Philosophical differences

DAVID EDMONDS and John Eidinow have shown a predilection for zeroing in on quarrels that encapsulate broad ideological issues. The pair’s brilliant first book, “Wittgenstein’s Poker,” used a 10-minute argument between two 20th century philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, to delineate drastically divergent attitudes toward what philosophy’s concerns should be. The poker of the title is the hot iron that Wittgenstein may have brandished at Popper during the heated 1946 exchange. Their second book, “Bobby Fischer Goes to War,” concerned Cold War tensions in the battle for the 1972 world chess crown between Fischer, the irascible American, and Soviet champion Boris Spassky.

The pair’s third volume of cultural history, “Rousseau’s Dog,” examines a feud between two great 18th century thinkers, David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As the authors themselves acknowledge, “We seem to be specializing in knock-down-drag-out clashes between men of titanic gifts.” The dog in the title refers not to Rousseau’s adored mutt, Sultan, but to a metaphorical beast over which the philosopher had no control: “This agitated companion, just as inseparable as Sultan and forever growling at Rousseau’s heels, was the writer’s deeply rooted belief that the world was hostile and treacherous, ready at any moment to betray him.”

When he met Hume in late 1765, Rousseau was “Europe’s foremost radical,” a fugitive who had been banned from his native Geneva and expelled from the Swiss towns of Motiers (where his house was stoned) and Isle Saint-Pierre, and from Paris. His criticism of the establishment and religion in his epistolary novel “La Nouvelle Heloise,” his revolutionary political work, “The Social Contract,” and his educational tract, “Emile,” all had brought “the wrath of church and state down upon him.”

At the urging of some friends and despite the cautionary warnings of others, Hume decided to help Rousseau flee to England and find suitable lodgings at below-market rates, since Rousseau refused to accept outright charity. A Scot, Hume hadn’t had an easy reception in England, but his seminal tracts, “A Treatise of Human Nature” and “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” were initially more ignored than attacked. When Rousseau met him, Hume had been lapping up attention for two years in Paris, where he was stationed as a diplomat and known as “le bon David.”

“Rousseau’s Dog” opens promisingly with the philosophers’ stormy crossing from Calais to Dover on the night of Jan. 10, 1766. “If the ship had foundered,” the authors write portentously, “she would have carried to the bottom of the Channel two of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth century.” Actually, both men’s contributions to philosophy were already behind them. What would have been lost was Rousseau’s groundbreaking memoir, “Confessions,” which “sets the standard of revelation for generations to come.”

Within a few months of being comfortably settled in the Staffordshire countryside, Rousseau turned on his benefactor with accusations that he was leading a conspiracy to destroy his reputation. Rousseau’s ingratitude enraged Hume as much as his wild accusations. Each launched repeated diatribes against the other, drawing notables of the day on both sides of the Channel -- including Frederick the Great, Voltaire and Horace Walpole -- to weigh in and join their respective camps.

The trouble with the feud at the core of “Rousseau’s Dog” is that it really was much ado about nothing -- a footnote to the history of the Enlightenment. The authors have attempted to freight this clash with contextual ballast in order to exploit it as a vessel for a fresh look at the philosophers and their fascinating era.

Of the two protagonists, Rousseau is more intriguing. Much of the dirt on him comes from his own “Confessions,” including details about his sexual predilection for spanking; his congenital bladder problem, which rendered intercourse obsolete by middle age; his lifelong relationship with his former scullery maid, Therese Le Vasseur, “in some ways ... the personification of Rousseau’s idealized primitive being”; and his shocking insistence that the five children he had with her early in their relationship be left at the Paris foundling hospital, even though this was a likely death sentence.

Among the large cast are the era’s ruling politicians and royalty, the hostesses of Paris’ intellectual salons and many of the philosophes who attended them. Scottish biographer James Boswell plays an interesting role: He had an affair with Le Vasseur, 20 years his senior, while escorting her from France to England several weeks after Rousseau’s crossing with Hume. Fortunately, Rousseau never found out, or that might have engendered a far more fiery feud.

As we’ve come to expect from Edmonds and Eidinow, their analysis of the personalities and philosophies in question is sharp and engaging. Rousseau was “a pessimist,” “a loner,” “rebellious,” “pyrotechnical and emotional.” Skeptical Hume, an empiricist, was “unadventurous and temperate,” “gregarious,” “straightforward and dispassionate.” In an age of reason, “both used reason to demonstrate the limits of reason.” For nature-loving Rousseau, “an appreciation of the world required not just reason but sensibilite.”

Their protagonists’ ship crossed the Channel unscathed, but Edmonds and Eidinow’s narrative founders in a sea of detail. The very clarity with which the authors analyze and puncture both participants’ roles in their assiduously charted clash diffuses its import. There was “no dialogue or engagement about ideas” in the two dozen letters that Hume and Rousseau exchanged during their 18-month interaction. Their altercation was essentially about Rousseau’s paranoia and impossibly high standards of friendship and Hume’s inability to empathize with this man of passions and rise above his unwarranted accusations of disloyalty.

It is a stretch to argue that this irrational dispute augurs the Age of Reason’s demise in favor of the sensibilite of the Romantic era. Once we understand the pitiful paranoia behind Rousseau’s “tumbling stream of allegations,” they don’t seem worth dwelling on. Yet dispassionate Hume did dwell on them, and that’s what interests the authors. According to their findings, le bon David behaved badly and may have deserved some of Rousseau’s criticism. In his fury, Hume sank to a smear campaign that reflected more darkly on him than on Rousseau. As Frederick the Great, a longtime supporter of Rousseau, commented trenchantly: “I think he is unhappy and to be pitied.... Only depraved souls kick a man when he is down.”

Of course, Rousseau’s and Hume’s altercation would have been of no interest to anyone without their influential work on knowledge, causation, morality, education and religion. Edmonds and Eidinow spill a lot of ink on this 18th century slugfest, using it as a window into Rousseau’s and Hume’s ideas. Sometimes, a door provides a better portal. *