best explained by amour de soi-même. A life of vice, he claims, is more lucrative than one of virtue. As the dialogue progresses, he seems to care less about being a genius and more about money. At one point, he asserts to Diderot-moi: “Gold, gold is everything, and everything without gold, is nothing.”172 Rather than defend his chosen occupation on the grounds that it is a form of genius, he suggests it is the surest way to support himself. The nephew explains that the Parisian economy is “hell” for many people. It is unforgiving to everyone but the rich and talented, and a large portion of the city’s inhabitants live lives of desperation and poverty. Mediocre musicians like himself cannot hope to make an honest living. Thus, he opts for vice and hypocrisy as the most reliable means with which to avoid poverty and find some enjoyment in life. Best to playact the fool than make an honest living as a music tutor.
Diderot departs from Rousseau’s view of amour-propre in another important respect as well. He has the nephew reject the idea that amour-propre is born of society. Rather, it is a fact of nature that needs no societal catalyst. Referring to his young son as a “little savage,” which seems to be a reference to Rousseau’s primitive humans in the Second Discourse, the nephew asserts that his son “he would of his own accord want to be richly dressed, magnificently fed, liked by men and loved by women, and concentrate on himself all the goods of life.”173 Nature makes us prefer ourselves to and wished to be esteemed by everyone, not civilization.
In any case, much of Diderot’s portrait of the nephew is consistent with the account of moral psychology and the characterization of Paris by Rousseau. His narrative is constructed, however, so he can defend the opposite politics. Specifically, he seeks to exonerate geniuses, which presumably includes the philosophes, from Rousseau’s indictment that they are responsible for the corruptions of the age. Contrary to Rousseau, the intellectuals in Rameau’s Nephew are not considered to be the best of the species and leaders of French culture. Instead, they are “queer people” who are badly out of step with the predominant values of the day. Although they are not perfect and include numerous bad actors among their ranks, Diderot still believes they tend to be as virtuous as the population at large and have more social value. The villains in his dialogue are the nobles and the wealthy, who hoard all of society’s resources and reward knaves and vice rather than virtue and talent.
Finally, it is arguable that Diderot-moi’s proposed solution to the nephew’s unfortunate predicament is a veiled criticism of Rousseau. At the conclusion of the dialogue, the nephew is encouraged by Diderot-moi to take Diogenes as a role model.174 Rather than slavishly conform to Paris convention and value vice and gold, he could stop being driven by both amour-propre and amour de soi-même and follow Diogenes by dedicating himself to principles such as moderation and virtue. Notably, Rousseau was viewed by many of his contemporaries as a modern-day Diogenes.175 Perhaps this reference is a reminder to Rousseau that he has failed to live up to his own philosophy. He still cares too much what people think of him and conforms to the values of the city he claims to ignore and despise.
The Abbé Petit in d’Holbach’s Salon
Rousseau had ample reason to distrust the defenses d’Alembert and Diderot give of the mechanical arts and the artisan classes. Their support for the average person is at best uneven and at worse insincere. Even if Rousseau had not read the letters and writings of his former friends (and he could not have read Rameau’s Nephew), he personally witnessed their contemptuous attitudes toward the masses and working classes. There is one particular experience, in fact, that perfectly sums up Rousseau’s criticisms of Paris and his defense of provincial life—one recorded by Baron d’Holbach himself. On Shrove Tuesday in 1754, Rousseau attended a reading on tragedy by the Abbé Petit, a provincial from Normandy, set up by Diderot at d’Holbach’s salon. The reading was a disaster from beginning to end, as the abbé began spouting out numerous absurdities on the nature of tragedy and quickly revealed he was utterly lacking in literary talent. Rather than politely allowing the abbé to finish and sending him on his way without any unnecessary encouragement, the attending members of the d’Holbach coterie were determined to humiliate him. They put “up a mock show of admiration for the wretched author’s tragedy.”176 Rousseau was horrified by his friends’ puerile behavior, and he not so gently informed the author of the humiliating truth of the situation. Rather than thank Rousseau for his candor, however, the clueless abbé turned his anger on him, and the two had to be separated.
Rousseau’s Anglo biographers, while intrigued by the story, usually fail to appreciate its significance. Typically, it is read in light of Rousseau’s fraying relationship with the philosophes.177 The content of the dispute is far more revealing, however, and ties in with Rousseau’s arguments at the end of the First Discourse. The poor abbé becomes the object of ridicule for the sole reason that he lacks literary talent. The philosophes in the room affirm themselves based on their superior talent. And, worst of all, the value of the abbé’s personality would invariably decline in his own eyes if he understood and accepted the truth of the situation. If he would accept the truth, he would be led to erroneously conclude that his contributions to the world as a religious leader are meaningless and that his life has value only if he is a writer. For Rousseau, this must have been a cruel case in which life imitated art, and it probably reminded him of his worry that in a culture enamored of the arts and sciences a great clothier would be shamed into quitting his trade to become “a bad versifier or an inferior Geometer”178—or, in this case, an awful literary theorist.
Even if d’Alembert, Diderot, and the other philosophes were genuinely ambivalent about the mechanical arts, their occasional praise did nothing to soften the implications of judging people by their intellectual abilities. Rousseau’s position is that the philosophes could not simultaneously celebrate talent as the true measure of human worth and respect those without it, such as artisans and peasants. Moreover, their confidence that they had unique talents produced in the philosophes a subtle arrogance and contempt for the general mass of humanity. How much compassion can one expect, after all, from those who believe that the fate of the species rests on their shoulders? Rousseau asked the philosophes to repudiate themselves, and that they would not do. They would become who they were. Any concessions made to Rousseau masked their true intent: to double down on their original claims.
In the years right after the publication of the First Discourse, then, Rousseau found himself in a debate not so much about the value of the arts and sciences as about the social value of the artists and scientists themselves. The philosophes, he realized, were promoting themselves as a social class as much as they were promoting the knowledge they sought to catalogue and began to adopt the attitudes of classical aristocrats. Included in this aristocratic glorification of the talented was a healthy, if not always publicly expressed, contempt for average people, who according to the new value system were encouraged to view themselves through the eyes of those who looked down on them. The psychological and existential consequences of this project, Rousseau well understood, were devastating to all but a small sliver of the population. As his dispute with the philosophes developed, the concept of amour-propre would increasingly become one of the most effective arrows in his quiver.
Conclusion
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