Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
Germaine de Staël (April 22, 1766–July 14, 1817) is celebrated as the first Modern Woman. Tolstoy counted her among the “influential forces” that have propelled humanity’s progress. Lord Byron considered her the greatest living writer. Emerson credited her with introducing him to German thought, which shaped his own influential philosophy.
She was among a handful of women, alongside Joan of Arc and Sappho, included in Auguste Comte’s famous Calendar of Great Men — a compendium of 559 world-changing minds, spanning from Saint Augustine to Galileo to Zeno. (Lest we forget, brilliant women have been “men” for the vast majority of human history.) Napoleon — who banished her from Paris for a decade for opposing his dictatorial regime and punished all who visited her in exile — reportedly recognized only three powers in Europe: Britain, Russia, and Germaine de Staël.In the midst of the French Revolution, De Staël composed A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions Upon the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations (public library | PDF) — a visionary inquiry into the limits of and optimal conditions for human flourishing on the interdependent scales of the one and the many.
One of the most insightful portions of the book deals with the proper aim of ambition — or what De Staël terms “the love of glory” — and the crucial difference between ego and genius. Half a century before Dostoyevsky contemplated ambition and success, De Staël writes:
Of all the passions of which the human heart is susceptible, there is none which possesses so striking a character as the Love of Glory.
The traces of its operations may be discovered in the primitive nature of man, but it is only in the midst of society that this sentiment acquires its true force.[…]
According to that sublimity of virtue which seeks in our own conscience for the motive and the end of conduct, the love of glory is the most exalted principle which can actuate the soul.
And yet this universal motive force has as its object something that eludes all but the very few who possess true genius. A century and a half before Einstein lamented the charade of celebrity, De Staël writes:
True glory cannot be obtained by relative celebrity. We always summon the universe and posterity to confirm the title of so august a crown. It cannot be preserved, then, but by genius, or by virtue.
Noting that the “fleeting success” attained by ambition can only resemble but is not glory — “that which is truly just and great” — De Staël admonishes that ambition syphons happiness with “the seducing brilliancy of its charms,” which yield no satisfaction of substance. She paints the social contract at the heart…
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