Here is an interesting quiz to determine one’s philosophical stance.
Unsurprisingly, my views coincide 100% with those of Ayn Rand. More surprisingly, I coincide in 0% with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I really thought there would be at least a 5% overlap, but there is nothing. I’m also close to John Stuart Mill and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Clarissa's Blog 
My top ten
John Stuart Mill (100%)
Jeremy Bentham (85%)
Epicureans (77%)
Thomas Aquinas (73%)
Aristotle (66%)
St. Augustine (66%)
Immanuel Kant (64%)
Benedictus Spinoza (61%)
Jean-Paul Sartre (55%)
Ayn Rand (51%)
and bottom three
David Hume (39%)
William James (39%)
Nel Noddings (25%)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (0%)
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So we both are anti-Rousseau. Interesting.
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This quiz troubled me a lot.
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me too
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Top eleven:
1. John Stuart Mill (100%)
2. Jean-Paul Sartre (94%)
3. Epicureans (88%)
4. Jeremy Bentham (87%)
5. Immanuel Kant (85%)
6. Benedictus Spinoza (81%)
7. Stoics (77%)
8. Aristotle (74%)
9. Ayn Rand (72%)
10. Thomas Aquinas (70%)
11. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (67%)
Bottom four:
18. Cynics (31%)
19. St. Augustine (30%)
20. William James (15%)
21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (0%)
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It’s been a while since I’ve taken a philosophy class so I cannot comment on how well constructed this quiz is. I didn’t rank any of the questions, btw.
Why is it that nobody so far agrees with Rousseau?
Top:
1. John Stuart Mill (100%)
2. Jean-Paul Sartre (90%)
3. Epicureans (74%)
4. Thomas Aquinas (69%)
5. St. Augustine (69%)
Bottom:
16. Cynics (43%)
17. Stoics (42%)
18. Prescriptivism (36%)
19. Plato (25%)
20. William James (18%)
21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (0%)
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Turns out we are all united by our unconscious love for John Stuart Mill on this blog. Even though I have never even read him.
Soon, like Monsieur Jourdain, we will discover that we speak in prose.
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He’s a lot of fun to read. I recommend starting with the “The Subjection of Women.”
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Just for you, Clarissa …
13. John Stuart Mill 46%
Below Hume and Plato, in fact.
So actually, no. 🙂
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I got Epicurean (100%) and Rousseau 0 too. I’m very Kantian and 47% for the vile Rand.
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I happen to love Ayn Rand, so let’s be gentle. 🙂
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There’s a lot I like about Rand (I was expecting her to be a lot higher in my list) and found your analysis of her as autistic was great – it’s a connection I never would have made in a million years but it explains so very much.
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My autism-radar is very refined. 🙂
People tend to forget that, for an immigrant who learned English in adulthood and always spoke with a heavy Russian accent, becoming a hugely best-selling author in English is an absolutely incredible achievement. They also love to disregard her experiences of the Russian Revolution and the way they informed her worldview. Yes, the huge gold dollar signs are vulgar as hell. But it’s really cute how easily everybody forgets much greater vulgarities in the cases of non-immigrant male writers.
OK, I feel better now. 🙂
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If you don’t already read The Toast, Mallory Ortberg loves Ayn Rand
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At the bottom of my list was Rousseau (somewhat surprising) and the Cynics (not surprising at all.) My top four were Sartre, Noddings, Bentham, and the Epicureans. I can see where I am some combination of Noddings, Bentham, and the Epicureans. The Sartre result is surpring to me however.
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You should definitely read John Stuart Mill if you find the chance! He was a 19th century feminist (see “On the Subjection of Women”), which, well, puts him in rare company. He’s also author that has deeply influenced english political philosophy, especially liberalism. You cannot take a step without implicitly citing him, in some circles.
His “On Liberty” is probably the best option for a reader with a general interest.
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“You should definitely read John Stuart Mill if you find the chance! He was a 19th century feminist (see “On the Subjection of Women”), which, well, puts him in rare company.”
– Ah, this explains everything! 🙂
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I agree with DWeird (and should have read this comment before I commented above).
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My top results were:
1. Thomas Aquinas (100%)
2. William of Ockham (98%)
3. John Stuart Mill (91%)
4. Plato (91%)
5. Immanuel Kant (89%)
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I’m too well developed as a philosopher in my own right to go in for such a quiz. However everything in me is inimical to Rousseau. I consider him and his to be my quintessential philosophical and political enemies.
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You should totally do the quiz. It would be super funny if you turn out to be 100% Rousseau. 🙂 🙂
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I think I’ve done it before. I can do it again if you like but it is really mechanical and I didn’t agree with the way the questions were structured as they were too assumptive.
The easiest thing for you might be to believe I am just 100 percent Rousseau, and then we can have conversations and we will see what your perception of Rousseau is.
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“The easiest thing for you might be to believe I am just 100 percent Rousseau, and then we can have conversations and we will see what your perception of Rousseau is.”
– I don’t think you have anything in common with Rousseau. But I do think the test is quite primitive and can assign views to one based on very superficial questions.
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I believe the Roussean mentality has been the most responsible for messing up my life. That is, to the extent it has been messed up, and I do mean my professional life. Marx– not so much. In fact, Marx hardly at all, because when I was attacked by the unionists, in what may have been construed as a primiitive, Marxist fashion, it just made me stronger. But Rousseau whittles and undermines. It’s very hard to deal with it. Once should give up one’s authority and become like children, but not in pure innocence, not in a way that could be truly romantic, like the literary British romantics, who were actually rather scary. One has to be childishly attentive to things in a sado-masochist way. It’s like being cut off at the knees every time. What to make of it?
At the same time, some people tend to thrive best in this kind of a psychological environment, at least temporarily. I find it odd.
For instance one woman — she called herself a revolutionary anarchist — sought my help about bullying in the workplace and I even passed some work onto her and paid her quite a lot with what little money I had. Then suddenly she blocked me and defriended me on Facebook because I didn’t support her stance on Palestine.
You have to marvel at such insanity.
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“For instance one woman — she called herself a revolutionary anarchist — sought my help about bullying in the workplace and I even passed some work onto her and paid her quite a lot with what little money I had. Then suddenly she blocked me and defriended me on Facebook because I didn’t support her stance on Palestine.”
– A very familiar story. People are totally deranged. The woman you are talking about is the kind of human being that I find completely incomprehensible. It’s like such people are from a different planet. I fear and avoid them because they are capable of any odd behavior. Everything is ass backwards in their stupid little world.
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Well she thinks she can draw endless resources from innocence and her nature (not Nature itself, in the literary romantic’s sense, but her own nature). Contemporary feminism seems to be going down this particular track of reasoning, too, in supposing that all one reasonably has to do in life is lean back and rely on one’s feminine nature. There’s no desire to build solidarity or trust or anything like that. And then you get such people reviewing your books and they say, “Jennifer is a hysteric because she had to deal with as situation that is not part of my tiny, tiny little world and never will be.”
I mean to say, one has to read between the lines to understand what they are trying to get at, but it’s very limited.
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Musteryou, I figured you would say that.
Some things which jump out at me from the Wikipedia article:
–Rousseau’s antipathy towards the idea of a representative democracy and his preference for an oligarchy of a minority of citizens.
–The idea that the arts and sciences have not been beneficial to mankind because they arose from pride and vanity.
–His complete exclusion of women from his philosophical world view except as adjuncts of their men because men can’t control their boners. (paraphrasing wildly).
In his personal life, he just seems like a giant leech who was propped up by the women in his life.
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It’s interesting how even the extreme right are somehow pyschologically purer, more consistent, above all drier and more tolerable than this mushy mess. You just don’t end up in good places when people act “according to their natures”.
And it is true that they are against respresentative democracy. You only have to get a relatively more leftwing government in power, or a women, and these “radical leftist” will start whining about “ego” and the impurity of action, and so on. It seems what they really want is a hardline rightwing government to keep them in place “according to nature” and to give them the sensation of being romantic martyrs.
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For instance one woman — she called herself a revolutionary anarchist — sought my help about bullying in the workplace and I even passed some work onto her and paid her quite a lot with what little money I had. Then suddenly she blocked me and defriended me on Facebook because I didn’t support her stance on Palestine.
That philosophical label seems like an affectation rather than borne of any deep belief. An affectation is not a reason to toss away a friendship.
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There are a lot of people who are really quite nutty here. They follow their intuition, but it is not a trained intuition by any means. There’s a world of difference there. Right now I am watching a bunch of right wingers who are acting like a swarm of stinging ants when something interesting lies in range of their nest. First they are idly curious, and then one after another they get more alert and curiosity turns into the instinct to sting the unknown object.
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This quiz is rigged. Turns out that I’m in 100% agreement with Ayn fucking Rand!
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And with me.:-)
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Mill 100%, Rousseau 0%. I really did not like the quiz, I don’t know enough about philosophy to really understand the questions ina technical sense or to tell how well constructed the quiz is. So I do not really stand by the answers I gave. I got Kant and Sartre too, which is fine by me. It was interesting to see who they included and who they didn’t.
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As I recall they make Nietzsche out to be Dionysian, when h is the ultimate rationalist in the sense of investigating whether humans might incorporate a much stronger understanding of our emotional needs and unconscious urges into our overall, much more conscious philosophical perspectives. He was far from going, “ra, ra, ra, let’s all be orgiastic!” He was saying, “Let’s realize what already exists and then lets see if we can incorporate this into our knowledge as part of what we consider to be true.”
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Jeremy Bentham 100%, score one for the utilitarians. Actually I’m a negative utilitarian, but Karl Popper wasn’t on their list, so Bentham is as good a choice as anyone, with Mill a logical close second.
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Good poll on your blog. The majority of your readers gave the right answer, which is rare and speaks well of them. 🙂
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I’ve been busy, but why not do this for the lolz …
1. Thomas Aquinas 100%
2. Jean-Paul Sartre 98%
3. Stoics 96%
4. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 90%
(ONLY 90%?! WHAT PLANET IS THIS?!)
5. Aristotle 77%
6. Ayn Rand 75%
7. Cynics 74%
8. St Augustine 72%
9. William of Ockham 66%
10. Immanuel Kant 62%
And because it’s amusing …
21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 0%
([mumbles] social contract, what social contract, i’m in adherence with the will to power here, the only things i lack are a fluffy white cat named mister bigglesworth and minions who won’t muck up my plans for world domination …)
Actually, I didn’t have much hope for this thing and thought jokingly that it’d accuse me of being a philosopher of the Berkeley-Nietzsche school of thought … 🙂
I suppose it makes sense from a particular view of my book reader’s contents, which include Aquinas, Sartre, a few Stoics, a lot of Nietzsche, enough Aristotle, the more interesting fiction of Ayn Rand (such as “Anthem”), and so on.
I wouldn’t read too much into that, considering I also have the Comte de Lautréamont’s “Les Chants de Maldoror” as well as Jean Baudrillard’s “The Spirit of Terrorism” on it as well …
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We have turned out to be a blog of Rousseau -haters.
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\\ We have turned out to be a blog of Rousseau -haters.
\\ Everybody here is a child of immigrants but most people are highly functioning.
And so our communal identity / consciousness is gradually partly revealing itself…
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I was just about to write about the blog ‘s egregore. 🙂
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1. Thomas Hobbes (100%)
2. David Hume (100%)
3. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (86%)
4. Ayn Rand (72%)
5. Jean-Paul Sartre (70%)
6. Cynics (61%)
7. Stoics (61%)
8. Nel Noddings (53%)
9. Jeremy Bentham (49%)
10. Epicureans (48%)
11. John Stuart Mill (46%)
12. Benedictus Spinoza (45%)
13. Immanuel Kant (39%)
14. William of Ockham (37%)
15. Aristotle (36%)
16. Plato (35%)
17. St. Augustine (30%)
18. Prescriptivism (29%)
19. Thomas Aquinas (20%)
20. William James (7%)
21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (0%)
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Fuck Rousseau!
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I’ll take even Rousseau over Hobbes, but I also scored 0% Rousseau (how many data points is that by now?). I suspect the survey is constructed with Rousseau-bashing as a goal. Everyone hates Rousseau, just like everyone hates Malthus. Some people in the history of ideas have been selected for scapegoating and pillorying. Perhaps that is the whole purpose for which the survey was created.
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\\ I’ll take even Rousseau over Hobbes, but I also scored 0% Rousseau (how many data points is that by now?). I suspect the survey is constructed with Rousseau-bashing as a goal.
May be, there simply is a bug in the code counting or printing out Rousseau %.
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I hate Rousseau now:
\\ Even supposed reformers abandoned their children: Rousseau, who became famous for saying that mothers should nurse their children, sent all five of his own children to foundling homes. He also declared that “woman is made specially to please man and to be subjugated.”
http://www.psychohistory.com/originsofwar/10_patriarchalFamilies.html
Interesting idea (same chapter):
\\ Because mothers began to abuse their children somewhat less by the sixteenth century, men could grow up less afraid of females, and need not “fear approaching the kitchen full of women,” so fathers stopped living in separate quarters and reduced their having sex with concubines and established for the first time constant patriarchal dominance of wives and children. Paternal love was still missing, but fathers spent much more time with their wives and children
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