By |

Can the Highest Forms of Human Excellence Be Taught?

If the greatest Athenians could not teach virtue to their own sons, can virtue be taught?

Can courage be taught? Can wisdom? Can goodness?

We take it for granted that mathematics can be taught, languages can be taught, and medicine can be taught. But what of the qualities that matter most? Can they, too, be passed from teacher to pupil, or picked up from a textbook?

More than two thousand years ago, Plato wrestled with exactly this question.

The First Puzzle

In one of Plato’s early dialogues, the Laches, Socrates asks two generals, Laches and Nicias, to define courage. Laches thinks the question an easy one, and asserts that courage is when a soldier is willing to remain at his post and fight against the enemy.

Socrates objects that a soldier who flees from his post can also sometimes be called courageous. He cites the example of the Scythian cavalry who combat both in pursuit and in retreat, and of the mythical hero Aeneas who, Homer says, was always fleeing on horses. Homer praised Aeneas for his knowledge of fear, and called him the ‘counsellor of fear’. When Laches protests that Socrates is speaking of horsemen and charioteers rather than hoplites (foot soldiers), Socrates layers on the example of the Spartan hoplites at the Battle of Plataea, who fled the enemy but then turned back to fight once the enemy lines had broken. 

What Socrates really wants to know is what courage is in all of its instances—not only for the hoplite, but also for the horseman, the charioteer, and every other class of warrior, as well as for those who ‘show courage in illness and poverty’, ‘are brave in the face of pain and fear’, and so on. What is it that all these instances of courage have in common? For example, quickness can be found in running, in speaking, and in playing the lyre, and in each instance, ‘quickness’ can be defined as ‘the quality that accomplishes much in a little time’. Is there a similar, single, unifying definition of ‘courage’ that can apply to all of its instances? Before reading on, think upon it for yourself… How would you define courage?

This time, Laches defines courage as ‘a sort of endurance of the soul’. But Socrates points out that endurance can be foolish as well as wise, and foolish endurance is likely to be harmful. After several more attempts, Nicias suggests that courage is some sort of knowledge or wisdom. Socrates says that, if Nicias means that courage is knowledge of the true grounds of fear and hope, then courage must be very rare among men; while animals, which want for such knowledge, could never be called ‘courageous’ but at most ‘fearless’—which, indeed, ordinary language use seems to confirm. Nicias concurs, and surmises that the same is also true of children: ‘Or do you really suppose I call all children courageous, who fear nothing because they have no sense?’

Socrates presses the argument further until he reaches a remarkable conclusion: if courage, and virtue in general, is knowledge, it cannot be separated from the rest of knowledge and wisdom. In seeking to define courage, the three of them have succeeded in defining virtue herself. Virtue is knowledge, which is why people with some measure of one virtue usually have a similar measure of the other virtues and of virtue in general—a thesis known as the Unity of the Virtues.

The First Solution

Courage, says Socrates, is knowledge or wisdom. Suppose I am walking along a beach and see someone drowning. I know that I can’t swim and that the currents are strong, but jump in anyway because a human life is at stake. Moments later, I too need rescuing. Having misjudged the situation, I have only made it worse, and acted not courageously but recklessly.

The lifeguard, in contrast, is a strong swimmer and equipped with a floater. From her years of experience and familiarity with the beach, she knows that if she dives in she stands an excellent chance of making a rescue. Of course, there is some risk involved, but the potential benefit is so large and so likely that it far outweighs the risk. If the lifeguard truly understands all this, she will ‘courageously’ dive in. If she does not dive in, she has not fully grasped the situation.

One of Socrates’ most famous arguments is that no one ever knowingly does evil. People do wrong not because their ethics are overwhelmed by a desire for pleasure, as is often believed, but because they are unable to weigh up pleasures and pains. They act with recklessness or cowardice or foolishness or vice (which are all really one and the same thing) because, from their limited perspective, it seems like the right or best thing to do. But if they knew better, they would behave differently. Virtue, then, is a form of knowledge.

The Fatal Objection

If Socrates is right in holding that courage and all of virtue is knowledge, then surely courage and the other virtues can be taught by the same methods as geometry or medicine or any other field of human knowledge. So who is wrong, Socrates in holding that courage is knowledge, or us in our common intuition that courage cannot simply be taught?

Plato returned to the problem in a later dialogue. In the Meno, Socrates observes that people with wisdom and virtue are very poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles, the great Athenian statesman and general, was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and shooting javelins, but no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom—and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.

Perhaps it was too early in 402, the dramatic date of the Meno, for Socrates to have added his own three sons to the roll of dolts and dunderheads, but Aristotle, who had the benefit of hindsight, tells us that they too grew up to be ‘fools and dullards’.

In another dialogue, the Protagoras, Socrates says that Pericles, who led Athens at the peak of its golden age, gave his sons Paralus and Xanthippus the most excellent instruction in everything that could be learnt from teachers. But when it came to wisdom, this paragon of wisdom simply left them to ‘wander at their own free will in a sort of hope that they would light upon virtue of their own accord’.

A New Answer

If virtue cannot be taught, not even by the most eminent and distinguished of Athenians, then it is not, after all, a type of knowledge.

But then how, asks Meno, did good people come into being?

Socrates replies that he and Meno have overlooked that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge. A man who has knowledge of the road to Larissa (a city in Thessaly) may make a good guide, but a man who has only correct opinion of the road, but has never been and does not know, may in some cases make just as good a guide. If he who thinks the truth can be just as good a guide to Larissa as he who knows the truth, then correct opinion can be just as good a guide to right action as knowledge.

If this be true, how is knowledge, which is the more highly prized, any different from correct opinion? Socrates compares correct opinions to the statues of Daedalus (a mythical architect and craftsman of unsurpassed skill), which had to be tied down to prevent them from running away. Correct opinions can be tied down with ‘an account of the reason why’, whereupon they cease to be correct opinions and petrify into knowledge.

Since courage and the other parts of virtue are not knowledge, all that remains is for them to be correct opinion. This much explains why the likes of Themistocles and Lysimachus and even the great Pericles were unable to make anything much out of their sons—and why, then as today, having children is to dice with the devil. Good people are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.

The Teachers We Remember

Courage, like all the virtues, consists not in knowledge but in correct opinion. The virtues relate to human behaviour, and in particular to good or moral behaviour—that is, to ethics. In ethics, the choice of one action over another, or others, involves a complex and indeterminate calculus that cannot be condensed into, and hence expressed as, knowledge. Whereas knowledge is concrete and exact, correct opinion is subtle and ineffable, and more the province of intuition than of reason, of art than of science. For this reason, correct opinion cannot be taught but only ever invited or inspired.

The best education consists not in being taught but in being inspired.

The teachers who we hold in our hearts, those we never forget, are not those who assiduously taught us the most facts, or fastidiously covered every bulleted point on the syllabus, but those who inspired us and opened us up to ourselves and to the world.

Unfortunately, many people are not amenable to being inspired, not even by the most charismatic teachers or greatest works of art—which is why, in the final reckoning, Socrates and Plato held virtue to be a gift of the gods.

…if we were right in the way we spoke … virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift of the gods which is not accompanied by understanding, unless there is someone among our statesmen who can make another into a statesman. If there were one, he would be said to be among the living as Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, namely, that ‘he alone retained his wits while the others flitted about like shadows’. —Plato, Meno

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed Plato’s insight, you might also enjoy The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, which contains one or two others.

You may also enjoy

By |

His Life, Character, and Philosophy

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.

In the preface to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP, 1670), Spinoza eulogises his country and its constitution:

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, The Ethics, 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.

Continue Exploring

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.

You may also enjoy

By |

His Life, Character, and Philosophy

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.

Continue Exploring

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.

You may also enjoy

By |

Why Friendship Is Essential to a Good Life

Plato and Aristotle, detail from Raphael's School of Athens.
‘Plato is dear, but dearer still is truth’—a saying that captures Aristotle’s willingness to disagree with his teacher in the pursuit of truth, and his conviction that genuine friendship need never fear honest disagreement.

We have never had so many ways of connecting with other people, and yet so few close friends.

Many of us have hundreds or even thousands of online contacts, but no one we could call in the middle of the night. We move cities, change jobs, change partners, and change phones without thinking twice, and our friendships often prove just as disposable.

Aristotle would have regarded this not merely as a social problem, but as a human tragedy.

‘Without friends,’ he writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’

It is a remarkable claim.

Most of us think that, given enough money, success, health, freedom, and comfort, we could muddle along well enough on our own. Aristotle thought otherwise. Friendship is not simply one of life’s pleasures. It is one of its necessities.

Why We Need Friends

The ancient Greeks had several words for love, including eros for passionate or romantic love, and philia (the root of ‘bibliophile’ and ‘anglophile’) for friendship.

For Aristotle, philia is a virtue which is ‘most necessary with a view to living … for without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’ 

Philia underpins not only personal happiness but the very health of the state. Friendship fosters trust, cooperation, generosity, forbearance, and even justice—for when friendship exists, justice is scarcely needed.

But friendship is not simply for enjoying and getting along. In its highest form, it is a vehicle of virtue, helping us to become better people.

The Three Forms of Friendship

Aristotle begins with a broad or minimal concept of philia. For one person to be friends with another, it is necessary, simply, ‘that [they] bear good will to each other, without this escaping their notice’.

A person may bear goodwill to another for one of three reasons: that they are useful; that they are pleasant; or that they are good—that is, rational and virtuous.

Friendships of utility are based on mutual advantage. We enjoy one another’s company because each has something to offer the other. Such friendships are common in business, politics, and everyday life, and there is nothing wrong with them. But remove the advantage, and they usually disappear.

Friendships of pleasure are based on enjoyment. We like another person’s wit, humour, charm, or shared interests. These friendships are especially common among the young, whose lives are often governed more by feeling than by settled character. They, too, tend to fade as tastes and circumstances change.

The highest form of friendship is based not on usefulness or pleasure, but on virtue. ‘Perfect friendship’, says Aristotle, is ‘the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue.’

Perfect friends are drawn to each other not because they expect anything in return, but because they genuinely admire and value one another’s character. They love their friend not for what he has or provides, but for who he is. 

Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of their nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good—and goodness is an enduring thing … And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it in all the qualities that friends should have.

Another Self

A perfect friend, says Aristotle, is ‘another self’.

This does not mean someone who merely resembles us or always agrees with us. It means someone who cares enough, or is noble enough, to disagree with us and challenge us.

A true friend shares our deepest values, but also helps us to live up to them. We become better not by admiring virtue from afar, but by practising it together. Friendship is not merely the reward of virtue; it is one of the principal ways in which virtue is cultivated.

Every act of friendship is also an exercise in virtue. In being patient with our friend, we become more patient ourselves. In speaking honestly, we become more honest. In encouraging what is best in another person, we strengthen what is best in ourselves. Our good and their good are no longer competing like fishmongers: each one’s happiness adds to that of the other. We become, in the deepest sense, another self.

We may find an illustration of this ideal in Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus spend an afternoon walking in the Attic countryside while reflecting on the soul, love, and the art of persuasion. Their friendship is grounded not merely in pleasure, but in a shared pursuit of truth. At the end of their conversation, Phaedrus responds to Socrates’ prayer with the simple request: ‘Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.’ Whether or not Aristotle had this dialogue in mind, it beautifully embodies his conception of perfect friendship.

Why Friendship Is Rare

Unfortunately, perfect friendship is uncommon.

First, it requires good character, and good character is itself uncommon. Second, it demands something that has always been scarce and may never have been scarcer than today: time.

Friendship cannot be hurried.

People only come to know one another by sharing experiences, surviving disappointments, forgiving offences, and gradually learning that they can be trusted. Like character itself, friendship grows slowly.

We live in a culture that prizes speed, convenience, novelty, and consumer choice. Relationships, like everything else, are expected to fit around our schedules and satisfy our needs. Friendship asks something very different of us. It requires attention, loyalty, respect, forbearance, and sometimes considerable sacrifice.

The Courage to Be Known

There is another difficulty.

Many of us have become so unaccustomed to genuine friendship that, when we encounter its possibility, we instinctively retreat from it.

A true friend is not simply someone who makes us feel better. He knows us. He sees through our pretences. He notices when we deceive ourselves. He quietly expects us to become better than we are.

That can be deeply unsettling.

We often say that we want people to accept us exactly as we are. Aristotle might have replied that a friend accepts us as we are while refusing to leave us there.

Perhaps that is why perfect friendship is so rare. It demands not only affection, but humility; not only loyalty, but the willingness to be changed.

Nowadays, it is all too easy to retreat into comfortable mediocrity.

Friendship and Happiness

Throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that happiness lies not in pleasure or success, but in living according to reason and virtue.

Friendship is one of the principal ways in which this becomes possible.

A good friend encourages what is best in us, restrains what is worst, and accompanies us in the long and difficult work of becoming the person we are capable of being. If we abandon a true friend, really, it is our own self that we are abandoning.

We tend to think of friendship as one of life’s pleasures.

Aristotle thought of it as one of life’s disciplines.

A good friend does not simply make us happier.

He helps us become better and bigger.

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed this article on Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship, you’ll find much more in The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, which examines the lives, ideas, and enduring influence of the three greatest philosophers of antiquity.

You may also enjoy

By |

How Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle Reimagined Happiness

The Death of Socrates, by David.

We all say we want to be happy, but the pursuit of happiness often seems like a wild goose chase.

Maybe the problem is not so much with us, or the world we live in, but with the very concept of happiness.

The ancient Greeks had a much better concept. They called it eudaimonia, literally ‘good soul’, ‘good spirit’, or ‘good god’.

Although Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle understood eudaimonia in somewhat different ways, they all regarded it as the highest good, often even the very aim and purpose of philosophy.

What Is Eudaimonia?

Eudaimonia is often translated from Greek simply as ‘happiness’—but that is very misleading. The word ‘happy’, which is related to ‘happen’ and ‘perhaps’, derives from the Norse happ for ‘chance’, ‘fortune’, or ‘luck’. From Irish to Greek, most European words for ‘happy’ originally meant something like ‘lucky’—one exception being Welsh, in which it originally meant ‘wise’.

Another word for ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ in Old English is gesælig, which, over the centuries, morphed into our ‘silly’.

Eudaimonia, in contrast, is anything but silly. It has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with hard work. It is a much deeper, fuller, and richer concept than happiness, sometimes articulated in terms of flourishing or living a life that is worthwhile or fulfilling.

Many philosophical schools in antiquity thought of eudaimonia as the highest good, although schools such as Epicureanism and Stoicism conceived of it in somewhat different terms.

What can be said is that, unlike happiness, eudaimonia is not an emotion but a state of being—or even, especially for Aristotle, a state of doing. As such, it is more stable and reliable, and cannot so easily be taken away from us. Although it leads to pleasure or satisfaction of the deepest kind, it does not come from pleasure, but is according to higher values and principles that transcend the here and now.

The idea of eudaimonia evolved over time, especially across the three generations that separated Socrates, via Plato, from Aristotle—the three greatest philosophers of antiquity.

Socrates on Eudaimonia

Socrates, from what we can tell (mainly from his student Plato), equated eudaimonia with wisdom and virtue. In the Greater Alcibiades, he says that he who is not wise cannot be happy; in the Gorgias, that nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man; and in the Meno, that everything the soul endeavours or endures under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness.

In the Apology, at his trial, Socrates gives a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honour as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul. ‘Wealth,’ he says, ‘does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.’

Socrates provided the ultimate proof of his principle that ‘nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man’. When the jurors condemned him to death, they only made him and his ideas immortal—and he did all he could not to prevent that from happening. 

Plato on Eudaimonia

Plato was inspired by the example of Socrates. In the Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon argues that most people are fundamentally selfish, but maintain a reputation for virtue and justice to evade the social costs of being or appearing unjust. But if a man could get hold of the mythical Ring of Gyges and make himself invisible, he would most surely behave as it suited him:

No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.

We behave justly not because we value justice, but because we are weak and fearful; while the unjust man who is cunning enough to seem just will get the better of everyone and everything.

As part of his lengthy reply to Glaucon, Plato famously conjures up an idealised Republic to help him ‘locate’ (define) justice, first in the state and then in the individual. Plato argues that justice and injustice are to the soul as health and disease are to the body: If health in the body is intrinsically desirable, then so too is justice in the soul. For Plato, an unjust man cannot be happy because he is not in rational and ordered control of himself.

Aristotle embraced much of Plato’s account, but gave eudaimonia a broader and more practical meaning.

Aristotle on Eudaimonia

It is with Plato’s one-time student Aristotle and his Nicomachean Ethics that the concept of eudaimonia is most closely associated.

For Aristotle, a thing is best understood by looking at its end, purpose, or goal. For example, the purpose of a knife is to cut, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what a knife is; the goal of medicine is good health, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what medicine is, or ought to be.

Now, if one does this for some time, it soon becomes apparent that some goals are subordinate to other goals, which are themselves subordinate to yet other goals. For example, a medical student’s goal may be to qualify as a doctor, but this goal is subordinate to her goal to heal the sick, which is itself subordinate to her goal to make a living by doing something useful. This could go on and on, but unless the medical student has a goal that is an end in itself, nothing that she does is actually worth doing.

What, asks Aristotle, is this goal that is an end in itself? This ‘supreme good’, he replies, is eudaimonia, and eudaimonia only.

But what exactly does Aristotle mean by eudaimonia?

For Aristotle, it is by understanding the distinctive function of a thing that one can understand its essence. Thus, one cannot understand what it is to be a gardener unless one can understand that the distinctive function of a gardener is ‘to tend to a garden with a certain degree of skill’.

Whereas human beings need nourishment like plants, and have sentience like animals, their distinctive function, says Aristotle, is their unique and god-like capacity to reason. Thus, our supreme good is to lead a life that enables us to use and develop our reason, and that is in accordance with reason.

By living our life to the full according to our essential nature as rational beings, we are bound to flourish, that is, to develop and express our full human potential, regardless of the ebb and flow of our good or bad fortune.

To put this in modern terms, if we develop our thinking skills, if we guard against lies and self-deception, if we train and master our emotions, we will, over the years, make better and better choices, do more and more meaningful things, and derive ever-increasing satisfaction from all that we have become and all that we have done, and are yet able to do.

Although Aristotle’s account proved the most influential, his was not the last word on the matter. The Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics all regarded eudaimonia as the highest good, although they conceived of it in somewhat different terms. For the Cynics and Stoics, happiness depended less on flourishing than on living in accordance with nature and reason, and on cultivating an inner freedom that no amount of bad fortune could destroy. The Epicureans sought tranquillity through moderation, friendship, and freedom from unnecessary desires, while the Skeptics argued that peace of mind arises from suspending judgement about matters that cannot be known with certainty.

In recent decades, philosophers and psychologists have rediscovered eudaimonia as an alternative to the modern pursuit of pleasure or subjective happiness. Increasingly, they recognise that a good life depends not only on how we feel, but also on how we live.

‘Happiness’ is something that comes and goes. It is at the mercy of fortune and circumstance. A life well lived, however, is a treasure that no one and nothing can ever take away from you, and that will shine in the eyes of others long after you are dead.

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed this history of eudaimonia, you’ll find much more in The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, which explores the lives, ideas, and enduring influence of the three greatest philosophers of antiquity.

You may also enjoy