13: Francois de La Rochefoucauld’s Immoral Maxims
It's another episode about a Nietzsche influence. This time, rather than talking about a philosopher from Ancient Greece, we found one from the Ancien Régime: Francois de La Rochefoucauld, the author of the Moral Maxims. Like fellow French philosopher Jean de La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld is "a man of one book". The Maxims - a volume that is about sixty pages in length - is his sole contribution to the Western philosophical canon. Yet, solely on the basis of this work, Voltaire praised La Rochefoucauld as the greatest master of language since the revival of letters. We'll briefly consider Rochefoucauld's life as a background for his work, study a few central epigrams and his prefaratory essay on self-love in order to lay the groundwork of his thought, compare his ideas to those of Nietzsche's, then take a quick look at a selection of his epigrams of my own choosing. La Rochefoucauld's style was to write in very short epigrams, often merely a sentence-long. The content of his work is concerned with a number of themes, among them: self-love as the explanation of all human action; the rule of thumb that our true motives are usually concealed from ourselves; that our virtues are often merely our vices in a disguised form. Thus, La Rochefoucauld has the distinction among Nietzsche's influences, insofar as he influenced Nietzsche both in style and substance. Ironically, the author of the Moral Maxims may have been an immoralist to prefigure Nietzsche. After all, he was one of the first psychologists... and isn't psychology inherently a vice?