Criminal actually. He deserves to be cancelled just for not citing D'Alembert alone.
enlitment reblogged
sometimes self-care is drinking peppermint tea and reading actual experts in the fields trashing Steven Pinker's piss-poor takes about the enlightenment
If anyone is in the mood for some delightful academic snark:
and a few paragraphs later after carefully showing you why Pinker's notion of 'age of reason' is problematic to say the least, the author hits you with a delightful:
sometimes self-care is drinking peppermint tea and reading actual experts in the fields trashing Steven Pinker's piss-poor takes about the enlightenment
Anonymous asked:
I dont know if you already answered this question (I'm sorry if you did!) but, which JJ's book do you recommend for starters?
Hi, thank you for the ask. I don't think I've ever answered it publicly actually!
It depends entirely on what interests you:
1. The Social Contract/Du contrat social
-> start here if you want to pick up Rousseau because you're interested in the French Revolution/politics/political philosophy. It is probably his most famous work (along with Emile maybe)
It's surprisingly readable (and funny at times!), though if you expect a perfectly coherent and logical system, be prepared for disappointment. It also helps to know at least some basics (like the gist of Hobbes' or Locke's political philosophy), but don't worry if you don't, you're still understand most of it.
2. Letter to M. d'Alembert on Spectacles
-> start here if you want a genuinely fascinating insight into late 1700s misogyny. It's chilling how some of the arguments feel so contemporary. It's fairly short, and reads more like a ramble/angry twitter thread that just pulls you right in.
It's great to get your blood boiling, but not a great start if you want to like Rousseau. Oh, and if you read it alongside Confessions, the sheer level of cognitive disonance/denial it's simply delicious.
3. Confessions
-> start here if you want to learn about Rousseau's life. It won't necessarily give you the true facts, but it will offer you a fascinating insight into his mind.
It's one hell of a ride, but it's not all weird psychosexual wtf moments. You can learn a lot from it about what life was like in the 18th century, and about the (usually unspoken) social norms. One thing I loved was that it revealed how much power French women actually had in the society, though it wasn't immediately obvious.
Also, there are some passages in which he talks about his social anxiety and insecurities where I genuinely find myself sympathising with him.
I'm also sorry to say that I firmly believe that it's a fun read. It gets very, very frustrating at times, but the man could write.
4. Introducing Rousseau by Dave Robinson
-> Start here if you want a quick overview/something to hold onto before jumping straight in!
Yeah, it's an illustrated guide, it's a tiny book and it looks a bit daft, but I personally swear by it. It's a very quick and engaging read, but it represents his philosophy and his life fairly well from what I can tell.
Pictured here with my hand and the man himself:
Honourable Mentions:
5. Discourse on the Arts and Sciences -> start here if you want to start with a text that first made Rousseau famous/are keen to approach his works in a chronological order
6. Emile, or On Education -> I haven't read this one I'm afraid (though I now own it!), but it's one of his most influential works. If you're interested in the idea of childhood and education, this one's for you! (but prepare to be angry re: Education of Sophie I guess)
Hope this helps, and do let me know how you get on!
enlitment reblogged
so last night i was struggling with a difficult section in a game, and when i woke up this morning i got it on my first try. this reminded me of a documentary i saw as a kid about how mice have maze-exploration brain activity in their dreams after a maze task, and have better performance after, so dreaming is maybe "practice" of daily activities.
anyway, i mention this because i noticed myself conceiving of this sleep-skill-benefit as a "mouse ability", and feeling gratitude towards Mouse (the abstract spirit of mice) for granting me this boon. this is the gator's aid all over again
<- re: prev's tags - this with JJ except he got some poor girl to write it down for him
enlitment reblogged
Thinking bout him*
*blorbo from my thesis
The Voltaire-Rousseau Beef aka V v. JJ part III.
for @stars-in-the-night , @headsinsand and other great (and amazingly patient) readers
7. THE ORPHANAGE (to be read in Eliza Hamilton's voice)
The one thing from his personal life that Rousseau is probably best remembered for is the fact that he gave up all five children he had with his long-term partner, Thérèse, to a Parisian orphanage. One after the other, in what could be called a rapid succession, a simple case of salut and adieu.
The reasons he gave for his behaviour differ from ‘I have fallen with a bad crowd in Paris and this is just what people around me did’ and ‘I basically had no other option anyway’ (not true, he could have married Thérèse and try to make it work. Sure, money was tight, and someone could make a few snarky remarks about the first baby looking surprisingly big for a six-month old or whatever, but these things happened quite regularly. Also, Diderot married his working-class mistress despite his father’s stern disapproval. Just saying) to – now this comes up somewhat later in the Confessions and is significantly darker – ‘I really hated Thérèse’s family and thought it would be better to let my kids be raised by the state than be around them’.
If this was him trying to break a cycle of generational trauma though – perhaps one of the side of his own family as well – I’d argue there were far better ways of going about it. There’s also potentially one even darker, quasi-psychoanalytical reason for this now infamous choice, but it’s probably best to steer clear of Freud. Nothing good usually comes out of it.
Of course, doing something like this would make anyone seem like a douchebag, but a guy famous for writing a treatise on how to best raise children?* Guy who repeatedly argued that the single purpose of a woman’s life is to be a mother? Now that’s a hypocrisy so deliciously juicy that one simply cannot resist sharing it with the world!
*interestingly enough, he insists in the Confessions that he wanted to reveal this information in his On Education (aka Emile), and that in one of the book's passages, he alluded to this episode in such a way that he ‘basically confessed to it already’. I haven’t found that part yet, and I remain somewhat sceptical about whether this is truly the case.
8. SECOND INTERMEZZO: VOLTAIRE THE AVID HATE-READER
- V on Julie, or the New Heloise: „silly, middle-class, dirty-minded and boring“
- V on Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar: „I read his On Education. These are reasonings of a stupid nurse in four volumes, of which forty pages directed against Christianity. They are among the most daring that have ever been written, [but] by virtue of inconsistency worthy of this head without a brain and this Diogenes* with no heart, he uttered as much abuse against the philosophers, as against Jesus Christ.“ (letter to Damilaville, 1762)
*calling JJ ‘Diogenes’ was definitely a trend in the 1700s, and what seems like V’s go-to insult for him. Calling him a ‘lackey of Diogenes’ does potentially get a bit kink-shame-y though...
9. A MOUNTAIN AND AN AVALENCHE
The last post featured an earthquake in Portugal, now get ready for a distinctly Swiss natural disaster!
To be perfectly fair to Voltaire, although he was certainly not a person who was above spreading gossip, he did have a good reason to publish what he knew about Rousseau and let all hell break loose, since...
in Rousseau’s Letters Written from the Mountain published in 1763, JJ had exposed Voltaire as the author of the infamous Sermon of the Fifty, an anti-christian work that had the potential to get its author into serious trouble. Voltaire could not and would not let this slide – especially when he had the perfect weapon on his hands. Payback time!
Voltaire therefore went on to publish a short anonymous pamphlet titled Sentiments des Citoyens (aka How Citizens Feel – since JJ proudly called himself ‘citizen of Geneva’ in his works and he championed sentiments over reason – see, it’s all very clever!) in which he exposed details from Rousseau’s personal life. This of course included the most shocking, most hypocritical, and most memorable detail of all: Rousseau, Mr. Family First, Mr. Let’s-raise-precious-children-in-a-way-that-won’t-corrupt-their-natural-godness had dumped all of his offspring into a Parisian orphanage! Not so virtuous now, is it?
Interestingly, Rousseau never put two and two together and realised Voltaire was the real author of the fateful pamphlet. It would be interesting to see how he would react had he known.
That said, much like d’Alembert’s article on Geneva a couple of years earlier, the Sentiments des Citoyens led JJ to pick up a pen once again to do what he did best: to defend the poorest and most oppressed souls against the cruel and unjust world. Which usually just happened to be himself.
And thus, as Roger Pearson, an author of one of Voltaire's many biographies concludes:
“we have Voltaire to thank for (…) being the catalyst of Rousseau’s Confessions” which he calls “one of the world’s great autobiographies”
(no, not like that @chaotic-history. Though now I cannot unsee it every time I read the quote)
->
Tune in next time for the (mis)adventure in Britain which will feature:
- another philosopher - David Hume - dragged into the mess
- a fake letter from Frederick the Great (that was actually penned by the most messy gossip of a person in the 18th century)
- a genuinely funny statue story with an appearance from d'Alembert
To say this anecdote about Catherine the Great and Diderot lives in my mind rent-free is an understatement. In fact, it's probably achieved landlord status by now:
@lafcadiosadventures -> you get me, right?
haters will say it's because Diderot was one of the earliest atheist materialist thinkers, but deep down in my heart, I know it was because of those lesbian nuns
enlitment reblogged
The Nouvelle Biographie Générale's article on Villette, 1866
Because my sleep-deprived brain decided last night that translating Villette things was clearly my top priority. Footnotes like this (1) are original; the ones like this ¹ are added by me.
VILLETTE (Charles, marquis DE), born December 4, 1736, in Paris, where he died on July 9, 1793. His father, treasurer extraordinary of war, left him a 150,000 livre pension; his mother was popular for her wit and her beauty: he therefore had an easy path in the world. After having gone on a handful of campaigns, he returned to Paris (1763) with the rank of quartermaster general of the cavalry [maréchal général des logis de la cavalerie]. He was imprisoned, for what reason we don’t know¹, in the Strasbourg citadel; as soon as he had left at the end of six months, he went to Ferney to seek out Voltaire, who had been a friend of his mother. ‘I currently have at home with me to cheer me up’, wrote Voltaire, ‘a young M. de Villette, who knows all the verses that have ever been written, and who writes them himself, who sings, who does impressions of other people quite amusingly, who tells stories, who is a pantomime, who would delight even the inhabitants of this sad Geneva’². With the support of the philosophe, whom he didn’t hesitate to call his father, Villette threw himself into the literary world, wrote many verses, competed for prizes from the Académie Française which he didn’t win, and above all sang in every tone praises of Voltaire, who reciprocated doubly by calling him the French Tibullus. Displaying with effrontery his taste for unnatural vices, as was attested to by his contemporaries, it was thought that he would not marry, until he married a person equally distinguished by her virtues and by her amiable qualities in the Ferney chapel in 1777, and he thus became, according to a rueful joke of the patriarch of Ferney, a doctor in utroque³. He had with her a son, whom he had baptised in 1792 under the name of Voltaire-Villette. This marriage did not prevent him from returning to his vicious habits, nor from engaging in scandalous intrigues with fashionable women, among whom were Mlles Arnould et Raucourt. At the time of the revolution, Villette drafted the cahiers du bailliage for Sentis, in which he spoke warmly of the new principles, and he collaborated on the Chronique de Paris. Named deputy of Oise for the National Convention (1792), he protested strongly against the September massacres, and voted, in the trial of Louis XVI, for his imprisonment [rather than his execution]. He succumbed a few months later to a languishing illness. He owned the hôtel where Voltaire lived in Paris, on the quai which today bears his name; he acquired the château de Ferney and preserved the heart of his protector (1) in an urn bearing this inscription:
His spirit is everywhere and his heart is here.
Of a very slim literary talent, Villette was truly what Mme du Deffand called him: ‘a comic character’⁴. The wits of the time did not spare him; people laughed especially at his belief that he could share in Voltaire’s fame, and this epigram ran for a long time throughout Paris:
Little Villette, it is in vain
That you aspire to glory;
You will never be anything but a dwarf
Who plays a giant on the comic stage.
However, he was kind, devoted to his friends, and during the revolution he showed real courage in standing firm in his beliefs against the prejudices of the nobility and against revolutionary excesses. Palissot assures us that Villette’s best works should be attributed to Gugeland, his secretary. Be that as it may, these are the works which he had printed: Éloge de Henri IV; Paris, 1770, in-4°; Éloges Historiques de Charles V et de Henri IV; Amsterdam (Paris), 1772, in-4°; La Patroclée, ou Commencement du Seizième Chant de l’Iliade, Traduction Littérale en Vers; Paris, 1778, in-8°: Palissot attributes this to Voltaire; various pieces in the Almanach des Muses, reprinted in Œuvres de Boufflers et de Villette; London (Paris), 1782, in-18; Œuvres du Marquis de Villette; London and Paris, 1784, in-12, and 1786, in-16; Edinburgh and Paris, 1788, in-8°: in general, his Lettres contain interesting anecdotes. Between 1784 and 1792, Villette presented eight operas to the Académie Royale de Musique, which seem to have been neither put on nor succesful.
(1) This relic, preserved by his son, was given in 1864 to the government, which had it placed in one of the rooms of the Bibliothèque Impériale [now the Bibliothèque Nationale de France].
¹Like pretended father, like son, it was for causing a stir by planning to duel a lieutenant-colonel whom he had publicly insulted, according to Grimm’s correspondence.
²Voltaire to the comte d’Argental, February 27, 1765
³In utroque jure, meaning a doctor of both civil and ecclesiastical law, ie., if Villette gets married he will have sex with women as well as with men. Voltaire uses the term in this way in a letter to Villette from June 7, 1765.
⁴Mme du Deffand to Horace Walpole, February 12, 1775
'would delight even the inhabitants of this sad Geneva' aaa the shade. Citizens of Geneva are canonically a bunch of killjoys
also super not okay about the urn description :(
Thanks so much for sharing!
enlitment reblogged
A moodboard request for @enlitment
Thank you sm! 🤩
Decent Dad Contest:
in light of the already depressing recent poll and and even more depressing thread, I think it's best to do a nicer poll this time!
Thanks to @anotherhumaninthisworld for coming up with the idea and providing info about Camille's dad!
1. Jean Benoît Nicolas Desmoulins
- Supportive of his son's revolutionary goals while also expressing worry about his safety (perfectly reasonable)
- Seemed to have a lot of patience with his son (which is saying something, given that it's Camille we're talking about... you need all the patience you can get)
- Most likely rooting for his relationship with Lucile
- Ready to give his son advice
- "No, my son, I am not and can never be of your enemies (...) I am and always will be your friend and your best friend"
- wrote a letter to the public prosecutor to try and plea for his son's life (in which he mentioned that he's proud of him: fellow-citizen Desmoulins, who until now has held himself honoured in being the father of the foremost and most unflinching of Republicans)
2. Denis Diderot
- named his daughter Angélique after his beloved sister and mother
- the shared love for their daughter is assumed to be what kept Diderot's and his wife's shaky marriage together for a long time
- used the money he got from working on the Encyclopédie to secure the best possible tutors for his daughter
- Went again the standards of girls' education of his time (usually focused on singing and piano lessons), instead choosing to teach her to 'think logically' and secure classes in subjects such as history, geography, or musical theory
- "I shall teach her, if I can, to endure [the difficulties of life] with fortitude"
- there's a reasonable evidence that he believed in his daughter's 'genius' as a composer, and even had the prelude she composed printed (you can listen to it here!)
I recommend this great post and this article for further reading if you're interested!
Also take this with the grain of salt, especially the Diderot one, I should be packing for a trip and didn't have that much time to dig for sources.
Also unfortunately some not completely enlightened views on women authors by our enlightenment philosopher... but hey, at least he believed his daughter to be special, which is kind of sweet? The female question in the 1700s is complex okay...
#this is hard#vote with your heart I guess?#polls#also so glad I've discovered A's music!#frev#french revolution#frev community#frevblr#desmoulins#camille desmoulins#jean desmoulins#denis diderot#age of enlightenment#enlightenment#philosophy#philosophy memes#women's history#Angélique Diderot#history#history memes#history polls#1700s#18th century#music
enlitment reblogged
For the record tho so many parents sucked
Robespierre’s dad sucked and dipped
Danton’s mom was at least neglectful, given he got gored in the face twice (I am being 85% facetious don’t @ me)
Talleyrand’s parents are going to shove him into the church due to his disability, apparently not caring that Talleyrand - look at Talleyrand. He’s not a churchman. He’s not. Look at him.
Something, something, on the other end of the political scale Marie Antoinette’s parents are going to ship her to France at 14 and I know it’s how monarchy rolls but like also that’s why we need to get rid of monarchy because that is some shit to the bull
Marquis de Sade’s mom abandoned him and resented him for ruining his political career at four (four!) and his dad openly hated him and oh boy Sade grew up into a sack of shit but, and this isn’t an excuse, but what do you think you’re gonna get
Idk it might be easier to have a poll like, “what figure born from 1740-1815 had a parent who was not a jerk?” “Which parent was the least shitty?”
(This is a response to banter with @enlitment!)
Didn't know about de Sade's parents! (also lol at Danton... actually kind of a fair point)
Humbly adding D'Alambert's mother Claudine Guérin de Tencin who straight up left his son on the steps of a church a few days after he was born
(also I actually really want to do a decent enough parent poll as well, @anotherhumaninthisworld already proposed a contender and I have one in mind as well! I'll get to it tomorrow)
I realised that I can no longer be silent and had to share my truth! (I've also consulted this with an esteemed The Smiths scholar who for some reason doesn't wish to be named)
"And thus do we have Voltaire to thank (...) for being the catalyst of Rousseau's Confessions, one of the world's great autobiographies."
– from R. Pearson's Voltaire Almighty
So now you know who to blame!
Rameau's Nephew: A Case for Book History
if you've scanned through the whole text you're getting a strawberry as a treat: 🍓
#did I spend the whole morning on this? ...perhaps. But I needed to get it out of my system#denis diderot#enlightenment#philosophy#history#historiography#book history#čumblr#czech history#diderot#age of enlightenment#goethe#johann wolfgang von goethe#catherine the great#1700s#18th century#19th century#1800s#1900s#resistance#books#literature#1940s#world war 2#czech#french philosophy#essay#article