Public Happiness and Virtue;
or, continuing studies in Rational Freedom (the tradition I work in, affirming that the freedom/happiness of each individual is conditional upon and coexistent with all individuals. Here are a couple of books which affirm the same thesis.
The Pursuit of Happiness
Prof. Ryan Rynbrandt, Collin College
Paper Prepared for the Western Political Science Association 2016 Annual Conference in San Diego, CA, March 25, 2016
‘The inclusion of the Pursuit of Happiness as one of three specific unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence was no fluke. The founding generation shared near universally the assumption that governments exist to facilitate that pursuit and should be judged on their performance in doing so. This idea was the result of immersion in the philosophies of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the great theologians and the varied great minds of the Enlightenment. The happiness they envisioned included the enjoyment of life, but also full engagement in purposeful activities, the practice of virtue and meaningful relationships with and service to others. In assessing how well the government of the United States fulfills the intent of the framers, then, Americans would do well to look to the extent to which it facilitates the widespread happiness of its people.’
https://wpsa.research.pdx.edu/papers/docs/rynbrandt.pdf
The tradition of public good, of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Rousseau … Happy to see my name in there too, words and ideas doing some good, and in good company. (Enjoyed San Diego too )
Throw in some heavyweight German thinkers, and it’s my tradition too.
We live under the shadow of Marx. Nietzsche and Weber.
Post-truth society?
‘There are no facts, only interpretations’ (Nietzsche)
It’s a post-value society too, it has been for a long time. A world of disenchantment and diremption. Where morality is just a series of value judgements, irreducible subjective opinion, with no objective compass with which to evaluate positions. That’s the self-made social world I’m talking of, of course, not the world of the true, the good and the beautiful. But the world we’ve made … through imposure … a world that is ‘After Virtue’ (Alasdair MacIntyre).
There’s little point appealing to the common good in a society that lacks the social identity that makes that appeal relevant.
We’ve just seen Pope Francis’ message on caring for our common home seemingly fall on deaf ears.
Private interest trumps the common good, wrote the Pope in Laudato Si. We should not expect appeals to the common good to override private interest within prevailing social relations – the social identity connecting the individual good and social good does not exist. The problem is not that the common good is impossible but that it is unavailable in anything other than abstract forms in these conditions. Political ideology has proven stronger than scientific and moral appeal. The only surprise is that we are surprised. We live in a world of social relations and interests, and the views expressed articulate social positions in the world. How to achieve the universal good in a world of particular interests? How to reconcile short-term particular interests to the long-term common good? How to rig social relations so that universality and commonality is forced at the everyday level, forming the social content of the state as the ethical agency of the common good.
‘Make each one love and see himself in the others, so that all may be the better united (d’Alembert 1948:169). By achieving a unity of existence, individuals are returned to the ‘peace, freedom, equity and innocence’ which are the preconditions of ‘solid happiness’.
Rousseau harmonizes the ideal of individuality and the ideal of community so as to show that the good person and the good citizen are one and the same being.’
‘The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.’
Rousseau Social Contract I.VI
Rousseau thus justifies political obligation through the reciprocal act and relation upon which political society is based. Rousseau returns to the relation between each individual and all individuals.
‘The undertakings which bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without working for ourselves.’
Rousseau, SC II.iv
Here’s to public life, happiness as a common endeavour, and a recovery of the true meaning of politics – polites – those concerned with public affairs.
My own book on this (need to add chapters on religion, education and psychology/emotions).
“Though it has rarely been the subject of academic criticism, there is a philosophy of truth that animates Jean-Jacques Rousseau's broader philosophical system. This philosophy of truth was unique for its time—in the same way as the whole of Rousseau's thought—in its emphasis on feeling over reason, the heart over the mind, the simple over the sophisticated, the useful over the demonstrable, the personal over the systematic. Rousseau's philosophy of truth might be more accurately called a ‘philosophy of truthseeking’ or an ‘ethics of truthseeking’, because its focus is on the pursuit and acquisition of truth rather than on the nature of truth itself. What was needed, Rousseau believed, was a guide back to the simple truths of human happiness—truths that were immediately apparent to us in our natural state but have become opaque in society. This article describes Rousseau's normative philosophy of truthseeking, of what human beings must do if they hope to (re)discover the truths of human happiness. This philosophy can be summarised as utility, autonomy, immediacy and simplicity in pursuit of what Rousseau called the ‘truths that pertain to the happiness of mankind’”.
Rousseau's Ethics of Truth: A Sublime Science of Simple Souls by Jason Neidleman
Fine book, affirming that there is an ‘ethics of truth’ that animates Rousseau’s diverse writings on politics and religion, on solitude and society.
‘In 1758, Rousseau announced that he had adopted "vitam impendere vero" (dedicate life to truth) as a personal pledge. Despite the dramatic nature of this declaration, no scholar has yet approached Rousseau's work through the lens of truth or truthseeking. What did it mean for Rousseau to lead a life dedicated to truth? This book presents Rousseau's normative account of truthseeking, his account of what human beings must do if they hope to discover the truths essential to human happiness. Rousseau's writings constitute a practical guide to these truths; they describe how he arrived at them and how others might as well. In reading Rousseau through the lens of truth, Neidleman traverses the entirety of Rousseau's corpus, and, in the process, reveals a series of symmetries among the disparate themes treated in those texts. The first section of the book lays out Rousseau's general philosophy of truth and truthseeking. The second section follows Rousseau down four distinct pathways to truth: reverie, republicanism, religion, and reason. With a strong grounding in both the Anglophone and Francophone scholarship on Rousseau, this book will appeal to scholars across a broad range of disciplines.’
From the Precis of Rousseau’s Ethics of Truth: A Sublime Science of Simple Souls By Jason Neidleman (Routledge 2017)
‘The inspiration for the book came from an arresting phrase—communion des coeurs (communion of hearts)—that appears in Marcel Raymond’s commentary on Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker. A “communion of hearts” was the aim, Raymond wrote, of Rousseau’s solitary reveries.’ ‘As I reflected on the Reveries, it became clear that Rousseau sought in reverie something analogous to the fellowship of citizens he so famously celebrated in political writings like the Discourses, Social Contract, and Government of Poland. … It is my contention … that, in reading Rousseau through the lens of communion and his preferred pathways to communion, a coherent and consistent philosophy of truthseeking emerges. There is a symmetry that unites the communion Rousseau experienced in solitary reverie, with the religious communion he enjoyed among his “brothers” in Neuchâtel, and the political communion he extolled in his writings on politics. (Political Fragment, iii:178; iv:54) There is an impulse represented in each of these experiences to become part of something larger than oneself, to “extend our being,” as Rousseau puts it in Emile. (iv:430; xiii:312)
This impulse toward communion is manifested across the spectrum of Rousseau’s writings, whether as the savage’s love of existence, the citizen’s love of the patria, the solitary’s love of nature, the philosopher’s love of the “whole human race,” (Geneva Manuscript, iii:178; iv:54), or the Christian’s love of her “brothers.”
Neither religious faith, nor civic virtue, nor nature walks, nor public festivals were ends in themselves for Rousseau. Each was rather judged by him on the basis of its capacity to move human beings closer to the communion that the savage and solitary experience as communion with nature, the citizen, Julie, and Emile experience as a communion des coeurs, and that the religious believer experiences as communion with God and with his or her fellow believers. Each could be hijacked, usually under the influence of amour propre, such that it undermined communion and fostered instead division and inequality. But each could be redemptive as well, when pursued within the constraints of Rousseau’s philosophy of truthseeking.’
Here’s some more thinking along my lines, for the readers out there.
Williams examines whether Rousseau is a Hobbesian or a Platonist with respect to rejecting or accepting transcendent norms, and produces an effective argument in favour of the transcendental position. It’s my view too.
‘The book is organized into three main parts. The first sketches the background of Platonism and materialist positivism in modern European metaphysics and political philosophy that provided the context for Rousseau’s intellectual development. The second examines Rousseau’s choice of Platonism over positivism and its consequences for his philosophy generally. The third addresses the legacy of Rousseau’s thought and its appropriation by Kant, Marx, and Foucault, suggesting that in an age where materialism and relativism are rife, Rousseau may have much to teach us about how we view our own society and can engage in constructive critique of it.’
“Rousseau is too often thought to have waved his hands at what successors like Kant and Freud would really grasp. Williams is to be congratulated for following Rousseau’s own lead to Plato, his greatest predecessor. Surprisingly, his Platonic Rousseau, though rooted in the past, proves a greater original and more important guide to our own time than the Rousseaus who gesture toward the future.”
—Jonathan Marks, Ursinus College
I have to say … I agree very much. This all takes me back to when I was having to fend off objections to notions of ‘Truth’, involving having to respond critically to the miserable caricatures of the thinkers I love, like Rousseau, but also Plato, Hegel and Marx.
Truth matters, morality matters. Truth exists. And we will never be in a world ‘beyond good and evil’. How we make those this matter in our political institutions and social relations and identities, of course, is the big question. But since truth and ‘post-truth’, and the character and quality of public life, are in the news, these books – and the tradition of thought they – and I - work in – are certainly worth investigating. The field of practical reason – politics and ethics – and the big question of how human beings may come to live well together.