moral corruption. What's the conquest angle?

12:40 Wes: So he uses this phrase vain curiosity.

12:42 Jeff: Yeah.

12:43 Wes: Yeah.

12:44 Brian: That was certainly a confusing part because, you know, he. And kind of relying on Montaigne, talks about the Native Americans and uses them as an example of a people that will not be conquered, partly because they have so few needs. And that didn't end up the case.

13:01 Unknown speaker: No.

13:01 Jeff: And in fact, in some of those footnotes, he talks about the Spanish and their behavior in South America. Right. So he knows that whatever moral purity the Native Americans have, their time is limited at the hands of the Europeans. Right. They're going to suffer defeat at the hands of the Europeans. So there's obviously some kind of complication here.

13:19 Wes: So the initial thrust is that truth seeking leads to weakness. This is on. I don't know if it's useful to refer to pages but five of my edition.

13:26 Dylan: I sort of took it as him saying, you get your eye off the ball. There's a kind of multiplicity of aims that happens that as a community, you end up being less focused on the primary things, and there's sort of too many things, and you have a kind of dissolution that leads to weakness. That's part of it. I wasn't sure if that's a corruption exactly, but at least they. A diminution. And so by having the great people in your community focused on other things than the narrow virtues and the military virtues of. He's unclear about this, but they seem to be to him most directed towards the individual freedom of the members as well as the health of the community.

And I confess that I found that I wasn't sure about how to really judge that. He just basically asserts that that's true, that maybe we're sort of figuring that out, like what would be the characteristics of it. But part of it was just having fewer stuff, fewer things to focus on.

14:28 Jeff: In terms of the structure of the argument, it might help to notice the assertions are more or less in the first part, which he calls historical inductions, and those are all the examples. And then he comes back to some reasoning in the second part, although that reasoning could be entirely unsatisfactory. Right. But we could look at that if we wanted to, about the decline of the military virtues.

14:46 Lise: Dylan introduces a further complication which is related the opening question, namely, what is the purpose of civil society? So it seems like we've looked at corruption in terms of the individual, but if we're going to look at it as a societal thing also, we need to understand what a healthy society would Be.

15:03 Brian: So he has a line in the first part pretty early on. It's maybe like the fourth or fifth paragraph in the first part where he says, the mind, as well as the body, has its needs. Those of the body are the basis of society, those of the mind its ornaments. So I think that kind of gets to Lise's point. But that line is very confusing to me because, you know, he's maybe trying to be a little provocative. But when you think about vice, you usually think about the body, right? You think about gluttony, you think about sloth. You think about most vices dealing with the body.

And it seems like he's either saying that outside of the corrupt society, there wouldn't be those vices of the body and that there's no real virtue in examining what he calls these ornaments, these pursuits of the mind, that there's worse vices in the pursuits of the mind. And to a certain degree it makes sense, right? He talks about how science and the arts have garnered with flowers the chains that kings have put upon the people. You know, which is something that you can wrap your head around. You can say, okay, yeah, so much as it encourages the subjugation of a free society and not the flourishing of a free society, you can kind of get your head wrapped around that.

But I think even that concept kind of contradicts this because he just says that the ideal society, or at least implies the ideal society, is based around satisfying bodily needs, but only the most basic bodily needs. And that's a little tricky for me to wrap my head around that.

16:34 Jeff: Well, maybe one helpful thing here is just to see an implication of that sentence or those two sentences you read, right, which is that the needs of the body are the foundations of society. But satisfying the needs of the body is intrinsically unpleasant, right? In other words, if it were pleasant, we wouldn't need to satisfy the needs of the mind in order to make things hold together. So I think he has something in mind like this. The reason we get together in societies is because we can't care for ourselves adequately by ourselves, right? Maybe division of labor, or maybe it's because other people have already gotten together, and if I'm on my own, I'm just going to get beaten up or killed.

But once we get together, subordination happens. We have to start doing what other people want us to do. And that is really unpleasant. There's no way to make being in an organization or being in a society pleasant unless you conceal it using maybe the sciences and the arts or maybe something else, but something that can make me feel good about myself in a situation where I'm nonetheless doing the bidding of other people. And if you think about our lives, a lot of our lives are spent doing stuff that we wouldn't do unless we were paid for them or unless we got a reputation for them.

So I think he's thinking about compensations like that we don't actually live the way we want to live. According to Rousseau, in most societies. Maybe all.

17:54 Brian: Well, maybe it'd be helpful to look at the sections where he's talking about Lycurgus and Sparta, because I was very confused about that and I'm trying to pull it up. And usually what I do, Wes and Dylan, is I just kind of allude to a section that I vaguely remember and then Jeff and Lise just kind of remember it verbatim and then explain it to me. That's usually how this shtick works.

18:13 Wes: It's in part one, page seven in my edition, if that helps.

18:16 Brian: You know, you're talking about making people do things or, you know, doing things you don't want to do.

18:22 Wes: And there at the point with Sparta, he's turning to the virtue of ignorance. And there's actually like a three page argument there around the idea that ignorance is preferable to what Socrates called conceit of wisdom. The idea, the thinking that you know things when you don't really know things, that starts with Sparta. There's a little paragraph about it's not stupidity that leads you to prefer other forms of exercise to exercise of the mind. So this connects to the stuff about the body that comes later and military virtue. But he gives this picture of people who are essentially idle.

There's an idleness to using your minds and there's a lack of utility to it. And they're debating about vice and virtue. Arrogant reasoners he calls them, but they're not doing that. That's words and thoughts rather than action. And somehow the two don't work well together for some reason. They're inversely proportional. So the laws of Sparta, he says, for her happy ignorance, as for the wisdom of her laws, in a way the Spartan virtue and laws, the wisdom of them is a function of ignorance.

19:27 Brian: So is Sparta succeeding in some way to Rousseau's ideal, don't bother with these ornaments of the mind.

19:33 Lise: Yeah, don't bother with the ornaments of the mind. But back to this connection, which I think we still need to flesh out, between what the excellence or health of an individual would be compared to that of civil society. I think it's the coherence of the Spartans, that is, I wouldn't call them natural people because for Rousseau, the more obvious individual needs are subordinate to Sparta. You're sort of deeply indoctrinated to be dedicated to the city, but the indoctrination is so pervasive and so well done that it makes you into a fairly whole human being.

That is, you're not at odds with yourself because you're so indoctrinated. That means you can. You have some shot at being healthy. You actually are pretty healthy insofar as you don't have internal contradictions. It's the modern societies where you aren't so committed to the society as a whole and hence your individual desires emerge and are at odds with society, while you're also required to pretend that they're not. That's where the dishonesty comes in. And the society is actually in a way filled with enemies because there isn't this sort of indoctrination to hold it together in the way Sparta was.

20:45 Dylan: I don't know how much to make of this, but isn't part of that indoctrination also selection in the case of Sparta, that it's not just that every human soul is fit for Sparta and educated, it's that surely, from what I read, clearly there are plenty of souls that end up getting sort of thrown out that they are selected against. So that you have really an education of a Spartan, a Spartan educatable soul that makes a Spartan society. But there's a whole bunch of other souls out there that just don't fit there and could not be educated for it. And that thinking a little bit more about this dissolution that I referred to before is that part of it having your mind on different individuals with different balls is a kind of.

I don't know if it's pluralism or multivalency of different kinds of souls in it that the society that would have. That would necessarily be less focused and there might be accommodations that have to be made in order to have, even by the individuals. Right. A different kind of education that would be required to have a less univalent set of souls in that community. And it would have different virtues in it.

21:57 Jeff: The evident thing would be the virtue of tolerance, right? Which I take it, is not a Spartan virtue, but is one of our virtues, the virtue of not starting a fight with everybody who disagrees with you just because they disagree with you, but thinking that it's fine to have a disagreement and it doesn't need to be prosecuted.

By the way, there's a really nice remark that Rousseau makes that points exactly to the difficulty that you're raising of how the Spartans came to be virtuous in the way that they are. That's a couple paragraphs after what west was referring to. Rousseau brings our attention to that by avoiding the question, right? And only quoting what non Spartans say about how the Spartan virtue is achieved.

26:59 Brian: Ironically.

26:59 Jeff: Yeah, yeah, they're born virtuous. The very air of the country seems to instill virtue. The other peoples don't know, they don't get it. But yeah, eugenics, disposal of unfit children and then very harsh education are the way that this unanimity is purchased.

27:16 Dylan: Which besides education is also selection, right? I mean again, it's not as if everybody who makes it to the education is going to make it to being a real Spartan and also putting aside the Helots. But.

27:28 Jeff: Right. Slavery too. Exactly.

27:30 Wes: I mean, the virtue of the Spartan is to be uneducated and not too much touched by education. If we mean literary and education in the arts and sciences. So this idea of them being born virtuous, I think we should take that seriously. It's an idea of something that's closer to nature and natural health, that's interfered with by the arts and sciences. And then you get to the ironic use of Socrates to defend Sparta using the concept of Socratic ignorance, where he's playing off the Socratic idea that viciousness is not so much a product of ignorance, although you might think that initially with Plato, it's not so much a lack of virtue, is not so much a product of not knowing something as thinking that you know something that you don't know, which the Spartans don't have.

They don't have to worry about that. But anyone. Once the arts and sciences come on the scene, then your society is filled with posers and sophists and pretentious people who want to seem like they are sources of certain knowledge. And at that point, conceivably, you could see a way out of Rousseau's kind of strange blanket condemnation of all his stuff, which we could talk about later. Because if you thought there were a society in which you could. And he kind of hints at this at the end, when the arts and sciences don't produce this sort of knowingness, you could call it that, or arrogance, hubris, then you could conceive of how there might be a place for them somehow, the way it affects regular humanity.

I think he thinks it tends to corrupt in this way.

29:03 Lise: The reference to Socrates, I think, is important for Dylan's last comment as well. That is, while Sparta may produce on the whole, citizens or human beings who are coherent wholes or more so than the modern human being, and I'll cycle back and say something about what that means. A philosopher would not want to be in that society precisely because the very methods used to create the that wholeness, that is a subordination of individual desires to the city, is contrary to the freedom the philosopher needs to think. So that's not a city for the philosopher.

So now we're back to the tension between what might be, although I think for Rousseau this needs further explanation. The highest good of the human being, namely to be a philosopher on the one hand, and the good of the society on the other hand. Should we cycle back and say something about what wholeness is because that might not be familiar to some of our listeners. We're employing it. It's an important part of the text.

30:01 Jeff: Yeah, yeah, I think so. We should.

30:03 Lise: The wholeness is when the various parts of one's soul, insofar as one might speak of the soul with parts, at least for pedagogical purposes, are not at odds with each other. So this might become clear in Rousseau's Emile. But your appetitive parts, your curiosity and your intellectual pursuits are all aligned so that what's pleasant is also useful, is also good for you. For example, a very difficult circumstance, and the one that Rousseau has obviously in mind, is where what is useful and pleasant to you is regarded socially as morally bad. That's the difficulty right now. You have to pretend to be good while actually your private needs are at odds with the public doctrine about what the good is. Is.

30:49 Dylan: Especially thinking back about Jeff's opening, about walking to see Diderot in prison.

30:54 Brian: Yeah, I mean, harmony and conflict are like the crux of the argument for me. It's what works together for the needs of the body and the needs of the individual soul versus the needs of society, and what parts are in harmony and what parts are in conflict. The Sparta thing is tricky, and the Athenian thing too, which you know because of the Helots and you know, because also Rousseau's doesn't seem to be a huge fan of Athenian culture in general. If there's some ideal society and Sparta maybe has part of it, I'm not clear as to how ideal Rousseau thinks Sparta was, but if it requires like a totalitarian state to enforce, then how harmonious is that to the individual's needs as far as the body and the soul?

31:36 Dylan: And to Lise's point, if the virtue of Sparta is ignorance of a Spartan as a kind of ignorance, it's deeply anti philosophical in that you would never have a Spartan who knows that they don't know, because the virtue of that kind of knowing isn't part of the deal. There's always certainty. There's the gift of clarity. You always know exactly what you have to know, but you don't have a philosophical clarity where you would know what you don't know. That's just not part of the deal.

32:04 Jeff: There's a really helpful formulation in the second paragraph of the second part that might indicate to us just what Rousseau considers to be the limits of possible unity. He's talking about the defects of the objects of the sciences and the arts, and he asks a bunch of rhetorical questions like he does really frequently in this whole discourse. And one of these rhetorical questions is, who would want to spend his life in sterile speculations, the stuff that we enjoy doing, if each of us, consulting only the duties of man and the needs of nature, had time for nothing except his fatherland, the unfortunate, and his friends.

And so there you get two things and then three things. Maybe it's not possible really, or even not desirable really, for Rousseau to reduce that list to one thing or one list of one thing. Maybe there's always going to be some difficulty combining what it is to be a human being by nature and what it is to be a man with duties, let's say. But that is certainly better than the multitude of futile concerns that civilized human beings have, according to him.

33:14 Lise: If I could do the thing that shall not be done, which is refer to an outside text, there is an image that might be helpful here again, Rousseau's Emile, when he's trying to distinguish what I would call coherence or wholeness of a human being, one could also say a natural human being from the unnatural one. He uses the image of a plant. And he says, well, the nature is if you leave, in this case, this plant, at least if you leave this plant on its own, it grows upward toward the sun. And you could also put that plant on a trellis and get it to grow horizontally.

If the trellis was well constructed. That is, I suspect, like Sparta, the social apparatus, the indoctrination. That plant can and will grow sideways, but you can see that it's not its natural inclination. Insofar as soon as you remove the trellis, it's going to go back up. So I think that's the difference as the. If you're going to cultivate the nature of a human being so that it is social, you do need a strong trellis like Sparta to reduce the incoherence. If that's your goal, that's how to do it. And if you want a human being to be natural, it's a different story.

And again, part of the problem of the modern situation is we haven't actually clearly defined what it is that we want out of our society.

34:31 Brian: But I think that the trellis is a construction, right?

34:33 Lise: It's artifice.

34:35 Brian: It's an artifice. And so if you have a society based on some amount of artifice, as pretty a trellis as it might be, as much as it may in the short term even allow that plant to grow, quote, unquote, stronger in the long term, the lack of minor conflicts that will kind of smooth out existence don't exist or don't occur by being comfortable in ignorance or being comfortable growing around. Artifice restricts our ability to find out what is true and not true.

35:07 Lise: Goes back to Jeff's point though that may be a political conflict that can never be overcome. The same conflict, say that comes up in Plato's Republic. Of course society requires artifice, of course it requires certain education.

35:21 Dylan: I was just going to say that just to pursue the analogy a little bit. Even if we were to say that the society is a kind of trellis, or you need to have a good sturdy trellis, AKA society, to do that, but left alone, the plant will grow in its own direction. In that analogy itself, there is the trellis of whatever that environment is. Enough sunlight, enough dirt, enough air, enough water. I mean, there's a whole apparatus for which the plant will not exist at all. There's a context of embeddedness that it really can only mean that the most well aligned set of nutrients and environment that leads to the flourishing of that plant in the way it most naturally would.

Absent that, you have no plant, you have a non existent entity because the plant won't grow absent those things. And so it's displacing the. And maybe making an important point about the nature of political institution. But to merely fault it as not being the right kind of trellis is, I think putting aside the problem that what it would mean to have a set of contexts that's properly nourishing is presuming that that question is easy to solve in the first place, that there's like a natural easy way to solve,

36:44 Jeff: that there is this presupposition. I think Rousseau thinks that human beings are well enough suited to their environment that they generally spread. And so even if they were planted, as it were, very far from one another, eventually they get forced into contact with one another. He's got some theories in the Second Discourse about how this might happen. And that's where the trouble occurs, right? Where the plants start to bump into one another and what happens then? And that's when somebody sooner or later comes up with the first primitive trellis and says, why don't we do it this way? But then you're off to the races. Then it's just this trellis versus that, right?

37:21 Dylan: Because we're talking about Rousseau. I only want to bring up the point that the thing that most contrasted with this to me is I kept, especially when you were just talking, I kept thinking about Aristotle and the way in which we're natural political animals. And that is part of the flourishing of us in our souls as human beings, which would seem to. If I had to pick one thing off the top of my head, it would be most at odds with this that the individual planted by themselves would flourish most naturally in the greatest way they could, which would be diametrically opposed to that notion.

37:56 Lise: I guess that depends on how literal one thinks Aristotle's being when he wants to say that the gentlemanly virtues are not in any way in tension with the philosophic ones. I suspect that Rousseau and Aristotle might be a lot closer than they first appear. Let me dig it in this way. Sort of an ugly part of, or the undercurrent of this discourse, I think came up in what Wes said. It could be the case that for most human being. Go back to what you said, Dylan, who might not have the natural capacity to be philosophic and therefore might be much better off by getting a sort of the education offered by the trellis that directs their growth, so to speak. Their indoctrination allows for the philosopher to flourish. What's good for the very select few, that is the flourishing of arts and sciences does come at the expense of many.

38:50 Wes: Yes, this is sort of a little twist at the very end. He really explicitly says this, right? He's talking about geniuses needing no teachers, and in a way it being possible for them to be people like Descartes, Newton, beneficial to society if they also have worthy day jobs, if they have political positions, let's say things that are, or other things that are practical. There's an idea at the very end, after really giving it to the arts and sciences, that as long as the arts and sciences are united to something political, to power, and if it's the right sort of person, that this could be a good thing.

And then he gives the caveat for us ordinary men to whom heaven has not distributed such great talents and whom it does not destine from so much glory, let us remain in our obscurity. So this little twist at the end makes you think that the sort of blanket condemnation he's made can be modified to make way for great human beings of genius. It's just that it's the posers, the pretentious ones who don't have such talents are yet are attracted to the arts and sciences. Those are the dangerous ones.

40:01 Brian: As somebody who is pretentious and is attracted to the arts and sciences, I feel like Rousseau's taking a shot at me.

40:07 Dylan: So

40:09 Wes: we are all, like Rousseau, ordinary human beings.

40:14 Brian: So I'll take a shot back.

40:16 Wes: I'm Just an ordinary guy.

40:19 Brian: That's a good point. At least I'm up front about it. You know, I was thinking as I was reading this, and he's kind of dogging on the sciences, and he has that line about, like, chemists and physicists and astronomers leading people astray from the good life or the civilized life, the great corruptors. And that seemed a little interesting to me. He sounds like a philosophy major who didn't like math. He's just jealous. And so I'm like. I'm thinking about the notional sign on the front of the school of Plato, which is, let no man enter here who hasn't studied geometry.

There's a wholeness in that. When you study Euclid, and we've all studied Euclid, where if you can define your terms and build your argument and it doesn't contradict itself, then there's some amount of truth there. There might be a separate whole truth, a separate wholeness like what Lise was talking about, that also doesn't contradict. But you learn a lot by looking at both of those systems. And Athens and Sparta are somewhat of an example of this, where they contradicted themselves to a degree, but a limited degree, as much as is possible potentially in a civil society.

So I guess my question is, what is he missing by dismissing the sciences? Plato would agree to a certain degree with the arts. Right? Plato didn't like poets either. I'm still convinced we have a running joke that Plato was joking after the footstool thing in the Republic, at least it's my running joke. But I feel like that there is missing the specificity that comes with understanding math and science, especially around defining terms and building your argument. So just dismissing them out of hand. I know I'm turning this thing 90 degrees, but just something I wanted to bring up about the specific piece of the sciences.

41:59 Wes: And also the irony of this is a great exercise in literary rhetoric, Basically the very thing he condemns.

42:08 Brian: If you're a rustic. Let me put it another way. If you're a rustic and you like chopping wood in your flannel and building your hut and hunting deer, what's the harm in building a telescope and figuring out if the Copernican system is accurate or not?

42:23 Lise: Make it a question. Is it a blanket dismissal of arts and sciences, or is it a critique of the Enlightenment project? As I'm thinking about Dylan bringing up Aristotle, and I was sort of wondering after he brought that up, okay, so why is it that Aristotle doesn't take the Rousseau path and One reason might be that there wasn't the sense that one could make everybody philosophic. But that does seem to be the stated project of the Enlightenment. And I think Rousseau's trying to say that's a very ill advised project. Because to go back to the other point Dylan made, you can't just stick the same sort of education on everybody as though everybody is the same type of human being and has the same good available to them. Right.

43:09 Jeff: Can I just point out a couple details with the two parts of the solution that Wes mentioned that might be helpful in this connection? This thought that there's going to be some kind of cooperation between scientists and politicians. The strict terms of that argument are that talking about the scientists, if we wish nothing to be beyond their genius, nothing must be beyond their hopes. They're not going to be content with being college professors or working in some academy. They're not going to be content with advising.

43:38 Wes: It's not just content, it's also the way it affects their work. Possession of actual responsibility and power has implications for their work and whether it is actually good work.

43:50 Jeff: Right, exactly. So the maximal work involves the maximal political responsibility. They are going to found political societies and traditions of political societies.

44:01 Lise: It reminds me a little bit of Bacon's sort of the academic tower becomes more like sort of Bacon's private place where these great minds work and nobody really knows what they're up to. Right. Some of it trickles out to the public, but a lot of it does not.

44:14 Jeff: Well, maybe just one more thing quickly. The very concluding suggestion that the common people are going to be proud of fulfilling their duties and they're going to leave science to the scientists and they'll get along that way. The comparison is with two great peoples, right? Athens and Sparta. But Athenians and Spartans didn't get along. Exactly. So there's some suggestions too that this kind of coexistence of common human beings and a scientific project is highly problematic. Maybe a source of war.

44:43 Wes: Right. And we see that political tension in our society all the time. Right. The effete and elite liberals versus the red staters, the real, real Americans.

44:54 Dylan: I wanted to make a comment about this issue with what kinds of sciences there are and the sciences as being part of the ivory tower, so to speak. And I don't know that Rousseau would disagree with this, but when he speaks of like the virtues of agriculture, right. And you know, farming and then, you know, we had the chopping, the wood and the stuff like that, at least it feels like he's underestimating how Scientific those things are. And even if we take the case of the rustic persons who are just trying to take care of their own stuff, in all those cases you have this kind of contemplation of how the world works that we see seated in a university or something like that, and maybe not also always trying to find enlightenment project types of things of the grand unified theory or something like that, but you see very, very practical exercise of innovation and trying to figure out how the world works.

To try, directed towards a combination of understanding and utility, to try to figure out how to grow better crops, how to build your hut better so it doesn't leak. I mean, solving that problem, I have a leaky hut, I'm getting rained on. I'm tired of getting rained on all the time. And solving that problem is a technological innovation. And it also, directly to wes point, it also leads to power. So you find a new kind of material, or mine, a new kind of material, develop it, and you have a better hut and you have ways to have your family have better huts.

That's a way in which that becomes a power and it becomes people who can do that become the part of what become the ones who rule. And we see that modern times in terms of commercialism and capitalism and stuff like that, and you see that historically in the power of innovation regarding just the implements of war, straight up. But that's all science. That's straight up trying to understand the world and knowledge. Science in an old sense and science in a new sense, straight up.

46:59 Wes: I think that kind of science, the seemingly useful science, is also one of his targets. So he, at the end of part one, science and virtue incompatible. Well, let's talk about that in part two and look at the sciences and the arts in themselves and whether they're actually something that lead to progress. And then he goes on, there's a lot of paragraphs and a lot of the upshot is that it's not so useful after all. First he talks about ignoble sources for the sciences like astronomy and superstition. And then it's ignoble objects, fruitless speculations about duties and things like that.

The third paragraph, what dangers, what false pathways in the investigation of the sciences, how many errors a thousand times more dangerous than the truth is useful, must be endured in order to reach it. So here's sort of an admission that I think that science can lead to the truth, and I think even that truth might be useful. He's not saying that the truth couldn't be useful. He's just saying that it's not worth it. All the errors, the dangerous errors on that pathway make it not worth it. And you could see the same sort of argument in the development of technology.

Right. Technology, yeah. Technology is useful, but is it worth it from the standpoint of how it affects people's. enervates people and makes them unvirtuous?

48:19 Jeff: One of the chief technologies that's at stake in all of this is the technology of printing.

48:24 Dylan: Yes.

48:25 Jeff: Which we. So burn the libraries. Right. It will destabilize Europe. Right. There will be religious wars over the question of whether you and your Bible are sufficient for access to God or whether you need a priesthood in addition. But Rousseau himself writes and publishes. He even calls attention to this when he says, oh, Socrates was so great, he left nothing behind other than the memory of his virtue. But Plato, of course, very busily wrote a number of things about Socrates, including things that he claims Socrates said. So Rousseau, I think, is not simply dismissive of useful technologies, and he is trying to think of ways to turn the ones that are useful to the benefit of healthy human flourishing. In accord with the other parts of his argument.

49:09 Dylan: He also read a lot of books.

49:10 Jeff: Absolutely. Including a lot of math and science, by the way.

49:14 Wes: Yeah. I mean, the contradiction is so glaring that. I mean, he's a philosopher, he's a writer, he's doing rhetoric here, and it's a literary enterprise. And he's an intellectual condemning intellectuals. It's not the first and last time that's happened, but it would be nice to hear more about. Well, what's your place in all this? Are you just the intellectual trying to undo intellectualism in general and therefore it's sort of. It's justified, it's a means to an end. Or how does his activity fit into all of this? He's an ordinary man, remember, he's not one of the geniuses who has the right to do this.

49:51 Jeff: Well, he says that about himself, but he also has a frontispiece that depicts him as Prometheus bringing the fire of the sciences to the people. So I think he has a way of speaking from a couple different perspectives. I think he thinks he's the equal of Plato, for example, but. Sorry, go ahead, Lise.

50:10 Lise: No, I was going to say that seems right to me. So then if we dig a little farther into. So what's he actually up to? It seems. I think we've said this in various ways, but let's pull the threads together. He's concerned and he named some particular people that even geniuses, at least some of the Geniuses are very inclined to, given what they are today, to want public honor, to be honored, to be recognized. And that as a result of that, their studies, their inquiries are becoming simply utilitarian or simply aimed at the pleasure of the many. Whereas it's sort of like putting the cart before the horse. In fact, those geniuses should be doing not necessarily useless things, but they ought to be guided so simply by their curiosity and their interests. They ought to determine their own projects. Whereas what's happening now is that their projects are being determined by non geniuses.

51:07 Brian: Like the magazine ad asking for a discourse on. Well, not even on, but explaining how the arts and sciences have improved virtue.

51:16 Jeff: Yeah, exactly. Asking the wrong question.

51:19 Lise: Yeah, that's what I was going to say. That's a nice example actually, because he literally takes the question which would give him public honor and is being given to him by. By people whose intellect is less. But he just changes it.

51:30 Dylan: Right.

51:31 Lise: And it's the change that really makes the essay a product of genius.

51:35 Brian: I think that that's probably a good time to wrap up. Plus we're about at an hour and just Wes and Dylan, Jeff and least love the meta contradiction stuff. Rousseau and Machiavelli. We come back to those a lot and I enjoy it because I don't understand the meta contradiction as well as Jeff and Lise do. The other thing is usually Lise then teases out some kind of anagram. So does Cleopatra show up in this at all? Lise and did I miss it or.

52:05 Jeff: Read the footnotes, Brian.

52:06 Brian: Read the footnotes. Lise is like, well, there's an anagram in here. And I'm like, oh, how did I miss that?

52:13 Lise: Got to look very carefully at the frontispiece because I'm sure she's in there.

52:18 Brian: Great. Well, Wes and Dylan, thanks so much for for being on our pod and thanks for having on your pod as this will be in both places.

52:27 Dylan: That's great.

52:27 Brian: Also wanted to put in a plug. Lise, Jeff and I will be doing a partially examined Life not school seminar on August 14th at 8pm Eastern on Nietzsche's Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense. And so you can get more information on the Not School program and becoming a PEL citizen over at partiallyexaminedlife.com and we'll have that event on our Facebook and on pel's Facebook book. So thank you guys a ton. Really enjoyed this and anything I missed. Guys, thanks for hosting.

52:58 Lise: Brian.

52:59 Jeff: Thanks for hosting us, Brian.

53:00 Brian: Thanks all. Great. Well, thanks guys.

53:02 Wes: Thanks for having us.

53:03 Dylan: Thanks a lot thank you. Thank you.