Vonnegut

I read Slaughterhouse-Five for WWII book club topic. The few passages that I enjoyed:

She said she was going to join a church as soon as she decided which one was right. She never did decide. She did develop a terrible hankering for a crucifix, though. And she bought one from a Santa Fe gift shop during a trip the little family made out West during the Great Depression. Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

and

Billy asked for something to read on is trip to Tralfamadore. His captors had five million Earthling books on microfilm, but no way to project them in Billy's cabin. The had only one actual book in English, which would be placed in a Tralfamadorian museum. It was Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.

Mysteries at book club

For book club I read Dorothy Hughes, The Expendable Man.


"Unyielding bigots were a minority save in pockets of the Deep South. In today's climate, it was they who could do nothing but retreat behind their warped, sagging fences. No longer could they demand that the fences enclose the rest of the country."

The last of Rousseau and Hume

For Hume, every detail had to be addressed. In uncovering the conspiracy, Rousseau accorded the most trivial incidents equal probative value with the most wounding. No happening was by chance or without significance. To misquote T. S. Eliot slightly, “In the sordid particulars, the unearthly design appears." And only by confronting and disputing the sordid particulars could Hume confront and dispute the underlying narrative-his alleged plot against Rousseau. 

and

For a period, Rousseau's educational theories were all the rage, not only in France and England, but in Switzerland, Germany, and lreland, too. Scores of novel pedagogical treatises were produced, almost all of them bearing his imprint. Parents who experimented by raising their children on Rousseauian principles experienced mixed results, some reporting that they produced a disconcerting wildness in their guinea pigs. [t is possible that Davenport intentionally brought up his orphaned grandson Davies along Rousseauian lines. The boy turned out well, but fretted that he had received insufficient formal education, and did not like to hear the name of Rousseau mentioned. 

In Paris during 1770-71, Rousseau gave readings-sometimes for up to seventeen hours-from the Confessions. His erstwhile friend Mme d'Epinay, feeling defamed by his portrayal of her as a scheme: and gossip, eventually persuaded the police to prohibit them. His readings elicited polarized reactions. Some listeners wept and kissed Rousseau’s hand.Others were revolted.
 

Also posthumously published was the insanely brilliant Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques, which had gestated over several years. In these split-personality dialogues between Rousseau and Jean-Jacques, Rousseau is judge, jury, and defendant as the author's deeds and personality are forensically examined and extracts from his writings used as evidence against him. Rousseau convicts himself on several counts, including being weak willed and following his whims, rather than being influenced by his duty. (Here he also has second thoughts on Ramsay's portrait of him, accusing Hume of having contrived the painting out of sheer malice and ensuring that in every respect-posture, clothes, Ramsay’s palette-the sitter emerged as dark and monstrous with, in Rousseau’s characterization, “the face of a frightful cyclops.”) When the work was completed in 1776, Rousseau was desperate to forestall any attempt by his foes to suppress it. 

and

OUR TWO PROTAGONISTS shared one noteworthy devotee. In 1762, with Rousseau in Métiers and Hume about to move to Paris, in the isolated Prussian city of Konigsberg, a thirty-eight-year-old lecturer devoured Rousseau’s works as they were published. According to one anecdote, the fastidious Immanuel Kant, whose daily routine was so rigid and undeviating that people set their watches by him, became so absorbed in Emile that he bewildered his neighbors by forgetting to take his usual post-lunch constitutional. Kant was alert to the seductive dangers of Rousseau’s language: he worried that its beauty detracted from his ideas; to penetrate these ideas he read and reread him Rousseau understood, he thought, the paradox of autonomy-that freedom meant conformity to a rule. As he was writing his own masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason, he had a single portrait in his house-of JeanJacques Rousseau. 

As for Hume, Kant said the Scot had “woken him from his dogmatic slumber.” His preoccupation with cause and effect, which he thought the basis of all scientific knowledge, was provoked by Hume's skeptical reflections. Unable to accept Hume’s skepticism about causation, he sought to demonstrate how a proposition such as “every event has a cause" could be known a priori (i.e., could be known independent of experience), even though it was a synthetic proposition (not true or false by virtue of its terms). “Water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius” is a synthetic proposition. “All bachelors are unmarried” is an analytic one, true by definition. 

WITH THE EXCEPTION of Nietzsche, probably no philosopher’s posthumous reputation has fluctuated quite so dramatically as Rousseau’s. The Confessions was initially decried ...pompous and obscene being the general judgment. Yet within a decade, sentiment was already becoming more positive. The work is now established as a literary masterpiece. 

Rousseau’s political legacy has been much more contentious. Although he himself was no advocate of rebellion, his name became inextricably bound up with the French Revolution. Its makers on all sides drew on his works to justify their actions, most famously Robespierre, who ideologically embraced Rousseau (along with such Romans as Cato) and executed with zeal his understanding of “the general will of the people”-in his own phrase une volonté une, “one single will." Nevertheless, two years before Robespierre grasped power, Edmund Burke had responded to the revolutionaries’ worship of Rousseau with a brilliant and farsighted diatribe, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. “Everyone knows that there is a great dispute among leaders [of the National Assembly] which of them is the best resemblance to Rousseau." The truth was, he said, they all resembled him. And Burke accused them of adopting the worst of Rousseau’s vices, vanity, “that makes the whole man false." “We have had the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England. . \ . He left no doubt in my mind that he entertained no principle to influence his heart of guide his understanding but vanity. With that he was possessed to a degree little short of madness.” In the twentieth century, Rousseau was charged with offering intellectual justification for totalitarianism. 

Rousseau’s constant influence on later generations is indubitable though not always positive). He can be seen as father of the Romantic movement (and even a great-grandfather of the Green movement). The Romantics were inspired by his confirmation of the worth of each and every one of us, however ordinary, by his emphasis on equality, on knowledge of the inner self, and on a spiritual connection with nature, as well as by his imagination and the depth of his feelings. 

In 1816, Byron and Percy Shelley went on a pilgrimage to Lake Geneva, carrying with them Héloise. Shelley described Rousseau as “a sublime genius.” Mary Shelley had studied Rousseau, and his writings inspired Frankenstein: the monster becomes corrupted by his association with society. Schiller, Stendhal (for whom he was “the noblest soul and the greatest genius that ever was”), de Tocqueville, and Schopenhauer were all admirers. To Hazlitt, he was a new Prometheus. Lytton Strachey said of the Confessions that it "started the vast current in literature and sentiment which is still flowing." A youthful Leo Tolstoy took to wearing a medal on which was engraved Rousseau's portrait; he read all of Rousseau’s works, but was captivated in particular by Héloise, Emile, and the Confessions. 

IF ROUSSEAU’S POSTHUMOUS reputation has ridden helter-skelter...one moment as a benevolent patron of equality and liberty, the next the warped mastermind of tyranny-Hume's has steadily climbed, though with the occasional hiatus. In America, the influence of his less theoretical writings (his essays and History) should not be overlooked. Among the United States’ founding fathers, for instance, James Madison was a staunch disciple, his version of federalism traceable to Hume’s thinking. Many American luminaries consumed Hume's History-including Samuel Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Rush (though Thomas Jefferson despised the work, labeling Hume a “conceited Scotchman”). 

In the nineteenth century, the historian began to make way for the philosopher. Hume’s History ceased to be the standard text, superseded by, among others, Thomas Macaulay’s. Meanwhile, the Treatise, the book that fell "dead born," came to be recognized as an enduring masterpiece. By the twentieth century, Hume's standing as one of the most significant thinkers of all time became firmly entrenched: there remain ongoing engagement with his skeptical conundrums, which still fascinate and unsettle, tease and bewitch. His philosophical style is hailed as an exemplar of clarity and a model of ingenuity. Bertrand Russell, an empiricist in the Humean tradition, acknowledged Hume’s supreme importance in his A History of Western Philosophy. The Vienna Circle, which for a time before World War II dominated the world of philosophy, was a legatee of the eighteenth-century Scot. This group of mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers dismissed much of aesthetics, morality, and religion as meaningless metaphysics; to be meaningful, propositions had either to be verifiable through experience or true by definition. Two centuries earlier, Hume had famously concluded his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: 

If we take in our hand any volume: of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance: let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental masoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. 

Members of the Circle grappled with Hume's conundrum about induction, as did the Viennese-born Professor Sir Karl Popper. In his book about Hume, the philosopher Sir Freddie Ayer could confidently assert that Hume was the greatest of all British philosophers. Beyond the confined world of academic philosophy, Albert Einstein revered Hume, giving credit to the philosopher for transforming his powers of critical reasoning and ultimately with being a catalyst in his discovery of the theory of relativity. In a 1915 letter Einstein revealed that just before his fundamental insight, he studied Hume's treatise with eagerness and admiration.

and 

It was at this point that a disjunction in their intellectual personalities ensured that the division between them would be unbridgeable. Rousseau conceived a bold conclusion, and then filled in the details. Hume operated in the other way-starting with the facts, and using these to build a case. So Rousseau imagined the deadly and extensive conspiracy against him, before unearthing his corroborative evidence. Hume, in contrast, went straight to that evidence. By examination of each piece, he sought to discredit his attacker’s nightmare thesis, to persuade the public that there were more reasons to disbelieve than to believe it. Rousseau’s reliance on intuitive imagination disoriented and enraged his erstwhile benefactor. 

All this goes some way to explaining why Hume erupted so violently when he saw Rousseau’s allegations, and why he made such frenetic efforts to limit any damage from what he knew was plausibly the most potent and destructive pen in Europe, for he never lost sight of Rousseau’s genius. But the unremitting brutality of Hume’s reaction put his reputation in Paris more at risk than any claim of Rousseau’s: in effect he exchanged roles with his accuser in his search for vengeance. He also demonstrated how little he had assimilated the manners of the salons in which he was feted. Perhaps he had not been offered the opportunity to study the Rule of Life on Mme de Boufflers’s bedroom wall. 

MORE PERPLEXING IS Hume’s persistent mendacity-his utter falsehoods, his economies with the truth, his deviousness. Before the “plot” coalesced, these included the false impression he gave that he was ignorant of the King of Prussia letter; his holding back its authorship from Rousseau, then telling him that Walpole had intended it to remain secret; his not forwarding letters to Rousseau from de L’Espinasse and (later) d’Alembert; the exaggeration of his role in winning Rousseau’s pension. 

The affair of the faux retour chaise is illuminating. Surely this was subterfuge with the purest of motives, for he was supporting the indigent and concealing the charity.

Hume was just as unlikely to give the ploy a second thought When it came to the truth, he had an instrumentalist outlook, telling his publisher, in August 1770: “You see I am a good casuist, and can distinguish cases very nicely. It is certainly a wrong thing to deceive any body, much more a friend; but yet the difference must still be allowed infinite between deceiving a man for his good and for his injury." 

That attitude, to Rousseau, was anathema. As so often, there are puzzling inconsistencies in Rousseau’s pronouncements, but his gut instinct was to recoil at any form of deception. For Rousseau, a white lie was still a lie, an act that both slighted its target and sullied its creator. Even if Hume was not the originator of the trick over the chaise, his awareness of it, in Rousseau’s eyes, made him complicit; his private judgment as to what was in his guest’s best interest was both condescending and contemptuous. 

In the Fourth Walk of the Reveries, where he confesses to having sometimes lied out of shame or embarrassment, he writes, “The lies we call white lies are real lies, because to act deceitfully in one’s interest or that of others is no less unjust than to act deceitfully against the interests of others." Rousseau saw himself as the apostle of truth: for him, the truth was of paramount importance, for him his “horror of falsehood outweighed all other things." 

PERHAPS THE MORAL of the whole sad encounter is that while m men cannot make madman sane, madman an make sane men mad. In his momentary madness, fury, and panic, Hume never grasped the root of Rousseau’s complaint: that though Hume I'M carried out the obligations of a friend in practice, he was constitutionally incapable of doing so in spirit. Rousseau expected his fnends to be entirely straight with him, to open their heart, to be motivated purely by love. Friendship required a special form of understanding. He wanted Mme d'Epinay: “My expressions rarely have the usual significance, for it is always my heart that communes with you, and some day maybe you will realise that its language is not that of other hearts." The nature of friendship is something Rousseau returns to time after time. In the Confessions, he reveals the bar of suspicion potential friends had to hurdle.

Rousseau had a visceral grasp of Aristotle's analysis of friendship m the Nicomachean Ethics.“What is just is not the same for a friend towards a friend as towards a stranger.” Friendship involves a basket of mutual emotions-respect, trust, warmth, a desire for that penal. happiness and success, a desire to be in that person’s company-rein. forced by action. And friendship is sustained over time. Do not expect friendship to ripen too quickly, Rousseau admonished young Flam Coindet in 1758. Friendship “is something that must mature slowly ovuthe years, so that true friends are friends long before they use the word ‘friend.’ ” 

Hume was baffled by Rousseau’s fondness for Sultan, “his affection for that creature is above all expression or conception." But Round: relationship with the canine gives us some insight into Rousseau’s relationship with his fellow humans. Friendship for Rousseau was achievable only by equals, who were independent of each other. A true friend had every claim on his heart but none on his liberty. During Boswell’s pilgrimage to Rousseau in Motiers, Rousseau maintained that a person’s attitude to cats was a vital test of character. Those of a despotic nature “do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave." A relationship with a dog, too, should not be one of ruler and subject. About the predecessor to Sultan, Rousseau mote. “My dog himself was my friend, not my slave: we always had the same will, but it was not because he obeyed me." As for Sultan, though he was a source of endless trouble, he could never be mendacious; he could never be disingenuous, insincere, hypocritical, or patronizing. Sultan was incapable of disloyalty.