Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- He is the father of the romantic movement
- he is for Sparta, and against Athens.
- he admired particularly the life of Lycurgus. Like the Spartans, he
took success in war as the test of merit; - Science and virtue, he held, are incompatible, and all sciences have an ignoble origin.
- He says that democracy is best in small States, aristocracy in middle-sized ones, and monarchy in large ones.
- “forced to be free”, “general will”
- Hegel, who owed much to Rousseau, adopted his misuse of the word “freedom,” and defined it as the right to obey the police, or something not very different.
- The Social Contract became the Bible of most of the leaders in the French Revolution, but no doubt, as is the fate of Bibles, it was not carefully read and was still less understood by many of its disciples.
- Its first-fruits in practice was the reign of Robespierre; the dictatorships of Russia and Germany (especially the latter) are in part an outcome of Rousseau’s teaching.
CHAPTER XXIV Schopenhauer
[…]He dislikes Christianity, preferring the religions of India, both Hinduism and Buddhism.[…]
Schopenhauer’s mother was a lady of literary aspirations, who settled in Weimar two weeks before the battle of Jena. There she kept a literary salon, wrote books, and enjoyed friendships with men of culture. She had little affection for he son, and a keen eye for his faults. She warned him against bombast and empty pathos; he was annoyed by her philanderings. When he came of age he inherited a modest competence; after this, he and his mother gradually found each other more and more intolerable. His low opinion of women is no doubt due, at least in part, to his quarrels with his mother.
[…]He kept a poodle named Atma (the world-soul), walked two hours every day, smoked a long pipe, read the London Times, and employed correspondents to hunt up evidences of his fame. He was anti-democratic, and hated the revolution of 1848; he believed in spiritualism and magic; in his study he had a bust of Kant and a bronze Buddha. In his manner of life he tried to imitate Kant except as regards early rising.
Nor is the doctrine sincere, if we may judge by Schopenhauer’s life. He habitually dined well, at a good restaurant; he had many trivial love-affairs, which were sensual but not passionate; he was exceedingly quarrelsome and unusually avaricious.[…]
[…]It is hard to find in his life evidences of any virtue except kindness to animals, which he carried to the point of objecting to vivisection in the interests of science. In all other respects he was completely selfish. It is difficult to believe that a man who was profoundly convinced of the virtue of asceticism and resignation would never have made any attempt to embody his convictions in his practice.
Historically, two things are important about Schopenhauer: his pessimism, and his doctrine that will is superior to knowledge.[…]