"Collected Maxims and Other Writings" by La Rochefoucauld

La Rochefoucauld was a French author and nobleman most famous for his memoirs and his maxims. Part of the literary movement of classicism, his maxims often dealt with very human struggles that can be related back to philosophies found in aspects of Plato, Socrates and even Xenophon and Zeno. There are three parts to his writings that are split accordingly and all include some sort of philosophical enquiry into his own times: there are the memoirs in which he details his own life alongside its importance or lack thereof, there are his maxims which are the most famous and famed for being existentialist questions interpreted as double edged swords of the human experience - relating both good and bad actions to the passion and the reason of human nature. Finally, there are the letters in which he corresponds often using aspects of his own philosophy to either rationalise or complicate his own feelings in a way that often only he can comprehend, leaving the correspondent imaginably quite baffled and introspective. Within the writing of the “Maxims” there has been frequent alterations made by the author during his life, a few made after his death and in translation and editing, the text has been again corrupted from its original source.

In total now, there are 504 normally published. Many of them are only a few lines long and naturally do not exceed more than half a page. Rochefoucauld seems to take observations of mankind from his own times of war, turbulence and suffering and refuses to cast his thoughts over with a blind eye to the reality of France during this period, showing the true form of human nature when passion gets in the way of reason and vice versa. Both passion and reason are proven to be positive things, but one is always against the other and thus, without equilibrium they will both suffer and so will the human from which these emotions are coming from - inflicting it upon others is even worse and yet, completely inevitable. La Rochefoucauld is commended with having influenced an entire generation of not only the existentialists, but also the philosophers who have their prime study in human morality and how we rationalise the passionate actions of humans acting in extreme good, or in extreme bad and what that even means. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche admired La Rochefoucauld and was influenced heavily by his approach the ethics and the nature of human justification for moral compasses. La Rochefoucauld’s influence can be found in philosophical works such as ‘Either/Or’ by Soren Kierkegaard and the works of Schopenhauer, Kant and even the poetry of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.

The main focus of La Rochefoucauld’s works that have made it into the present day currently are his approaches to reason, passion, human nature, judgement and the way in which the human experience is impacted and often made worse by considering what is the right thing to do and what the human particularly wants out of their experience - often these are either two different things or the person does not actually know and ends up under the influence of another, more than most following a crowd theory on what is generally considered just. The way in which La Rochefoucauld tries to reason this is through a series of maxims in which some appear more than often to be paradoxical and therefore, they present the human condition of morality, ethics and judgement as being overcast with this constant decision of the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ where the ‘why’ is mostly the argument of others. Therefore, Rochefoucauld argues that morality cannot truly exist in a space where the morals are primarily based on time and place for they will change from the past to the present and from the present into the future, making the past seem immoral and the future seem impossible.

La Rochefoucauld takes the passion argument of human nature and gives it a voice to which it is responsible for the artistic follies and often the over-exuberance of human involvement with cause. Passions, according to the philosopher, are a feeling of injustice and therefore are dangerous to the logic and reason of the human experience, impacting the morality in ways that even the human experiencing passion cannot comprehend fully for their emotions are changed and manipulated for the situation at hand:

“Passions are the only orators who always succeed in persuading. They are, so to speak, a natural art, with infallible rules; and the most artless man who is passionate, is more persuasive than the most eloquent man who is not…” (“Moral Reflections or Maxims”, p.5, v.9)

The aspect that La Rochefoucauld argues for the most is that man is passionate, but when lost in the emotion of passion, cannot be reasonable to any degree and therefore, is not leading himself but is led by others who influence, inform and involve themselves with this passion. Whether it be for war and patriotism or love and death, passion often overshadows reason by allowing morality and ethics to be influenced by the want for free will and notoriety in goodness rather than the primary and often impulsive want to do good for the fact that it is right and just in reason. This, to the philosopher, is the primary difference between the heart’s compulsion to take over the mind and the brain’s compulsion to take over the mind - both struggling to keep equilibrium:

“Man often thinks he is the leader when he is being led; and while his mind is pointing him in one direction, his heart is imperceptibly drawing him in another. Strength and weakness of the mind are ill-named; in reality they are only good and bad conditions of the body’s organs.” (“Moral Reflections or Maxims”, p.15, v.43-44)

Passion is also relative to love and so, La Rochefoucauld often relates passion to the spirit of humanity and the mystery of the soul. Love is also relative of hatred in the text and so, La Rochefoucauld relates hatred to passion as well. From this, the reader often gets the impression that the most extreme of human emotions are clouds to the perception of just and often the correct will of man. Thus, the reader will understand that the prime difference between reason and passion is that reason is often performed without the emotional attachment that passion leads the spirit and the soul to:

“It is hard to define love. What can be said about it is that, within the soul, it is a passion to reign; within the mind, it is a kinship of spirit; and within the body, it is merely a hidden subtle wish to possess what we love after going through many mysterious rituals. If there is a kind of love that is pure and unmingled with our other passions, it is one that is hidden in the depths of our heart and unknown even to ourselves. No disguise can hide where love exists or simulate it where it does not exist. There are hardly any people who are not ashamed of having loved, when they no longer love each other. If love is judged by most of its results, it is more like hatred than friendship.” (“Moral Reflections of Maxims”, p.23, v.68-72)

To conclude, it is more than often that La Rochefoucauld goes through the maxims that cause differentiation between the mind, the body and the heart where the mind is reason and ethics, the body is want and persuasion and the heart is passion and irrationality. The way in which the observations are made are often paradoxical for the reason of showing how humanity cannot possibly control all three at once, as to imbalance the three would mean to make the other two remaining (and now lower) of the three suffer greatly and thus, the human involved also suffers on their judgement, on their morals, on their ethics and on their perception of reality. The main point is that it is true that passion makes fools out of us all.

Citation:

La Rochefoucauld, F (2008). Collected Maxims and Other Writings. UK: Oxford World's Classics