The best books are those that tell you what you already know, but didn’t know that you knew.—Neel Burton, psychiatrist and philosopher, University of Oxford
There is more to being human than the absence of disorder.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent much of your life trying to make sense of things—happiness and suffering, love and loss, reason and emotion, the strange business of being human.
We live in an era of rapid change. Many of the structures that once gave us identity, meaning, and direction have weakened. More than ever, we must answer life’s deepest questions for ourselves. How should we live, love, work, suffer, and die?
My search for answers has taken me through philosophy, psychology, literature, history, and ancient wisdom—because the deepest truths often emerge where disciplines meet.
I hope you find something here that speaks to you.
If you’re new here, these are good places to begin.
Modern philosophy began in the warmth of a cockle stove, with three visions.
René Descartes (1596–1650) is often called the father of modern philosophy. The title owes less to any single doctrine than to the ambition of his project. As the old Aristotelian worldview collapsed under the weight of the Scientific Revolution, Descartes set out to rebuild human knowledge from the ground up, in a way that could accommodate God, the soul, and human freedom.
A World Crying Out For a Philosopher
The demise of the Aristotelian system, brought about by the Copernican and Scientific Revolutions, left a void that needed filling—ideally by some all-encompassing metaphysical system on the scale of the old, Aristotelian one. If the Earth no longer stood at the centre of the cosmos, was man not the glory of creation, as affirmed in the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:7)? In this new mechanistic, atomistic world of matter in motion, where might God and the immaterial soul fit in? Where freedom and justice? And where, even, heaven and hell?
As recently as 1588, Galileo, qua mathematician, had been invited to address the Florentine Academy on the location, size, and arrangement of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno—underscoring the scale of the mind shift required. Even that paragon of the Scientific Revolution, Newton, albeit in secret, dedicated the larger part of his life to alchemy and the search for the fabled philosopher’s stone.
The three seventeenth-century philosophers who rose to the challenge of formulating a comprehensive metaphysics are René Descartes (1596–1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who sometimes inserted, with little to no justification, the nobiliary particle von in front of his cognomen.
Three Visions in a Stove-Heated Room
Descartes categorically rejected the substantial forms and primary matter of the mediaeval, Aristotelian schoolmen. In a letter to his friend Marin Mersenne dated 28 January 1641, he writes that his Meditations on First Philosophy ‘contain all the foundations of my physics. But please do not tell people, for that might make it harder for the supporters of Aristotle to approve them. I hope that readers will gradually get used to my principles, and recognise their truth, before they notice that they destroy the principles of Aristotle.’
Two decades earlier, Descartes had been serving in the army of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria. On 10–11 November 1619, while stationed near Ulm or else Neuberg an der Donau, he found refuge in a room with an ‘oven’ (probably a cockle stove) to escape from the cold and reflect on his thoughts. That night, he had three dreams which determined the course of his life. To repay these visions, he vowed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loretto in the Italian region of Marche—and, in 1623, fulfilled his vow.
What Descartes had seen or grasped on that eve of St Martin’s Day 1619 is the unity of the sciences under mathematics: if a concrete problem could be abstracted into mathematical form, it would become clearer and more amenable to solving. Thus, in the course of his life, he contributed several mathematical innovations. In his La Géométrie (1637), he introduced the modern exponential notation which is taught in every contemporary school. He established the convention of using the letters x, y, z to represent unknown variables in equations, and a, b, c to represent known variables. If that were not impressive enough, he bridged algebra and geometry by transforming numerical relationships into geometrical shapes, plotting these lines and curves on a coordinate plane, and showing how they could be represented in the form of algebraic equations—a field now known as analytic, coordinate, or Cartesian geometry.
Descartes sought to carry the certainty of mathematics into philosophy itself. The culmination of that lifelong project was the Meditations on First Philosophy, which laid the foundations of his new metaphysical system while quietly dismantling that of Aristotle.
The Method of Doubt (Dubitatio methodica)
The closed-in stove-heated room later came to symbolise Descartes’ famous method of doubt, by which he systematically dismantled the edifice of his beliefs to rebuild on a more secure foundation of indubitable truths, to be arrived at through a predetermined set of logical rules.
In this climate of radical doubt, he could doubt the existence of the outside world, even the existence of his own body—but not that he was the one doing the doubting. This insight is encapsulated in his famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). The very act of doubting presupposed a thinking self to do the doubting.
Although Descartes knew that he was thinking, and so that he was, he could not be sure that his thinking bore any relation to the outside world. So he introduced an a priori proof (a proof derived from thought alone) for the existence of God, and argued that such a benevolent being would not deceive his favoured creation, man—so long as man had employed his (Descartes’s) method of doubt and taken every precaution to have ‘clear and distinct’ ideas and not to be deceived.
Dualism and the Piece of Wax Analogy
The Cogito also transformed Descartes’ understanding of reality. The indubitability of the thinking self led him to conclude that mind and body must be fundamentally different kinds of substance. The defining attribute of the mind (or soul, or res cogitans) is thought, while that of the body (or res extensa) is extension. It is by the knowable mind, rather than the deceptive senses, that the physical can be apprehended.
Descartes illustrated this point with one of the most famous passages in the Meditations: the wax analogy. When a piece of wax is heated, all its sensory properties change. Only the mind grasps its underlying essence, which consists in extension (as well as flexibility and movability in space), and recognises it as the same piece of wax. The physical, being extended, is divisible; but mind is indivisible, and therefore not physical. Since it is not physical, mind is beyond the laws of physics, and free and immortal.
[T]here is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible. For when I consider the mind, or myself in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete… By contrast, there is no corporeal or extended thing that I can think of which in my thought I cannot easily divide into parts; and this very fact makes me understand that it is divisible. This one argument would be enough to show me that the mind is completely different from the body.
The Soul of Animals
Descartes’s mind-body dualism is commonly taken as the starting point of modern philosophy. His method is indeed revolutionary, but the substance of his philosophy is in fact an attempt to shelter God, man, and his immortal soul from the new mechanism. Thanks to Descartes, those who embraced the Copernican revolution could remain good Christians, or claim as much.
But in solving one problem, Descartes created several others, most notably the place of animals and the mind-body problem.
Under the Aristotelian system, all living things had a vegetative (or nutritive) soul; animals, in addition, had a sensitive soul; and humans, on top of that, had a rational soul.
For fear of granting them immortality and a place in heaven, Descartes denied souls to the animals. Animals, he claimed, are mere automata, whose functions ‘follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels’.
For Descartes, it is not merely that animals do not reason, but also, contra common sense, that they do not feel, perceive, or sense. Clearly, he did not have a cat. According to lore, he once threw a cat out of a window in an attempt to demonstrate that the poor thing lacked consciousness.
The Mind-Body Problem
If mind and body truly are incommensurate, how is it possible for them to interact? How might my mind move me to write these words without violating, or else submitting to, the laws of physics? Conversely, how might my eyes and ears relay sense experience to my mind?
Descartes responded to this so-called mind-body problem in two ways. At times, he said, literally, ‘Only God knows.’ At other times, he suggested that mind and body interact at the pineal gland, on the grounds that this structure is mobile and central in the brain. But this only puts the problem at one remove, for the question then becomes, how is it possible for the mind to interact with the pineal gland?
The Philosopher’s Daughter
Although France’s most famous philosopher, Descartes spent the greater part of his adult life in the relative safety of the Dutch Republic. There, he met a servant called Helena who became the mother of his illegitimate daughter Francine (b. 1635), whom he passed off as his niece. When Francine died, aged five, of scarlet fever, he called it the greatest sorrow of his life, even stating that it was not unmanly to cry. Later, a legend arose that he—the philosopher who had compared living bodies to machines—constructed an automaton in her likeness.
The Tree of Life
The name René derives from the Latin Renatus, ‘born again’—fitting for the man who sought to rebuild philosophy from first principles. But although remembered as a philosopher, Descartes looked upon himself first and foremost as a natural philosopher (scientist) and physicist.
In the preface to his Principles of Philosophy (1644), he compared philosophy to a tree, with metaphysics as its roots, physics as its trunk, and the other sciences as its branches—and it is, of course, the branches that bear the fruit.
The ‘other sciences’ could be reduced to three principal ones, medicine, mechanics, and morals—which is why, in 1649, he published a book on the emotions, The Passions of the Soul. He sent a copy to his penfriend Queen Christina of Sweden, who was so impressed that she invited him to join her court.
In October 1649, he left Holland for Sweden. But the northern winter did not agree with him, and the frenetic Christina insisted on taking her lessons at five in the morning. He did not live to see the spring.
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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The German Greeks, which traces the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche, via Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.
A religious fanatic slashes Spinoza’s cloak outside Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue. Spinoza kept the torn cloak for the remainder of his life.
Baruch Spinoza transformed Western philosophy with his radical ideas on God, freedom, and the nature of reality, inspiring thinkers from Goethe and Hegel to Einstein. Yet the man who identified God with nature was denounced as a heretic, excommunicated by his own community, and earned his living grinding lenses in rented rooms. Few philosophers have lived so quietly while thinking so dangerously.
Steeped in Descartes
When Descartes died, Baruch Spinoza (also known, after his excommunication, as Benedict, or Benedictus, de Spinoza) was seventeen years old.
Growing up in Amsterdam, he became familiar with the philosophy of Descartes—to the extent that, until 1660, he supported himself by giving private lessons in Cartesianism.
In fact, he became, as far as method is concerned, more thoroughly Cartesian even than Descartes. His Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, published in 1663, is a reconstruction of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in the formal deductive format of Euclid’s geometry, complete with definitions, axioms, and theorems. It succeeded not only in recasting Descartes’s system, but also in clarifying, refining, and, finally, undermining it.
Given its merits, Spinoza held on to the geometric method for his magnum opus, the Ethics [Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata]. Its geometric method provided Spinozism with added curiosity and credibility, and, to an extent, still does.
Freedom in the Dutch Republic
Like Descartes before him, Spinoza enjoyed relative freedom in what has retrospectively been called the Dutch Republic (formally, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands; informally, the United Provinces), then in its golden age and the most liberal, and richest, place in Europe.
Now since we have the rare good fortune to live in a commonwealth where freedom of judgement is fully granted to the individual citizen and he may worship God as he pleases, and where nothing is esteemed dearer and more precious than freedom, I am undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task in demonstrating that not only can this freedom be granted without endangering piety and the peace of the commonwealth, but also the peace of the commonwealth and piety depend on this freedom.
In the TTP, Spinoza critically analyses the Bible and argues for the establishment of a secular state founded on toleration. His purpose in critiquing the Bible is to undermine the repressive theological and political order of the era. ‘The purpose of the state’ he concludes, ‘is freedom’—a maxim far ahead of its time, and inscribed on the pedestal of his monument in Amsterdam.
Merchant or Philosopher?
For all its freedoms, life in Amsterdam had not been a bed of tulips. Spinoza’s paternal grandfather Isaac, a Portuguese Jew, had fled the Iberian Inquisition. In the early 1630s, his father Miguel and uncle Abraham moved the family business from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, where Baruch was born. Had the firm not been bankrupted, essentially, by the First Anglo-Dutch War, Spinoza might have continued as an importer of fruits, nuts, and wine.
Attempted Assassination and Excommunication
In April 1655, on the steps of Amsterdam’s Portuguese synagogue, a knife-wielding fanatic attempted to assassinate Baruch, shouting, ‘Heretic!’ Fortunately, the assassin succeeded only in slashing his cloak, which he kept as a memento of the dangers of fanaticism.
A year later, on 27 July 1656, in his twenty-fourth year, his Jewish community expelled him for his freedom of mind. His excommunication order decried his ‘abominable heresies’ and ‘monstrous deeds’: ‘By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza…’
Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law.
The sting, however, came in the tail, banning all members of his community, including close family, from engaging with him: ‘We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favour, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells [around four metres] of him, or read anything composed or written by him.’
In a tradition going back to Socrates and Plato, he wrote (but did not publish) an ‘apology’, or defence. Although the work has been lost, he incorporated its contents into later works, especially the TTP—which a viral pamphlet described as, ‘forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil…’
Some time after his excommunication, he adopted the motto Caute [Take care] and had it engraved on his signet ring along with a thorny rose (‘Spinoza’ derives from the Latin spinosus, ‘thorny’).
Life as a Castaway
After his excommunication, Spinoza boarded in rented rooms in other people’s houses, in Amsterdam, in Rijnsburg near Leiden, in Voorburg, and finally in The Hague.
Those who knew him were struck by his simplicity, courtesy, and quiet contentment. He lived so frugally that his daily meals often consisted of little more than bread, milk, raisins, and a little butter. In his spare moments, he watched spiders weave their webs and observed flies under his microscope.
In Rijnsburg, under the influence of Descartes, he wrote the unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, on knowledge and method and the purification (or ‘emendation’) of the intellect.
This work on ‘thinking skills’ opens with a sentence that could have been written by Seneca or some other Stoic:
After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life, and I realised that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else—whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.
For fear of compromising his freedom, Spinoza rejected a stipend from a patron and a professorship at Heidelberg, to eke out a living by grinding lenses—including for Huygens, who, in 1667, wrote to his brother, ‘The [lenses] that the Jew of Voorburg has in his microscopes have an admirable polish.’
He should have taken the stipend: the inhalation of glass dust led to his death in 1677, at the age of forty-four, from silicosis.
In the months preceding his death, the thirty-year-old Leibniz, as if acting on a premonition, travelled to The Hague and spent several days in conversation with him—in arguably the greatest meeting of minds since Plato and Aristotle.
The God of the Ethics
Spinoza’s masterpiece, TheEthics, completed in 1675 and published posthumously in 1677, consists of five parts.
The first part, Concerning God, contains an ontological proof, founded on his necessary perfection, for the existence of God, not dissimilar to the one deployed by Descartes.
Departing from Descartes, Spinoza argues that God is not beyond the world but at one with it. Propositions 14 and 15 state, ‘No substance apart from God can exist or be conceived,’ and, ‘Whatever exists, exists in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God.’ This lack of a distinction between the Creator and his creation is encapsulated in the slogan, Deus sive natura, ‘God, or nature.’
Many contemporaries understood Spinoza to be an atheist, although later Romantics interpreted him rather as a pantheist. The Romantic poet Novalis (1772-1801) famously referred to him as ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch, ‘a God-intoxicated man.’
The Mind-Body Problem
Whereas, starting from an ontological argument, Descartes had argued that at least one thing exists, and that that one thing would not deceive us, Spinoza had argued that at most one thing exists, and that that one thing is everything, including us.
For Spinoza, you and I have no independent existence outside of God; we are not substances, but modes of God, who is the one and only substance.
God has infinitely many attributes, but we can only know two of them, namely, thought and extension. Spinoza’s answer to the mind-body problem is thus to deny that there is a problem: thought and extension, that is, mind and body, are two ways of apprehending the same reality.
Mind and body do not interact, or even correlate, but simply correspond, like the two sides of a same coin.
Freedom
God being eternally and necessarily as he is, things could not be otherwise. Everything follows from God’s essence and prior causes. This being so, nothing is intrinsically good or evil; ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are simply subjective judgements as to what may be helpful or harmful to our survival.
Freedom, too, is a construct of the human mind. People think that they have free will because they cannot grasp the complex concatenation of infinite causes that determines their every thought and action. Freedom is not the ability to do otherwise, but the capacity to comprehend reality as if outside of time and subjectivity, sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, in the manner of a geometrical proof.
Freedom, in other words, is knowledge, which leads to tranquillity and virtue, is blessedness, and can only be achieved in the secular state.
Immortality
There is no afterlife or personal immortality, because there is no person. But the human mind is capable of grasping eternal truths and, in so doing, participates in something that transcends the individual. If we can bring ourselves to see the world sub specie aeternitatis and share in the eternal mind of God, we achieve a kind of immortality.
Appraisal
As I said, Spinoza has been read by some as an atheist and by others as a pantheist. I see in his Ethics many parallels with Stoicism, Paganism, and, above all, Hindu Vedanta. As per the Chandogya Upanishad, ‘When a man knows the best and the greatest, he becomes the best and the greatest.’
Both ancient and remarkably modern, Spinoza stood completely outside, or beyond, his time. While we may debate the nature of his God, we cannot doubt what he, or it, is not, namely, the God of the Bible—and wonder whether Spinoza’s metaphysics derives, in fact, from his politics.
When asked whether he believed in God, Einstein replied, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.’
Whereas Descartes, with his vain attempts at resolving the mind-body problem, had struggled to salvage received religion from the trainwreck of the Scientific Revolution, Spinoza did his utmost to overturn it.
The metaphysics of Leibniz, who almost literally picked up the torch from the dying Spinoza, may be read as an attempt to solve the mind-body problem while preserving, rather than overturning, the status quo ante.
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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy my book The German Greeks, an accessible overview of the German philosophers who responded to Descartes and Spinoza and the challenges posed by the Scientific Revolution.
Rebels on the run. Hume leading Rousseau to safety in England.
Rousseau’s ideas on freedom, education, inequality, and the corrupting influence of civilisation transformed politics, philosophy, and literature, inspiring figures from Immanuel Kant to the leaders of the French Revolution. Yet the man who urged humanity to return to nature lived a life marked by poverty, exile, and growing paranoia. Few thinkers have had so great an influence while living such a turbulent—and scandalous—life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712 in the Republic of Geneva, more precisely, at 40 Grand-Rue, which still stands on the hill of Geneva’s quaint old town. The French reformer Jean Calvin had arrived in Geneva in 1536, a few months after the city had turned to Protestantism and shaken off the dukes of Savoy. Surrounded by Catholic states, the self-governing city became a haven for Protestant refugees drawn to Calvin’s teachings, and came to be known as the Protestant Rome.
Although he once forfeited his Genevan citizenship (in 1728, at the age of sixteen, for converting to Roman Catholicism) and once renounced it (in 1763, after Geneva condemned the Social Contract and Emile, leading to a warrant for his arrest), Rousseau always pointedly signed his books, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen de Genève [Citizen of Geneva]. His political thought and religious puritanism are deeply rooted in the Cité de Calvin (or Kalvingrad, as locals still call it, on account of Calvin’s austerity), which he held up as a foil to frivolous Paris and absolutist France.
Rousseau’s father, the watchmaker Isaac Rousseau, also had strong Republican sympathies. His mother Suzanne had been raised by her uncle Samuel Bernard, a Calvinist preacher, and had come with a handsome dowry—hence the house on the Grand-Rue. Only three months after the birth of their first child, Isaac left for Constantinople to serve as watchmaker to the sultan (or so he claimed). He returned after a full six years, shortly after Suzanne’s live-in mother had died and Suzanne had come into 10,000 florins. Soon after his return, Jean-Jacques was born.
Childhood in Geneva
A few days after giving birth to Jean-Jacques, Suzanne died from puerperal fever (a postpartum infection). Isaac’s younger sister moved in to help with the children, and Rousseau grew close to his aunt. From the age of six, he, together with his father, began reading a collection of classics left by Samuel Bernard. Plutarch, who emphasised character over deeds, made the deepest impression on him. Although (or because) he did not receive a formal education, Rousseau rose into a master of French prose.
At the age of ten, Jean-Jacques’s father entered a quarrel and fled to nearby Nyon (then administered by Berne), taking his sister with him. Jean-Jacques and his brother were handed over to the Bernards. The Bernards sent Jean-Jacques and his cousin Abraham Bernard to live with the Calvinist minister Lambercier and his sister Gabrielle in Bossey, a village just outside the city walls, where Jean-Jacques discovered a passion for nature.
At the age of thirteen, Jean-Jacques was sent back to Geneva to work as an apprentice, first to a notary and then to an engraver who frequently beat him. At the age of sixteen, he ran away after returning from a walk and finding that the city gates had been locked.
Madame de Warens
On the run in Savoie, he found shelter with a Catholic priest. The priest put him onto the attractive Françoise-Louise de Warens, who had separated from her husband, converted to Catholicism, and become a proselytiser in the pay of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy (since 1720, Piedmont-Sardinia). Completely smitten, Rousseau completed his conversion to Catholicism in the Piedmont-Sardinia capital of Turin, where he supported himself by working as a footman and secretary to an ailing countess. After the countess died, he pocketed a pink and silver ribbon, which was discovered in his room. He blamed a cook, Marion, who of course denied it. The Count de la Roque dismissed them both with the prophetic words, ‘The conscience of the guilty will avenge the innocent.’
At the age of twenty, Rousseau returned to Madame de Warens in Chambéry, and their relationship turned sexual. Although Warens was also intimate with her household steward, he considered it the greatest love of his life. He began to call her Maman, and she him Mon petit. So far, so French.
In those years, he struggled to establish himself and spent a year travelling. He went mostly on foot, meeting people from all walks of life. When he returned to Warens, he pursued his love of music and read deeply. But Warens could no longer support him, so, at the age of twenty-seven, he took a post as a tutor in Lyon, which gave him the opportunity to reflect on pedagogy.
The Paris Years: The Greatest Scandal of All
With Warens growing cold on him, in 1742, at the age of thirty, Rousseau moved to Paris to present a new system of musical notation to the Académie des Sciences. The Académie praised his mastery of the subject but found his system impractical and rejected it. In 1743, his Enlightenment connections led him to a job as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. He revelled in the superior Italian music, but did not get on with the ambassador and, the following year, returned to Paris.
He met a laundry girl, Thérèse Levasseur, who would become his life companion and, in time, his wife. In 1746, she bore the first of their five illegitimate children. All five were immediately handed to a foundling hospital, where the chances of surviving into adulthood would have been slim. Later, Voltaire would anonymously publish a pamphlet to expose this secret and discredit Rousseau as a moral and educational authority. Rousseau took in Thérèse and her mother to live with him as servants, and assumed the burden of supporting her large and feckless family.
Rousseau wrote ballets, with little success. He began to spend a lot of time with Diderot, Condillac, and d’Alembert, and became involved with Diderot’s brainchild, the Encyclopédie, to which he contributed almost four hundred articles on politics and music. The Encyclopédie, a pillar of the Enlightenment, was denounced by both the king and the Church.
The Paris Years: The First Discourse and the King’s Pension
In 1749, Diderot was imprisoned in Vincennes for his Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See. While walking to Vincennes to visit him, Rousseau read an announcement in the Mercure de France for the Dijon Academy’s essay contest, on the question, ‘Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?’ This led to the radical and distinctly un-Enlightened idea that the arts and sciences had led to the moral degeneration of man, who began as moral and vigorous—or, at least, uncorrupted by vanity, superficiality, inauthenticity, luxury, and inequality. Whereas the spirited Spartans set all of Asia trembling, the sophisticated and self-indulgent Sybarites let themselves be overrun by a bunch of peasants. In his Confessions, Rousseau wrote, ‘Within an instant of reading this [advertisement], I saw another universe and became another man.’ With his prize-winning essay, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (the ‘First Discourse’), Rousseau rose into a cause célèbre.
In 1752, Rousseau wrote a simple, Italian-inspired one-act opera, Le Devin du village, which premiered at the royal court at Fontainebleau. The king liked it enough to offer him a pension, which he declined—gaining further notoriety as ‘the man who had refused a king’s pension’.
Return to Geneva and the Second Discourse
In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva, converted back to Calvinism, and had his Genevan citizenship restored. He embraced a personal, natural religion, or ‘religion of the heart’, which, together with his belief in the corrupting influence of civilisation, set him apart from the other Encyclopédistes, who championed reason and progress, and atheism.
In 1755, he completed his second major work, the Discourse on Inequality (the ‘Second Discourse’), in which he painted a rosy picture of man in the original ‘state of nature’ and argued that private property is the original source and basis of all inequality and misery. The ‘social contract’ was essentially a conspiracy by the rich to legitimise their ownership and enslave the masses. Though it is impossible to return to the state of nature, it is possible to correct some of the errors of civilisation. When Voltaire received his copy, he wrote back to Rousseau: ‘No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on all fours.’
Madame d’Epinay, Sophie d’Houdetot, and Julie
The saloniste Madame d’Epinay, having noticed the second discourse, offered Rousseau a pension together with a cottage on her estate in Montmorency. He refused the pension but moved into the cottage with Thérèse and her mother. He resented being in the keep of Madame d’Epinay and soured things by falling head over heels for her cousin and sister-in-law, Sophie d’Houdetot. He came to believe that there was a plot against him and wrote a series of letters to the likes of Diderot and Hume that damaged his reputation. In 1757, he moved with Thérèse into a villa on the nearby estate of the duc de Luxembourg, who became his patron. His bestselling novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), is inspired by his liaisons with d’Houdetot and Warens.
The Social Contract and Emile
After Julie, Rousseau turned his pen to his two most acclaimed works, the Social Contract and Emile. In the Social Contract, which begins with the famous sentence, ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ Rousseau sets out how to create a just state in which we may recover some of our natural freedom and goodness. Only the general will [volonté générale], which aims at the common good of a people, has the right to legislate. Although Rousseau advocated for direct democracy, the general will need not coincide with the majority vote if citizens are misinformed or motivated by self-interest rather than the common good. The general will, which is the sovereign power, can only legislate laws that apply equally to all, and must be separate from the executive power, which deals with matters of application of the law. Only under the general will can the people be said to be freely obeying themselves.
In Emile, Rousseau, an autodidact with no formal education, set out a system of education which might preserve the individual’s innate vigour and morality. Having encouraged the child to become active, curious, and critical, it remains, in adolescence, to make him into a loving and feeling being, ‘to perfect reason by sentiment’. Emile, however, is aimed exclusively at wealthy orphan boys with a dedicated, live-in tutor (orphan, to remove the corrupting influence of the parents). In the section on Emile’s female counterpart Sophie, Rousseau states that ladies should be ‘passive and weak’ and ‘put up little resistance’. Book IV contains the incendiary ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’, in which the vicar’s argument leads to natural religion, that is, to an unmediated, self-discovered relationship with a creator God. In a letter, Voltaire deemed Emile ‘a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known’ [C’est un fatras d’une sotte nourrice en quatre tomes, avec une quarantaine de pages contre le christianisme, des plus hardies qu’on ait jamais écrites].
On the Run
The Social Contract and Emile were banned from both France and Geneva, with warrants issued for Rousseau’s arrest. Over the next few years, Rousseau moved from place to place until his reputation caught up with him. For a time, he lived on an island on Lake Biel, where no one could throw stones at his windows. Frederick the Great, on principle rather than from shared conviction, offered him protection and assistance. His nemesis Voltaire invited him in vain to Ferney (nowadays, Ferney-Voltaire) on the Geneva border, where renegade writers could border hop to escape the authorities.
In 1766, Rousseau travelled to England with Hume. Tasked with escorting Thérèse to England, Boswell seduced her en route, with Thérèse telling him, ‘Don’t imagine you’re a better lover than Rousseau.’ Perhaps understandably, Rousseau’s paranoia intensified, and he began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. The two men fell out when Hume, seeking to protect his reputation, published an account of the whole affair.
Final Years
Rousseau returned to France in 1767 under an assumed name, and spent the next three years in paranoid retreat. He married Thérèse, practised botany, and wrote his disarmingly candid Confessions, published posthumously in 1782.
He died in 1778, at the age of sixty-six, from what was recorded as apoplexy (some said suicide). He was buried at midnight by torchlight on the île des Peupliers on the estate of the marquis de Girardin in Ermenonville. In 1794, his remains were moved to the Panthéon and placed next to those of… Voltaire.
Despite his love of hosting, conversation, and fine dining, Kant’s house was unadorned and austere. He had only one picture, which hung above his bureau. This picture was of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was only twelve years older than him.
In his Remarks on the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764),Kant acknowledges his debt to Rousseau, who, he says, ‘set him right’:
I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge, and a restless passion to advance in it… There was a time when I thought this alone could constitute the honour of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This blind prejudice vanishes; I learn to respect human beings, and I should consider myself far more useless than the common labourer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart a value to all others in order to establish the rights of humanity.
Rousseau had taught Kant to judge people by their moral worth, rather than their education and standing—a lesson that would have resonated with Kant’s memory of his mother.
Rousseau’s influence also extended to Kant’s moral philosophy. If for Rousseau, it is by following the general will that we can be said to be free, for Kant, it is by obeying those moral laws that we would will as universal laws. Moral laws that we would will as universal laws are given not by our individual will but by our rational will, which we have in common with all other rational beings. We often experience this dichotomy in our minds: this is what I selfishly or frivolously want to do, and this is what I truly ought to do—because I want to live in the kind of society that abides by this principle, and would resent it if other people behaved in such a selfish, thoughtless way. To conform to the universal law is not to be a slave; on the contrary, it is to follow reason and free ourselves from our irrational and disordered appetites. For Kant, this capacity to overrule our individual will lies at the heart of our special dignity.
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If you want to know what happened next, read The German Greeks, which tells the story of how Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others responded to the philosophical revolution that Rousseau helped to create.
David Hume was one of the greatest philosophers of the Enlightenment—and one of its most controversial. At a time when philosophers placed their faith in reason, he questioned everything from causation and the self to religion and morality. His radical scepticism led many to regard him as an atheist and cost him several university appointments. Yet the man whom many feared for his ideas was, by all accounts, open, sociable, and cheerful. Today, he is recognised as one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy.
David Hume was born in 1711 in Edinburgh. His father Joseph was the laird of Ninewells, his mother Katherine the daughter of the Lord President of the Court of Session (Scotland’s supreme civil court). His father’s family was a cadet branch of the Earls of Home (pronounced ‘Hume’). In 1713, Joseph died at the age of thirty-three, leaving Katherine in sole care of three tots.
Hume went up to the University of Edinburgh at the age of ten or twelve, young even for the time, but found little of value in formal lectures. Later, he told a friend that ‘there is nothing to be learnt from a professor, which is not to be met in books.’ He shunned the legal studies that his family intended for him, preferring instead to devour classical and philosophical texts. ‘While [my family] fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.’
This inner conflict drove him, at the age of eighteen, to a nervous breakdown. A local physician diagnosed ‘a disease of the learned’ and had the good sense to prescribe horse riding for outdoors and, for indoors, wine drinking, which worked a charm. Once Hume had found and embraced who he was, his malady never returned. In later life, he became an advocate of ‘ordinary life’ as a cure for ‘philosophical melancholy’.
I dine, I play backgammon, I converse … and whenafter three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.
A Treatise of Human Nature
In 1734, at twenty-three, Hume moved to Bristol to work as a clerk for a sugar importer. Ill-suited to the job, he soon left for Paris, then Rheims, then the small town of La Flèche, with its Jesuit college made famous for having schooled Descartes. Hume had been attracted to La Flèche by the college’s library of some 40,000 books, as well as the lower cost of living compared to Paris or Rheims. He remained in La Flèche for three years (1734-1737), during which he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature.
When it was published in 1739, the reception was not as Hume had hoped. In the short autobiography written near (almost at) the end of his life, he tells us that the Treatise ‘fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.’ He disavowed the Treatise and asked that his more polished Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding(1748) be regarded as his final word—a request that posterity has ignored.
Essays Moral and Political
After his disappointment with the Treatise, Hume turned to essay writing, which was then in vogue. In 1742, he published the first volume of his Essays Moral and Political, which were favourably received and ‘soon made me entirely forget my former disappointment’.
Hume developed a talent for prose and a reputation as a skeptic and all-round heretic. In 1745, he applied for the vacant chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, but was rejected on the strength of his reputation. He took up the post of tutor and companion to the troubled and impossible Marquess of Annandale, but resigned after a year.
He then joined a planned expedition to Quebec, serving as secretary to Lieutenant-General James St Clair. However, the expedition was cancelled and the forces diverted to a raid on Lorient in Brittany. The failure of this operation did not prevent Hume from sporting the uniform of an officer on subsequent diplomatic missions with St Clair to the courts of Vienna and Turin (then the capital of Savoy).
History of Great Britain
In 1748, Hume’s re-write of the first volume of the Treatise of Human Nature was published as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (retitled in 1758 to An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). After being turned down as an improper person for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, he became, in 1752, the Keeper of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh—affording him the time and resources to write his monumental, and monumentally successful, History of Great Britain, published in six volumes over eight years (1754-62). Hume became, in his own words, ‘not only independent, but opulent.’ Such was the success of the History that, in his lifetime and for a long time after, he was better known as a historian than a philosopher.
Rescuing Rousseau
In 1763, Hume became Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris. He basked in the adulation that le tout Paris afforded to a successful writer. He acquired the nickname le bon David and, according to Horace Walpole, became ‘fashion itself’. Though the relationship was never consummated, he became intimate with the countess and grande dame Madame de Boufflers.
At that time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was in big trouble following the publication of The Social Contract and Emile. Boufflers put Hume to rescuing Rousseau by sending him to the safety of England. In January 1766, at the end of his tenure at the embassy, Hume left for London with Rousseau. The two men had much in common, not least their infamy, and held each other in the highest regard. But Rousseau was prone to paranoia and began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. To protect his good reputation against Rousseau’s mighty pen, Hume reluctantly pre-empted Rousseau by publishing an account of the whole affair.
Final Years
In 1767, Hume took up his last appointment as Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Department (the predecessor of the Foreign Office). The following year, he retired to Edinburgh and built himself a house in St Andrew’s Square, where he lived with his sister Katherine.
Within ten years, shortly after the American Declaration of Independence (July 1776), Hume died from a ‘disorder of the bowels’. He wrote a concise autobiography, My Own Life, so near to his death that at the end he switches to the past tense:
I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments … I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.
In his eulogy, Adam Smith, who had recently published The Wealth of Nations (1776), wrote that his friend Hume approached ‘as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit’.
The Newton of Human Affairs
Already at the age of eighteen, Hume complained about philosophy being engaged in ‘endless disputes’ of an entirely hypothetical nature. He disparagingly referred to rationalist systems such as those of Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes as ‘speculative metaphysics’.
Newton, in contrast, set out only to describe and predict events, without seeking to explain them. One of his most famous phrases is, Hypotheses non fingo [I do not feign hypotheses].
I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and mere hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.
Hume saw himself as extending Newton’s experimental method to the study of human nature and the ‘moral sciences’—whence the subtitle of A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.
Empiricism and Skepticism
At the core of Hume’s radical empiricism are two tenets. First, there are no innate ideas: all knowledge and concepts must arise or else derive from sensory impressions. Without prior observation, Adam (from Adam and Eve) could not have inferred that fire would burn him, or water drown him. All that is not founded in sense experience is essentially meaningless.
Second, all we can directly perceive are our internal mental states. The self is no more than a bundle or collection of various perceptions and sensations, ‘which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity’. Taken together, these two tenets have dramatically skeptical implications, undermining traditional concepts such as God, the soul, a persistent self, external objects, and causation.
The Problem of Causation
When it comes to causation, we never perceive a ‘necessary connection’ between events, only ever a ‘constant conjunction’ of one event following another, over and over again. The supposed causal link is missing from sense experience. Cause and effect are merely a habit of mind. But that the sun keeps on rising every morning need not mean that it will always rise every morning. Cause and effect, which underpins all science, is justified not by reason and deduction but only by induction (habit), which is unsafe.
Reason the Slave of the Passions
At the height of the Age of Reason, Hume was the great debaser of reason. ‘Reason’ he said, ‘is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions…’
Still today, most people think of choice and action as a battleground between reason and the ‘passions’ (desires, emotions, and sensations). Hume argued that it is in fact a battleground between the passions and the passions. For example, if I pass over dessert, this is because my desire to feel and look good is stronger than my desire to eat something heavenly. It can sometimes feel as if the passions are fighting with reason, when, really, it is an urgent passion, such as my desire for dessert, fighting with a calmer, longer term one, such as my desire for moderation which masquerades as reason.
Reason on its own cannot impel action. Its role is simply to supply us with true beliefs about the best means of achieving the ends that our passions have already determined. The aim of a monarch or general in delivering a battle exhortation is not to be right or logically sound, but to fire up the passions and try to make it so that the resolve of his men is greater than their fear.
A passion may be justified or unjustified, but cannot be true or false like a belief. When a passion is founded on a false belief, the problem is with the false belief rather than the passion. Once we have ascertained that there are no gremlins under the bed, or persuaded ourselves that there are no such things as ghosts, our fear of these things simply evaporates.
Morality and the ‘Is-Ought’ Problem
Because morality is about choices and actions, it cannot arise from reason. Or in Hume’s famous turn of phrase, ‘You cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.’ Prescriptive statements (‘oughts’) arise not from facts and reason but from values and feelings, especially the capacity for sympathy, which leads to pleasure in response to prosocial actions and aversion in response to antisocial ones. Whenever a prescriptive statement appears to derive from a descriptive one, this is only because there is a prescriptive premise that is missing but presumed. For example: ‘Stealing harms other people. Therefore, we ought not steal.’ The presumed prescriptive premise here is, ‘We ought not harm other people’—which is not a fact but a value judgement.
You can see why Immanuel Kant was disturbed by all of this. If Hume was right, science rested on habit rather than certainty, and morality on feeling rather than reason. His response, the 856-page Critique of Pure Reason (1781), emerged after a ‘silent decade’ during which he retreated into himself and published a total of just 23 pages. He later wrote that it was Hume who had awakened him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’.
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If you want to know what happened next, read The German Greeks, which tells the story of how Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others responded to the philosophical revolution that Hume helped to create.
Why Self-Deception Belongs Within Critical Thinking
The priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Before seeking answers from the oracle, visitors first met with the words, ‘Know Thyself.’
Critical thinking has never been more popular. Schools, universities, and employers encourage us to evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, and recognise cognitive biases. Entire books are devoted to helping us think more clearly.
Yet intelligent people continue to believe ridiculous things.
They buy into political propaganda, dubious medical claims, financial scams, cults, conspiracy theories, and all manner of comforting or self-serving lies. They do so not because they lack intelligence, and often not because they lack evidence.
They do so because modern critical thinking shares our greatest blind spot. It teaches us how to analyse arguments, but not how to analyse ourselves.
Most books on critical thinking treat reasoning as though it were mathematics. Learn the rules and you will think more clearly. But reason is not merely an intellectual achievement. It is also a moral and psychological one. We do not merely need sharper minds, but greater courage and honesty.
The greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance. It is our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.
Unlike ordinary deception, self-deception is unconscious. We do not deliberately lie to ourselves. Instead, we unconsciously reshape reality to preserve a comforting image of who we are. We rationalise our failures, project our faults onto others, and convince ourselves that what we want to be true is true. These are not simply errors of reasoning but acts of self-protection.
This is why intelligent people can cling to implausible beliefs despite overwhelming evidence. Often, they are not defending an argument so much as defending themselves.
To think clearly, then, it is not enough to study logic, rhetoric, and cognitive bias. We must also understand the unconscious forces that distort our judgement before reason has even had a chance to speak. Self-deception is not peripheral to critical thinking. It belongs at its very heart.
More than two thousand years ago, Socrates reached much the same conclusion. Rather than speculate about the natural world, he turned philosophy towards the study of ourselves.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, as they pass the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia, Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he believes the story. Socrates politely declines the invitation. While still ignorant of himself, he says, he has no interest in such questions:
I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.
For Socrates, self-knowledge came before all other enquiry.
Perhaps it should also come before critical thinking.
Socrates had been inspired by the oracle at Delphi, the greatest oracle of the ancient world. Long before there were textbooks on critical thinking, there was a two-word inscription above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi:
Γνῶθι σεαυτόν
Know thyself.
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To explore self-deception and the hidden workings of the mind in greater depth, see Hide and Seek.
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