Rousseau and Romanticism — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — John Shaqi
Rousseau and Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · en
logic with the classic spirit was made by a Frenchman who was himself
violently logical and also a great geometrician--Pascal. One should
keep distinct, says Pascal, the _esprit de géométrie_ and the _esprit
de finesse_. The _esprit de finesse_ is not, like the _esprit de
géométrie_, abstract, but very concrete.[32] So far as a man possesses
the _esprit de finesse_ he is enabled to judge correctly of the
ordinary facts of life and of the relationships between man and man.
But these judgments rest upon such a multitude of delicate perceptions
that he is frequently unable to account for them logically. It is to
intuitive good sense and not to the _esprit de géométrie_ that the
gentleman (_honnête homme_) of the neo-classical period owed his fine
tact. Pascal himself finally took a stand against reason as understood
both by the Cartesian and by the man of the world. Unaided reason
he held is unable to prevail against the deceits of the imagination;
it needs the support of intuition--an intuition that he identifies
with grace, thus making it inseparable from the most austere form of
Christianity. The “heart,” he says, and this is the name he gives to
intuition, “has reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” A Plato or
an Aristotle would not have understood this divorce between reason and
intuition.[33]
Pascal seems to get his insight only by flouting ordinary good sense.
He identifies this insight with a type of theological dogma of which
good sense was determined to be rid; and so it tended to get rid of
the insight along with the dogma. Classical dogma also seemed at times
to be in opposition to the intuitive good sense of the man of the
world. The man of the world therefore often inclined to assail both
the classical and the Christian tradition in the name of good sense,
just as the Cartesian inclined to assail these traditions in the name
of abstract reason. Perhaps the best exponent of anti-traditional good
sense in the seventeenth century was Molière. He vindicated nature,
and by nature he still meant in the main normal human nature, from
arbitrary constraints of every kind whether imposed by an ascetic
Christianity or by a narrow and pedantic classicism. Unfortunately
Molière is too much on the side of the opposition. He does not seem
to put his good sense into the service of some positive insight of
his own. Good sense may be of many degrees according to the order of
facts of which it has a correct perception. The order of facts in human
nature that Molière’s good sense perceived is not the highest and so
this good sense appears at times too ready to justify the bourgeois
against the man who has less timid and conventional views. So at
least Rousseau thought when he made his famous attack on Molière.[34]
Rousseau assailed Molière in the name of instinct as Pascal would have
assailed him in the name of insight, and fought sense with sensibility.
The hostility of Rousseau to Molière, according to M. Faguet, is that