Transcript for Fred Neuhouser Interview on Rousseau | Self-Esteem Requires External Validation

0. Introduction

Fitting for Rousseau, I begin with a confession. As an undergraduate studying with Frederick Neuhouser, I'd only read his seminal work, Rousseau’s Theodicy so carefully because I was guilty of all the absurd foibles it cataloged. I was obsessed with status and prestige and winning the approval of the very peers that I sought to one up.

From Neuhouser, I learned that Rousseau identified a singular psychological source at the origin of all this phenomenon, amour-propre, the desire for recognition. With the clarity of hindsight, it's clear that amour-propre led me to rack up achievements I didn't need, to pursue careers I didn't want all in order to impress people I didn't particularly like. And as soon as I learned about all the havoc that amour-propre was wreaking on my life, I did perhaps what any hasty young man would've done, I tried to renounce it completely.

I switched from Computer Science to Philosophy. I deleted all of my social media. I moved to Nepal to practice in a Tibetan monastery. But Neuhouser's book also rescued me from this line of extreme thinking. It showed me that amour-propre is so constitutive to what makes humans humans, that we can no sooner relinquish our desire for recognition than a triangle can cease to have three sides. And so this whole host of modern advice that we hear so often, stop caring what other people think. Be your own man. Think for yourself. It's not only impossible but as we'll discuss today, it's in a very expression of inflamed amour-propre itself. 

Renunciation is not the point, because if you trade your suits for rags, if you take too much pride in being a starving artist, if you delight in your lack of recognition as proof that you're part of the avant-garde, then you've simply navigated away from one set of perversions by beaching yourself on another. When it comes to recognition, poverty can be just as indulgent as opulence. The goal then is not to stop caring about prestige, but to know how to delight in the right type of approval from the right type of person for doing the right thing in the right amount. This fundamentally is what this book has taught me, and its tremendous influence on my life can be best summarized by an elegant passage that Rousseau himself writes from the perspective of a tutor to a young man:

If I keep him away from society to the end, what will he have learned from me? Everything perhaps except the most necessary art for a man and a citizen, how to live with his fellows.

​​​​(Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

It is this delicate art that Professor Neuhouser has to teach us today.

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1. Why We Desire External Validation

Johnathan Bi: Can you give us a gentle introduction to the central distinction that you read in Rousseau? 

Fred Neuhouser: Amour de soi is the kind of self-love we first think of when you hear the word self-love or self-interest in this. And it means that you are more interested in your wellbeing than you are in the wellbeing of other people, that your wellbeing is especially important to you. Paradigm instances of what self-love is after would be things like food, sleep, necessary shelter, clothing, and so on and so forth. That kind of self-love is not so hard to understand. 

The other kind of self-love that Rousseau thinks is very different is what he calls amour-propre. And amour-propre is basically a drive. Rousseau calls it a passion that we have as human beings to seek what you might call esteem or respect from other people. Rousseau sometimes says amour-propre leads us to seek the good opinion of others, the favorable opinion of others, so approval and all kinds of things that fit under the category of esteem and respect.

Johnathan Bi: So we're already painting a very intersubjective social view of human nature. And what we're trying to win is recognition. Nietzsche tells us that we should read philosophies as intimate confessions of, by the philosophers himself. Tell us a bit more about Rousseau's life. Why was he so interested in this topic? 

Fred Neuhouser: Rousseau personally was obsessed with not being recognized in his life. The famous incident in his confessions. He was an adolescent working as a servant in an aristocratic family. And Rousseau felt he had been done wrong by his employers because he wasn't included in their will. That's an injury of narcissism, that's an injury of amour-propre. And so to get revenge for that, he stole a ribbon from the woman of the house. And when he was discovered, he denied that he stole the ribbon and blamed it on a poor servant girl in the house who then got punished and dismissed for stealing. 

So this is a big incident in Rousseau's life. He comes back to it all the time, but that shows really clearly that there's something about being recognized or being misrecognized. That's extremely important to Rousseau. And then in his later years when Emile and The Social Contract were published, he was driven from France. His books were burned. He was desecrated publicly. He had to search for a place in Europe where he could live. And so he was constantly moving around trying to escape real persecution. 

And so this issue of not being recognized, it leads him finally to go off to try to live a solitary life, the reveries of a solitary wanderer or what he wrote to describe this. And he describes very clearly, he tries to get rid of his amour-propre. He tries to not care about the contemptuous looks he thinks he's receiving from people, and he can't do it. He can't do it. So you're right, this was a big issue for Rousseau, the philosopher, too.