PHIL 2027 Philosophy of Rousseau Letters to Malesherbes

Who was Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes ( )? Important royal official w/ many duties –A noble of ‘the robe’ (vs. ‘the sword’) Chief censor—cleared works for publication Protector of the Encyclopédie Keen botanist, like Rousseau –they exchanged many letters on this topic King Louis XVI’s lawyer at his trial during the Terror Malesherbes was guillotined.

Malesherbes, 25 Dec Corr. Comp. Lettre 1610 ‘…I saw in your proceedings an extreme sensitivity, a great fund of melancholy and a strong disposition to see things from the blackest perspective, but also an equal disposition to devote yourself to justice and to truth when they are presented to you’.

Malesherbes’ letter, cont. ‘The sensitivity of the heart is imprinted in your works with too much force and too much truth that one should not be surprised to find it in your conduct… This somber melancholy which is the unhappiness of your life is prodigiously augmented by illness and solitude, but I believe that it is natural to you and that the cause is physical. I even believe that you should not be upset if people know this. The kind of life you have embraced is too singular and you are too celebrated for people not to be interested in it’.

Confessions, Book XI R felt M had misunderstood him, had believed his enemies (Diderot, Voltaire and others) Fears about the censors inspecting Emile, Julie ‘I wrote him four consecutive letters explaining the real motives of my conduct, giving him a faithful description of my tastes, my inclinations, my character, and all the feelings of my heart. These four letters, written straight off, hurriedly…and left unrevised, are perhaps the only things I have written with facility in the whole of my life…’ (525-6).

Question Why did R. write the four Letters? –to kill time? –To communicate with the censor? –To reply to his critics—the philosophes (next slides)? –Other reasons?

D’Alembert (l.) & Diderot (r.)

Enlightenment Ideas Nature: as standard or guide for morals, law and society: –A machine, a nurturing mother, or a set of impersonal physical forces apprehensible through mathematical laws? –Revival of ancient atomist idea that there is only matter in motion (Democritus, Lucretius) Religion: watchmaker God or no God at all (any political implications in absolute monarchy?) Truth: reason tears away the veil from truth in frontispiece to Encyclopédie; –Rousseau’s motto: ‘to submit one’s life to the truth’; –Descartes (innate ideas)—increasingly rejected; –Locke (sensationalism) –Francis Bacon (empiricism).