The Priority of Pity from Calvin to Rousseau

Abstract

When d’Alembert suggested in the Encyclopédie that Geneva would be more sophisticated if it had a theater, he drew a famous response from Rousseau, citoyen de Genève. On the contrary, Rousseau replied in his 1758 Lettre à M. D’Alembert sur les spectacles, a theater would destroy the city, since theaters corrupt humanity’s noblest sentimental faculty – the ability to pity – by artificially arousing and discharging a false pity for false objects. That Rousseau should have thought of Geneva as a place of pity might be surprising. Geneva was known internationally for its works of benevolence and as a place of refuge, but Rousseau’s difficult childhood there had been marked by abandonment before his abrupt departure in 1728 at the age of 16. Helena Rosenblatt has argued that this letter on the theater was an attempt to “forge an alliance between the city’s traditionalist pastoral corps and the people against Voltaire and the Genevan patriciate.” Rousseau was speaking to the pastors in terms they would appreciate, and in doing so he made the connection between their concerns and his pity. The strained relationship between Rousseau and the city of his birth has been fruitfully analyzed, as has the irony that the model city of Calvin, who argued that humanity was depraved, should be the birthplace of Rousseau, who claimed that people were innately good. And yet despite their striking differences, many aspects of Rousseau have been found to have been secularized from Calvin: his concept of an elect, postlapsarian sense of the world, subjectivism, rigorous morality, an ideal of communion as a model for society, focus on justification, reliance on interior emotional states to test virtue, and republicanism.