ACTA HISTRIAE * 8 • 2000 • 1 (IX.) received: 2000-02-27 UDC 17.000.1" 17" HONOR AMONG THE PHILOSOPHES: THE HUME-ROUSSEAU AFFAIR REVISITED* John MARTIN Trinity University, Dept. of History, USA-San Antonio, TX 78212-7200 ABSTRACT This essay looks to the famous Hume-Rousseau dispute of ¡766 as a case study in the history of honor. Scholars have often Seen the late eighteenth-century as the period in which the early modern notion of honor as a matter of one's external reputation gave way to a modern notion of honor as an internal virtue. To the contrary, Martin argues that Rousseau's efforts to displace the concern with reputation (famously developed in his novel Julie) were undermined by Rousseau's own continuing preoccupation with his standing in the Republic of Letters. Rousseau's strategy in the dispute leaves us with a paradoxical legacy: we moderns crave honor, even as we recognize that it is insincere to do so. Key words: honour, ethical values, Hume, sincerity. Rousseau, I8'h century Questa lettera dunque ti trovera a Londra...io sto aspettando che la malinconia del clima c il fondo feroce dcgli abitanti ti disgustino non meno che la spesa, che bisogna fare per ogni mínima cosa. Da te sapremo qualche nuova di Rousseau, di cui hai sentito parlare tanto a traverso m Parigi; sappi che Beccana comincia a ritirarsi un passo dal giudizio datone e sappi che quanti di noi hanno letto le cose últimamente stampate sono decisamentc per Rousseau e risguardiamo il signor Hume come uomo, che fa sospettare del suo carattere e sicuramente dimostra di non avere la deli-catezza e sensibilitü, che merita di trovare in un amico il signor Gian Giacomo. - Pie tro Verri to Aiessandro Verri, 15 December 1766 [CCR, no. 5621] * I presented an earlier version of this paper at the conference "Honour. Identity and Ambiguity in Informal Legal Practice," at Roper, Slovenia, November 11-13, 1999. 1 an! most appreciative to the organizers of that conference as well as to Trinity University for the financial support thai made my participation possible. The current paper constitutes a fragment of a work in progress on Die history of sincerity in early modem Europe. 181 ACTA HISTRIAE • 8 • 2000 • 1 (IX.) John MARTIN; HONOR AMONG THE PHU.OSOPHFS: THE HUME-ROU.SSEAlJ AFFAIR REVISITED. 181-194 In January 1766 the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, persecuted in both France and Switzerland for his writings, arrived in London in the company of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Working through a series of friends and contacts, Hume, who had voluntarily assumed the role of Rousseau's patron and protector, spirited Rousseau out of France, found temporary lodging for him in London, introduced him to English society, and then arranged for him to live in the English countryside, at Wootten in Derbyshire. At first things went smoothly between the two men who, earlier, had known each other only by reputation. For a short time, it even seemed that a deep friendship might develop. Bui all this changed in early April when a letter spoofing Rousseau was published in the Si. James' Chronicle. The letter (allegedly written by Frederick. King of Prussia, to Rousseau himself) took aim above all at Jean-Jacqucs's eccentricities. "You can find a quiet haven wiihin my States. I wish you well and shall treat you kindly." it read, adding the promise to "provide you with such misfortunes as you wish; and. nnlike your enemies whose attitude is very different, I shall cease persecuting you when you stop taking pride in being persecuted." (Pottle, 1967, 259) Predictably Rousseau look this letter as an attack upon his honor. He wrote the editor of the Chronicle and demanded an apology. But Rousseau also suspected that Hume, his apparent friend, h:ul played a collaborative role in the writing of the letter that Rousseau believed to be the work of his enemy, the French philosophe Jean Le Rond d'Alembert. And as Rousseau thought back over hts association with Hume, he began to discern a number of ' signs" that only led him further to suspect the machinations of the Scottish philosopher. Rousseau must have stewed about this matter for some lime, for in laic June he made his suspicions known to Hume. "Vous vous èies mal caché," Rousseau wrote to his one-time friend. "Vous m'amenez en Angleterre, en apparence pour m'y procurer un azile, et en effet pour m'y deshonorer." (CCR, no. 5242) Now it was no small matter in early modern Europe, even in the Republic of Letters, to accuse a gentleman, as Rousseau did Hume, of lying, of intentionally and deliberately deceiving another. "To give the lie" - to make such an accusation - was a challenge to another's honoT. Rousseau may have felt dishonored by the "King of Prussia" letter in the Sain! James' Chronicle, but Hume was now dishonored by JeanJacques. In a carefully crafted response, Hume both defended his honor and offered Rousseau a way to save face. "I shall charitably suppose that some infamous Calumniator has belyed me to you: But in that case, it is your Duty, and I am persuaded in it will be your Inclination, to give me an Opportunity of detecting him and of justifying myself... You owe this to me. you owe it to Yourself, you owe it to Truth and Honour and Justice." (CCR, no. 5246) But Rousseau did not take up the offer for a graceful reconciliation. Hume had, in fact, misunderstood Jean-Jacques, whose letter was, at heart, a plea for reassurance, an invitation to Hume to reassert 182 ACTA HISTRÏAE • 8 • 200(1 ♦ 1 (IX.) John MARTIN HONOR AMONG THE PHILOSOPHES: THE HtJME-KOUSSf.AU AFFAIR REVISITED, 181-194 his friendship. When this invitation (which was, after all, veiled) was declined, Rousseau had no choice hut to push his charges further (Starobinski, 1957, 163-168). In a long letter written tn early July, Rousseau laid his charges before his former friend (CCR, nos. 5274, 5274bis, 5274ter). Given both the rhetorical power and the nearly legalistic tone of Rousseau's letter, Hume now feared that Rousseau was on the verge of publicizing the charges against him. Accordingly, over the next few months Hume engaged in a steady effort to shore up his reputation. He wrote friends justifying his own actions in an attempt to inoculate himself against Rousseau's potential attack. On 15 July - the day he received the letier from Rousseau - Hume wrote long, defensive letters to d'Alembert, to Hie comtesse de Boufflers-Rouverel, to Richard Davenport, and to Hugh Blair (CCR, nos. 5281, 5282, 5283, 5284). He solicited a letter from Horace Walpolc, the author of the letter mocking Rousseau, in order to exonerate himself (CCR, no. 5318). Eventually word reached Jean-Jacques that Hume was considering publishing, as a kind of pre-emptive strike, his correspondence with the French philosophe. When Rousseau learned of these intentions, he slated, "s'il l'ose faire, à moins d enormes falsifications, je prédis hardement que, malgré son extrême adresse et celle de ses amis, sans même que je m'en mêle, M. Hume est un homme démasqué." (CCR, 5332). But how would Hume defend his honor? Even in the seventeenth century when dueling was nearly epidemic in England, scholars had rarely resorted to violence to protect their reputations; and in the eighteenth century, after the Church and crown had largely eradicated dueling from English society, such a reaction would have been even more unlikely. Yet Hume could not ignore Rousseau's insult, not only because he was a gentleman, but also because he was a radical philosopher, working ai the cutting edge of English empiricism. Hume's credibility was dependent on his reputation for veracity. Indeed, he prided himself on this. To allow another philosophe to attack him and not respond would have meant risking having his own credibility undermined. Urged on by his friends in France, especially d'Alembert and Julie de Lespinasse, Hume decided to get the facts on the table - to give his own account and document it the best he could (CCR, no. 5300). Thus, Hume rose to the challenge by writing a de fense and then publishing the correspondence between himself and Jean-Jacques in a work entitled Exposé succinct de la contestation qui s'est élevée entre M. Hun te et M. Rousseau (1766; English trans. 1766; Italian trans. 1767). Throughout Europe the public looked on with great interest. Commenting on the interest tl attracted, Friedrich Melchior Grimm noted in a letter to the Contesse de Boufflers that "a declaration of war between two great European powers could not have caused a greater stir." (Goodman, 1991-92, 188 189). Hume and his allies fully cxpected to win the case and be victorious in the court of public opinion. In the end, however, il was Rousseau who carried the day. 183 ACTA HÏSTRiAE • 8 • 2000 • 1 (IX.) John MARTIN. HONOR AMONG THE rHIWSOI'flES TlIK HUMF.-UOUS$EAt f AFFAIR REVISITH1), 181-194 Rousseau's triumph derived, as we shall see, from his explicit appeal to sincerity -an ideal that proved to have far greater currency in the court of public opinion than did Hume's appeal to Reason. Moreover, to a large degree the outcome of this dispute appears to fit in neatly with what many historians believe to have been a fundamental shift in the code of honor in the later half of the eighteenth century. In this period, they believe, Ihe traditional medieval and early modern codes of honor (in which honor was conceived as reputation or an external quality) gave way to modern notions (which view honor as an internal or intrinsic personal quality) (Stewart, 1994, 39-41). Certainly, the history of eighteenth-century political thought seems to support this view. While Montesquieu had argued for tiie preeminence of honor as the dominant political value in the early eighteenth century, later philosophes - most notably Voltaire and Rousseau - had challenged this ideal, making the case for personal virtue as the well-spring of political life (Pappas. 1982; Blum, 1986). In general, I accept the view that eighteenth-century thinkers camc to view honor increasingly as a function of internal or intrinsic motivations. Indeed, Rousseau himself played a significant role in fashioning just such notions of internal virtue in the modern definition of honor. Thus honor - or so Rousseau publicly claimed - was a matter of integrity (an index of the internal state of one's soul) rather than a matter of social reputation as it was for Hume. As Julie expressed it to her lover St,~Preux in Rousseau's best-selling novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, first published in 1761, "L'honneur d'un homme...n'est point au pouvoir d'un autre; il est en lui-même et non dans l'opinion du peuple; il ne se défend ni par l'épée ni par les boucliers, mais par une vie intègre et irréprochable." (Rousseau, 1964, 158). Rousseau, in short, played a pivotal role in the shift in the European understanding of honor as a code of conduct shaped by a predominantly military' and aristocratic ethos to honor understood as personal virtue. Reputation had given way - or so it seemed - to the ideal of the "vie intègre," to sincerity of intention. It was precisely this discourse that shifted the notion of honor from its status as an external quality to its status an as internal virtue. But the emphasis on this shift formulated in these terms (external vs. internal, social vs. psychological, other-directed vs. inner-directed, and so on) masks, I believe, a fundamental characteristic of honor: namely, that it is primarily a matter of cultural capital and (hat it changes much less than do the cultural forms on which it draws. Honor, in short, is a function of the social values and customs of particular societies and even of specific settings in specific societies, with the result that a social analysis of the place of honor is a prerequisite lo an understanding of this term (Bourdieu, 1977, 171-183; Pitt-Rivers, 1966). It is from within this framework that I wish to explore the Hume-Rousseau affair. In particular, it is my goal to demonstrate that, despite the apparent discrepancies in their strategies, both Hume and Rousseau were profoundly concerned with reputation. Each was perennially anxious about his 184 ACTA HISTRIAE • 8 • 2000 • 1 (IX.) latin MARTIN: HONOR AMONG THE PHILOSOPHER THE HUME-ROUSSEAU AFT'AiR REVISITED, 181 -194 standing in the Republic of Letters. Their differences stemmed, therefore, not so much from a different perception of honor per se as from their differing views of identity and selfhood - views that had been shaped by profoundly different experiences as sveli as by social and cultura! locations within eightecnth-century Europe. To the gentlemanly Hume, as we shall see, the movement to reassert his honor was largely a direct appeal to external guarantees (from friends and from documents) that he had behaved in a respectable fashion. By contrast, Rousseau's strategy moved in precisely the opposite direction. A brilliant man shut out of the higher circles of European society both by background and by temperament, Rousseau downplayed his concern with reputation and stressed, instead, that it was one's heart, one's feelings, one's motives that ultimately mattered. Paradoxically, however. Rousseau's appeal was in fact to a great public - one he had in a sense helped fashion - of men and women who, like him, had grown frustrated by the emphasis placed on such external or conditional markers of honor as noble birth. Historians have explored the Hume-Rousseau dispute - cette affaire infernóte • from a number of angles. As we might expect, biographers, with no tittle partisanship, have devoted considerable attention to the dispute, and they have made much of the differing temperaments of the two men (Ritchie, 1807; Burton, 1846; Greig, 1931; Mossner, 1980; Guéhenno, 1966, Cranston, 1997). Several scholars have also focused on the dispute itself. The historian Dena Goodman, in her excellent study of the case, has argued lhat Rousseau and Hume not only clashed over the facts of the dispute. They also operated out of two "opposing conceptions of truth." (Goodman, 1991-1992, 188; Peoples, 1927-1928; Guillemin, 1942. Linares, 1991). "Rousseau," she notes, capitalized on the intimacy of the letter form, while Hume...emphasized the documentary aspect of the annotated correspondence." (Goodman, 1991-1992, Í83). And indeed Hume's instructions concerning the publication of the Exposé succinct as well as its English translation go to great lengths to stress the factuality of his claims. In an especially impressive documentary move, Hume offered to desposit the originals of the letters in the British Museum. By contrast, Rousseau's letters appealed to sentiment, to emotion, and to the heart. Thus, in Goodman's view, this affair revealed a fundamental tension in European culture between the Enlightenment commitment to reason, veracity, and documentation, and the new, emerging ethic of sincerity and feeling that Rousseau himself had done so much to popularize. Hume and Rousseau were both radical critics of traditional epistemologies. Both slaked their reputations on extremely strong claims about the discernment of truth, but truth was also, as Steven Shapin has eloquently argued in his Social History of Truth* a construction (Shapin. 1994). Truth in the abstract, that is, is a fiction. Truth is always embedded in social relations. What renders the Hume-Rousseau debate so significant is that for both protagonists their reputations were implicated in their truth 185 ACTA H1STRIAE • S ♦ 2000 • 1 (IX.) John MARTÍN: HONOR AMONG THE PHILOSOPHF.S; THE HUME-ROUSSEAU AfíAlft REVJSJTHÍ). ISl-m claims, while their honor depended largely on their ability to persuade the public of their individual views of the truth. Hume's task was especially delicate. Having made the rejection of all metaphysical notions of the transcendental self or ego - whether the self was conceived as the Cartesian res cog i tans or as the Christian soul - he was not able to appeal to cither his sincerity, his intentions, or his conscience to validate his honor. The proof of his claims required empirical documentation or evidence. Thus, the traditional view of truthfulness in early modern England that "the word of a gentleman was not only a matter of public reputation but was also construed as flowing from an individual's inner nature" was nol available to Hume; nor were any claims of authentic gentility (Shapin, 1994, 68). To the contrary, Hume's defense of himself, was tied to a far more fragile notion of the self. To Hume, the self, was, after all, nothing bul a "fiction." It was, in his words, "a kind of theatre," a sphere in which "perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away." Thus, Hume continued, cach of us is "nothing but a bundle or collcction of different perceptions." (Hume, 1978, 253; see also Pike, 1967; Penelhum, 1975). Hume's validation of his truth, therefore, required documentation, empiricism, impartiality. But in the fluid world of early modern publishing, such documentary transparency was virtually impossible. From the very beginning, Hume's efforts to defend himself and his reputation were vexed. The publication of the Exposé succinct, after all, was to a large degree the initiative of d'Alcmbert. In a letter dated 15 July 1765, shortly after reading Rousseau's accusatory epistle, Hume wrote to d'Alcmbert to defend himself from Rousseau's insinuations. And in this letter, Hume offered to send along copies of "quelques lettres que nous (i.e. Hume and Rousseau) nous sommes écrits." (CCR, no. 5281). Shortly afterwards, d'Alembert responded, stating that he and several of his Parisian friends were convinced that Hume must publish his defense: "vous devcz," d'Alembert wrote to his Scottish friend, "donner cette histoire au public avee touted ces circonsianccs." (CCR, no. 5300) Hume then sent Ihe transcripts over to d'Alembert in Paris. At this point, the work left Hume's hands, only to be doctored by his Parisian friends. In October 1766 d'Alembert's circle working closely wilh Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard published Ehe Exposé succinct. Hume, however, needed or believed he still needed an English translation. But he now faced a dilemma. His French allies - who were also, we must remember, Rousseau's enemies - had taken ccrtain liberties with the original documents (Meyer, 1952). Should he publish an English translation that would follow the original correspondence exactly - or should he publish an English version thai would follow the Exposé succinct7 In his letter to William Strahan, his London publisher, Hume makes his own desires clear: "I shall immediately send you up a Copy of the original Manuscript, which is partly English, partly French; hut more of the latter Language, which must he 186 ACTA HISTJUAE • 8 » 2000 • 1 (IX.) John MARTIN: HONOR AMONG THE PfflljOSOPHES: THF, HUMB-ROI/S51-AU AFFAIR RF.VISITCD. ISMSM translated.... The Method the Translator must proceed is this.... Let him compare exactly the French narration with my English: Where they agree, let him insert my English: Where they differ, let him follow the French and translate it: The Reason of this is. that I allowed my Friends at Paris to nuike what alterations they thought proper; and I am desirous of following exactly the Paris Edition. AU my letters must be printed verbatim, conformable to the Manuscript ! send you" (CCR, no. 5485). To be sure, there was to be no alteration of Rousseau's letters here, but there was of Hume's. Moreover, Strahan was an awkward choice. First he was the editor of the Saint James' Chronicle, where the "King of Prussia" letter had originally appeared. Moreover, he showed no inclination to follow Hume's instructions on the matter of the English translation. And against Hume's explicit wishes, he had revealed the identities of two prominent French noblewomen whose names had been suppressed in the French version (CCR, no. 5576bis). Nor could Hume control the way the publicity of the affair would develop, once it had become public. Voltaire joined the fray with his own epistolary contribution (Voltaire, 1766). Furthermore, along the way, Hume also managed to alienate his former English publisher David Millar and also the literary cad Horace Walpolc, whose spoof of Rousseau had ignited the entire struggle (CCR, nos. 5511, 5522). In short, the publication process had begun to undercut rather than reinforce Hume's credibility. Having severed all claims that the truth was an expression of the internal self, Hume had to rely exclusively on the claim that truth could be socially constructed in a philosophic enterprise of publication that would reclaim his reputation. But the publication process was vexed by the appearance and the reality of the animus of the d'Alemhert circle against Rousseau, by the missteps of publishers and translators on both sides of the Channel, by pirated and doctored editions, and even by the curious decision of the trustees of the British Museum not to accept the manuscripts of the Hume-Rousseau correspondence (Mossncr, 1980, 530; Johns, 1998) In the end a purely external notion of honor - one that appealed to discrete facts alone, without any reference to intentions or the conscience - proved fragile indeed. Rousseau sensed this. Rousseau had always been critical of philosophical reasoning as the governing criterion of truth. In his Profession de foi du Vicaire savoyard, published originally in Book IV of Emile, Rousseau equated philosophy with vanity. Indeed, this critique of reason would play a significant role as we shall see in Rousseau's argument for sincerity (Melzer, 1996). In a famous passage. Rousseau writes: "Quand les philosophes seroient en état de découvrir la vérité, qui d'entre eux prendroit intéresse à elle? Chacun sait bien que son sistême n'est pas mieux fondé que les autres." (Rousseau, 1964, 569). It is vanity, therefore, that leads to philosophical argument, not love of truth, not reason. Rousseau, therefore, turns within himself to discover the foundations of what is true: "Portant donc en moi l'amour de la vérité pour toute philosophie, et pour toute méthode une régie facile et simple qui 187 ACTA HÏSTRIAE • 8 • 20