A Man For all Seasons

Dagon On His Face

Here are some insights from an exceptionally good biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, entitled Rousseau--The Self Made Saint by J. H. Huizinga (New York, Grossman Publishers, 1976).

Rousseau is undeniably an important figure in the West.  To this day he is probably the most influential shaper of Western pedagogy and teaching methods.  He, more than any other, is responsible for "child-centred education"--that oxymoron of oxymorons.  Huizinga tells us that modern scholarship is besotted with him.

Never, therefore, was there an intellectual of immense renown whom it is so difficult to take seriously.  Yet few writers have been the object of such painstaking study.  Few have kept and are still keeping so many erudite scholars at work analysing and interpreting the maestro's every word; putting the most ingenious constructions on his chaotic incoherence so as to "unify his thought"; annotating his thousands of letters so as to reveal that words like "I have a cold" in the first draft were replaced by "I have a bad cold"; digging out yellowed documents so as to acquaint the world with the details of the great man's laundry bills (which--believe it or not--fill twelve pages in the latest edition of his collected works); . . . (Op cit., p. 20)

It is ironic that the Unbelieving West has chosen Rousseau as one of its patron saints.  It turns out that he was a self-inflated, opinionated gadfly, his writings riddled with contradictions and his life oozing hypocrisy from every orifice.


Firstly, his writings: according to Huizinga there is a:

. . . chaotic incoherence that characterizes nearly all his writings. . . . So striking are the . . . contradictions that one begins to wonder whether he even remembered what he had said a few pages or chapters earlier, whether he forgot as "incredibly" quickly what he had written as what he felt the moment before.  Thus in one and the same book he describes his life-companion as the "woman I loved" and as something for whom he "never felt the least glimmering of love".  In one and the same chapter he says of his grand passion, "in my heart I have committed the crime of seducing her a hundred times over" and "I loved her too much to want to possess her".  On one and the same page he glories in his "noble pride" and calls it "silly".  And, indeed, he himself admits that "once I have written a thing down I cease to remember it".  (Ibid., p. 19)

This has meant that his writings can be used to make Rousseau believe anything or say anything.  It all depended upon what he thought at the moment--the first existentialist.

If he so often seems hopelessly contradictory, it is partly because the premises, not to say the dreams from which he starts reasoning, vary with and are indeed inspired by the ever-changing feelings of the moment.  Thus he could go on record with utterances showing him to be a revolutionary and a reactionary, an individualist and a collectivist, a rabid nationalist and a fervent European, rationalist and romantic, Christian and deist.
(Ibid. p.19.)

And the reason for this chaotic mishmash?  It seems as if he believed that all life was a stage, and he was a prodigious genius called to play many parts, each of which was to be acted with great fervour and passion.  Truth was not the issue; making an impression upon one's public by acting out the passion of the moment was.

. . . haughtily indifferent to criticism he simply did not care how much he contradicted himself. And for this explanation, too, his own authority can be invoked: "I say naively what I feel and I think, however bizarre and paradoxical . . . I do not try to persuade anybody, I only write for myself."  Hence the great difficulty indeed, the impossibility, of doing him justice, as a human being or as a writer and thinker.  Whatever you make him say by quoting from his writings, whether about society or religion or morality or his favourite subject, himself, you can nearly always make him say the opposite, too.
(Ibid.)

The publisher's blurb gives us a broader perspective:

Who was this man, and how did he come to such extraordinary veneration so quickly?  In this lively anecdotal biography, J. H. Huizinga provides a shocking portrait of the man, his work--and the process of sanctification-by-history.  Acknowledging the range of Rousseau's talent and his accomplishments Huizinga also reveals the ruse behind the reality, confronting:

Rousseau the democrat, who insisted that his mistress--ill-bred, uneducated--serve dinner to his guests and then take her own meal in the kitchen.

Rousseau the educator, who wrote a celebrated and influential book, Emile, about a natural, child-centred method of education--and who consigned five illegitimate children of his own to a foundling hospital, much against their mother's wishes; . . .

Who was this man, indeed?  If a people are known by the patron saints they venerate, what does this lionising of Rousseau in academia, in education, and in political circles for over three hundred years tell us about the West?

Highly prejudiced irrationality lies at the root of our anti-Christian, devolving society.