Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Transparency and Obstruction 9780226771267, 0226771261, 9780226771281, 0226771288

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JEAN-JACQUES

ROUSSEAU T ransparency and Obstruction JEAN STAROBINSKI Translated by

Arthur Goldhammer With an Introduction by

Robert J. Morrissey

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Jüan S t a r o b i n s k i is professor emeritus at the University o f Geneva. His book Montaigne i?i Motion is also published by the University o f Chicago Press. A r t h u r G o l d h a m m e r , who has translated more than thirty-live books, including Montaigne in Motion, is presently translating Starobinski’s selected essays. R o b e r t J. M o r r i s s e y

is associate professor of French at the University o f Chicago.

Originally published as Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l'obstacle, ® 1971 Editions Gallimard. The University o f Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University o f Chicago Press, Ltd., London ® 1988 by The University o f Chicago All l ights reserved. Published 1988 Printed in the United States o f America 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88

54321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, transparency and obstruction. Translation of: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et l’obstacle. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 1712-1778. I. Title. B2137.S713 1988 848'.509 87-19050 ISBN 0-226-77126-1 ISBN 0-226-77128-8 (pbk.)

Contents

Translator’s Note Preface

vii ix

Introduction Jean Starobinski and Otherness by Robert J. Morrissey

xi

T r a n s p a r e n c y a n d O b s t r u c t io n

1

The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts “Appearances Condemned Me” Divided Time and the Myth of Transparency Historical Knowledge and Poetic Vision The God Glaucus A Theodicy That Exculpates God and Man

3 6 11 14 15 20

2

Critique of Society The Primordial Innocence Work, Reflection, Pride Synthesis through Revolution Synthesis through Education

22 25 26 29 30

3

Solitude “Let Us Settle My Opinions Once and For All” But Is Unity Natural? Inner Conflict Magic

33 45 47 53 58

4

The Veiled Statue Christ Galatea Theory of Unveiling

65 68 70 73

v

VI

C ontents

5

La nouvelle Héloïse Music and Transparency Elegiac Feeling The Feast Equality Economy Apotheosis The Death of Julie

81 88 90 92 97 104 111 113

6

Misunderstandings The Return “Unable to Utter a Single Word” The Power of Signs Amorous Communication Exhibitionism The Tutor

122 126 136 139 167 170 177

7

The Problems of Autobiography How to Describe Oneself? To Tell All

180 186 188

8

Guilty Reflection Obstacles Silence Inaction Friendships among the Plants

201 218 224 230 234

9

Imprisoned for Life Achieved Intentions The Two Tribunals

239 240 251

10

The Transparency of Crystal Judgments “Alone on Earth”

254 261 266

Essays on Rousseau Rousseau and the Search for Origins The Discourse on Inequality Rousseau and the Origin of Languages Rousseau and Buffon Fiction and Boundaries

271 271 281 304 323 333

Contents

vii

Reverie and Transmutation On Rousseau’s Illness

352 365

Notes Index

379 409

K Translator’s Note

For the convenience of the reader without French in locating pas­ sages from Rousseau’s work in context, I have included page ref­ erences (in parentheses) to the following English translations: Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1953). Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1984). Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (New York: Pen­ guin, 1979). Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1968).

My translations of Rousseau sometimes follow these very closely, sometimes not. Translations from other works of Rousseau are my own. I want to express my thanks to my wife, Dr. Stephanie Engel, her colleague, Dr. Humphrey Morris, and Jean Starobinski for help in translating medical and psychiatric terminology, and deep grat­ itude to Jean Starobinski for his invaluable comments on the entire manuscript. —Arthur Goldhammer

tT Preface

This book is not a biography, although in overall outline it tries to follow the chronological development of Rousseau’s attitudes and ideas. Neither is it a systematic exposition of the philosophy of the citizen of Geneva, although crucial aspects of that philosophy do come in for detailed examination. Righdy or wrongly, Rousseau was unwilling to separate his thought from his person, his theories from his personal destiny. We must take him as he offers himself to us, in this fusion, and confusion, of existence and idea. This leads us to analyze Jean-Jacques’s lit­ erary creation as if it represented a kind of imaginary action and to analyze his behavior as if it constituted a lived fiction. Adventurer, dreamer, philosopher, antiphilosopher, political theorist, musician, and victim of persecution: Jean-Jacques was all of these. As diverse as his work is, it can, I think, be read and comprehended as a unified whole: it is rich enough to suggest themes and motifs useful for grasping both the variety of its ten­ dencies and the unity of its intentions. By attending naïvely to the work and refraining from hasty condemnation or absolution, we can hope to discover the images, obsessions, and nostalgic desires that more or less constantly governed Jean-Jacques’s conduct and work. I have limited myself as much as I could to observing and de­ scribing the structure of Rousseau’s world. Rather than impose external patterns and values, I have chosen to read the texts in such a way as to reveal their internal coherence or incoherence and to highlight the symbols and ideas that structured Rousseau’s thought. Yet this study is something more than a “close textual analysis.” For it is obvious that one cannot interpret Rousseau’s work without taking into account the world that its author opposed. If intimate personal experience enjoys a special place in that work, it acquires that place as the result of Rousseau’s conflict with a society he XI

XII

P refa ce

deemed unacceptable. Indeed, as we shall see, the proper place of the inner life is defined solely by the failure to establish any sat­ isfactory relationship with external reality. Rousseau desired com­ munication and transparency of the heart. But after pursuing this avenue and meeting with disappointment, he chose the opposite course, accepting—indeed provoking—obstructions, which enabled him to withdraw, certain of his innocence, into passive resignation. Note

This translation is based on the 1971 French edition published by Gallimard, which includes numerous detailed changes to the orig­ inal 1957 edition. These emendations do not affect the overall structure of the work, however. Citations in this edition are to the critical edition of Rousseau’s works: Oeuvres complètes, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). The seven essays collected at the end of this volume were pub­ lished in various places between 1962 and 1970. Two other essays on Rousseau are not reprinted here: “Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le péril de la réflexion” appears in LOeil vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1961 ; 2d ed. 1968), and “L’interprète et son cercle” appears in La relation critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). —Jean Starobinski

Introduction Jean Starobinski and Otherness Robert J. Morrissey At a time in contemporary French criticism when many are her­ alding a rediscovery of the individual and a return to history, the case of Jean Starobinski takes on special significance. Throughout his career he has remained steadfastly committed to an examination of the problems of subject and subjectivity and has constantly re­ minded us of the importance of the diachronic perspective. And yet in discussions of a theoretical nature he is often seen as a kind of brilliant eclectic who does not have, or want, a method. To a large extent this is true, and it would be of little use to try to “contain” him by constructing a methodology around him. On the other hand it is important to understand the basic tenets of his approach to the text and to explore some of the epistemological questions they raise. For this, his work on Rousseau is crucial. Over his long and distinguished career, Jean Starobinski has consistently returned to the Genevan philosopher as to his first love and greatest obsession. Rousseau is for him both a complex individual and a profoundly emblematic figure. In this respect, Starobinski’s ap­ proach brings together two very different critical tendencies, two very different visions of Rousseau. One vision of Jean-Jacques Rousseau makes him a product of his times. His thought marks an important transitional moment on both a political and a metaphysical level. Politically speaking, he is situated at the beginning of the twilight of an ancien régime ever more threatened by the rise of enlightened individualism and the growing incompatibility of aristocracy and absolutism. From a metaphysical point of view, his thought is the result of a series of decentering epistemological revolutions that had profoundly al­ tered man’s view of himself and his position in the universe: the Copernican revolution had removed man from the center of the universe, and empiricism had displaced the “center” or essence of man toward the peripheries, from the Cartesian cogito to Lockean sensation.

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Certainly, whether or not one considers him to be determined by the Zeitgeist, by the structures in place, or, in a poststructuralist view, by the transpersonal interplay of “differences,” Rousseau must be seen as a pivotal figure in history. Rousseau was a philosopher who led what was to become the Romantic charge against the En­ lightenment. In the moments preceding the awakening of modern class consciousness, he defined himself as a commoner and asserted the value of his story and the worth of the individual against a society of privilege. As a moralist, he tried to reconcile the universal necessity of the laws of reason and history with a vision of man as essentially free and capable of making his own destiny. An outsider by class, by nationality, and by temperament, he gained universal recognition by decrying the scandalous victimization of those ex­ cluded. He expressed in words before the fact the violence, aspi­ rations, and contradictions acted out in the Revolution of 1789. Perhaps more than any other, he formulated the terms and the tone of revolutionary discourse in France. But the time of revolution was not at hand. In the ideology of the ancien régime, the words and ideas of Rousseau were literally out of place. He was forced to carve out that place for himself, and in so doing he created a space that was to be occupied by revolu­ tionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike. It was not only that his words were too radical, they were too passionate. Indeed, Rousseau introduced the language of passion into the discourse of political theory: “Love of truth has become dear to me, I feel, because I have had to pay for it. Perhaps, at first, it was merely a system; now it is my ruling passion. It is the noblest one that can enter the heart of man.”1 And the most dangerous, one is tempted to add. But Rousseau believed he had been paying from very early on, and this strange mixture of logic and a passionate, personal identification with an absolute, transcendent truth can already be found in his earliest writings. It is here in Rousseau’s passion that Jean Starobinski begins his now-celebrated Transparency and Obstruction— not in a critical analysis of Rousseau’s political philosophy as manifested in the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts but in a discussion of the trembling, personal anger that betrays itself in Rousseau’s denun­ ciation of a scandalous absence of human communication. Refusing any fascination with “purified” ideas that might exist independent of the text, Starobinski seeks to identify a fundamental intention that is acted out in and through the text. In the preceding lines my emphasis has shifted from a view of Rousseau as a product of his times to one of him as a creator of

Jean Starobinski and Otherness

xv

his own space, or, to put it another way, from a passive, determined Rousseau to an active, responsible Rousseau. The latter constitutes the second vision of Rousseau, to which I will return later. But Starobinski begins by situating what proves to be the dominant theme of seeming and being or appearance and reality in the historically determined context of a literary and philosophical topos. In his view, just as ideas are not to be abstracted from the text, the text is not to be abstracted from history. Rather than concentrating on the text as a formal entity as did the American New Critics, Starobinski, whose approach is indirectly influenced by the thought of the German philosophers Dilthey and Heidegger, conceives of it primarily as an expression of meaning and insists on the impor­ tance of its roots in history. For him, there is no true understanding of meaning outside of time and space. From this perspective, Rous­ seau is very much the product of his age, and the themes he develops are those of his era. Because for Starobinski, a work “is defined by what surrounds it [and] has no meaning except in relation to its context,” meaning is relative in its essence, and understanding is, on a very fundamental level, an understanding of relations.2 He does not try therefore to measure Rousseau’s ideas against a set of absolutes that transcend his time. Instead, he comprehends Rous­ seau within the functioning parameters of his era. The truthfulness or falseness of Rousseau, his “legitimacy,” is to be judged in terms of the questions he poses, and those questions are anchored in a particular sociohistorical situation. This is not to say, however, that these questions and Rousseau’s manner of response are without importance to us, but rather that we must remain aware of the distance that separates him from us. This stance has important methodological consequences. We are forced to ask, on the one hand, what constitutes the proper context for understanding and, on the other hand, what is the nature of the relation that one can or should have with the literary work. To a certain extent, there can be no satisfactory response to the first question. It implies that the context itself becomes an object of study which then functions as a necessary condition for under­ standing the work. But how, then, is one to define that object? Starobinski clearly recognizes this problem: “Here is the snag: the context is so vast, the critical relations so numerous, that [the critic] succumbs to a secret despair; he will never bring together the elements of this whole. . . . What is worse, from the moment he decides to situate a work in its historical perspective, only an arbitrary decision can limit the inquiry.”3 On a theoretical level, the desire

XVI

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to attain a full, unified understanding of the total context is un­ realizable. Criticism is condemned to a constant state of becoming; it is always in search of a “final unity,” a total, and for that reason unattainable, knowledge.4 Yet this ideal remains there as an epis­ temological imperative that gives a unifying intention to the critical enterprise. From this point of view, Starobinski’s work self-con­ sciously defines itself in terms of its limitations, its impossibilities, or to put it more strongly, its own inescapable failure. In fact his work serves as a practical critique of this search for total contextual knowledge. Such a concern with context threatens to engulf the text, and the work loses its privileged position as the primary object of study to become nothing more than “one of the innumerable manifestations of an era, of a culture, or of a ‘world vision.’ ” Seen in this light, the triumph of contextualization only represents a form of failure, for “in pretending to give us the world in which the work is afloat, it makes us lose sight of the work itself and its meaning.”5 But Starobinski refuses to lose sight of the work as an expression of the individual. From this point of view, the reason for studying the work’s surroundings, or the various milieux in which it is formed, is primarily differential in nature. Thus the study “Rousseau and Buffon” aims at differentiating the “philosophical anthropology” of Buffon from that of Rousseau. There are, of course, similarities to be examined. But more significant is the dissimilarity between the two, the way in which Rousseau transforms notions found in Buffon and how the great naturalist serves as a justifying authority in Rousseau. Rousseau is to be studied in context precisely because he is different from that which surrounds him both in time and in space—not immeasurably different, but irreducibly so. Starobin­ ski’s aim, then, is to try to measure that difference. For this reason, the unfulfillable requirement of a unifying total knowledge is meth­ odologically important: the more complete the contextual knowl­ edge, the better the understanding of the work’s specificity. Without it, the critic is condemned to a passive observation of diversity and thereby succumbs to fragmentation.6 We are now better able to grasp Starobinski’s relation to Geistes­ geschichte: apprehending the meaning of an author’s work implies understanding the culture in which it was produced as a cohesive whole. Yet total understanding of another time and place implies seeing all, total transparency, omniscience in sum, and in this sense one can say Lhat theological aspirations inform Starobinski’s ap­ proach. However, the recognized impossibility of their fulfillment

Jean Starobinski and Otherness

XVII

puts the critic into a position of “existential” responsibility. Because a complete understanding of the ultimate whole is impossible, the critic must define lesser totalities as relevant objects necessary for the understanding of the work. “It is an arbitrary decision that delimits the boundaries of a whole, and consequently the relations governing the elements of the system thus defined.”7 With the critic’s choice goes the critic’s responsibility. But what kinds of systems are relevant? In principle at least, all aspects of the historical moment, be they sociological, biographical, or linguistic, constitute valid fields of inquiry for better understand­ ing the literary work. What is more, there is a wide variety of methodological tools for examining these objects. Here, Starobinski becomes an apologist of method, or rather of methods, arguing that the critic should choose those methods most appropriate for given objects of study. But he makes an important distinction be­ tween method and interpretation. Methods are impersonal ana­ lytical tools that do not engage the responsibility of the person employing them. “Interpretive discourses presuppose methods and make use of them, but they do not themselves have any method­ ological guarantees. They come into play outside of those areas where methods are able to make use of techniques of verification.”8 For Starobinski, then, we would do better to speak of a Freudian style of interpretation, for instance, than of a psychoanalytic method. In the human sciences, to subordinate oneself to “a” method is to refuse to assume one’s responsibility—and one’s freedom. Thus Starobinski gives a restrictive definition of method, assigning to it a more technical role. Yet methods are essential, and foremost among them is that method without which historical and literary interpretation is im­ possible—philology.9 This is so precisely because the system of lan­ guage is the matter out of which the work is constituted. The value of words, their meaning in a text, can only be understood in terms of the usage of the times, the contemporary system of language and the rhetoric of the day.10 It is around this point that one un­ derstands the importance of Leo Spitzer for Starobinski.11 Starobinski not only applauds Spitzer’s general commitment to philological methods, he values above all the German scholar’s use of the notion of écart, or deviation from a linguistic norm, in his elaboration of a theory and practice of stylistic analysis. Here the term norm has a descriptive rather than a prescriptive function. It refers to the general usage or the “average” language (langue moy­ enne), with the same connotations that average or norm would have

xviii

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in disciplines making use of statistical analyses. But in Spitzerian stylistics, the norm is defined through philological methods: ac­ quiring a knowledge of the use and meaning of words, studying semantic fields, understanding the synchronic workings of words, expressions, and topoi in the system of the language at a given time. This effort to obtain a view of the language as a functioning whole has very clear affinities with structuralist theories (although, as Starobinski points out, on this level Spitzer is less interested in seeing language as a system of differences than as a network of convergences) and leads Starobinski to describe him as “a philol­ ogist enamoured of totality.” We can immediately see what Staro­ binski finds attractive in Spitzer’s approach: it satisfies the epistemological requirement of a unifying vision and it situates the literary work in a social context—the general usage. But while it shares with Geistesgeschickte the notion of a totalizing comprehen­ sion, it represents an attempt to go beyond the latter’s romantic, idealizing tendency to view cultural phenomena simply as mani­ festations of a hypostasized “spirit of the times” or Zeitgeist. For both Spitzer and Starobinski, the point of primary interest remains the écart, the deviation, the textual difference.12 Thus Starobinski discovers in Spitzer’s notion of style a description of that which is “neither the purely particular, nor the universal, but a particular that is undergoing universalization and a universal that escapes to reveal an individual liberty.”13 However, Starobinski extends the notion of écart well beyond purely linguistic or stylistic concerns in order to make of it a general interpretive concept functioning on two fundamental levels: that of production and that of interpretation. From the point of view of production or writing as an existential act, the écart is a diver­ gence implying the revolt of the individual against the norm, the refusal to be determined by the structures in place. Here writing is, in its very essence, an “oppositional act” in that, on the one hand, it expresses the adhesion to and acceptance of the norm and de­ termining structures inherent in language and, on the other, it reveals at the same time an intention of refusal or revolt, be it con­ scious or not.14 This conflict between common practices and par­ ticular experiences is what makes writing both a gesture of self­ liberation and an attempt to reconcile oneself with the world through the literary work.15The work represents an act in that it is a working through of the author’s relation to the world. Given this understanding, the notion of écart acquires an addi­ tional importance for interpretation. To one degree or another,

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Starobinski interprets all information exterior to the work in light of this notion. This is the case when, in the opening line of the preface to Transparency and Obstruction, he affirms that his study is not a biography, but that it nevertheless follows Rousseau’s chron­ ological development. In point of fact, Starobinski often comes back to events in Rousseau’s life or discussions of this correspondence. In so doing he does not hesitate to make use of his training as a medical doctor and a psychiatrist.16 But the goal is not so much to tell us about Jean-Jacques’s life as to point out the écart, the dis­ crepancies between what Rousseau says about his life and what the existing evidence would lead us to conclude. A work is revealing not only in its resemblance to the inner ex­ perience, but also by reason o f its difference. If there are enough documents to permit us to construct a probable image of the empirical personality o f the author, it becomes possible to measure yet another écart: that by which the work goes beyond and trans­ forms the primitive givens of experience. In considering differ­ entially the work and the psychological life, it is no longer the principle o f emanation or reflection that is at work, but the prin­ ciple of creative invention and desire, of successful metamorpho­ sis. It is necessary to know the man and his empirical existence in order to know what the work is opposing or its coefficient of negativity.17

In his considerations of all that surrounds the work, be it bio­ graphical, historical, or philological, Starobinski is less interested in knowing the context as a thing-in-itself than in knowing it as a differential entity-in-relation, allowing him to circumscribe the lim­ its of the work, to distinguish it from what it is not: it is not identical with its times; its language is not consubstantial with the language of the moment; and it is not a faithful image of the author’s interior experience. And yet the work certainly partakes of all these things. But while these extratextual totalities help to delimit the work, they are in the end only hypothetical constructions, valuable yet only more or less plausible conceptual models, and to them he prefers the material presence of the text precisely because it has an identity that resists assimilation, because it is not the creation of the critical mind. It is not just that the text is an object, however; it is an object that calls to us; it needs a reader to “realize” itself—to mean some­ thing it must mean something to—and thus by its very nature it beckons to us.18 Alter being “looked at” it must be “looked into,” and hence it is not surprising to find that the metaphor of the

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critical “gaze’1informs Starobinski's approach to the text. Seeing is an activity of Lhe senses and not of the mind, more a sensitivity Lhan an intellectual construction. Sensible seeing implies a trained receptivity to the text, that is, a “sense11of the historical and of the distance separating us from the object of our gaze. To train the gaze is to concentrate it on a specific object, to “look into” it, to explore and understand it. Phenomenological philosophers from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty have made of the gaze the privileged vehicle of the individual’s relation to die world. Our consciousness of the world passes through the corporeal intermediary of the senses. As Merleau-Ponty ex­ plains, meaning depends quite literally on how we see things: “Vis­ ual content is picked up, utilized, and although it is sublimated on the level of thought by a symbolic power that goes beyond that content, it is nevertheless on the basis of vision that this power can constitute itself. . . . Vision is the foundation upon which the sym­ bolic function is built, not because vision is the cause, but rather because it is that gift of nature that the Mind [Esprit] would use beyond all expectations.”1* The way we are in the world and our consciousness of ourselves are based on the experience of “seeing,” which thus becomes synonymous with “being aware.”20 This ex­ periential reality, which is the only reality we Live immediately (as opposed to a scientific “reality,” which is abstract and grasped in­ tellectually rather than experientially), is thus fundamentally sub­ jective in nature. The objects that surround us function less “as they are” than “as they mean,” and objects only mean/or someone.21 Whence the positing of the primacy of the subject as well as the use of the term intentional to describe that world-constituting or meaning-giving role of consciousness. To see implies seeing meaningfully. It is in this context that Starobinski defines the gaze as an “in­ tentional relation to others and the surrounding world” and thus “less as the faculty that receives images than that which establishes a relation.”22 The task of the critical gaze trained on a text is “to decipher the words in order to gain access to the intuition of Lheir full meaning: this perception no longer has anything to do with a visual act other than in a metaphorical sense.”2HAnd so it is that the gaze, for Starobinski, becomes a metaphor for understanding: “seeing” the meaning of a text. Such a position raises two kinds of objections. Georges Poulet, among others, suspects that behind Starobinski’s intellectualization of the critical gaze lies a tendancy toward “angelism” which diminishes the role of the perceiving body.24

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While this is true to some extent, one can counter that this “angelism” is a necessary consequence both of the textual nature of the objects and of the basic hypothesis of a unity of consciousness. Starobinski is specifically trying to understand how the body is written into the text. He certainly assumes that the body is appre­ hended immediately as part of the perceiving I, but he is essentially dealing with how this view of the body is textually thematized. Thus in discussing “Rousseau’s illness,” on the one hand, he is not con­ cerned with the pure experience (Erlebnis) of the body but with the textually mediated one, and, on the other, he is looking less to “see” what the disease was than what it meant for Rousseau, that is, how he experienced it or how it functioned in his “vision” of himself and the surrounding world. We now have two instances of gaze: Starobinski trying to “see” Rousseau’s “vision.” This convergence is not accidental, for it is Rousseau’s gaze that fascinates Starobinski. His desire to under­ stand Rousseau, to see into him as it were, parallels Rousseau’s desire to see into the hearts of others. On one important occasion the Genevan philosopher expressed, by way of his character Wolmar in La Nouvelle Héloïse, a wish to be a pure, disembodied gaze. “If I could change my nature and become a living eye, I would do so willingly, . . . while not concerned about being seen, I need to see [my fellow men].”25 And later, in the Rêveries, Jean-Jacques muses about what it would have been like to have owned the magic ring of Gugês, ancient king of Lydia, which gave its owner the power to render himself invisible at will.26 In Rousseau the impor­ tance of seeing without being seen is that it would give him inde­ pendence from his fellowmen—he would be free from their judgmental and condemning gaze while at the same time being able to see them as they really are. In entitling his two-volume collection of critical essays The Living Eye, Starobinski underscores the profound analogy between this desire of Rousseau and the critic’s desire to “look into” an author. But what Starobinski sees when he looks at Rousseau’s manner of seeing or making sense of the world around him becomes, as we shall find, the matter of a second and potentially more damaging objection to his own critical approach, that of impressionism. As he focuses on Rousseau, he sees the subjective limitations of Jean-Jacque’s gaze. [The] solicitation of meaning is spontaneously, from its inception, an act o f interpretation: it implies that a general meaning has been attached to the world, against which particular meanings will take shape. In oilier words the gaze that looks out upon the world

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elicits signs destined for it alone, which disclose its world. . . . Rousseau, however, refuses to admit that meaning depends on him, that it is, in large part, his own creation. He wants it to inhere entirely in the object perceived. He does not recognize his own question in the world’s answer. He therefore deprives himself o f the part of freedom that each of our perceptions contains. Having chosen one o f several possible meanings offered by the external object, he blames the object itself for his choice and sees a pe­ remptory and unequivocal intention in the sign. This leads him to impute a decisive will to things, when in fact the decision is contained in his own gaze.27

In Starobinski’s view, Jean-Jacques does not see the world, he sees only himself, and in so doing he loses the freedom to see. What Rousseau is looking for, and what he never will find, is a state of universal Sameness—whence his desire for transparency, unity, freedom, and a moral and ontological absolute. But since Sameness can only be defined in terms of self, freedom for Rousseau is above all freedom from Otherness. The only escape is either to make one’s own Sameness function as a transcendent absolute, thus elim­ inating all obstructions by making the world a transparent extension of the self, or to refuse any encounter with the Other by declaring all that is different to be an insurmountable obstacle and with­ drawing in alienation from the world. In the first case, liberty is total and power absolute; without constraint, the “I see” becomes the “I can.” But for Rousseau ihe moral philosopher, freedom and power imply responsibility. Because I am free to do as I wish, I am responsible for what I do. In the end, however, Rousseau refuses to assume this responsibility for his actions. In the second case, surrounded by obstacles and constraints, I am no longer free to act, but I no longer must bear the responsibility for my actions. In this case, freedom becomes a freedom from responsibility and, par­ adoxically, subjugation becomes a precondition for freedom. At this point, ”his freedom is not freedom to act but freedom for self­ presence; it is but a mere feeling/’28 Both these attitudes are to be repeated over and over again in various permutations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the self as absolute and the indi­ vidual as alienated victim. Many of these permutations are already implied in the work of Rousseau: self as collectivity; self as uniquely original; refuge in dreams and reveries as more “real” than the objective world; love or its sublimation as a remedy to alienation; reason as a solution; the renewal of history or submission to it.

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The underlying problematic that Starobinski discovers in Rous­ seau, then, is Otherness, the very same problematic that is at the heart of phenomenology. It is this convergence of object of study and critical approach that I shall explore in some detail. Without falling into too much word play, we can affirm that Rousseau is constantly returning to descriptions of a state of indifference both on an ethical and on an existential level. In fact the two levels are intimately connected. On the ethical level, he seeks an ataraxic indifference not unlike that of stoic wisdom. On the existential level, he evokes moments of universal Sameness. We find the latter in the General Will of the Social Contract, in the fête at Clarens, and in the Golden Age of humanity before the advent of history. On the moral as well as the existential level, the result is the same: the problem of Otherness disappears. There are thus two interdependent modes of overcoming difference: unity and autonomy. The wisdom of the ancients afforded individual independence in the same way that Clarens affords economic independence.29 By def­ inition, unity, whether collective or mystically transcendent, effaces difference. On both levels what is achieved is a freedom defined essentially as freedom from difference or otherness. And so it is that transparency reveals itself as nothing more than a way of always seeing oneself—only the definition of the self varies from individual to collective—while the veil or obstacle end up becoming a pretext for refusing to look beyond oneself. Time after time, in very dif­ ferent areas of Rousseau’s work, Starobinski comes to the same conclusion. In art: Rousseau/Pygmalion “is unwilling to allow the work of art to be other than himself.”30 In Rousseau’s defense of the struggle against religious intolerance: “Removal of the veil abol­ ishes the subjectivity of error. But in the end we must confront a new subjectivity, certain that it knows the truth. Maleficent sub­ jectivity has given way to felicitous subjectivity. But we remain within the confines of consciousness, even when we think we are encountering objects.”31 In matters of the heart Rousseau’s use of the same word, supplement, to describe both his lifelong com­ panion, Thérèse, and his onanistic practices “shows us what Rous­ seau saw in Thérèse: someone he could easily identify with his own flesh, and who never raised the problem of the other”** In this context Rousseau’s final “return to self” is nothing more than another means of avoiding the same problem. “Neither in pure sensation, nor in imagination does consciousness confront an object distinct from itself.”33

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Not only is it impossible to have any true intersubjective relation, but there are no avenues for reformulating the problem of sub­ jectivity and “alienation.” Looking into an era where transcendent values are straining under the attack of the Enlightenment and where Lhe modern notion of class has not yet been discovered as a justification for action, Starobinski is able to trace in Rousseau the collapse of universal into a subjectivity that refuses aherity. At this historical juncture, a set of problems that can no longer be “resolved” on the theological front and cannot yet be transferred to the political front becomes the problems of the individual. In making them basic elements of self-definition, Rousseau tests the limits of subjectivity and invests the notion of freedom with a new sense of urgency that integrates both metaphysical uneasiness and social and political apprehensions. Unable to escape subjectivity, Rousseau attempts to find the true self, to overcome the “self-forgetfulness” that has made us other than ourselves. In his preoccupation with originary moments—as in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and in the Essay on the Origin of Languages—Rousseau is seeking to establish meaning out­ side of history and to delve beneath the layers of “forgetfulness” in history to find the essence of natural man. While Starobinski refuses meaning outside of hisiory, Rousseau does represent for him an originary figure who defines in an exemplary manner the problematic of modern consciousness as it manifests itself in lit­ erature. And nowhere is this more apparent than in Rousseau’s relation to language. This new language has nothing in common with classical “dis­ course.” . . . No longer does the literary work call forth the assent of the reader to a truth that stands as a “third person” between the writer and his audience; the writer singles himself out through his work and calls forth assent to the truth o f his personal ex­ perience. Rousseau discovered these problems: he truly invented a new attitude, which became that of modern literature (beyond the sen­ timental romanticism for which he has been blamed). He was the first to experience the dangerous compact between ego and lan­ guage, the “new alliance” in which man makes himself the word.3^

For Starobinski, Rousseau’s genius and great significance lie in his lifelong struggle with the problem of the individual; Rousseau’s great failure is in not confronting the Other, in avoiding an en­ counter without which one can understand neither the world nor one’s place in it: in losing the Other, Rousseau loses himself. On the one hand, he refuses to recognize that language, by definition,

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is convention, hence inhabited by Otherness, and that writing is a way of being-for-others; on the other hand, in having recourse to writing, he is making of the immediacy of his intimate life a means to justify himself in the eyes of others and thus he loses his own authenticity. “Jean-Jacques loses both the purity of immediate sen­ timent and the possibility of concrete communication with others. This double loss defines him as a writer”™In this sense, Starobinski’s criticism has a moral thrust and centers on Rousseau’s refusal to assume his freedom by accepting responsibility for the meanings he chooses to see and the mediation that he chooses to employ. Rous­ seau’s failure is thus situated on the level of an existential “bad faith” in a Sartrian sense. At the same time Rousseau represents a particularly important challenge for Starobinski in that, by bringing his critical gaze to bear on him, he not only undertakes to reveal the philosopher’s blind spot but, above all, undertakes not to allow himself to be blinded in like manner.30 Yet what is to guarantee that his own gaze will not be as deformed as Rousseau’s, that it is not his own gaze that decides what it will see in Jean-Jacques? Starobinski turns to Rousseau with a profound sense that he is returning to the origins of our own—and his own—particular form of desire as moderns to understand our world, and in so doing he places these origins squarely in history and not in any necessary, universal, and ahistorical fundaments. Yet to a great extent, he accepts the values espoused by Rousseau. Unity and freedom are, as we have seen, Starobinski’s fundamental critical ideals. And Starobinski seeks to preserve and extend what could be called the Enlightenment’s op­ timism with the forces of reason and “light.” Further, he accepts the subject/object distinction as essential. In this he differs from such thinkers as Foucault and Derrida, who specifically repudiate the subject/object framework of modern humanism. Finally, Sta­ robinski sees a profound similarity between artist and critic, be­ tween the creative gaze and the critical gaze, for both are trying “to lead the mind beyond the visual realm into that of meaning.”37 From this point of view, we can say that Starobinski’s approach contains in itself a remedy to Rousseau’s failure: Rousseau is an Other, and to understand him, to “see” him correctly, is to have a “good” or “proper” relation with that Other; at stake then is the possibility of knowing. But the critic’s approach also contains evi­ dence of having learned from the philosopher’s failure. In this sense the object of study is instructing the gaze that is interpreting it. There is a circular relation between the two that Starobinski ex-

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plicitly recognizes and places in the German tradition of the her­ meneutical circle: “the explicated object . . . is not only an illustration and an application of a preexistent methodology, it brings Lo the methodological principles the possibility of being transformed as they are exercised, so that in the end the interpreted object con­ stitutes a new element of the interpreting discourse.”™This circular relation with Rousseau, who has remained the dominant pole in Starobinski’s career, profoundly marks his critical approach and allows us to clarify certain aspects of it: WhaL is the proper relation with a work? And what am I relating to, is it the work or the writer? What does Starobinski mean when he talks about Jean-Jacques Rousseau? His relation with Rousseau also allows us to understand better what distinguishes his approach from that of the phenom­ enological critic, Georges Poulet, who, along with Marcel Raymond, has had the strongest formative influence on Starobinski. Both Starobinski and Poulet believe in a first intuitive and cmpathetic reading. This is the first contact with the work as Other. But this work is the expression of a subjectivity and provides a privileged access to the interiority of the Other. That which I, the reader, experience empathetically in my own ego while reading leads to an alter-ation of my being. 1 am “seized by the Other,” by an alter-ego, “When I am absorbed in my reading, a second T takes me over and experiences for me.”™Seen in this light, reading is a passive, alienating “act” in which I experience the Other as a subject for the wrorld, that is, I experience his world apperception. This alienation has two faces in that it is at once an estrangement—I am made other—and a suspension of the alienness of the Other—the other is in me. But the presence of the Other exists for me only in the form of his textual actuality. The subject that I attain in my reading is not the author in a biographical or historical sense. “The subject pre­ siding in the work can only be in the work.’M" Thus the interiority of the Other is in the work itself and is never situated outside of it. To look outside of the work, or behind it, to a psychological ex­ perience or a psychological causality is to miss the point by placing meaning outside of the work rather than in it. For this reason, Starobinski keeps his distance from psychoanalytic approaches. Further, to attempt to go beyond the work to some pure or “real” experience (Erlebnis) of the author, as did Spitzer in his early work, is to lose oneself in a purely conjectural area that is, in the end, inaccessible to us. Both Starobinski and Poulet attempt to “attain the author as he made himself through his work and not as he was

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before it,”41 and each successive work represents another stage in the constant process of becoming. The critic’s goal, then, is a complicity or an identification with the author-in-the-work or the creative consciousness manifested in the work. Poulet designates this creative consciousness the cogito, which functions as the structuring core of every work. Poulet aims at coinciding with this subjectivity and this means apprehending what could be described as an author’s intransitive, preconceptual consciousness, that consciousness which precedes any consciousness of something. Because Poulet aims at identifying totally with the creative consciousness, criticism for him is “the mimetic redoubling of a cognitive act”; the critic partakes of the creative consciousness, and criticism functions as an extension of it.42 Criticism can only clarify and explicate from inside, the difference between critic and author having been eliminated. Criticism is then essentially tauto­ logical, a clarifying repetition. In this sense Poulet emphasizes the passivity of the critical encounter in which the critic’s alienation or alter-ation by the Other takes precedence over any active or con­ stitutive appropriation. One might even go so far as to say that Poulet, because he is looking for total complicity, is a prisoner, albeit a willing one, of his author.43 Starobinski does not share Poulet’s view of an author’s intransitive consciousness. Like Husserl and Sartre, he believes that conscious­ ness is, by definition, transitive or intentional; there is no con­ sciousness that is not consciousness of something. For Starobinski existence is ontologically both relative and relational; there is no Self without the Other. Thus the empathetic reading, although a crucial moment, constitutes only one moment in the critical process. He believes that it is neither possible nor desirable to establish a complete identity of consciousness between reader and author-inthe-work. The critical relation, as he defines it, is very much based on the notion of difference. The critic differs irreducibly from the author in time—his work is différé in that it comes after the work being studied—and in consciousness—the author-in-the-work is a different being with whom it is impossible to be one. The authorin-the-work is on some level always the Other for Starobinski, and thus his approach, while recognizing the crucial importance of the passive moment, emphasizes the moment of active appropriation. Not to distance oneself from the object of study is to fall into the trap of Sameness that plagued Rousseau. “It is not adequate to define interpretation as a language circle that closes back in on itself and that establishes an order of sameness by absorbing every-

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thing it touches into its coherent universality. It is in this way that Rousseau ran the risk of interpretive delirium; it is in this same way that most of us run the risk of what might he called delirium intelligmtiae, the dogmatism of hypothetico-deduclive reasoning.”“ For Starobinski, criticism must consist of both an empathetic alter­ ation of the interpretive 1 and an encounter with the Other qua Other. The danger of limiting oneself to the first moment lies in the solipsistic, ''absolute I” syndrome in which all difference is ab­ sorbed into my sphere of sameness and where one ends up with a sort of immanent transcendence not unlike the kind one experi­ enced in the workings of the imagination where the I envisions itself as Other without ever really confronting an external object. Thus it is not only through identification but also through con­ frontation that I attain a true or transcendent transcendence. On this level, the critical I can not only see the object of study as other but also sees “itself” as the Other of the text. Such a stance has significant practical and theoretical conse­ quences. Most important, it recognizes the constitutive function of the textual Ollier: the text constitutes me as its Other, that is, as reader. It is precisely the legitimacy of the constitutive capacity of the Other that Rousseau refuses to recognize. In reading, I become aware “of a gaze that is directed at me: this gaze is not the reflection of my own questioning. It is a different, radically other conscious­ ness that seeks me out and summons me to answer iL.”“ This second level presupposes the empathetic identification, for only to the extent that I can identify with the Other and see myself from his or her point of view can I envision myself as the text’s Other. It is in this sense that the creative consciousness Lhat I have appre­ hended constitutes me as reader. This means that the critical I is no longer a simple extension of the creative I and that the relation between the two is based on difference. As the text’s Other, I con­ serve my independence, and I maintain my right to question, to comment, and to judge. But this objectifying self-apperception takes place through the text. Having moved from the level of subjectivity to that of intersubjectivity, I now acquire an identity in relation to the Other and, with that identity, the freedom of inquiry—not an absolute freedom to be sure, but one defined in relation. And with this relation comes a sense of responsibility, which to a great extent involves respecting the difference between self and other. “While I can never attain the author outside of his work, I have the right and the duty to question the author in his work by asking who is speaking. And immediately I must ask who is the destinataire—real,

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imaginary, collective, unique, or absent—to which these words are addressed: to whom or before whom are they spoken.”46 It is in this context that Starobinski sees the critical relation not only as an acquiescence to the work but also as an encounter or a confrontation with it. We have seen that in theory at least the criticism of Starobinski answers some of the problems posed in Rousseau, but these answers are fashioned in a praxis and have practical implications. The mix­ ture of acquiescence and confrontation has two important conse­ quences: it allows for a more comprehensive analysis in that it leads the critic to contemplate the literary work from both a writerly and a readerly point of view, and it gives to Starobinski’s work the character of a conversation. Looking at the text from a writerly point of view yields what might be called a thematic structure of the author-in-the-text’s consciousness. Looking at the text from a readerly point of view leads to an examination of the work’s se­ ductive power. On this level Starobinski concentrates on the more “objective” characteristics of the text—composition, phonetics, syn­ tax—and on the formal, internal relations of the text, with an eye to understanding the effects on the reader. But in reality he finds that the seduction is in the meaning as much as in the textual strategies. “Form is not the external covering of content; it is not a seductive appearance behind which a more precious reality is hiding. . . . A structural approach helps us overcome a sterile op­ position: it allows us to see both meaning in its incarnation and the ‘spiritual’ function of the ‘objective’ elements.”47 Such an attempt to integrate formal and “objective” concerns is pursued with re­ markable success in Starobinski’s analysis of the “dinner in Turino.”48 However, although the study of the “objective” aspects of Rousseau is not entirely neglected in Transparency and Obstruction, the book is on the whole much more oriented toward analyzing the basic consciousness-structuring schemata by which Rousseau apprehended himself and the world around him. A simple glance at the text indicates the conversational character of Starobinski’s work. Rousseau speaks often in Starobinski’s text. Acquiescence and confrontation produce a particular type of dia­ logical discourse in which the critic’s statements must find multiple resonances in the work being analyzed. In this, as well as in its regressive movement to an originary moment and in its desire to reveal a latent content, Starobinski’s approach has much in common with a psychoanalytic model. However, the origin to which Staro­ binski goes back is not a repressed one, but a moment of awareness,

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a prise de conscience in which Lhe individual takes stock and examines his place in die world. Starobinski is more concerned with the fundamental structure of awareness than with the hidden causes of that structure. The latency he seeks to reveal is the intentionality of the author rather than his or her conscious intentions. Further, Starobinski’s study of Rousseau has an important “progressive” aspect, for while the consciousness of the author has a number of basic constants, it is also in a constant state of becoming. For this reason, Starobinski’s analysis mixes, and not without some confu­ sion at times, the logical and the chronological. In this context Starobinski speaks of certain “fundamental existential choices” that Rousseau makes and that serve to reveal his relation to the world.,y (To understand what Starobinski means here by choices, we might think of the choices an actor makes in playing a role in improvisational theater where the basic character traits are given, which the actor must then act out, and thus give meaning to, as he will.)50 Fundamentally then, the phenomenological critic is looking for a latent meaning contained in the work and not a hidden cause. “Even if we must admit with Freud that the symbol is hiding or disguising an underlying desire, it is also the very thing that points to and reveals that desire. And it is hard to understand why it is necessary to cut through the symbol (as though it were an interposed screen) in order to have access to a region situated below or beyond the literary work. Let us recognize that the symbol has the right to its own life.”51 The work is not a reflection of the author’s relation to the world, it is that relation. Rather than attempting to look behind appear­ ances for a deeper reality, Starobinski accepts appearances as that by which reality manifests itself. In fact, one can say that all of Starobinski’s work is aimed at exploring the depth and richness of appearances. In this sense, literary criticism becomes an application, a practical working through of an existential position that has its t o o l s in moral philosophy. The most challenging task of the her­ meneutical enterprise is to understand and respect its own limits. In his critical endeavors, the set of problems that Starobinski examines remains fundamentally the same: the problem of sub­ jectivity and self-knowledge; Lhe temptation of a hidden reality and the rejection of appearances; and the status of the literary work as an act of revolt or transgression (which is nothing if noL a decla­ ration of difference). Indeed, it is the discovery of these problems in an author that constitutes for him the call to respond critically. If, on the one hand, Rousseau represents the modern problematic

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and the modem failure in this area, Montaigne represents a pro­ totypical example of that same problematic and a model resolution. In Montaigne in Motion, he discovers in the sixteenth-century humanist a dialectical relation based on a ternary movement that begins with a rejection of the vain appearances and masks of the everyday world and a retreat from that world in the name of liberty and autonomy.52 But Montaigne’s return to self and his attempt to find a more fundamental truth in the works of moral philosophy only lead to fragmentation, contradiction, and alienation. Thus, in a movement of synthesis, Montaigne comes back to the world of appearances which he had rejected before and accepts joyfully others’ and his own limits. Yet there is something paradoxical in looking to the premodern Montaigne to respond to the challenges of modernism and post­ modernism. After all, the differences, the very otherness of Mon­ taigne, would seem to make his solution inapplicable, even if Montaigne did formulate certain fundamental aspects of subjec­ tivity. Above all, what separates Montaigne from modernism is the fact that expression was not yet seen as essentially subjective. But it is here that the role of the critic becomes important. The critical gaze discerns this solution in Montaigne by mediating between a modern conception of language and an attempt at self-expression bound to a tradition of an “objective” language. It is precisely this relation that Starobinski has devoted himself to exploring as a re­ ciprocity that is informed by tradition and history, but is never reduced to a relation of identity. In the disciplines of history and literary criticism, attempts have been made to repudiate the prob­ lem of the self and the other by going beyond it either through the abstract reasoning of logically rigorous theory or through the positing of the abolition of the subject. In Starobinski’s eyes, the former misses the specificity of the object, the latter is profoundly counterintuitive, and both represent an abdication of the individ­ ual’s responsibility. Starobinski remains committed to this respon­ sibility in his use of the critical gaze to understand the literary experience. *

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In the context of a discussion on Otherness, the problem of trans­ lation becomes particularly interesting. Arthur Goldhaminer has given us an excellent, highly readable translation of Jean Starobin­ ski’s work. He has managed to transport much of the subtlety and elegance of Starobinski’s prose into English. Goldhammer’s ap­ proach to translation is not “literalist;” rather he auempts to rethink

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the text. The result is a text that is “at home” in English and readers who are “at home” in the text. If we were to place this effort in the context of our discussion of Starobinski’s work, we would view Goldhammer as having chosen to assimilate the Other to the Same, reducing Starobinski’s difference from us and, in a sense, denying his identity. Yet this strategy can be defended on the grounds that a more literal technique would only lead to awkward English prose and that awkwardness is only a fool’s substitute for alterity. For example, Starobinski achieves subtlety and precision by his use of ternary syntactic structures. When translated literally into English, these structures tend to look bombastic. While Starobinski's use of them in French is not stylistically neutral, it certainly cannot be considered overblown. In translating them, one is forced to choose between accepted norms of stylistic felicity and the added precision afforded by nuancing and reinforcing repetitions. Goldhammer responds to this challenge by translating the thought and restruc­ turing the sentence. Goldhammer has thus made clarifying choices that are certainly justifiable and Lhat have been carried through with remarkable consistency. Among these choices, those concerning a set of vocab­ ulary that draws upon a tradition of phenomenology have Lhe great­ est impact on Lhe meaning of Lhe text and should be noted by the reader. Starobinski’s book is structured around the opposition be­ tween what has been translated as appearance and reality. In French the opposition is between two substantivized infinitives: être mean­ ing “to be” and paraître “to appear.” While “appearance” renders fairly comprehensively the meaning of paraître (although seeming would often also be appropriate), the more usual translation of être, in the phenomenological tradition, is by the substantivized parti­ ciple: being. But this phenomenological terminology is less familiar to English readers. Pairing being and appearances or being and appearing would not have constituted a clearly and immediately recognizable oppo­ sition for most readers and, indeed, on some level might have been misleading. Moreover, pairing being and appearance would have been awkward stylistically and difficult to use with the same consistency as reality and appearance, either because it pairs a participle and a noun or because the participial form of to appear is not commonly accepted as a substantive. Because this opposition is separated from its phenomenological resonances, Goldhammer, in order to render it more intelligible in the context of the comb incident, for example,

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places the concept of appearances under the sign offalse appearances. Thus a sentence such as “Rousseau découvre le paraître en victime du paraître” (literally: “Rousseau discovers appearance as a victim of appearance”) becomes “Rousseau discovers the falsity of appear­ ances as a victim of that falsity.”53 Because Rousseau becomes con­ vinced that there is a “reality” behind appearances, it is no word play to say here that, in spite of appearances, this is not a mistranslation, especially given the way in which Goldhammer develops the vocab­ ulary as the book proceeds. But something is definitely lost in the translation. The same can be said for the word conscience, which is sometimes translated as mind rather than as consciousness or aware­ ness. But these “losses” are to a great extent unavoidable. What is more important is the fact that Goldhammer is consistent in his choices. For English-speaking readers, the appearance/reality couple is a well-recognized opposition that has its roots in the Platonic tradi­ tion, but that also opens out into the Kantian opposition between “an appearance” and “a thing-in-itself.” The opposition is between the sensory data of the physical world and either some other level of existence, as in the case of Plato—where the opposition is on­ tological—or the possibility of knowing, as in the case of Kant— where the opposition is epistemological. The opposition êtrelparaître has a function similar in the French language to that of appearance/ reality in English. But it is semantically richer—and has the added force of rhyme. For one thing, in the Thomist tradition Being is used to refer to God. He is the Being who transcends any opposition between existence (the fact that a thing is) and essence (what it is); he is pure, undivided Being. Certainly in speaking of Rousseau, Starobinski often uses the term Being to refer to a transcendent absolute. But there is also the rich phenomenological terminology that attempts to place being on a phenomenal or experiential level. A whole family of terms has developed around being: being-initself, being-for-itself, being-for-others, being there. In this tradi­ tion, things have many distinct ways of being. Reality is always a perceived reality, and thus reality as subjective experience is con­ sciousness. In this context, die opposition between being and ap­ pearing is not a valid one, or radier it is overcome. This is die tradition that informs SLarobinski’s approach to literature and diat is always present in his analyses. One might say that the êtrelparaître distinction can do more “work” in French than die reality/appearance opposidon in English.

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Because of Lhe consistency of his choices, Goldhammer enables the readers to understand better the profoundly binary nature of Starobinslas thought, which is structured around a basic set of oppositions. I hope that by making readers aware of some of these choices, I will enable them to perceive the benefit of the eminently readable prose as well as some of the resonances of Starobinski’s difference. *

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Jean Starobinski was born on November 17, 1920, in Geneva, Switzerland. He received his Licence ès lettres from the University of Geneva during the Second World War in 1942. At that time he began teaching literature as the assistant of Marcel Raymond. Partly because of the uncertainties of the times and partly because of natural affinities, he began studying medicine while continuing to teach literature. He completed his medical studies in 1949 and began a series of residencies, including one in psychiatry. “1 wanted to bring together literary history, medical history, and problems raised by contemporary psychiatry. The common denominator could only be philosophical, or to be more exact, anthropological in the broadest sense of the word.”5,1 George Poulet, who was teaching at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1950s, encouraged Staro­ binski to come to Baltimore, where he taught literature and con­ tinued his work in medicine. There Starobinski met Leo Spitzer, whose work he had known before coming to the United Stales. Starobinski taught at Johns Hopkins from 1953 to 1956, and when he left he had completed a draft of his doctoral ihesis, “Transpar­ ency and Obstruction,” which was published in 1957. Upon his return to Switzerland, he taught at the Universities of Geneva and Basel. In 1958, he was awarded the Chair of History of Ideas at the University of Geneva. In 1961 he was named Professor of Literature at the University of Geneva, but he continued his teach­ ing in the history of ideas, above all at the medical school, where he taught the history of medicine. Starobinski retired in 1985 and is currently preparing a work on Diderot.

Notes 1. “Ebauches des Confessions," in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), I: 1164. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 2. “Elle se définit par ce qui l’avoisine, elle n’a de sens que par rapport à l’ensemble de son contexte.” Jean Starobinski, Oeil vivant (Paris: Galli­ mard, 1961), 26.

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In regard to the influence of Dilthey and Heidegger, Starobinski, in a personal communication, emphasized that this influence was not direct and believes it might have come through the work of Eric Weil (Logique de la philosophie), a student of Ernst Cassirer and an interpreter o f Hegel’s thought. 3. Ibid.y 26—27, “Or voici l’écueil: le contexte est si vaste, les relations si nombreuses, que le regard est saisi d’un secret désespoir; jamais il ne rassemblera tous les éléments de cette totalité. Au surplus, dès l’instant où l’on s’oblige à situer une oeuvre dans ses coordonnées historiques, seule une décision arbitraire nous autorise à limiter l’enquête.” 4. lean Starobinski, Oeil vivant II: La relation critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 11. 5. Starobinski, Oeil vivant, 27. “Le triomphe du regard surplombant n’est . , . qu’une forme de l’échec: il nous fait perdre l’oeuvre et ses significations, en prétendant nous donner le monde dans lequel baigne l’oeuvre.” 6. Starobinski, Relation critique, 11 —12. 7. Ibid., 73. 8. Jean Starobinski, “Entretien avec Jacques Bonnet,” in Jacques Bonnet, ed., Cahiers pour un temps: Jean Starobinski (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985), 10. This volume also contains several very helpful essays on Sta­ robinski as well as some more recent articles by him. 9. Starobinski’s terminology on the question of method varies somewhat according to the polemical weight that the term carries at a given moment. In La relation critique, published in 1970, he distinguishes between technical means and the methodological reflection that should accompany any critical undertaking. In the interview with Jacques Bonnet, which took place in Geneva in 1984, Starobinski responds in the following manner to the question: “Is there a Starobinskian method?” “If you had asked me this question at the time of methodological tyrannies, I would have been tempted to prove to you that there could be no such thing as method (in the scientific sense of the word) in the areas o f literary criticism and history. But, now that methods have lost some o f their drawing power and, on the contrary, a certain arbitrariness (to each his own fiction) seems fashionable, I am tempted to plead the case for method” (Cahiers pour un temps, 9). Clearly Starobinski takes a mischievous pleasure in evoking the least “fashionable” of all “methods”: philology. 10. It goes without saying that Starobinski believes that in order to understand the language and rhetoric o f a given time, it is important to know their historical antecedents, that is, how they differ from what pre­ ceded them. 11. Jean Starobinski, Eludes de style (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Starobinski also included this piece in La relation critique. 12. I do not mean to imply that Starobinski does not engage in broad studies of cultural history, witness The Invention of Liberty (Geneva: Skira, 1964) and 1789: The Emblems of Reason (Paris: Flammarion, 1973). Rather

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I am examining how he interprets the relation between an author and his sociohistoric moment. 13. Starobinski, Relation critique, 56 14. On the notion o f the “oppositional act,” see Michel de Cerlcau, Einvention du quotidien (Paris: Union Général d’Editions, coll. 10/18, 1980), 7. 15. Starobinski, Relation critique, 56. 16. Starobinski is careful to point out that while he received training in psychiatry, he was not trained as a psychoanalyst and has not undergone psychoanalysis himself. 17. Starobinski, Relation critique, 63. 18. Ibid., 16. 19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Galli­ mard, 1947), 147. “Les contenus visuels sont repris, utilisés, sublimés au niveau de la pensée par une puissance symbolique qui les dépasse, mais c'est sur la base de la vision que cette puissance peut se constituer. . . . La fonction symbolique repose sur la vision comme sur un sol, non que la vision en soit la cause, mais parce qu'elle est ce don de la nature que l'Esprit devait utiliser au-delà de tout espoir.” 20. Husserl's definition is helpful here: “Immediate seeing [is] not merely sensuous, experiential seeing, but seeing in the universal sense as an originally presentive consciousness of any kind whatever.” Ideas I, §19. trans. K. Kersten (The Hague: Martinets Nijhoff, 1983), 36. 21. For an excellent treatment o f this question see Erazim Kohàk, Idea and Experience: Edmund Husserl's Project of Phenomenology i?i “Ideas 1 ” (Chi­ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 22. Starobinski, Oeil vivant, 13. 23. Ibid., 24. 24. Georges Poulet, "Jean Starobinski," in La conscience critique (Paris: Corti, 1971), 233—61; see also J. Hillis Miller, “The Geneva School," in John K. Simon, ed., Modem French Criticism f rom Proust and Valéty to Struc­ turalism, (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1972), 277—310. 25. Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), II: 491. 26. Ibid., /: 1057-58. 27. Jean Starobinski La transparence et l'obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 187—88: in trans., 000—00. 28. Ibid., 291; in trans., 000. 29. Ibid,, 135-36; in trans., 00 0 -0 0 . 30. Ibid., 90; in trans., 000. 31. Ibid.,99; in trans., 000. Rousseau is discussing the Allegorical Piece on the Revelation. 32. Starobinski, La transparence et l'obstacle, 214—15; in trans., 000. 33. Ibid., 263; in trans., 000. 34. Ibid., 239; in trans., 000—00. 35. Ibid., 208; in trans., 000. 36. In Blindness and Insight, Paul de Man criticizes the critical attitude which is “diagnostic and looks on Rousseau as if he were the one asking

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for assistance rather than offering his counsel. . . . One hears this tone of voice even in so sympathetic and penetrating a critic as Jean Starobinski” (Blindness and Insight [New York: Oxford, 1971; 2d ed., Minneapolis: Uni­ versity o f Minnesota Press]), p. 112. 37. Starobinski, Oeil vivant, 24. 38. Starobinski, Relation critique, 162 and 165. 39. Poulet, Conscience critique, 283. 40. Ibid., 284. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes how a literary work functions as subjectivity: “A novel, a poem, a painting, a piece of music are individuals, that is, beings where one cannot distinguish the manner o f expressing from what is expressed, where the meaning is only accessible through direct contact, and which send forth their meaning without leaving their place in time and place. . . . When it is successful, the expressive act [Vopération expressive] is not limited to leaving the reader and the writer himself with a memory aid, rather it makes meaning exist as a thing in very heart o f the text, it makes it live in an organism of words,” (pp. 177, 213). This list of “privileged” objects could be extended to include mémoires and other documents. In fact the criterion of literarity remains unclear in phenomenological criticism. Clearly literary works are consid­ ered as having a special value. There is what Starobinski calls the fait littéraire which refers to something that might best be described as the “literary specificity” of a work. However it must be remembered that this notion does not describe an absolute, but is itself anchored in time and space. Much o f the raison d’etre of the privileged status that phenome­ nology accords the modern work of art is due to the fact that society and individuals invest it with special, transcendent significance. This explains why Poulet as he goes back in time returns to other, more personal or private documents that often have the character of philosophical meditations. 41. Starobinski, Relation critique, 61. 42. Poulet, Conscience cntique, 307. 43. The best introduction in English to the so-called Geneva School o f Criticism remains Sarah Lawall, Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Struc­ tures of Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). Other works of interest include. J. Hillis Miller, “The Geneva School: The Crit­ icism of Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, and Jean Starobinski,” in Simon, Modern French Crit­ icism, 277—310; [Robert Magliola], Phenomenology and Literature: An Intro­ duction (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1977); Philipe Carrard, “Hybrid Hermeneutics: The Metacriticism of Jean Starobinski,” 1, no. 2 (Fall 1984): 2 4 1 -6 3 . 44. Starobinski, Relation critique, 165. “Le cercle d’une parole qui se referme sur son origine, qui fait régner l’ordre du meme, qui absorbe dans son universalité cohérente tout ce quelle touche: cela ne suffit pas à définir Pinterprétation. C’est là qu’apparaissait pour Rousseau le risque du délire; c’est là que surgit, pour la plupart d’entre nous, le risque du dog­ matisme, de la pensée hypolhético-déductive. ce délire de l'intelligence.”

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45. Starobinski, Oeil vivant, 27. Of particular relevance for this question o f the constitutive role o f the Other is Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sarte, and Buber (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984), 84-95. 46. Starobinski, Relation critique, 23—24. 47. Ibid., 18. 48. Ibid., 9 8 -1 5 4 . 49. Starobinski, La transparence et Vobstacle, 204. 50. See Kohàk, Idea and Experience, 25. 51. Starobinski, Relation critique, 282. 52. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Montaigne en mouve­ ment (Päris: Gallimard, 1982). 53. Starobinski, La transparence et Vobstacle, 20; in trans., 00. 54. Starobinski, Cahiers pour un temps, 15.

Transparency and Obstruction

1

The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts

The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts begins pompously with a eulogy of culture. Noble sentences give an abbreviated history of the progress of enlightenment. But a sudden reversal brings us face to face with the disparity between appearance and reality [être]: “The sciences, letters, and the arts . . . wrap garlands of flowers around the iron chains they [i.e., men] wear.”J A nice rhetorical effect: a wave of the magic wand inverts the values, and the brilliant image that Rousseau had created for us becomes a false decor— too good to be true: “How sweet it would be to live among us, if the outward countenance were always the image of the heart’s dispositions.”2 Behind this false surface lurks a void, from which stem all our woes. For it is through the gap between the “outer countenance” and the “dispositions of the heart” that evil comes into the world. The benefits of enlightenment are counterbalanced, indeed prac­ tically annihilated, by the vices introduced into the world by de­ ceptive appearances. In a burst of eloquence Rousseau describes the triumphal rise of the arts and sciences; then, in a second burst of eloquence, we are abruptly jerked about and shown the full extent of the “corruption of morals.” The human mind triumphs, but man has lost his way. The contrast is violent, for what is at issue is not merely the abstract notion of reality versus appearance but the destiny of men, caught between the innocence they have re­ nounced and the perdition that is certain to follow: appearance and evil are one and the same. That appearances are deceiving was hardly a novel theme in 1748. In the theater and the church, in novels and in newspapers, sham, convention, hypocrisy, and masks were denounced in a variety of ways. In the vocabulary of polemic and satire no words occurred more often than unveil and unmask. Tartuffe was read and reread. The deceiver, the “vile flatterer,” the scoundrel in disguise were the 3

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common currency of comedy and tragedy. Every well-wrought plot required the unmasking of a deceiver. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau would be remembered for the lines: Le masque tombe, l’homme reste Et le héros s’évanouit.3 [The masks falls, the man remains And the hero vanishes.]

The theme was sufficiently commonplace, vulgarized, and au­ tomatic that anyone could work variations on it without strenuous intellectual effort. The antithesis between appearance and reality belonged to common parlance: the idea had become a cliché. Yet when Rousseau encountered the blinding truth on the road to Vincennes, and as he “turned and returned” the sentences of his essay, 1 the cliché came back to life: it blazed up and glowed white hot. Suffused with paLhos, the antithesis of appearance and reality gives the Discourse its dramatic tension. What had been merely a well-worn figure of rhetoric now expresses a pain, a rending of the soul. Despite the bombast of the discourse, a true feeling of division is established and maintained. The clash between appear­ ance and reality is echoed in a series of other conflicts: between good and evil (and between the righteous and the wicked), between nature and society, between man and his gods, even between man and himself. Finally, history itself is divided into a before and an after: before there were fatherlands and citizens, now there are none. Once again, Rome provides the example: the virtuous re­ public, beguiled by glittering appearances, is doomed by luxury and conquest. “Fools, what have you done?”5 Although die target of this diatribe is the prestige enjoyed by public opinion, and although it deplores the betrayal of Rome into the hands of the rhetoricians, all the rules of* rhetoric are observed. Nothing is left out of this competition essay, written to be judged by Academicians: apostrophe, prosopopoeia, gradation—all are here. Everything, down to the epigraph, reveals the influence of literary tradition: Decipimur specie recti.6 The main theme is pre­ sented to us under the aegis of a Roman epigram. The citation is apt, moreover. In thrall to the illusion of goodness, captives of appearance, we allow ouselves—it says—to be seduced by a false image of justice. Our error is of a moral rather than an episte­ mological order. To be mistaken in this regard is to do wrong in the belief that one is doing right. Unwittingly and against our will

The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts

5

we are embroiled in evil. Illusion does not merely cloud our un­ derstanding; it veils the truth, distorts all our actions, and perverts our lives. This rhetoric serves as the vehicle for an embittered philosophy, a philosophy haunted by the idea that human communication is impossible. In the first Discourse Rousseau already voices the com­ plaint that he will repeat indefatigably during the years of perse­ cution to come: that souls are invisible, that friendship is impossible, that trust can never endure, and that there is no sure sign by which we can judge the dispositions of the heart: One no longer dares to appear as one is. And under this perpetual constraint, the men who make up the herd that is called society, given identical circumstances, will all do the same things unless more powerful motives dissuade them. Hence one never really knows with whom one is dealing: to know one’s friend, one must await a great occasion, or in other words, until it is too late, since it is for such an occasion that it was essential that we know him. What train o f vices will not accompany such uncertainty? No more sincere friendships; no more genuine esteem; no more wellfounded trust. Suspicion, umbrage, fear, coldness, reserve, hatred, and treason will hide beneath the uniform and perfidious veil of politeness, beneath that much-praised urbanity that we owe to the enlightenment of our century.7

That appearance and reality are two different things and that a “veil” covers our true feelings—this is the initial scandal that Rous­ seau encounters, this is the unacceptable datum for which he will seek the explanation and cause, this is the misfortune from which he longs for deliverance. The theme is a fertile one. It opens the way to inexhaustible developments. By Rousseau’s own admission, the scandal of deceit was the driving force behind all his theorizing. Many years after the first Discourse, when he looks back on his work in order to interpret it, in order to write the “history of his ideas,” he will say: As soon as I was in a position to observe men, I watched them act and I listened to them speak; then, having noticed that their actions did not resemble their words, I sought the reason for this disparity, and I discovered that reality and appearance were for them two things as different as acting and speaking, this second difference being the cause of the first.8

This declaration is noteworthy, but it raises certain questions. “As soon as I was in a position to observe men”: Rousseau here claims

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the role of observer. He adopts the attitude of the naturalist phi­ losopher, who transforms observations into concepts and proceeds inductively to establish reasons, first causes, for what he sees. But in stating that he admires objective analysis, isn't Rousseau in fact “rationalizing” far more confused emotions and far more subjective feelings? Isn’t he adopting the tone of abstract learning more or less deliberately as compensation for, and in order to conceal, cer­ tain quite personal disappointments and failures? Rousseau himself authorizes us to ask these questions. Well before modern psychol­ ogy drew our attention to the emotional sources and unconscious underpinnings of thought, Rousseau, in his Confessions, asked us to seek the origins of his own theories in his emotional experience, and in his Reveries went further still, asking us to consider even his dream life: “My entire life has merely been one long reverie.”9 Was it a sustained act of critical attention that revealed to Rous­ seau the disparity between appearance and reality? Was it calm comparison that inspired his thinking? There is reason to think not. Aware that the theme of false appearances was a commonplace of the period, we may doubt that it was the real starting point, the original inspiration, of Rousseau’s philosophy. Assuming that it is in any way possible to comprehend the sources and origins of Rousseau’s thinking, shouldn’t we look to a deeper level of his psychology? Shouldn't we seek a primary emotion, a more intimate motivation? If we do, the theme of false appearances will crop up again, this time not as rhetorical cliché or methodological principle but as part of Rousseau’s inner drama. “Appearances Condemned Me”

Let us turn to book 1 of the Confessions. “I have displayed myself as 1 was”10 (that is, as he thinks or wishes he was). He is not con­ cerned to trace the history of his ideas. Rather, he lets his mind fill with emotional memories: his existence seems to him to consist of a sequence not of thoughts but of feelings, a “train of secret emo­ tions.”11 If the theme of false appearances were merely an intel­ lectual superstructure, it would hardly have a place in the Confessions. But in fact it occupies quite a large place. Significantly, Jean-Jacques’s self-consciousness begins with his en­ counter with “literature”: I do not know what I did until I was five or six. I do not know how I learned to read. I only remember my first books and their

The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts

7

effect on me; it is from my earliest reading that / date the unbroken consciousness of my own existence. My mother had possessed some novels . . .12

The discovery of the self coincides with the discovery of the imag­ inary: the two discoveries are in fact the same. From the beginning, self-awareness is intimately associated with the possibility of becom­ ing someone else (“I became the character whose life I was read­ ing”).13Although Rousseau sees danger in this method of education, which awakens sentiment before reason and yields knowledge of imaginary things before knowledge of what is real, he does not hold here that appearances are an evil influence. The sentimental illusion fostered by his reading involves a risk, to be sure, but in this case a risk that brings with it a significant advantage: Jean-Jacques is brought up as someone who is different. “These confused emotions, which I experienced one after another, did not warp my powers of reasoning, for as yet I had none. But they shaped my mind in a peculiar way.”14 His belief that he is unique stems from the fascinating fan­ tasies fostered by the novelistic illusion. This is the first biographical fact offered as confirmation of the statement made in the opening paragraph of the Co7ifessions: “I am not made like anyone I have ever met.”15 Jean-Jacques desires this difference but also deplores it: it is both a misfortune and a reason to be proud. Emotions inspired by fiction, exaltation produced by imagination, made him different from other people. His condemnation of these literary emotions and ex­ alted mental states is consequently ambiguous: the novels read in his youth are a vestige of his lost mother. Next we come to another childhood memory in which JeanJacques states that his discovery of false appearances caused a sud­ den disruption in his life. He began not by observing the disparity between appearance and reality but by enduring it. He describes his first experience of the evil in appearances. This “traumatic” discovery has crucial importance in his life: “From that moment I never again enjoyed pure happiness.”16 This catastrophe (or “fall”) destroys Jean-Jacques’s pure childhood pleasure. From this mo­ ment on, injustice exists in the world, and evil is present or possible. The memory is important as an archetype: the discovery of false accusation. Jean-Jacques appears to be guilty although in fact he is not. He appears to lie when in fact he is sincere. Those who punish him are acting unjustly, although they speak the language of justice. In this case, moreover, physical punishment does not

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yield the erotic side effects of the spanking administered by Mile Lambercier; Jean-Jacques discovers not physical pleasure but lone­ liness and separation: One day I was studying my lessons alone in the room next to the kitchen, where the servant had left Mile Lambercier’s combs to dry on the stove top. When she returned for them, she discovered that the teeth of one were broken all along one side. Who was to be blamed for this? No one but me had been in the room. I was questioned and denied having touched the comb. M. and Mile Lambercier jointly lectured, pressed, and threatened me, but 1 steadfastly maintained my denial. They were convinced otherwise, however, and so sure o f themselves that they swept aside all my protests, even though this was the first time that I had been sus­ pected o f an outright lie. They took the matter seriously, as it deserved. The mischief, the lie, and my stubborn refusal to con­ fess all seemed worthy of punishment. . . . Nearly fifty years have passed since this occurrence, and I have no fear of being punished for the offense. But I declare before heaven that I was not guilty. . . . I lacked the reasoning power to see how much appearances were against me or to see the thing as others did. I stuck to my own view, and all I felt was the cruelty of an appalling punishment for a crime I had not committed.17

Rousseau is here cast in the role of the accused. (In the first Discourse he plays the role of accuser, but from the moment he meets with contradiction he resumes the role of the accused.) The experience described in this passage involves not an abstract, no­ tional comparison of reality with appearance but a disturbing con­ trast between real innocence and apparent guilt. “Imagine the revolution in [the child’s] ideas, the violent change of his feelings, the confusion in his heart and brain.”18Even as the child is somehow gaining obscure knowledge of the ontological rift between ap­ pearance and reality, he is also subjected to the unbearable mystery of injustice. He learns that inner certainty of innocence is powerless against apparent proofs of guilt. He discovers that minds are sep­ arate from one another and that we cannot communicate the im­ mediate evidence of inward conviction. From that moment paradise is lost, for paradise was the state of transparent communication between mind and mind, the conviction that total, reliable com­ munication is possible. In that moment the very aspect of the world changes and darkens. The terms that Rousseau uses to describe the consequences of the broken-comb incident are strangely like

The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts

9

the words he uses in the first Discourse to describe the “train of vices” that develop once people “no longer dare to appear as they really are.” In both texts Rousseau speaks of a loss of confidence and then refers to the drawing of a veil: We stayed on at Bossey for several months. There we lived as we are told the first man lived in Eden, but we no longer enjoyed it. The situation was the same in appearance but utterly different in reality. No longer were we pupils bound by ties of respect, inti­ macy, and confidence to our teachers. We no longer looked upon them as gods who read our hearts. We were less ashamed when we misbehaved, and more afraid o f being blamed. We began to be secretive, to rebel, and to lie. All the vices of our age began to corrupt our innocence and to give an ugly turn to our amuse­ ments. Even the country lost the sweet and simple charms that touch the heart. It seemed dark and empty, as if it had been covered by a veil that hid its beauties.19

Souls cease to connect, and take pleasure in hiding from one another. Everything is confused, and the punished child discovers that uncertainty in our knowledge of others that he will later (in the first Discourse) deplore: “One no longer knew with whom one was dealing.” For Jean-Jacques the catastrophe is especially disas­ trous because it separates him from “precisely those people whom he most cherished and respected.”20 This break constitutes an orig­ inal sin, an accusation all the more cruel because it involves a crime of which Jean-Jacques was not guilty. It is worth noting that no one in the story of the comb bears the responsibility for introducing evil and separation into the world. An unfortunate combination of circumstances is to blame, a simple misunderstanding; nothing else. Nowhere does Rousseau say that the Lamberciers are wicked and unjust. He describes them, in fact, as “gentle,” “highly reasonable,” and “justly severe.” Only they are wrong. They have been deceived by the appearance of justice (to borrow the phrase in the epigraph of the first Discourse); the injustice is impersonal and inevitable. “Appearances” are against Rousseau. Their “conviction was too strong.” Nowhere is there a guilty party. There is only an accusation and an apparently guilty party thrust forward as if by chance and automatically offered up for punish­ ment. The individuals involved are all innocent, but their relations are corrupted by false appearances and injustice. The evil of false appearances and the separation of consciousness from consciousness put an end to the blissful unity of childhood.

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Henceforth unity is something that must be recovered or redis­ covered. Individuals, separated one from another, must achieve reconciliation. The mind, driven from paradise, must embark on a lengthy journey before returning to its original felicitous state. It must seek another happiness, of a totally different kind yet one in which its original condition will be totally restored. The revelation that appearances are deceiving is experienced as an injury. Rousseau discovers the falsity of appearances as a victim of that falsity. He perceives the limits of his subjectivity when that subjectivity becomes an object of calumny. He is misperceived by others: the self suffers for its appearance as from a miscarriage of justice, inflicted by people by whom it wished to be loved. Hence the “phenomenal” structure of the world is called into question only indirectly. Here, the discovery of false appearances is by no means the result of reflection upon the illusory nature of perceived reality. Jean-Jacques is not a philosophical “subject” who analyzes the spectacle of the external world and casts doubt upon its reality on the grounds that it is a mere tissue of appearances created by the deceptive agency of the senses. He discovers that other people do not share his truth, his innocence, and his good faith; it is only afterward that the landscape darkens as if shrouded by a veil. Before the self senses its distance from the world, it experiences its distance from others. The evil in appearances strikes first at the existence of the ego and only secondarily at the shape of the world. “It is in man’s heart that the spectacle of nature lives.”21When man’s heart loses its transparency, nature turns dark and tangled. The image of the world is shaped by the way in which mind relates to mind; any alteration in that relationship distorts appearances. By the time the episode at Bossey is over, the heart’s transparency is gone, and so is the luminosity of nature. Gone, too, is the almost divine ability to “read in hearts.” A veil is drawn over the landscape, and the lamp of the world dies out. The “veil” has fallen between Rousseau and himself. He can no longer see his original nature, his innocence. And, to be sure, JeanJacques begins to misbehave (“we were less ashamed of misbehaving . . . we began to be secretive”),22 but he is not responsible for the introduction of evil into the world, and he begins to conceal himself only because the truth has first concealed itself. His story had begun differently. His childhood had at first been one of complete con­ fidence and total transparency. His memory is still capable of taking him back to that time, of restoring him to the limpidity of a brighter world. But he cannot alter the fact that that world is lost and

The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts

11

everything has turned dark: “We do not see the souls of others, because they hide, nor of ourselves, because our intellect has no mirror.”23 We must live in opacity.24 Divided Time and the Myth of Transparency

This moment of crisis—in which the “veil” of separation is lowered and the world turns dark, in which minds become opaque to one another and mistrust makes friendship forever impossible—is part of a larger story: it marks the beginning of a disturbance in JeanJacques’s happy childhood, the beginning of a new era, another age in the development of consciousness. This new age is charac­ terized by a crucial discovery: for the first time consciousness has a past. But this discovery, if it brings new wealth, also reveals an essential impoverishment, a lack. The temporal dimension that opens up behind the present moment is perceptible only because it is fleeing into inaccessibility. The mind turns back to an earlier world and sees that world, which once belonged to it, as lost forever. As the child’s happiness slips away, the mind recognizes the bound­ less value of this now-forbidden joy. There is nothing left to do but create the poetic myth of a bygone era. In the past, before the veil fell between the world and ourselves, there were “gods who read in our hearts,” and nothing denatured the transparency and clarity of our souls. We lived at one with the truth. In both individual biography and the history of humanity, this time is situated close to birth, in the vicinity of the origin. Rousseau is one of the first writers (perhaps one should say poets) to cast the Platonic myth of exile and return in a form pertaining not to some heavenly home­ land but to the condition of childhood. In evoking the time of transparency the first Discourse uses im­ agery strikingly similar to that found in the story from the Confes­ sions. As in the Bossey episode Rousseau refers to the presence of the “gods.” In this time divine witnesses live among men and read in their hearts. This is a world in which one consciousness recog­ nizes another at a glance: These are beautiful shores, decorated by no other hand than nature’s, to which the eye is constantly drawn and which the heart cannot leave without regret. When man was innocent and vir­ tuous, he liked to have the gods as witnesses to his actions and lived in common huts. But now that he has grown wicked, he finds spectators inconvenient.25

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Until art fashioned our manners and taught passion to speak an affected language, our ways were rustic but natural. Differences in behavior revealed differences in character at a glance. Human nature was not fundamentally better; but men found security in the ease with which they could see into one another s hearts.26

Prior to any theory or hypothesis concerning the state of nature, Rousseau gives his intuitive (or imagined) description of that state, which resembles his own childhood up to the Lime when he is falsely accused. In the state of nature man lived happily in peace. Ap­ pearance and reality were in perfect equilibrium. Men showed themselves and were seen by others as they really were. External appearances were not obstacles but faithful mirrors, wherein mind met mind in perfect harmony. Here, of course, nostalgia for a “prior life** detaches us from the “contemporary" world without causing us to lose contact wiih either nature or our fellow man. In this previous state of happiness we are surrounded by the same nature, the same vegetation, that sur­ rounds us today. We see the forest, which men have mutilated, but of which large tracts still remain. To explain the fall of man no demon tempter or tempted Eve—no supernatural intervention— is required; human causes will suffice. Man, being perfectible, has always tried to supplement nature’s gifts with inventions of his own. Man’s pride and the ever-increasing burden of human artifice that is its consequence have accelerated the fall into corruption: such is the history of mankind. Horrified, we gaze upon a world of masks and mortal illusions, and there is no reason for the observer (or accuser) to believe that he alone has escaped the universal affliction. Hence the drama of the fall does not precede man’s earthly existence. Rousseau takes the religious myth and sets it in historical time, which he divides into two ages: a changeless age of innocence, during which pristine nature reigns in peace, and an age of his­ torical change, of culpable activity, of negation of nature by man. But if the fall is man’s own doing, a mere accident of human history, it follows that man is not by nature condemned to live in a vicious climate of mistrust and opacity. For the flaws in man’s condition are the work of man himself, or of society. Hence there is no reason why we cannot remake or unmake history in order to regain the transparency we have lost. There is no supernatural taboo. Man’s essence is not compromised but only his historical situation. “Perhaps you would like to go back?”"7 The question is left unanswered, but clearly Lhere is no flaming sword that prevents our entering the lost paradise. For some people (on distant shores)«

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who have not yet abandoned that paradise, perhaps it is not too late to “stop.”28 But even if, for purely human reasons, the evil is irreversible, even if we must concede that a “vicious people never returns to virtue,” history sets us the challenge of resisting and thwarting the progress of evil. If we cannot “ make good those who are good no longer,” the least we can do is “preserve those who by good fortune still are.”29 Because the introduction of evil into the world is a fact of history, the struggle against evil is a struggle that must be waged by man in history. Rousseau has no doubt that some form of action is possible and that by our own free will we can devote ourselves to lifting the veil from the face of truth. But he has several different ideas about the nature of such action and of such a decision to serve the truth, ideas that he expresses at different times (or even simultaneously) in his work: at times he sees it as a matter of personal moral reform (vitam impendere vero), at times as a matter of individual education (Emile), and at times as a matter of forming a political community (in Political Economy and the Social Contract). Beyond this, there is a fundamental uncertainty in Jean-Jacques’s desires: sometimes his wishes are directed toward the past, sometimes to the most im­ mediate present, the refuge of the self-sufficient mind, and other times—more rarely—to transcendence in the future. At first he harbors “Arcadian” dreams of a return to the primeval forest. Later he argues in favor of a conservative solution, a stable compromise in which the soul and society maintain what remains pure and original in each of them. Still later he sketches “the idea of man­ kind’s future happiness”30 and constructs his atemporal ideal of the virtuous city in Institutions politiques. It is difficult to reconcile in a fully satisfactory manner so many dissimilar designs. One common feature is worth noting, however: the unity of intention, which is to preserve or restore a compromised state of transparency. In Rousseau’s impassioned appeal to his contemporaries there may be nothing more than an invitation to cultivate the ethics of good will and clear conscience, or one may read his work as an invitation to transform society through political action. This ambiguity is em­ barrassing. What is unambiguous, however, is that Rousseau first calls upon us to will a restoration of transparency, both for ourselves and in our lives. This desire is unmistakable, as powerful as it is simple. Ambiguity begins when this simple desire must confront concrete tasks and difficult situations. From desire for transparency to possession of transparency the transition is not direct; there is no immediate access to the desired state. The man who sets out to

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tree himself from false appearances must sooner or laier face the question of means (diverse and contradictory as these are) and the question of action, which may bring either success or failure and which threatens to plunge him back into the world of falsity and opacity from which he had sought to free himself. Historical Knowledge and Poetic Vision

How far are we, though, from the lost transparency? How many layers of veil must be penetrate? How far do we have to go to regain what we have lost? In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Rousseau interposes “multitudes of centuries.” The distance is vast, and the light of our primitive happiness seems almost to vanish in the mists of die ages. What can we know of a time so long ago? Reason cannot refrain from voicing its doubts: Was the time of transparency indeed real, or is it merely a fiction of our own invention, necessary for un­ dertaking a speculadve reconstruction of human history from its incepdon? In a passage in the second Discourse in which Rousseau is clearly surveying his whole philosophy, he goes so far as to suggest that the state of nature “perhaps did not exist.” It is a mere spec­ ulation, the starting point of a “hypothetical history,” a principle from which certain conclusions can be deduced in an attempt to establish a chain of cause and effect, to construct a genetic explanadon of die world as it appears to us. This procedure is no dif­ ferent from that used by nearly all scientists and philosophers in this period, when people believed that proof required tracing all phenomena back to their simple and necessary sources: scholars therefore took upon themselves the role of historians of the earth, of life, of the faculties of the soul, and of societies, whose origins they attempted to trace. In bestowing upon speculation the name observation, they hoped to be dispensed from the need to provide further proof. In fact, the more Rousseau developed his “historical” fiction, the more it shed its hypothetical character: intellectual prudence gave way to ever-increasing confidence, to a rapture of the spirit. The description of the primordial state, of what was scarcely more than an animal existence, turned into an enchanted evocation of a “place in which to live.” The idea of a “healthy,” nomadic existence, with its sensory equilibrium and proper self-sufficiency, aroused such feelings of nostalgia that it produced an elegy. For Rousseau, the image was too powerful, too profoundly satisfying, not to have

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corresponded to the letter of historical truth. A certainty took shape within him—a certainty poetic in essence but mistaken as to its own true nature. It sought to speak the language of history and called to witness the most earnest erudition. Conviction overcame all doubt: the origins of mankind were incontrovertibly thus and so, Rousseau declared, and primitive man must have been exactly as he believed. Rousseau justifies his nostalgia by making up an objective history of an Age of Transparency. His certitude is that of memory. Cer­ titude of this kind is fortified by contact, and Rousseau’s disciples viewed him not as the author of a hypothetical history but as a seer (Seher; as Hölderlin called him) possessed of memory of very ancient times, of a past finer than the present. In an unfinished ode entitled “Rousseau,” Hölderlin wrote: auch dir, auch dir Erfreuet die ferne Sonne dein Haupt, Und Strahlen aus der schönem Zeit. Es Haben die Boten dein Herz gefunden.31 [For thee too, for thee too The distant sun illuminates thy head With rays from a finer time. The messengers Found thy heart.]

Hölderlin here casts Rousseau in the role of “interpreter,” one touched by the light of a future age or a vanished past. The God Glaucus

Has the primal transparency really disappeared? Or has it been preserved in the transparency of memory and thereby saved? Has it deserted us entirely, or does it still loom nearby? Rousseau cannot choose between contradictory answers. At some point the myth gives rise to two distinct versions. In one of these, the human soul has degenerated; it has been deformed, totally transformed, and has forever lost its primal nobility. In the other, however, what has occurred is not a deformation but a kind of eclipse: man’s primitive nature persists, but hidden, veiled, shrouded in artifice—yet intact. What we have, then, is an optimistic and a pessimistic version of the myth of origin: Rousseau believes sometimes in one, somelimes in the other, sometimes in both simultaneously. He tells us that man has irrevocably destroyed his natural identity, but he also says that man’s original soul is indestructible and hence that it survives un­ changed beneath the mask of artifice.

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Rousseau uses the Platonic myth of the statue of Glaucus for his own ends: Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, the seas, and the storms had so disfigured that it resembled less a god than a wild beast, the human soul modified in society by a thousand ever-recurring causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and errors, by mutations taking place in the constitution of the body, and by the constant impact of the passions, has, in a manner of speaking, changed in appearance to the point of becoming almost unrecognizable.32

But here, the words “in a manner of speaking” and “almost” keep hope alive. There is something enigmatic about the image of Glaucus as Rousseau uses it. Has Glaucus’s face been eaten away by time? Has it lost forever the form it possessed when it first left the hands of the sculptor? Or has it merely been encrusted with salt and algae, beneath which the divine physiognomy preserves its original shape, with no loss of substance? Or again, is the original face a mere fiction, an ideal against which the current state of mankind can be measured? It is no light enterprise to separate what is original from what is artificial in man’s present nature and to obtain sure knowledge of a state that no longer exists, that may never have existed, and that probably never will exist, yet about which we must have sound ideas if we are to judge our present state satisfactorily.33

To remain as one was or to submit to change: the alternatives are equivalent, in Rousseau’s mind, to the theological alternatives of salvation and perdition. Rousseau does not believe in hell, but he does believe that change is evil, whereas to remain true to oneself holds out at least a promise of salvation. Historical time, which as Rousseau sees it is not incompatible with organic devel­ opment, must bear a burden of guilt. Historical change obscures the past; it brings not progress but distortion. Rousseau sees change as corruption.34 As time goes by, man becomes disfigured and depraved. Not simply his appearance but his very essence becomes unrecognizable. This drastic (and, if you will, Calvinist) version of the myth of origin occurs at several points in Rousseau’s work. Underneath, we detect a very real anguish, aggravated by Rous­ seau’s sense of irreparable decline. He several times states that evil is irredeemable, that once a certain threshold has been crossed the soul is lost and must resign itself to its loss. A “smothered nature” never returns, he says, “and one loses both what one has

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destroyed and what one has made.”35 “Miserable! what have we become? How is it that we ceased to be what we were?”36 The distortion, it seems, is such that nothing remains of the original form. Rousseau himself felt attacked and threatened: The most vile tastes and base mischief drove out all memory of agreeable amusements. Despite the most upright education I must have had a true penchant for degeneracy, for it came on me rapidly and without the slightest effort: never did a Caesar become so quickly a Laridon.37

This passage follows closely on the Bossey episode. With it I want to cite a text from the end of Rousseau’s life, which is particularly significant, I think, because it dates from a period in which Rous­ seau is steadfast in his assertion that he has always been true to himself: Perhaps, without realizing it, I changed more than I should have. What nature could withstand a situation like mine without deteriorating?”38 Rousseau hastens to answer this question in the negative. Indeed, at a moment when everything has changed for him and he thinks he is living in a dream, he struggles against the anguish of inner change with all his might and fights to maintain his identity. Some­ thing has changed, but his soul has remained the same. He places the responsibility for change outside himself. It is others who have undergone the most surprising metamorphosis and who, them­ selves unrecognizable, have distorted his image and works. Rous­ seau himself remains what he has always been. His feelings have changed only because the external realities are no longer the same: But things changed utterly . . . as soon as my misfortunes began. Since then I have lived among a new generation, quite unlike the first, and my own feelings for others have suffered from the changes I have observed in theirs. The people whom I have seen in these very different generations have as it were adapted them­ selves to each.39 I, the very same man who I was then and am still today.40

Beneath the mask that others, outside himself, have imposed on him, Jean-Jacques remains Jean-Jacques. At the height of his obses­ sion with persecution, he reminds himself of the optimistic version of the myth of origin: nothing has been lost; time has altered nothing essential, but only the surface of things; evil originates outside the self and remains external to it. Beneath the disfiguring incrustation Glaucus’s features remain unchanged. Jean-Jacques

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then applies to himself (and to himself alone) an idea that he had previously applied to man in general. He distinguishes between a lost nature and a hidden nature, the latter being a nature that may be masked but can never be destroyed. Too powerful and perhaps too godlike to admit of transformation or eradication, this hidden nature eludes whatever we may do to profane it and takes refuge in the depths of our being, covered by extraneous shrouds. It is forgotten but not really lost, and when memory finally yields up vestiges of some remote past, we can snatch away the veils and recover the hidden nature that has remained present and alive within our bosom. “The afflictions of the soul . . . temporary, ex­ ternal alterations to an immortal and uncomplicated essence, grad­ ually disappear, leaving the soul in its original form, which nothing can change.”41 When Rousseau confidently invokes a “nature that nothing can destroy,” he becomes the poet of enduring essences, at last un­ veiled. He discovers the primal transparency close at hand, indeed within himself. “Natural man,” whom he had sought in the depths of time, turns up in the depths of the self, with all his “original features” intact. A man who can delve into himself can rediscover the resplendent face of the god, free of the “rust” that had con­ cealed it: Where can the painter of and apologist for a nature today so disfigured and reviled have found his model, if not in his own heart? He has described nature as he felt it. Prejudices to which he was not subject, artificial passions of which he was not the victim, did not blind him as they have blinded so many others to original features forgotten or unrecognized by nearly all. So new and so true, the rightness of those features was confirmed by the evidence of the heart, but they never would have reemerged had not the historian of nature begun by scraping away the rust that hid them. Only a retiring and solitary life, a lively taste for reverie and contemplation, and a habit of introspection, of calmly passionate seeking after what the multitude cannot see, could reveal those original features to him. In a word, a man had to paint himself in order to show us primitive man in this way.42

Self-knowledge, then, is the same as reminiscence. But it is not memory that reveals man’s “original features” to Rousseau, even though those features belong to an earlier age. Rousseau did not have to travel back somehow to the beginning of time in order to enter the state of nature and become its historian. He had only to describe himself, to know himself intimately, to get close to his own

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true nature through a process that was at once active and passive: exploring his inner nature and abandoning himself to reverie. In­ ward exploration yields knowledge of the same reality, it reveals the same absolute norms, as does exploration of the most remote past. What was first in historical time is also deepest in Jean-Jacques’s experience. Historical distance is reduced to mere interior dis­ tance—a distance soon traversed by a man who knows how to aban­ don himself to his emotions. From that moment, nature (like the divine presence for Augustine)43 ceases to be what is most remote from us in the past and becomes what is most central to our very existence. No longer transcendent, the norm is now immanent in the self. If we are just sincere—just ourselves—natural man ceases to be a remote archetype: he becomes identical with us. Previously, transparency was possible because man existed naïvely under the gaze of the gods; now transparency is an inward condition, a matter of one’s relation to oneself. Jean-Jacques describes himself as he really is. An image results, which (Rousseau assures us) is a true image of the history of the species as a whole: the vanished past is resurrected and revealed to be the eternal present of nature. Hu­ man beings regain the certainty that they are all alike (“every man bears the entire form of the human condition,” said Montaigne). Because Jean-Jacques was able to abandon himself to his reveries, men will in turn recognize one another. Behind their false truths they will rediscover a forgotten present, a form that remained intact beneath the veils. Delivered from oblivion, they rediscover their true selves. It is possible, therefore, to grasp man’s original nature without knowing his real origins and without engaging in speculative his­ torical reconstruction. Rousseau explains this clearly in the second Discourse, in which he readily concedes that he can say nothing about man’s “true origins” and yet reserves the right to speculate as to the “nature of things”: The kind of research that one can do on this subject should not be expected to reveal historical truth; it amounts to no more than speculative, conditional reasoning, more apt to illuminate the na­ ture o f things than to demonstrate their true origins A4

Is it possible to grasp the nature of man independent of human history? Rousseau is not sure. He can neither relinquish the noLion that there is an essential human nature nor do without the idea of historical change, which enables him to explain plausibly why man­ kind was denatured as it moved away from its blissful origins. Rous-

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seau does not wish to give up the possibility of criticizing society for perverting human nature, but at the same time he wants to claim that man’s original goodness remains unaltered. The two claims may appear contradictory, and Rousseau has been criticized for subscribing to both. To die extent that society is the work of man, it must be admitted that man is guilty and bears responsibility for the evil done to mankind. But to the extent that man has remained a child of nature, his innocence is indestructible. How does one reconcile the assertion that “man is naturally good” with the assertion that “everything degenerates at the hands of man?” A Theodicy That Exculpates Man and God

As Ernst Cassirer has demonstrated, Rousseau’s assumptions yield a solution to the problem of theodicy without requiring that the blame for evil be laid at the door of either God or man.45 It [is not] necessary to assume that man is wicked by nature when one [can] demonstrate the origins and progress of his wickedness. These reflections led me into new investigations of the human spirit considered in its civil estate, wherein I discovered that en­ lightenment and vice always developed in equal proportions, not in individuals but in peoples; a distinction that I have always been careful to make, and that none who attacked me have been able to conceive.46

Evil is produced by history and society without altering the es­ sence of the individual. The flaw in society is not a flaw in man’s essential nature but in the relations that exist among men. Provided that a distinction is made between the essence of man and relations among men, between sociability and human nature, it is possible to state that the persistence of man’s original nature is the central truth, to which the existence of evil, of change over time, is merely peripheral. Hence evil can be identified with man’s passion for what is external to himself: prestige, appearances, possession of material wealth. Evil is external, and it is the passion for the external: if man succumbs entirely to the seduction of alien goods, he falls entirely under the dominion of evil. But he always has the option of securing his salvation by turning inward. Rousseau, unlike most previous moralists, is not content merely to criticize external things: he incriminates the external in his very definition of evil. This condemnation is merely the counterpart of an exculpation that claims, once and for all, to save man’s inner essence. Relegated to

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the periphery of being, to the realm of interpersonal relations, evil ceases to enjoy the same ontological status as man’s “natural good­ ness.” Evil is veil and obfuscation, it is mask, it is intimately bound up with fiction, and it would not exist if man had not the dangerous freedom to deny, by means of artifice, what is given by nature. Things degenerate at the hands of man, not in his heart. His hands do work, change nature, make history, shape the outside world, and ultimately produce differences between historical epochs, con­ flict between nations, and inequality between “individuals.” In the space of a single page, Rousseau protests against the “false philosophy” that claims that “men are everywhere the same” yet maintains that the vices of the contemporary world “are vices not of man but of man ill governed.”47 A significant contradiction. Rousseau affirms both the permanence of an essential innocence and the fact of historical change, which means alteration, moral corruption, and political degeneration and gives rise to conflict and injustice.48 In later theories of progress we find a similar hypothesis, in­ tended to reconcile the postulate of an enduring human nature with the idea of collective change. “Man remains the same, but mankind constantly progresses,” said Goethe. The pessimism of the second Discourse was challenged, and many people found Goethe’s more optimistic view easier to accept. Philosophically, however, the problem is the same. On either view, one must reconcile the stability of human nature with the mobility of history. One must explain why man (qua individual) enjoys the privilege of remaining “the same,” while mankind (qua collectivity) is subject to change. Rousseau needs history, however, only in order to explain evil. It is the idea of evil that gives his system its historical dimension. His­ torical change is the means by which mankind acquires guilt. Man is not vicious by nature; he becomes vicious. To restore goodness is therefore to rebel against history and, in particular, against the pres­ ent historical situation. If Rousseau’s philosophy is revolutionary, it is revolutionary in the name of an eternal human nature rather than of historical progress. (In order to see Rousseau’s work as a decisive factor in eighteenth-century political developments, that work must be interpreted.) Aware of the need to confront the world and “men as they are,” Rousseau’s social thought is, as we shall discover, aimed primarily at establishing or reestablishing the sovereignty of the im­ mediate, that is, the primacy of a value upon which duration has no claim.

2

Critique of Society

Among the writers of his day, Rousseau belongs with those who challenged monarchical values and social structures. Opposition to the status quo creates a resemblance and an air of fraternity among these diverse writers, each of whom may in some sense be consid­ ered a contributor to or precursor of the Revolution. Hence it has been possible to effect a posthumous reconciliation between Rous­ seau and Voltaire, resulting in their common apotheosis or, better still, in their promotion to the status of a Janus-faced deity, a tutelary dyad: in popular engravings the two are immortalized together— two geniuses, lamps in hand, spreading enlightenment and glowing with Luciferian brilliance. Rousseau sought to attack the root of evil. He leveled a finger of accusation at society, at the social order from top to bottom. He did not scatter his critical volleys, attacking one at a time the mul­ tiple manifestations of evil, but aimed rather at their common cause. This choice freed him from the need to attack particular abuses, particular usurpations of power, and particular cases of fraud. (He was in any case too egocentric to accept the role of a righter of wrongs. Voltaire made himself the champion of justice in the Calas affair and a dozen similar cases. Rousseau was totally preoccupied with one affair: his own.) Rousseau traces the history of his thoughts as follows: he observed a disparity between men’s words and their actions; he explained this in terms of yet another disparity, between appearance and reality; he then identified the root cause. I found it in our social order, which, being contrary in every way to indestructible nature, tyrannizes that nature and obliges it to insist constantly on its rights. I pursued this contradiction to draw out its consequences and saw that it alone explained all the vices of men and all the ills of society.1

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In this passage, which vigorously sums up the argument of the two Discourses, Rousseau gives the clearest definition of the object and scope of his social criticism: his protest is directed against society insofar as society is contrary to nature. Society, which negates nature (or the natural order), has not eradicated nature. Society and nature remain, rather, in permanent conflict, and it is this conflict that gives rise to all man’s ills and vices. Rousseau’s critique thus begins a “negation of the negation.” He accuses civilization, which is characterized by its negativity with respect to nature. The established culture denies nature: this is the dramatic claim put forward in the two Discourses and Emile. Civilization’s “deceptive lights” do not illuminate man’s world but veil the transparency of nature, separate men from one another, give rise to special interests, destroy all possibility of mutual confidence, and substitute for true communication between souls a factitious commerce, devoid of sincerity. The result is a society in which individuals isolate them­ selves in selfishness and take refuge behind false appearances. A striking paradox: what might have seemed a world in which eco­ nomic ties among men were closer than ever becomes a world of opacity, falsity, and hypocrisy: I protest that philosophy is loosening the social bonds formed by mutual esteem and benevolence, and I protest that the sciences, the arts, and all the other objects o f commerce are tightening social bonds through personal interest. Indeed, one of these bonds cannot be tightened without loosening the other by an equal amount. Hence there is no contradiction in what I say.I2

Significantly, Rousseau here contrasts two types of social relation, antithetical in the same way as transparency and opacity. Esteem and benevolence constitute a social bond in which men relate to one another immediately: nothing comes between one mind and another, and each individual is fully and spontaneously open to the other. By contrast, the bonds created by private interest have lost this characteristic immediacy. No longer is there a direct connection of mind to mind: the relationship now involves the mediation of things. The resulting perversion stems not merely from the fact that things come between minds but also from the fact that men no longer identify their interest with their personal existence but instead with mediating objects, which they believe to be indispensable to their happiness. Social man no longer seeks his being within himself but outside, among things; his means become his end. Mankind as a whole becomes a thing, or the slave of things. Rous-

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seau’s critique denounces this alienation and proposes instead a return to immediacy. Civilized society, by constantly increasing the distance between itself and nature, obscures the immediate relation of one mind to another: loss of the primordial transparency goes hand in hand with alienation in the world of material things. Rousseau’s analysis in this regard prefigures the analyses of Hegel and Marx; all rely on an account of human history. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality is in fact a history of civilization as progress in the negation of nature, a progress that corresponds to a loss of innocence. The history of technology is set forth in close parallel with the moral history of mankind. Unlike nineteenth-century philosophers, how­ ever, and in contrast to his more positivistically inclined contem­ poraries, Rousseau is seeking not to establish anthropological knowledge but to justify his moral judgment of history. It is as a moralist that he writes the history of morality. This accounts for the ambiguities in his argument. The stages through which man­ kind has passed and the condition in which it now lives must first be established as facts. Then they must be accepted: mankind has undergone inevitable transformations that brought it ineluctably to its present condition—so much is beyond doubt. But the factual truth of the matter tells us nothing about what is right. The his­ torical facts justify nothing. History has no moral legitimacy, and Rousseau does not hesitate to condemn, in the name of eternal values, the historical mechanism whose necessity he has proven and whose effects he has extended to the moral functions themselves. Having traced the progress of culture, defined as negation of nature, Rousseau refuses to accept that progress: he negates the negation by virtue of a moral judgment that claims to be based on an ethical absolute. Rousseau’s indignation (as a “natural” man) against society (a historical creation) is the emotional expression of this conflict. Rousseau raises his voice to say No! to antinature. The present situation, with its contrasts of wealth and poverty, is his­ torically logical but morally unacceptable. Rousseau understands the society of his day but rejects it in outrage. His philosophy cannot end with indignation, however. Merely understanding an opaque world is not enough to restore its lost transparency. For Rousseau, comprehension does not lead simply to intellectual commitment to “fact” but directly to moral opposition on behalf of what is “right.” He protests against Grotius that his “method of reasoning is always to offer fact as proof of right.”3 Rousseau judges and condemns, on behalf of what is right, the facts whose historical necessity he

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has demonstrated. In order to realize his ideal of transparency, however, he requires a world in which fact and right coincide. Hej seeks this world, now before history, in “ancient times” prior to corrupting progress, now beyond history, in an abstract future in which a more perfect order will have supplanted the disorder of the present. The Primordial Innocence

Prior to the development of the arts and of reason, the human /a d was not yet sufficiently developed to enter into conflict with a still unarticulated right: primitive man is “good” because he is not yet active enough to do wrong. The moralist’s judgment in conferring goodness is retrospective. Natural man, for his part, lives “naïvely” in an amoral or premoral world. His limited intelligence does not distinguish beween good and evil. Hence what is is not truly in harmony with what is right: the conflict between fact and value has simply not yet erupted into the open. Man’s horizons in the state of nature are limited, and he lives in an equilibrium that does not yet bring him into conflict with either the world or himself. He does not work (which would involve him in conflict with nature), nor does he reflect (which would involve him in conflict with himself and his peers): His desires do not go beyond his physical needs. . . . His imagi­ nation paints no images. His heart yearns for nothing. His modest needs are so close at hand, and he is so far from the degree of knowledge necessary to acquire greater knowledge, that he cannot possibly exhibit either prudence or curiosity. . . . His soul, which nothing disturbs, dwells only in the sensation o f its present existence.4

In this state of perfect self-sufficiency, man does not need to transform the world in order to satisfy his needs. Here we have an “animal” and “sensationalist” version of the Stoic ideal of autarchy. Man does not look outside himself, nor does he look beyond the present moment. In a word, he lives in the immediate. If each sen­ sation is new, the apparent discontinuity is merely a way of expe­ riencing the continuity of the immediate. Nothing comes between man’s “limited desires” and their object. Language is scarcely nec­ essary. Sensation has direct access to the world, to such a degree that man scarcely distinguishes between himself and his environ­ ment. He sees things clearly, and the possibility of error does not yet disturb his vision. The senses, as yet unaided, uncontaminated

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by judgment and reflection, are not subject to distortion. Just as Rousseau retrospectively ascribes goodness to man’s premoral con­ dition, he retrospectively ascribes truth to his prereflective expe­ rience, which he assumes to have been purely passive. The state of nature presumably exists prior to any distinction between truth and falsehood, and Rousseau accords to man in the state of nature the privilege of immediate possession of the truth. As he himself ad­ mits, this state is akin to that of childhood, and even now it is possible for a child a live in a state of nature so long as adults do not “corrupt” him prematurely. Emile is “wholly engaged in his current existence, but enjoying a fullness of life that seems to want to extend beyond him. . . . His still pure senses are free from illusion.”5 Rousseau’s discussion of “sensual truth” is similar to that of Con­ dillac, for whom error begins at the moment we begin to judge sense data: “There is neither error, nor obscurity, nor confusion in what goes on inside us, nor in the relations that we establish between it and the outside. . . . If error enters in, it does so only insofar as we presume to judge.”6 Sensation is always correct, but it does not know that it is correct.7 Work, Reflection, Pride

But just as the child, in growing up, leaves the world of sensation to enter first the “moral world” and then the social world, so, too, does primitive man abandon the paradise of pure sensibility. In this process, gradual but irreversible, Rousseau holds that the strug­ gle to overcome natural obstacles plays a role of the utmost im­ portance. Psychological changes commence when man begins to use tools. Chronologically, work and the use of instruments precede the development of judgment and reflection: Such was the condition of nascent man; such was the life of an animal limited at first to mere sensation and scarcely profiting from the gifts bestowed on him by nature, let alone dreaming of wresting anything from her. . . . Natural weapons—branches o f trees and stones—were soon found to be at hand. Man learned to overcome the obstacles of nature, to fight when necessary against other animals, to struggle for his subsistence even against other men, or to compensate himself for what he was forced to yield to the stronger.8

Fresh obstacles obliged men to fashion new implements, less “natural” than branches and rocks. The distance between man and

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nature—a distance created by the artifice to which man resorted in order to dominate his environment—was thus increased: Barren years, long hard winters, scorching summers consuming everything demanded new industry from men. Along seacoasts and river banks they invented fishing lines and hooks and became fishermen and fish eaters. In the forests they made bows and arrows.9

Man's effort to struggle actively with the world resulted in psy­ chological changes. The faculty of comparison made him capable of rudimentary reflection: he began to perceive the differences between things. He discovered, for instance, that he was different from the animals and indeed superior to them, and therein arose a first vice: pride. This repeated comparison of various creatures to himself and to one another must naturally have given rise to the perception of certain relationships. These relationships . . . eventually resulted in some sort of reflection. The new discoveries that followed from this development in­ creased man’s superiority over the other animals by making him conscious o f it. . . . Thus man’s first scrutiny o f himself yielded the first sthring of pride.10

Rousseau proceeds to describe a long series of “moments” in man’s pursuit of perfection. Natural obstacles were overcome by work; work led to reflection; reflection produced “the first sensation of pride.” With the beginning of reflection, the time of “natural man” comes to an end and the time of “mankind” begins. The fall is nothing other than the introduction of pride. The equilibrium of the sen­ tient being is destroyed. Man is no longer innocently and sponta­ neously at one with himself. If nature “intended us to be healthy, I would almost venture to say that the state of reflection is unnat­ ural, and that man who meditates is a depraved animal.”11 The active division between self'and other begins now. Selfishness perverts innocent love of self [amour de soi as opposed to amour-propre], vice is born, and society takes shape. And as reason progresses, property and inequality arise, and what is mine is ever more sharply distin­ guished from what is yours. The gap between appearance and reality marks the triumph of the “factitious,” the ever-growing dis­ parity not only between ourselves and the outside world but be­ tween ourselves and our own inner nature.

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Each man began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself.12 For his own advantage he had to make himself appear other than as he really was. Appearance and reality became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose insolent osten­ tation, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their train.13

Man is alienated in his appearances. Rousseau describes (false) appearances as both an effect and cause of economic changes. In­ deed, he sees a profound connection between the moral problem and the economic problem. Social man, whose existence is not autonomous but relative, constantly invents new desires, which he cannot satisfy on his own. He needs wealth and prestige. He wants to possess objects and dominate minds. He is truly himself, he believes, only when he enjoys the “consideration” and respect of others on account of his wealth and appearances. An abstract notion from which all sorts of concrete woes derive, appearance explains not only the inner division of civilized man but also his subjugation to limitless desires. The condition of civilized man stands at the opposite extreme from the happiness of primitive man, given over to the immediate. For the man of appearance there are no ends but only means, and he himself is reduced to the status of a means. None of his desires can be gratified immediately, for gratification involves the imaginary and factitious: the opinion of others and the labor of others are indispensable. Since men no longer seek to satisfy their “true needs” but only the needs created by vanity, they are never at one with themselves but always estranged—one an­ other’s slaves. Rousseau’s language in denouncing the alienation of social man clearly prefigures the language of Kant and Hegel, even though it remains in many respects that of a Stoic moralist.14 In a passage that seems to anticipate modern philosophies of history we find all the themes of ancient philosophy: Once free and independent, now man has become through a host of new needs subjugated, as it were, to all o f nature and above all to his fellow men, whose slave he becomes in a sense, even as he becomes their master. If rich, he needs their services; if poor, he needs their help; and mediocrity does not put him in a position to do without them. Hence he must constantly seek to interest others in his fate, to make them see profit, real or apparent, in working for his benefit: which makes him false and cunning in his dealings with some, imperious and harsh in his dealings with others.15

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Despotism then becomes the extreme form of the now universal servitude, in which man is slave both to his fellow man and to his own needs. Humbled by tyranny, men once again find themselves living in equality, but this time an equality of oppression and non­ existence: “Here all individuals regain their equality, because they are nothing.”16 We have come full circle: starting from the equality of presocial independence, we end with the servile equality of des­ potic society. Man has completed the process of social development, but the cost of intellectual and technical progress has been moral degradation. He has become inauthentic, and the conflict between himself and nature has grown steadily worse. Synthesis through Revolution

Is there any way out of this situation: Or is transcendence impos­ sible? In interpreting the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Engels emphasizes the conclusion of Rousseau’s text.17 Enslaved men, op­ pressed by a brutal despot, resort to violence to free themselves and overthrow the tyrant: The despot is master only as long as he remains the strongest. . . . Once the people are ready to throw him out, he has no ar­ gument against violence. The uprising that ends with the sultan being throttled or dethroned is no less legitimate an act than the sultan’s previous exercise o f the power o f life and death over his subjects. Force alone kept him in power, and force alone can overthrow him. This is the natural order o f things.18

In other words, there is a “natural order” in the very historical process that has estranged man from his “natural condition.” In­ equality, Engels says, is finally transformed into equality: not the equality of primitive, prelinguistic man, but the higher equality of the social contract. The oppressors are oppressed. Prior terms in the series are at once preserved and transcended. Men realize the negation of the negation. This Hegelian-Marxist interpretation as­ sumes that the Social Contract can be read as a sequel to, indeed as a denouement of, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Such an interpretation of Rousseau’s meaning is certainly ap­ pealing. But it makes sense only if one reads the two works as parts of a continuous argument. One objection to this interpretation is that, according to the second Discourse, the revolution that culmi­ nates the historical process will not bring about decisive change. It will merely end change in what is essentially an evil state of affairs. This changelessness is diametrically opposed, however, to the

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changeless innocence of the state of nature. The revolution against despotism does not establish a new form of justice. Having lost the equality of natural independence, man achieves equality in servi­ tude. Rousseau does not invoke hope, and he does not tell us how equality might be won in civil liberty (a question deferred until the Social Contract). He simply looks forward to “short and frequent revolutions,” that is, to enduring anarchy. At the nadir of his moral decline, man is unable to avoid chaos and violence. History ends, but it ends chaotically: against this evil there is no recourse.19 The Social Contract, moreover, contains no discussion of present or future historical conditions. The hypothetical contract is situated at the beginning of social life, just as man emerges from the state of nature. There is no question of destroying an imperfect society in order to establish freedom and equality. Rousseau thereby side­ steps the practical problem of how to effect the transition from the present society to the perfectly just one. (He will consider this problem more seriously when the time comes to advise the Poles.) In one fell swoop, with no transition, he moves from the state of nature to the decision that establishes the primacy of the general will and the law of reason. This decision is inaugural in character, not revolutionary. Although he clearly states the problem of the lawgiver, Rousseau does not locate his legal speculation at any spe­ cific stage of actual history. He is not explicit about what sort of action might bring about the changes he describes. The social pact is not an evolutionary development that follows naturally from the second Discourse; it belongs, rather, to another dimension, a purely normative dimension, outside historical time. We begin ex nihilo, without asking what conditions must be met in order for the po­ litical ideal to be realized. With this new and more reasonable start, history begins not with the possessive assertion—“This is mine!”— but with the transfer of the common will into the hands of the collectivity. Such a hypothetical society is not subject to the inevitable historical misfortune that condemned actual humanity to fall into an irrevocable state of corruption. It is, rather, an icljeaJ_model against which corrupt society can be judged.20 Synthesis through Education

Engels’s interpretation links the Social Contract to the second Dis­ course via the idea of revolution (the “negation of the negation”). Kant and more recently Cassirer also consider Rousseau’s theo­ retical thought as a coherent whole. They find the same dialectic,

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the same ternary rhythm, as Engels did. But the synthesis of op­ posing terms is for them effected not by revolution but by education. The final moment is the same: the reconciliation of nature and culture in a society that returns to nature and transcends the in­ justices of civilization. Essentially, the difference between the two interpretations concerns the transition between the second Discourse and the Social Contract. Since Rousseau does not make this transition explicit, the exegete must reconstruct it using such clues as he can find in the texts, none of which is decisive. A certain arbitrariness of interpretation is inevitable, since one is forced to carry Rous­ seau’s thinking beyond what he himself explicitly affirmed. Engels chooses to focus on the last two or three pages of the second Dis­ course, in which Rousseau describes the restoration of equality and the revolt of the slaves. Kant and Cassirer prefer to interpolate passages from Emile and Rousseau’s other pedagogical writings, in order to establish a necessary connection between the argument of the second Discourse and the positive construction in the Social Con­ tract. Revolution or education: this is the crux of the difference between the “Marxist” interpretation of Rousseau and the “idealist” interpretation. Both agree, however, on the need for a global inter­ pretation of Rousseau’s theoretical contribution. Kant was one of the first to maintain that Rousseau’s thought is constructed according to a rational plan: those who accuse Rous­ seau of contradicting himself, says Kant, fail to understand him. In Kant’s view, Rousseau not only denounced the conflict between nature and culture but sought to resolve it.21 Rousseau attempted to define the conditions under which the possibility of cultural progress might exist, progress “that would enable mankind to de­ velop its dispositions [Anlagen] qua moral species [sittliche Gattung] without violating its determination [zu ihrer Bestimmung gehörig], in such a way as to surmount the conflict that opposes mankind to itself qua natural species [natürliche Gattung].” Nature is restored when art and culture attain their highest perfection: “Consummate art becomes nature anew.” What Kant means by art is the juridical institution, the free and reasonable order in conformity with which man decides voluntarily to live. The supreme function of education and law, both built upon freedom, is to allow nature to flourish within culture. Then (adds Cassirer)22 men recover the immediacy they had enjoyed previously in the state of nature.23 What they discover now, however, is not merely the primitive immediacy of sensation and feeling but the immediacy of the autonomous will and reasonable intellect.

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Furthermore, Rousseau himself suggested the possibility of such a synthesis at the end of the first Discourse: if men, and above all princes, want to overcome alienation, then, indeed, it can be over­ come and a true community reestablished. The essence of evil lies not in knowledge or art (or technology) but in social disintegration. Under current conditions it is simply the case that the arts and sciences favor and indeed accelerate such disintegration. But there is no reason why the arts and sciences cannot be made to serve better ends. Thus Rousseau’s point is not to banish the arts and sciences forever but to restore the social totality by emphasizing the imperative need for virtue, which alone is capable of creating the necessary cohesion: Only then can we hope to see what can be accomplished by virtue, science, and authority, animated by a noble emulation and working in concert for the happiness of the human race. But as long as power shall remain on one side and reason and wisdom on an­ other, philosophers will rarely think great thoughts, princes will rarely perform noble deeds, and nations will continue to be base, corrupt, and miserable.24

What Rousseau deplores is the fact that political power and cul­ ture may choose divergent goals. For he is ready to absolve culture, provided that it takes its place as part of a harmonious totality instead of encouraging men to seek private pleasures and advan­ tages. He does not dream of abolishing science. He counsels, rather, that science be preserved but that the current conflict between “power” and “reason” be eliminated. To that end Rousseau calls upon princes and academies (here, out of politeness no doubt, the Academy of Dijon). Behind the flattering formulas, however, we see clearly the wish for a return to unity, for a restoration of con­ fidence, and for a reestablishment of communication. None of what men have thought and invented would then need to be rejected; everything could be incorporated into the felicity of a life reconciled with itself.

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If the interpretations are contradictory, the reason is that Rousseau merely sketches a possible synthesis in which lost unity might be restored. This possibility looms dimly on the horizon as the point at which several distinct strands ought to converge. Rousseau con­ ceived of the origins of inequality in historical terms, but he did not concern himself with the “eschatological” problems of the end of inequality in human history.1The “social contract” is a postulate with no definite place in history: it posits the need for civil liberty that would arise if all men agreed to alienate their natural inde­ pendence. Had Rousseau been rigorous in his philosophical in­ vestigation, he would have asked himself under what conditions a synthesis that would be of benefit to all society could be achieved. But then he could not have stopped with mere dreams of liberty’s coming; he would have been obliged to formulate concrete means for winning man’s freedom. Had he patiently examined the his­ torical conditions necessary for the restoration of unity, however, Rousseau would have had to forget about himself. And a Rousseau capable of putting aside his own personality would no longer be Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He is in too much of a hurry to secure for himself the happiness that history cannot promise right now. Rec­ onciliation as he sees it lies in either the remote past or the distant future, but for Rousseau the question is whether he can obtain it for himself, during his own lifetime. It is as though Jean-Jacques’s impatience placed the problem squarely within the bounds of his own life, requiring him to discover an immediate solution. After formulating his thoughts about the world and its history, Rousseau retreats to the realm of subjectivity, as if forced to turn inward by the very urgency of the questions previously raised in historical and social terms. The world was not yet ready to solve these prob­ lems, and Jean-Jacques had no desire to put himself aside in order to enter the world of action. If there was something to be done, it involved not the outside world but the self. 33

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Having raised certain problems in a historical context, Rousseau went on to live those problems in the context of his own life. His work, which began as a philosophy of history, ended as an existential “experience.” It is a forerunner of the work of both Hegel and his antagonist Kierkegaard. Here we have two aspects of modern thought: the progress of reason in history and the tragic quest for individual salvation. The author of the second Discourse asks himself, What shall I do with my life? No one, it seems, is waiting for him to write a new literary work to resolve the antitheses so vehemently set forth in the works that have gone before. What is required of him, he thinks, is that his life become an example, that his principles be made visible in the way he lives. It is up to him, first of all, to demonstrate the meaning of nature and of the primitive unity that is threatened by civilization. His decision involves himself alone; mankind, whose evolution he has so brilliantly analyzed, need make no commitment. At this point it is reasonable to ask whether Rousseau’s historical theory is not a mere construct whose real purpose is to justify a personal choice. Is he really choosing to live according to his prin­ ciples? Or has he perhaps forged his principles and historical the­ ories merely to excuse and justify his personal peculiarities—his timidity, awkwardness, and moods—and his choice to live with the ill-bred Thérèse? The conflict that Jean-Jacques denounces in his­ tory has all the earmarks of a personal conflict. This ambiguity must be taken into account and not dismissed for the convenience of the interpretation. Rousseau is alone. The characters he meets are all masked. “All put their reality in their appearance.”2 He meditates in solitude on man’s collective fate. Yet his meditation is not disinterested, since it will allow him to blame history and society for the defects in his personal life. He will prove that he is right to be so unusual and to live alone. His concern is not so much to demonstrate the truth of his system as to justify his attitude. Little by little, personal apol­ ogy takes the place of speculative thought. When he first attacks society’s vices, he has no one at his side and wants no ally. The more general his protest, the more solitary he becomes. (Others might put it this way: he wants to be alone, and this desire forces him to make his protest more general.) His cri­ tique, whose target is the root of evil, has in his view nothing in common with the philosophes’ critique of oppressive institutions. In­ deed, as Rousseau sees it, the philosophical critique is merely one

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more expression of the evil in society. Far from being inimical to society, the philosophical critique is merely society’s most elaborate, most poisonous product. It actively contributes to making things worse. “Philosophers” are no exception to the general rule of vanity and corruption, and, what is more, they profit from the wickedness of a world bent on self-destruction. Their influence increases the distance between individual minds and further advances the dis­ integration of society. (Later, Rousseau adopts a paranoid form of the same idea. He imagines that the philosophes and the authorities are in league against him: Choiseul [minister of foreign affairs under Louis XV—T r a n s .] and the Encyclopedists are accomplices in evil. They do not fight but assist one another.) The philosophes are still part of the world they criticize. Rousseau accuses them indiscriminately of working to preserve defective in­ stitutions while destroying the true bonds that hold society together. Pärasites on a society in disintegration, they heap ridicule upon the very ideas that ought to bind men together within a more just social order. “They smile disdainfully at the old words fatherland and religion.”3 But their mockery stems from nothing other than a “rage to distinguish themselves,” to achieve social success in a society that has ceased to be a fatherland and makes fun of its own religion. In the salons, where false appearances and opinions reign trium­ phant, one can say anything, but no one believes anything that is said: the protests of the philosophes are nothing more than gossip, inauthentic commentaries on an inauthentic world. To avoid becoming the worst of these commentators, Rousseau sets himself apart and seeks to stand out as an exception. Although he has attacked the arbitrariness of existing institutions, the injus­ tice of absolute power, and the absurdity of certain customs and abuses, nothing has yet set him definitively apart from the Ency­ clopedists, and nothing in his philosophy yet requires solitude as its necessary complement: he might have been solitary merely by virtue of temperament, illness, or narcissism, and his solitude, as a mere biographical detail, would have held but little interest for us. No profound link would exist between Rousseau’s solitude and his thought. But Rousseau’s rebellion, directed as it was against the very es­ sence of contemporary society, was so sweeping that it made sense only as the rebellion of a man who had excluded himself from that society. The only way to guarantee the seriousness of his challenge to the status quo was to take a stance—alone and against all others— somewhere outside hypocritical society. Evil and society being one

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and the same, fraud and hypocrisy would exist wherever human society was found. It was therefore necessary to flee society at all costs and to become a belle amey or beautiful soul. The vehemence and absoluteness of Rousseau’s critique forced him into solitude. (Others might put it this way: wanting to be alone, he took for his excuse the radical evil that perverts communal life.) If he wished to be taken seriously, he would have to be much more than an opposition writer. His criticism would truly count only when his entire life had become an exemplary contradiction. A man who becomes a writer to denounce the social fraud places himself in a paradoxical situation. By choosing to become an author and, even more, to begin his career by winning an academic prize, Rousseau entered the social circuit of opinion, success, and fashion. From the first he was therefore subject to suspicion of duplicity, contaminated by the very disease he was attacking. As his solitude became increasingly absolute, Rousseau became more and more convinced that his literary debut had been a curse: “From that moment I was lost.”4 The only possible redemption was to make a public statement of his separation: withdrawal became necessary, and a permanent disengagement would serve as Rousseau’s justi­ fication. I am speaking to you, he would henceforth say, but not as one of you. I belong to another world, to another fatherland. You have forgotten what a fatherland is, but I, I am a citizen of Geneva. No, I am not even a citizen of Geneva, for the Genevans are no longer what they once were. Your Voltaire has come and corrupted them. I am simply: the citizen.5 Once he becomes a man of letters, the accuser can never fully excuse his compromise with evil, which perpetuates itself within him as long as he continues to write. Even his excuse, so long as it remains public, is yet another link to public opinion and does not eradicate his mistake. Ultimately the only solution is to keep silent, to reduce oneself to a nullity for others. But Rousseau cannot keep silent; he can only write that he wishes he were a nullity. Rousseau’s problem, then, is to close the gap that is constantly reappearing between his life and his principles. All his conduct must somehow counter the artifice of the corrupt world that he is attacking but that still claims too much of him. He must make sure that his protest is not mistaken for mere literature. In words too fine he proclaims a dangerous truth, which condemns vain elo­ quence and declares that virtue lies in silent wisdom.

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The proposition that society is the opposite of nature leads im­ mediately to the statement: / am opposed to society. It is the “I” that takes upon itself the responsibility to reject a society that is the ne­ gation of nature. The negation of the negation thus becomes, in essence, a lived attitude (rather than a moment in a historical process or a project of historical action). Society is collectively the negation of na­ ture; Jean-Jacques would make himself, as a solitary individual, the negation of society. Once again we are forced to turn from the his­ torical theories of Rousseau to the individual Jean-Jacques, from speculation on human evolution to life’s inner problems. The tran­ sition from one category to another, from objective knowledge to subjective experience, makes no logical sense. And yet nothing could be more logical, given the logic of a morality aimed at establishing the identity of words and actions. Jean-Jacques will establish his per­ sonal salvation upon the collective perdition that he denounces. Many commentators have stressed the “modern” or “romantic” tone of Rousseau’s individualism. It would be easy, too, to trace its ancient, and especially Stoic, sources. To live in harmony with one­ self and with nature is a precept that Rousseau might have found in Seneca or Montaigne. He merely adapts, with a singular infusion of passion, a very old commonplace of moral philosophy: “With all the strength of my soul I sought to break the shackles of opinion and to do with courage what seemed to me good, without giving the slightest thought to the judgment of men.”6 Rousseau does not want to be taken for a speechifier or sophist: he wants his actions to conform to his words, and he wants to live out his truth without allowing himself to be influenced by the judg­ ment of others. His solitude is therefore justified: he will live alone in order to prove that he is right and everyone else wrong. Now he can give a reasonable explanation for his solitude, which is based on universal values. But his decision does not bring Rousseau the inner contentment, or ataraxia, promised by the ancient sages. In fact, it is all but impossible for Rousseau to live out his thoughts without extreme tension and continual misunderstandings in his relations with others. His resolve to live virtuously amounts to a deliberate decision to seek unhappiness. How is it possible to live in accordance with universal truth but in opposition to all other men? Isn’t there a radical contradiction between the withdrawal into solitude and the appeal to the universal? Can I still claim justification on the basis of universal truth if I decide not to “give the slightest thought to the judgment of men?”

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Rousseau can neither forgive this hypocritical world nor abandon it entirely. He takes his distance but returns in the role of accuser. He renounces the world without “dying to the world.” From that moment he becomes the prisoner of a role that obliges him to show the public that he is a man of virtue. He maintains this final tie, which enables him to say that he has broken all ties wiih the opinions of others. The effort to regain possession of himself and of his freedom is intended to give visibility to Jean-Jacques (and to the truth that he has chosen for himself). Hence the choice of solitude is never fully realized: caught by his exhibitionism, Rousseau re­ mains trapped in society’s snares. He knows this himself, suffers from the knowledge, and is constantly punishing himself for it. But in order to prove his theories, he must put them to the test in his own life, and for this he requires witnesses: Rousseau will be forced to publicize his way of life as he once publicized his ideas. His personal reform, which is intended to free himself from en­ slavement to public opinion, can succeed fully only if he is capable of shaping that same opinion: “My resolution caused a stir.”7 His enemies, moreover, will say that he constructed his system only to highlight the uniqueness of his personaliky. Let us accommodate ourselves to this dual focus: Rousseau lived his life in accordance with the requirements of his theories, while, conversely, he adapted his system to the requirements of his “sen­ sibility” that is, to his need for emotional gratification. In his “sin­ gular posture” there is an element of pride and a wish to be noticed, and his critics did not fail to assail him on these grounds. But Rousseau is the first to admit the justice of the criticism; the most stringent and ironic criticism comes from Rousseau himself. It is he who teaches us to be suspicious of him. What appears to be a heroic sacrifice to virtue is sometimes mere emotional sophistry: the accusation occurs in the Confessions^ Rousseau is the first to raise the question of bad faith. It is true that he indicts only his reason, from which he dissociates himself. In using arguments based on “cold reason,” he tells us, he has pleaded causes whose ultimate goal was not rational truth but the satisfaction of some obscure “vital interest” or pathological "libido.” In Rousseau’s impassioned discourse, in his reasoned fulmina­ tions against reason, there is a quality of intoxication that interferes with the straightforward exercise of reason. But we must also rec­ ognize that liiere is a desire to bring the darker realms of experience into the light of a truly sovereign reason. Rousseau’s confusion of

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pathos and logos can be interpreted in two ways: where pathos seems to pervert logos, we must also recognize the effort (never fully successful) of a mind attempting to free itself from pathos in order to attain the serenity of logos—“in the calm of the passions.”9 The very movement by which Rousseau wrests himself free from passion is itself a surge of passion: he is too constantly oppressed by feelings of inner turmoil not to want to attain the clarity of reason. But the reason to which he lays claim is not that of the reasoners, not that which brings intellectual certainty: he wants to clarify his ideas only in order to provide better justification for his existence. A life whose singularity cannot be justified is condemned to the ultimate un­ reason: insignificance. The important thing is to escape from this condition of meaninglessness. On the other hand, Jean-Jacques is unwilling to take a position in the camp of reason already occupied by others. He wants not to sacrifice his solitude but to save it, and it is to rational truth—at once intimate, universal, and unknown to other men—that he ascribes the power to sanctify.10

Not enough attention has been paid to the curious mixture of pride and irony in Rousseau’s account of his “personal reform.” He proudly affirms the greatness of his enterprise, only to mock it immediately as a fraud. It is an extraordinary act of courage, but also a feverish act of “foolish pride.” Rousseau thus warrants a dual interpretation of his “reform.” On the one hand, the solitary chal­ lenge that he hurls at society can be interpreted as the ideology of a timid man, a sick man who hopes to make the best of his malad­ justment, so much so, in fact, that he makes it his proudest pos­ session. Does he not wish to live among other people? Well, then, at least let his estrangement and awkwardness stand for a passionate conversion to virtue! Since he feels ill at ease in the salons, let him attract their attention by slamming the door on his way out! “You have lived a great deal in the opinion of others,” Mirabeau would write to him.11 On the other hand, however, the point was to trans­ form a literary career into a heroic destiny: to free life from the vicissitudes of literature, to bring actual behavior into accord with a virtuous ideal first learned from books, and finally, fortified by the conquest of truth, to set forth, in writing, a philosophy para­ doxically based on the rejection of literature. “The work that I was doing could only be done in absolute retirement.”12 For the first time, the problem of an “existential” transcendence of literature arose outside the confines of traditional religious spirituality: the renunciation of the world’s vanities and the conversion to “another

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moral world"1* took Rousseau not toward the Church but toward the foresi and the life of the vagabond. Those who take refuge in the Church can maintain their silence, however (since die Church speaks in their name, and in justification of their silence, through its saints and doctors), whereas Rousseau, whose only justification is within himself, can never be silent. He must forever rise to speak because he can never finish explaining the true meaning of his solitude. This, he knows, is open to inter­ pretation as the solitude of Lhe wicked or prideful man. “Only the wicked man is alone,” declares Diderot.11 Rousseau, who believed himself to be the target of this attack, would spend the rest of his life answering it, for he never could stand ambiguity. The struggle would not have been so tragic for Rousseau had the only question been to stand out from the crowd and make manifest his difference from others. His task, however, is not simply to play the role of the odier (in the guise of an Armenian), but also to demonstrate to a wicked society that which is radically different from evil; in other words, he must make men see the good thaï they have failed to recognize. The tragic tension in Rousseau comes not just from separation and rupture in themselves but from the need to make his solitude coincide at all times with essential goodness and truth, not only as he recognizes goodness and truth within his heart of hearts but also as goodness and truth may be recognized by others. What we see, then, is not merely the irrational claim of a mind attempting to establish itself through opposition; Rousseau's subjectivity lays claim to certain privileges, not only to be fully recognized by others (which is already a great deal for the son of a Genevan artisan astray among the marshals and farmers-general of France), not only to force the world to watch the spectacle of an uncompromising personality, but to win acceptance as the le­ gitimate interpreter of a truth that others have allowed to fall into oblivion. Rousseau wants to give his solitary ruminations meaning as both protest and prophecy. By setting himself in opposition to others, Rousseau is not seeking merely to impose his own unique personality; he is making a heroic effort to live in accordance with universal values: freedom, virtue, truth, and nature. Rousseau settles in solitude so that he may speak legitimately in the name of the universal. When he leaves the big city and breaks off relations with his “so-called friends,” is he seeking refuge in “mystery” or in the “spiritual depths” of subjective existence? Not at all: we must be careful not to ascribe to Rousseau a romanticism of which he is no more than an early precursor. Subjective intuition

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for Rousseau has none of the intellectual character that it had for Descartes and Malebranche, yet it does, as with those two writers, claim to reveal a universal truth that is neither irrational nor su­ prarational in nature. Turning inward is a sure way of achieving greater clarity of thought and immediately perceptible proof, as opposed to the meaninglessness that reigns in society. Rousseau’s uncertainty as to the value of reason makes sense once one rec­ ognizes that reason seems dangerous to him only to the extent that it claims to reach the truth in nonimmediate fashion, that is, through a “chain” of arguments. When Rousseau attacks reason, his target is primarily discursive reason. Whenever he can rely on intuitive reason, immediate illumination, he becomes, once more, a ration­ alist. The crucial choice is not between reason and feeling but between immediacy and mediation. Rousseau opts for the imme­ diate, not the irrational. Immediate certainty may be associated with either emotion, sensation, or reason. As long as immediacy obtains, Rousseau sees no hierarchy between the “sensible imme­ diate” and the “rational immediate.”15 On the contrary, reason and feeling turn out to be perfectly compatible. Rousseau’s hostility is limited to la raison raisonnante (what Kant would later call the “un­ derstanding” [der Verstand]), which inspires “the senseless judg­ ments of men.”16 This instrumental reason imprisons men in the confused subjectivity of opinion and illusion. Rousseau denounces it as absurd; as seen by a more profound reason, the false clarities of common reasoning prove senseless. Rousseau made himself a stranger to men in order to protest against the alienation that makes men strangers to one another— a paradox for which he is still criticized. His decision to wed the cause of absent truth led him to claim the fate of the exile. The same choice that makes him the defender of lost (or unrecognized) transparency also makes him a vagabond. An exile and a vagabond, then, but only in relation to the world of alienation, and only in order to make that world ashamed of itself. In reality Rousseau claims to have “fixed” his ideas, “settled his inner life for the rest of his days.” He has pitched his tent in the camp of truth so that he can live the life of a homeless person, of a man who flees from asylum to asylum, from retreat to retreat, on the periphery of a society that has placed a veil over man’s original nature and dis­ torted all communication between men. Because he dreams of total transparency and immediate communication, he must cut any ties that might bind him to a troubled world over which pass worrisome shadows, masked faces, and opaque stares.

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The veil that had fallen over nature, the opacity that entered the scene at Bossey, will disappear once Rousseau has conquered sol­ itude. His lost happiness will be restored, but only in part, for although the brilliance of the natural landscape returns, Rousseau must pay the price: a definitive break with his fellow men. Rous­ seau’s solitude represents a return to transparency, but only on condition that he stand apart from society. The vapors o f self-love and the tumult of the world cast a pall in my mind over the bloom of the groves and disturbed the peace o f my rcLreat. Though 1 fled into the depths o f the woods, an importunate crowd followed me everywhere and veiled all of na­ ture. Only after I freed myself from the social passions and their mournful train did I rediscover nature in all her charm.17

Once society was forgotten and all memory of and concern for the opinion of others were banished, the landscape once again took on the character of a primordial and primary side in Jean-Jacques’s eyes. Its charm reappeared; its true magic made itself felt. Now Rousseau is able to encounter natatore in an immediate fashion, with no foreign object to intervene—no unseasonable reminder of human labor, no stigma of history or civilization: I then went at a more tranquil pace in search o f some wild or deserted place in the forest, where there would lurk no mark of the hand o f man to proclaim servitude and domination, some asylum that I might think I was the first to have reached, and where no unwelcome visitor would come between nature and me.18

In the midst of nature, immediately available to the senses once again and rescued from the curse of opacity, Rousseau again as­ sumes the role of prophet. He proclaims the hidden truth: In the depths o f the forest I sought and found the image of the beginning o f time, whose history I proudly traced; I swept aside the petty lies o f men, 1 dared to unveil their naked nature and to follow the progress o f time and the filings Lhat disfigured it.1"

But for one who simply wishes to get back to nature, Rousseau takes too much pleasure telling us that he has left behind the vain pleasures of the world. His forgetfulness is not complete, and his detachment is not total. He may not miss the world, but he re­ members it in order to condemn it. Even as he flees into the forest to take refuge among the fundamental truths of nature, he does not lose sight of the factitious world he has rejected, and he has

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not forgotten the “petty lies” he hates. He enjoys the immediate pleasures of nature only as he fulminates against the world of instrumental and mediated relations. He has not fled far enough to forget the errors of others, and if “social passions” no longer possess him, he is still the antagonist of corrupt society. Paradoxical as it may seem, he remains, in the depths of his isolation, linked to society through his antisocial rebellion and passion: hostility is a bond. The only way for Jean-Jacques to avoid the opacity that threatens him from without is to make himself transparent, to experience transparency from within, while making sure that he remains visible to others, imprisoned though they be in an opaque world. Only then does the act whereby universal truth is proclaimed merge with the act whereby the ego displays itself in a single revelation. If truth is to reveal itself, it must be lived by a “witness.” (Kierkegaard will later write: “An existential relationship to the ideal is never visible, for an existence of this kind is one lived by the witness to truth.”)20 The witness’s life is double: his relationship is not only the truth but also with the society before which he stands as witness. He must constantly explain himself. What gives him the right to set himself up as witness? And if society is false appearance, why maintain a dubious attachment to it? The witness, then, must prove that he has the right to throw down the gauntlet to society.21 He must be certain that his rela­ tionship to truth is essential, that is, that his personal existence is somehow identical with the essence of truth. When he speaks, his ego must first assert itself, then vanish in the transparency of the impersonal, so as to reveal the eternal values that stand behind the individual witness: liberty and virtue. Rousseau will have nothing to do with the precarious or conjectural aspects of subjective ex­ perience. He hastens to establish an absolute, for it is only with the aid of the absolute that he can quell his anxiety, his fear that he is somehow culpable. Virtuous words, purifying renunciations, and painful rejections are not enough. It is not enough that he has sold his watch, given up his sword and fine linen, and fled the cities. Further proof is needed, and further sacrifice. He must endure many more dreadful misfortunes, persecutions, and “tempests.” The “witness to truth” will never achieve final certainty as to what kind of man he is or what kind of truth he claims to bring mankind; he will never be done proving himself. Rousseau, in fact, will anx­ iously court misfortune, because misfortune is for him a kind of consecration. The witness to truth looks forward to martyrdom as

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ultimate proof of his mission: “I hope that some day people will judge what kind of man I was by what I was able to endure. . . . No, there is nothing so great, I think, nothing so beautiful, as to suffer for the truth. I envy the glory of the martyrs/*22 Kierkegaard, who was also tempted by the idea of martyrdom, expressed himself in strikingly similar terms: "After all, there is but one thing to do in order to serve the truth: suffer for it.”23 The critique of society thus turns into an epiphany of private consciousness. Not because individual life is somehow more valu­ able than communal life: society is not wicked because social man lives communally but because the motives that impel men to join together in society inevitably cloud the primordial transparency of presocial existence. Rousseau’s hostility is directed against social hypocrisy and the tyranny of opinion, not against society as such. He does not seek solitude for itself (at least he denies that he does): solitude is necessary because it opens the way to reason, to freedom, and to nature. If it were possible for a society to be created in conditions of transparency, if all minds could agree to be open to one another and to abdicate any ulterior or “private” motives—as the Social Contract hypothesizes—then there would be no reason to prefer the individual to society. On the contrary, in a social orga­ nization that encouraged communication between minds, in a har­ mony based upon the “general will,” nothing would be more pernicious than for an individual to withdraw into himself and rely on his own private will. By placing self-interest first he would threaten the harmony of the larger society. The blame would then lie with the resisting individual and not with the collective law. Traditional criticism sees a mysterious hiatus between the Social Contract and the rest of Rousseau’s work, because he fails in the former to sanc­ tion the claim of personal happiness, which elsewhere is so impor­ tant to him. But in fact Rousseau is, in a profound way, faithful to the principle of transparency. If transparency is embodied in the general will, then society must take precedence over the happiness of the individual. If it can be achieved only in solitary life, then solitary life must take precedence over society. Rousseau’s hesita­ tions and “vacillations” merely involve the time, place, and condi­ tions under which transparency can be restored. He abandons hope in Parisian society and takes refuge in the Hermitage. Has he made a definitive choice in favor of individual existence? No, because he immediately begins dreaming of his Political Institutions. A solitary transparency remains a fragmentary transparency, when what Rousseau wants is total transparency.

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Let me add here one further remark concerning not JeanJacques’s intentions but the (for him) unpredictable consequences of his philosophy and way of life. We saw earlier that as Rousseau began to focus almost exclusively on the demands of his private sensibility, his main preoccupations ceased to be history and phi­ losophy. It must be conceded, however, that this withdrawal into individuality did not diminish Rousseau’s historical influence but in fact increased it. Rousseau changed history (and not merely literature) not only through his political theories and views about history but, to a considerable extent, because of the myth that grew up around his peculiar way of life. He was no doubt sincere in his withdrawal from the world and his wish to make himself a nullity in the eyes of others, but his manner of turning his back on the world transformed the world he spurned. Toward the end of his life he ceased to care about the world's fate except to worry about how he would be remembered. Would he finally be rehabilitated? Would generations to come recognize his innocence? The only thing that seemed to matter to the author of the Dialogues and Rêveries was not that humanity some day reform its laws but that it change its attitude toward Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Soon even the hope that posterity would do him justice was to fade, and Rousseau would direct his final appeal exclusively to his conscience and his God. But his disinterest in history only made his effect on it more profound. “Let Us Settle My Opinions Once and For All”

In making himself the herald of truth, Jean-Jacques hoped to bind himself to his work and thus force himself to stabilize his own personality.24 In explaining Jean-Jacques’s enthusiasm for a literary career, the account in the Confessions looks not so much to intellec­ tual conviction as to a heartfelt need. This need is multiform: what Jean-Jacques seeks is of course the truth, but also the rapture of heroic exertion and the glory that goes along with it. The essential need, however, seems to be to establish an identity capable of meet­ ing any challenge. Assuming the role of defender of virtue, Rous­ seau is forced to unify his personality by drawing upon the unity of virtue itself. The need for unification figures in the enthusiasm for the truth as well as in the proud claim that he, Rousseau, possesses it. Because Rousseau wants to settle [fixer] his life, he chooses to base his existence on what is most immutable: Truth and Nature. And to make sure that he will keep faith with himself,

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he proclaims his resolve for all to hear; he takes ihe whole world to witness. Yes, Lhis man is sincerely seeking the truth. And yes, his soul is swollen with pride. No other way is open to him that will allow him to find his identity and become, at last, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen and man of nature. Hence the passion for truth is not “disinterested.” It does not cul­ minate in knowledge of the world. Rather, it inaugurates, in JeanJacques’s life, a period of firmness of will and unshakable convict ion. It is a way of putting an end to the instability from which he has suffered for so long. For thirty-eight years he has lived as a vaga­ bond. Now the time has come to put an end to this life of wandering, with its half lies and partial failures of courage. With varying degrees of success Rousseau has played at being many different people: tu­ tor, musician, steward, diplomat. He has allowed himself to be taken in by dubious masters. He has subjected himself to too many influ­ ences. Now, at last, he can once again be what he really is: a “citizen” and a foreigner, but one whose cause is identified with the cause of Virtue. He can “be himself ,” a simple man of* the people who lives by his work, and he can force the world (that is, high society: the nobility and the haute bourgeoisie) to attend to the extraordinary spectacle of a man who earns his bread by working and who, shock­ ingly enough, chooses to live as an artisan at ihe very moment when success holds out the hope of subsidized comfort. He will make the idle rich ashamed by refusing their gifts and stubbornly insisting on earning his living at “a penny a line.” By protesting against the falseness of society Rousseau seeks to acquire a lasting identity for himself. It soon becomes apparent, however, that he lacks confidence in his strength to accomplish this task. He casts about for outside help. How often had he “drifted”2* in the past, failing to live up to his noblest resolutions? How many times had he been forced to swrerve from his path? This time, however, he invokes the universal: he appeals to the highest values and calls all mankind to witness. Thus he places himself in safe keeping. Should he wish to abandon his enterprise, others will not permit it. Rather than rely solely on his own will, he trusts in transcendent powers, which will not forgive the slightest failing. He will be forced to toe the straight and narrow, for Virtue will not have it any other way, and men will laugh at his first misstep. Burning all his bridges is a great help. The very vehemence of his protest and exaggeration of his virtue leave him absolutely un­ fettered, except for his ties to the absolute; from now on no com­ promise is possible. He has so thoroughly cut himself off from

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society that incorruptible Truth is his only refuge. The misfortunes that he suffers (or provokes) turn out to be advantageous, in that they bolster his identity and establish his role as that of the honest man wrongfully persecuted. Jean-Jacques in this way forces him­ self—more by resignation than by will—to live for one cause and one cause only: this unique cause will become the foundation of his inner unity. To compensate for his weakness he seeks the aid of an outside force, which obliges him to resign himself, frequently with obvious pleasure, to the slings and arrows of an inexorable destiny. He makes his own the commandment of Saint Augustine, to look within. But in order to carry through this conversion to the self and fully enjoy his self-containment, Rousseau must have his decision imposed on him by a hostile outside force. Illness some­ times plays this role early on. Later, it is fate that Rousseau accuses, or the malevolence of “those gentlemen.“ No longer does he have to choose his own place, and no longer need he hesitate to choose: others have chosen for him, and all that he must do now is show himself equal to his destiny. He will show others that he is capable of living up to his own ideal. They may exclude him and cut him out, but the worst they can do is oblige him to take up commerce with himself. From this he can only profit. Persecution is a means to salvation. Rousseau repeats this to himself constantly, not merely because he finds it consoling but also, perhaps, because it reveals his secret purpose: to turn the hostility of others to his own ad­ vantage. “Persecution has ennobled my soul. Love of truth has become dear to me, I feel, because I have had to pay for it. Perhaps, at first, it was merely a system; now it is my ruling passion.“26 Persecution makes the abstract ideal of truth a value by which Rousseau actually lives. Jean-Jacques’s “sadistic superego“ enforces unflagging courage. Target of a consistently dangerous enemy, he must, in turn, be consistent in his defiance. It is as if Rousseau looked forward to persecution as a goad to conscientious resolve. A man who foolishly succumbs to the most contradictory temptations and the most diverse enthusiasms chooses to accept the burden of fate and voluntary seclusion in the hope that, by resigning himself to irremediable misfortune, he may acquire the center of gravity that he lacks. But Is Unity Natural?

Later, however, Rousseau will criticize the “ardent enthusiasn“ with which he dedicated himself to achieving unity, for, by so doing, had he not done violence to his spontaneous nature? In his enthusiasm

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for abstract and general truth» had he not been unfaithful to his own inner truth, compounded of weakness, fickleness, and insta­ bility? Having publicly chosen Nature as his vocation, had he not chosen a path that conflicted with his inner nature? Even as he sought to bring unity into his life, he again fell prey to inner conflict and paradox. Epictetus (whom Rousseau studied) counsels that we should act in life as though were acting on the stage.27 Wc do not choose our roles, however; we must make the best of whatever role we are given. According to Stoic morality, man must will himself, but will himself as Fate or God would have him. The wise man brings imagination to his role, which complements his humble acceptance. Without inventing the role, he strives simply to be equal to it, to be a good actor in a commedia del l’arte whose plot and outcome he is not free to change. His performance is a matter of style, nothing more. He can play his part with grace, with grandeur, even with freedom, but he cannot choose or modify it. Stoic virtue is therefore a kind of virtuosity. Striking the right balance between submitting to the inevitable and “looking good” in the part we have been given requires abundant talent. How do we know when we have it right? Overplay the part, and sage constancy becomes mere ostentation. Too little pride, and resignation becomes cowardice. At the time of his “personal reform” Rousseau no doubt believed that he had struck the right balance. He did not blink at the fact that he was playing a part, but he was at last convinced that now he was playing his true role, assuming his true character. Jean-Jacques’s reform begins (does it not?) with what is most external, most visible. ‘7 began my reform with my dress. I put aside gold ornament and white stockings, I chose a round wig, I lay down my sword, 1 sold my watch.”28 The initial gesture is the most ostentatious: Rousseau theatrically rejects those aspects of civilized life that make life re­ semble the stage. But this histrionic gesLure reflects his desire to be true to himself: “7b be consistent with myself I must not blush, no matter where I may be, because I am dressed in keeping with the estate I have chosen.”29 When writing the Confessions, however, Rousseau says that a kind of intoxication was responsible for his reform. He lacked the sta­ bility that comes from assured wisdom and the virtuosity that per­ mits appearance and reality to coincide. The initial impulse came from without. In their conversation at Vincennes, Diderot played the role of the serpent, tempting Rousseau to taste the forbidden

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fruit. The account in the Confessions exhibits a strange ambivalence as to the circumstances surrounding the beginning of Rousseau’s career as a writer. Everything seems to stem from an inner illu­ mination and metamorphosis (“As I read [the subject submitted to competition by the Dijon Academy], I saw another universe and I became another man”).30 Elsewhere, however, Rousseau blames outside influences and ill-intentioned suggestions that he was weak enough to follow. (Diderot, he says, “exhorted me to develop my ideas and compete for the prize. I did so, and from that moment I was lost. All the rest of my life and my misfortunes were the inevitable consequence of that misguided moment.”)31 Hence there are two ways of looking at the event. On the one hand Rousseau felt as though he had been visited by a “truly heavenly fire.”32 The text of the Confessions is warmed by the memory. The light of truth illuminates everything. Yet the same facts, reconsidered and relived at Wootton or Monquin, abruptly reveal their darker face, their aspect of doom. At the moment Rousseau abandoned himself to the “enthusiasm of truth, freedom, and virtue,” the shadowy part of his life began without his being aware of it; an evil fate took hold of him. The Confessions present both interpretations of the past side by side. Within the space of a few lines the same events are described on the one hand as acts of sovereign inspiration and on the other hand as links in a chain, stages in an implacable destiny. Whether Rousseau acted because of a heavenly visitation or un­ der the influence of malevolent friends, some sort of alienation is blamed for his decision: an alien force (persecutory or inspirational) compelled him to betray his true self. Victim of wickedness or inspired enthusiast of the Good: in either case, he is no longer himself. This, at any rate, is the way the years of effervescence, of feverish activity, appear in retrospect. The ambiguity is surprising. The Confessions tell of Jean-Jacques’s heroic efforts to free himself from the alienation of opinion and the judgment of others, but the apologetic account of his “personal reform” suggests that here too alienation was something to which Rousseau was subjected. Intoxication, folly, heavenly fire, evil fate: he was forced to abandon his true identity by the very enthusiasm that he felt for the decision to reassert it. A boundless extravagance impelled him toward a literary career despite himself. The search for unity took Jean-Jacques away from his true “nature.” That nature desired repose, idleness, a carefree existence, and free in­ dulgence of contradictory desires. Rousseau was not made for any other kind of life. The passion for truth plunged him into a fright-

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fully strange world. Into what desert had he wandered? What kind of man had he become, estranged from himself and cut off from others? In looking back on these febrile years, Lhe Rousseau of the Confessions seems no longer to understand; he does not know what judgment to make. He admires his courage, feels ironic pity for his illusions, and is frightened that he became another person. This was a period of intimacy with the sacred, but it was also a time of abject infidelity and shameful error. In Le persifleur (a project for a periodical, and written before the “reform1*), Rousseau described himself as restless, fickle, inconsis­ tent, and incapable of settling on a stable identity: When Boileau said o f men in general that they change from black to white, he was painting my portrait in two words. The individual portrait would have been more accurate had he included all the other colors of the spectrum, with all their intermediate hues. Nothing is more unlike me than myself, hence it is pointless to try to define me except as a person o f singular variety. Fickleness is so much a part of me that it frequently influences my sentiments. Sometimes I am a harsh, fierce misanthrope, while other times I wax ecstatic over the charms of society and the delights of love. Sometimes I am austere and devout, and for the sake o f my soul I do everything in my power to make those holy dispositions last. But before long I turn into a free-thinking libertine, and since 1 am then much more concerned with my senses than with my reason, I generally abstain at such times from writing.. . . In short, a Proteus, a chameleon, or a woman is less changeable than I. The curious should consequently abandon hope of recognizing me by my character. For they will always find me in some peculiar state, which will be mine only for the length of a moment. Nor is there hope, even, o f recognizing me by my habit o f making changes, for these have no fixed period: sometimes they take place from one moment to the next; other times I remain in a fixed state for months on end. This very irregularity is the substance of my constitution.39

An unpredictable man who prides himself on being an enigma for others, Rousseau is pleased to be inscrutable (even though he will later complain that no one knew him). He is a man of constant changes, of utter irregularity. Immediately, however, Rousseau con­ tradicts what he has just stated: in the next paragraph he admits to the existence of an inner rhythm, a more regular and constant pulse. It is not altogether true that there is no “fixed period” to his changes. He recognizes the constancy of a cyclic law, and beyond

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those cycles he evokes, in a bantering tone, the permanent presence of a more or less concealed “folly”: Withal, in examining myself, I have not failed to discern certain dominant dispositions and almost periodic recurrences, which would be difficult to identify for all but the most attentive ob­ servers, which is to say, for all but myself. By the same token, the vicissitudes and irregularities o f the atmosphere do not prevent sailors and country folk from noting certain annual occurrences and phenomena to which they have ascribed rules for predicting, approximately, what the weather will be in certain seasons. I am subject, for example, to two main moods, which change fairly regularly every seven days and which I call my weekly humors: in one I find myself wisely mad, in the other madly wise, but in such a way that, since in either case folly predominates over wis­ dom, it is most visibly predominant in the week during which I call myself wise, for then the substance of any subject that I treat, no matter how reasonable in itelf, is almost entirely absorbed by the vain and extravagant things with which I am always careful to surround it. My mad humor, for its part, is much wiser, for even though it always draws the text with which it deals from its own depths, it puts so much art, order, and force into its reasoning and demonstrations that folly thus disguised scarcely differs at all from wisdom.34

Behind all the variations of Le persifleur; then, there is a hidden constant, which Rousseau calls his folly. He singles out the principle of discontinuity and change so as to ascribe to it, in jest, continuity. Of course Rousseau is here turning cartwheels before the reader. Influenced proximately by Diderot and more remotely by Mon­ taigne, he speaks with a nonchalant tone that he cannot keep up for long. But in the Dialogues (that is, twenty years later), we find a self-portrait not entirely dissimilar from the one in Le persifleur; Rousseau again insists on his fickleness, on the insignificant reasons for his changes of humor: His ideas are scarcely persistent enough to make any real plans. But inflamed by lengthy contemplation of an object, he will some­ times make sudden and vigorous resolutions in his rooms, only to forget or abandon them by the time he reaches the street. All the strength o f his will is used up in the resolve; none is left for the execution. His whole character is determined by a primary inconsistency. The same contrast that is found in the elements of his constitution recurs in his inclinations, mores, and conduct. He is active, ardent, hardworking, and indefatigable; he is indolent, lazy, lacking in vigor. He is proud, audacious, reckless; he is fear-

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Tul, timid, embarrassed. He is cold, disdainful, standoffish to the point o f asperity; he is mild, gracious, easy 10 the point of weak­ ness, and does not know how to avoid doing or suffering what pleases him least. In a word, he passes from one extreme to the other with incredible rapidity, and without noticing the change or remembering what he was the moment before.35

Here again, the cause of the variability is said to be constant: a permanent quality that Rousseau calls sensibility, or passion. His extreme fickleness is consequently absorbed in “an unvarying, sim­ ple, and routine life.”36 All the irregularities of behavior are due to an “ardent nature,” which leaves its mark on the most diverse actions. Jean-Jacques consistently maintains that he possesses an underlying unity, which expresses itself in the spontaneity of change. Sympathy is required to detect this unity of character, just as it is necessary to see his work as the realization of a unified project. To make palpable this permanence in the face of change Rousseau repeats, at the beginning of the second Dialogue, a metaphor that he used earlier, in Le persifleur, namely, the regularity of atmospheric change:37 I followed him in his steadiest form of existence as well as in his minor ups and downs, no less inevitable, or perhaps useful in the calm of private life, than are slight variations in the air and wind in the calm of the most beautiful days.**

Thus does Rousseau describe himself in Le persifleur and the Dialogues, that is, in the days before he dizzily abandons himself to the fever of writing and then again, later, as he seeks to escape the “sad destiny” to which his decision to become a writer had exposed him. Once, long ago, he had wandered freely, a vagabond awaiting some great occasion to settle his personality, to show himself in public, and to establish his glory. But after “six years” of “heavenly fire,” six years in which glory compelled him to inhabit strange houses (the palaces of princes of the blood and marshals of France and the cottages of farmers-general), Jean-Jacques once again chooses the roving life of the vagabond. But now he is no longer expectant, no longer an adventurer in search of success, but a tramp on the run. He flees the course of the glory he has won. He seeks to put that glory behind him. At first, perhaps, his flighL from glory was not entirely sincere. Possibly he rejoiced to hear the tumult growing behind him as he hasiened toward new asylums. But even­ tually the tumult catches up with him. Insults rain upon his home like hailstones. Glory cannot be a home; it condemns Jean-Jacques

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to live without one. Now he seeks, in vain, an island where he might find oblivion, where he might gratify his true nature by quietly giving in to contradictory impulses. If only he could once more be an innocent wanderer. If only he could roam the world as he did in his youth, without purpose. If only he could escape the curse and be allowed to live in peace, to indulge his weakness and his laziness. Settled in the rue Plâtrière, he attempts to reestablish his carefree existence (though obsessed by the thought of persecution and slander). He describes himself at that time in much the same terms as he used earlier, in Le persifleur: changeable, sensitive, at peace with himself, obedient to a hidden drummer, just as the quality of the air on a fair day changes in accordance with hidden rules. This is doubtless an attempt to placate fate: Rousseau pro­ claims his happiness and inner peace in order to give them reality and to bolster his courage in the face of danger. Later, when he comes to paint the portrait of his youth, he depicts it as a time of sensuous reverie and innocent amazement, because he needs to have a past that can serve as refuge. But abundant testimony proves that his youth was in fact one of worry and anguish—to a far greater degree than the Confessions are willing to recognize. Rousseau dis­ torts the reality because he wants to make a myth of his life: the unfettered daydreams of youth were interrupted, he tells us, by an alien course. He allowed his happiness to be snatched away. But now he has regained his true identity. The muddied waters have cleared, but fewer reflections shimmer in the now transparent pool. Transparency is emptier, colder than what went before. Inner Conflict

Extreme variability does not imply inner conflict. The protean Rousseau of Le persifleur and the infinitely variable Jean-Jacques of the Dialogues endure a variety of experiences, but they remain true to themselves throughout, if only long enough to sense Lhe advent of a new identity. Change is experienced as the imposition of a new law by an outside authority. The self is not in control of its meta­ morphoses. It changes as the heavens change (and sometimes be­ cause the heavens change). It looks on, without rebelling. Hence it can claim to be at peace with itself: “The uniformity of this life and the sweetness that he finds in it show that his soul is at peace.”3U Variety is reduced to uniformity and peace: the paradox is more apparent than real. Even the most contradictory impulses can be indulged without inner conflict if experienced one after another

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and with the mind’s full consent. They are contradictory only to an outside observer who insists upon perfect consistency A com­ pliant spirit that does not oppose the changes to which it is subject remains in perfect harmony with itself: no matter how dissimilar its successive phases may be, the consciousness at the center remains the same. In order to be aware of any contradiction, the mind must assume the standpoint of the intransigent judge who, from outside, insists upon unity and coherence. Nothing prevents the self from challenging the authority of an outside observer to whose law it does not wish to submit. If its behavior were tenable, it could avoid conflict indefinitely. It would not be at odds with itself or with the outside judgment that it rejects. It would live within contradiction without suffering from it. It would be able to support variability without conflict. Personal reform comes at the moment when Rousseau becomes aware of the incoherent character of his life and makes an attempt to dominate that incoherence. He suddenly sees his changeability as an inconsistency that must be eliminated. It becomes unbearable to him that no invariable principles govern his conduct, his speech, or his feelings. He scrutinizes himself with the eye of an uncom­ promising judge. He calls upon all men to scrutinize him in turn and promises to stabilize his identity, to settle his ideas once and for all. He thus sets himself a novel goal. He rigidly adopts a posture of virtue. At that moment conflict begins, and it will grow worse. For Jean-Jacques has not somehow managed to root out his mutable and inconstant “nature.” He has set himself the duty of taming it, but it is still there. From now on he is going to have to fight, he is going to have to acquire the strength without which no virtuous soul can exist. He must show that he has changed radically, that he is no longer the frivolous and feeble character he once was. Impul­ siveness and inner peace are no longer compatible: change of any kind is now a weakness, and vacillation grounds for remorse. The imperative of the moment is no longer justified on its face; the only legitimate demands are those that make sense in the context of some long-term program. Unless an impulse is an integral part of a virtuous plan, to give in to it is culpable weakness. The mind thus recognizes within itself a danger of discord. A new depth opens up within, born of conflict and danger. (But this is merely to de­ scribe the birth of the spirit, which comes into being when con­ sciousness, in the name of some higher goal, repudiates its naïve identification with the sequence of moments that hitherto defined its content.)

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Hence from the moment Rousseau sets himself in opposition to false appearances in the world, inner conflict becomes inevitable. The virtue in whose name he sets out to do battle with a perverse and masked society is a cruel master. It makes him aware of an inner division, a lack of unity within his own mind. He will be obliged to acknowledge that to give in to a momentary impulse is easy compared to the constant effort required by virtue. (Rousseau is quick to confess that he is incapable of such effort: Jean-Jacques is not virtuous. He is the slave of his senses. He lives a life of innocent spontaneity and lacks the strength to combat his own nature.) The personal reform whereby he had hoped to achieve inner unity in fact reveals to him how difficult such unity is. He had hoped to put an end to a life of roving and uncertainty. He had hoped to settle his ideas and behavior. B ul a decision that was supposed to banish error from his life inaugurates a period of trial that puts the truth in doubt. An act that should have yielded a final conclusion turns out to be inconclusive. Its very violence generates new tensions, new disorientation. The will to achieve unity exposes an inner weakness that threatens to destroy the possibility of unity. Rousseau, who had hoped to achieve a stability firmly based on the noblest values, gradually comes to understand that, by his decision, he has made himself vulnerable and courted danger. The recourse to justification based on absolutes brings him not security but the risk of failure. The danger is twofold. First, as we have seen, Rousseau can display his opposition to false appearances in the world only by borrowing the world’s corrupt arms: Lhat is, the language of lit­ erature. And second, the strict values on which he hopes to base his existence are threatened internally by instability, weakness, and the temptation to seek immediate gratification. The scattering of energies that had been part of Rousseau’s nature now becomes an enemy that he must, but cannot, overcome. In writing the ninth book of the Confessions, Rousseau disavows the years of exaltation during which he had sought to become “witness to the truth”: Were one to search for the state o f the world most contrary to my nature, this is what one would find. Were one to recall those brief moments in my life when I became another person and ceased to be myself, it would again be in this time I am speaking of. But it lasted not six days or six weeks but nearly six years, and might endure still but for the peculiar circumstances that put an

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end to it and restored me to my natural condition, above which I had sought to raise myself.40

As Jean-Jacques realizes, his personal reform was but another of the sudden changes to which he was prone. But its purpose was to put an end to all change. Hence it created a powerful internal contradiction. Rousseau had declared war on Lhe ubiquity of hypocrisy and sought to set a straight course for his life and work, but this course of necessity deviated from the sinuous, everchanging path dictated by his true “nature/’ That nature lacked continuity; but now, to that lack of continuity, he had added the further and more serious sin of seeking to rise above it. Rather than live life as a series of separate moments, he sought something more and found instead anxiety and dissatisfaction. He continued to be subject to inner variability, to unpredictable changes of mood, but now these became the source of an essential inner division. Rousseau can neither repudiate the changing data of immediate experience nor integrate them into the unity required by his moral system. (He attempted to do so, as we shall see, in his projected Morale sensitive, but success was impossible, for reasons whose dis­ cussion I wish to defer.) Having chosen to defend the abstract ideas of nature and virtue, and having sought an “existential” realization of his ideal, Rousseau found himself in conflict with his empirical nature. His natural weaknesses and caprices of mood testified against the sincerity of his indictment of the world of apperances and, too, against the solidity of his personal example. The contradictory diversity of his spontaneous life was something from which he could not escape. That diversity persisted within him as a hostile threat, despite his insistence upon an unattainable unity. His very existence was threat­ ened, his very life in jeopardy; antithetical demands undermined each other's foundations. The quest for unity imperiled the spon­ taneity of immediate experience, while spontaneity, compromised though it was, remained powerful enough to thwart the “antinatural” quest for unity, which was made to seem foolish. Tranquillity was impossible. Inevitably, Lhe resulting tension produced a number of consequences. In the end, Rousseau decides to accept his fickle nature and abandon himself to the realm of the sensible, to im­ mediate sensation, but his enjoyment of the senses can no longer be innocent: it has to justify itself, explain itself. Hence Rousseau must write, must accept the mediation of language and literature. And although he writes only to denounce his mistake, the inevitable

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result is to compound his error. The return to nature is possible now only at a price: the effort required will be as extravagant as in the earlier attempt to rise above nature. Seeking to tame the unpredictable vacillations of his mood, Jean-Jacques sets in motion still greater oscillations, of such amplitude, in fact, that they soon exceed the limits of the tolerable. The “revolution” that returns him to his point of departure fails to bring him stability, much as his previous efforts have failed. Rousseau is left vulnerable to major mood swings, unable to recapture the relative calm (that is, the oscillations of lesser amplitude) he had enjoyed before his literary vocation led him astray: If the revolution had restored me to my previous condition and ended there, all would have been well. Unfortunately, however, it went further and quickly carried me to the other extreme. From then on my vibrating soul kept swinging past the position of rest, in which its oscillations, constantly renewed, never allowed it to settle.41

The question then arises whether the notion of “nature” still makes sense. This oscillatory motion precludes the possibility that the soul will ever come to rest, that it will ever return to its natural state. Is there, then, such a thing as a natural state? At best it is an imaginary position, midway between two extremes. There, how­ ever, movement does not cease. The “natural” self is nothing more than a fleeting image, glimpsed in passing and blurred by motion. My self is merely something that I lack, something that constantly eludes my grasp. I am always someone else, someone without a stable identity. Perhaps what is needed is a radical semantic change: suppose we use the word nature (or essence or truth) to refer to the very motion that makes stable identity impossible. Such a move gives the oscillation a validity that it appeared at first to lack. The “self” is not the unattainable position of rest but the anxiety that makes tranquillity impossible. My truth reveals itself by wresting me from the grip of what I had mistaken for a fundamental fact (which disappears the moment it is scrutinized), the “nature” wherein I had thought my “true self” was located. Now all my actions, all my errors, all my fictions, and all my lies herald my nature: I am authentically this, namely, the failure to achieve an equilibrium to which I am constantly drawn yet from which I am just as constantly repelled. (“All movement lays us bare,” said Montaigne.) There is no folly or madness that cannot be subsumed in the totality of the self, a totality all of whose aspects are equally open to question,

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equally illegitimate, and yet provide the basis for the incontestable value and legitimacy of the subject. Hence everything must be recounted, confessed, and laid bare in order that a unique person may emerge from utter chaos. Magic

On the very page of the Confessions where Rousseau describes his enthusiasm for virtue as “foolish pride” and “the state most contrary to my nature,” he also says this: “This intoxication began in my head, but it found its way into my heart. There, the noblest pride took root on the rubble of uprooted vanity. I did not act; I became in fact what I appeared to be.”lJ Foolish pride or noble pride? State contrary to nature or sincere transformation? Rousseau, in judging his past, allows the ambiguity to remain. He had been false to his “true nature,” but he had not lied, he had nor worn a mask. He actually became what he appeared to be, without reservation and without duplicity. What Rousseau is suggesting here is not an inner split but a sort of eclipse of his “normal” personality: for a fairly lengthy period he succeeds in assuming an “invented” personality. He places all his resources, all his energies, at the service of this fictive personality: no one can accuse him of playacting, because he has given himself in his en­ tirety to his role and to its attendant fate. What signals fiction, in this case, is not that Rousseau does not surrender sufficiently to his role but that he surrenders too much, to a degree at times unimaginable. A man wearing a mask could never throw' himself so utterly and completely into his part; he would cling to some measure of irony and detachment. He would retain the power to renounce his commitment and allow himself the right to change masks if need be. But not Rousseau, who is only too eager to identify with his part. He wants to be virtuous to such a degree that virtue becomes his ineluctable fate. Instead of detachment and irony, he succumbs to the opposite vice: he refuses to allow himself any freedom of movement, any escape, any option. He will be virtuous and nothing but virtuous. To explain his intoxication with virtue Rousseau compares it with “those moments” in his youth when he became “another person.” His decision to stabilize his identity, to identify with virtue, is likened to his youthful bouts of “mythomania,” periods during w'hich he was beset by chimerical daydreams and assumed the identity of other people. Now, having decided to devote himself to the Lruth

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and to be none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Ge­ neva, he mimics the “folly” of his youth, when he pretended to be Vaussore de Villeneuve or the Englishman Dudding. His madness and his sincerity have not changed one iota. It is odd to see Rousseau acknowledge such complete equivalence between his pseudonymous adventures as a young man and his effort to be himself under his real name. But if one looks at the pages where Rousseau recounts those adventures, it is clear that the psychology of dissimulaiton plays no part in them. With few exceptions, he never sought to hide his true identity but instead to acquire a new identity and make it his own. He donned masks not to dupe others but to change his own life. When Rousseau lies, he believes in his lies, just as he believed he had become Tasso while reading Gerusalemma liberata and Roman while reading Plutarch. Rousseau becomes absorbed in his fiction to such a degree that no hiatus remains between the old “reality” that he leaves behind and the fiction that fascinates him. He sheds his personality so as to enter into his role, and the metamorphosis leaves no residue. He is convinced that he has a “a polyp in the heart,” just as the hysteric is convinced that her leg is paralyzed. He does not know (or does not want to know) that he is dissimulating. “He is out to fool himself,” writes Marcel Raymond,43 commenting on the epi­ sode of the concert in which Rousseau passes himself off as the composer Vaussore de Villeneuve.44 He is not content merely to play the role of Vaussore; he wants to be his character, wants to possess his talents and knowledge of music. And he becomes the composer so completely that he hastens to give immediate proof of the fact by staging the concert that ends in disaster. An impostor would be afraid to be put to the test. Rousseau, by contrast, is happy to give proof, because at least he is free to live his new identity and allow his new self to act. Not only does Jean-Jacques enter fully into his role; he expects that role to carry him along with it, to dictate his words and actions, to teach him music, to help him conduct an orchestra. Rousseau trusts in and abandons himself to the character whose identity he has assumed. Such a method of becoming another person can of course be viewed as an act of will, but along with that act of will goes an astonishing passivity. What begins with an act of will ends in a sort of hypnosis, in which Rousseau has only to allow to happen what the role of Vaussore requires. This behavior can be called magical, because magic is the act of calling forth forces that are then allowed to act on their own. Those forces escape our control. Once unleashed, they absolve us

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of the need to will and guide our actions. All we have to do then is assent to what happens. Begun by us, the magical act completes itself without our assistance. Jean-Jacques’s magical metamorphosis is of this sort: the initial act of will binds him to a fictional identity, to which from then on he need only submit. He thus moves from the realm of voluntary actions to the realm of destiny, where (as his feverish brain believes) talent, glory, and happiness await him as miraculous rewards. Note, in particular, that Rousseau’s use of magic: is a way of attaining certain ends without having to employ the usual means: with a single bound he hurdles the obstacle that stands between him and his goal; all intermediate stages are avoided. In the realm of magic consequences are immediate; the tiresome mediation of work and study can be circumvented. As Marcel Raymond has pointed out, Rousseau seeks to satisfy his desire without accepting the constraints imposed by the human condition.15He wants to become a composer and musician all at once, without the bother of studying compo­ sition and music; this miracle is to be wrought by a grace immanent in the very intensity of his desire. The Lausanne concert is a failure. But Le devin will be a success, and sensitive souls will find much to their liking in the Discourses and Héloïse. In response to the magic, real powers awaken in Rous­ seau: he will simply be possessed by his role. And he will be lucky: his character will no longer betray him, as happened at Lausanne. He can throw himself fully into his part. The Vaussore story back­ fired, but the Jean-Jacques Rousseau story will not. Yet the very role that will carry him to glory will also plunge him into misery. The intoxication that accompanies the effervescent virtue of Rousseau’s personal reform reveals the magical nature of that re­ form. What began as a deliberate choice is transformed into passive pleasure. In his moment of firmest resolve Rousseau is no longer the master of his enthusiasm, which carries him away in a dizzy whirl. Well aware that there is no such thing as virtue without strength, he nevertheless falls into a paradoxical state of virtuous rapture, which overwhelms his defenseless will. In that state he has only to obey the dictates of virtue. But this inspired virtue is merely a fascinating, exhilarating illusion that absorbs all the mind’s energy. The reign of virtue should have been the achievement of a lucid will; instead virtue is consumed by its own exaltation. That exaltation requires solitude, however, and Rousseau is dri­ ven toward sacrifice and perhaps martyrdom. Unable to recognize his own desire, he sees only the ineluctable commandments of fate.

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The same man who once delighted in changing his identity, the adventurer who once traveled under the names Vaussore and Dudding, forgets, after a warrant is issued for his arrest, how to conceal his true name, though his freedom is at stake. His hand shakes as he prepares to sign a document with an assumed name. He has no right, he thinks, to disobey the dictates of virtue; he cannot lie; he will expose himself to the danger and endure whatever fate is his: I must tell you, however, that in passing through Dijon I had to give my name, and that, although I picked up the pen with the intention of substituting my mother’s name for my own, I could not go through with it. My hand trembled so much that I was obliged to put the pen down twice. In the end, the name Rousseau was the only one I could write, and my only dishonesty was to eliminate the initial J from one o f my first names.46

An act of courage or defiance, but one in which Rousseau behaves as though he were bewitched. In this forced sincerity we see the same “compulsive” excess, the same paralysis of the will, the same magical bewitchment that we find in those bizarre episodes in which Rousseau became “another person” and allowed himself to be car­ ried away by his role. We have seen, then, how Rousseau’s personal reform introduced contradiction and conflict into the soul of Jean-Jacques. And we have also noted Rousseau’s peculiar ability to identify himself all but completely with a character he wished to portray. Roles that were initially but figments of his imagination become characters with which he authentically identifies. Throughout his account of his personal reform Rousseau alternates between one of these two explanations and the other, to the point of baffling the reader: he made himself over, he says, “contrary to his nature,” but on the other hand what was at first a set of arbitrarily chosen principles became a sincere object of passion. The affectation of virtue was transformed into genuine intoxication with virtue. The idea pre­ cedes the feeling, but not by much: feeling hastens to compensate for its tardiness, and all Rousseau’s energy is placed at the service of an “ego ideal’ that was originally a mere fiction. Reread some of the passages cited previously. They show us, in very clear terms, how Rousseau, starting from an inauthentic duality, succeeds in creating an authentic personality. The ego is subsumed in a selffabricated truth, in an identity that did not previously exist: “My feelings rose with inconceivable rapidity to the height of my ideas.”17

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Rousseau’s whole temperament is summed up in the “rapidity” to which he alludes in this passage, which describes the impetuous way in which life is transported to a plane previously explored only in thought. Listen to this further confession: “Love of Lruth has become dear to me, I feel, because I have had to pay for it. Perhaps, at first, it was merely a system; now it is my ruling passion.’M M An intellectual system becomes a passion. Ideology takes the form of actual experience, not just because morality requires that every man live according to his principles but also because feeling wants to identify with ideas that promise a higher level of justification. The Confessions tells us of both the failure and the truth of this transformation of the ego. What was originally mere affectation of virtue gradually assumes the character of true nobility and virtue. But at the end of the journey Jean-Jacques no longer feels at one with himself: Plunged in spite of myself into society without possessing its man­ ners, and in no state to learn them or conform to them, I deckled to adopt manners of my own, which dispensed me from the need. Unable to overcome my foolish and sullen timidity, since its cause was fear o f violating the requirements o f good manners, I made up my mind to embolden myself* by trampling those requirements underfoot. I became cynical and caustic out o f shame. I pretended to feel contempt for manners I was incapable o f emulating. True enough, in accordance with my new principles this asperity look on noble proportions in my mind, where it assumed the shape of courage and virtue, and I dare say that it was upon this august foundation that my soul rested more solidly, and longer, than one might have expected of behavior so contrary to my nature. Yet in spite of the reputation for misanthropy that my outward appearance and a few felicitous remarks earned me in society, there is no question that in private I always sustained the part badly.49

The words are revealing: the decision whereby the soul acquires its foundation also obliges Rousseau to take note of his inner di­ vision. Here we see how the man invented himself so that he might gaLher all his parts in a fiction of his own devising. The arbitrary nonchalance (“I decided to adopt manners of my own”) opens the way to the noblest sentiments. But no sooner is the personality established on its foundations than it collapses in contradiction (suggested by the very rhythm of the sentence and the page). A man who had once been so sharply critical of the gap between appearance and reality in civilized humanity now perceives in him­ self a contrast between his “outward appearance” and his "nature.”

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He is, he feels, the very weakness he denies. The scandal he once denounced in society has shifted its location: now it resides within Rousseau’s own life. The evil he so feverishly attacked when it lay outside himself has been internalized. Wedding the cause of virtue has failed to put an end to the disparity between appearance and reality: but now the problem is his problem. The foundation he has chosen for himself has crumbled beneath his feet, casting every­ thing into doubt. In theory, a reconciliation should have been easier to effect. In one of his letters to Sophie, Jean-Jacques writes: “Anyone who has the courage to be what he seems to be will sooner or later become what he ought to be.”50 This formula postulates a miraculous con­ cord between two ideas: that the individual possesses an enduring nature and that he can transform himself as morality requires. Sincerity, that is, the simple, transparent affirmation of an individ­ ual’s true nature, has the effect of transforming that nature, causing it to become what it ought to be. By confessing that I am what I am, I become someone else; I acquire a new identity. Confession in itself is tautology: I am what I am; but it is the cause of a genesis and a metamorphosis. There is no better way of saying that sincerity saves and transfigures the soul. The morality to which Rousseau here gives voice is doubtless a secular morality, but it cannot be understood without reference to a religious model. The act of the will whereby I seem to be what I am plays the role that is played in theology by Christ the mediator, who regenerates the soul of the believer. The difference is that according to Rousseau the act whereby I seem to be what I am in fact is an immediate one, which transforms me without requiring me to take any explicit action to change myself, and without requiring me to turn for assistance to any outside power or grace. The transfiguring grace dwells within my consciousness. I shed my self only in order to become what I ought to be. I shall want to consider sincerity in greater detail later on. Here I want simply to indicate its place in Jean-Jacques’s life. Sincerity is self-reconciliation: it is a way of overcoming inner division. In Rousseau’s case, inner division is not present from the beginning; it is an internalized reflection of Jean-Jacques’s rebellion against a society that he deems unacceptable. Even within the terms of an analysis intended to be purely “existential” (and not socio­ logical or Marxist), the question of rebellion is in a sense prior to, and more important than, that of sincerity. Jean-Jacques’s con-

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cern with sincerity is a partial response, at the level of the ego and only at that level, to a situation that includes not only the ego but also its relations with society circa 1750. But even as the preoccu­ pation with sincerity forces the mind to turn away from social life in order to focus on its private conflicts, others are expected to sit up and lake notice. Though focused on inner problems, sincerity is indirectly concerned with the outside world: it is worth the trouble to describe ourselves sincerely, because in the society with which we have broken relations there may already be individuals capable of understanding us. Sincerity begins the task of social restoration, not by means of political action but through human understanding. In tliis respect, effusive sincerity is a prerevolutionary humor. The danger is that for “beautiful souls“ satisfied by their own enthusiasm it will take the place of any kind of genuine action.

4

The Veiled Statue

The Morceau allégorique1 ends with a philosophical dream, whose fairly traditional symbolism (derived from Scipio and Poliphilus) hardly suggests an authentic “oneiric imagination.” The Romantics were better at this sort of thing. Still, this text is of capital impor­ tance in another way. Naïve and unoriginal as its imagery may be, the Morceau allégorique clearly—perhaps too clearly—represents the successive stages in the revelation of truth. The fragment was never finished, and Rousseau probably did not intend it to be published. In it, however, he creates a myth in which he believes more than is at first apparent. After contemplating the universe and meditating upon the exis­ tence of God, a philosopher falls asleep. He dreams that he is in an “immense edifice consisting of a dazzling dome supported by seven colossal statues.” Seen from up close, all these statues were deformed and horrible to look at, but through skillful artifice and use of perspective they looked different when viewed from the center o f the building, where they seemed to present a charming picture to the eye.

Here, of course, we immediately recognize the theme of illusion, of deceptive appearances, as in the first Discourse. In this case the ill-fated illusion is produced in a temple, a sanctuary for human beings. The setting is a solemn one, where man enters into relation with the sacred. We witness strange religious rites: in the center of the building is an altar, upon which stands an “eighth statue, to which the whole edifice is consecrated.” But this statue is “always wrapped in an impenetrable veil.” The statue bears no resemblance, however, to the young goddess who dominates the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie and whose attractive body can be seen through a gossamer veil to which she barely clings. This veiled goddess ad­ vances with the light of the rising sun, dispelling shadows as she 65

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goes, shadows that form inoffensive wreaths at the top of the en­ graving, designed by Cochin. By contrast, at the beginning of Rous­ seau’s dream, error and irrational opinion still hold sway. The moment of illumination will come later. Dense clouds of smoke, part of the ritual of an absurd cult, rise from the foot of the veiled statue: She was perpetually served by the people but never seen. Her worshipers painted her in their imaginations in accordance with their own characters and passions. The more imaginary the object of this worship, die more devoted the worshiper, who saw none other dian his heart’s idol behind the mysterious veil.

No rays of light emanate from this strange statue. She is an evil power shrouded in darkness. The dreamer catches vague glimpses of various abominations, a vast Sodom of crime: The altar, which stood in the middle of die temple, could barely he made out through thick clouds o f incense that went straight to the head and clouded die mind. While the vulgar saw nodiing but phantoms concocted by wild imagination, the more tranquil philosopher saw enough to judge what he could not make out. Around this terrible altar were die instruments o f a continuous carnage. He looked with horror upon die monstrous mixture of murder and prostitution.

In this “poetic” description of the atmosphere of evil, Rousseau employs a profusion of classical symbols of opacity, fraud, and criminal deception. The horror of the spectacle as it is described to us lies not so much in the crimes themselves as in the mystery in which they are shrouded. (I shall have more to say later about the negative value that Rousseau almost always attaches to whatever is hidden or mysterious. In all his writing, and especially in the Dia­ logues, mystery and evil are almost synonymous.) Worship of the statue, which leaves men in thrall to their irrational subjectivity, becomes the crime to represent all crimes: it takes place in the shadows, at the foot of a veiled statue of the idol. The victims are fascinated by their own illusions, and the priest-torturers, who hide their cruelty “beneath a modest and meditative exterior,” manage somehow to blindfold their followers. They have, moreover, the power to punish the recalcitrant by disfiguring them in die eyes of others: They first blindfolded anyone who wished to enter the temple. After taking their victims off into a corner o f the sanctuary, the priests permitted them to use dieir eyes again, but only after all

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the objects in the temple had conspired to create an effect of fascination. If someone attempted to remove his blindfold while in transit, the priests pronounced some magic words over him to make him seem monstrous to the others, until, abhorred by all and a stranger even to his own kin, he was torn apart by the assembly.

Rousseau here gives free reign to a phobia that would haunt his final years (but that had been with him since adolescence): the idea of metamorphosis through slander. He is expressing his fear of having the monster s mask hung on him and being unable to get rid of it: universal opprobrium would be heaped upon an innocent whom others had identified as guilty. Salvation will take the form of unveiling, whose purpose is to lift the veil from the statue and, with it, the statue’s power to do evil. Three characters are introduced, one after another. Each acts alone but on behalf of all mankind. Rousseau describes, allegorically, the work of the liberating hero. The symbol here is one of Aufklärung: the hero restores sight to the blind, makes visible what was veiled, and brings light to the world. The first character, possibly a double of the philosopher (for he “is dressed exactly like him”), restores sight to several people, but his courage fails when it comes to attacking the statue. His fate is to suffer a fatal slander: This man, whose demeanor was grave and serious, did not go to the altar himself; but by subtly shifting the blindfolds of those who were being led there, and without causing any obvious dis­ turbance, he restored their sight.

The ministers of the temple grabbed him and “immolated him” on the spot, “to the unanimous acclaim of the blinded herd.” This martyr to the truth is followed by another: an old man who claims to be blind but really is not. We recognize him as Socrates. He is bolder than his predecessor, for he dares to unveil the statue, but he is unable to secure a victory for truth: Bounding nimbly onto the altar, [he] boldly uncovered the statue and exposed it to general view. Painted on its face were expressions o f ecstasy mixed with rage. It trampled on a figure representing mankind, but its eyes turned tenderly toward heaven. . . . This vision made the philosopher tremble, but the spectators, far from being repelled, saw not a look o f cruelty but only heavenly ardor, and felt even more zealous toward the uncovered statue than they had before its true face was revealed.

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The allegory is easily deciphered: the idol is none other than fanaticism, which, while pretending to worship heaven, sacrifices human beings on its altar. This was the enemy that Enlightenment philosophy had chosen to attack. Rousseau is here making common cause with the philosophes, who lambasted false priests and su­ perstition. Yet he is also saying that unveiling the evil is but a first step: its power to deceive and fascinate remains intact. Condemned to drink “green water,” the old man in his death agony will pay surprising homage to the statue. The real face of evil has been laid bare, but that is not enough. The truth of goodness has yet to manifest itself. The essential act has yet to be accomplished. Christ

Now comes the third hero, identified as the “son of man”: obviously Christ. He has only to show himself for the truth to become man­ ifest. He is the truth. He brings the light that instantly conquers all hearts. He triumphs over the statue effortlessly, without a fight: “O, my children!” he says, with a tenderness that penetrates the soul, “I come to expiate and to heal your errors. Love Him who loves you and know Him who exists.” Then, seizing the statue, he effortlessly topples it, and, calmly climbing onto the pedestal, he seems to be assuming his rightful place rather than usurping that of another. . . . To hear him once was enough to admire him always. One sensed that the language of truth cost him nothing because he held its source within himself.

This, then, is the decisive moment: a sudden reversal establishes the reign of Good on the ruins of Evil. Rousseau frequently makes uses of such stark contrasts between extremes. Absolute Good or absolute Evil: we are given no other alternative. Note, however, that the obscure domination of a veiled Iking here succumbs to the liberating presence of a divine human being. Merely unmasking the hideous face of evil is not enough. Even unveiled, the statue is still omnipotent. What counts is the epiphany proffered by a truth­ ful man wielding a truthful language: a revelation of a truth whose source lies within the human mind. The crucial moment, then, is not that of unmasking evil but that in which truth incarnate testifies to its effective presence. For then a consciousness stands before us and by its very transparency pro­ claims itself to be a source of universal truth. The Good makes its appearance in the world through ihe agency of an ego. The mangod (like Rousseau himself, in different circumstances) offers him-

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self to the public not in order to be seen for himself but in order to make manifest, through the very act of speaking, a source of the sacred. This truth is singularly facile. To the man who pronounces it, it ‘‘costs nothing,” and it is instantly understood by those who hear it. What we have here is a twofold immediacy. The man-god is in immediate possession of the truth, and he transmits it immediately to others. Mankind’s conversion is instantaneous. There is nothing here remotely reminiscent of the :scandal alluded to in gospel. Truth establishes itself through a kind of magic, which sweeps away all obstacles and renders all effort nugatory. In this, clearly, there is something childish, something that occurs as a general rule only in fairy tales. The authenticity of this Christ figure is also open Lo question. He proclaims that he has come in order to “expiate” man’s errors. But Rousseau’s text (is it really unfinished?) breaks off just before the crucifixion—a fact of considerable significance. The reason is that Rousseau does not know what Lo make of the cross, a symbol of mediation. For him, the essence of Christianity lies in the preach­ ing of a truth that is immediate. He proposes an image of Christ as educator, speaking to men with tender words that “go straight to the heart.” Rousseau’s Christ is not a mediator. He is merely a great exemplar. He is greater than Socrates not because he is divine but because he is humanly more courageous. Nowhere do we glimpse the the­ ological dimension of Christ’s death, as the act of reparation at the center of all human history. Christ’s death is no more than an admirable archetype: the just man reviled by his people. Socrates does not die alone; the grandeur of Christ’s death comes from his solitude. His is the most edifying example of a destiny of exception, a destiny that Jean-Jacques feels and desires to be his own: Before he [Socrates] defined virtue, Greece was full of virtuous men. But where did Jesus find among his people the pure and noble morality that he alone taught and exemplified? In the midst of the fiercest fanaticism the highest wisdom made itself heard, and the simplicity o f the most heroic virtues honored the vilest of all peoples. The death of Socrates, calmly philosophizing with his friends, is the gendcst death that one could wish for. That of Jesus, expiring in torment, insulted, mocked, and cursed by a whole people, is the most horrible that one can fear.2

Rousseau piles antithesis upon antithesis, to the detriment of all subtlety: the vilest people—the highest wisdom; the gentlest death—

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the most horrible death. Superlative versus superlative. In a final antithesis he opposes man and God: “Yes, if Socrates' life and death are those of a saint, Christ’s life and death are those of a God.”3 But the death of Jesus in Rousseau’s myth is merely a heroic exploit. The divine death has no supernatural consequences. As Pierre Burgelin observes: “Rousseau’s Christianity is intended to be evangelium Christi, accepting the divine prophet of Galilee who teaches the laws of life to all men of decency. He rejects an evan­ gelium de Christoy which would posit the absolute value of the dead Christ for the salvation of men.”1 In fact, the Morceau allégorique depicts Christ as a consciousness that finds within itself the source of truth (although truth may, Rousseau concedes, originate somewhere else, somewhere beyond). Any one of us is capable of equaling Christ’s exploit, by looking inward, finding the source of truth, and recognizing the “voice of conscience.” Any one of us might then become—following Christ’s example—an educator of humanity, who stirs men’s hearts and awakens the goodness that lies dormant within. For Rousseau, im­ itating Christ means imitating the “divine” act whereby an isolated human consciousness becomes a source of truth or a transparent vehicle for a truth that comes from beyond. Far from being a mediator indispensable for man’s salvation, Christ teaches men to reject mediation. His example exhorts mankind to heed “the im­ mediate principle of conscience.’”*Rousseau, who will not seek his own salvation through Christ, wants, like Christ, to announce the truth. Christ is merely witness to the illumination of conscience by a special light, and any one of us may serve as witness to a similar illumination. “How many men between God and me!” cries the Savoyard vicar. Rousseau’s desire is to see God without mediation. The fewer in­ termediaries there are, the better we may grasp the divine presence. Priests are not essential, and neither is dogma. Jean-Jacques accepts the Gospels because the truth in them is immediately apparent: “I recognize the divine spirit in them: it is as immediate as can he. There are no men between the proof and me.”6 Galatea

“The scene represents a sculplor’s studio. On the sides one sees blocks of marble, sculpted groups, roughed-out statues. Toward the back is another statue, covered by a light, glistening cloth with fringes and garlands.”7 Once again the image of a veiled statue

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appears in Rousseau’s work: this time the statue is of Galatea’s perfect body, sculpted by Pygmalion to conform to his desires. This is not the idol that presides over an evil world; it is ideal beauty, embodied in inanimate stone. “1 adore myself in what I have made,” cries Pygmalion. Like Narcissus in love with his own image, Pyg­ malion wants to embrace the likeness of himself that he admires in his creation. He has divided himself in two: part of his soul has passed over into this lifeless thing. But Pygmalion cannot bear to be separated from what he has wrought. He is unwilling to allow the work of art to be other than himself, a stranger to him. Incapable of accepting, in return, the love that he lavishes upon his creation, he feels condemned to live in unbearable loneliness: no longer really alive, he has been deprived of the strength spent in the attempt to give a soul to the bewitching statue. "The cold of death remains in this marble. The life that it lacks is killing me. . . . Yes, two creatures are incomplete.” Pygmalion does not want the statue simply to come to life. He wants to be loved by it and recognized as its creator. He wants to take back the force expended on the work. For he is a miserly artist, who cannot forget himself in what he is doing and who lacks the courage Lo accept the loss of a finished work. His hope is simply die image of his desire, but as reflected in a living mirror. Hence the work must not remain a cold object of marble, fixed in its autonomous existence. Pygmalion begs for a miracle to eradicate the exteriority of the work and substitute for it the expansive interiority of narcissistic passion (just as Rousseau does when he invents "creatures after [his] own heart”). Note, in passing, that this can be seen as the expression, in mythical form, of a "sentimental” aesthetic, which not only sets art the task of imitating the ideal of desire but also demands that the work of art be transformed into actual happiness. The work has no independent, objective existence. The artist's creation is an imaginary subjectivity intended to respond to the subjectivity of its creator. The artist, having shaped a soul, refuses to let go of it. The poet wants to wed his poetry. Successful art then results in die silence of art. If every­ thing must end in actual pleasure, life drives out art. A living Galatea ceases to be a work of art and becomes an independent consciousness. The happy Pygmalion will lay down his hammer and chisel; Galatea’s love is all he needs. He will make no more statues. How telling is Goethe’s criticism of Rousseau’s Pygmalion: "Much could be said on this subject. For this marvelous production oscil­ lates regularly back and forth between Nature and Art, with the

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false ambition of seeing Art subsumed in Nature. We are shown an artist who has done work of the utmost perfection and who, having projected his idea outside himself, having represented it according to the laws of art and bestowed upon it a superior life, remains unsatisfied. He must bring the work back down to earth. Where spirit and action have produced something of a higher na­ ture, he wants to destroy it by an act of the most vulgar sensuality.”8 It is preferable, Goethe holds, that the work retain its ‘‘higher form of life” which has nothing in common with our “earthly life.” The artist must be willing to alienate himself in his work, for this is what the spirit requires. Pygmalion at first hides the statue: “I was afraid that admiration for my own creation was distracting me from my work. I hid it beneath this veil.” But the moment of unveiling only causes him to suffer more acutely: he sees the perfection of his work, but he also sees that his masterpiece remains lifeless. Unveiling the statue reveals to Pygmalion what it crucially lacks: “But you have no soul. Your figure must have one.” A miracle brings Galatea to life: the statue develops a sensibility, like the statue imagined by Condillac. But Galatea’s existence does not begin with perception of the out­ side world. She does not become a “fragrance of roses.” Her first sensuous act is to touch her own body, an act that immediately yields “self-consciousness.” She says “I.” Only in the second stage does the outside world become perceptible to this nascent con­ sciousness. “Galatea took a lew steps and touched a block of marble: That is not me.” Finally, she encounters Pygmalion, touches him, and sighs: “Ah! Still me.” Two parts of a single seif are finally reunited. The separation between artist and work is abolished. The labor of creation was expended only to be subsumed in the unity of a loving Ego. Though the two texts are written for very different purposes, Morceau allégorique and Pygmalion are strikingly similar. At first both statues are veiled. Unveiling brings us face to face with the hidden object: once visible, the statues become objecLs of “sacred” fascination—horror or love. The unveiling, important as it is, is merely a stage, an incomplete revelation of the truth. The pathetic expectation is not fulfilled until a living person appears on the pedestal. In both allegories, the transition from inanimate object to living thing involves a mysterious intervention, a magical or divine act. The miracle is in the replacement of an object by a consciousness.

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Theory of Unveiling

On the basis of these two texts it is possible to formulate a theory of unveiling. Unveiling takes place in two stages. In each stage a truth (or reality) is revealed, but the revelations are of unequal importance. The first unveiling is a critical act: deceptively seductive appearances are dispelled, a pernicious spell is ended. This un­ veiling is a work of disillusionment and disenchantment. It does not alter the reality beneath the mask but eradicates errors rooted in that reality. Men become aware of having been deceived. As yet they know nothing else, but already a liberation has taken place. The critical unveiling attacks the error that obscures the truth. Before attacking what is behind the veil, it denounces the veil's own presence. In the Morceau allégorique this stage is represented by the philosopher who restores sight to the statue’s victims and by the Socratic gesture of tearing away the veil. Rousseau sees his work as performing such a critical function, particularly the Discourses: In his early writings he was interested mainly in destroying the prestige o f illusion, which causes us stupidly to admire the in­ struments o f our woes, and in correcting false judgment, which causes us to honor ill-starred talents and scorn useful virtues.9 Papists, Huguenots, potentates, paupers, men, women, nobility of the robe, soldiers, monks, priests, religious fanatics, physicians, philosophers, Tros Rutulusve fuat—all are depicted, all are un­ masked, with never an embittered word or note o f personal rancor toward anyone, yet sparing no one.10

Reading these declarations, we understand how Schiller could have defined Rousseau as the “sentimental” poet of pathetic satire, whose target is the disparity between reality and the “ideal.”11 Had he stopped there, there would be very little difference be­ tween Rousseau and his enemies, the philosophes. Like them, he denounced the solemn lies of priests and churches. He took plea­ sure in carrying “demystification” to the point of scandal: “Religion is merely a mask for interest, and worship a cover for hypocrisy.”12 Here the very tone is that of the philosophes. But Rousseau is unwilling to stop his criticism short of the essential. He wants to reveal a fundamental truth, a truth that the philosophes do not want to hear. What Rousseau dislikes about the philosophes is that they worship the very lies that they unmask, like Socrates in the Morceau allégorique, who on his deathbed pays homage to the idol

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of the fanatics. When followers of the Baron d’Holbach unmasked despoLs and priests, they discovered the face of self-interest. Well and good! But when they interpreted nature, they detected an ineluctable sequence of cause and effect that determined even moral behavior. It follows that every man should pursue his own selfinterest. But if evil is self-interest, how can morality be “interest properly understood“? After indicting self-interest, Holbach and his friends resurrected il, and accepted without undue regret so­ ciety’s ills, from which they did not suffer. After all, they were aristocrats and wealthy bourgeois, comfortable with the world as it was. They protested against false values only to accept the absence of all values, only to palliate their enjoyment of privilege—and of their elegant dinner parties. Having torn away all masks, they dis­ missed all scruples. The false values they denounced—religion, the conventions of good and evil—only impeded their pleasure. In a mechanistic and materialistic system, which establishes the physical necessity of all things, there is no pleasure, no privilege that is unjustifiable, and no taste that cannot be indulged. “A philosophy convenient for the happy and rich, who make their paradise in this world.“13 As Rousseau sees it, his materialist adversaries, incapable of imagining anything beyond impersonal forces, are one with their system: to him they are “mechanical objects” driven by “blind ne­ cessity.” Jean-Jacques therefore sets out to unmask these would-be unmaskers, aware that die risk is great and that he may be forced to pay dearly: “The philosophes, whom I have unmasked, want lo do me in at all costs, and they will succeed.“14 The second unveiling comes as the complement and continuation of the first. If the first stage is the denunciation of the “veil of illusion,“ the second will be the discovery and description of what remains hidden from our eyes. Once error is dissipated, we come face to face with solid reality. The metaphor of the lifted veil is the figurative counterpart of a realist dieory of knowledge. It is an image employed in a naively optimistic manner, which pretends to see the true visage behind the mask, to grasp the “thing in itself,“ to touch the reality behind the appearance, the substance beyond the acci­ dent. But does Rousseau recognize the realist implications of his metaphor? Rousseau is an optimistic realist in one sense only: he hopes to penetrate the mask to discover the human or moral reality that lies behind it. He seeks to discover human nature but will have nothing to do with efforts to discover the reality of physical nature. From Malebranche and Locke he drew the conclusion that it is illusory

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to look for a truth hidden “in things.“ The only truth accessible to us is in our ideas or sensations or sentiments, that is, in consciousness. Using myth or allegory, he treats this “subjective unveiling” as though it were objective, as though the object unveiled were a tan« gible fact as well as a revealed moral quality: the cruel statue is hideous to behold, while Galatea is a woman of ideal perfection. The antithesis is significant: unveiling as disillusionment bares the reality of evil by dispelling its prestigious aura, whereas discovery of hidden beauty or goodness exalts the discoverer. If evil lurks behind an attractive exterior, we must probe deeper, beyond the now-unveiled face of evil which functions as a second mask, in order to reveal the still hidden purity and innocence. The idol in the allegory is hideous, but the statue of Glaucus, though encrusted with shells and seaweed, may retain its original form beneath its unattractive exterior: “Some faces are more beautiful than the masks that cover them.”15 An unveiling that begins as bitter disillusion­ ment may end in a marvelous revelation. Rousseau draws a sharp contrast between the denunciation of evil and the revelation of good, which remains as a last chance. The exaltation of discovery is subjective, not objective, even diough the allegorical form requires that it be given objective expression. The statue of Glaucus is natural man, and natural man is, imme­ diately, Jean-Jacques. In order to reveal natural man Jean-Jacques must show himself His demonstration does not point at some object outside himself; Rousseau turns his light inward, upon himself. He shows us his mind, so that we can see its uniqueness but also so that we can appreciate his claim to state a universal truth. What a peculiar object the statue of Galatea is! It is scandalous because it is an inanimate object, but in the end that ceases to be the case. Even before the statue receives a soul, however, it is not a thing like other things. It is perfection imagined; it represents the illusion of desire. The ultimate miracle does not dispel the illusion but rep­ resents its triumph. Galatea’s sudden “animation” is perhaps the height of illusion. This is the moral of the story hinted at by Rous­ seau, who dislikes miracles and would rather propose a psycholog­ ical interpretation: “Ravishing illusion . . . ah! never leave my senses.”,ß Here we also see a rehabilitation of illusion. Previously, evil was associated with misguided opinion. But now even ideal beauty turns out to be illusory. Evil was a subjective appearance. But now goodness and beauty turn out to be equally subjective. The reality of the external world remains hidden, but it hardly matters, since now the truth appears to us as inner truth. Even

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more, it seems (to judge from certain texts) that Jean-Jacques ex­ pressly wishes that external and material reality remain protected by a veil. Since the world of the ‘‘thing in itself” is inaccessible, any quest that does not rely on inward evidence is idle or ill-fated. Vana curiositas. Let us give up the attempt to strip the veil from nature once and for all: “The heavy veil that she has drawn over all her activities would seem sufficient warning that she did not intend for us to engage in idle research.”17 We find the same assertion in a letter to M. de Franquières, this time in regard to knowledge of spiritual essences. Man’s capacities stop short of the ability to per­ ceive clearly the nature of the soul or God. Let us accept the fact that the supreme realities remain hidden from us: The reasonable and modest man, whose practiced but finite un­ derstanding is aware of and accepts its limitations, finds therein notions of his soul and of the author o f his being, even though he cannot make those notions clear or contemplate them as fully as he could if he were pure spirit. Full o f respect, he therefore stops short and does not touch the veil, content with the knowledge that an immense Being lies beneath.18

The truth is not available to the living, in odier words, although Rousseau, in writing the Rêveries, expresses the hope that it will be revealed to him after his death: “My soul . . . delivered from the body that shrouds and blinds it, and seeing the unveiled truth . . . will perceive the poverty of the knowledge on which our false thinkers pride themselves.”19 Here we recognize the traditional Platonic no­ tion that truth can be perceived by the spirit only after it has been delivered from the opacity of the body. As far as earthly existence is concerned, Rousseau is perfectly willing to accept the notion Lhat a veil separates us from the objects that we wish to know (including the notions of the soul and God), as long as man is fully present to himself in the form of consciousness. To do good we do not need to connect with the “immense Being” hidden beneath die veil; the imperative lies within ourselves. We must rely on inner certitude, which though not based on objective knowledge is nonetheless ab­ solute. The law of conscience, based on both universal reason and intimate feeling, provides firm support. Kant, in affirming the pri­ macy of practical reason, was merely giving Rousseau’s idea its fullest philosophical formulation. You object, Sir, that if God had wished to oblige men to know him, he would have made his existence obvious to all. This ob­ jection is one that must be answered by those who make belief in

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God a dogma necessary to salvation, and they do so by invoking revelation. For my part, I believe in God without believing that faith is necessary, and I see no reason why God should be obliged to give it to us. I think that every man will be judged not on what he believed but on what he did, and I do not believe that a doc­ trinal system is necessary for good works, because conscience sub­ stitutes for it.20

There is a revelation, then, but not the one discussed by the theo­ logians. The only revelation that counts figures in no dogma but presents itself immediately to our consciousness. It is not an object of faith, because it imposes itself upon us as directly and irrefutably as our belief in our own existence. We are free not to follow the orders of the inner dictamen, but they are orders that we cannot fail to hear. Hence there is within us a light and a presence: equivalents of the unveiling of external reality. Rousseau expresses this equiva­ lence with a variety of images. Sometimes the inward illumination results, symbolically, in a magical illumination of the external land­ scape: in contrast to what occurred at Bossey, where a veil fell over the countryside following the discovery of injustice, moral certainty makes the air translucent. At other times, however, a man may keep his attention focused inward, enjoying the presence of the absolute as if it were also an unveiling of the outside world. He can give up the idea of an objective unveiling of nature because self-presence (présence à soi) is accompanied by expansive feelings of ecstasy at the inner vision, feelings that transform themselves into ecstasy about outer reality as well, but without expecting any particular reward from nature or making any real effort to explore the world. An example may be found in a celebrated passage of the third letter to Malesherbes: “mystical” experience of reality makes it un­ necessary to unveil nature in any material sense. For even unveiling is an action and hence an intermediary activity. But Rousseau’s ec­ static apprehension of reality transcends all active knowledge: what delights him is the immediate presence of reality in the act of un­ veiling itself. He has no further need to discover or explore it but only to welcome it as it yields and uncovers itself within his con­ sciousness. The unveiling is the work not of ego but of reality itself: Had I unveiled all nature's mysteries, I think I should have found myself in a state less delightful than the dizzying ecstasy to which my mind gave itself over unreservedly, and which in my agitated excitement made me sometimes cry out, O! Great Being! O! Great Being!, unable to say or to think anything more.21

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The expansive imagination does not seek to confront external reality. Within the confines of the self and in a state of Dionysiae disorientation, consciousness becomes absolute immediacy (indeed, dissolves in absolute immediacy), transparent to itself and to all things. The “mysteries of nature“ remain mysteries; the ecstasy of Being takes the place of impossible knowledge of the world because subjective awareness of totality supplants objective discovery of na­ ture and its laws. Nature ceases to be an outside spectacle and becomes fully present to the “inner eye.“ The expansive imagi­ nation subsumes the “universal physical system“ in a unique self, overcome by ecstasy. The unveiling of truth is essentially an unveiling of consciousness: this is what we learn from the Morceau allégorique and the myth of Galatea. In both there is a clear demarcation between the unveiling of the statue and its replacement by a living consciousness. Once the veil has been torn away and die statue laid bare, it must dis­ appear to make way for a higher truth. The stone must either come to life or be destroyed. Removal of the veil abolishes the subjectivity of error. But in the end we must confront a new subjectivity, certain that it knows the truth. Maleficent subjectivity has given way to felicitous subjectivity. But we remain within the confines of con­ sciousness, even when we think we are encountering objects. The statues themselves are works of the spirit, symbols of desire: theirs is a world of pseudo-objects, of illusions mistakenly erected into absolutes. From this world we must escape if we wish to arrive at pure subjectivity and simple self-certainty. The statues, which stood before spectators as things, have given way to consciousness, which stand as truth and are immediately recognized by other conscious­ nesses. The show is over and the spectators have gone. What had been a spectacle is now exalting communication and, in its highest expression, amorous union. The “son of man“ captures every heart. Galatea and Pygmalion constitute a single ego. Everything is re­ solved in a single presence. Galatea says simply: “I.“ The “son of man“ speaks to mankind in the “language of truth, whose source lies within himself.“ How different these two “revelations“ are! And yet, how similar! In Galatea we witness the first phase of sensuous existence. Con­ sciousness of existence bursts forth from the nothingness of stony sleep. The awakening ego captures this feeling of existence. This awakening is primordial in an absolute sense: the nascent con­ sciousness as yet has no past and is ignorant of time. It knows

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neither where it is nor who it is. It discovers itself and sees itself for the first time. A moment before there was only the night of inanimate matter. Note the special value that Rousseau attaches to the moment of awakening, and in particular to those rare circumstances in which consciousness awakens without knowing its identity, without yet being able to link itself to its history or its past, so that nothing clouds the perfect clarity of the present moment. In the country outside Lyons, in the theater at Venice, and, even more, after the fall at Ménilmontant, Jean-Jacques experiences such awakenings or ‘‘rebirths”: he emerges from nothingness and for an instant stands outside time. He experiences the timeless happiness of the first sensation and the first moment of self-awareness. In the odd letter that he receives from Henriette he is struck by the “sad and cruel awakenings” whose horror she so vividly describes."2 He wants to teach her the pleasure to be had in “delicious reawakenings.” Obsessed from adolescence by the imminence of death and perhaps also by the thought diat his birth was “the first of his misfortunes” (since it killed his mother), Rousseau is pleased to imagine a pure beginning, a sudden emergence of sensuous consciousness ex nihilo. and a regeneration of moral consciousness, “as if, already aware that life was escaping, 1 tried to recapture its beginnings.“23 Galatea represents the inception of sensuous experience; the “son of man” relays the truth that emanates from a source within himself. Again we encounter the idea of a spontaneous emergence, but now in the realm of moral sentiment. In both instances consciousness receives an initial gift, given unconditionally: in the case of Galatea this is the ego of individual existence; with the son of man it is the universal truth derived from intimate sentiment. In both allegories consciousness manifests itself as an absolute beginning, an inaugural act totally distinct from the prior unveiling, which, being merely the end of an illusion, inaugurated nothing. Rousseau himself claims to represent—simultaneously—both the Galatean ego and the universal truth laid down by the son of man. This double revelation, reworked and incorporated into a single, actual truth, will justify both Jean-Jacques’s solitude and his conflict with a perverted society. Like Galatea he repeats, “Yes, me, only me.”2'1 And like the son of man he shouts: “Virtue, truth! I shall ceaselessly cry, Truth, virtue!”25 At the time of his reform, Rousseau set himself the duty of testifying as to the primordial truth, the forgotten innocence of man. He wants to be both the unique in-

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dividual, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the universal model, natural man. This desire to know the sensuous fullness of the ego while at the same time being in possession of the truth will never leave him: he wants both the “unicity” of individuality and the unity of uni­ versal reason. When he dreams of happiness beyond dead), he writes, in Emile: “I shall be myself without contradiction.”26 And in the Rêveries he writes: “I shall see truth unveiled.” To be oneself and to see the truth: he wants both, and he wants each by means of the other. It remains to be seen, however, whether or not Rousseau does in fact succeed in reconciling the singular and the universal, the authenticity of experience and the truth of reason. This question, here left unanswered, should not be forgotten.

5

La nouvelle Héloïse

Among the many intertwined motifs of La nouvelle Héloïse is an extended reverie on the theme of transparency and dissimulation. The description of mountain scenery at the beginning of the novel shows us a landscape from which the veil has been lifted and to which the luster lost in the episode at Bossey has been restored: Imagine the variety, grandeur, and beauty o f a thousand aston­ ishing sights; the pleasure o f seeing everywhere only new things, strange birds, and bizarre and unknown plants; o f observing, in a sense, another nature; and of finding oneself in a new world. All this makes an ineffable feast for the eyes, whose charm is increased still more by the rarefied quality of the air, which bright­ ens the colors o f objects and accentuates their features, and draws together many different points o f view. Distances seem less great than in the plains, where the thickness o f the air covers the earth with a veil, so that a scan of the horizon yields more objects Lhan it seems possible for the earth to hold. There is a somehow mag­ ical, supernatural quality to the spectacle, which delights the mind and the senses. You forget everything, even yourself, and you no longer know where you are.1

Here Rousseau depicts Lhe scenery of another world, magically transformed by the transparency of Lhe air. Though this world is vaster than our own, things in it seem closer together: the misfor­ tune of distance is somehow attenuated. To come quickly to the point: at the beginning of the first Dialogue Rousseau will describe the “enchanted world“ in curiously similar terms. In this ideal realm we find the same liveliness of color, the same clarity of the air. Where the description of the mountain speaks of die removal of a veil, the first Dialogue describes immediate pleasures. The terms are equivalent: in Rousseau’s allegorical lan­ guage, the removal of the veil is synonymous with immediate pleasure: 81

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Imagine. . . an ideal world similar to our own and yet quite dif­ ferent. Nature is the same as on our earth, but its economy is more apparent, its order more evident, its sights more admirable. The forms are more elegant, the colors more vivid, the fragrances sweeter, and all the objects more interesting. All nature is here so beauLiful that contemplation o f it inspires the soul with love for so touching a tableau, and with the desire to cooperate in so lovely a system comes fear of disturbing its harmony; this gives rise to an exquisite sensibility, wliich gives immediate pleasure to those so blessed, plea­ sure unknown to hearts in which similar contemplation has kin­ dled no flame.2

This pleasure, to judge from the letter about the mountains of Le Valais, is one of ecstatic exaltation in which the spectator forgets himself in his rapture. uYou forget every thing, even yourself.” The landscape seems clearest at the moment the sense of a bounded personal existence disappears. It is as if a veil has been removed. The spectator himself is less opaque; transparent to the light, he can no longer be seen. The accentuation of color and form saps the will and banishes the private thoughts that circumscribed the limits of self. The scope of existence is broadened. Overcome by the abundance of intense sensations, I forget what distinguishes me from others and languish in tranquil sensuality: “Overly keen desires lose their edge. They lose the sharp point that makes them painful and leave only a mild, gentle emotion in die bottom of the heart.“1 Thus, paradoxically, a kind of anesthesia resuhs from hy­ peresthesia, from the quickening of the senses due to the presence of striking shapes and vivid colors. Rousseau is here describing the striking combination of indolence and acuity characteristic of all his moments of happiness. Purely sensual pleasure coincides with forgetfulness of self in a state of expansive emotion. In a world without obstacles to deflect the soul or force it to reflect upon itself, being coincides (or diinks it co­ incides) with instantaneous sensation. The self has no history. It bears no burden of the past. Consciousness ceases to be separate from the world (or, at any rate, such is its illusion). Yet the self is certain that it exists. Boundless desire fills all space; the external world is concentrated in the pure ecstasy of ego. Concern for the future disappears, so there is no limit to the pleasure of the mo­ ment. The tenuousness of individual existence is rather mysteriously converted into intensity of pleasure and clarity of vision. Everything passes through me; nothing is beyond my reach. I cease to be anything in myself and become pure space; hence space no longer stands in opposition to me.

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Limpid space: a transparent self looks out upon transparent sur­ roundings. That is the sum of Rousseau’s desires. He actually achieves such transparency in a few exalted moments, when no one stands in the way of his self-sufficient bliss. In times of trial, these are the moments he would like to recapture. From WootLon he writes to Mirabeau: “My wishes would be satisfied by very little. Less physical pain, a milder climate, a purer sky, a more serene at­ mosphere, und above all more open hearts, so that when I pour out my heart I might feel that it Hows into someone else’s.”1 He is asking for almost nothing. There is nothing he wants to have. He wants only to dispel the clouds and eliminate the obstruc­ tions that separate one heart from another. The very language in which Rousseau formulates his nostalgia lor these moments of transparent perfection is reminiscent of Saint-Preux’s letter about Le Valais: “After walking in the clouds, 1 reached a more serene spot from which, in certain seasons, you can see thunderstorms take shape around you . . . . There, in the pure air; 1 discerned the real cause of my change in mood, and of the restoration of that inner peace that I had lost so long ago.”5 But this intensification of color and form and increased clarity of the air are not features peculiar to the mountains or any other landscape: they are a quality of perception, a mythical figure of happiness, a metamorphosis that the soul, in its exaltation, is able to project into the world around it. If the quality of the mountain air can alter the hiker’s mood, the mood of a happy lover can in turn alter the quality of the air. The atmosphere in the valley then becomes as clear as the atmosphere on the mountaintop. A similar magic captivates the senses. Transparency of the heart restores nature’s lost brilliance and intensity: Tlie country is more agreeable, the green fresher and livelier, the air more pure, the sky more serene. The birds sing more sweetly and pleasantly. The murmur of the waters induces a more amorous languor. In the distance the flowering vine exhales the sweetest of fragrances. A secret charm makes everything more beautiful and fascinates my senses.6

Saint-Preux writes these lines after Julie confesses her love for him. La nouvelle Héloïse strikes us throughout as a kind of daydream in which Rousseau gives in to his desire for a limpidity he can no longer find in the real world or in human society: his desire for a purer sky, more open hearts, and a world at once more intense and more diaphanous.

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“If my image ol the hearts of Julie and Claire is correct, they were transparent to one another.“7The theme of the “two charming friends” (one of the inspirations for Rousseau’s novel) establishes the central zone of transparency, so to speak, around which even­ tually crystallizes a “very intimate society.” The signs are apparent in the book’s opening pages: the symbolic names Claire and Clar­ ens, and die lake chosen as setting (“I needed a lake”).* Each character in the book must overcome various difficulties before joining this group of communicating souls and extending the zone of transparency. Saint-Preux cannot hide anything. “All our secrets can be read in your soul,” Julie writes.9 Saint-Preux’s passive transparency is matched by M. de Wolmar’s passion for observation and inquisitive curiosity. “He has some kind of super­ natural gift for reading the depths of the heart.”1'’ He wants to be omniscient, like God. “If I could change my nature and become a living eye, I should be glad to do it.”11Julie’s children, educated in die manner of Emile, can never keep a secret: When allowed to follow the inclinations of the heart, undisguised and undenatured, our children do not assume an artificial out­ ward form but retain precisely the form of their original character. That character develops daily before our eyes, without inhibition, and we can study nature’s activities down to their most hidden causes. Confident that they will never be scolded or punished, they do not know how to lie or dissemble, and in everything they say, whether to us or to each other, they uninhibitedly reveal whatever is on their minds.’2

Comforting evidence! As the book proceeds, secrets are divulged, confidence grows, and the characters’ knowledge of one another becomes ever more perfect. From the beginning Saint-Preux and Julie confess their love to Claire. But that love is at first clandestine. It requires a veil. Julie writes to her lover: “Night in this season of Lhe year is already dark by that hour. Its veil can easily hide people in the street from the eyes of onlookers."'* In the letLer that immediately follows this one, written by SaintPreux in his misLress’s bedroom, the theme of the veil recurs as if in antiphon: “Charming place, place of good fortune . . . be witness to my happiness, and forever veil the pleasures of the most faithful and happiest of men.”1’1After Julie’s mother discovers Saint-Preux’s letters, which reveal her daughter’s guilty passion, cousin Claire writes: “This odious mystery must be hidden beneath an eternal

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veil . . . . The secret belongs to six trustworthy people.”15 Six! Ini­ tially there were only three. While the lovers endure the trial of separation, the number of “initiates” has increased. Indeed, the more sublimated Saint-Preux’s love becomes, the more remote from carnal satisfaction, the more transparent it is to the gaze of others: once hidden, now it can reveal itself without shame. As his love gradually becomes pure, it is revealed to more and more witnesses. The conquest of virtue is also a conquest of trust. Perfect trust brings exquisite pleasures to the small group of belles âmes: Grant . . . that the charm o f our society lay in this openness of heart, this sharing o f all our feelings and all our thoughts, which made it so that each person, aware of what he ought to be, showed himself to us as he really was. Suppose there had been some secret intrigue, some relationship that needed to be hidden, some reason for reserve and mystery. From that moment all our pleasure in seeing one another would have vanished. We would have felt ill at ease in each other’s presence. We would have hidden from one another. The moment we met, we would have wanted to flee.16

The society of Clarens is based on unanimous consent, like the society in the Social Contract, in which each individual member must conform to the general will. The center of the Clarens community is Julie, whose soul is open to all around her. This small group, with its feminine central figure and rather “maternalistic” character, is in many respects quite different from the virile, egalitarian re­ public of the Social Contract. In both works, however, purity and innocence are restored because people are willing to place absolute trust in one another. The total alienation that makes each person open and visible to all the others ultimately gives them the right to exist as autonomous and free human beings, ending their solitude and servitude. Recognition of others justifies and sustains the life of each individual. Everyone watches everyone else; together these separate individuals constitute a social body. Thus Julie sees her friends as part of her self: Everything that interests me is close at hand. For me, the whole world is here. I enjoy my devotion to my friends, their devotion to me, and their devotion to one another. Their mutual benev­ olence either comes from or relates to me. There is nothing that does not enhance my life, and nothing that tears it apart. My being is distributed throughout my environment. Nothing is be­ yond my reach. My imagination has no more work to do. There is nothing that I desire. Feeling and happiness are one and the

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same. I live in the midst o f what I love, and I am happy and satisfied with life.17

Because Julie is the omnipresent center of her intimate little group, Rousseau is able to justify the uniformity of style of the letters in the collection, even though they are written by people whose diction and manner of expression might be expected to vary considerably. He invokes not literary principles but psychological causes: the uniformity of style results not from a requirement of art but from a transparency of minds, from the magical i7ifluence exerted by Julie. This Rousseau states quite clearly in the second preface to La nouvelle Héloïse: I have observed that in very intimate groups, styles as well as characters become similar; friends mingle their souls and confound their ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking. Julie, whatever she is, must be an enchanting creature. Whatever comes near her must resemble her. Around Julie everything must become Julie.,M

Instead of an aesthetic justification Rousseau here invokes a moral principle: the communication of souls. In the Confessions he will justify the uniformity of style by saying that his own dreams and desires are represented in each of the characters. In other words, he explains the unity of the later book by the ego of its author rather than by the radiant influence of its central character. In the end the problem is reduced to one of self-expression.19 Julie radiates transparency. At the cost of sacrificing carnal plea­ sure, her presence illuminates a community that has both temporal and spiritual dimensions. Sensual love is transcended through vir­ tuous devotion. But at the peak of her spiritual ascent, the virtuous Julie regains the basic ability to feel pleasure: “Feeling and hap­ piness are one and the same.”20 In the higher realm of moral feel­ ing, she reconciles herself to the immediate pleasure of sensation. Sensuous existence was at first savored, then destroyed, and finally transcended. In the end it is recaptured: the circuit is complete. By the end of the novel's fifth part, the characters have risen above the absurd institutions that prevented them from satisfying their desires; they have also risen above the chaos of the passions. A double negation, a double effort of liberation, has been completed. In the name of nature, passionate love had violated the rules and conventions of traditional society, which M. d'Etanges (the jealous father) defended most vigorously. Later, virtuous abnegation van-

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quished unruly passion. Only after no is uttered twice does it be­ come possible to say yes to desire and yes to virtue. A new society and a new love—Lhe two no longer antagonistic— are discovered on a higher plane of existence. The requirements of eros are at last reconciled with the requirements of order. But the old social order and the old amorous rapture have both been mortally wounded, only to be resurrected as old conflicts are re­ solved in a new and ideal unity. Benevolent sympathy, or love trans­ figured, reigns in a regenerated society. Thus the novel exhibits a dialectical structure. (The synthesis is formulated in the fifth book, which can be considered a first con­ clusion. The final episode, which culminates in Julie’s death, is a second conclusion.) What I want to emphasize is the fundamental antithesis that underlies this dialectic. Rousseau was not fond of the dialectical mode—quite the contrary. He was forced to use dialectic because die desires he ascribes to his characters at the beginning of his story cannot be satisfied simultaneously. Yet si­ multaneous gratification is precisely what Rousseau wants: he wants to enjoy physical pleasure along with an exalted sense of virtue. Despite his dislike of anything that is not immediate, he therefore embarks upon the difficult path of dialectic. As Julie says, “inno­ cence and love were equally necessary to me,” but she knows that she cannot “have both together.”21 On the higher plane of existence she finally attains, however, she can combine the two and savor both pleasures at once. To reconcile the irreconcilable Rousseau had to invent a dialectical process, had to imagine intermediate stages, had to work for transcendence and imagine a process of becoming. That is why time plays such an important role in La nouvelle Héloïse: of necessity the novel must span a considerable period. The impor­ tance accorded to the “long term” is significant in a writer generally considered, with good reason, to be the poet of the ecstatic moment. (As we shall see presently, however, the second conclusion intro­ duces a sharp distinction between the temporal and the atemporal, and Rousseau seems to argue against the notion that with time mankind experiences progress.) La nouvelle Héloïse ends in felicitous synthesis, admirably expressed through symbols of the harvest feast (part 5, letter 7). All veils have been lifted, and the characters live in trusting intimacy. Rousseau cannot resist expressing the idea allegorically, with a rising autumn sun. Among the many details that give the day its “festive atmo-

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sphere” is a “veil of jog that the morning sun lifts like a theater curtain to reveal the charming spectacle.” We witness the recon­ ciliation of pleasure and duty, of Dionysiae rapture and careful organization. The holiday is also a day of work. No trace here of the folly of the ancient feast day, when men consumed the wealth they had worked so hard to accumulate. Rousseau’s harvest feast is a day during which wealth continues to be accumulated, even as moderate amounts of it are consumed. The work of the harvest is scarcely distinguished from the day’s amusements: ‘‘This holiday is beautiful to contemplate, because in no other holiday has man been able to combine the agreeable with the useful.” This gives rise to a “common condition of celebration,” a “general happiness that seems to cover the face of the earth.” Music and Transparency

From daybreak “the song of the grape pickers” could be heard. And the feast ends quietly with music (while work continues): After supper people go on for an hour or two stripping hemp. Each person in turn sings a song. Sometimes the harvesters sing together as a choir, or with soloist and chorus. Most of the songs are old ballads [romances] whose tunes are not very memorable. But there is something ancient and sweet about them, which is touching in the end. The words are simple, naïve, often sad. Yet they are likable.

Morning and evening. The presence of naïve music and poetry is of particular significance. Note in passing the cliché of the “old ballad,” a literary commonplace destined to endure for many years to come. Popular poetry and music soon captured the interest of intellectuals such as Herder, who was a devoted reader of Rousseau. Women’s voices sing in chorus, in unison. “Of all harmonies,” SaintPreux goes on to say in his letter about the harvest festival, “none is more agreeable than the song sung in unison.” If we consult the Dictionnaire de musique, we discover that unison is “the most natural harmony.”22 And what is a ballad? Rousseau defines it as “a sweet, natural, country melody, which produces its unique effect regard­ less of how it is sung.”23 A ballad sung in unison is therefore a natural melody set to its natural harmony. It is a triumph of nature, which sings through the singer. The singer needs no “artistic per­ sonality.” The interpreter has no need to intervene: eloquent with­ out an intermediary, the ballad has the power to move without

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mediation. Not only can it do without a virtuoso, it can also do without the senses: the ballad works directly on the soul of the listener. For melody has the power to affect the heart: this is a major tenet of Rousseau’s musical theory, which justifies his pref­ erence for melody and distrust of harmony. He detests music whose purpose is to show off the talent of the performer and shuns pieces whose sole purpose is to give pleasure to the senses. Why? Rousseau subscribes to a sentimental idealism. For him, the interpreter’s per­ sonality is an obstacle that stands between the “essence” of the music and the soul of the listener, and so is the listener’s merely sensual pleasure. There must, of course, be a voice that sings and an ear that listens, but these must serve as pure vehicles, intercepting nothing. In Rousseau’s theory they are simply conducting media. The magic of melody lies in its power to transcend sensation and become pure feeling: The pleasure of harmony is merely a pleasure of pure sensation, and sensual enjoyment is always brief. Satiety and boredom soon follow. But the pleasure of melody and song is a pleasure of interest and feeling, which speaks to the heart.24 It is from melody alone that the invincible power o f impassioned accents emanates; it is from melody that all music’s power to act upon the soul derives.25

To be sure, there is an immediacy of sensation as there is of sentiment. Harmonic music is aimed directly at the senses. Complex and sophisticated as it may be, it never transcends the elementary realm of physical sensation. Music that works through “the imme­ diate empire of the senses” acts “only indirectly and slightly on the soul.”26 The felicity of immediacy in this case is for the senses, not for the soul, which is frustrated. Purely sensuous pleasure in music lacks depth. It is without echo and, though it may seem paradoxical to say so, can be sustained only through artifice. By contrast, melody has ilmoral effects that surpass the immediate empire of the senses.”27 Rous­ seau is here claiming for melody the privilege of acting directly on a more intimate faculty: now the soul alone savors the joy of immediacy.28 Old ballads are therefore in their proper place in a feast that celebrates transparency and unfettered communication. But naive melody speaks of the kingdom of nature to belles âmes living in the kingdom of moral law. Music thus adds profundity to the feast; it introduces a new dimension: the past. The “tunes have something ancient about them.” Correspondingly, the belles âmes had to van-

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quish crude nature in order to achieve their present state of hap­ piness. The music therefore reminds Julie and Saint-Preux of their own past, when their passions were governed by the law of nature. It reminds them of the suffering from which they had to extricate themselves. The tune may express the happiness of transparency, but the sad words tell of threats to Lhat happiness, evoking nostalgic remembrance of a past that cannot be repeated. In the Dictionnaire de musique Rousseau asserts that music is a “mnemonic sign.“29 As the women sing, Julie and Saint-Preux feel the past awaken with particular keenness: Claire could not stop herself from smiling, nor Julie from blush­ ing, nor myself* from sighing when we heard in those songs phrases and expressions that we ourselves had used in the past. Glancing at them and thinking of the past, I shuddered as an unbearable weight pressed upon my heart, leaving me with a somber impres­ sion that was difficult to overcome. Yet I find in these vigils a kind of charm that I cannot explain to you.30

Saint-Preux is remembering, comparing different periods in his life, reflecting on the past. Reflection: a cloud forms in what had been clear skies. Elegiac Feeling

The backward glance, the shudder, the charm of the past: taken together, these features define what 1 shall call an elegiac state of mind. Rousseau’s account provides striking illustration of the dif­ ference between what Schiller called the “naïve” and the “sentimental."51 Listening to naïve popular song, the belle âme, beguiled by nostalgia, abandons itself to elegiac sentimentality. The soul is irrevocably cut off from its past, and that past is none other than nature, still innocent, transparently expressed in popular melody. The melody itself is not elegiac; it is naively sad. But the song both expresses nature and reveals the past. A mnemonic sign, it sym­ bolizes what has been lost, stands for a ghostly world that no longer exists. Elegiac sentiment, not directly present in naïve song, is awak­ ened by the music. The sudden irruption of a regretted past reveals inner tension behind the apparent happiness of the feast. Time has passed; more than that, renunciation and transcendence have established an in­ superable distance between past and present. An essential part of the self belongs to a vanished world. We are fascinated by what we once were, but neither past nor present offers real support. The

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past is finished; the present becomes a land of exile. Overwrought, Saint-Preux tries to defend himself against nostalgia, as does Julie. Memory of past pleasure is upsetting. They do violence to them­ selves to escape such memory, and they must repeat the effort again and again. Such perpetual struggle can easily become unbearable. True transcendence requires constant vigilance and deliberate ef­ fort. (The past is still seductive and must be repressed constantly.) But Rousseau almost always prefers to avoid action and effort; he prefers to remain calm, passively acquiescent. Julie’s death is more than a pathetic calamity designed to elicit tears in female readers. Death is Julie’s only release: she dies happy, freed of the need to act, joyful that her duty is finally done. Tension—the presence of a suppressed, indeed of a consciously “repressed,” past—is evident even as Rousseau speaks of the ab­ solute confidence that the belles âmes have in one another, of the unfettered communication that takes place between them, and of the absence of all secrecy. The grape harvest takes place under the omniscient eye of the patriarchal master. Saint-Preux, exalting this perfect transparency, admits the need to struggle against “tender memory”: I sighed without inhibition. There was no longer anything in my sighs that I needed to keep silent, nothing I was embarrassed to show in the presence o f Wolmar the wise. I am not afraid that his enlightened heart will read the depths o f my heart. And when a tender memory struggles to be bom, a look from Claire diverts me, or a look from Julie makes me blush.32

The atmosphere here might be that of pure idyll (which is what Schiller considered La nouvelle Héloïse to be), except that we are repeatedly shown the dangers that threaten idyllic happiness. Rous­ seau’s art lies in his ability to keep us constantly aware of how difficult it is for him to remain virtuous: all his characters are perpetually in danger of succumbing to sin. Transparency cannot prevail by itself: the danger of a relapse into opacity is constant. Only a “sweet illusion” is capable of turning Saint-Preux’s thoughts back to the biblical idyll: “O time of love and innocence, when women were tender and modest and men were simple and lived in happiness! O Rachel! charming girl, and constantly loved.”33 A time of purity, but in the form of fiction. We sense that we have returned to the “beautiful river bank, dressed by nature’s hands alone,” which was described in die first Discourse. In this admirably limpid landscape, it seems almost as if man's original innocence has

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been recaptured. But we are forever cut off from that innocence. Virtue, which consists in knowledge of good and evil and in the will to triumph over evil, cannot regress in order to become in­ nocence, which is to say, ignorance of good and evil—undivided plenitude. Having experienced a time of trouble, the virtuous souls of Clarens cannot deny what they have endured. Transparency, now regained thanks to their confidence in one another, once was lost: this they cannot ignore. Having restored their happiness, they cannot forget their time of misforLune and division. They remem­ ber the period of tribulation between loss and restoration; they are aware, in other words, of their historicity. They also know that their present happiness is a result of free choice and strength of char­ acter, hence precarious. Should they tire of making the constant effort of will required, they risk relapsing into opacity. A moment’s weakness and their hearts may close upon their secret and com­ promise the serenity for which they have fought so hard. Though aware of this, they cannot help missing the past, when innocence reigned spontaneously, effortlessly, safe from danger. The Feast

The country feast simulates the return to an original state of in­ nocence. The belles âmes know that this is only an illusion, but the effect of the illusion is to bring the image of idyllic innocence miraculously closer, lending credence to the notion of having come full circle, to the idea that consciousness, at the end of a period of moral evolution, can once again immerse itself in the world of unreflective spontaneity from which it had been snatched by history. But this is a fiction, a symbolic game, not a true return to the origins. The harvest feast is in no sense a “ritual.” It belongs to no tra­ dition. Nothing is done according to custom. On the contrary, everything appears to be improvised. The feast not only symbolizes a return to the golden age, to biblical times, but also represents the efforts of the “very intimate society” of Clarens. It is a pure inven­ tion, a free creation, unfettered by any preestablished form. Rous­ seau is enchanted by die pleasure that comes of doing one’s duty. Cooperative labor is exalted, and the clear conscience celebrates itself (Hegel refers to the “cult” of the belles âmes). Yet the feast, which evokes the original state of mankind, is not intended to be “mnemonic” or commemorative. It is born out of custom, yet with­ out any planned ritual; it develops through cooperative endeavor in which no one need hide what he thinks or feels. Here people

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are not happy because they have come to a feast; rather, the feast is the visible manifestation of the joy they feel in being together. Their happiness runs over into dancing, games, ceremony, and song. The grape harvest is little more than a pretext, a circumstantial cause. The real object of the feast is openness of the heart. We are shown a spectacle: Rousseau compares the dissipating fog to the rising curtain of a theater. But this is a spectacle of a very special kind, in which everything is made plain. The participants are in rapture because they see one another with perfect clarity: there are no masked actors, and no spectators peering out of darkness. Everyone is both actor and spectator, entitled to an equal share of the limelight, of the attention of others. It is no exaggeration to say that this idealized feast is one of the key images in Rousseau’s work. (It also proved to be one of the most influential: recall the attempts to establish public festivals after the French Revolution.Jean-Jacques shed ,4sweet tears” while writ­ ing his Letter to d'Alembert. His tears and “tender delirium” clearly indicate the elegiac character of that work. The Letter, of course, is in part a moralizing critique of the evil wrought by the theater; in it, however, Rousseau refers constantly to an ideal form of spec­ tacle, description of which he defers to the end of his brief essay. This ideal is based on his memory of an improvised festival that he witnessed in childhood. He thus calls attention to the contrast be­ tween the “false” prestige enjoyed by comedy and tragedy and the genuine, communal joy he experienced as a child and now relives nostalgically. I remember being struck in my childhood by a rather simple spectacle, an impression o f which has stayed with me despite the passage o f time and the variety of things seen since. The regiment of Saint-Gervais had completed its maneuvers and, as was cus­ tomary, broke into companies for supper. Most o f the troops gath­ ered after supper in the Place Saint-Gervais and started dancing, officers and soldiers alike, around the fountain, onto the basin of which drummers, fifers, and torchbearers had climbed. People dancing happily after a long meal would not seem to offer much of interest for the eye to behold. Yet the unity of five or six hundred men in uniform, holding one another by the hand and forming a long band that snaked about in rhythm and without confusion, with a thousand twists and turns; a thousand figured harmonies, and the selection o f tunes that animated those har­ monies; the noise o f the drums, the light of the torches, and a

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certain military formality in the midst of pleasure—all of this combined to create a very vivid sensation, so that one could not remain unmoved. It was late and the women were asleep. All got up. Soon the windows were full of spectators, who redoubled the zeal of the actors. Unable to remain at their windows for long, the women came down into the street. Mistresses came to watch their husbands. Servants brought wine. Even the children, awak­ ened by the noise, ran about half-dressed among their mothers and fathers. The dancing was halted; now there were only kisses, laughs, toasts, caresses. The result o f all this was a general emotion that I cannot describe, the same feeling of universal joy that we feel fairly naturally whenever we are surrounded by what we hold dear. My father hugged me, and as he did trembled in a way that I can still feel and share. “Jean-Jacques,” he said, “love your coun­ try. Do you see these good Genevans? They are all friends, all brothers. Joy and harmony prevail among them.”35

It is of little importance whether the event was in fact as Rousseau describes it. What is important is that these images constitute the internal norm according to which Rousseau judges other public spectacles and finds them wanting. No detail in this portrait of an evening’s gaiety is without significance: the initial meal, the drinking of wine, the presence of music (as in the harvest feast), the patriotic character of a celebration in uniform, the presence of the father, and the temporary equality of masters and servants in this tame satur­ nalia—all are important, all are pregnant with meaning. The meaning of the feast emerges with even greater clarity from a second passage in the Letter to d'Alembert. Pay particular attention to the terms and images Rousseau uses in comparing the closed theater to the open-air communal celebration: Let us not opt for these exclusive spectacles, which sadly enclose a small number of people in a dark cavern; which restrain them, fearful and immobile, in silence and inaction; and which show nothing but walls, steel blades, soldiers, and other distressing images of servitude and inequality. No! Happy nations, these festivals are not yours. It is in the open air, beneath the sky that you ought to gather and give free reign to the sweet sensation o f happiness. . . . Let the sun shine on your innocent spectacles. You yourselves are one o f those spectacles, the worthiest on which the sun can shed its light. But what will the objects of those spectacles be? What will be shown? Nothing, if you will. With freedom, wherever there is affluence there is also well-being. Put a stake in the middle o f a square and wreathe it with flowers, call the people together, and you will have

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a festival. Better still: make the spectators the spectacle; make them actors; see to it that each person sees and loves himself in the others, for the greater unity of all.36

Thus the theater is to the festival as opacity is to transparency. With its darkness, its steel blades, and its walls the theater inspires the same fears as the cruel temple of Rousseau’s allegory, in which the monstrous statue reigns. The same fascination with evil holds sway. Though an enemy of the theater, Rousseau does not under­ estimate its power to seduce. He holds, however, that the theater (like the statue) entices people into the realm of opacity, evil illusion, and baleful isolation. In the darkened theater the spectator becomes a prisoner of his solitude. “People think they gather together in the theater, but in fact they isolate themselves. They go to the theater to forget their friends, neighbors, and relatives.“147Indeed, they go “to forget themselves“: it is here dial one forgets oneself and others most completely. The theater robs our being: it is total alienation, for which we receive nothing in return. We are drawn in by the prospect of something fabulous but remote. For the theater may act on our passions, but it enchants through the magic of distance and estrangement: “Whatever is staged in Uie dieater is not brought closer to us but is taken farther away."** After painting the theater’s portrait in terms so dark that it recalls the mournful temple of the Morceau allégorique, Rousseau praises the communal festival, using images strikingly reminiscent of those occurring at the end of the myth of the veiled statues. By a miracle of sorts the division between spectacle and spectators (and, worse still, between spectator and spectator) is overcome. The objectspectacle robbed us of our liberty and held us fixed, like inanimate objects, in a darkened hall: we were petrified by the gaze of Medusa. Now, just as the indoor spectacle has given way to the open-air spectacle, so, too, is the opaque object of the former supplanted by a community of open minds, each drawn toward the others. Sepa­ ration gives way to mutual regard. Earlier we saw the “divine object“ Galatea acquire a consciousness and join Pygmalion in the equality of a shared Ego. We also saw the “son of man“ topple the idol and proclaim a truth drawn from an inner source, a truth immediately recognized as such by his fellow man. The same thing happens when the “exclusive“ and “closed“ spectacle becomes an open-air feast. An entire people acts out its happiness. A spectacle open to everyone, which is also a spectacle of openheartedness, is an “innocent” spec­ tacle, not a “danger,“ and it is at the same time more “intoxi-

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eating.” The animation of the collective festival accomplishes one of the epiphanies of transparency of which Rousseau has dreamed. “There is no pure joy that is not public joy.”39 Public joy has no object and is universal, whence its purity. The community expresses itself in the act of communication and becomes the theme of its own exaltation. Minds open to the outside world because they are pure and have nothing to hide. And they are pure because they are able to open themselves to one another. Purity is perhaps not so much a cause of collective joy as a consequence. “What will be shown? Nothing, if you will.” If the festival had any purpose other than to affirm transparency—if it had a partic­ ular object—we would still be in the realm of means and mediation. Is the spectator plunged into absolute solitude in the theater, as Rousseau claims? Not at all: when I watch a play, I know that others are also watching, and I share with them the sense that we are all watching the same action. This is the archetype of mediated com­ munion: I am indirectly linked to my fellow spectators through the action on the stage, which is what I am attending to directly. But that is precisely the point: the mediated relationship among the­ atergoers apparently has no value for Jean-Jacques. A communion that is not absolutely immediate is not, in his view, a true com­ munion: it has more in common with solitude and isolation. Where we see mediated communion, Jean-Jacques sees only broken com­ munication. Where we see intermediaries, he sees obstructions. For this there is no remedy except to create a kind of spectacle in which nothing is represented. If nothing is represented, then space is a free vacuum, the optic medium of transparency: mind is directly accessible to mind with­ out intermediary. And if nothing is represented, then everyone can represent himself and see the representations of others. Nothingness (as to the object of representation) is strangely necessary if subjec­ tive totality is to emerge. The communal feast is reminiscent of the general will of the Social Contract. Public pleasure is the lyrical aspect of the general will, as it appears when it dresses in its Sunday best: “Is there sweeter pleasure than to see an entire people abandon itself to the joy of a feast day, and all hearts unfold to the rays of supreme pleasure that pass in brief but brilliant flashes between life’s clouds.”40 The festival expresses, in the “existential” realm of emotion, what the Social Contract formulates in the theoretical realm of law. In the rapture of public joy every man is both actor and spectator. Similarly, after the social contract has been signed the citizen enjoys a dual

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status: he is at once “member of the sovereign” and “member of the state.” In other words, he both wills the law and obeys it. See to it that each man sees and loves himself in others, for the greater unity of all. Watch one’s brothers and be watched by them in turn. Similarly, the Social Contract postulates a simultaneous alienation of wills, in which each person ultimately receives back from the col­ lectivity whatever he voluntarily cedes to it. Separation, then mediation to overcome separation: the result is a secondary immediacy. Each person, in giving himself to all the others, gives himself to none, and since there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right that he cedes over himself, he receives the equivalent o f what he loses, and is bettter able to hold on to what he has.41

The Social Contract deals with the will and possession, the festival with the realm of social visibility. The latter does not legitimate what people have but what they are. Each person is “alienated” in the gaze of others, and each is restored to himself by means of universal “recognition.” Having given itself freely, the self becomes absorbed in narcissistic contemplation. But what it discovers is pure freedom, pure transparency, through its intimate association with other free and transparent souls, indeed, with the “communal soul.” Now the dancing can begin, as bodies freed from worry over sol­ itude join in the general animation. “Let’s go dancing under the elms. Step lively, girls.”42 The last scene of the Village Soothsayer made the same point, but in the tone of “naïve” idyll. Equality

In the grape harvests at Clarens, “everyone lives in the greatest familiarity. Everyone is equal, and no one is forgotten.”43 In the general jubilation it seems that primitive equality has somehow been recaptured. In the second Discourse Rousseau described this original equality of mankind, and he showed how human history could be viewed as a decline into inequality. Could all the damage be undone? Had the residents of Clarens somehow managed to recover the happiness of ancient times? Or was this, like the return to inno­ cence, merely a “sweet illusion,” an effect of a fleeting autumn light? In fact, tiie supposed equality is quite illusory. It appears with the holiday rapture and will disappear with it as well. It is a mere epiphenomenon of communal happiness. In ordinary times Clar­ ens enjoys neither the natural equality of ancient times nor the civil

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equality described in the Social Contract. Masters and servants are as unequal as can be. To be sure, the servants are bound to their masters by trust (part 4, letter 10). But the systematic Wolmar seeks the confidence of his subordinates only to make good servants of them: his method is a method of training, which produces better servants but does not attempt to establish egalitarian solidarity. In every line of the letter concerning the domestic organization of the estate, we recognize the characteristic attitudes of “paternalism”: much ingenuity is expended in the effort to win the consent and even the affection of servants for their masters, in order to turn them into more docile instruments. The masters retain the privilege of feeling equal if it pleases them to do so, but this privilege belongs to them alone, not to their servants. The feeling of equality is therefore still a luxury, whose purpose is to permit the master to enjoy his property without troubling his conscience: I admired the way so much affability could coexist with so much subordination, and she and her husband could condescend so frequently to equality with their domestics without the latter being tempted to take them at their word and pretend to equality with their masters. I do not think that any sovereign in Asia is served in his palace with greater respect than these good masters are served in their home. Nothing could be less imperious than their orders, yet no orders could be more promptly executed: if they bid that something be done, someone races to do it; and if they excuse an error, the guilty party is aware o f his wrong.44

In this benevolent trust there is a hypocrisy of which the servants may not be the only dupes. Are not the belles âmes who play the role of good masters also taken in by this pious fraud? They deceive themselves to serve their desires. They delude themselves into thinking that they never deviate from the ideal of immediate com­ munication. By trusting their servants they are able to persuade themselves that they do not treat domestics as means to an end, that they have not descended into the dispiriting realm of instru­ mental action. The beautiful souls maintain their purity. Indeed, demonstrating that purity becomes the essence of their activity. What must be done to ensure that the household will prosper and the estate bear fruit? Nothing: people need only show themselves as they really are. Then others will take it upon themselves to perform the necessary labor: “The great art of the master who wishes his servants to be a certain way is to show himself to them as he really is.”45 In that way he can be sure of being served without

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betraying his high principles: “Man is too noble a creature to have to serve merely as an instrument of others.” Critics have not been slow to point out the contrast between the democratic ideal of the Social Contract and the still feudal structure of the community at Clarens. The differences are indeed important and raise the question of the strength of Rousseau’s devotion to the ideal of democratic equality. It is worth noting, however, that Rousseau feels a need to compensate, by means of the harvest festival, for the inequality he tolerates in daily life: until that in­ equality is dissimulated in the rapture of the festival, he cannot feel comfortable. With the help of wine (drunk, of course, in moder­ ation), human relations are reestablished on a new foundation of sentimental equality. The juridical assumptions of the Social Contract are realized—in an emotional sense—for one brief moment, but the joy of equality, of a society free of corps intermédiaires, will not outlive the holiday. This brief triumph of fraternity in no way threatens the customary order or economy of the estate, which is based on the domination of masters and the obedience of servants. The egalitarian exuberance cannot endure; it contains no promise of continuity. The happiness of the holiday lasts for a week or two. We are shown equality in a concentrated moment of great intensity, but it is a temporary intensity, which lacks the power to perpetuate itself in institutional form. It is an equality that must be enjoyed on the spur of the moment, in the knowledge that tomorrow noth­ ing but nostalgic memory will remain. The belle âme does not seek to reform society so that equality may spread; he is satisfied merely to express the wish (which he knows perfectly well to be vain) that time might come to a halt and the happiness of the moment be continued: “It would not be upsetting to start again the next day, and the next, and every day for the rest of our lives.”46 It may be that Rousseau sees the ephemeral rapture of the festival as an emotional substitute for real equality, for which he is not prepared to fight. I have called attention to the parallels between universal alienation in the Social Contract and in the harvest festival and compared the concept of the general will with the general transparency of the festival. Which will Jean-Jacques choose? Is he not disposed to prefer festivals to revolutions? Consider his last political work, the Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne. This begins with two questions: “How can the law be placed above man? How can hearts be touched?” Jean-Jacques’s answer involves a the­ ory of festivals and “public games.” Here is what he proposes to the Poles: “Many open-air spectacles, in which the different ranks are

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carefully distinguished but all the people take part equally, as among the ancients.’*17 Even in the very heart of the festival Rousseau concedes the existence of social inequality. He requires simply Lhat equality man­ ifest itself in the subjective enthusiasm with which an entire people participates in the spectacle. It hardly matters that the institutions are not egalitarian: for Rousseau it is enough that equality is achieved as a collective stale of mind. This view is already clear in Saint-Preux’s letter about the grape harvest. In the concrete structure of Clarens society there is no equality: equality is strictly a “holiday affair.” Saint-Preux writes: “The sweet equality that prevails here reestablishes the order of na­ ture, offering instruction to some, consolation to others, and the bond of friendship to all.”48 Even though the order of nature is “reestablished,” die disin­ herited have gained nothing but consolation. Nothing has really changed in the social order, which means that the natural order has been reestablished not for real but only for fun. Rousseau adds a footnote that further clarifies this point: the holiday does not abolish social differences but simply makes it possible to overlook them. The realization of equality in the context of the feast dem­ onstrates the futility of an actual transformation of society. Here we recognize a type of argument that would be employed by con­ servative thinkers throughout the nineteenth century and beyond: “If this gives rise to a communal holiday, no less agreeable to those who condescend than to those who rise to the occasion, does it not follow that all estates are essentially the same, provided one can quit them on occasion?”4-1 Jean-Jacques is quick to accept illusory equivalents for equality as long as they are justified by feelings. He is ready to accept a society in which only pseudoequality exists, provided that it is pos­ sible occasionally to make everyone feel equal, as though the essence of equality consisted in egalitarian the feelings .5ÜThis “Platonism of the heart” (as Burgelin calls it) legitimizes deception. Others can reasonably be deceived provided it is for their own good. When Wolmar arrogates to himself the right to oblige his servants to trust him, he is behaving like an “enlightened despot,” making short work of the moral requirement of reciprocity. No matter! He has created a feeling of equality, and we are urged to forgive the dubious means used to achieve that end. As Burgelin has noted, there is a “Ma­ chiavellian” aspect to Rousseau’s social theory. The enemy of opin­ ion, masks, and veils is willing to overlook the master’s coercive

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methods of establishing domestic order and harmony: “How can domestics, mercenaries, be controlled if not by coercion and con­ straint? The master’s art consists in his ability to hide that constraint beneath the veil of pleasure and interest, so that they think they want what they are being forced to do.”51 The servant is treated here as Emile will be treated by his teacher: the man of reason imposes his will by means of artifice and by disguising the violence that he does to his pupil or servant, who is left the illusion of free will. Does this indicate contempt for children and the lower orders? It would seem so. But Rousseau is quick to identify with the child and the people. A “natural man,” he, like the child or plebeian, is incapable of hiding his feelings: “The people shows itself as it is . . . . Men of the world disguise themselves.”52 Because Wolmar belongs to superior society, he is a man who wears a disguise, and so is the teacher in Emile. There is one essential difference, however: the teacher guides Emile out of the state of childhood, while Wolmar is hardly concerned with transforming the servant into a man of reason. The reign of innocence was not restored at Clarens, nor was the reign of equality established. The belles âmes were simply en­ chanted by the image of innocence and the feeling of equality as­ sociated with the holiday. Clarens, moreover, was a small, exclusive, and deliberately closed community. But its members had dedicated themselves to universality. Consider Saint-Preux’s emotions as the holiday begins: he is moved by the “agreeable and touching portrait of communal happiness, which seemed at that moment to cover the face of the earth.”53 In imagination, Clarens’s joy becomes universal. The ideal of the “intimate society” (like the ideal, in the Dialogues, of an “enchanted world” accessible only to initiates) apparently reflects Rousseau’s strong desire for a circumscribed life. (Similarly, his political ideal is based on the small city-state.) As Amiel has observed,54 Rousseau is attached to insularity and needs to restrict his life within narrow limits. Clarens is precisely the setting he requires: it is an island, a walled garden, a tiny community living in happy isolation, which it has been able to create for itself. It is the earthly refuge of beautiful souls who have excluded55 themselves from the rest of the world. But this insular community needs to experience the “communal happiness that seemed at that moment to cover the face of the earth.” Thus even as he satisfies his desire for life lived within a narrow compass, Rousseau gives free reign to his “expansive soul.” Aware that he must settle for illusions (which

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he claims are enough to satisfy him), Jean-Jacques nevertheless wants to experience the rapture of totality and universality. The general exaltation of the closed community becomes a symbol of universality, though it remains a subjective, psychological experi­ ence. Internally, this is a community of transparent souls. In the exaltation of the feast, transparency becomes happiness; the belles âmes interpret this transformation as a result of their having hit upon universal truths. They interpret their unbridled joy as a con­ sequence of participation in a boundless Whole, a world of infinite possibility. Thus in his third letter to Malesherbes, Rousseau de­ scribes himself as fleeing other men, but only in order to engage in contemplation, the end result of which will be to raise himself, in thought and feeling, to a “universal system of things,” to the level of “the incomprehensible Being that subsumes nmything.™ He of­ fers here a perfect example of “insularity” counterbalanced by in­ ward experience of universality and totality. Clarens’s collective pleasures are Jean-Jacques’s solitary ecstasies writ large. The society of Clarens is hermetic, but its members abandon themselves to ecstatic contemplation of the “great Being.” There are two rather different ideal types of the feast in Rous­ seau’s work. Feasts can be organized in two different ways. The first requires that the group be animated by a common spirit. The initiative for die feast comes from many sources. Hence the com­ munal celebration has no distinguishable center. All participants have the same importance: all are actors as well as spectators. A unified communal spirit manifests itself in each member of the community, and all are equally moved. Enthusiasm wells up in each individual. The feast has no legislator, just as the hypothetical “so­ cial pact,” at its ideal stardng point, requires no lawgiver because it is supposedly the result of a simultaneous decision by each in­ dividual in the society. But the feast can also be organized by a central personage, a luminous figure who inspires others and guides their action. Hap­ piness radiates from this dominant individual. In other words, the feast is organized around a demiurge. The benevolence of an ex­ pansive soul awakens universal joy in others. Rousseau finds bodi images equally attractive. In the Letter to d'Alembert, the feast is in essence an expression of the collective spirit, yet Rousseau also imagines himself in the role of its central figure. In one lengthy passage nearly every sentence begins with the words “I should like.”57 Rousseau is literally feasting himself in his imagination; he sees himself as the center, the lawgiver.

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To be the center and originator of a feast and to find one’s own goodness mirrored in the joy that one creates are among the “rare and brief pleasures” that Rousseau mentions in the ninth Rêverie. At La Muette he offers wafers to a group of girls: “Then the sharing became almost equal and the joy more general . . . .The feast was not ruinous» moreover. It cost me thirty sous at most, but produced at least a hundred écus worth of happiness.”58 This account of an improvised feast immediately calls to mind another, in which JeanJacques again finds himself at die center of a joyous group. More than that, the feast he organizes stands in sharp contrast to the false pleasures of wealthy society: I was at La Chevrette at the time o f the master’s feast. The whole family had gathered for the celebration, and many noisy amuse­ ments were deployed toward that end. Games, spectacles, ban­ quets, fireworks—no effort was spared. People had no time to catch their breath and were made dizzy rather than happy.59

To five or six Savoyard boys Jean-Jacques offers the “puny ap­ ples” they had coveted. This feasL within a feast costs him very little: true happiness, obtained at little cost, is contrasted with the spendthrift pleasures of the great: 1 then witnessed one o f the sweetest sights that a man can see, as happiness coupled with the innocence o f youth spread around me. Whoever looked upon this happiness shared in it, and 1, who partook at such low cost, felt the additional pleasure o f knowing that it was my work.00

This scene warrants a closer look: the happiness that Jean-Jacques experiences in this and similar circumstances is due to the magical character of his action. He is amazed by the disproportion between the small cost of his action and the intensity of the pleasure it gives him. He spreads happiness not by the power of money but by the magic of benevolence. The true feast is one that costs nothing. If pleasure is to be truly immediate, not only must the object of the spectacle be eliminated, but the spectacle itself must be accom­ plished without expenditure, that is, without resorting to impure means: money. For Rousseau feasting is always frugal, whether it originates in a communal spirit or with a benevolent personage. No doubt this attitude coincides with a deeply puritanical concern for economy: Rousseau does not like to spend money. But he is less interested in saving money than he is in not spoiling the purity of the feast. If the feast is to remain pure, souls must express themselves spontaneously. They must create the feast by them-

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selves. Collective joy is a creation of autonomous consciences, which enter spontaneously into communication with one another. If one pays for a feast (as Rousseau does in the case of the young Savoyards and the girls at La Muette), that payment can still be justified by arguing that it was practically nothing and that the resulting hap­ piness far exceeded die paltry expenditure needed to obtain it. Economy

At Clarens the feast of equality is apparently the result of a si­ multaneous enthusiasm, a joy that bursts forth at the same instant in the well-tempered hearts of which this little society is composed. Yet the figure of Julie remains the radiant center of this day. Her “expansive soul” ignites joy in those around her. Simply being Julie is enough to inspire the happy animation of the festival. And since Julie’s mere presence is enough to set a whole disciplined micro­ cosm in motion around her, there is no need to spend money to add to the general cheer. The ideal of frugality is admirably real­ ized: “Supper is served on two long tables. The luxury and ac­ coutrements of great banquets are missing, but the abundance and joy are not,”*1 In fact, this holiday is a working day, and production far exceeds outlay. The beginning of Saint-Preux s letter reflects what one might call the lyricism of accumulation. Here is the essence of rural prosperity: How delightful it is to see good and wise stewards make of the cultivation o f their lands the instrument of their profit, amuse­ ment, and pleasure, and fill their arms with the gifts of Provi­ dence; how delightful it is to see diem feed man and beast alike with the crops that overflow their barns, their cellars, and their lofts, and accumulate abundance and joy, and do work that rewards them with the wealth of a continual feast!62

Accumulation is proportioned to die needs of a community whose only economic goal is to be self-sufficient. The only reason to work for wealth is to become independent. We see a society of independent individuals against a background of agrarian prosperity. Clarens is successful because it has achieved two kinds of autonomy: psycho­ logical and material. Rousseau always saw a connection between epistemological and economic problems: there can be no indepen­ dent thought, he argued, without economic independence. Phis is a moral argument, probably borrowed from the Stoics: the soul must seek its gratifications within itself and among its own posses-

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sions, without calling upon outside assistance. At Clarens, the moral ideal of autarchy, transposed to the economic plane, took the form of a hermetic society capable of providing for its own material needs. All reasonable needs could be frugally met. Wealth would not be allowed to accumulate to any greater degree. Wolmar is not out to earn a profit, in the sense of income not to be converted immediately into consumption. Prosperity is not translated into capital accumulation. The family has no debt, but neither does it hold any surplus production in reserve. It is content to live com­ fortably without adding to its ready capital. The belles âmes shun additions to their material burden: they do not make money. They do not borrow, but neither do they save. They consume as much as they produce (or as their farmers and servants produce at their behest), together with that slight surplus that makes daily con­ sumption seem like a modest feast. What better image could there be of autarchy than this, in which there is neither the alienation of unsatisfied desire nor that of superflous wealth? For all the eco­ nomic detail, money is scarcely ever mentioned. For money has nothing to do with the inner life of the community. It comes into play only in contacts with the outside world, which members of the community try to avoid as much as possible: Our great secret for being rich . . . is to have little money and, in using our wealth, lo avoid as much as possible intermediate exchanges between production and use . . . . We avoid transporting our prod­ ucts by using them on the spot; we avoid trading them by con­ suming them in kind; and as for the indispensable conversion of what we have too much o f into what we lack, rather than selling and buying for cash and thereby incurring double damages, as it were, we look for opportunities lo barter, where the parties gain in convenience what they lose in profit.63

Money, an abstract intermediary, is not necessary in this society, which immediately consumes what it produces and feeds on the prod­ uct of its labors. To be sure, this labor requires descent into the wretched world of instruments and means (the burden of which falls on the servams). But immediate consumption of what is pro­ duced wipes away, in a sense, the sin inherent in labor: negation of nature. Wealth cannot come between individuals, and men can rightfully claim to be their own masters. Labor satisfies current needs, nothing more. Money and the problems of possession do not cloud the future, which the belles âmes can confront without com­ promising their purity.

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Wolmar’s professed distaste for “intermediate exchanges“ de­ serves further attention. We recognize the discomfort that Rousseau always felt in the presence of money. But Wolmar creates a noble system and transforms into economic doctrine what is expressed in the Confessions in terms of likes and dislikes: “None of my pre­ dominant tastes involves things that can be bought. I require none but pure pleasures, and money poisons everything . . . . By itself it is good for nothing; it must be transformed in order to be enjoyed."** Money is in effect something that cannot be enjoyed immediately: all the pleasures it can buy are necessarily mediated pleasures. A pleasure acquired by means of money no longer has the purity of immediacy: it is poisoned. There is another point on which comparison of La nouvelle Héloïse and the Confessions can shed some light: the principle of immediacy, which at Clarens serves as the basis of a virtuously autarchic econ­ omy, serves in the Confessions to justify certain immoral acts com­ mitted by Jean-Jacques. Why did he commit so many petty thefts? Because he shuddered at the thought of resorting to money as an intermediary. Because desire wants to hurl itself directly upon its object: 1 am less tempted by money than by things, because there is always an intermediary between money and the desired possession, whereas between a thing and enjoyment of that thing there is none. I see the thing, and it tempts me; if I see only the means o f acquiring it, it does not tempt me. Hence I have been a thief, and sometimes I still am, of things that tempt me and that I would rather take than ask for.05

Thus the reasons for Jean-Jacques’s propensity to steal are also the reasons for Wolmar’s consumption of the produce of his estate. They are close to being different aspects of a single ethic. When Rousseau explains his thefts, the principle of immediacy is invoked to illuminate a psychological mechanism in a purely descriptive way; but almost at once that principle is also invoked as a justifi­ cation, a moral imperative, superior to and more constraining than the ordinary rules for distinguishing right from wrong. To help oneself to as much of what is available as one wants is the privilege of the state of nature, discussed in the first part of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. But society introduces a distinction between what isyawrs and what is mine, from which there is no turning back: thieves are locked up in prison. The idle selfsufficiency of the state of nature gives way to a state of perpetually

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unsatisfied need: man forgets himself in his work, in which he becomes the slave of things and of other men. Yet work also makes man human; it raises him above the condition of the animals. Man begins to define himself as a working animal with a free will, who distinguishes himself from nature by using tools to transform it. The social condition is wretched because man, always in search of new satisfactions, loses himself among his implements and ceases to be his own master. He is torn by feelings of inadequate satisfac­ tion but only makes his dissatisfaction work by seeking to secure still other pleasures. At Clarens, however, where the belles âmes reconcile nature and culture in themselves, the autarchy of the state of nature is brought into harmony with the henceforth indispens­ able need to work. Primitive independence once again becomes compatible with use of the implements of civilization. To meet his own needs man now submits to the necessity of work, rather than simply pluck the fruits offered gratis by Nature. Yet it is still possible to achieve the ideal equilibrium, the perfect state of self-sufficiency that constituted man’s happiness in Lhe state of nature. Now it is reason that defines what is necessary, pares away what is superflu­ ous, and adjusts labor to legitimate needs. Thus reason sets the limits within which all shall live in frugal contentment. Reason ends the tyranny of opinion and roots out the evils of civilization without eliminating its advantages: An order o f things in which nothing is conceded to opinion and in which everything has real utility defined by true natural needs constitutes a spectacle that not only can be approved by reason but also satisfies the eyes and the heart, in that man is seen only in an agreeable light, sufficient unto himself . . . . A few people o f gentle and pacific disposition, joined together by mutual needs and reciprocal regard, cooperate in various ways toward a com­ mon goal; since each person finds in his estate all that he needs to secure his happiness and to prevent his wanting to change his condition, he will accept his Jot as one that he must keep for the rest o f his life, and his only ambition will be to do his duty well. Those who give orders do so with such moderation, and those who obey do so with such zeal, that equals might have distributed the same employments among themselves without complaint. Thus no man envies the employment of another man. No man thinks that he can increase his own fortune in any way other than by improving the welfare o f all. Even the masters measure their happiness by the happiness o f those around them. Nothing can be added here and nothing taken away, because nothing is here but what is useful, and everything useful is here, with the result

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that no one desires anything that he cannot see, and there is nothing that can be seen o f which one can say, Why isn’t there more?66

No internal conflict threatens the cohesiveness of the group, and since nothing outside this closed world seems desirable, no temp­ tation threatens from without. The community has no goal other than to consolidate itself by securing the “welfare of all.” Means vanish, revealing the one end that counts, the contentment of au­ tonomous minds. The produci of labor is converted as quickly as possible into reasonable satisfactions. Nothing could be more re­ mote from “manufacturing,” which turns ouL quantities of objects destined to be sold elsewhere. In imagining the happiness of Clarens, Rousseau lays down the ideal conditions for Lhe immediate trans­ formation of labor into pleasure. Economic success consists in meet­ ing all local needs without producing a surplus that might necessitate recourse to sale and exchange, those twin clouds hovering on the horizon of transparency. Any material surplus not corresponding to a real need or not rapidly absorbed by the community for its own gratification would lx? a burden unbearable to individuals whose ideal is to be masters of themselves. Wealth in excess of what the community is capable of consuming would be tantamount to slavery. The product of labor must never be allowed an autonomous ex­ istence, as a commodity for sale or accumulated wealth. As each product leaves the hands of its creator, it must immediately be put to the reasonable use that justified its creation in the first place, thereby reestablishing the primacy of man over things. At Clarens man produces only in order to take possession of what he produces as rapidly as possible, in order to liberate himself from the object and reaffirm his liberty. “We work only for pleasure.”87 The same is true in “Rousseau's personal life. To live one must have the means to live. To live as a free man, the means to live must not entail any commitment, any irreversible bond on one’s conscience: the best kind of work is work that is indifferent, work to which one is never tempted to commit oneself, work that one can always set aside to recover one’s self intact: I wished to live in independence, but still it was necessary to survive. 1 thought o f a very simple expedient: this was to copy music at so much per page. H some more solid occupation had served the same purpose, I would have taken it. But since this talent was to my taste and the only one capable o f earning me my daily bread without personal subjection, I kept at it.68

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In fact, Rousseau’s picture of Glarens’s economic self-sufficiency is based on the self-sufficiency of the Stoic sage. But the sage’s moral resources all come from within, whereas il is clear that the Clarens estate cannot live solely on its own material resources. A closed yet prosperous economy is clearly an unrealistic hypothesis, a sentimental illusion strongly influenced by the myth of Robinson Crusoe. Yet Rousseau believes that he is not departing in any great degree from the conditions that would actually be faced by a closed com­ munity established on the shores of Lake Leman. In an imaginative flight he transposes the ideal of the self-sufficient ego into a myth of the self-sufficient community. Surrounded by “creatures after his own heart,” he allows the solitary self-sufficiency of the sage to prolif erate in a consoling dream of “collective autarchy.” He invents a society yet preserves the essential privileges of solitude, namely, freedom and a sense of independence. He thereby gives his desire for independence a more sophisticated form: whereas the solitary individual must seek external assistance in order to survive, the ideal community has no such need. Conceived as a single organism, all of whose parts complement one another, the community, viewed as a collective ego, works in a self-contained fashion: it never has to turn to the outside world. Robinson Crusoe has to fight to take possession of his island. For Wolmar and Julie the property is al­ ready there, and all they have to do is maintain the proper balance among needs, production, and enjoyment. Individual labor invar­ iably involves an alien world, upon which the individual becomes partially dependent, but communal labor remains purely interior: the means employed by the community in doing its work do not subject it to any alien power. Its activity is instantaneously reflected inwardly. The group at work feels no need that relates it to the rest of the world and therefore engages in no commerce beyond barter. Having secured for itself complete autonomy, the closed community sets itself up in relation to the rest of the world as a person at leisure and perfectly free. Everything at Clarens fits together. Economic autarchy requires social unanimity. Social unanimity in turn requires open hearts and pure trust. Rousseau assumes that all these conditions will be met and that they will be compatible with one another. Particularly revealing in this regard are certain symbolic inven­ tions relating the theme of autarchy to the theme of reconciliation between nature and culture. To wil:

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—-Julie's malaga. The principle of self-sufficiency prohibits im­ portation of foreign products. “Anything that comes from afar is subject to distortion or adulteration ” says M. de Wolmar.fiy For one who has resolved to live in autarchy, the outside world is the realm of fraud and illusion. Only what is “homemade’’ is authentic. If the outside world has real pleasures to offer, it is futile to search for them outside the community. Clarens will also provide them. Julie knows a secret process for taking local grapes and producing a wine that tastes like malaga. True, nature has to be forced a little: some violence must be done to nature through “thrifty industry.” Is this fraud? Hardly. The false malaga is less fraudulent than the malaga one can buy on the market. Art makes up for nature’s unavoidable limits. Clarens brings “twenty climates together in one place”70 and becomes a world unto itself, capable of dispensing with the rest of the world. — Julie’s Elysium. In the midst of fields made prosperous by labor, Julie has fenced off an area for herself, a hortus clausus, a locus amoenus. “The thick surrounding foliage prevents the eye from seeing in, and it is always carefully closed and locked.”71 What is this garden? A work of art that gives the illusion of nature in the wild, an “artificial wilderness.” Saint-Preux expresses naïve aston­ ishment: “1 see no sign of human labor.” But the opposite is true: the human labor has been so perfectly done that it has rendered itself invisible. There is nothing in this sanctuary of nature that Julie did not warn there: “It is true,” she says, “that nature has done it all. but under my direction, and nothing is there that I have not ordered.” No human footsteps are visible “because care was taken to erase them.” What is more, all these preparations have been done “by fairly simple means” and, as Julie points out, at no cost. The economic morality remains inviolate; art has been frugal, and if the place is luxuriant, it is nature that has borne the cost of such luxury. Thus the sanctum sanctorum of the civilized family is a place that offers an image of nature as she was before civilization trans­ formed her. “I felt that I was looking at nature at her wildest and most solitary, and that 1 was the first mortal ever to set foot upon this wilderness.” In the midst of Clarens, a civilized island, we come upon this replica of an unspoiled island from far-off Polynesia. The synthesis (the just society) thus preserves what has been tran­ scended. The Elysium gives us, through pious illusion, an image of the beginning of time and the far corners of the world. “O Tinian! O Juan Fernandez! Julie, the end of the world is at your

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doorstep!” What further need is there for travel? Clarens’s autarchy is carried to the point of reproducing a perfect image of man’s origins. To be sure, this recaptured nature is not the same nature with which primitive man once lived in direct, sensuous contact. The Elysium is nature reconstructed by enlightened men who have moved from the plane of sensuous existence to that of moral existence. In Schiller’s terms, this recaptured nature is no longer “naive” nature but a simulacrum thereof produced by “sentimental” nostalgia for what has been lost. Recall the passage from Kant cited earlier: “Consummate art again becomes nature.” Nothing could be more mediate than this nature, which is a product of human art. But in a consummate art, the labor is effaced and the resulting object is a new nature. The work is mediate, but the mediation vanishes and the enjoyment is once again immediate (or gives the illusion of being immediate). Here we recognize the aesthetic of Pygmalion: the most beautiful forms created by the artist must not remain mere “works of art” but must return to natural existence, as though the sculptor had never done his work. Apotheosis

This success is purely human, purely terrestrial. It is the work of the atheist Wolmar (although it is true that Julie, a convert to Christianity, is the soul of the group of friends). Transparency is reconquered because individual consciences have made an effort to achieve virtue and mutual confidence. Having made this effort, they have nothing to hide from one another. All their confused desires, their impure enthusiasms can be admitted, since the very act of confession is also an act of represssion, which transmutes carnal passion into moral transparency. A precursor of the Kingdom of God is thus established on earth, its membership limited to a small group of the elect who enjoy happiness in unity. For immediate presence, absolute self-suffi­ ciency, inward enjoyment, and the power to order are privileges of God: man appropriates those privileges when his essential con­ flict is resolved, when antithesis gives way to synthesis. The “pa­ terfamilias” then becomes like God: present in all he possesses and sufficient unto himself. The plenitude of having coincides exactly with the plenitude of being. He is all that he has; he is in full possession of himself in his estate. The microcosm that surrounds him is his sensorium, just as space is the sensorium of Newton’s God.

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He wants lor nothing, so that the outside world does not exist for him. Desire, ostensibly a wain of being, has no place in his scheme of things. If he uses means to achieve his ends, they are always the most direct means, and no sooner arc they employed than they vanish, leaving only direct, immediate relations in their place. The paterfamilias does not govern his subordinates through in­ termediaries such as money or coercive force; he obtains their collaboration directly, through confidence and esteem, through unmediated communication between one consciousness and an­ other (or at any rate through the equivalent of free persuasion): A paterfamilias happy in his home is rewarded for his constant care wuh constant enjoyment of nature’s sweetest sentiments. Alone among mortals he is the master o f his own happiness, because he is happy as God himself is happy, desiring nothing but what he enjoys. Like that immense Being, he dreams not of enlarging his possessions but of making them truly his own through the most perfect relations and the most extensive direction. If he does not enrich himself through new acquisitions, he does so by possessing what he has more fully. Once he enjoyed only the income from his lands; now he enjoys the lands themselves, by presiding over their cultivation and ranging constantly over them. Once his ser­ vant was a stranger to him; now he makes him his boon, his child, he takes possession o f him. Once he commanded only actions; now he takes command over wills. Once he was master only by means of money; now he makes himself master through the sa­ cred empire of esteem and good deeds.72

Wolmar does not believe in God but sees himself as the analogue of God, a being who lives in meditative satisfaction, in possession of himself and of all he surveys. Material possession is completed by spiritual possession. The Clarens estate is the domain of a con­ sciousness that recognizes itself in everything it sees. (Wolmar has already claimed one divine privilege, in expressing the wish to become a ‘living eye.”) Is it surprising that an atheist should wish to be so like God? Nothing here is incompatible with the (avowed or implicit) ten­ dencies of “Enlightenment philosophy.” As has often been ob­ served, the philosophes' major ideas are for the most part secularized religious concepts. In the words of Yvon Beiaval, it is as if the philosophy of the eighteenth century “transferred to the World the infinite attributes of God and permitted transferring to man God’s moral attributes.”73

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The atheist Wolmar refuses to believe in a personal God so as to become his successor on earth. He believes himself to be in possession of a divine prerogative, in that anyone who is perfectly self-sufficient becomes divine. For Rousseau, what makes man re­ semble God is never the fruit of the tree of knowledge; it is selfsufficiency and the untroubled repose that goes along with it, even if that repose comes close to ignorance, and even if it means leading an attenuated life reduced to little more than the “sentiment of existence.” The fifth Rêverie describes one of those pious moments in which man feels divine not because he is in contact with God or illuminated by transcendent Being but because he is self-sufficient in his immanent being and thus comparable to God: “What is the source of one’s pleasure in such a situation? Nothing outside one­ self, nothing but oneself and one’s own existence, for just as long as one is sufficient unto oneself, like God.’’74 The happiness that the idle and solitary Jean-Jacques experiences on the shores of the Lake of Bienne is expressed in almost the same terms as Wolmar’s active happiness. What a difference, some­ one may object, between that passivity and this activity! Yet an activity that never extends beyond the horizon of the ego is, as we have seen, tantamount to inactive independence. Wolmar is active, but his self-sufficiency makes his physical activity seem like unbro­ ken repose. The idle Jean-Jacques and the acfive Wolmar partake of the same divinity. The Death of Julie

In contrast to Wolmar, who succeeds in making himself a substitute for God, Julie embarks on a quest in search of God. La nouvelle Héloïse might “reasonably“ have ended on a note of earthly hap­ piness, but Rousseau chooses to add a second conclusion, religious in its tenor. The story does not end with the idyllic happiness of Clarens’s intimate society. Julie dies. Her death is far more than a pathetic incident tacked on, like a minor after a major cadence, for no other purpose than to plunge the belles âmes into mourning. Julie’s death, and her profession of faith, open up a new “ideological” dimension and indicate a radical departure from the ideal embodied in Clar­ ens, that of a balanced human society. All human order is called into question. A new aspect of transparency is revealed. To be sure, the tragic conclusion plunges us back into the at­ mosphere of passionate love that prevailed in the opening sections

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of the novel. Pässion is destructive. Saint-Preux often thought of suicide. The Tristan archetype (of which, according to Rougemont, La nouvelle Héloïse is a recasting in a bourgeois key)75 requires the lovers to face insurmountable obstacles, which they overcome only when they are at last united in the grave. True, Julie does not die of love but of having discharged her duty as a mother: Rousseau has transposed into the key of virtue an act that, according to the myth of passionate love, should have been motivated by the will to destruction inherent in passion itself. An element of ambivalence remains, however. Julie dies for virtue, but her death releases SaintPreux’s passionate regret: “She can’t be dead!”76 It is known that Rousseau at one point considered giving a tragic end to Julie and Saint-Preux’s outing on Lhe lake: a squall would have capsized their canoe, and their impossible love would have ended with the death of both lovers. But such a denouement would have diminished the scope of the souls’ dialectical progress; the novel would have ended with the triumph of passion in its most devastating form. Such a catastrophe would have left Rousseau where he started: affirming love as an absolute from which the only issue is death, with this night of ecstasy as ideal culmination. In order to preserve passion even as he transcends it, Rousseau resorts to sublimation. The lovers’ simultaneous death is already a negation of carnal passion. Then this negation must in turn be sublimated: amorous passion must be regenerated and redirected toward God. Denied in order to be saved, passion survives: Julie’s religious death is also death for love. Her last words to Saint-Preux are significant: “No, I am not leaving you, I am going 10 wait for you. The virtue that separated us on earth will unite us in the eternal abode.”77 In turning toward God Julie does not turn away from her lover. (The ideal of the virtuous triad is carried over into heaven; God replaces Wolmar in the role of the Spouse.) Some ambiguities remain. Are the antithetical terms, passion and virtue, really reconciled? Is passion really transcended? Does the synthesis really take place? And how solid, finally, is the harmony of nature and culture revealed to us in the “social” felicity of Clar­ ens? All these questions must be asked, and the difficulty of an­ swering them points up the danger of accepting unreservedly a “dialectical” interpretation of Rousseau’s thought such as the one sketched here. It was Kant who suggested the idea of looking for a synthesis of nature and culture like the one achieved at Clarens. Was it in fact part of Rousseau’s intention to distinguish opposites in order to reconcile them? He assures us that his novel was a

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reverie, and dialectical arguments are not the stuff that dreams are made of. It has been said that Rousseau’s style of thought is bipolar. It is also animated by a constant aspiration toward unity. The co­ existence of bipolarity with a desire for unity can begin a dialectical process and even carry it some distance. But internal contradictions cannot easily be reconciled with an aspiration for unity within a well-ordered intellectual “system.” Although Rousseau himself ad­ mits that he has a contradictory nature, he is a long way from being aware of all the contradictions in his character and thought. The will to unity is not served by a perfect conceptual clarity: it is a confused thrust of Rousseau’s whole being rather than an intellec­ tual method. Certainly there is in his work more implicit meaning than he is aware of. This is true of any writer, but especially of Rousseau. “It took Kant to think Rousseau's thoughts as Eric Weil has written (and I would add: it took Freud to “think” Rousseau’s feelings).78 The aspiration to unity remains forever unsatisfied: it indicates the direction of a desire and not a sure possession. It does not prevent Jean-Jacques from relapsing into his initial contradictions. The antitheses, it seems, are often obstinate. Achievement of a higher unity is a perpetually renewed utopia, the prospect of which makes conflict bearable. What we witness is not a dialectical process but a perpetual division: opposing forces locked in constant strug­ gle. Desire, giving in simultaneously to contradictory temptations, wants to answer the call of both night and day; it hopes to achieve both terrestrial order and the ecstasy that denies the existence of the terrestrial sphere. It wants to culminate in a mood of grief and glory. When Jean-Jacques gives in to the fascination of extremes, he seems more like a troubled soul racked by ambivalence than a thinker positing thesis and antithesis. La nouvelle Héloïse is an “ideological” novel. Happily for the work, however, the quest for a moral synthesis does not prevent constant slippage into passional ambivalence. It is highly significant that the success of Wolmar, the novel’s rational character, is threatened by psychological ambiguities that Rousseau constantly felt in himself and that are represented in the novel by Saint-Preux and Julie. Thus the enticement of failure counterbalances the aspiration to happiness, and desire for punishment coexists with the will to justification. The theme of the veil reappears. The intimate society at Clarens lives in happiness and mutual confidence. The hearts of its mem-

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bers would be perfectly transparent were it not for the persistence of one final secret, one final vestige of opacity. Julie’s heart is not all light; her radiant soul is tormenied by “secret sorrows”79 (and here, for once, Rousseau attaches a positive value to secrecy, which he sees as something both dangerous and precious): “A veil of wisdom and decency is wrapped in so many coils around her heart that no human eye can penetrate it, not even her own.”80 These words—though spoken by the omniscient Wolmar—indicate that total knowledge is reserved for God alone. In human relations there are inevitable and insuperable barriers, which protect a hidden part of our being, a part accessible only to God. This affirmation is preliminary to the affirmation of yet another kind of “immediate communication,” infinitely clearer and more direct than commu­ nication between human consciousnesses, namely, communication between the soul and God. Julie is a Christian. The cause of her “secret sorrow” is that Wolmar refuses to believe in God. In his presence she does not hide her faith, but she does try to dissimulate her sadness even if she cannot conceal it altogether: “No matter how much care his wife took to disguise her sadness, he sensed and shared it: such a clairvoyant eye is not to be deceived.”81 One dissimulation gives rise to another. Wolmar agrees to hide his atheism from the people. (Religion offers useful consolations to the common folk.) He abides by the outward requirements of religion, for example. “He comes to the temple . . . . He conforms to established custom . . . . He avoids scandal.” Thus “appearances” are “indeed saved.”82 The belle âme has become a hypocrite, how­ ever. What an affront to the principle of absolute candor, which is supposed to be in constant force! Husband and wife are enveloped in a melancholy aura: “The veil of sadness in which this clash of feeling has shrouded their marriage proves better than anything else Julie's invincible power.”** Simultaneous “union” (the marriage) and “separation” (the clash of feeling)! Julie's power is “invincible,” yet it gives rise to sadness and conflict. The veil symbolizes not that which separates Julie and Wolmar but that which enfolds their very union, like a fog blocking out the light. Jean-Jacques’s sense of ambivalence is apparent in his image of a world in which people feel simultaneously that they live in perfect unity and that they live apart: die marriage and the separation of minds, the union with God and the separation from God.

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Wolmar does not believe in God because he lacks “inward or emotional proof” of God’s existence.84Julie is in possession of such proof. What is more, she needs to live under the gaze of a tran­ scendent witness; in order to carry out her duty she needs to invoke a perpetual Judgment. For her, the presence of God is necessary. Yet that presence is elusive. The ultimate ambivalence is this: God is everywhere, yet he is hidden. “God himself has veiled his face.”85Julie possesses “inward proof” yet feels separated from God. Here Rousseau seems to combine two theological doctrines that are hard to reconcile: immanent rev­ elation within an individual human consciousness, whose “imme­ diate faculties” are all that is necessary to recognize the divine dictamen, and the theology of I)eus absconditus, which posits a tragic division between God and men, a division saved from being irrep­ arable only by Holy Scripture and the mediation of Christ. Julie wants a direct relationship with God. She does not succeed in this and admits her failure: “When I try to raise myself up to him, I no longer know where I am; unable to perceive any relation between him and me, I don’t know how to reach him, I no longer see or feel anything, and I am plunged into a kind of annihilation.”86 Immediate communication is unattainable. That leaves the pos­ sibility of a mediate relationship with God. Julie must consent to “the intermediation of the senses or the imagination.” But she does so with feelings of regret (according to her own words): “With regret I diminish the divine majesty; I interpose tangible objects between it and me. Unable to contemplate it in its essence, I at least contemplate it in its works, and I love it in its benefactions.”87 We must turn toward God’s creatures and love and contemplate him in his works. But Rousseau suggests that this alternative is only second best. Whatever is immediately apparent to the senses is in reality an obstruction (a veil) between God and ourselves. For the person who wishes to “raise himself up to his maker,” immediate sensation and sentiment cease to have the value of immediacy and become intervening intermediaries; the clarity of sense data sud­ denly turns opaque. Note that, for Julie, mediate contemplation of God involves not Christ or the Gospels but the world, that is, tangible objects and beings. This hidden God who can be loved in his works is not the God of Jansenism. He resembles much more closely the unknow­ able God of pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite and Saint Francis of Assisi, both of whom exhort the loving soul to engage in humble

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adoration of God’s creatures. God has drawn a veil over his face, but the world is a theophany. The theory of a mediate relationship to God, satisfactory as it may be to the mind, can be accepted only with regret, because Rousseau, who always requires immediacy for himself, finds it in­ adequately consoling. As we have seen repeatedly, any form of mediate communication makes Rousseau uncomfortable: he cannot rest until he has dispensed with all instruments and intermediaries. Although perfectly capable of conceptualizing the relation of means to ends, Rousseau cannot live in a world of means. Hence he is quick to put an end to Lhe situation in which Julie finds herself compelled to resort to the mediation of “tangible objects.” In death Julie blessedly achieves “immediate communication.” Delivered from that obstacle, the flesh, she witnesses die lifting of the veil that hitherto had hidden die face of God. In a dualism that is almost Manichaean in its radical disdnction between spirit and matter, death sweeps away all intervening obstructions and instrumental means: I see nothing absurd in the thought that a soul, freed o f the body that once inhabited the earth, can return there, wander about, even stay with what it held dear; not to alert us to its presence; it has no means to do that; not to act on us or to communicate its thoughts to us; it has no way to disturb the organs o f our brain; nor to watch what we do, either, because for that it would require senses; but to know what we think and what we feel, by way of an immediate communication, similar to that by which God reads our thoughts in this life, and by which, reciprocally, we shall read his in the other life, because we shall see him face to face.88

This is not the place to discuss the boldly spiritualist metaphysics contained in diis profession of faith. What is important is that it shows the triumph of immediacy in its most absolute form. The delivered soul enjoys the sight of God and in fact becomes divine, becomes like God by acquiring his ability to read hearts. Wolmar compared himself to God, and Julie in turn heralds her own apo­ theosis. For not only does she rejoin God the witness, whom she invoked constantly in life and by whom she expects to be justified in death, but she becomes, for those who survive her, a transcendent witness herself. “Let us live always under her eyes,” cries Claire.89 God has drawn a veil across his face, but Julie penetrates the veil that separates matter from spirit, life from death. More than that, in die final pages of the novel, even as Rousseau bestows upon the

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veil a metaphysical significance, he also gives it a physical reality. On Julie's face, disfigured by death, is placed a “golden veil em­ broidered with pearls," which Saint-Preux has brought back from India. Thus Julie’s death, which represents accession to transpar­ ency, also represents the triumph of the veil. In the book’s final cadence, two opposing themes, subject and countersubject, sol­ emnly reinforce and confirm each other. Previously the “veil" was only a metaphorical expression, in­ tended to symbolize separation and opacity. Now the veil takes on a material and concrete existence. It becomes a real object without losing its allegorical significance. With the exception of the two veiled statues, which occur in relatively minor works, this is the only passage in Rousseau’s writings in which the image of the veil is used in a sustained and deliberate manner, the only passage in which Rousseau eschews the usual semiabstract character of this figure of rhetoric. Here the veil ceases to be an episodic and fleeting metaphor and becomes a sustained allegory. The veil is separation and death. Given the importance that the image assumes here, we can safely conclude that even in passages where its use seems con­ ventional, its presence is never without significance; it is always rich in symbolic intention and value. The veil metaphor enters into reality. But it does so in stages: before becoming a concrete object, the veil is a dream vision. It appears to Saint-Preux in a premonitory dream in the most tra­ ditional “novelistic” style: I saw her, I recognized her, even though her face was covered by a veil. I cried out. I leapt to tear away the veil. I could not reach it. I stretched out my arm, I strained, but I touched nothing. "Calm down, my friend," she said to me in a feeble voice. “This awful veil covers me, and no hand can remove it.“90

Saint-Preux, on his way to Italy, returns to Clarens in a state of somnabulistic “lethargy." Standing outside the Elysium, he hears Claire and Julie conversing within. And he leaves without seeing Julie again. As Robert Osmont has pointed out,91 the veil symbol gives rise to a new symbol: the hedge that surrounds the secret garden is a “figure" of the veil. Thinking that I had only to penetrate a hedge and a few shrubs to see, full o f life and health, the women whom I had thought I would never see again, I renounced forever all my fears, my fright, my delusions and readily made up my mind to depart again, though I had not seen her.92

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Rousseau multiplies symbolic meanings: the veil, which will cover the dead woman’s face, stands for the separation of the two lovers (Saint-Preux having acquired it during his time of exile in far-off India). A deep analogy is established belween the estrangement made necessary by impossible love and the estrangement due to cleadi. And just as exile was the condition of a perfect spiritual union, so, too, does separation in Lhe wake of death hold out the promise of an absolute reunion. The obstruction must triumph in its realm so that, in another realm, the liberated spirit can finally enjoy the long desired ecstasy. Rousseau does everything he can to give the veil a supernatural character. Claire’s “imprecations,'' the wide-eyed expressions of the onlookers, the deliberate contrast be­ tween the precious substances of which the veil is made (gold and pearls) and the flesh of Julie’s face, which is already beginning uto decay1’93—all these tilings suggest, somewhat heavy-handedly, the presence of mystery, die horror and fascination of die sacred. Clarens’s earthly happiness has been interpreted here as a victory over the curse of the veil. But this happiness was fragile; the trans­ parency achieved remained imperfect. The preservation of hap­ piness required a virtuous tension, a constant resistance to Lhe always recurring vertigo of desire. Constant labor was necessary in order to achieve divine self-sufficiency. The “intimate society,” founded on freedom and immediacy, had to guard against the menace of time and destiny (less dian a republic but more than a family, such a society could not rely on either family traditions or legal institutions). And finally, the conflict between Julie’s faith and Wolmar’s unbelief left some doubt as to the nature of the trans­ parency achieved: Is benevolent communication between human consciousnesses enough? Or must a transcendent source of illu­ mination be invoked? Julie’s death destroyed all the social happiness that had grown up around her. Her friends survive her as individuals, but their intimate society does not survive. Julie achieves beatific ecstasy as an individual and alone discovers the joy of “immediate commu­ nication.” The ultimate unveiling is now that of a consciousness appearing alone before its Judge, whereas previously it had in­ volved a small group of people who had made up their minds to live together in a close community. In other words, Rousseau’s reverie began expansively with the notion of a “very intimate society” in which it might be possible to achieve unclouded friendship. Then came a solitary retreat, an

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individual quest for a transcendent witness capable of infusing the soul with knowledge of its justification, Rousseau imagines first the effusion of confidence, then the rupture with the world of men; the synthesis of reason, and the sublime catastrophe; first the action of virtuous striving, then the passivity of exemplary death; first the difficult forgiveness of the living (which must constantly be fought for and deserved), then the appearance before the Judge who does not condemn but “settles" the soul in its happiness, bestows upon it fullness of being, delivers it from the burden of decision and effort, and allows it to accept itself without guilt, because the gaze of the Judge can ensure that transparency will never again be lost. Thus we are presented with two images of the return to trans­ parency. Which to choose? Must we choose? Rousseau ends his novel in a manner that is tantamount to a choice. He prefers the absolute of personal salvation to the absolute of community. This is the meaning of Julie’s death. And in his autobiographical writings Rousseau chooses this same option for himself, as we shall see.

6 Misunderstandings

Bef ore becoming a writer Rousseau discovered both ihe power and the impotence of words. At Bossey with the Lamberciers, his pro­ testations of innocence are of no avail: “Appearances were against me.” At Turin with the Vercellis, where he steals a ribbon, he blames poor Marion, lies with “diabolical impudence“ and his honest judges are deceived: “Prejudice was in my favor.“1 Sometimes words can do nothing, sometimes they can do everything: they fail to dispel misleading “appearances,” yet they inspire “prejudices” capable of vanquishing truth. No words can convey the inner conviction of innocence, while fiction proves strangely believable. Language cannot be taken for granted, and Jean-Jacques is un­ comfortable whenever he must speak. He is no more master of his tongue than of his passions. What he says almost never corresponds to what he truly feels: words elude him, and he eludes his words. When he speaks to others, his speech is flat and makes him seem inferior, or else he takes off on a flight of eloquence that belies his true nature. His language is sometimes paralyzed by frightful weak­ ness, sometimes distorted by “involuntary” excess. At times we find Jean-Jacques stammering and embarrassed; at other times we find him full of assurance in company, crushing the “little witticisms” of others “as I might crush an insect between my fingers.”2 In any case, it is never the real Jean-Jacques who speaks; he is never him­ self. Inept or inspired, he is someone else, someone better or worse than he seems: So little master of my mind when I am alone, imagine what I must be like in conversation, where in order to say appropriate things one must Lhink, on the spot, of a thousand things all at once. The very idea o f a thousand rules o f propriety, at least one o f which I am sure to forget, is enough to intimidate me. I do not understand how anyone dares to speak in a circle. . . . In private conversation there is an even worse difficulty: the need to speak all the time. When someone speaks to you, you must 122

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answer, and if the conversation lags, you must pick it up again. . . . But what is even more fatal is dial instead of holding my tongue when I have nothing to say, I burn to speak in order to fulfill my obligation as quickly as possible. I blurt out words with­ out thinking, only too happy when they turn out to be completely meaningless.3

Jean-Jacques is clumsy in society. He lacks the necessary tone and aplomb. What bothers him is not his inability to communicate his thoughts or defend his ideas but the difficult time he has proving his mettle. In an eighteenth-century “circle” one defended one’s ideas only in order to def end one’s “quality” against adverse judg­ ment. Jean-Jacques stammers and feels ashamed: the fact that he says nothing means that he is nothing. He is nothing if he does not speak, and when he does speak it is in order to say nothing or, in other words, to annihilate himself, as though he opened his mouLh only to punish himself for speaking. The reason for Jean-Jacques’s discomfort with conversation is that his image is at stake, his self as it is seen by others. When he speaks he wants to be present in person, to be recognized for what he is worth. For to live in society, he thinks, is to expose himself to an implicit judgment, a judgment not of what he says but of what he is: any clumsy speech diminishes Jean-Jacques. Even in the most indifferent conversations the stakes are never indifferent: his rep­ utation is imperiled. Rousseau is afraid not that what he says will be misunderstood but that he himself will be. Inwardly he feels or senses his value, but he does not know how to make that value visible. Inner con­ viction of value is not enough for him. (Had it been enough, would he have become a writer?) His value will exist for him only when it is confirmed by the admiration of others. Of course he will never accept other peoples’ opinions of him. He will never accept the values on the basis of which they claim to judge him. He does not wish to share anything with them; rather, he claims to impose himself on his judges, to expose himself as an admirable and unique person. But when he stammers, he appears to be inept, and so he really is inept, both in his own and others’ eyes: “Anxious to overcome or hide my ineptitude, I rarely failed to show it.”4 Clumsy and embarrassed, he exhibits only a fraction of his character: his feelings assure him that he is better than he seems, but others have already judged him or misjudged him and robbed him of the right to become himself, to show the world another face. If only he is given the opportunity, he will show them

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quite another Jean-Jacques, quile another appearance. So he shuns the ‘"false judgments" of others, but in the hope of inventing a new language with which to conquer them and force them to recognize his exceptional nature and worth: “I would rather be forgotten by the human race than regarded as an ordinary man."5 Although he rejects the opinions of others, Rousseau cannot simply refuse to show himself in public and do without witnesses entirely, because he is nothing unless he is publicly recognized. He rebels against judgments that imprison him in conventional values or associate him with the clumsy ligure he cuts in public. Yet even as he challenges the validity of external judgments, he is deter­ mined to remain "in the public eye." Do not judge me, he says, but do not stop looking at me either. In fact, Rousseau both wants and fears to be misunderstood. He does not want to be understood, inasmuch as being understood [compris] means being caught [/>râ], that is, finding a ready-made place in the system of “inauthentic" values by which the world is governed. He does not want to be reduced to a mere “man of letters," as that phrase was commonly understood. Jean-Jacques’s sense of himself is that he is absolutely unique. While hoping that others will recognize his uniqueness, he refuses to be recognized as one of them. He wants to stand out: “When people notice me, it does not bother me if they do so in such a way as to set me somewhat apart from o th ers,ev en at the risk of causing a scandal. For it is better to cause a scandal than to be a person of no account. Failure is not to be misunderstood but to be unknown; it is to speak out only to make a fool of oneself, to shout into the void, to be greeted by general indifference. Jean-Jacques repeatedly tastes bit­ ter disappointment when he goes unnoticed, when he sings in his most beautiful voice beneath windows that never open. Recall, for instance, his trip to Annecy, as an adolescent, at the beginning of book 2 of the Confessions: “Whenever I saw a castle I hastened to seek the adventure that I was sure awaited me within. I did not dare enter or knock, because I was very timid. But I chose the most imposing window to sing beneath, and was quite surprised, after singing my lungs out for quite some time, when no lady or dem­ oiselle was drawn by the beauty of my voice or die salt of my songs."7 In the presence of others Jean-Jacques is misunderstood. He is unable to appear as his feelings assure him he really is: “Though not a fool, I often passed for one, even with people quite capable of judging. What is worse, my face and eyes promise a great deal,

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and frustrated expectations make my stupidity more shocking to others.”8 How can he dispel die misunderstanding that prevents him from showing his true worth? How can he avoid the risks of improvised speech? What other mode of communication can he try? In what other way can he show himself? Jean-Jacques chooses to be absent and to write. Paradoxically, he will hide in order to make himself more visible and trust to the written word: I would love society as much as any other man, were I not sure o f showing myself there not only to my disadvantage but quite other than I really am. My decision to write and to hide myself was perfectly suited to me. With me present, 110 one would ever have known what I was worth.9

This confession is striking and deserves emphasis: Jean-Jacques breaks with society but only in order to present himself through the written word. He will polish his phrases at leisure, protected by solitude. He will interpret his absence in the strongest possible terms: truth is absent from this society; I, too, am absent; therefore 1 am the absent truth. In setting my private values against the values of society, 1 am invoking the universal authority of nature, which people in society fail to recognize. To people who live in spiritual confusion, the truth is scandalous and seductive: I shall be scandal and seduction. In order to prove his mettle, Jean-Jacques forsakes society and begins to write books and music. He entrusts his being (his per­ sonality) to a different kind of appearance: not die appearance of his face, his body, or his concrete words, but the pathetic message of one who is absent. He thus composes an image of himself , which he intends to impose on others through the prestige of absence and the resonance of the written word. A passionate dreamer, JeanJacques knows from his own experience that nothing is more fas­ cinating than a presence that imposes itself in and through absence. “Apart from the Being that exists by himself, nothing is beaudful except what does not exist."10 In deciding “to write and to hide himself," Jean-Jacques is seeking to transform himself so thaL he will seem to others to possess the beauty of “what does not exist." To write and to hide. It is surprising that Rousseau attaches equal importance to these two acts. Neither is acceptable without the other. To hide without writing would be to disappear. To write without hiding would be to give up the idea that he is different

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from other people. Jean-Jacques can express himself only by writ­ ing and hiding. The expressive intention is conveyed by both acts together: by the decision to write and the desire to be alone. By breaking with society Rousseau is declaring to others that his soul is not made for common pleasures. The act of separation is as eloquent as the text itself (which is why we are obliged to pay attention to Rousseau’s biography as well as his thought). The act of writing is intended to achieve a result that cannot be written, a goal that is outside literature. Rousseau’s readers are mistaken when they engage with him in a debate of ideas. Some great principles aside, his critics miss the point when they discuss his qualities as a writer. The goal is to be recognized as a “noble soul,” to win a welcome that society was unwilling to accord when he presented himself in person. Rousseau almost says that he would have been willing to forgo writing and even speaking had that welcome been accorded him at once. The Return

Jean-Jacques hides, and writes, but only in order to lay the ground­ work for a return, which will compensate for the disappointment he felt in not being welcomed at once. He breaks with society only in the hope of making a triumphal return. He takes the “detour of words” only so that he can eventually return to society and ask to be recognized for what he is really worth. In fact, Rousseau’s desire to return to society in triumph is not merely the basis of his vocation as a writer. It is also a theme in his work and governs his behavior in many different circumstances. Indeed, it is what I might call a behavioral archetype, a constant element in Rousseau’s life and imagination: after failing to obtain a spontaneous welcome, Jean-Jacques pushes the misunderstand­ ing to the breaking point. But he does so only in order to overcome the break and make an emotional return to society, forgiving and asking forgiveness of those whom he has rejected. It would be possible to extend the previous analysis of La nouvelle Héloïse in this sense: Saint-Preux is a welcome stranger, even before the action has begun. An imagined welcome is therefore the book’s funda­ mental presupposition. The development of the novel involves a series of breaks and returns. Quarrels are patched up. Misunder­ standings and unjustified suspicions are dispelled (see, in particular, the episode of the quarrel and duel between Edouard and SaintPreux). Long journeys accomplish the sacrifice of passion but make

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the moment of return all the more devastating. Every step toward greater transparency presupposes a momentary darkening of the horizon followed by a dazzling return of the light. For Julie» to die is to return to the source of her being. As if to underscore the mystical symbol, Rousseau makes the death of his heroine coincide with the repentant return of the servant Fanchon’s husband.11 The fifth book of Emile shows us a series of episodes: a welcome, separations, returns. The sequel to Emile (Solitaires) makes the sep­ aration even more tragic, the return even more moving. Emile’s first meeting with Sophie is significant: lost in the country and caught in a downpour, Emile and his tutor ask for hospitality in a strange house. They are warmly welcomed by a model family. Here the dream of welcome takes its most naive, most adolescent form: hospitality is offered in a warm shelter where the travelers are able to rest and share in a simple but tasty meal, and where the boy’s eyes meet the glance of the virgin awaiting her Telemachus. Hap­ piness exists in this rural retreat, which holds out the promise of a long life—frugal yet fulfilling, quiet yet impassioned. A new stage of life begins: Emile awakens to love. From this retreat two (or sometimes three) people venture out on walks. Soon there are brief quarrels, which provide the pretext for “sweet reconciliations.” Then comes a more serious separation: Emile’s tutor wants him to know the world and the political institutions of various nations. They will travel, but Sophie must stay in the country. The lovers part in tears. (The tutor secretly experiences pleasure at the tears he causes to flow: his sadism is apparent before the fifth book.) Eventually the separation comes to an end, and we witness the “joy” of a return. The golden age “seems to have dawned again in the neighborhood of Sophie’s house.”12To return is truly to come back to the source. The young people marry, but is their happiness to last? No. When Jean-Jacques comes to imagine their married life, he envisions fur­ ther separations and returns. After settling in Paris, Emile and Sophie experience the corrupting influence of the big city. They become strangers to one another. “We were no longer one.”13 So­ phie is unfaithful. Emile leaves. He dies to his past; he drinks “the water of oblivion.”14 In solitude he will experience a rebirth—yet another return, but this time a return to himself. Kist, future, other people no longer exist: I tried to put myself entirely in the condition of a man who is just beginning to live. I told myself that in fact we never do anything but begin, and that there is no continuity in our existence

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beyond a sequence o f present moments, the first of which is always the one we are living now.15

The return to oneself is nothing, however, unless it is completed by reconciliation of the separated souls. Emile will go back to Sophie and tell her that her sin was not her fault: an unexpected encounter and a recognition will take place in the paradisiacal climate of a desert island. The novel is unfinished, but from the outset it heralds the rapture of return: “Of what unique stamp must a soul be made in order to come back so far to what it was before !”lfi We are immediately reassured: even this long trial will have a tender conclusion. In life, too, there is a problem with welcomes: how can Rousseau accept the hospitality of a generous host without forfeiting his freedom? How can he be welcomed as an equal? To be pure, a welcome must establish no material bond and no obligation of gratitude. It must signify the immediate union of two souls aware of their superiority and their similarity. Should Jean-Jacques accept the invitation of the Maréchal de Luxembourg? He is not sure. Will he be able to live in his friend’s immediate presence? Or will he have to put up with all too many intermediaries? This plan was certainly one o f those that I thought over for the longest time and with the greatest indulgence. But in the end, and in spite of myself, I had to conclude that it was not good. I had thought only o f the bond between two individuals, without thinking o f the intermediaries who would have kept us apart.17

Once, though, die dream of welcome does come true. Mme de Warens, that welcoming—all too welcoming—hostess, happens to live on Jean-Jacques’s route. All it takes is a glance, a letter of introduction. She smiles, recognizes Rousseau, and takes him in: It was Rdm Sunday in the year 1728. I ran after hcr, I sawr her, 1 caughL up with her, I spoke to her. . . . 1 ought to remember the place, for often since I have moistened it with my tears and smothered it with my kisses. Would that I could surround that happy spot with a golden baluster! Would that I could attract to it the homages of all the world! Anyone who likes Lo honor mon­ uments to man’s salvation should approach only on his knees. It was a path behind her house, between a brook on the right that separated the house from the garden, and the wall of the courtyard on the left, leading through a private door to the Fran­ ciscan church. Mme de Warens was preparing to enter that gale when she turned at the sound o f my voice. How the sight of her

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affected me! I had imagined an elderly and disagreeable religious fanatic. . . . I saw instead a face full o f grace, beautiful gentle blue eyes, a dazzling complexion, and the charming outline of her bosom. Nothing escaped the young proselyte’s quick glance, for I became hers on the spot, certain that a religion preached by such a missionary could not fail to lead to heaven. Smiling, she took the letter I offered her with a trembling hand, opened it, glanced at M. de Pontverre’s letter, returned to mine which she read in full and would have reread had her servant not told her that it was time to go in. “Oh, my child,” she said in a tone that gave me a start, “you’re very young to be traveling about the country. It’s really a shame.” Then, without waiting for me to answer, she added: “Go wait at my house. Tell them to serve you lunch. After mass I shall come and chat with you.”18

As reconstructed in Jean-Jacques’s memory, the scene includes virtually none of his own words. He has expressed himself in his letter and hence is freed from the need to worry about his language; the stage is set for the exchange of glances. “The sympathy of souls,” which precedes all explanation, manifests itself at a “glance” in the “first interview.”19 Mme de Warens does not even wait for JeanJacques’s answer: does an answer require speech? His true answer is in his startled reaction to Mme de Warens’s tone of voice—“the silvered voice of youth.” He has roamed far afield, but the wrench of parting is compen­ sated by a miraculous return: How my heart beat as I approached Mme de Warens’s house! My legs trembled under me, a veil fell over my eyes, I saw nothing, heard nothing, and would not have recognized anyone. I was obliged to stop several times to breathe and recover my senses: . . . No sooner did I appear before Mme de Warens than her look reassured me. I started at the first sound o f her voice, I threw myself at her feet, and in the most sublime rapture I fastened my mouth to her hand.20

The veil is immediately lifted as Jean-Jacques begins a period in his life marked by the return of transparency. He brings to Mme de Warens a heart “open to her as to God.”21 He rediscovers the happiness that he had lost at Bossey: to live in the presence of a divine (or divinized) person and to be oneself “unmixed and un­ impeded,”22 and unconcerned about means: “I abandoned myself to the sweet sentiment of well-being, which in her presence I felt all the more readily because it was unmixed with worries about the means to sustain it.”23

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In the unfinished text of the Tenth Walk, it is significant that Jean-Jacques remembers the happiness of that first return (fifty years after the event): “She had sent me away. Everything called me back to her, I had to return. This return decided my fate."24 Yet Jean-Jacques is still obsessed by his “desire to come and go,” and other returns will prove more disappointing. After a trip to Lyons, on which he accompanies and abandons poor M. Le Maître, Jean-Jacques—who had departed quite happily—is obsessed by the thought of the return: Nothing flattered me, nothing tempted me, and my only desire was to return to mama. . . . I did return as soon as I could. So speedy was my return and so distracted were my thoughts that though I remember all my other journeys with so much pleasure I haven’t the least recollection o f this one. I don’t recall a single thing. . . . I came and found her gone. Imagine my surprise and grief!25

But the last return! After a long spell of hypochondriacal con­ sumption, after the short affair with Mme de Larnage, after Mont­ pellier, Jean-Jacques returns to Les Charmettes full of virtuous enthusiasm. He has made his resolutions. From now on, he thinks, he can master his impulsive desires to leave, to take flight. He is a new man. Once again the idea of the return is linked to the idea of rebirth: Jean-Jacques comes to be reborn with his “mama”: “Once I had made up my mind, I became another man, or, rather, I became the man I had been before.” Jean-Jacques returns to him­ self, to mama, and to the “good.” But alas, this time there is no celebration of his return: I wanted to savor in all its charm the pleasure o f seeing her again. I preferred to delay a bit in order to add to this the pleasure of being expected. This precaution had always worked for me. My arrival had always been marked by a small celebration. I expected no less this time, and it was well worth the trouble to prepare the eager expectation that meant so much to me.26

But his place had been taken by the servant wigmaker Vintzenried. Instead of a dazzling return, the world turns dark. And, in a passage that exactly parallels the one in which he describes how the landscape at Bossey turns dark and empty, Jean-Jacques now bids farewell to the happiness of his youth, as before he bade farewell to the happiness of his childhood:

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The reader should know my heart by now, its steadiest and truest feelings, especially those that brought me back to her at that mo­ ment. What a sudden and total upheaval in all my being! Pul yourself in my place and judge. In an instant I saw the whole happy future that I had painted for myself snatched away. All the lovely ideas that I had turned over so affectionately in my mind disappeared; and I, who from childhood could not imagine my existence without hers, saw myself alone for the first time. That moment was frightful; those that followed it were somber. I was still young, but that sweet sentiment o f pleasure and hope that animates youth left me forever. From then on the sensitive being was half dead. Ahead o f me I saw only the sad remains o f an insipid life, and if at times an image o f happiness touched my desires, that happiness was no longer truly my own; I felt that even if I obtained it, I would not be truly happy.27

A felicitous return had fixed his destiny; now a failed return deprives him of happiness forever. (Throughout the Confessions Rousseau exhibits a tendency to ascribe to certain events a fatal significance: they indicate the beginning of a period of misfortune, as though a catastrophic spell has been cast over him. Again and again he uses the formula, ‘And then began . . .” Each time this solemn incantation marks the beginning of a new reign of woe; in the meantime, apparently, he has forgotten about the previous curse.) Of course the desire for return assumes such importance in Jean-Jacques’s relations with Mme de Warens only because he also feels such an intense need for estrangement and separation. Too much intimacy frightens Rousseau. He wants a presence that is also a partial absence. He wants separation in order to experience the joy of reunion. The longer the separation, the sweeter the reconciliation. After he is replaced by Vintzenried, Jean-Jacques makes another attempt to come home, his heart full of forgiveness and love and, above all, of self-reproach: A hundred times I was sorely tempted to leave at once, on foot, in order to return to her side. Provided I could see her one more time, I would have been content to die at that very instant. At last I could no longer resist memories so tender, which called me back to her whatever the price. I told myself that I had not been sufficiently patient, indulgent, or affectionate, and that I could again be happy in a very tender friendship if I put more of myself into it than I had done. I conceived the noblest plans and burned to carry them out. I abandoned and renounced everything. I set

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out, I made haste, I arrived as enraptured as in my early youth, and I found myself once more at her feet. Ah, I would have died for joy had I found in her welcome, her caresses, and her heart one-quarter o f what I found there previously and brought there still. How frightful are the illusions of human life! She still received me with the great heart that would live as long as she lived; but I came in search o f the past, which no longer existed and could never be reborn. After a scant half-hour with her I felt that my former happiness was gone forever.28

Rousseau again meets with failure when he tries to return to Geneva. He had hoped to find there the same welcome that greeted him each time he returned to “mama”: the warmth of a “small celebration.” Things are not too bad at first, but Rousseau soon discovers once again that his “place has been taken.” Just as the wigmaker Vintzenried had replaced him in the bed of Mme de Warens, so had “that Punchinello Voltaire” settled in Geneva. Some­ one else had robbed him of his celebration. The very word figures in his complaint: “If J.-J. had not come from Geneva, Voltaire would have been less celebrated there.”29 He says as much to Voltaire’s face: “I do not like you, sir. You have hurt me most grievously, me, your disciple and enthusiast. You have lost Geneva for me in compen­ sation for the asylum you received there. You have alienated my fellow citizens in compensation for the applause I won you. You make it impossible for me to stay in my own country; you force me to die in a strange land, deprived of all the consolations of the dying, and for all honor cast into a dung heap.”30 Return or death! But in the absence of return and in place of death, there is liter­ ature. Exile is favorable to writing. “I decided to write and to hide.” The Letter to d'Alembert and the Letters from the Mountain represent Rousseau’s returns (now tender, now fulminating) to his native city. Jean-Jacques even convinces himself that distance is necessary for effective political action: “If one wants to dedicate one’s books to the true good of one’s country, one must not write them within its borders.”31 With Jean-Jacques and his friends, the story is the same: as soon as there is the slightest misunderstanding, he withdraws and runs away. Even worse, he does his best to aggravate the misunderstand­ ing. He multiplies grievances, reproaches, and suspicions in long, bitter letters to the guilty friend. Jean-Jacques wants to know that he is loved, and he Lries to make certain that he is by claiming to

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know that he isn't, thereby forcing the accused friend to bare his heart in an effusive attempt at reconciliation. No! he says. You don’t love me, you don’t understand me, you’ve become a stranger to me. And then he waits impatiently for reassurance, hoping that he will be scolded, even punished, for his doubts. Jean-Jacques is willing to beg forgiveness. He is capable of experiencing joy in humiliation, joy akin to the pleasure he felt in being spanked by Mile Lambercier. “To be on my knees before an imperious mistress, to obey her orders, to have to beg her forgiveness—all these were the sweetest of pleasures for me.”32 Jean-Jacques expressly asks Mme d’Epinay to treat him this way: You are too easy on me and treat me too gently. Frequently I need something more than that; a scolding pleases me greatly when I deserve it. I am capable of viewing it as a sort of coaxing of friendship.

He then describes the ideal relationship of his dreams, in which caresses and punishments are confounded: This is what I want my friend to do. . . . I want him to caress me nicely and kiss me: do you understand, Madame? In short, let him begin by soothing me, which surely won’t take* too long, for there was never a fire in my heart that a tear could not extinguish. Then, when I am quiet, calm, ashamed, and confused, let him rebuke me well, let him state my wrong, and surely he will be content with me.33

Behavior of this kind abounds in Rousseau’s correspondence. Quite often the maneuver is successful; Jean-Jacques receives the confirmation he wanted. He is loved and esteemed; he has not been forgotten; his accusations are unfounded. When the Maréchal de Luxembourg dies, for example, Rousseau writes his widow a strangely egocentric letter of condolence, in which he takes pity on himself: “Following your example, he forgot me. AlasI What had I done? What was my crime, unless it was to have loved both of you too much, and thus prepared the sorrows that consume me now?”34 The unjust reproach elicits a reassuring response: “He loved you, I repeat. Yes, he loved you with all his heart, and I assure you that your being away from Päris was one of the things that pained and grieved him the most.”35 These were the very words Rousseau wanted to hear, the confirmation he needed. A compassionate hap­ piness overcomes him and transforms mourning into narcissistic satisfaction:

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What a frightful state 1 was in, and what relief your letter brought me! Yes, Madame la Maréchale, the certainty of having been loved by M. le Maréchal does not console me for his loss but relieves the bitterness, and causes my despair to give way to sweet and precious tears.36

The keener the grief, the more clearly Rousseau looks forward to the delight of reconciliation. Of Diderot, for example, he says: “A word, a single word of kindness, made me drop my pen and brought tears to my eyes, and I was at my friend’s feet."*7 And his great letter to Hume culminates in a moving scene: Hume comes to Rousseau with proof of his innocence, delivering his friend from “this unfortunate doubt." If only he could have begged Hume for mercy, Jean-Jacques would have been supremely happy: I am the most miserable of men if you are guilty, and the vilest if you are innocent. You make me wish dial I were worthy of contempt. Yes, were I to prostrate myself at your feet shouting mercy and doing everything in my power to obtain it, proclaiming my unworihiness for all to hear and paying homage to your glo­ rious virtues, my heart would burst with joy after this state o f suffocation and death into which you have plunged me.38

In fact, Rousseau had already played this great scene, but he had played it alone; Hume, who did tiot understand, gave not the slight­ est response, not the least sign of sensibility. What a strange scene, in which Rousseau starts with fright upon meeting his host’s gaze and then, before uttering a single word, throws himself into the arms of the “good David" (who has no idea what is going on): Soon a violent remorse overtook me; I become angry with myself; finally, in a transport that I still recall with pleasure, I threw my arms around him and pulled him close; suffocating with sobs, inundated with tears, I cried out in a halting voice: No, no, David Hume is not a traitor! If he were not the best of men, he would have to be the blackest!39

This scene reproduces, in nearly exact detail, the one in which Saint-Preux begs forgiveness of Lord Edward. Rousseau behaves according to a fictional model of his own invention: “I flung myself at his feet, my heart full of admiration, regret, and shame; I hugged his knees with all my strength, unable to utter a single word.”10 In vain Rousseau repeats this demonstrative outburst: at best this will be a sham return, an imperfect reconciliation, in which friendship is restored only for a brief moment, after which the veil of mis-

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understanding intervenes once again. Rousseau’s anxious attempts to assure himself that he is loved produce the contrary result. He aggravates the separation in the hope of bringing about a sudden reversal, in which distance will collapse and perfect trust reign anew. He pushes the break to the limits of the tolerable in order to pro­ voke a deliciously humiliating catastrophe, wherein an imagined enemy becomes a friend regained. He flees in grief to the ends of the world, into the blackest depths of night, so that he might glimpse the sudden renewal of the light that signals the restorative presence of the estranged friend. But his hopes are disappointed. He must make do with the sustenance of the imagination. (The action that unfolds between the first and third Dialogues is the story of a return. The Frenchman recognizes Jean-Jacques’s innocence, and his re­ turn prefigures the later return of all who still fail to do so: “Every­ thing possible was done to prevent and impede that return: but try as one will, the natural order reasserts itself sooner or later.”41 Indeed, the point is precisely that Jean-Jacques is reduced to re­ hearsing this argument at length; he is pleased to maintain a pleas­ ant make-believe. Rousseau is capable of such suddeu reversals and dazzling re­ turns. But what about others? Are their homecomings sincere? Do they come home for long? Or do they need to be constantly prod­ ded? Must Jean-Jacques go away repeatedly in order to remind them how much they miss him? For they are so quick to turn away, to look elsewhere and thus disappoint Jean-Jacques’s absolute de­ mands: “I become especially angry when Lhe first person to happen along compensates them for my loss.”12 Other people always mis­ interpret him: they see a man cut off from others by suspicion, a misanthrope overwhelmed by bitterness; they do not see (at least not always) the extortion of a man who wants to be “certain of being loved.” No misunderstanding ever disappears. Obstacles, sus­ picions, cruel words accumulate. The break remains. Greater dis­ tance, having failed to overcome the initial estrangement, makes the break irreparable. Other people become wary of Rousseau the madman. He becomes locked in permanent separation and solitude and, freed of worries about the future, even discovers a sort of calm. His fate is “fixed without return.” He renounces “the error of counting on a return of the public, even in another age.”43 In Rousseau’s work there is no shortage of examples in which the theme of return is explicitly linked to the myth of transparency. To part is to enter the night, the world of opacity. But the joy of return miraculously establishes a new transparency. Consider, for

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example, in the second book of Emile, the episode in which the child breaks the windows of his bedroom. Päy attention, in partic­ ular, to the symbolic value of glass and the equally symbolic signif­ icance of punishment by darkness. Rousseau dearly shares the punished child’s experience, perhaps to the point of identifying with him, so that he may also share the joy of returning to the light: He breaks the windows o f his room: let the wind blow on him night and day. . . . Eventually you have the windows repaired, still saying nothing; he breaks them again. Change your method. . . . Shut him up in a dark, windowless room. To this new tactic he responds at first by crying, throwing a tantrum. No one pays any attention. Soon he tires and changes his tone. He wails and moans. A servant comes, and the rebel child begs to be set free. Without looking for an excuse for doing nothing, the servant responds: “I also have windows to take care of,” and departs. Finally, after several hours have passed, long enough for the child to grow bored and remember what he has done, someone will suggest to him that he propose a bargain with you, in which you will let him go free in exchange for his promise not to break any more win­ dows. He will want nothing more. He will ask you to come see him. You will go. He will make his proposition, and you will accept it immediately, saying: “That’s an excellent idea. We both gain. Why didn’t you think of it sooner?” And then, without waiting for him to protest or confirm his promise, you will kiss him happily and at once take him back to his room.44

Here we have a pedagogical variant of the theme of return, which omits neither the sadism of estrangement nor the embrace of rec­ onciliation. The sequence of events repeats, in an astonishingly faithful manner, the same psychodynamic pattern, the same threepart dialectic: misunderstanding, deliberate separation, healing embrace. “Unable to Utter a Single Word”

The joy of the return is intense but silent. Words fail. Saint-Preux, “unable to utter a single word,”45 throws himself at the feet of Lord Edward. Jean-Jacques hopes for a sign (“a word, a single word of kindness”) that will make the pen fall from his hands. In all the scenes just cited, the essential message is conveyed without conventional language. When Rousseau is received by Mme de Warens, every­ thing is decided “from the first word, the first glance,” prior to any verbal explanation. Jean-Jacques does not speak to Hume until

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after he has impulsively thrown his arms around him. The ideal welcome, the ideal return, is either prior to language or beyond it: either nothing has yet been said, or everything has been said and nothing is left but to embrace the friend to whom one has returned. Jean-Jacques decides to write and to hide. But he writes only in anticipation of the miraculous moment when words will cease to be necessary, and he hides only in the hope that there will come a time when he will have only to show himself in order to be rec­ ognized. In Rousseau’s mind “the detour of words” is in fact a circular route, ending in a moment that resembles the primordial one before any words were uttered. Ideally the return ends all misunderstandings; it even erases the “explanations” that have ac­ cumulated on the written page. It is a rebirth, a “regeneration,” a new beginning, a reawakening. Under Rousseau’s pen, language denied the world of others: I am not like you, I do not recognize your values. But the moment of return denies this negative lan­ guage. The writer’s absence, his exile in literature, is converted into a mute presence; Jean-Jacques offers himself as he really is, that is, as he has constructed himself through his absence and in lit­ erature. Words are abolished, leaving behind, in a pure state, what language was intended to prove, namely, Jean-Jacques’s innocence, truthfulness, and uniqueness. Through discourse he has achieved self-fashioning in such a way that he can be recognized outside of discourse, in a “transport” in which feeling is fully sufficient unto itself. The humble posture, the embrace, the sobs tell the whole story without the aid of words. Not that words never play a part. But they are always superfluous, never needed to translate into clear language what first appeared outside language. Everything is said through emotion itself, of which words are never more than an uncertain echo. That is why Rousseau’s language, in describing such moments, is so unhinged: exclamatory, syntactically disorgan­ ized, uncoordinated. His words no longer need to be organized as discourse because they no longer play the role of intermediary; language has ceased to be an indispensable means of communica­ tion. Recall the “disorienting rapture” of the Third Letter to Malesherbes, in which Rousseau can only cry out: “O Great Being!” Remember, too, the prayer of the poor old woman who can only say: "Oh!”*»« We witness an emotional hurricane: starts, cries, trembling, suf­ focation, palpitations, and so on. Such physiological phenomena, which Rousseau ordinarily experiences as obstacles to satisfactory

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communication, he now accepts; he abandons himself to them as to an ideal mode of expression. In his “ordinary state,” emotional disorder is an impediment; it paralyzes Rousseau and inhibits his thought. “Feeling quicker than lightning filled my soul, but rather than enlighten it scorched and blinded me. I feel everything and see nothing. I am enthusiastic, but stupid.”47 In the ideal return, however, the physical effects of emotion are sufficiently meaningful in themselves and literally overwhelm the meaning of words. Hav­ ing become a writer in order to compensate for an emotional nature that makes him seem stupid, Jean-Jacques is constantly creating situations in which expressive emotion eliminates the need to write or speak; in such situations he is reconciled wiLh his body and can present himself in person. In these extraordinary moments immediate feeling is immedi­ ately expression. To be moved and to display emotion are one and the same. There is no further need to alienate feeling in words that betray it. Everything remains at the bodily level, but the body has ceased to be an obstacle; it is no longer an intervening opaque object. Through its movement, its surprise, and its pleasure it be­ comes meaning through and through. The storm of emotion is simultaneously passion and action; what occurs is a kind of expan­ sion, an overflowing of emotion. The world opens up to receive me; I cause hearts to open. As long as recourse to words remained inevitable, the world remained narrow. Now that language is one with the body and its emotion, the “heart” finds all the room it needs. Unity again becomes possible. Words may have laid the groundwork for reconciliation, but the reconciliation itself is silent. In contrast to the harmful form of emotion, which clouded the world and impeded communication, what we have here is a magical form of emotion, which liberates space. This magic (as Sartre has shown in his Esquisse cTune théorie des émotions) is a way of experi­ encing the world through the body, which is the “immediate, ex­ periential form of consciousness.”4” Emotion, therefore, is not merely the most immediate form of self-expression but also the most im­ mediate form of action upon the external world: it transforms the world without going outside the body and without employing in­ strumental means. A desire to revert to a form of expression more primitive than the discursive use of language, coupled with a return to the body: psychologists would use such words as narcissism, conversion hys­ teria, or regression. And they would also call attention to the role played by illness in Jean-Jacques’s expressive system. It is impossible

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to say whether his bladder ailmeiiL was organic or functional (or, as we would now say, psychosomatic); in retrospect one hypothesis is as good as another. What is certain is that Rousseau invested his illness with immediate significance. For Jean-Jacques disease always has an expressive function. It is not simply the occasion or pretext for certain feelings but manifests itself as a feeling: it is refusal, reproach, self-punishment, estrangement. In a more or less con­ fused manner it always says something. When Jean-Jacques leaves Mme de Warens and goes to Montpellier for treatment of what he believes to be a “polyp on the heart,” he is no doubt punishing himself (as René Laforgue assumes)** for having claimed the right to inherit the clothing of Claude Anet, who played the role of the father in the ménage à trois. What is clear in this case, however, is that the conflict, rather than externalize itself by “means” of lan­ guage, is expressed at a visceral level. The indispositions that JeanJacques recounts are somatic manifestations of desires and wishes that cannot or will not take the form of concrete action or explicit thought. Problems that the mind refuses to fully objectify are “con­ verted” into organic problems and “speak” through morbid symp­ toms. The meaning of the situation remains inherent in the body and takes the form of passive suffering. By taking refuge in illness, Jean-Jacques regresses to an immediate mode of expression. Has anyone noticed, however, that from the time of the Confessions Rous­ seau’s correspondence contains fewer complaints about his health? What is more, disease is less frequently used as an emotional ar­ gument. Perhaps the very act of confession had a liberating effect. And perhaps the obsession with persecution absorbed all the hy­ pochondriacal impulses that had previously been directed against Rousseau's own body. The Power of Signs

Julie has just been ill with smallpox. In her delirium, she thought she saw Saint-Preux in a dream (in reality he was present at her bedside). She proposes a hypothesis, which is also a wish: “Might it not be possible for two souls so closely joined to experience an immediate communication^ independent of the body and the senses?”5* Shortly before her death, Julie again formulates the same desire for immediate communication, “similar to that by which God reads our thoughts in this life, and by which we shall, reciprocally, read his thoughts in the next.” To communicate without the agency of the body or the sensible world is a privilege that initially belongs

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to God alone. Any soul that somehow acquired the ability to engage in immediate communication would become divine or godlike. Such ability is forbidden fruit, which Rousseau desires even though he knows perfectly well that man is not allowed to touch it. The person who shuns the means of action and human discourse and who as­ pires to immediate knowledge and “immediate pleasures” is rather like Lucifer, proud of giving off the same light as God. Rousseau had learned from Saint Augustine and Malebranche that “man is not his own light unto himself.”51 We must resist the temptation to think of ourselves as a source of light, when what light we have in us is derivative, refracted, and attenuated. Only God has intuitive knowledge of the universal. Man’s realm is not that of immediate intuition but that of discourse, language, sequence, and the con­ catenation of means. That is our infirmity, and as a result our knowledge is always incomplete, communication of our thoughts is always precarious and distorted, and our feelings remain at bot­ tom incomprehensible even Lo those who think they share them. Man is in exile in the world of means. That is the way things are, and it is idle to wish they were different. In order to chasten his own desire for immediate communication, Rousseau repeats the teachings of the theologians, for whom God’s creatures are infi­ nitely far removed from their creator: God is intelligent, but in what way? Man is intelligent when he reasons, and the supreme intelligence has no need to reason. For it there exist neither premises nor consequences; there is not even any such thing as a proposition. It is purely intuitive. It sees all that is and all that can be in the same way. For it, all truths are but one idea, all places a single pointy and all times a single mo­ ment. Human power acts through means; divine power acts by itself.52

Between human beings, immediate communication is impossible, hence we must resort to gestures and perceptible signs. In other words, men need a conventional language, because thought cannot be communicated immediately. “Instituted signs” are what we must use for want of anything better. We must speak; we must write; we must employ the senses of sight and hearing. This theory of lan­ guage was common to many of Rousseau’s contemporaries, who took it from Locke. Indeed, in the last chapter of An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke says: Man, though he have great variety of thoughts and such from which others as well as himself might receive profit and delight;

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yet they are all within his own breast, invisible and hidden from others, nor can o f themselves be made to appear. The comfort and advantage o f society not being to be had without commu­ nication o f thoughts, it was necessary that man should find out some external sensible signs, whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others. For this purpose nothing was so lit, either for plenty or quickness, as those articulate sounds, which with so much ease and variety he found himself able to make.-"

For Locke, the idea itself is the sign of the “thing considered,’' so that the word, or sign of the idea, is the sign of a sign. There is a series of external relations. For Rousseau, who pursues this same line of argument, speech is Lhe analytic sign of thought, and writing is in turn the analytic sign of speech. Ultimately we again come up against the sign of a sign: Analysis o f thought is done by speech, and analysis of speech by writing; speech represents thought by conventional signs, and writ­ ing represents speech in the same way. Thus the art o f writing is merely a mediated representation o f thought.54

The art of writing is therefore a doubly mediated representation of thought. Nothing could be further from the privileged state of immediate communication, which Julie hoped to enjoy in the af­ terlife. We are caught up in viscous instrumental action, whereas the ideal would be to be understood without having to make oneself understood. Marvelous writer that he is, Rousseau is constantly protesting against the art of wridng. For even though he recognizes that “hu­ man power acts through means,” he is unhappy in the world of means, in which he feels lost. If he perseveres with writing, it is to hasten the moment when Lhe pen will fall from his hands and the essential things will be said in the silent embrace of reconciliation and return. In the absence of a reconciliation with his perfidious friends, writing makes sense only as a way of denouncing any at­ tempt at communication as nonsensical. The writer of die Rêveries could not possibly stop writing (only death can stop him), because writing has become absolute proof of the absence of communica­ tion. For someone who has no further hope to be heard, words are no longer an exile. When there is no one left to turn to, no further hope of reconciliation, then the feeling of separation is also out of place. Even exile can no longer be called exile, because it is im­ possible to live anywhere else. In this situation one can speak calmly

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and interminably; words are freed from the curse of being inter­ mediaries, means, mediating instruments. More precisely, the me­ diation of writing intervenes, but only within the self. Writing presents Jean-Jacques to Jean-Jacques and enables him to enjoy a redoubling of his own presence: reading his reveries, he says, will “remind me of the pleasure of writing them, and by thus reviving the past will as it were double my existence. In spite of men I shall again savor die charms of society, and, decrepit, 1 shall live with my earlier self as I might live with a younger friend.“55 Writing becomes a joyful act for Jean-Jacques only when what he writes is intended for no one but himself. What impels Jean-Jacques to write is his need to overcome timidity and find some way to prove his worth. He writes to show he is a better man than he appears, but he also writes to proclaim that he is better than he writes. Do not take him at his word, he says; do not imprison him in his words. What is important is the intention behind the words, which is independent of the words themselves. It is the “disposition of soul“50 in which the reader finds himself after reading and which reflects the disposition of the aiuhor’s soul before he begins to write. Thus Rousseau takes up his pen only in order to acquaint the reader with the feeling that, ideally, precedes the moment of writing or that emerges from the written text. Re­ vealing in this connection is a letter from Rousseau to Mme de Verdelin, in which he begs her to pay attention to what he said in a previous letter: I understand that my previous letter contained dubious and poorly phrased passages. . . . Will you never learn that what a man says must be explained by his character, and not his character by what he says? . . . Please, learn to interpret me better in the future.57

Elsewhere he says: “If my expressions appear at times somewhat equivocal, I try to live in such a way that my conduct determines their meaning.”58 Jean-Jacques is now asking that his words be interpreted ac­ cording to his life. A strange reversal has come about. In order to force others to recognize his value, Rousseau fled society, deter­ mined that henceforth he should appear only through the written word. He hoped thereby to overcome the flaw that made him seem, in the presence of others, less of a man than he really was, one who did not live up to the promise implicit in his lively and intel­ ligent appearance. But now the flaw is in his language (indeed, it

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is a consequence of language), and Jean-Jacques invokes the truth of his life against the misunderstandings inherent in the written word. He look up his pen because he did not wish to be, in the eyes of others, the maladroit, stammering young man he seemed. But now that he is writing, he does not want to be reduced to what he writes. Proud words, brusque refusals, and unjust suspicions may have escaped his pen, but these do not constitute the real JeanJacques. At most they are merely a way of protecting his indepen­ dence and guaranteeing his freedom. With such protection he si­ lently abandons himself to feelings of tenderness and benevolence toward all. He asks his friends to have faith in him, no matter what he may or may not write. Quick to read evil omens in the silence of others, he demands for himself the right to remain silent if he sees fit. No one should hold him responsible for foolish words written in “the delirium of pain.”50Judge him, he asks, by what he is rather than by what he writes. In his letters he constantly pleads to be judged and evaluated. But as soon as he senses that he has been judged (even if that judgment is favorable), he feels mis­ judged, mistaken for someone else, distorted, tried in absentia with no chance to defend himself. He feels constantly obliged to rees­ tablish the truth, to reconstruct an accurate image of himself, to prove that words that have slipped from his pen do noL represent him as he really is, and to challenge the validity of evidence that he himself has put into the hands of his judges. Ultimately he claims the privilege of being understood and accepted without being obliged to speak. But he can claim this privilege only by writing and speaking about it: he needs the mediation of language to say that he does not want such mediation. Until the silent felicity of immediacy has been achieved, all one can do is deplore the absence of immediacy by means of words whose purpose is to state the desire for the death of words. Intense as the desire for immediate com­ munion may be, patience is essential; like it or not, human means of discourse must be accepted. The enormous body of Rousseau's work is testimony to this impassioned patience. “Soul of strong patience,” starkausdauernde Seele, was Hölderlins phrase for him.r>0 Rousseau’s patience is nostalgic patience, and he overlooks no opportunity to express his noslalgia. Everything that he writes on the subject of language reveals a very clear understanding of why conventional signs are necessary, coupled with regret that more direct modes of communication are not possible. In 1742 Rousseau published his “Project concerning New Signs for Music.”61 This was his first appearance in the public arena, and

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it was a failure, for which the award of the Dijon Academy prize made up eight years later. Yet this early failure cannot hide the significance of Jean-Jacques’s attempt to simplify musical notation. He wages war against conventional signs.62 There are too many notes, he says, and they stand as useless obstacles between the musical idea and the person who wishes to decipher a melody: These innumerable lines, clefs, transpositions, sharps, flats, nat­ urals, simple and compound measures, whole notes, half notes, quavers, semiquavers, demisemiquavers, whole rests, half rests, crotchet rests, quaver rests, semiquaver rests, demisemiquaver rests, and so on, yield a multitude of signs and combinations, from which two main disadvantages follow: they take up too much space, and they overtax the memory o f pupils; so that, since the ear is trained and the organs acquire the required degree o f suppleness long before the pupil is ready to sing at sight, the difficulty lies entirely in the observation of the rules and not in the performance o f the song.63

Musical tradition forces us to contend with a “uselessly diverse multitude of signs.” Since the use of signs of some sort is inevitable, let us at least choose the simplest possible notational system, so that the “volume” of signs is the minimum necessary to make musical discourse legible. In other words, Rousseau proposes to simplify a system of communication that is unnecessarily complex; a surfeit of signs makes musical scores disagreeably opaque. What is to be done? “How can we make our signs clearer without increasing their number?”64 Get rid of the unnecessary ones, Rousseau tells us, and make do with a “very small number of characters,” each of which should be perfectly perspicuous. And whereas under the old system signs are arbitrary, under the new they should be made more nat­ ural, more like the thing they designate. For instance, Rousseau proposes using numbers instead of notes drawn on a staff. Numbers might seem more abstract, but in fact they are in a natural way closer to the sound: “Figures being the expression given to num­ bers, and numbers themselves being the exponents of the gener­ ation of sounds, nothing is more natural than to express the various sounds in terms of the figures of arithmetic.”65 What does this new system accomplish? The intermediate act of reading music becomes easier. The intermediate period of learning is shortened. Jean-Jacques, who learned music in a roundabout and time-consuming manner, believes that he has invented a “quick way”(which, incidentally, he expects will earn him a fortune). Using

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his system pupils will acquire knowledge of music “by the shortest and easiest route.”66 To be sure, they still must study, and the sudden miracle that Rousseau hoped for in Lausanne at the home of M. de Treytorrens will not come about. Jean-Jacques promises to train “a first-rate musician within one year’s time,” a musician capable of coping with any difficulty and no longer preoccupied with the problem of means. “A pupil properly trained by this method” will become, in a surprisingly short period of time, a master “equally competent to play in any clef, familiar with all modes and keys and all the chords belonging to them, as well as the sequence of modulation, and able to transpose any piece of music into any key with the greatest of ease.”67 At that point, “ob­ servation of the rules” ceases to be an obstacle, and the mind can occupy itself entirely with feeling, with the “performance of the song.” Emile grows up among things. He is free, and the only obstacle he encounters is physical need. The tutor imposes his will only by disguising it as physical need, that is, by cloaking his decisions in the silent, sovereign authority of objectivity. As long as Emile’s powers of reason remain unformed, his experience comes from direct contact with the world. The tutor speaks only in order to bring Emile closer to things, hence only to allow things to speak for Lhemselves: “Do not give your pupil any verbal lesson; he must receive all his lessons from experience.”™Thus Rousseau recom­ mends delaying as long as possible the time when the child shifts his attention from things to the signs of things. Childhood must remain the age of immediacy! Young minds should not be allowed to wander into the world of arbitrary signs, which lack the power to deliver up their meaning: No matter what Lhe field of study, without an idea of the things represented, the representing signs mean nothing. Yet the child’s attention is always confined to those signs, even though it is im­ possible to make him understand what any o f them represent. By attempting to teach him about the earth, we only teach him to know maps. We teach him the names of cities, countries, and rivers o f whose existence apart from the paper that we show him he has no notion.69 In general, never substitute the sign for the thing unless it is impossible for you to show the thing. For the sign absorbs the child’s attention and makes him forget the thing represented.70

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To be sure, discourse abounds in Emile, but it also follows en­ counters with real objects. The verbal lessons (including even the “Profession of Faith”) merely interpret and make explicit a knowl­ edge already constituted in silent contact with educational circum­ stances. When the Savoyard vicar finally speaks to Jean-Jacques, every thing has already been revealed by the landscape they con­ template together from a hilltop. Even the “Profession of Faith” is an objective lesson. The verbal signs are noL distinct from the “thing represented.” The universe and God are present from the outset: It was summer. We rose at daybreak. He led me out of town, to a high hill at the foot of which flowed the Po, whose course one could follow through the fertile fields it touched. In the distance the Alps crowned the landscape. The rising sun darted rays over the plains and, casting lengthy shadows of trees, hills, and houses over the fields, created myriad effects of light that embellished the most beautiful scene the human eye could possibly know. It seemed as if nature spread all her magnificence at our feet in order to furnish the text o f our conversations. It was there, after contemplating these objects for some time in silence, that the man of peace spoke to me in the following terms.71

The scene speaks first: the words of the man of peace demonstrate nothing that has not already been displayed in the moments of silence contemplation preceding his speech. Modern languages are composed of conventional signs. But earlier, closer to the beginning, how did people talk? Did they even need to talk? Was there perhaps an era when language was less conven­ tional, more expressive, closer to nature? Such are the questions that Rousseau raises, and it is clear, despite the scholarly apparatus that surrounds the second Discourse and the Essay on the Origin of Languages, that his interest in speculative linguistics is stimulated by an unscientific nostalgia. Again we see his desire to combat the world in which he is forced to live, the world of mediation and mediated action, which he contrasts to another world in which human relations are presumably simpler, more direct, and more secure. An emotional need is transformed into a historical hypoth­ esis: once upon a time, communication was more direct, less dis­ cursive. Signs were closer to feelings, or perhaps they were unnecessary because emotion and feeling were sufficiently legible in themselves and required no translation into symbols.

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In the state of nature, man lives in the realm of immediacy; he encounters no obstacles to the satisfaction of his needs, and his desires do not extend beyond what is immediately available to him. He never seeks to obtain what he does not already have. And, since speech cannot come into being where nothing is wanting, natural man does not speak: Males and females united fortuitously according to encounters, opportunities, and desires; they required no speech to express the things they had to say to each other, and they separated with the same ease.7* We see . . . from the small pains that nature has taken to unite men through mutual needs or to facilitate the use of speech how little she has

prepared their sociability and how little she has contributed to what they have done to establish bonds among themselves.73

The man of nature engages exclusively in silent communica­ tion—indeed, more in contact than in communication: there is no exchange of thoughts, no discussion, because there are no obstacles to overcome. But one man wants to be recognized by another. Nature made man perfectible. For a long time his perfectibility remained a mere potential, but eventually it finds its opportunity: man begins to invent, and language is the means by which his inventions are preserved and communicated. Although language comes into its own only when man is forced to wage war against nature, it has, nevertheless, a “natural cause.” Hence language has a beginning, prior to which there is an era of perfect immediacy, in which contacts are fleeting and even love is silent. At first there are gestures and exclamations: shouts, moans, “cries of nature,” “voices” elicited by the passions.71 Initially speech does not consist of conventional signs of feeling; it is feeling itself and conveys passion without transcribing it. Speech is not an “ap­ pearance” distinct from the “reality” it denotes: man’s original lan­ guage is one in which feeling appears immediately as it w, in which the essence of feeling and the sound uttered coincide. Rousseau is careful to mention Plato’s Cratylus, because his description of the first language is derived from Plato’s hypothesis of “natural denom­ inations” and “primitive names,” which Rousseau applies to the passions and feelings. “Names have by nature a truth,” is how Plato puts it.75 The primitive language, as Rousseau imagines it, was possessed of almost infallible power; it presented “to the senses, as well as to the understanding, the almost inevitable impressions of passion, which seeks to make itself known.”76

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It would persuade without convincing and paint without reasoning.77 People would sing rather than speak; most root words would be sounds imitative of either the accent o f the passions or the effect of sensible objects: onomatopoeia would be used constantly.78

. How inferior the modern languages are by comparison! Domi­ nated by the conventions of writing, their structures no longer express the vivifying presence of feeling. Particular truth (authen­ ticity) is sacrificed in order to obtain the impersonal clarity of gen­ eral concepts. “In writing, one is forced to employ the commonly accepted meaning of every word. A person who speaks can vary meaning by his tone of voice and make words mean whatever he wants.“79 Living, accented speech expresses the personality directly; written language requires lengthy detours and circumlocutions in order to construct an artificial and approximate equivalent of the energy and passion expressed in oral language. The problem is not insignificant to anyone who, like Jean-Jacques, seeks to describe what is unique about himself. How much better everything could be expressed, if only we could return to the musical language of primitive man, to the immediate meaningfulness of melody! Is it within our power, however, to renounce conventional signs and revert to natural signs? Here again, regression is impossible. The French language must be accepted as it is, longwindedly discursive and abstract. It is im­ possible to revert to primitive language, composed entirely of “im­ ages, feelings, and figures.“80 No longer is it possible to give “each word the sense of an entire proposition.“81 Yet Rousseau does try to make his language conform as closely as possible to the primitive ideal: his writing, supple and musical, seems to heed the rhythm of the “first language.“ Among the various ways of recovering the energy of accented speech, he suggests, in a brief but important note, improvements in punctuation.82 He regrets, in particular, the absence of signs for vocative and ironic utterances. In writing Rousseau was constantly looking for equivalents of the simpler procedures that were available before writing was invented. His style—with its supple, carefully crafted, melodic phrases—ex­ presses nostalgia for a more immediate language. As marvelously direct as his writing is, he secretly deplores the absence of “prim­ itive language,“ with its pathetic accents and constant imagery. Rousseau’s literary “discourse“ is perfectly beautiful writing, but its pathos and inner tension betray a constant lament over the

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absence, in the written word, of the natural signs present in the voice itself. It was common in the eighteenth century to distinguish between ‘'natural” signs and “artificial” (or “instituted”) ones. Such a dis­ tinction can be found, for example, in Condillac and the Encyclo­ pedia. In the latter, under “Signs,” we read that natural signs are “the cries that nature has established for feelings of joy, fear, and pain.” In a slightly broader sense, natural signs include actions and gestures; Condillac says that primitive men and women used a “language of action” before discovering articulated speech.*1*If JeanJacques, the man of nature, refused to accept the yoke of conven­ tional signs, how else would he express himself but by natural signs? Indeed, he trusts implicitly in signs, so long as they are the natural rather than the artificial kind: The affections to which he is most inclined are those distinguished by physical signs. If he is moved even a little, his eyes moisten at once.84 His emotions are quick and hot but fleeting rather than enduring, as stands to reason. . . . The blood, inflamed by a sudden agitation, carries to the eye and face the impetuous movements that indicate passion. . . . Once the sign o f anger has disappeared from the face, anger has also been extinguished in the heart.85

Jean-Jacques describes himself as a “sensitive soul,” all of whose emotions are instantly visible: the natural sign and the feeling co­ incide exactly, for the sign and the feeling are composed of the same substance. Indeed, the natural sign is none other than feeling itself, speaking through the body. As emotion invades the body, it signals its presence externally; the expressive message does not need to be “articulated” as an afterthought. Emotion is, and should be, immediately expressive: eyes flashing with rage are not just the sign of anger but anger itself. Such language is absolutely faithful: it expresses what is. Like it or not, whatever takes place in JeanJacques’s soul is instantly expressed; that is why he is vulnerable to every gaze. In this there is danger. He exposes himself to his per­ secutors, while they are careful to hide their feelings. But this vulnerability reaps a wonderful reward; the language of natural signs automatically expresses the truth about Jean-Jacques, without requiring him to make a deliberate effort to be sincere and truthful. If only this automatic “mechanism” were all-powerful, Jean-Jacques would be relieved of any obligation to concern himself with the truth; he could rely, passively, on nature’s simple device. If one

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could depend entirely on natural signs, it would be enough to exist to demonstrate the truth; one would not have to do anything other than consent to be oneself. And the only way to unveil the true reality would be to renounce all artificial means, including speech. Rousseau therefore imagines a utopia in which all communica­ tion is by means of natural signs and no other language is necessary. Emile and the Dissertation on Modern Music warn us against the curse of conventional signs, which, far from conveying meaning, are obstacles, impediments to meaning. The natural signs that Rous­ seau dreams of relying on are quite different: they are gestures and movements whose meaning is self-evident, without the support of the conventional signs of verbal language. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Jean-Jacques takes shel­ ter behind the opinion of Isaac Vossius. Content to have found a text that expressed his desire exactly, he lets the learned theorist speak in Latin, deploring the confusion of tongues: I shall take care not to embark on the philosophical reflections that need to be undertaken on the advantages and disadvantages of this institution of languages. . . . Therefore let me quote some­ one who has not committed the crime o f sometimes daring to take the side of reason against the opinion o f the multitude: “Nec quidquam felicitati humani generis decederet, si, pulsa tot lin­ guarum peste et conione, unam artem callerent mortales, et signis, motibus, gestibusque, licitum foret quidvis explicare.”86

Rousseau dreams of reverting to this language of truth—dreams, because this is a language he does not possess. He is obliged to use the words of conventional language to express the happiness he would feel if only he could manage to express himself by means of natural signs alone. Often, in fact, he has the impression that his feelings are destined to remain forever obscure. “What can be seen is but a minor part of what is. It is the apparent effect, whose internal, hidden cause is often very complicated. . . . No one can write a man's life other than the man himself. His inward manner, his real life, is known to him alone.”87 In the language of natural signs the apparent effect and the internal cause are not supposed to be disjoint; there should be no discontinuity between the ap­ parent and the hidden, as Rousseau alleges here. But Jean-Jacques never ceases to suffer from the gap between appearance and reality. He begins writing because timidity prevents him from fulfilling the promise of his appearance. He proves his mettle through writing because he has not been able to prove it “the easy way,” that is,

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through his social presence and direct speech. But he writes in order to state his resentment at having been forced to do things “the hard way“ that is, by writing, as well as to express his nostalgia for silent communication, for expression without means of expression. When, in the first Dialogue, he describes the denizens of an “en­ chanted world,” he gives free reign to his dream of living among others in trusting, almost silent intimacy, where communication is by means of unambiguous signs that supplant words or act in spite of words. Because the “initiates . . . seek their happiness not in appearances but in intimate feeling,” they cannot rely on ordinary language, which is vitiated by the curse of appearances. Only signs can convey intimate feeling: Beings so uniquely constituted must o f course express themselves differently from ordinary men. With souls so differently modi­ fied, it is impossible that the expression o f their feelings and ideas not bear the imprint o f those modifications. If that imprint escapes those who have no notion o f this way o f being, it cannot escape those who do know it and are themselves affected by it. It is a characteristic sign by which initiates recognize one another, a sign little known and still less used, and what makes it so valuable is that it cannot be counterfeited; it never acts but at the level of its source, and when it does not part from the hearts o f those who imitate it, it does not reach hearts made to discern it; but as soon as it does reach the heart, there can be no mistake; it is true as soon as it is felt. It is in the whole conduct of life rather than in a few isolated actions that it manifests itself most surely. But in emotional situations in which the soul involuntarily takes flight, the initiate soon distinguishes his brother from the person who, though no kin, merely wishes to assume the accents of kinship.8*

Jean-Jacques imagines a more reliable, more direct, almost in­ fallible language. But this language is not universal; it is a secret, reserved to a small number of initiates whom nature has made different from the general run of mankind. They live apart from the rest of humanity, as their secret language attests. And they can communicate among themselves in a more profound way, relying on the power of secret signs known only to themselves. Among them no misunderstanding ever arises. Their conversation is no dialogue, however. What would they discuss, since they understand one another immediately? Fond of “immediate pleasures,” initiates do not engage in dialogue but sympathize with one another, pouring out their feelings: signs and silence are the language of sympathy,

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wherein minds meet “at the level of the source.” How revealing it is to find in a text entitled Dialogue a description of a form of communication more felicitous and efficacious than dialogue! Here we penetrate to the heart of a discourse that desires the annihilation of discourse. Sensitive souls are impatient: The heavy, sequential nature o f discourse is unbearable to them. They are vexed by its slow progress. Given the quickness of their feelings, they think that whatever they feel should be clear as day and penetrate the heart of another without the cold ministry of. speech*9

“Without the cold ministry of speech.” The phrase almost echoes another from La nouvelle Héloïse: “How many things were said with­ out opening the mouth! How many ardent feelings were com­ municated without the cold agency of speechl”90 But here, I think, nearly the whole of the letter on the “morning in the English manner” should be cited (part 5, letter 3). For this morning is a moment of perfect transparency, whose symbolic importance is equal to that of the grape harvest. The latter is an outdoor scene, the English morning an indoor one, but what is described is the same: a situ­ ation of absolute trust and unimpeded communication. In such moments, “consecrated to silence and collected by friendship,” three people share a joyful feeling that travels from one to another by means of signs: Warm, heavenly feeling, what discourse is worthy of you? What language dares to be your interpreter? Can what we say to our friend ever equal what we feel at his side? A hand squeezed, an animated glance, an embrace against the bosom, the sigh that follows— these say something, by God! And after them, how cold the first word seems!91 At this word, his book fell from her hands. She turned her head and cast upon her worthy husband a look so touching, so tender, that I myself trembled. She said nothing; what could she have said to equal that look? Our eyes also met. I sensed in the way her husband shook my hand that the same emotion had overcome all three o f us, and that the sweet influence o f that expansive soul was at work all around her and triumphant over insensibility itself.92

Expansion, influence. These qualities constitute the essence of the Rousseauian soul; communication takes place without alien­ ation, without venturing beyond the bounds of the self. The de­ scription of the morning presents the ideal of the expansive moment. The soul expands by means of signs rather than words, hence its

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range is greater and its influence more pure. The scene above is an account of ecstasy à trois. Rousseau says as much in his descrip­ tion of a plate that was to have illustrated this passage: “An air of mild and dreamy contemplation in the three spectators; the mother especially must seem to be in a state of rapturous ecstasy."1’3 Here is further evidence of the power of signs. Bernardin de SaintPierre reports what Rousseau told him in confidence: He said to me: Oh! How innocence adds power to love! I was twice passionately in love: once with a person to whom I had never spoken. A single sign urn the source of a thousand impassioned letters, of the sweetest illusions. 1 went into an apartment where she hap­

pened to be. I caught sight o f her, her back turned toward me, and thereupon joy, desire, and love burst forth on my face, in my features, in my gestures. 1 did not notice lhat she was looking at me in the mirror. She turned around, offended by my emotion, and pointed at the floor with her finger; I was about to Fall on my knees when someone entered.94

Rousseau is speaking of his affair, while he was still an adolescent, with Mme Basile, shortly after he left Turin’s Hospice of Catechu­ mens. But if we turn now to the Confessions, we find no evidence of the “thousand impassioned letters." (Were they an embellishment added by Bernardin? Whether true or not, the detail is plausible; it is in keeping with Rousseau’s psychology, as the Letters to Sophie, writ­ ten later in his life, make clear.) Many details in the account contained in the second book of the Confessions are cast in a different light; the two versions reveal important “variants."95 Should Bernardin’s tes­ timony be rejected for the sake of simplicity? Certainly not. More important than the discrepancies between the two versions is what remains constant. It seems likely that Rousseau was fond of “poeti­ cizing” his memories, starting with a few fixed details and adding em­ bellishments. Inventions are elaborated as a composer might elaborate a melody, reworked to fit the emotions called forth by writing; but the variations are constrained by the cantus firmus provided by mem­ ory. What fixed melody underlies the scene with Mme Basile? Silence is one; here there is agreement even within difference. Bernardin version: “A person to whom I had never spoken .” Confessions'. Jean-Jacques has already spoken to Mme Basile, but the crucial scene is “passionate and silent

Various images occur in both versions, such as Jean-Jacques’s re­ flection glimpsed in the mirror and, more important, the sign of

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the pointing finger, Mme Basile’s only gesture toward her admirer. According to the Confessions, this scene of love is precious to JeanJacques because of the way signs communicate across silence. He declares his love without uttering a single word, and the young woman responds with a simple “movement of her finger.” A glance at the relevant passage in the Confessions shows that the “movement of the finger” is the kernel around which the whole scene crystallizes: I threw myself on my knees just inside the door and held out my arms to her in an access of passion, quite certain that she could not hear me, and imagining that she could not see me. But over the chimney-piece was a mirror, which betrayed me. I do not know what effect this scene had upon her. She did not look at me or speak to me. But, half turning her head, she pointed with a simple movement o f her finger to the mat at her feet. I trembled, cried out, and threw myself down where she had pointed, all in a single second.96 But what seems almost incredible is that I had not the courage to attempt anything more, or to say a single word. I dared not raise my eyes, nor even, despite my uncomfortable position, so much as touch her on the knee, to give myself a moment’s support. I was motionless and dumb, but certainly not calm. . . . She seemed to me no calmer and no less timid than myself. Disturbed by my state, disconcerted at having provoked it, and beginning to realize the consequences o f a gesture no doubt made without reflection, she neither drew me to her nor repulsed me. Indeed, she did not take her eyes from her work, and tried to behave as if she could not see me at her feet.97

In the meditation that follows this description of a silent encounter, Rousseau’s thoughts again turn to the simple sign that Mme Basile makes with her finger. The unforgettable pleasure of this tête-àtête comes from the fact that neither Jean-Jacques’s declaration nor Mme Basile’s avowal involves the use of common language; feeling becomes sign, permitting pure communication to take place: None o f the feelings I have had from the possession of women have been equal to those two minutes spent at her feet without even the courage to touch her dress. . . . A simple sign with thefinger, a hand lightly pressed against my lips—these are the only favors I ever received from Mme Basile, and the memory o f them, slight though they were, still moves me when I think of them.98

For Jean-Jacques the pleasure of love lies not in possession but in presence, in the intensity of presence: motionless and silent, he falls into a trance before Mme Basile, transfixed by the overwhelm­ ing presence of his own feelings. The exchange of signs completes

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his happiness, and he is still able to savor the memory of such perfect felicity. No one has pointed out the importance of signs for Rousseau better than Hölderlin. He comments on the power to communicate through signs in an admirable stanza of an unfinished poem ded­ icated to the memory of Rousseau: Vernommen hast du sie, verstanden die Sprache der Fremdlinge, Gedeutet ihre Seele! Dem Sehnenden war Der Wink genug, und Winke sind Von Alters her die Sprache der Götter." [You heard, you understood the language of strangers, Interpreted their souls! Your desire Was satisfied with a sign, and signs have been Since the beginning of time the language of the gods.]

Who are the strangers of which Hölderlin speaks? The inhab­ itants of the “enchanted world,” no doubt; those whose coming is assured (die Verheisseneri). Here, the sign makes it possible to inter­ pret (deuten) the souls of strangers. Even though this knowledge is instantaneous (“At the first sign he knows what has been foretold”), it is, according to Hölderlin, interpretive. The gods speak only to those few who understand their language; they reveal themselves only to prophetic souls. This is the case in the enchanted world as Rousseau describes it: the “initiates” are a spiritual elite, and their privilege of understanding through signs is a gift of interpretation, a power to divine. The problem of interpreting signs is worth pausing over. If com­ munication is truly immediate, there is no need to interpret signs; and interpretation is an interposition, an act of mediation. The ideal of immediacy demands that the meaning of the sign be identical in the object and in my perception. Meaning imposes itself ineluctably, and I welcome it passively. Rousseau wants the sign to be felt and not to require interpretation (otherwise nothing would distinguish it from conventional language, which calls for tiresome interpre­ tation). But in that case the soul merely registers feeling in response to the sign; it plays no part in the elaboration of meaning. It merely allows itself to be illuminated. The meaning of the sign is so obvious that no interpretation is necessary. Reading that meaning is ef­ fortless. Reality apparently does not conform to Rousseau’s wishes, however. Even if we eschew conventional signs and return to nat­ ural ones, and even if we refuse to separate signifier from signified,

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we are obliged to concede that the mind has a role to play in perceiving the meaning of the sign. Idealist presuppositions aside, meaning will not yield itself up where there is no consciousness ready to receive it, no mind in search of meanings to attach to it (and “aimed,” as it were, at the sign). This solicitation of meaning is spontaneously, from its inception, an act of interpretation; it implies that a general meaning has been attached to the world, against which particular meanings will take shape. In other words, the gaze that looks out upon the world elicits signs destined for it alone, which disclose its world. This is not a mere reflection of the spec­ tator’s “inner life”; it is, rather, the world he has chosen to confront, the adversary-accomplice he has chosen for himself. Rousseau, however, refuses to admit that meaning depends on him, that it is, in large part, his own creation. He wants it to in­ here entirely in the object perceived. He does not recognize his own question in the world’s answer. He therefore deprives himself of the part of freedom thaL each of our perceptions contains. Hav­ ing chosen one of several possible meanings offered by die external object, he blames the object itself for his choice and sees a per­ emptory and unequivocal intention in the sign. This leads him to impute sovereign will to things, when in fact it is he who makes the decision by choosing where to direct his attention. Rousseau interprets the world instantaneously as he perceives it, but he does not care to know that he has made an interpretation. Rousseau dreamed of communicating by signs, but signs were to turn against him, signaling the existence of implacable enemies and proving the ubiquity of malevolence and hostility. To be sure, he is interpreting appearances. But most of the time he does not know, or does not want to know, that adversity is implicit in the way he looks at people and things. Rousseau’s paranoid interpretations are just a parody of his hope that there might exist a secret language by means of which men could communicate unambiguously. He wished for a mode of communication that words could not betray; needing no interpretation, signs would instantly communicate in­ fallible certainty “at the level of the source.” In other words, he desired a language more immediate than language, so that a person could reveal his soul merely by his presence. Now, however, he is surrounded by peremptory signs that speak more persuasively than any language or form of discursive reason yet herald opacity of the heart, obscurity of the soul, and impossibility of communication. The magic of signs has become an evil magic, enforcing the pres­ ence of shadow and veil. The qualitative reversal is absolute: signs

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still work instantaneously, but to cast shadows rather than light. The rule is “all or nothing.” There is no middle term between transparency and opacity, between the intimate smaller society and the persecuting larger one. “In regard to happiness and bliss, I required all or nothing.”100 And when Jean-Jacques cannot have all, he seems actively to desire nothing. Hence the slightest dis­ turbance in his field of vision, the least mist, is immediately declared to be total opacity. Every obstacle to the ideal of communication by means of signs is construed as an irrefutable sign of hostility. Be­ cause his desire for transparency is so excessive, Jean-Jacques must endure the effects of ubiquitous opacity. Negative signs, proof of hostility, are found not only in people’s faces but also in inanimate objects. There is no essential difference between facial expressions (a form of human behavior) and omens or symptoms (which emanate mysteriously from inanimate objects); in Rousseau’s writing the transition from one to the other is almost imperceptible. Whenever Jean-Jacques scrutinizes the world with sufficient intensity, hidden intentions are revealed to him and hidden omens become visible. Rousseau usually interprets signs retrospectively, at a distance. In the Confessions, where he wants to portray himself as a victim of fate, he attempts to read in his past prophetic signs of his present misfortunes. It is only in writing his autobiography that he discovers the significance of certain premonitory signs in his youth. When the drawbridge rose at one of Geneva’s gates, did Jean-Jacques perceive a sign? No matter. In memory it has become one: “Twenty paces from the forward guard post, I saw them raise the first bridge. I trembled as I watched its dreadful horns rising in the air, a sinister and fatal augury of the inevitable destiny that from that moment awaited me.”101 A marvelous example of the negative sign: Rous­ seau’s separation and expulsion from his native city are expressed through an image. But not until Jean-Jacques has endured the fate that awaits him does the image become, in retrospect, a sign of that fate. This is an example of the sort of regressive (or retrospective) interpretation whose principles Rousseau himself set forth in an­ other passage of the Canfessions: “The outer sign is all that strikes me. But later it all comes back: I remember the place, the time, the tone, the look, the gesture, the circumstance—nothing escapes me. From what someone did or said I discover what he thought, and 1 am rarely mistaken.”,01î The meaning of the sign, ambiguous at the time, becomes “clear” in memory, which compensates for the weakness of immediate perception. Only what is relived is fully

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meaningful. Rousseau believes that he is merely discovering what is obvious: behind the signs which he fails at first to penetrate lies a peremptory reality, and once he has seen this he confidently reconstructs other people’s innermost thoughts, even though it might seem that temporal distance would only compound his initial incomprehension. Accordingly, it is reasonable to ask whether the evil omens that Rousseau mentions in the Confessions and in his correspondence were not discovered as he looked back upon his past and, dwelling on some gesture, look, or object, interpreted it after the fact as having been a fatal and ominous sign. There is no dearth of examples, however, in which the meaning of a hostile sign is grasped instantaneously. The interpretation is made on the spot, with no critical distance. But in such cases we rely on Rousseau’s written testimony (worked over by his memory and hence in part an intellectual construct). There is little point in attempting to compare his testimony with what “really happened.” Our only evidence comes from the autobiographical reconstruction. The magic of signs as Rousseau describes it suddenly creates monsters. This is the opposite of what happens in fairy tales, where beasts are suddenly turned into handsome princes. Whenever the clear communication that Rousseau desires is impeded by some unexpected detail, wherever some surprising presence is not im­ mediately absorbed into its transparent surroundings, Rousseau’s interlocutor becomes a monster, as if the ambiguous sign somehow magically infected the person and rendered him thoroughly im­ pure. Communication is absolute or it is not communication. When­ ever an inexplicable defect produces a slight hesitation or momentary question, all sympathy is destroyed and Jean-Jacques feels para­ lyzed; he clenches, as though transfixed by the stare of Medusa. Everything is stood on its head: for becomes against, and expansive rapture becomes wary estrangement. The best example of the neg­ ative magic that transforms into a monster or creature who only a moment before had been supremely desirable is that of Zulietta and her malformed nipple: But just as I was about to sink upon a breast that seemed about to suffer a man’s lips and hand for the first time, I perceived that she had a malformed nipple. I beat my brow, looked harder, and made certain that this nipple did not match the other. Then I started wondering about the reason for this malformation. I was struck by the thought that it resulted from some remarkable im­ perfection of Nature and, after turning this idea over in my head, I saw as clear as daylight that instead of the most charming créa-

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ture I could possibly imagine, I held in my arms some kind of monster, rejected by Nature, men, and love.,L'3

What is the role of the sign? Is it the sudden discovery of the nipple that inhibits the outpouring of amorous feelings? Is the sign the real impediment? Or is Jean-Jacques's paralysis with Zulietta a form of “failure behavior”? Does he both want and fear the end of their relationship, Lhe loss of erotic energy, and the sudden withdrawal into hurt loneliness? Rousseau symbolically castrates liimself, taking as his pretext an insignificant imperfection in Zulietta’s body, which he turns into a decisive sign. But he might just as well have chosen any other detail as a pretext for his inhibition. Perhaps Rousseau wants merely to attribute his failure (or refusal) to some external impediment. Literally any sign is capable of jus­ tifying an inhibition. Sometimes Rousseau has only to cast his eye upon a detail: the twist of a smile, for instance. No lengthy expla­ nation is required for the evil magic to do its work and produce a negative unveiling. The other person becomes hideous in JeanJacques’s eyes; he turns into a monster, and his smile becomes a diabolic grimace. Consider, for example, an evening that Rousseau spends with David Hume. Glances are exchanged in silence: in La nouvelle Hé­ loïse such an exchange of glances was a delight to noble souls, who experienced “the union of hearts.” But now it only puts distance between Rousseau and his friend, whose face becomes frozen in a hostile expression. Not one word is exchanged, but Rousseau’s old friend becomes his false friend: His incisive, ardent, mocking, steady gaze became more than wor­ risome. To ward it o ff I tried staring back at him. But as my eyes met his I felt an inexplicable trembling and soon I was forced to lower them. David's face and tone are those of a good man, but O Great God! where does this good man borrow the eyes with which he stares at his friends?*1”

A metamorphosis rips away a mask, but only to reveal a visage still more shadowy than the mask itself. Not only is communication with Hume no longer possible, but Hume is now seen as the person who is scheming to cut Jean-Jacques off from all communication with others. “It appears that the intention of my persecutor and his friends is to cut off all communication between me and the Continent and to cause me to die here of pain and misery.”105 There are many similar moments in which a sign of absolute evil suddenly transforms a friend’s face. Consider the strange meta-

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morphosis that disfigures Du Peyrou while he sleeps from the ef­ fects of a drug: While his eyes were dosed, I saw his features alter and his face assume a distorted and almost hideous shape. I judged what was going on in that feeble soul, upset by fear of death. I then raised my own soul up to heaven, I resigned myself to the will of Prov­ idence, and I left it to Providence to provide my justification.106

From this point on the “dear guest” belongs to the dark kingdom; between him and Rousseau there is no further bond: “I have never been able to draw the slightest confidence, the slightest illumination, the slightest effusion from this dark and hidden h e art. . . the most hidden that ever existed.”107 Yet another worrisome sign is Father Berthier’s smile: “One day he thanked me with a half laugh for having found him such a good fellow. I noticed something sardonic in his smiling face, which to­ tally altered it in my eyes and the memory of which has often recurred to me since then.”108 Rousseau remembers this smile when he suspects the Jesuits of intercepting the manuscript of Emile. It is evidence enough for him to conceive the idea of a plot against him—a conclusive sign. The moment Rousseau encounters the un­ known, he sees an “iniquitous mystery.” No other possibility exists: a person who does not overflow with friendship immediately be­ comes a blackguard engaged in sowing evil. For Rousseau, knowl­ edge of others implies the power to judge: for or against, black or white. Suspension, hesitation, uncertainty are more intolerable to him than a firm judgment that things are as black as can be. Rather than have doubts about a friend he decides that the man must be a conspirator in a plot against him, for then at least he can break off relations without remorse. Pärt of Rousseau’s mind is capable of recognizing that his imag­ ination has run wild in its interpretation of signs. Another part simply accepts the fantasy as obvious, unaware that any interpre­ tation of signs has taken place. The dividing line between the two is ambiguous. Consider, for example, the account in the Confessions of Rousseau’s panic when he learns that the printing of Emile will be delayed. His perceptive analysis of his behavior makes us believe that he will soon come to his senses. Is he not about to throw off the spell and recognize that his obsessions are the products of his own mind? No misfortune o f any kind ever troubles or depresses me so long as I know just what it is. But it is in my nature to fear the dark;

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I dread and loathe its black presence; mystery always disquiets me, it is too much the opposite of my own character, which is open to the point o f rashness. The sight of the most hideous monster would frighten me very little, I think. But if I were to catch sight o f a figure in the night wrapped in a white sheet I would be afraid. So my imagination, set working by this long silence, began to raise phantoms. . . . Immediately my imagination was o ff like lightning, and unveiled the whole iniquitous mystery to me; I saw the march of events as clearly as if it had been revealed to me.109

Rousseau confesses that his fears are mere visions, delusions of a mind made anxious by protracted solitude. But “self-criticism” does not extend beyond this episode in the publication of Emile. Rousseau withdraws his fantastic interpretation of one set of events, but, it seems, only in order to bolster other, no less fantastic charges, which he makes without the slightest shadow of a doubt. He as­ sumes the guise of impartial objectivity. Because he is capable of recognizing errors due to his overactive imagination, should we not believe him when he denounces as real the ruthless plot that he sees organized against him? He accuses himself of having mis­ interpreted certain signs, but only in order to indulge himself else­ where in the wildest fancies; his mind unclouded by doubt, he surrenders to the power of evil omens. For Jean-Jacques, to live amid persecution is to feel caught in a web of concordant signs, an “impenetrable mystery.” Upon these he anxiously builds an edifice of speculation; he is tireless in his efforts to understand die meaning of his enemies’ secret signs and plumb the depths of dieir silent hostility, hidden accusations, and clandestine condemnation.un Worst of all are not the signs that reveal a malevolent meaning but those that refuse to reveal any meaning at all. In the eyes of the persecuted Rousseau, signs of hostility are “clear,” but they refer to an ultimate obscurity, a dark, meaningless “source”: Some people seek me out eagerly, cry tears o f joy and pity at the sight of me, hug me and kiss me passionately, in tears; while others at the sight o f me feel a rage that I see flashing in their eyes, and still others spit on me or in my direction with such a show that their intention is clear. Such different signs are all inspired by the same feeling, which is no less clear. What feeling is it that manifests itself by so many contrary signs? It is, I see, the feeling o f all my contemporaries toward me; but to me it is unknown.111

The signs are infallible, but what they reveal is the impossibility of transparency. Veils are lifted, but behind them lies an insur-

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mountable obstacle. Thus Rousseau gains nothing by interpreting one sign after another. Rather than clear up the mystery, he con­ fronts still deeper shadows: children’s grimaces, the price of peas at La Halle, the shops in the rue Plâtrière all reveal the same conspiracy, the motives for which remain impenetrable. Try as he will to organize these signs and link them together in a perspicuous manner, he always ends in darkness. “The interpreter’s morbid world is one of personal meanings; it is a world of significance,” according to Dr. Hesnard.112 “The patient perceives this personal meaning prior to reasoning about it.” This is the case with Rousseau at the end of his life. Interpretation is part of perception itself: perceiving reality and interpreting it as a sign of hostility are one act. That is why Jean-Jacques reacts in­ stantly to signs. Subsequently he muses at length over the signs he has perceived, hoping to establish a consistent plan, a system, a universal plot behind their apparent multiplicity. He reasons end­ lessly about the source of the machinations against him. But the hostility of those machinations is apparent from the beginning, from the moment of perception. The initial datum is decisive but incomplete: it reveals an intention but sheds no light on its causes or origin. The sign unveils the evil but veils its source. From the Rêveries as well as from those who knew Rousseau in the final years of his life, we know that he was capable of changing unpredictably from the deepest depression to a mood of almost childish gaiety. Persecution exists only intermittently. How does the sudden passage from one state to another take place? Here is Rous­ seau’s explanation: Always too strongly affected by what I see or hear, and particularly by signs of pleasure or suffering, affection or dislike, I let myself be swayed by these outward impressions and can only avoid them by running away. A sign, a gesture, or a glance from a stranger is enough to disturb my pleasure or ease my suffering. It is only when I am alone that I am my own master. At all other times I am the plaything o f all who surround m e.113

In other words, sudden shifts in emotion come in response to signs. They are an immediate and almost mechanical response to external stimuli. A sign is enough to cause Jean-Jacques to shift not just from one mood to another but from one world to another. The turning point is a silent encounter. The sign speaks before the other person has time to explain himself. Mere words and discourse cannot change Jean-Jacques’s mind; protests are of no avail. As he

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walks past the Military Academy» he does not speak to the disabled veterans there but is content simply to interpret their signs, the way they salute him and look at him: One of my favorite walks was around the Military Academy, where I enjoyed running into the old veterans who, trained in the ways of military courtesy, saluted me as I walked past. This salute, which my heart returned a hundred times over, flattered me and in­ creased my pleasure in seeing them. Unable to hide anything that moves me, I often spoke of the veterans and o f how the sight of them affected me. That was all it took. After a while I noticed that I was no longer a stranger to them, or rather that I was far more a stranger, since they gave me the same sort of looks as the general public. No more military courtesy, no more salutes. A hostile air and a fierce look had taken the place of their earlier politeness. Since in Lheir former profession they had to be sincere, they cannot do as others do and conceal their animosity under a sneering and treacherous mask, hence they openly display the most violent hatred.114

This is all the evidence Jean-Jacques needs to conclude that some­ one has instructed these veterans to snub him. Sometimes illumination comes from meeting a happy face, a benevolent expression. But usually such salutary signs are not “nat­ ural.” Rousseau does not search faces for signs of sympathy or affection. Having no further hope, he abandons all expectations: “the plot is universal, irrevocable and without exception, and I am certain of ending my days in this terrible ostracism without unrav­ eling the mystery.”115 Rousseau turns to other signs, about which nothing has yet been said. There is in fact a third type of sign, which is neither natural nor conventional. The Encyclopedia (in its article “Signs”) calls signs of this type “accidental,” that is, “objects that special circumstances have associated with certain of our ideas, which they are apt to awaken.” An accidental sign can revive a moment of past happiness. Jean-Jacques is able to take refuge in memory and savor the pure presence of reminiscence by absenting himself from the society of other men. He asks asylum of his past, the magic key to which Ls the “accidental sign.” Such a sign does not signal an external reality but awakens internal images. Actually, Jean-Jacques does not use the term “accidental sign.” He does, however, speak of mnemonic signs, or, more simply, mne-

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monies. Music is a mnemonic. In the Dictionary of Music Rousseau alludes to the mnemonic power of ram des vaches (Swiss pastoral melodies): These effects, which are not felt by strangers, come from habits and memories, from a thousand circumstances of which listeners are reminded by the air, recalling their country, their former pleasures, their youth, and their way o f life, arousing bitter regret o f all that has been lost. In this case music does not act entirely as music, but as a mnemonic sign.116

Jean-Jacques sings to himself “in a broken and trembling voice” songs learned from his aunt, all the more precious for being half forgotten. And what is an herbarium but a kind of mnemonic sign? To recognize a plant properly, one must start by seeing how it grows. Herbariums serve as mnemonics for plants one knows already.117 It is pointless to herborize in an herbarium or mossarium if one has not begun by herborizing in nature. Such collections should be used only as mnemonics.118

An herbarium is not merely a mnemonic for a real plant. A dried flower is an “accidental sign” that recalls the landscape, the day, the light, and the blessed solitude of the stroll during which the flower was collected. The sign enables past happiness to be relived as immediate feeling. Saving a fragment of the past from oblivion, it creates a panorama of indestructible transparency behind the present moment. On the page of the herbarium the plant not only declares its type sub specie aeternitatis but constantly reminds JeanJacques of the day, the hour, and the circumstance in which he first encountered it. Within his obsessional system these accidental signs are among the few signs that do not immediately turn into obstruc­ tions; they become the key to a vast inner space in which nature’s welcome is resurrected: I shall never again see those beautiful landscapes, those forests, those lakes, those groves, those rocks, or those mountains, the sight of which has always moved me, but now that I can no longer roam in those happy places, I have only to open my herbarium to be transported there. The fragments of plant life that I gath­ ered there are enough to bring back the whole magnificent spec­ tacle. This herbarium is like a diary o f my herborizing expeditions, which makes me set out again with renewed joy, or like a looking glass that places them once again before my eyes.119

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It is as if some signs made Rousseau a prisoner, while others offered him the possibility of escape. For this solitary man who had ceased to listen to his fellow man, passing signs magically darkened or lightened the world, much as passing clouds cast intermittent shadows over a landscape. The world can be construed in two different ways, through a screen of evil omens or through a screen of hopeful signs. The clouds are really in Rousseau’s perception, however. There are two kinds of signs in the world because Rousseau practices two modes of interpretation that, when applied to the same object or person, can yield diametrically opposite interpretations. Nothing changes in the object, but a metamorphosis transforms the message. A shadow passes over Jean-Jacques’s vision, turning a good omen into an evil one. Here is a striking example. Rousseau is looking for a trustworthy person to whom he can confide the manuscript of the Dialogues. By chance he is visited by a young Englishman, who had been his neighbor at Wootton: I behaved as might any wretch who sees in the accidents that befall him an express commandment o f fate. I told myself that this was the repository that Providence had chosen for me. . . . It all seemed so clear to me that, thinking I saw the finger of God in this fortuitous occasion, I hastened to take hold of it.120

Upon reflection, however, die providential sign turns dim. In Brooke Boothby’s visit Rousseau now sees not the finger of God but die dark intrigues of his enemies. In either case his visitor is guided by hidden forces. The visit has no intrinsic meaning but is the sign of something else] it indicates a transcendent intendon. Rous­ seau finally chooses the negative interpretation: “Could I ignore the fact that it had been a long time since anyone came near me who was not expressly sent, and that to confide in the people around me was to deliver myself into the hands of my enemies?”121 To Rousseau this interpretation is now as obviously correct as the other interpretation—that Boothby’s visit was providential—was initially. Signs speak, Rousseau believes; he does not know and does not wish to know that he himself has already decided their meaning. Consider once more the episode with Mme Basile. What is the true meaning of the sign she made with her finger? In Bernardin’s account it signifies that the lady is offended by Rousseau’s behavior, but according to the Confessions it is a silent declaration of love. In

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both texts the value of the sign is indubitable and its meaning is given as certain. In fact, however, it is Jean-Jacques who determines whether the sign is to be interpreted as favorable or unfavorable. The sign possesses absolute value not because of some quality of the object but because of Rousseau’s act of faith. He wants to live in a world governed by fate. Were he to recognize his freedom to interpret signs at will, nothing would be clear-cut. Absolute good and absolute evil would cease to exist, leaving only the vague pos­ sibility of good or evil. But Rousseau wants a yes or a no, all or nothing. He wants signs to carry an explicit and final meaning. The authority ceded to signs is subtracted from Rousseau’s own freedom. It is a great relief to him to submit to the decision of an external will, even if the intention of that will is to persecute him. If Providence, if God has made his decision known, Rousseau need only humbly accept or resist. He will not answer: “His strength is not in action but in resistance.”122 Rousseau escapes the torment of action, of choosing among the various possible meanings that the world offers. He views his interpretation of the signs as though it were not his own work but something imposed from outside. He thus relinquishes responsibility. He no longer needs to interrogate the outside world and can concern himself exclusively with the internal feelings that external signs provoke. Particularly revealing in this regard is the moment at Les Charmettes when Rousseau asks the signs to tell him whether he will be saved or damned: I was engaged in the mechanical exercise of throwing stones at tree trunks, which I performed with my usual skill, hitting vir­ tually none. In the midst of this fine exercise I took it in mind to calm my anxiety by making a sort of prognosis. I proposed to throw my stone at the tree opposite me. If I hit it, this would be a sign of salvation; if I missed, a sign of damnation. As I said this I hurled my stone with a trembling hand and a frightful palpitation of the heart, but aimed so well that it struck the tree right in the middle; which in truth was not so difficult, for I had taken care to choose a very fat tree and one very near. From then on I have never doubted my salvation. In remembering this story I do not know whether I should laugh or cry at myself.123

As in the case of his panic at the delay in the printing of Emile, Jean-Jacques here criticizes behavior that he will later adopt un­ critically. This passage is symptomatic of his attitude toward signs: he is waiting for a response that can calm his anxiety. What he re­ quires is not a favorable response but simply a definitive one. By calling forth God’s judgment Jean-Jacques seeks to transform an

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act undertaken on his own initiative into a sign of transcendent will. The initial gesture is his, but immediately thereafter God speaks, taking control of his action and depriving him of his freedom. The stone hurled at the tree strikes home and becomes a sign hurled Jean-Jacques. Its flight is reversed; the hand forgets that it has thrown the stone, and now it is God who acts alone. “From the beginning of time signs have been the language of the gods,” wrote Hölderlin in his ode to Rousseau. Yes, Jean-Jacques wants to listen to the language of the gods. And if the gods are silent, he is pre­ pared to provoke them, to ask them for an answer to quell his anxiety, to tell him whether he is saved or damned. But who speaks? Not God but the echo of Jean-Jacques, in the guise of the absolute. For wanting more than conventional human communication al­ lows, is not Jean-Jacques condemned to endure the absence of communication? Does he not become caught in a web of signs that, rather than reveal the world and bare the souls of other men, reflect his own anguish or plunge him into his own past? Signs failed to give Rousseau access to the world but, like the waters that reflected Narcissus’s own image, magically made his ego the slave of its reflection. Amorous Communication

For a long time the question of sexual experience remained for Jean-Jacques a part of die problem of communication. If the evi­ dence of the Confessions is to be believed, sexual desire first mani­ fested itself as an objectless anxiety; Jean-Jacques was incapable of desiring an actual woman or seeking to possess her. Desire was a sort of effervescence, an ardor without object, or with too many objects. It was not experienced as desire but as confusion, as obscure anticipation. Many things irritated and “inflamed” but nothing sat­ isfied it, for no determinate satisfaction yet existed. For a fairly long time, it seems, the object of desire and the rapture of desire were confounded. While anticipating still unknown pleasures, JeanJacques was happy to enjoy the anxious pleasure of being in a constant state of desire, of experiencing a perfectly blind sensual emotion to which no outside object could respond or correspond. Soon, however, he began inventing “imaginary societies” com­ posed of people fashioned to his liking, whom he placed in moving situations. He relived the novels with which he had passed the nights of his childhood. It hardly mattered to him that he had to bear the entire burden of his imaginary conversations by himself.

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In this realm illusion is worth more than reality. And since the presence of a desirable creature is here no more than a “circum­ stantial cause,” it is better to assign this role to imaginary characters, who can be made to disappear more easily when necessary so that Jean-Jacques may savor his precious emotions in solitude. Real people are too opaque, too unwieldy, too full of surprises; precau­ tions are necessary in dealing with them, and Rousseau has no idea how to go about it. Whenever he finds himself in the presence of a person who moves him, his feelings overcome him at once. Lack­ ing the clarity of mind and energy necessary for amorous conquest, he becomes clumsy and frightened, and unless he finds satisfaction in silent conversation or a “lightning-quick” emotion caused by the mere presence of his beloved, possession eludes him; the love of real persons does not take him as far as the love of imaginary ones. How much more to his liking are private visions, in which perfect creatures offer themselves to him! Was the joy he felt in such en­ counters any less real than the joy he took from being with a crea­ ture of the flesh? For Rousseau the world of reverie is an ideal world, not only because he populated it with beautiful and perfect beings but also because his enjoyment was instantaneous and easy and no obstacles stood in his way; he remains immobile and every­ thing comes to him, nothing has to be conquered in all-out battle. In the imagination, amorous conquest, unhappiness, separation, and return are simply miraculous gifts. Not all the satisfactions he imagines involve possession, either. There are also refusals and sacrifices, for nothing is more pleasant than to renounce in the name of virtue, and imaginary frustration brings forth sweet tears. In his daily dreams, for example, two “charming cousins” (and with them Mlle de Graffenried and Mile Galley) throw themselves into Rousseau’s arms, but he virtuously eludes both. What makes reverie so pleasant is that everything is freely given. All action is mimicked by imagination against an empty backdrop, and all that is left when the imagination has done its work is the feeling that overcomes Jean-Jacques. No real action is necessary. He welcomes his reverie and is immediately welcomed into an “in­ timate society.” Welcomes and is welcomed: the two situations are interchangeable. Things and people come to Jean-Jacques without his having to conquer them. Rousseau of course prefers to be wel­ comed, as we have seen. He thinks of himself initially as an outcast, deprived of maternal tenderness and forced to wander outside the walls of his native city; he expects princesses to receive him, indeed to offer him their intimacy, their society, their homes, and their

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beds. In fact, this need to withdraw into proffered intimacy is pre­ ceded by another tendency in which the imagination plays an equally important part, namely, Jean-Jacques’s penchant for living as an outcast, an exile, a vagabond. He alternates between two modes, first “hurling himself into the vastness of the world,“121 then plain­ tively imploring welcome, consolation, punishment, and forgive­ ness for the errors he commits as prodigal son. Jean-Jacques therefore waits for Mme de Warens and Mme de Larnage to take the initiative, to make the crucial advances. He allows himself to be conquered, like a woman: “Never . . . have I had the courage to make sexual proposals to any woman who has not more or less forced me to them by her advances.“135Even these unsolicited offers of sexual gratification are not really necessary; he is already happy simply being with his “mama“ [Mme de Warens] before she dreams of giving herself to him. Perfect pleasure is possible without sexual intimacy: “I felt neither emotions nor de­ sires in her presence; my state was one of blissful calm, in which I enjoyed I knew not what.“12(i He is prepared to settle for symbolicgratifications (some of the oral type): How often have I kissed my bed because she had slept in it; my curtains, all the furniture o f my room, since they belonged to her and her fair hand had touched them; even the floor onto which I threw myself, calling to mind how she had walked there! Some­ times even in her presence 1 fell into extravagances that seemed as if they could only have been inspired by the most violent love. One day at table, just as she had pul some food into her mouth, I cried out that 1 had seen a hair in it. She spat the morsel back on her plate, whereupon I seized it greedily and swallowed it. In a word, there was but one difference between myself and the most passionate o f lovers. But that difference was an essential one, and sufficient to render iny whole condition inexplicable in Lhc light o f reason.127

But as soon as Jean-Jacques becomes Mme de Warens’s lover, he leaps directly into a paradise beyond the flesh. What is essential in their love is not the commerce of the senses but something very like the happiness that Rousseau knew before he possessed her: for their “possession of one another“ was not “a love relationship, but a more real possession, dependent not on the senses, on sex, age, or personal beauty, but on everything by which one is oneself, and which one cannot lose except by ceasing to be.“,2H This pos­ session is immediate; it unites two beings without involving their bodies or their senses.

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Exhibitionism

Nothing is more revealing than certain extremes of Rousseau’s behavior. For a critic anxious to elucidate if not the totality of a writer and his work then at least the principles that make them intelligible, Rousseau’s sexual aberrations, as recorded in the work itself, contribute to its overall meaning just as much as its theoretical framework. The point is not to trace Rousseau’s ideology to its emotional roots. Yet it is impossible to deal with “intimate” matters solely by means of anecdote; the writer’s experience, explicitly in­ corporated into his work, cannot be viewed as a marginal datum. Exhibitionism was an aberrant phase of Rousseau’s sexual behavior, but it lies transposed at the root of a work like the Confessions. To be sure, there is no justification for a “regressive” interpretation. (A conventional psychoanalytic critic might, for instance, be tempted to characterize the Confessions as a more or less sublimated form of Jean-Jacques’s juvenile exhibitionism.) I prefer a “prospective” interpretation; I want, that is, to examine attitudes and events that reveal intentions, choices, or desires whose significance transcends the circumstances in which they first became manifest. Even if we did not know that Jean-Jacques’s exhibitionism in Turin’s “dark alleys” and “hidden hovels” presaged the public reading of his Confessions, our analysis of his sexual behavior would be incomplete if it failed to emphasize those aspects of Rousseau’s “relation to the world” that ultimately led him to produce an autobiographical nar­ rative. His erotic behavior is not an isolated datum but a manifes­ tation of the total individual, and it must be analyzed as such.129 Rousseau’s exhibitionism must not be overlooked, nor should it be treated in isolation as mere sexual deviance. His entire personality stands revealed, including some of his basic “existential choices.” A literary work is of course not just a camouflage for some infantile tendency; criticism must examine the primary facts of the writer’s emotional life in order to discover what impelled him to give those facts literary form, to couch them in philosophy and art. Everything, it seems, stems from Rousseau’s being deprived of maternal love. “I cost my mother her life, and my birth was the first of my misfortunes.”130It scarcely seems possible to say anything new about this birth, which may have instilled in Jean-Jacques a sense of the sinfulness of existence. Commentators have produced a variety of interpretations that fit together quite well (perhaps too well). To explain Rousseau’s masochism, for instance: his need to pay for the sin of being born. His relationship with Mme de Warens:

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obviously a result of his desire for the maternal breast. His proclivity for ménages à trois: the result of his symbolic quest to win his father’s forgiveness and protection. His passivity and narcissism: consequences of guilt feelings that prevent him from seeking “nor­ mal” gratifications, that is, from assuming the role of his father’s rival vis-à-vis women. His raptures and ecstasies and taste for the immediate: the result of a return to the womb, to the peacefulness of Mother Nature. And his liking for dairy products: the inter­ pretation is all too obvious.'41 Behavior cannot be fully explained in terms of ulterior motives or pretexts, nor in terms of the substitution of symbolic objects for primitive objects of desire. What is crucial is how the internal and the external are linked; we must ask how the purposes of action are conceptualized and structured. An answer to this question brings us close to the truth of thought and experience. To assume that something like the Oedipus complex determines everything about a personality is to accept a rather impoverished conception of psy­ chological causality. People often talk as though “complexes” pos­ sessed an energy of their own. But in fact psychic life involves an individual interacting with his environment. What matters about behavior is not unconscious motives or conscious aims but the way in which action links motives and aims together. Or, to put it another way, what matters is the invention of new forms of desire to meet the requirements of a chosen course of action. Applying this pre­ cept to the case of Rousseau requires that we take into account not only what he desires (consciously or symbolically) but even more the way he aims to satisfy his desire, his “manner of approach.” Rousseau gives numerous examples of sudden upheaval in his life. In the Confessions the contrasts between one episode and the next are often so stark that they seem to involve different personalities. What is particularly striking is the way Rousseau occasionally seems to forget what he has just recounted; he attaches great importance to a scene, only to move on to another scene in which the great lesson is immediately forgotten. The transition from book 2 to book 3 of the Confession is a case in point. Book 2 ends with the story of the stolen ribbon and Rousseau’s slander of poor Marion, who is dismissed as a result. He assures us that this “crime” left a “terrible impression” on him for die rest of his life. But on the following page begins die third book, in which Jean-Jacques describes his feelings in the weeks following the “crime.” We find not the slightest echo of die previous episode, nothing that can be interpreted as a

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consequence of the affair. It is as if Jean-Jacques has “drunk the waters of oblivion,” refusing to be confined by his past in order to yield more fully to his present desire: I was restless, absent-minded, and dreamy; I wept and sighed and longed for a pleasure that I could not imagine but of which I nevertheless felt the lack. This state is indescribable, and few men can even have any conception of it. For most of them have anticipated this overflowing o f life, which is both delicious and tormenting, and which, in the intoxication of desire, gives a for­ etaste of bliss. My inflamed blood filled my mind with pictures of women and girls. But not knowing the true nature of sex I imag­ ined them acting according to my own strange fantasies and had no idea of anything else.132

Among the things he fantasizes about is his treatment at the hands of Mile Lambercier: an ambivalent spanking, at once pun­ ishment and erotic gratification. It may be that the imagined pun­ ishment is Rousseau’s “unconscious” response to his mistreatment of Marion. That mistreatment was also ambivalent. By slandering her Rousseau proved that he loved her and almost declared his love openly: “When I accused the poor girl it is strange but true that my friendship for her was the cause. She was present in my thoughts, and I threw the blame on the first person who occurred to me. I accused her of having done what I intended to do myself. I said that she had given the ribbon to me because I meant to give it to her.”133 We detect here a hidden connection between moments not linked by any explicit continuity. Although the transition from the story of the “crime” to the account of erotic obsession is abrupt and the only overt similarity between the two passages is the pres­ ence in both of the word “strange” [bizarre], it is clear that JeanJacques’s masochistic fantasies are a reaction to the sadistic situation that precedes them. Libido wells up in reaction to the death of Mme de Vercellis, and the fantasies involving girls determined to spank Jean-Jacques feature a Marion-Lambercier who exacts a vo­ luptuous revenge. This reaction is simultaneously perverse and “moralistic”; Rousseau’s crime is redressed by an imaginary pun­ ishment, and his sadistic declaration of love is complemented by his vengeful partner’s consent. Rousseau’s exhibitionism begins here. Jean-Jacques wants to move from dream to reality, to be treated in real life as he imagines in his fantasies. But he does not know how and does not want to bridge the distance between himself and women of flesh and blood. He dares not ask to have what he desires. How could he ask for it

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without compromising his hope of gratification? For what he wants is precisely that women should take the initiative. What he most desires is to do nothing while a woman comes to him and hits him; then he can take delight in the mortification of his flesh. JeanJacques is ashamed to admit wliat he wants; he tries only to provoke the “desired treatment,, but without saying a word, without naming his desire. He is satisfied to “expose myself Lo women from afar, in the condition in which I should have liked to be in dieir com­ pany.”134 His satisfaction comes not from the act of exhibition but from the voluptuous punishment he hopes will ensue. His exhi­ bitionism is a silent way of asking a question that he is ashamed to pul explicitly, a pathological way of confusing the sign and the thing. All he can do to secure the gratification he desires is offer himself in silence. His role ends there. The rest must come from without. The only act of which Rousseau is capable stops at himself: “There was only one step for me still to make to achieve the ex­ perience I desired.”13* But it is up to some “bold girl” to do what he wants. Jean-Jacques will not make a move; his courage is the “courage to wait.”136 Finally, castrating punishment comes in the form of a “big man with a big moustache, a big hat, and a big sword.” This story, as told in mocking tones in the Confessions, seems rather ridiculous. Yet the confession is of the utmost importance. It exhibits a tendency that we have encountered before, but never with such clarity, namely, the tendency to rely on the magical power of simple presence. Jean-Jacques believes that he can fascinate women merely by “exposing himself.” He employs the “absurd” power of nudily to attract attention. His purpose is not to derive pleasure from exposing himself. Exhibitionism is only a means to an end. More precisely, it is the only means Jean-Jacques is capable of. And it happens to consist in a refusal to use all “normal” means, a choice to rely instead on immediate seduction. Jean-Jacques wants to act on others, but he is trapped within himself. His exhibitionism is an extreme instance of a pattern of behavior directed toward the outside world but unwilling to confront its obstacles head-on. Rous­ seau wants to affect others but without venturing outside himself. He prefers to be himself and to show himself as he is. Given his refusal to act, the distance between self and others can be traversed only by magical means. But his attempt to employ such means ends in failure. It is not as easy as he thought to provoke the “experience he desires” or even to attract attention. Failure throws him back upon himself,

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upon consciousness of his solitude (a propitious moment for the lessons of the Savoyard vicar or M. Gaime). Narcissus spies his own reflection and prefers it to the sight of others. He again plunges into reverie, aware now that there is no simple way of passing from imagination to reality. He can, however, cling to the imaginary, immerse himself wholeheartedly in his imagination. “I made up my mind to write and to hide.” In the erotic sphere Jean-Jacques makes the same decision: “I remember that Mme de Luxembourg once spoke to me disparagingly of a man who left his mistress in order to write her letters. I told her that I might have been that man, and I might have added that at times I had been.”137 To write her letters. In other words, to separate from the beloved (or de­ sired) person in order to keep company with an image of her, and with oneself. Or to keep company with oneself and to offer oneself up to love in words, phrases, and images that might exert a more powerful fascination than mere physical presence. There is something ambiguous in this retreat into the imagination and solitude. For Rousseau it represents a return to total indepen­ dence and to the perfect self-sufficiency of immediate sentiment. But objectively it is a roundabout way of attracting attention by means unavailable to simple physical presence. Through his re­ course to language Jean-Jacques uses objective means to draw at­ tention to his subjective uniqueness, his hostility to the rest of the world. He in fact uses mediation, though his belief in immediacy remains unshaken. Jean-Jacques seems to want to make himself attractive by re­ maining permanently in a state of exaltation, consoled by his private dreams and fictions. He wants to seduce without letting go of him­ self, without giving up the immediate rapture of desire. He seeks to elicit the attention, sympathy, and passion of others, but without doing anything beyond surrendering to his cherished dreams. Se­ duced himself, he will seduce others, will seduce them because he is seduced himself. He fascinates his audience because he is fasci­ nated by the spectacle within. His dual strategy is obvious. When he exposes himself to the gaze of others, his intention is to provoke the response he needs. But he provokes that response as though he had done nothing to bring it about, as though he neither desired nor looked for it, as though it occurred spontaneously by some strange quirk of fate. He some­ times pretends to be surprised. He speaks up only when bidden by the inner voice of duty (or truth or pleasure), yet others are bent on contradicting or enticing him. He claims not to care, not

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to deserve such an honor, to want only to be himself. The imme­ diacy of the inner life is his alibi and his asylum. It is also a way of doing without the means normally required to make contact with other people. Jean-Jacques hopes to win love simply by being him­ self. Without venturing outside himself he hopes to attract ten­ derness and devotion. In this some will see—and have already seen— hypocrisy and bad faith. Rousseau is unwilling to accept the risks or to make the effort required to achieve authentic communication with another person, hence he loses his grip on the truth of his personal relationships. But at the same time he loses his grip on the truth of his feelings, since he feels nothing that is not intended overtly or covertly to be displayed before witnesses. He is innocent, sincere, resigned, or prostrate in the eyes of all Europe. Unwilling to engage in mediate action or to commit himself to the harsh world of means, Jean-Jacques loses both the purity of immediate feeling and the possibility of concrete communication with other people. This double loss defines him as a writer. He writes books and operas only to console himself, to enter into conversation with imaginary characters. But he hopes that this ac­ tivity, which keeps him confined in commerce with himself, will win him the sincere admiration of his contemporaries. Apparently with­ out doing anything to bridge the gap between himself and others, abstracted in reverie, he gets what he wants: other people look at him and come to him in trouble and confusion. His choice of art is not pure, because he thinks too much about the effect he will have on sensitive souls. He has not had to travel the true road to the heart, the long detour of mediation, because he never con­ cerned himself without establishing and maintaining real ties to others. A magic of representation is thus constructed. Its power is quite different from that of the magic of presence on which Jean-Jacques first pinned his hopes. After writing Le devin du village (The Village Soothsayer) and La nouvelle Héloïse and becoming enchanted with his own visions, he finds himself unexpectedly but happily the center of attention; people look at him with “delicious tears” in their eyes, and he eagerly laps them up. Jean-Jacques feels present in a rep­ resentative image that fascinates his female audience. What is most precious about the glory he achieves when Le devin is successful is the amorous gratification, not very different in nature from what he expected when he exposed himself in Turin’s alleys and hovels. But this time he shows himself in his work (which is the dream of his tender and innocent soul). He can stay where he is; the “courage

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to wait” is enough. Instead of receiving voluptuous punishment, he causes tears to flow and bosoms to heave with sighs. The mas­ ochism of the spanking has turned into the gentle sadism of pastoral tenderness: I felt the entire spectacle in a swooning rapture that was too much for m e.139 I soon surrendered myself, fully and unreservedly, to the pleasure of savoring my glory. I am nevertheless certain that sexual desire had more to do with it than an author’s vanity, and certainly if there had been only men I would not have been racked, as I was constantly, by the desire to lap up with my lips the delicious tears that I caused to flow.139

A miraculous return. When he presented himself the first time, he failed. Now he represents himself and succeeds. Of course Rousseau knows that in opera the feelings are mim­ icked only in the least immediate manner. He says as much in the Dictionary of Music : In order to please consistently and prevent boredom, music must raise itself to the rank of the imitative arts, but its imitation, unlike that of poetry and painting, is not always immediate. It is usually by means o f words that music fixes the object whose image it offers us; the moving sounds of the human voice enable that image to arouse appropriate sentiments in the heart.H0

But the pleasure that Rousseau experiences when Le devin suc­ ceeds does not come to him by way of the lyrics or melodies of the work. The event is an erotic one, though the role of flesh is un­ important. Pleasure comes from communication at a distance. The ladies in the audience have their eyes fixed on the stage, yet JeanJacques senses that he is master of their hearts. With tears of emo­ tion in their eyes, these women belong to him. The ecstasy that he experiences, although obtained in such an indirect manner, is an immediate pleasure that negates the cumbrous opacity of the flesh: soul touches soul. Rousseau is Dionysus, sowing the rapture of virtuous love and involuntary frenzy. He is surrounded by his maenads. They feel passion for him and through him. At last his power and his presence coincide because he has been clever enough to absent himself entirely, to pour himself out into music that sings of the seduction of absence and the joy of return. But lyrical rapture is not Rousseau’s only means of reestablishing the possibility of a seductive presence. Among the other avenues open to him is the assertion of reflexive superiority, of virtuous heroism. This is not mere sublimation, not mere transcendental

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triumph of morality. It is a mode of behavior whose effect is to enhance the prestige of presence, with an eye to rather unusual amorous gratifications. The Tutor

It has been argued, by psychoanalyst René Laforgue among others, that love triangles offer Rousseau the opportunity to relive the experience of being a guilty son hoping to restore a lost intimacy. But Rousseau attempts almost immediately to overcome the de­ pendency and inferiority inherent in his position as an interloper; he seeks to become the teacher, the master, in sole possession of knowledge of happiness. Jean-Jacques assumes, for example, the role of protective mentor whose only concern is to bring Sophie d’Houdetot and Saint-Lambert together. He writes Sophie Lettres morales to teach her love as virtue and love as wisdom. He enjoys the pleasure of being the one through whom the current of love must pass. He is the mediator, without having to relinquish the immediate pleasure of benevolence. In appearance he wants to possess nothing outside himself. It is enough that the lovers need him in order to have each other. He is neither the lover nor the beloved but the point of contact between the two. In Emile, for instance, the tutor joins the hands of the young couple: Contemplating my work in them, how often I feel a rapture that causes my heart to palpitate! How often 1join their hands in mine while blessing Providence and sighing ardent sighs! How many kisses I press upon those two clasped hands! How many tears of joy they see me shed! And they in turn are moved by my emotion.141

What a strange ecstasy, that wants to be a reflection of the lovers’ happiness yet inhabits that happiness as its own creation. The tutor claims a place both at the center of love’s rapture and outside it. He knows both die rapture of contact and the freedom of total disengagement. He enjoys and renounces simultaneously. He aban­ dons himself to feeling but immediately withdraws into reflection. In Rousseau’s work the love triangle always implies rapture and reflexive transposition. The Rousseauian hero is both sage and seducer. He deranges and he ennobles (or deranges as he ennobles). He is less interested in physical possession than in spiritual fasci­ nation; he wants to become an emotional confidant.142 Thus he makes use of a seductive magic that does not compro­ mise itself in the sexual act. Often this magic is indistinguishable from the exaltation of virtue; one reinforces the other, creating

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an ambiguity that was understandably considered impure. SaintPreux’s friend, Lord Bomston, “loved by two mistresses,” wavers between impassioned madness and calm reason: he drives an ar­ dent marquise “insane” while teaching repentance and virtue to a young Roman courtesan. He needs nothing more and does not try to possess either woman. Henceforth he can love himself narcissistically: His virtue produced in him a bliss sweeter than the pleasure a woman’s beauty would have elicited, and which is not exposed to exhaustion as sensual pleasure is. Happier in the pleasures he renounced than the voluptuary is in the pleasures he enjoys, he loved longer, remained free, and enjoyed life more than those who use it up.H3

Two loves become the pretext for two refusals; Lord Bomston dominates two women, both of whom desire him, but he stays safely out of range. In the two desirable women he renounces he sees a reflection of himself, purified by renunciation. Lord Bomston’s amorous adventure ends in restoring the integrity of his ego after the inner storm and tumult caused by his passion. There is no return to the realm of inner feeling because that realm was never abandoned. As in the scene where the tutor joins the hands of Emile and Sophie, reflexive wisdom enjoys sensual rapture only to spurn it at once in the name of a higher freedom. A suspect con­ nivance, yet one that in its way represents a reconciliation of the mediate and the immediate, of reflection and sensation. The re­ flective man finds pleasure where he seemed to spurn it; he ap­ propriates for his own benefit the sensual pleasures and pains he provokes in others, upon whom he does not wish to be dependent. While maintaining his purity by standing aloof from sensation, he momentarily becomes a sensitive soul once more, surreptitiously capturing an emotion for solitary enjoyment. When Emile and Sophie become engaged, the tutor insinuates himself into the effusion of their emotion. Their happiness is his creation, and he wants to enjoy it from within. Yet he retains an attitude of superiority. The young couple owe him gratitude and affection, but he owes them nothing in return. He collects his debt by sharing in their love. The responsibility of the engagement falls entirely on Emile and Sophie. The tutor retains his freedom, even though he indiscreetly intrudes in their married life, whose purest, most intimate, sweetest (and most mawkish) moments he shares without shouldering any of the material burdens of romance. How

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much time and effort it took, though, first to arrange and then to enjoy this moment of emotional superiority! The tutor has to create the happiness of the young couple before he can enjoy it from his sovereign height. To achieve this moment of independent bliss, of pure exaltation, of unfettered participation required much exer­ tion employing many means and involving numerous intermediate stages. Again the magic of presence becomes effective only afLer a lengthy detour, and help from mediating reflection is indispens­ able.141 Here the seduction is not that of Dionysus but that of Soc­ rates, who shows the soul the path that it must follow.113 And Thérèse? She allows Jean-Jacques to stay within himself. She brings him the “supplement*1he needs.146 Supplement. The word is revealing. It occurs earlier, in the third book of the Confessions: “I learned that dangerous supplément, or means of cheating nature [masturbation], which leads in young men of my temperament to various kinds of excesses that eventually imperil their health, their strength, and sometimes their lives.“147 The use of this particular word shows us what Rousseau saw in Thérèse: someone he could easily identify with his own flesh and who never raised the problem of the other. Thérèse is not a partner in a dialogue but an auxiliary to Rousseau’s physical existence. With other women he sought the miraculous moment when the presence of the flesh would cease to be an obstacle. But in Thérèse he found flesh that simply was not an obstacle. No wonder that, as we know from Boswell’s papers, she allowed herself to have love affairs with other men.

7

The Problems of Autobiography

“Who am I?” The question has an immediate answer. “I feel my own heart” [Je sens mon coeur]. 1 The self, in other words, possesses a distinct form of knowledge: in tu itjye, immediate self­ understanding, derived entirely from feeling. For Jean-Jacques selfknowledge is not a problem but a given: “Having spent my life in my own company, I should know myself.”2 Self-knowledge is based on feeling, the substance of which is ever changing. Circumstances may alter,but feelings are irrefutable and unmistakable. Self-knowledge perpetually begins anew; truth in each instance dawns for the first time. The act of feeling can be repeated indefinitely, but at each moment its authority is absolute; it inaugurates the truth. The self discovers and in the same moment takes possession of itself. And as it does so it calls into question all that it previously knew, or believed it knew, about itself. Its prior self-image was confused, incomplete, naïve. Only now comes the lightWhence the prodigious variety of Rousseau’s autobiographical writings. He begins the Dialogues as though he had never written the Confessions, in which he claimed to have “told all.” Then come the Rêveries and yet another fresh start: “What am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry.”3 The more he succumbs to his delusions, the more completely he severs his ties to other men, the more complex and difficult self-knowledge seems: “The ‘Know Thyself’ of the temple at Delphi was not such an easy precept to observe as I had thought in my Confessions.”4 Knowledge is difficult to obtain, but never so difficult that the truth escapes, never so difficult that the mind is left without recourse. Introspection is never impossible. If the truth does not assert itself at once, it is enough, in order to dispel all obscurities, to “scrutinize one’s con­ science” for the length of time it takes to complete a solitary stroll. Everything is explicable; it is possible to see oneself whole, to turn the “in itself” into the “for itself.” Occasionally Rousseau realizes 180

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that his actions are peculiar, but he never blames shadowy parts of his consciousness or will. He is only half responsible for the oddness of his behavior, and he is content simply to report his actions and declare them bizarre, as though confession drained them of mystery. For Jean-Jacques the spectacle of consciousness must be a spectacle without shadows; no exceptions to this rule can be tolerated. To be sure, Rousseau sometimes puzzles himself and finds his actions hard to fathom: “The true original causes of most of my actions are not as clear to me as I used to imagine.” But immediately following this passage (Rêveries, Sixth Walk) he forgets about the defects in his in­ ner vision and claims to give a full elucidation of what initially seemed obscure. Rousseau occasionally begins with an admission of igno­ rance about himself, but he never ends with one. Gaps in memory do not trouble him; never does he say, like Proust, that a forgotten event hides an essential truth. What slips from memory is unim­ portant to him; it cannot be essential. In this respect he is unflaggingly optimistic, sure of his firm grasp on the inner truth. Inner truth tends, moreover, to externalize itself immediately. Jean-Jacques says that he is incapable of dissimulation. Everything he feels transforms itself into a sign, so that his feelings are instantly visible. All his emotions, he likes to think, are visible on his face. His subjective life is not “hidden” not buried in psychological “depths.” It bubbles spontaneously to the surface; emotion is always too powerful to be contained or repressed. “It is totally impossible for me, given my nature, to hide anything that I feel or think.”5 Furthermore, “my heart, transparent as crystal, has never been able to hide, even for a minute, any feeling of any warmth that sought refuge there.”" But this absolute transparency is unavailing. It is not enough to be an open book; others must agree to read the truth that is written there, and to do so they must be able to read the language in which truth is couched. In fact, however, they fail to recognize Rousseau's true nature, true feelings, and true reasons for acting or not acting: I see from the way in which those who think they know me in­ terpret my actions that they know nothing. Nobody in the world knows me other than myself.7 I see that those who live on the most intimate terms with me do not know me and attribute most o f my actions, whether for good or for ill, to motives other than those that caused them.8

Thus error lies in other people’s perception. Although JeanJacques is completely open, he remains completely unknown. Al-

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though his life is an open book, others act as though he were dissembling. Although he thinks he has laid his soul bare, the truth about him remains hidden, as though he were wearing a disguise or a mask. He seems, through no fault of his own, to be hiding dreadful secrets, even though he has stripped himself naked in public. He doubts not his knowledge of himself but others’ un­ derstanding of him. The difficulty, he thinks, lies not in acquiring self-knowledge but in making others see what he already knows. The Confessions are intended primarily to correct other people’s errors, not to remember things past. Rousseau’s first question is: Why aren’t immediately obvious inner truths immediately recog­ nized by other people? Why is it so difficult to reconcile the way we see ourselves with the way others see us? He is forced to resort to autobiography, to write an apologia pro vita sua, because it is not enough to understand himself; dial understanding must be re­ flected through the eyes of witnesses in die outside world. In other words, merely to dwell in the grace of transparency is not enough for Rousseau. He needs to persuade others that his transparency is real. A man who desires recognition must act; he must resort to language and express himself indefaligably. Truth, revealed in its pure form by unmistakable signs but unrecognized by others, must be made explicit in “the language of the tribe.” If the spontaneous evidence of the heart will not do, the truth must be made clearer still. Rousseau’s heart is transparent to himself, but now he must make it transparent to others. As he puts it, “I want everybody to read my heart.”9 Or again: I would like somehow to be able to make my soul transparent to the reader, and to that end I try to show it to him from all angles and in all lights, so that nothing takes place within it that he does not see; this in order that he may judge for himself what causes these things to happen.10

To make one’s soul transparent to the reader. It is as if trans­ parency did not already exist but had to be created, as if inner clarity alone were not enough. As long as transparency is strictly private, unrecognized by others, it is paradoxically veiled and solitary, potential rather than actual. Inner transparency is en­ cased in a shell, trapped, cut off from the outside world. It be­ comes real only wrhen perceived as transparency by an outside observer or, as Rousseau puts it, when it becomes “transparent to the reader.”

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So far, however, all outside observers have peremptorily rejected Jean-Jacques’s inner certainty; his is a transparency without spec­ tators. Worse, other people mistake him for someone he is not. They see him as proud or wicked. He discovers this for the first time at Bossey, when he is accused of a “crime” he did not commit. Others mistake him; they punish him because of imaginary sus­ picions; they inflict pain he does not deserve. He is innocent, but his judges are misled by “opinion.” And he is too weak to escape their verdict. Jean-Jacques talks about himself because he is in the position of one who has already been judged and who wants to appeal that judgment. Rousseau’s first major autobiographical text comprises the four letters to Malesherbes. Not having heard from his printers, he pours forth unjustified accusations and desperate appeals. When he has calmed down, he begs pardon, blaming his panic on the situation of extreme isolation in which he finds himself. In the meantime, the friends he has alarmed without reason have un­ doubtedly drawn conclusions of their own. Certain that they have found him in the wrong, Jean-Jacques feels a need to appeal their verdict. Since solitude was the reason for his panic, he feels he must explain why he has chosen to live in isolation: not because he dislikes action but because he loves justice and humanity. He is no mis­ anthrope: he does not hate men but loves them too dearly not to suffer constantly from their presence. It is true that he has behaved unjustly, but fundamentally his behavior stems from innocent inten­ tions and feelings, tender passions, disappointed benevolence, a boundless need for friendship that satisfied itself with fantasies, and so on. He submits this evidence to his judges in the hope of winning a reversal of their verdict. Their previous judgment, he claims, was wrong. Until he has “told all," he wants to be given the benefit of the doubt: “Reader, stay your judgment.” He looks for­ ward to a new verdict that will at last be honest and just. Rousseau more or less deliberately confuses logical judgment, which decides the facts of die case, with ediical judgment, which establishes right and wrong. He appeals to a transcendent judge, who in a single act will both establish the truth and render justice. Speaking of himself, he says: “Justice and truth are in his mind synonymous and interchangeable words.”11 The “struggle for recognition” (to use Hegel’s terminology) is nothing other than an appearance be­ fore a tribunal. For Rousseau, to be recognized essendally means to be jusdfied, to be found innocent. (Yet the only court whose

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jurisdiction he does not challenge is that of God, the only judge who combines justice and truth; the only judgment to which he will submit is the Last Judgment.) Rousseau appeals the judgment that has been brought against him, seeking a revision of the verdict in which he will not only be found innocent but also recognized as innocent; he wants both his authenticity and his righteousness con­ firmed. In the eyes of the Judge for whom justice and truth are synonymous he will then claim, as one who has been judged, the corresponding privilege: irrevocable certainty that innocence and existence are one and the same. In the early drafts and the preface to the first version of the Confessions, Rousseau is preoccupied with another problem, a prob­ lem he could not avoid even if no trace of it was to remain in the final version of that work. He proposes to tell the story of his life, but he is neither a bishop (like Saint Augustine) nor a nobleman (like Montaigne) and has taken no part in court life or in the army. Hence he has no right to present himself to the public, or at least no right of the kind hitherto invoked as justification for works of autobiography. He is, moreover, a poor man, obliged to work for his daily bread. What right does he have to call attention to his existence? Yet what is to prevent him from claiming such a right? Commoner that he is, why should he not claim attention simply because he is a man and the feelings of the heart depend on neither status nor wealth: I am a poor man, and when in need o f bread I know no more honest way of earning it than to live by my own work. This idea alone will prevent many readers -from continuing. They cannot imagine that a man in need of bread can be worth knowing. It is not for them that I am writing.12 Do not object that, being a man o f the people, I have nothing to say that merits the attention o f readers. That may be true of the events of my life, but I am writing not the history of those events in themselves but that o f my state of mind as they befell me. Now, a soul is more or less illustrious according as its sentiments are more or less great and noble and its ideas more or less vivid and numerous. Here the facts are mere occasional causes. How­ ever obscure my life may have been, if I have thought more and better than kings, the history o f my mind is more interesting than the history of theirs.13

Here, the claim that feeling has rights is intimately associated with the claim that a mere commoner may reasonably aspire to tell the story of his life. Man’s value lies entirely in his feelings, hence

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no social privilege or prerogative matters. (Saint-Preux is the wit­ ness, and Julie the martyr, of this new truth.) Greater sentiments, more vivid ideas: there is no contradiction here between sentimen­ talism and the rationalism of the Enlightenment. On the contrary: the intellectual authority of reason and the moral primacy of sen­ timent are both ideological arms of the prerevolutionary bourgeoi­ sie. States of mind, feelings, and thoughts are equivalent tokens of superiority. The work that Rousseau is about to undertake is therefore more than just a plea of innocence on the part of a victim of persecution. It is also a manifesto from a member of the third estate, an affir­ mation that the events of his inner life and his private life have an absolute importance and that, though he be neither prince nor bishop nor farmer-general, he nevertheless has the right to the attention of all men. The social significance of the Confessions should not be forgotten. Jean-Jacques wants to be recognized, not just as an exceptional mind or an innocent victim but as a simple man, an untitled foreigner, yet one who is for that very reason capable of producing a portrait of man possessing universal validity. A traveler and an adventurer, he claims to know mankind better than most men, with a knowledge that is broader, more varied, and more useful than usual. A former lackey, he openly proclaims the su­ periority of the servant over the master. As a foreigner and a man of no account socially, he has been able to move freely and to observe all levels of French society while dwelling in none. Having no station, he has been able to know people of every station: Having no estate o f my own, I have known all estates; I have lived in all, from the lowest to the highest, with the exception o f the throne. The Great know only the Great, the petty know only the petty. The latter perceive the former with admiration for their rank and are perceived only with unwarranted contempt. The one being too distant from the other, the humanity that both share escapes them equally. But I, careful to peel away its mask, rec­ ognize it everywhere. I have weighed and compared their re­ spective tastes, their pleasures, their prejudices, and their precepts. Admitted into their homes as a man without pretensions or im­ portance, I examined them at my leisure; once they were no longer disguised, I was able to compare man to man and estate to estate. Being nothing and wanting nothing, I embarrassed no one and importuned nobody. I had access everywhere but staked no claims, dining some mornings with princes and supping eve­ nings with peasants.14

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Such a passage reveals clearly what the man Jean-Jacques Rous­ seau claimed for himself: that his experience has universal signif­ icance and that, precisely because he is a self-taught man of the people, he is entitled to be heard, because no one else possesses so accurate an idea of man as he really is. Nothing in himself, he was able to understand everything. The privilege of representing man in general, hitherto the property of the aristocrat, the honnête homme or man of quality, passed now to a cultivated parvenu, a bourgeois, who, seizing the opportunity afforded by the disintegration of aris­ tocratic society, was capable of taking in and judging the whole spectacle. How to Describe Oneself?

Can I tell the truth about myself? Rousseau answers this question in the affirmative. Autobiography, he believes, comes much closer to the truth than any attempt to describe a person from the outside. The painter is content to capture a likeness. He does not imitate reality as much as he constructs it and never even glimpses the soul that ought to have been his subject. His method is bold, but its result is arbitrary: “They [i.e., painters] grasp the prominent traits of a character, link them together with other features of their own invention, and as long as the result looks like a fact, what does it matter if it is a good likeness? No one can judge such a thing.”15 Seen from outside, a person’s likeness can never be checked. No matter how attentively the portraitist gazes at his model, he can never penetrate to the “inner model.” If he wishes to bare the hidden motives and springs of action, he must resort to conjecture and invention. To perceive psychological depth one must grasp the temporal dimension, and this the external observer cannot do, for his gaze stops at the surface and cannot go back in time. A statement of Rousseau’s that seems to affirm the existence of an unknowable part of our psychology actually refers only to the outside observer: In order to know a character well, one must distinguish between what is acquired and what is innate; one must see how it was formed, what occasions shaped it, what sequence of secret affec­ tions made it as it is, and how by changing it can produce the most contradictory and unexpected effects. What can be seen is but a small part of what is; it is the apparent effect, whose inner cause is hidden and often quite complicated. Each of us divines in his own fashion and paints according to his fancy; we fear no comparison of image with model; how could we come to know

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this inner model, which someone who paints another person can­ not see, and which when we see our own we do not wish to show?16

“When we see our own.” In other words, the inner model is not invisible to the subject himself, who could “show” it if he wished, if he were not generally unwilling to let himself be known. Rousseau grants the autobiographer opportunities he denies the painter: “No one can write a man’s life other than himself. His inner way of being, his true life, is known only to himself.”17 But Rousseau im­ mediately adds that “in writing, however, he disguises himself.” Is the self-portrait as arbitrary as the portrait? Is the image that a man gives of himself as fictional, as fabricated, as the image painted by someone else? Rousseau’s objections are not aimed at himself, however; they concern his predecessors, especially Montaigne. Rousseau will be the first and only man to offer a full self-portrait. For the first time a man is going to paint himself as he really is. Rousseau makes himself an exception. Not only will his portrait not be arbitrary, as are all portraits painted by outside observers; unlike all other autobiographies it will not be hypocritical either. His narrative will begin a new age, an age of truth: “I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent.”18 An unprecedented en­ terprise of a unique individual, like no other. Yet his ambitions for that enterprise are large: he proposes to offer men a “specimen for comparison” and philosophers an object of study. Others cannot rightly judge; they do not know themselves, be­ cause they do not know anyone but themselves. In order to over­ come the “double illusion of self-love,”1'9 they must agree not to judge their neighbor against themselves; they must agree to know someone other than themselves. If men are to cease living in error, they need Jean-Jacques to make them a gift of his truth. He proves that they need him: “I want to try, so that anyone who wishes to know himself can have at least one specimen of comparison; so that anyone may know himself and one other person, and that other person will be me. Yes, me. Me alone.”20 Again Rousseau makes an exception of himself. If he adhered to the rule he lays down for others, he, too, would be obliged to look outside himself for some “specimen of comparison,” But after asserting that anyone who limits his knowledge to himself is liable to error, he arrogates the right to speak only of himself. This shows how little Rousseau was able to place himself in a situation of rec­ iprocity and accept the duties that he assigns to others. Truth for him is a unilateral privilege: others must know him in order to

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truly know themselves; they must judge him and find him innocent in order to “appreciate” themselves. He must be the cynosure of all eyes; that is his due. But he has no duty other than to tell his own story. To Tell All

Self-knowledge is simple and instantaneous. Self-knowledge and feeling are the same thing, and feeling, Rousseau says, proves the essential innocence of the self. But inner certainty is not enough; it must be communicated to others, and there is no direct, simple way to do this. Rousseau would have been pleased had it been possible with a sign or short speech to tell all and convince others of his innocence. At the height of his anguish he even cries out: “I am innocent!”21 But what is to be done if others fail to hear the cry or to recognize its sincerity? Keep silent? No. That would be intolerable; it would be tantamount to recognizing a defamatory judgment. Hence Rousseau must speak, must seek a means of trans­ lating into effective language an inner truth to whose incommu­ nicability he cannot resign himself. But how can we translate a truth whose proof involves an intuitive act of feeling? How can we induce others to perform the no less intuitive act of judgment and recognition? A “circuit of words” intervenes between Rousseau’s initial sentiment—that he is not guilty—and the final judgment, in which others will recognize his innocence. The problem is to force others to form a true image of Jean-Jacques’s character and feelings; that image must, on prin­ ciple, be as simple, as clear, as unified as Rousseau’s inner feeling. What to do? Open up “all the folds” of his “soul.”22 He displays, spread out over biographical time, the truth that feeling takes in at a glance. The unity and simplicity of that truth are unraveled in a multitude of instants lived one after the other in order to show how a single law governs and therefore gives unity to his character. He must show how he came to be the person he is. Hence he must set forth, discursively, his entire life history and ask others to put the pieces together for themselves. Because Jean-Jacques cannot elucidate his nature, his character, and the principle of his unity in a single word, he must rely on witnesses; it is up to them to construct his image and to judge it, this time with the aid of an overwhelming weight of evidence that will compel them to see him as he really is. To reiterate: Rousseau never doubts for a moment that his life does constitute a unity, despite the contradictions and

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discontinuities that he himself points out. But he does believe that he cannot establish the truth without recounting his life story and that the details of his life will “go over” more easily than the as­ sertion, “I am innocent.” Any such bald assertion risks being re­ jected out of hand. Confronted with a ready-made image, people are suspicious; they smell a fraud. So Rousseau offers them instead the raw material of his life and leaves it up to them to construct an image in which, having created it Lhemselves, they can believe all the more readily. His detailed narrative will not only captivate his readers’ attention but also constrain their judgment, forcing them to create a true image of Jean-Jacques:

N

Everything fits together . . . it is all in my character . . . and this bizarre and singular assemblage requires all the circumstances of my life to be fully unveiled.23 If 1 took the result upon myself and said [to the reader], "Such is my character," he might believe, if not that 1 am deceiving him, then at least that I am deceiving myself. But in simply detailing for him everything that has happened to me, everything that I have done, everything that I have thought, everything that I have Fell, I cannot mislead him unless I wish to, and even if I wish to, it will not be easy to do by such means. It is up to him to assemble these pieces and figure out the person they compose. The result must be his work, and if he should make a mistake, the entire error will be his own fault. . . . It is not up to me to judge the importance o f the facts; I must tell them all, and leave it up to him to choose.24

Rousseau thus ascribes to his readers the task of making a unity of multiplicity. He trusts his readers. This is of course a way of pleading not guilty: a man so confident, so unwilling to hide any­ thing, and so ready to let his readers judge him can hardly be guilty of anything, can he? But at the same time Rousseau ascribes the blame for any remaining misunderstandings to other people; if the reader reaches an erroneous conclusion, it is entirely his own fault. The trial will be conclusive; if the readers, or judges, of his Confes­ sions do not draw the appropriate conclusions, then Rousseau will know for certain that the fault is theirs. In portraiture, a face is constructed “on five points”; the rest is left up to the painter’s invention. But, Rousseau asks, if one reports all the events of a life, all the thoughts, and all the feelings, without leaving out even the most insignificant of details, is not the reader then forced to accept a whole, a composite, made up of a thousand “points” that leave nothing to the imagination? The more confes-

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sions one makes, the more elements one provides the viewer with which to compose a portrait that resembles its original in every detail: What was the good o f saying this? To bring out the rest, to bring the whole composition into harmony. The features o f the face produce the proper effect only because they are all there; if a single one is missing, the face is disfigured. When I write, I do not think of this whole; I think only o f saying what I know, and that is what produces the composite and makes the whole resem­ ble its original.25

But how can one manage to say everything? What order, what method, should one adopt? If Rousseau really requires all the cir­ cumstances of his life in order to fully reveal his character, then revelation becomes an endless task. The risk is enormous, since the slightest omission threatens to compromise the veracity of the entire project. With his penchant for antithesis, Rousseau sees only two possible outcomes: total success or total failure. “If I omit some­ thing, people will not know anything about me.”26 On the one hand he hopes to come infinitely close to the truth (that is, to provide the total truth), but on the other hand he is afraid of perpetuating or even aggravating the misunderstanding. Sensing the weight of judgment upon him, Rousseau feels compelled to omit nothing: Since I have undertaken to reveal myself absolutely to the public, nothing about me must remain hidden or obscure. I must remain incessantly beneath the reader’s gaze, so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every last corner of my life. Indeed, he must never lose sight of me for a single instant, for if he finds the slightest gap in my story, the smallest hiatus, he may wonder what I was doing at that moment and accuse me of refusing to tell the whole truth. I am laying myself sufficiently open to human malice by telling my story, without rendering myself more vulnerable by any silence.27

As he speaks, Rousseau feels himself under a threat. The further one reads in the Confessions, the more painfully evident this be­ comes. From book 7 on, moreover, the nature of the intentions that Rousseau imputes to his contemporaries changes radically. At first he felt summoned to speak, but now he has the sense that his enemies are using every imaginable means to prevent him from writing and making his voice heard. Rousseau carries on with his intention to tell all, not to satisfy the reader but to defy the hostility he feels on all sides: “The floors have eyes, the walls have ears.

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Surrounded by evil but vigilant spies and watchdogs, anxious and distracted, I hastily scribble down a few broken sentences that I scarcely have time to reread, let alone correct.”20 The gaze of others is now a gaze that wants to see all but no longer wishes to know the truth; it no longer even asks to know the truth but contrives to get rid of it. Hence it is more important than ever to tell all, for the sake of other men and other generations (if only the manuscript can reach them, if only it can escape destruction or falsification at the hands of men leagued together in the plot against Rousseau). But can all be told by means of ordinary language? Rousseau, as we have seen, prefers signs Lo the “cold agency of words.” Ordinary language is unsuitable for expressing the events and feelings that together constitute a unique existence. Accordingly, this man, who feels that he is radically different from other men, wishes to indicate that difference by using a different language, which he will be the first and only person to employ; after him, the mold will presumably be broken, just as nature broke “the mold in which she cast” JeanJacques: For what I have to say I shall have to invent a language as novel as iny project. For what tone, what style should 1 adopt to unmuddlc the extraordinary chaos of feelings as diverse, as contra­ dictory, oftentimes as vile, and sometimes as sublime as those that beset me constantly. What trivialities and miseries shall I not re­ veal? What revolting, indecent, childish, and often ridiculous de­ tails can be omitted, if I wish to follow the thread of iny hidden dispositions and to show how each impression that left a trace in my soul entered there for the first time?29

The difficulty, as Rousseau states it here, is to find a style capable of faithfully reproducing the incomparable savor of personal ex­ perience; it is to invent a language supple enough and diverse enough to record the variety, the contradictions, the petty details, the “trivialities,” the sequence of “petty perceptions” that together constitute the fabric of Jean-Jacques’s unique existence. Hence he must cast about for a style suited to its object, that object being in no way external to Jean-Jacques himself—in no way “objective”: it is none other than the writer’s self, his personal existence, in its infinite complexity and absolute difference. Explicitly, Rousseau states his intention to rely on a style capable of representing him accurately, of reproducing the substance of his existence. But if that substance must be made explicit, it is none other than his history. And that history, if it must be decomposed into its constit-

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uent elements, consists of a multitude of trivial events, lacking nobility and with no obvious pattern. If it were indeed necessary to report “every impression that has left its trace,” then Rousseau would have to recount every instant of his life, because every instant is a beginning, an inaugural act. Recall Les solitaires: “We never do anything but begin, and . . . our existence is nothing more than a series of present moments, the first of which is always the one that is now present. We die and we are born in every moment of our lives.”30 To report every initiation is tantamount to recording every moment, but such extreme fidelity of language to life is scarcely conceivable. And if somehow one did succeed, that success would amount to substituting language for life. Life would disappear, absorbed into words. But in Rousseau’s system of values life takes priority over “literature,” which is merely life’s shadow. Rather than betray the pleasure he experienced in life, Rousseau decided not to record his most rapturous reveries in writing: “Why dispel pres­ ent pleasure in order to tell others that I have experienced its delight?”31 He experiences a need for silent repletion, which coun­ terbalances his need for total justification. The Confessions represent a middle term between these two needs. In a sense, however, this autobiographical work is doomed to fail in two ways. For it is im­ possible to tell all, so that justification can never be complete. And the silence of perfect happiness is destroyed forever. Language fills a middle ground between the primordial innocence and the verdict of final judgment, which is supposed to establish the fact that Rous­ seau has regained his innocence. But the primordial happiness is no longer complete unto itself, and the work of justification is far from finished. The Confessions simultaneously express nostalgia for lost unity and anxious anticipation of ultimate reconciliation. One principle seems incontrovertible to Rousseau: he must trace the chronological development of his consciousness, follow his progress, rediscover the natural sequence of his ideas and feelings, and relive, in memory, the series of causes and effects that deter­ mined his character and fate. His method is “genetic”: to trace the hidden determinants of the present back to their source. The same method was used in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. The goal is to demonstrate continuity of evolution (“the thread of my hidden dispositions”), but in so doing Rousseau also wants to record the discrete “impressions” that impinged on his soul “for the first time.” He must show not only how “everything fits together” but also, in detail, how new “impressions” inaugurate new phases of conscious­ ness by leaving indelible “traces” or scars. In Rousseau’s mind there

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is no incompatibility between the continuity of the evolutionary process ancl ihe discontinuity of initial impressions. The continuous and the discontinuous are perfectly interdependent; each new trace is like the entry of a new voice in a symphony, a voice that, once begun, will never again fall silent: The earliest traces engraved in my mind have remained there, and those that have impressed themselves upon me since then have combined with rather than effaced their predecessors. There is a definite sequence o f emotions and ideas, and those that come first modify those that come later; one must know this sequence in order to judge properly. I always try to bring out the initial causes in order to explain the sequence o f effects.32

How far back must we go to find these “initial causes”? And how are we to decide when one moment determines another, which flaen becomes a mere effect? Distinguishing between cause and effect is an act of judgment. Isn’t Rousseau overtly reclaiming the privilege of judgment, which he previously entrusted to the reader? Every moment of a life may be considered either a cause or an effect, and only an arbitrary decision can ascribe to certain moments the status of absolute primacy: “Now begins . . .” But Rousseau does not hesitate. He judges. He orders events by invoking causal relations among them, while proclaiming that he is leaving it to others to judge. Never does he stand aside, as he claims to have done, to let us look at the raw material of his life. When he tran­ scribes letters, he acts as though he were presenting exhibits in a court of law, yet he comments on the letters as he transcribes them. How could he do anything else? How could he recount his life without ascribing meaning? To establish a sequence of cause and effect is tantamount to establishing a meaning, not only because it establishes an interpretive order that emphasizes certain selected moments but also because the very choice of this mode of inter­ pretation indicates that a specific way of ascribing meaning to life has been chosen. The notion of a “sequence of cause and effect” implies a law of destiny, a dependence of the self on its past. Rous­ seau places himself in the situation of victim. He endures, against his will, the consequences of a past over which he has no control. It is interesting to note that, within the context of this deterministic fatalism, Rousseau places the greatest emphasis on the earliest events: “There is a definite sequence of emotions and ideas, and those that come first modify those that come later.” Clearly, Rousseau’s very method reflects his “fundamental choice” to cast himself as the

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innocent victim of hostility against which he is powerless. Just as he has no control over the past that determines who he is, so he has no control over the malevolence of his persecutors. Alone and powerless, he has no freedom to act, but it is not his fault, nothing is ever his fault. The one freedom left him is the freedom to write, and he wants to explain how he came to the decision to avail himself of it. But already his enemies are stealing his papers and preventing him from writing. Since he is no longer free, he is no longer re­ sponsible, and since he is no longer responsible, no one can blame him for anything; he is innocent. The proof is complete. The alibi stands. All aspects of the past are dominated, apparently, by fatality and necessity. Freedom preserves one refuge, however: feeling (and the act of writing itself). Though not admitting that he freely fashioned his life, Rousseau feels entirely free in representing that life in literary form. Rousseau sees his life as having been imposed on him by a powerful destiny, yet his autobiography is an act of free­ dom. He will tell the truth about himself because he will freely assert his feelings, accepting no external constraint, hindrance, or rule: If I wanted to produce a carefully written book, like other books, I would camouflage rather than paint myself. But this is not a book; it is my portrait. I shall go to work in the camera obscura, as it were; the only art I shall require is that o f tracing exactly the lines I see marked out. My choice of style is like my choice of things. I shall not try to make it uniform; I shall take whatever style comes my way and not hesitate to change styles as the mood strikes me; I shall say what I feel about everything; I shall tell what I see, without exaggeration, embarrassment, or concern for the motley colors. By abandoning myself to both the memory of past impressions and to present sentiments, I shall paint two por­ traits o f my mental state, showing it as it was when the event occurred and as it was in the moment I described it. My uneven but natural style—now brisk, now digressive; now restrained, now wild; now grave, now gay—will itself be part of my history.33

The likelihood of touching on the truth depends on this freedom of language, this spontaneity of style. Abandonment to memory and feeling: Rousseau is here describing an attitude that is passive but free. He is speaking now not of resignation in the face of an alien power but of joyous abandonment to an inner force, to an inward adventure. The past is no longer a constraint, a chain of

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causality that binds the present; it is no longer a web of determi­ nations that obliges us to submit to fate. The focal point is now the present; the “source” is here and now, not in the past. The present dominates the past rather than being crushed by it. Not a product of the past, Rousseau discovers that he produces his past within himself, where the past lives in the form of present emotion. “I shall take whatever style comes my way.” The formulation is revealing. It points up Rousseau’s desire to cede the initiative to language. Rousseau lets his emotions speak and agrees to write from dictation. He lets go of the rudder and allows himself to be tossed about by memory and words. Here we witness the emergence of a new conception of language (whose influence would continue to make itself felt as late as the surrealists). To be sure, Rousseau is a long way from renouncing the tradi­ tional idea of language as an instrument that the writer seeks to raster, the view that language is merely a means, a tool, to be wielded as one would wield any material implement. He is quick to reestablish the principle that the writer dominates his style, for he adds that he will change styles as he sees fit. In other words, the choice of style is up to him, even if he is guided by his moods. Still, this passage marks the dawn of a new attitude: let language have its way, do not interfere. The relation between writer and language ceases to be an instrumental one, analogous to the relation between the worker and his tool; it is no longer a relation of exteriority. The writer is his emotion, and emotion is immediately language. Writer, language, and emotion cannot be distinguished. The emo­ tion is the writer in the act of self-revelation, and language is emo­ tion in its expressive form. In narrative Jean-Jacques is immediately his language. Words and writer are one, just as the living Galatea and Pygmalion are one. To be sure, the function of* language is still to “mediate” between sell and others. But language is no longer an instrument distinct from the self that makes use of it; it is the self. Here one must cite Hegel, for he has provided the best analysis to date of the language of “inner conviction” as found in Rousseau: “Language is consciousness of self that is for others, that is im­ mediately present as such... . The content of the language of good conscience is the Self which knows itself as essence. That is all that language expresses.”31 Self-expression is the essential action, but it is an action in which the self never moves beyond its own boundaries. Self-revelation, a task that had once seemed infinite, now seems strangely easy. We need only abandon ourselves to feeling and let our feelings speak. The truth of autobiography is guaranteed by the decision not to resist the forces of feeling and memory. The

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task no longer requires the invention of a new language; a new language stands ready-made as soon as we cease to pay attention to the techniques of expression and forget about making a work of literature. The self is absorbed only with itself and not with the work or with language-as-instrument. The work will come about of its own accord, and therein lies its truthfulness. In Rousseau’s discussion of the great difficulty of self-expression, he still consid­ ered writing a way of “unmuddling the extraordinary chaos of feelings so diverse.” But the problem of language evaporates as soon as writing is no longer envisioned as an instrument of reve­ lation but as revelation itself. What Rousseau has done is to claim for writing here and now the expressive privileges accorded to “primitive language” in the Essay on the Origin of Languages. Lan­ guage is emotion immediately expressed. Rather than a conven­ tional tool useful for laying bare a hidden reality, language itself is the secret revealed, the immediate manifestation of the hidden reality. What is more, the spontaneous fidelity of expressive lan­ guage to emotion ensures the truthfulness of what is expressed; the immediate truth of language guarantees the truth of past ex­ perience. Language retrospectively propagates its purity, its inno­ cence, its evidence. The lies and vices of Jean-Jacques’s life are subsumed in, and purified by, the immediate transparency of confession. I shall paint two portraits of my mental state. Rousseau readily assumes that he will succeed in his attempt to portray two truths even though there is every reason to believe at the outset that he will fail twice over. If his goal had been to exhume precise facts from the past, to locate and describe past events precisely as they occurred, his autobiography would likely have amounted to little more than a dubious and incomplete compilation of anecdotes. It is impossible to reconstruct the factual past. Memory is finite as well as fallible. Few scenes are vividly recorded. Most vanish as soon as memory attempts to dredge them up. What is more, my present mental state overwhelms my vision of the past. My present emotion is like a prism, which alters the shapes and colors of my past life. At one moment my past seems darker, at another brighter, than it really was. Attempting to reconstruct the past objectively is like Orpheus attempting to find Eurydice. To this argument, Rousseau’s response is that, as in the Glaucus myth, the essence of the past remains intact. For the essence is not the objective fact but the feelings, and past feelings can be revived, can be called up in one’s mind and

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transformed into present emotions. The sequence of events may not be available to memory, but the sequence of feelings is, and around those feelings forgotten facts can be reconstructed. Feeling is thus the indestructible core of memory; starting from feeling and proceeding by a kind of induction, Jean-Jacques can recapture the external circumstances and “occasional causes“ that influenced his evolution: The papers that I had collected to make good the defects in my memory and to guide me in this undertaking have all passed into other hands and will never return into mine. I have only one faithful guide on which I can count: the succession of feelings that have marked the development o f my being, and thereby recall the events that have acted upon it as cause or effect. I easily forget my misfortunes, but I cannot forget my faults, and still less my genuine feelings. The memory o f them is too dear ever to be effaced from my heart. I may omit or transpose facts, or make mistakes in dates; but I cannot go wrong about what ! have felt, or about what my feelings have led me to do; and these are the chief subjects o f my story. The true object of my confessions is to reveal my inner thoughts exactly in all the situations of my life. It is the history of my soul that I have promised to recount, and to write it faithfully I have need of no other memories; it is enough if I enter again into my inner self, as I have done till now.35

In other words, affective memory seems infallible. Through it alone, and not through rigorous reflection, can a genuine resur­ rection of the past be achieved. “When I say to myself, I felt plea­ sure, I feel pleasure once again.”16 What is more, the remembered emotion is often more intense, more overwhelming, than the orig­ inal impression. The past does not fade from memory but gains in strength and acquires deeper resonances: “Objects make less of an impression on me than does their memory.’’17 The true “dimen­ sions” of an emotion become apparent only when it is relived. There are of course exceptions to this rule. Some past joys cannot be translated into words. Some moments are so overwhelming that Jean-Jacques can never recapture them. The moment of illumi­ nation on the road to Vincennes is one such: “O Sir,” Rousseau writes to Malesherbes, “had I only been able to write a quarter of what 1 saw and felt beneath that tree.”18 In any case, the exactness of reminiscence is of little importance. Memories should reverberate and be amplified in Lhe mind and mingle widi current feelings to the point where the two can no longer be distinguished. Rousseau hopes to portray his soul by

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telling us the story of his life. What is of primary importance is not historical veracity but the emotion experienced as the past emerges and is represented in consciousness. The image of the past may be false, but the present emotion is not. The truth that Rousseau wishes to communicate is not exactitude of biographical fact but accuracy in depicting his relation to his past. He paints a dual portrait, giving not only a reconstruction of his history but also a picture of himself as he relives his history in the act of writing. Hence it scarcely matters if he uses his imagination to fill gaps in memory. The quality of one’s dreams, after all, reflects one’s nature. What does it matter if a self-portrait is, in the vulgar sense, not a good likeness? The painter’s soul is evident in his manner, his touch, his style. The distortions he introduces reveal something more es­ sential: the way he looks at himself and the impossibility of seeing oneself without distortion. He does not claim to dominate his sub­ ject (that is, himself) in the cold, impartial manner of the historian, possessor of a truth ne varietur. He shows himself searching for the truth and making errors; the search and the vaguely defined object of the search are simultaneously his subjects. Together, these con­ stitute a more complete truth, but one that escapes the usual laws of verification. We have moved from the realm of (historical) truth to that of authenticity (the authenticity of discourse). In a letter to Dorn Deschamps Rousseau wrote: “I am convinced that we are always well painted when we paint ourselves, even if the portrait is not at all a good likeness.”39 There is no such thing as a self-portrait that is not a good likeness, because “likeness” is not a quality of the represented image but a matter of the self’s being present within the medium of representation [parole], A selfportrait is not a more or less faithful copy of a subject called “the self.” It is a vital record of a search to discover the self. I am that search. Even if I forget myself and lose my way in words, those very words reveal me and express my essence. (In the Dialogues Rousseau says that all his work is one vast self-portrait.) Authentic speech is speech that does not limit itself to mimicking something that already exists; it is free to deform and to invent, as long as it remains obedient to its own inner law. That law is subject to no outside control or discussion. The law of authenticity prohibits nothing, but it is never satisfied. It requires not that language re­ produce a preexisting reality but that it produce truth freely and without interruption. The law of authenticity tolerates, even re­ quires, that the writer give up looking for a “true self” in an un­ varying past and seek instead to create a self through writing. Hence

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it exalts as truth an act that, in strict morality, might be condemned as fiction, as a product of unverifiable fancy.111 Sincerity does not require that the writer reHeci upon himself. It is not a matter of scrutinizing a preexisting self, maintaining the distance necessary to achieve the accurate description required for judgment. That is reflective sincerity, which introduces an irre­ vocable division into consciousness. What Rousseau has in mind is unreflective sincerity. Authenticity is nothing other than sincerity without distance or reflection; it is spontaneity in the absence of a previously constituted object capable of commanding obedience. Authentic speech occurs when immediate impulse takes control. Words and essence coincide at once in the affirmation of a self that “knows itself as essence,” in Hegel’s terms. The coincidence of words and essence is no longer a problem but a given. The reflective approach is cautious; it seeks to define its object, whereas the unreflectite approach creates its object. It is unnecessary for the self to seek its source in the past, for that source exists here and now, in the surge of present emotion. Everything takes place in a present so pure that even the past is relived as present feeling. Ehe essential task is therefore not to reflect upon or judge myself but to be myself. In an ethic of authenticity Rousseau’s motto, vitam impendere vero, becomes synonymous with vitam impendere sibi. For the truth to which he must consecrate his life is in the first place his truth; his pact with truth is a pact with himself. The imperative to “be oneself” (which Rousseau repeated to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre) did not oblige him to surrender his life to a preestablished abstract truth41 but only to accept himself as the absolute source of his being. That seems quite easy because all his actions express him, no matter what he does. Am I ever in danger of not being myself? Yes, according to Rousseau, because man possesses the faculty of reflection, that is, the dangerous privilege of living at some distance from himself. Hence it is not as easy as it seems to be oneself. To retrieve ourselves from self-alienating reflection is a never-ending task. Otherwise there would be no need for Rousseau to express himself at such length in order to be himself. His need to do so shows that he has noL yet achieved undivided unity. His need to justify himself con­ stantly through writing proves that he is continually just beginning to be himself; the real task always lies ahead. Only now does the full novelty of Rousseau’s work become ap­ parent. Language has become a locus of immediate experience even as it remains an instrument of mediation. It demonstrates two things: that the writer is bound up with his inner “source” and that he

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needs to face judgment, that is, to win justification in the universal. This new language has nothing in common with classical “dis­ course.” It is far more imperious and far more precarious. Lan­ guage is the authentic self, yet at the same time it reveals that perfect authenticity has still not been achieved, that plentitude remains to be conquered, and that no possession is secure without the consent of others. No longer does the literary work call forth the assent of the reader to a truth that stands as a “third person” between the writer and his audience; the writer singles himself out through his work and elicits assent to the truth of his personal experience. Rousseau discovered these problems; he truly invented a new at­ titude, which became that of modern literature (beyond the sen­ timental romanticism for which he has been blamed). He was the first to experience the dangerous compact between ego and lan­ guage, the “new alliance” in which man makes himself the word.

8 Guilty Reflection

Extreme singularity becomes anomaly when all reciprocity is elim­ inated. How does this happen? And what about those aspects of any human relationship, or even of any dialogue, that resist reciprocity? To distinguish between normal and abnormal we need norms. But a norm is nothing more than a peremptory requirement (whether individual or collective) raised to the status of an objective, scientific law. History, which claims the right to judge Rousseau, relies on norms of its own. As for contemporary critics, some hold that Rousseau was mad; others allude to his bewilderment and wounded sensibility; still others approve the writer and shift the blame to society. Such disagreement shows that our norms are not universally accepted and that it is probably poindess to expect a clear and unequivocal resolution of the “Rousseau problem.” Many psychiatrists who treat personality disorders today pay little heed to formal diagnoses (these being no more than general categori­ zations of mental illness, useful as a guide to prognosis and treat­ ment but for little else). Establishing a diagnosis with the benefit of hindsight is therefore not likely to clear up Rousseau’s “case.” Yet there has been no end of proposed diagnoses of his disease. Every new medical fashion, every literary or ethical school of thought, has yielded a new verdict on Rousseau. Among the pro­ posed diagnoses we find dementia, psychopathic personality dis­ order, neurosis, paranoia, folie raisomiante, and uremia-induced organic brain disease. If attention is focused on selected symptoms, documents, and eyewitness accounts, no contemporary psychiatrist will have much doubt about the correct diagnosis: paranoid delu­ sions [idélire sensitif de relation].1 But as soon as this diagnosis is put forward, some rather embarrassing questions arise. Taken as a whole, do Rousseau’s life and work show evidence of the disease? Or was his mental disturbance a relatively late and episodic phenomenon? The question of the influence of disease in Jean-Jacques’s life and 201

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work remains open, and we may ask how his madness and his more lucid thoughts were related. Paranoid delusions develop when an irrational idea intrudes upon what appears to be a perfectly reasonable psychological “context.” The practical shape of the world as seen by the patient does not change. His personality does not disintegrate but asserts itself more forcefully than ever. Spatial and temporal references are the same for the patient as for a “normal” person. The intensity of the disease depends on how strongly the irrational idea directs the mind’s other activities and subordinates them to its ends. Now, the question is to what extent Rousseau’s work exhibits the effects of the disease or, conversely, to what extent it shows signs of resistance to persecution anxiety. It is not at all easy to distinguish symptomatically between the disease and the reaction against the disease. (As phy­ sicians are well aware, the symptoms of a disease are generally manifestations of an organism’s defensive responses to a noxious agent.) The most insane passages of the Dialogues and the Rêveries can be regarded either as signs of the disease or as defensive mech­ anisms whose purpose is to exorcise fear. Rousseau’s flight into solitude, his bursts of lyrical imagination, his recourse to mechanical occupations, and his grandiose, pathetic pleas for sympathy may be either symptoms or spontaneously improvised forms of therapy. His reveries—those magical retreats from a hostile world that Rous­ seau creates for himself in response to his pathological suspicions— would not exist without his paranoia (which make him feel that it is “impossible to reach real people”).2 But his conversations with “creatures of his own devising” are moments of respite in which anxiety seems to end; persecution no longer affects or concerns him. Rousseau’s pleasure in sham communication and simulated happiness, shared with companions created out of whole cloth by his fancy, represents the artificial respiration of a consciousness that would probably have died of asphyxiation if forced to live, besieged by its own obsessions, in the midst of a hostile world. If it is naïve to maintain that Rousseau was susceptible to madness because of his “sensitive” constitution, it is equally pointless to try to separate the “real Rousseau” from his disease. It is all too easy to argue that his behavior was wholly determined by some morbid “character” or innate psychological disorder. And it is just as sim­ plistic to minimize his mental disorder in order to celebrate the greatness of the writer, whose literary and philosophical genius flourished in the face of a host of enemies, before he became ill and, indeed, in spite of his illness. Mental illness may not explain

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all, but it is not on that account a mere accident of no great im­ portance. Rousseau’s enemies were real, but he provoked them and his imagination magnified their significance. In a broader perspective, it is clear that certain primary forms of behavior are the source of both Rousseau’s speculative thought and his mental illness. Initially, however, these primary behaviors were not morbid in nature. Mental illness developed only when they became disruptive. What is mysterious about mental illness is not the initiating situation but the extravagance of development. Disease is just an exaggerated form of existential difficulties with which the mind has be^n unable to cope. In Rousseau’s case these difficulties can be described, although the task is not an easy one. In his moments of madness he is isolated but not impenetrable. He becomes the prisoner of his conviction, but we continue to understand him and, with an effort of sympathy, can put ourselves in his place. In this respect Rousseau’s madness is far less mysterious than schizophrenia—absolute otherness to which we have no access. We can and must follow Jean-Jacques down the paths of mental disease. Päranoid delusion results not in disintegration but in drastic re­ organization of the personality. To succumb to a mental illness of this type can be seen as the negative counterpart of Rousseau’s literary “vocation,” that is, of his intention to express the uniqueness of his personality through writing. The possibility of achieving absolute certainty is a constant underlying theme in all Rousseau’s theoretical work. Carried to an extreme, absolute conviction is a form of insanity, yet it is closely related to Rousseau’s insistence on the importance of individual experience. It is as though he delib­ erately makes claims for private conviction so extravagant that oth­ ers are forced to consider them illegitimate. At the time of his personal reform, Rousseau set himself apart from other men by his manner of dress and speech; his intention was to assert his right to live according to principles laid down by his conscience. He heeded only his heart and mind and paid no attention to the opin­ ions of others. The more obsessed he became with persecution, the more unique he seemed in his own eyes, and the less he had to insist on proof of his uniqueness in the form of external signs. Later on, he gave up his Armenian dress; it was no longer needed to express his originality, which now was something he had to en­ dure. He no longer needed to stand apart from other men, for society had banished him. Paranoid delusions transformed a willed solitude into an endured solitude. There was no break, no discon-

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tinuity, between one state and the other; Jean-Jacques never wav­ ered from his chosen path. Anyone who claims to be absolutely unique is in fact rebelling against commonly accepted norms. He is claiming the right to live in an abnormal fashion because inner conviction tells him that he must. More than that, he is claiming to be the inventor of a new norm that makes other men seem blinded by error. In Rousseau’s late writings we find a man who not only claims to have been banished from all social order but also insists that he is the model on which any legitimate social order must be based. Some passages tell us that Jean-Jacques feels he is living a nightmare from which he can never awake, while others insist that he is the only man in a corrupt world who has been able to live in accordance with his ideal, as a “man of nature.” He thus feels at times that his life stands outside all human norms, at other times that he is safe­ guarding the one essential norm, ignored by others. Banished from everywhere yet at the center of everything, he is always alone. He is the only one to have been forced to live an absurd life, ignorant of his own whereabouts; he is the only one to possess true knowledge, clear insight into good and evil. Rousseau’s earliest writings (letters written before he was twenty) exhibit clear signs of suspicion and mistrust. He has been slandered, he says; his behavior has been misinterpreted; people think he is a spy. From the outset Rousseau attempted to exonerate himself from such accusations (or even the possibility of accusation). At Bossey he is unjustly accused and punished. In imagining perse­ cution in later life Rousseau invented no new facts; he merely allowed feelings that had always been present in his mind to become obsessions. Still, the evolution of certain key themes and ideas in Rousseau’s theoretical writings suggests that these were what I shall call idea­ tional correlates of his delusions. The Dialogues and Rêveries, for example, introduce no new themes. What distinguishes them from earlier works is the connections, or lack of connections, between ideas—the system, if you will. The elements of Rousseau’s thought are familiar, but their function and significance have changed. Expressions that belonged at first to the lexicon of love enter the lexicon of persecution. The word enlacé (ensnared, entwined, em­ braced), used repeatedly in the Dialogues and Rêveries to characterize the situation of the victim, has an amorous meaning in the fifth

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book o ïEmile, where it is used to describe Sophie’s tender solicitude: “Forgive her concern for the person she loves, her fear Lhat he is never sufficiently embraced [enlacé].”* Here is another example of a shift in meaning. The persecuted Rousseau feels that his life is in the hands of those who “control his destiny” [disposent de sa destinée]. But this situation of absolute dependency is what SaintPreux desires; he implores Julie: “Have pity on me. Do not abandon me to myself. Be good enough at least to control my fate [disposer de mon sort]”4 Again, the lover’s wish seems to be fulfilled, in a parodie, masochistic sense, in the cruel world of persecution. Still another example: the unanimity that made the social compact so exalting an experience is turned against Rousseau in the inexplic­ able hostility of an entire generation. “The league is universal, irrevocable, without exception.”^ The pronoun on, which in the Social Contract represented the general will, now stands for the anonymous members of the universal conspiracy against Rousseau. (The hostility originates with a small group, “those gentlemen,” and spreads from there to engulf all mankind; the gentlemen become first ils, then on.) In the Dialogues certain of Rousseau's key ideas achieve their final form. Here I want to examine the roles ascribed to the notions of reflection and obstruction. Both are emphasized in significant ways that shed a good deal of light on the final stages of Rousseau’s development.6 The second Discourse assigned an ambiguous role to reflection. Recall that the power of reflection is there associated with the per­ fectibility of man. Man emerges from animal existence by learning to use tools and by developing reflective judgment. At that point change begins, but change estranges man from his original state of repletion; it perverts him by estranging him from his original nature. The man who reflects is a depraved animal, but saying this implies no moral condemnation; a depraved animal isjust an animal no longer guided simply by its instincts. Reflection deprives us of the immediate presence of the natural world. In theory, therefore, the development of reflection is precisely contemporaneous with the invention of the first tools, the means with which man will hence­ forth confront nature. Civilization is a joint product of reflective thought and instrumental action, and once begun there is no turn­ ing back. Disastrous as the break with primitive clarity and direct experience may have proved, it cannot be undone; we must make do with our present condition.7 There are grounds on which re-

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flection may be condemned, yet the faculty of reflection is proof of the spirituality of man. In Emile, reflection figures prominently in Rousseau’s arguments against materialism. Man is capable of judgment and comparison and is therefore not entirely the play­ thing of material forces; his spirit is not entirely governed by the laws of inanimate nature. As profound as Rousseau’s nostalgia for the immediacy of the sensuous, instinctual life is, he recognizes in Emile that sensuous existence may be purely passive. In order for man to realize his potential he must display the “active principle” of his soul; he must judge, reason, compare. (Locke and Condillac said as much before Rousseau.) Going beyond sensuous existence, man acquires the power to “give meaning to the word ü.”8 Thus Rousseau, in his pedagogical teachings, accepted the need for reflection as a necessary stage in the evolution of consciousness. To be sure, he thinks it ill-advised to ask a child to exercise judgment too soon. Emile is capable at first only of feeling. It would be a mistake to set him an artificial exercise that would separate him from immediately perceptible reality. But there comes a time, around the age of puberty, when the mind is ripe for reflection. In an education conducted on natural principles, reflection has its place, but only when the time is ripe, when the pupil has reached the appropriate age. Rousseau proposes a dynamic pattern of devel­ opment in which reflection figures as an intermediate stage between immediate sensation (part of childhood) and the discovery of moral sentiment, which constitutes a synthesis, at a higher level of devel­ opment, of instinct with spiritual wants awakened by reflection. In a phrase that looks forward to Kant, Rousseau assigns reflective reason the task of educating practical judgment: “Thus my rule of surrendering to sentiment rather than reason is confirmed by rea­ son itself.”9 An intermediate stage, reflection is in a sense a mis­ fortune, since it destroys the original unity of the mind and separates it from the natural world. The act of judgment estranges me from the truth I too easily took for granted: “I know only that the truth is in things and not in the mind that judges them, and that the less I put of myself in the judgments I make, the more certain I am of approaching the truth.”10 Once separated from objective truth, however, the mind takes possession of itself; it comes to know itself qua consciousness. Henceforth, immediate revelation takes place in the mind, not in the world. Reflection, having destroyed the initial unity, establishes a new unity, equally absolute but illuminated by knowledge. Con­ sciousness is no longer naively at one with the world; the source

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of its unity lies within. Inner conviction is the basis of conscience: “Conscience tells us not the truth of things, but the rules of duty/’11 Reflection, which veils the “truth of things,” allows the unveiling of the moral sentiment. It takes us toward die ultimate stage, in which reflection is no longer necessary and we can allow ourselves to be guided by the “dictameh” of conscience alone. Reflection leads to internalization; we lose our direct contact with the external world, but light shines within. The world may remain hidden beneath a veil,12 but we are satisfied with the transparency that exists within ourselves. These are the terms that Rousseau uses to describe ec­ static experience in the third letter to Malesherbes. Julie, too, achieves the ecstasy of “immediate communication,” even as the veil of death falls over her face. When he writes the Dialogues, however, Rousseaus emphasis changes. Reflection ceases to be an ambivalent power that corrupts society while promoting man’s moral development. It is no longer a nec­ essary stage in the development of consciousness, and there is noth­ ing that lies beyond reflection, no higher synthesis. Reflection quite simply becomes a hostile force, the root of all evil. A change that was at first dialectical hardens into a permanent antithesis. There is no way of overcoming the conflict between immediacy and re­ flection. At the beginning of the Dialogues Rousseau constructs a system in which reflection is represented, in kinetic terms, as a deflection of the soul’s primitive energy: All nature’s first impulses are good and true. They are the most direct possible way o f preserving our life and happiness. Bui soon those impulses lose the momentum needed to maintain their orig­ inal direction against heavy resistance and allow themselves to be deflected by a thousand obstacles, away from their true goal and into oblique routes where man forgets his original destination.13

Reflection causes us to deviate from our true goal. In the language of mechanics Rousseau is here saying the same thing he said earlier when he defined reflective man as a depraved animal. Reflection is here cast as a degraded form of spiritual energy. By contrast, in Emile reflection was proof of the active strength of the human mind, thanks to which man is a free, autonomous being. Because we can judge and make comparisons, we actively struggle against the world rather than passively endure it. Now, however, reflection is a “weakness of the soul.” We lack the strength to reach our original goal via the direct route. Encountering obstructions,

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our energies are sapped, our initial ardor is extinguished. Reflec­ tion is icy cold, and whatever it touches is immediately struck by a mortal chill. To reflect is to compare. But pride [amour-propre] con­ sists in comparing oneself to others. Reflection is therefore the source of pride and of all the “repulsive passions”: Positive or attractive action is the simple work of nature, which seeks to extend and reinforce our sense of existence; negative or repulsive action, which limits or shrinks the sense o f existence of others, is a stratagem produced by reflection. The former gives rise to all the loving and gentle passions, the latter to all the hateful and cruel ones.14

Prior to reflection there is love of self [amour de soi], whereby we innocently affirm our own existence. Self-love is concerned only with oneself, not with the difference between oneself and others; hence it offers no active opposition to others. Once others enter the purview of judgment, however, we fall prey to pride; we com­ pare ourselves to them, and evil becomes possible. Only those who compare themselves to others by means of reflection are capable of lying or of hiding their true feelings. Wicked men, conspirators, act with “considered and deliberate [réfléchie] baseness.”15Reflection is the fundamental sin, which looses the curse of false appearances on the world: The first art o f all wicked men is prudence, which is to say, dis­ simulation. Full o f plots and feelings they wish to hide, they learn how to compose their features; govern their looks, their manner, and their bearing; and make themselves masters of appearances. They learn how to seize opportunities and cover with a patina of wisdom the dark passions that eat at their insides.. . . The passions of ardent and sensitive hearts are the work o f nature and there­ fore manifest themselves in spite o f the person who feels them. . . . But pride and its derivative emotions are merely secondary passions produced by reflection, hence they do not affect the machine so visibly. That is why people governed by those kinds of passions are more masters of appearances than those who surrender to nature’s direct impulses.16

To give up one’s spontaneity, to cease to obey nature’s direct impulses, is therefore to make common cause with the wicked. This is the sin that other people commit but from which Rousseau feels exempt. He describes himself as a man of spontaneity and impulse, a man with a horror of reflection. He only acts impulsively, and the reactions of his sensibility, as ardent as they are brief, never

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lead him down “oblique paths.“ Jean-Jacques is governed by im­ mediate sensation. Therein lies absolute proof of his innocence. He cannot be wicked because he is not subject to reflection. “His first impulses are always hot and pure; he is little subject to second thoughts. . . . Never will he do wrong deliberately. . . . Even his worst faults are sins of omission.“17 Admittedly, he has at times betrayed his nature and given in to the temptation of reflection. But he was not really responsible; he was seduced, he was enticed into evildoing. He became a writer, but only because he had fallen victim to a kind of spell: “Sometimes I have thought quite pro­ foundly, but this has rarely given me any pleasure and has almost always been done against my will and under duress as it were; reverie amuses and distracts me, reflection wearies and depresses me; thinking has always been for me a disagreeable and thankless occupation.“18 Indeed, he goes so far as to say that whenever he has done wrong, it was because he temporarily heeded the counsel of reflective thought: “All the evil that I have done in my life, I have done through reflection; what little good I have been able to do, I have done through impulsiveness.“19Jean-Jacques's errors are not im­ pulses but ill-fated attempts to abide by the counsels of reflection. The image that Jean-Jacques constructs of himself in the Dialogues is one that tolerates every contradiction and weakness of his char­ acter but shuns the taint of reflection. Jean-Jacques’s innocence is thus traced to its root: the source of all evil is foreign to him. Rousseau withdraws into a world in which he is infallibly good simply because he is not contaminated by reflection. It matters not that he speaks by turns of the energy of his passions and of the weakness that causes him to surrender helplessly to sensation. There is no contradiction between active spontaneity of feeling and passive sub­ mission to the senses; both represent absolute surrender to the immediate. Immediate activity and immediate passivity are equiv­ alent, equally pure. The only culpable weakness is that which leads to reflection. Jean-Jacques is weak; he is the slave of his senses. But that weakness is of no consequence, for it does not turn him away from immediate pleasures. He is not virtuous, only good; but guilty he can never be. The unreflective world in which Rousseau takes refuge is in­ tended to be sufficient and complete. According to the revised theory, mental activity does not begin at the stage of reflection, as in the psychological doctrine of Locke and Condillac. In this new world, which claims to owe nothing to reflection, man is supposed

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to be fully active without having to exercise judgment. As we have seen, Rousseau argues that there can be a kind of memory that involves not reflection on an object perceived in the past but a resurgence of feeling in the present. Imagination, too, works without the aid of reflection. Thus two kinds of mental activity are saved jrom this affliction, and Rousseau can engage in them without^ remorse. AU morality, moreover, is based on pity, which is prior to the emergence of reflective thought; this is a point on wliich Rous­ seau frequently insists. In the second Discourse, for example, he saw the source of morality as natural pity, that is, as lying in a “pure movement of nature, prior to all reflection.”20 Hence an upright life is possible before the existence of others becomes an object of prideful comparison. Before we exercise the faculty of reflection, we feel spontaneous sympathy; we identify with rather than pit ourselves against our neighbor. “Positive sensibility,” derived from self-love, introduces us to the“loving and gentle passions.”21 Noth­ ing essential is lost if we retreat into a world in which the primitive light of conscience shines unmirrored in die dark glass of reflection. In other words, Rousseau has abandoned the idea of a progres­ sive synthesis that would include and transcend the stage of re­ flection. He rejects the plan of evolution proposed in Emile, according to which man had first to master reflection before moving on to the higher plane of spontaneity. Before, it seemed that after a period of separation we could regain our unity at the end of a long journey. But now we are stuck with no way out. Our world is cut to pieces, mutilated. There is no hope of reconciling immediacy with reflection, no path that leads from one to the other. The wicked opt for reflection; the good—that is, Jean-Jacques—lurch from im­ pulse to impulse, never “deviating” from their spontaneously de­ termined course. To reflect is to judge. But the subtitle of the Dialogues is “Rousseau, judge of Jean-Jacques.” To reflect is to compare. But at the begin­ ning of the Dialogues we read: “It was absolutely imperative that I say how, if I were someone else, I would see a man like me.”22 Not only does Rousseau here divide himself in two in order to engage in reflection, but throughout his book he compares himself to his enemies so as to pinpoint his exact location, in the innocence of the unreflective life. Rousseau describes Jean-Jacques and proves that he is a “slave of his senses,” but in so doing he never loses sight of the others, the wicked, who have surrendered to the cold passion of reflection. It is therefore not unreasonable to say that the Dia-

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logues are essentially a reflection aimed against reflection. That is what is so nonsensical, so fundamentally mistaken about the book, as much if not more than the paranoid insistence on persecution. The conversation between Rousseau and the Frenchman is an end­ less reflection whose purpose is to prove that, because Jean-Jacques is a man guided solely by sensation and impulse, he is incapable of living according to the dictates of reflective thought. Jean-Jacques judges himself from the outside in order to tell us that he can never step outside himself. The whole book is an ill-fated and shamefaced reflection that revolves around nostalgia for the unreflective life. It undermines its own argument as it aggravates and compounds the crime of writing and reflecting, a crime to which Rousseau pleads not guilty. Whence the endless denials: Jean-Jacques was not born to be a writer but was led astray. He was never a thinker. He wrote only in order to paint a portrait of himself, to express his most spontaneous feelings. His true place is that “enchanted world” populated by “initiates” who understand one another di­ rectly, by means of infallible signs and without recourse to the medium of human language. It is certainly Rousseau’s intention in the Dialogues to reveal the true Jean-Jacques in the most direct manner possible. He wants to force the Frenchman to recognize this by causing a sudden light to dawn: “Let us try . . . might there not be some way of making you feel all at once, through a simple and immediate impression, what, given your present opinions, I shall never be able to convince you of by proceeding gradually.”23 But this simple means does not exist. Endless talk, interminable discourse, is necessary. Every conceivable argument, including the most abstract, is brought to bear for the purpose of constructing the myth of a Jean-Jacques incapable of reflection and discourse. Rousseau compromises this mythical im­ age in the very attempt to represent it. The myth is undermined by inauthenticity at its source. The Rousseau of the Dialogues lives in the world of reflection; he suffers the misfortune of the divided self; he seeks justification. But the Jean-Jacques of whom he speaks inhabits another world; he has never crossed the threshold of re­ flection; he has never relinquished the undivided unity of nature; he has no need of justification. In the first Discourse Rousseau was conscious of paradox; he knew that he was a man of letters arguing against letters. Here, the same paradox is even more evident, but Rousseau has ceased to be aware of it. He cannot see that he is a man of reflection who claims to be ignorant of reflection. The Rousseau who judges and the Jean-

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Jacques who is unfit for the effort of judgment cannot be the same man. If he were as he conceives himself to be, Rousseau would not be entitled to think what he thinks. The reflective activity by means of which Rousseau seeks to prove his innocence is prohibited by the very principles on which good and evil are based. If Rousseau were conscious of engaging in reflection, he would be conscious of his own guilt, because to reflect is to choose evil. He would know that he lives in the world upon which he has pronounced his anath­ ema. There are two possible ways of overcoming this basic contra­ diction. Rousseau may continue to hold that reflection is the root of evil, in which case he must resign himself to silence. Or he may continue to speak out, in which case he must revise his opinion and find that reflection is innocent. But Rousseau persists in his con­ tradictory behavior. He continues to hold that silent communication is best, and he continues to avail himself of an immediacy that his discourse destroys. The Rousseau who speaks to us is absolutely alien to the image he constructs of himself. Therein lies his true alienation, in the psychiatric sense of the word. He suffers within himself from the cleavage that divides the world in two, pitting the evil of reflection against the innocence of immediacy with no hope of reconciliation. His mind is divided into two warring camps, which no path joins together. He cannot demolish reflection, nor can he transcend it; he has merely expelled it from his world. Simultaneously, he has made it impossible to speak about himself except from outside, adopting the point of view of those whom he holds to be in error. His discourse does not unite language and feeling; it remains de­ finitively alien to the “true self” that claims to live in undivided plenitude. Rousseau is excluded from Jean-Jacques, yet it is on this peculiar exclusion that the portrait of Jean-Jacques is based. When Rousseau earlier conceived his project of a sensuous ethics, a similar problem arose. It is one thing to submit to the influence of an environment, another thing to analyze the moral effects of sen­ sory experiences and shape the objects around us in such a way that their influence is beneficial. Rousseau wanted to surrender entirely to sensation, but only if the environment was favorably disposed toward him: Numerous striking examples that I had collected put the matter beyond all dispute; and thanks to [the] physical basis [of my sen­ sations] they seemed to me capable o f providing an external code,

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which, varied according to circumstances, could put or keep the mind in the state most conducive to virtue.24

An active initiative, observant and reflective, is therefore nec­ essary to “vary the external code1’ and prepare the way for a sub­ sequent abandonment (in a purely passive sense) to outside impressions. Such a project can only succeed if sensation is em­ ployed as a means, an effective instrument that can be put to use by reasoned, deliberate action. But Rousseau holds that the purpose of sensuous ethics is to spare the mind the effort of reflection. Its purpose is to establish automatic responses so that a life of im­ mediacy will also be a life of virtue. Assuming this scheme proved successful, one could surrender naively to sensation, ignoring the fact that sensation was a means employed by reflection. But this would have required an immense speculative labor, and Rousseau became discouraged. Too many preliminary reflections would have been necessary before reflection could have been done away with once and for all. (Intellectual effort is worth the trouble, according to Rousseau, only if it yields tranquillity, eliminating the need for further effort. In the Rêveries he states that he embarked upon a difficult series of reflections in order to settle his ideas about meta­ physics and religion once and for all.25 He engaged in thought in order that he might no longer have to think. He worked out his credo, his profession of faith, so that he might never again have to dwell upon his doubts and so that he could surrender to feeling with a clear conscience. Philosophy thereupon resumed its ancillary role, in the service not of theology but of immediate sensation.) Rousseau does not see that the sensuous existence he dreams of cannot exist without constant scrutiny by reflective thought. He does not see that, while reflection can be transcended, it cannot simply be rejected as though its assistance had never been invoked. To think that reflection can be done away with so easily is to engage in mystification, and Rousseau apparently wishes both to orches­ trate the mystery and to be duped by it. He wants to rule himself even as he submits to the alien rule of physical reality: “From what errors might reason be preserved, and what vices would be nipped in the bud, if one knew how to compel the brute functions [économie animale] to support the moral order they so often disturb!”2* But how can the same person both compel and be compelled? How can we live an innocently sensuous life when we ourselves have estab­ lished conditioning through the senses? How can we orchestrate the scene, arrange everything that happens, and still preserve the

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docile blamelessness of “animals” ingenuously guided by their senses? We would have to be, by turns, both animals and gods. It would require a masterpiece of artifice to arrange the world in such a way that virtue could be achieved naively and effortlessly, guided solely by the senses. Once the primordial material is manipulated to achieve a moral end, spontaneity is apparently destroyed or at least profoundly denatured. Rousseau cannot bring himself to renounce the possi­ bility of exerting influence through the senses, which he regards as the source of all moral feelings: “All [sensory influences] offer us innumerable and almost certain opportunities for controlling those feelings that we allow to dominate us at their very onset.”27 But how can we preserve the primitive purity of the feelings and control them at the same time? Instead of achieving a synthesis, do we not risk losing the primordial freshness of the senses without obtaining the control possible with the help of reflection? We are exiled from Eden before we gain a foothold in the realm of rigorous thought. Sensation’s rights are not yet restored, and reflection’s have yet to be established. We are left wavering between shamefaced reflection, unable to assert itself, and sensibility without spontaneity, clouded by reflection and not fully under our control. Psychological manipulation through the senses is an artifice that compromises freedom. A man who sets up a magic show cannot succumb passively to its magic without bad faith. He cannot ignore the fact that he deliberately created what he wants to experience as an independent force. If he deliberately subjects himself to ex­ ternal influences—to “climates, seasons, sounds, colors, darkness, light, the elements, foods, noise, silence, movement, rest”28—he knows that he can just as freely remove those same influences. Rousseau’s proposal for a morality of sensibility shows that he made up his mind to surrender entirely to physical influences and then immediately forgot that his decision was made of his own free will. He convinces himself that he can now allow the physical universe to work its will. Good will arrive and the moral order will be con­ structed automatically. What Rousseau seems to be looking for is passive security, a state of blessed obedience that no longer needs to be questioned. Hence he must ignore the fact that his free choice can be revoked at any time. In his morality of sensibility, condi­ tioning comes from outside; decisions are made or compelled by external objects (suitably arranged). Rousseau need no longer take the initiative; the physical world does so for him. Evil no longer exists. Where could it come from? Rousseau does not act, and things

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are innocent. Yet evil was introduced at the outset, in the repudia­ tion of reflection; the stage is set before the curtain is raised. Rous­ seau’s error is to abandon his freedom to the immediate material world, to things. As in the Dialogues he arranges things in such a way that two “moments” of consciousness—reflection and sensa­ tion—became so alien that they seem to belong to different individuals. In fact, even before Rousseau denounced the faculty of reflection, he saw it as something that could not coexist easily with the spon­ taneity of sensation. Reflection cannot inhabit a mind under the empire of the senses (or of sentiment). Rousseau drew a distinction between the reflective man and the sensuous man. He created pairs of complementary characters (Saint-Preux and Wolmar, Emile and his teacher) between whom a pedagogical relationship existed. The reflective man knows how to govern the mind of the sensuous man. He does violence to the sensibility of Lhe sensitive, but it is benev­ olent violence, designed first to ensure that the sensuous man will lead a good and orderly life and second to instill in the pupil an enlightened understanding of order and goodness. The purpose of education is to make sure that the sensuous man will eventually acquire the powers of reflection, that is, to bring about an eventual synthesis. But in the beginning the distance between the two is great; master and disciple belong to different worlds. Before his persecution began, it seems that Rousseau delighted in playing both the reflective man and the sensuous man, one after the other. If Emile may be said to be another Jean-Jacques, his teacher is another Rousseau. Similarly, Wolmar and Saint-Preux are imaginary identities alternately adopted by the dreamer of the Hermitage as he wrote his novel. He relives the golden age of childhood and experiences the joys and misfortunes of a sensitive soul, but it also pleases him to possess the demiurgic powers of Wolmar and of Emile’s tutor. The reflective master takes it upon himself to facilitate the unrefiective life of the child, until such time as the pupil is ready for initiation in the art of reflection. We sense a deception, however, in the way the master arranges the objects intended to exert their influence on the sensitive mind of the disciple. (We encountered this same deception earlier, when we were looking at the relation­ ship between Wolmar and his servants.) Saint-Preux is led almost unwittingly to virtue. Emile is educated “in accordance with nature,” using artificial means employed by his omnipresent and omniscient

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tutor. “Negative education” is the fruit of positive reflection. Emile is manipulated through his senses, and his freedom is lulled to sleep. His tutor of course intends to bestow full responsibility upon him—in due course. But as long as Emile’s education lasts, the pupil is entirely controlled by his teacher. This may be education for freedom, but it is certainly not in any authentic sense education by means of freedom. Emile feels free but really is not. His behavior is conditioned by innumerable invisible constraints; he is supposed to live in “nature,” but in fact he lives in a world arranged by his teacher. Emile is caught in a sophisticated trap. Yet most readers have read Emile as if Rous­ seau were inviting them to imitate the child’s spontaneous sensitivity rather than the reasoned reflection of the tutor who manipulates that spontaneity. The book was seen not as a treatise on education, on carefully thought-out pedagogical technique, but as a paean to unreflective feeling. Such a reading is a misunderstanding of Rous­ seau, but one for which he himself is partly responsible. Nothing in the teacher’s theories supports or justifies his own attitude; he con­ stantly asserts his opposition to premature reflection, whose effects he says are harmful. He seems unaware of the fact that he himself is engaging in reflection, and he constructs a system according to which his own discourse has no right to exist. Rousseau gives the teacher the role of mediator but makes him the prophet of imme­ diacy. His method is to make sure that, until the child reaches a cer­ tain age, he is “always self-contained and attentive to what affects him immediately.”29 Thus Rousseau posits the necessity of media­ tion (since a teacher is always necessary) but at the same time rejects it (since the teacher preaches the gospel of immediacy). The rejection of mediation becomes increasingly peremptory. In the Dialogues Rousseau sees sensation and reflection as irreducibly opposed terms. He cites himself as an example of a person who has never abandoned immediacy of sensation. So much for the dialectic according to which reflection served as a middle term between the primordial unity of nature and the superior unity of morality. Reflection is now the absolute opposite of nature, the implacable enemy. Everything is frozen in a manichaean antinomy. Whereas Rousseau had once been willing to identify with the teacher, the role of pedagogue is now consigned to the enemy camp. Dangerous, the powers of reflection are powers that belong to others, to the wicked among whom Rousseau cannot and will not count himself. His fantasies of persecution become a dark parody of the happy relationship between Emile and his teacher. Jean-Jacques

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manipulated by his persecutors resembles Emile manipulated by his Lutor. The benevolent deception of the pedagogical relationship has been transformed into a diabolical plot. Reflection had merely been shameful; now it is culpable, the root of all evil. Consider the following passage from Emile: He should always think that he is the master, but you should always be the master in fact. No subjugation is more perfect than one that maintains the appearance o f liberty; the will itself becomes a captive. The poor child, who knows nothing, is capable of noth­ ing, and aware o f nothing—is he not at your mercy? Are you not in full control of his environment? Are you not the master, free to arrange it as you please? His work, his play, his pleasures, his pains—are these not in your grasp, unbeknownst to him? He must do only what he wants to do, o f course. But he must want only what you want him to. He must not take a step that has not been planned by you; he must not open his mouth without your know­ ing what he is going to say.30

The teacher has robbed his pupil of his freedom in order to prepare him for future happiness and freedom. Such utter dom­ ination would be reprehensible if the teacher harbored evil inten­ tions. Rousseau himself feels that he is the target of a deliberate plot, the evidence for which he regards as irrefutable. He relegates reflection to the alien shadows and remains alone in the situation of victim, a helpless pawn manipulated by plotting adversaries. And to describe how he is manipulated he uses the same terms he used earlier to describe Emile’s docile passivity. The plans of his per­ secutors are stated in language remarkably similar to the educa­ tional advice just quoted: They took . . . effective precautions, keeping him under such close surveillance that he could not say a word that was not reported nor take a step that was not observed nor conceive a project that was not known from the moment o f its inception. They saw to it that, though he lived in apparent freedom among others, he had no real society with them; he lived alone in the crowd, knowing nothing of what was happening, nothing o f what was said around him, above all nothing o f what affected and interested him the most; everywhere he felt shackled by chains o f which he could neither see nor show any trace. Around him they erected walls of darkness which his eyes could not penetrate; they buried him alive among the living.31 [They ensnared him] in so many ways that in the midst o f this sham liberty he could not say a word or take a step or move a finger without their knowledge and desire.32

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The omniscience of the reflective gaze belongs not to Rousseau but to his persecutors. Self-consciousness has been permanently expunged. No longer does Rousseau look upon Rousseau as Emile’s teacher looked upon Emile, with benevolent power; instead JeanJacques is subjected to the dread surveillance of the “conspiracy.” His actions are no longer his own; they are the captives of hostile onlookers. His environment is arranged in such a way that his deeds are no longer his true deeds. Inwardly he knows he is the same, but everything else—his movements, even his face—is imposed upon him from outside. A monstrous mask has been laid over his fea­ tures. Reflective men reflect their malevolence on Rousseau; they bury him beneath their own sentiments and make him a wicked man in their own likeness. He has been robbed not only of his liberty but even of his appearance: the portraits of him that are distributed everywhere are nothing short of slandrous. He is shut up in a “triple wall of darkness,” whose opacity he cannot penetrate because the shadows touch the very surface of his skin. Only the interior remains untouched, but no one is left who can serve as witness, except God. Obstacles

The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality explains that man invented weapons and tools because of the need to “overcome nature’s ob­ stacles.” This led, Rousseau deduces directly, to the development of reflection in the human species. The need to confront natural obstacles causes man to move from the realm of immediacy to the realm of mediation. Upon encountering nature’s obstacles, man’s original unity is shattered and his power over the world—science and technology—is born. Man’s perfectibility suddenly becomes apparent; what was potential becomes actual and the process of historical evolution begins. As soon as man attempts to combat the obstacles that stand in his way, he is wrested from the eternal present in which he originally dwelled; he must judge, compare, and make use of instruments. He discovers hope and regret. Time unfolds its hidden dimensions. The future begins to matter, to count among man’s concerns. The opinions of other people become a source of anxiety. An equally important function is assigned to obstacles in the Social Contract: man’s encounter with them reveals the need for a social pact. “I assume that men reach a point where the obstacles to their preservation in a state of nature prove greater than the strength that each man has to preserve himself in that state.”33

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Here we have another example of a decisive change that comes about as a result of striving to overcome obstacles. Physical adversity forces man to invent a new way of life and form of social organi­ zation. Without distorting Rousseau’s thought as set forth in the second Discourse and the Social Contract, one can say that mankind creates itself as a result of encountering obstacles challenging its existence. Reflection originates in the encounter with obstacles, but guilt comes along with it. Because Rousseau fulminates against reflec­ tion, we expect to see him shun the obstacles that give rise to it; we expect him to turn away in horror. And this is indeed the attitude we find in the Dialogues. From the very first page the inhabitant of the enchanted world is defined by his deliberate ignorance of obstacles. More accurately stated, he is ignorant not of obstacles themselves but of the struggle to overcome them and of the physical means and stratagems needed for the task. He either hurdles obstacles as though they did not exist or comes to a halt before them as though they were insuperable. There is no middle ground. The initiate in this world of enchantment immediately attains any goal he desires, or else he renounces the possibility of ever attaining it. His pleasures are “immediate” and his actions “direct.” None of his energy or thought is available to be diverted from his goal and directed instead to the problem of overcoming the obstacles that stand in his way. He does not wish to take account of the adversity of things. Attempting to vanquish that adversity would indicate his willingness to forgo immediate pleasures in order to subject himself to the law of instruments, techniques, and mediation. The obstacle is no longer seen as the point at which a movement begins but as the point at which the initial energy of the individual flags, subsides, or is diverted from its goal. According to a curious ballistic analogy that we encountered earlier, primitive passions ri­ cochet from the obstacle and follow an “oblique course.” They then become “hateful” or “secondary” passions, characterized by a cold nastiness that results from the sapping of motion. Contact with an obstacle does not produce a fresh burst of energy but perverts and deforms the soul’s spontaneous effusion. But only weak souls com­ promise when they “smash into an obstacle.” The strong soul is not deflected; “it is not turned aside but like a cannonball smashes what­ ever obstacle it meets or else has its force broken and falls.”34 Direct assault results in instantaneous destruction of all resistance or else leads to a complete standstill in the face of an insuperable obstacle.

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Rousseau thus translates the problem into purely mechanical terms. (This is his way of formulating the laws of psychodynamics.) The mechanical model reflects his wish to concern himself purely with energy expended “at the level of the source.” When a shell is fired, the outcome is already determined; the shot strikes home or goes awry depending on the intensity with which the powder burns. The action is literally emitted at a distance from the obstruction. Once the “cannonball” is launched, no fresh initiative can correct its trajectory; no calculated effort can measure the resistance of the obstacle and elaborate a plan for surmounting it. If the first shot does not pulverize the obstacle or pass through it unscathed, the whole campaign grinds to a halt. Either the obstacle proves trivial or it reduces Jean-Jacques to “total inaction.” A bizarre law seems to be in effect: either the obstacle vanishes before the expanding ego or it is insurmountable—an opaque surface that action cannot or will not overcome. Thus there are two possibilities: either the world is entirely free of obstacles, or absolutely impenetrable obstacles fill the horizon, beyond which there is nothing. Two worlds: one infinitely open, the other a closed prison. Rousseau lives in both. His imagination is capable of leaping every obstacle and magically opening limitless vistas (in which case he conceives of himself as being at one with the “system of beings”). But he is also capable of thinking of himself as a nullity, inhabiting a world in which every object has been transformed into an obstacle, a “triple wall of shadows,” an “im­ penetrable mystery.” Either he is excluded from everything or at one with the entire universe. He is an innocent victim of an un­ precedented conspiracy, or he is godlike in his pleasure in himself and in all things. He is at the mercy of every external sign, or he is capable of infinite expansion. He is passively governed by fixed laws,35 or he is actively in command of his own fate. No matter whether the obstacle is insuperable or nonexistent, Jean-Jacques is innocent. If the obstacle cannot be removed, Rousseau renounces action, turns inward, and consoles himself with his good intentions, which, though ineffective, are all the more pure as a result. If, on the other hand, the obstacle vanishes as he passes, this shows that his desire can indeed be satisfied immediately, that there is no need to pause in order to overcome resistance and thus share in the guilt of instrumental action. Rousseau, we have seen, often resorts to magical forms of behavior. This is again the case here. Obstacles can be totally eliminated only by recourse to magic. According to

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the ordinary laws of nature, first thrusts never strike home. There are always obstacles. Man never has a clear field. Approaching an object, encountering a real situation, always blurs Jean-Jacques’s vision. The mist or veil that comes between him and things in the outside world is dispelled only if he recovers the pure sensation of the thing or if the real object becomes an image in memory or reverie. Pure sensation involves the world’s giving itself without opposition from us. We create a horizon in our imagination from which things offer themselves to us without effort on our part. Imagination completes our action before we come into contact with external reality: By concerning itself with the object he covets, by reaching out to it through his desires, his bouniiful imagination hurdles the obstacles that impede or frighten it to reach its goal. It does more than that; by paring away from the object everything that is foreign to his wants, his imagination presents the object to him as wholly appropriated by his desire. Thus his fictions become sweeter to him than realities themselves. They eliminate the defects along with the difficulties; everything comes to him ready-made for him alone, so that desire and enjoyment are for him one and the same.36

In experiencing pure sensation or exercising the imagination, consciousness does not confront an object distinct from itself. An object would weigh it down. What the mind wants is not to possess a fragment of the real world but to enjoy the mental state corre­ sponding to such possession. The pleasure is only enhanced if it is obtained without a detour via the world, without overcoming any obstacles, but simply by positing an image of the desired object. The mind regards as legitimate the pretense whereby it experiences as its own creation the perfect relations that the inertia of the real world makes impossible. Though aware that the image of the de­ sired object is a figment of its own desire, the mind pretends to mistake it for an object in the world as long as grounds for ecstasy can be found in it. It lavishes sympathy on itself; it showers itself with affection. The effusion of the imagination offers the mind pure pleasure and, what is more, pleasure no less real for it than that which would be obtained through actual possession. We must assume that Pygmalion was happy even if the gods did not bring his statue to life. His happiness stems from the intensity of his passion, which could not have been more intoxicating had Galatea

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been alive. The glow of imagination surpasses the happiness a real woman would bring. If every reality raises the possibility of en­ countering an obstacle, Rousseau prefers that which does not exist: “Nothing is beautiful except that which does not exist.”37 The ego is a space without obstacles. In order to open up the enchanted world, the world without bound­ aries or obstacles, the “ordinary” world has to be firmly closed out and rejected. When Rousseau does not dwell in free space (the realm of the imagination, of memory, of pure sensation), he finds himself in a world in which everything has become an obstacle, an impediment to his will. Anything that prevents things and people from appearing to be transparent to his desire takes on the value of an evil omen, a sign of hostile intent, which discloses what it is intended to hide. Whatever is not immediate becomes a gruesome mask and turns against Jean-Jacques. Faces and walls hide the dark malice of a tribunal that has found him guilty before he has had a chance to present his defense. He feels as though the sentence has already been handed down and is awaiting execution. People pretend to commiserate but are in fact joined together in punishing Jean-Jacques. Whatever impediments he encounters appear to have been deliberately placed in his way as signs of his persecution and concealment of his persecutors. Mystery is ubiquitous and darkness endless. The obstacle cannot be swept away by a frontal attack. How can one act when all outcomes have been fixed in advance? Ap­ pearances are deceiving, not only because perception is misleading but also because every object is a trap laid expressly for JeanJacques. The uncertainty of appearances is no longer a “normal” part of human experience but a curse engineered by the enemy. Things are unclear, but not because Jean-Jacques cannot grasp the reality behind the appearance; it is his persecutors who have denied him the right to see things clearly. Just as Rousseau, projecting his own reflections onto his enemies, saw them as an instrument of persecution, so, too, did he blame others for his own inability to see things clearly: “Convinced that they do not allow me to see things as they are, I refrain from judging on the basis of appear­ ances they have contrived; they conceal their true motives, and any they leave for me to see are certainly deceptions.”38 As we saw earlier, Rousseau does not want to know that he is interpreting or that he is free to interpret appearances. He does not want to know that he is the one who interprets things as ob-

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stades. No. Things have a meaning they will not disdose to him, for nothing lies within his field of vision that has not been delib­ erately put there by “those gentlemen.” The wicked have furnished his world—wicked men with unfathomably evil intentions. Hence the only meaning he can ascribe to the objects that surround him is their absence of meaning, their hostile, implacable foreignness. By choosing to put the worst possible face on things, Rousseau spares himself the painful difficulty of choosing among different possible interpretations. The thin veil that once separated Rousseau from others has thick­ ened considerably, to the point of becoming an “immense barrier” that he is certain he will never penetrate. If, by accident, one barrier should give way, one fear should be alleviated, it is only to reveal the immense depths that lay hidden behind the vanished obstacle, depths of darkness that become yet another obstacle impossible to overcome. Jean-Jacques makes his way through “an immense lab­ yrinth, permitted to see nothing in the darkness but false routes that lead him farther and farther astray."*'J The nature of the obstacle is such that any action to overcome it is futile. Jean-Jacques is paralyzed not merely because the obstacle is insuperable but also because anything he does to confront it immediately becomes subject to the machinations of his enemies. Every action he takes, every word he utters, is instantly reported to his enemies and turned against him. No sooner does he write a page than he is convinced that it will be intercepted, twisted, revised without his knowledge, published in a mutilated version, or simply destroyed. His work no longer belongs to him. They refuse to believe that he is the author of his books and impute to him books he never wrote. The meaning of everything he does is twisted and the outcome perverted by his enemies. “No longer able to do good that does not turn to evil,”40 he is reduced to silence and inaction. If he attempts to speak, they rob his words; when he attempts to do good, they rob his act, entangling him in his own errors. The greatest concern o f those who control my fate having been to keep me entirely surrounded by false and deceptive appear­ ances, any occasion for virtuous behavior is never more than a bait to tempt me into the trap they have laid for me. I know this; I know that the only good that is henceforth within my power is to abstain from acting, lest unwittingly and unintentionally I should act badly.41

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Jean-Jacques’s enemies pervert the consequences of his actions. They also establish the motives. Thus the realm of action is entirely in the hands of the conspirators. Jean-Jacques’s will is surrepti­ tiously controlled by those who wish him ill. The moment he quits the refuge of immediate feeling, his enemies manipulate whatever he does. All ways of making contact with objects in the outside world or with other people, all instruments of self-defense, have been confiscated by his persecutors (and may always have belonged to them anyway). All routes leading away from immediacy are blocked. Any action directed toward the outside world is imme­ diately swallowed up by hostile shadows. Silence

What becomes, in particular, of the crucial act of self-revelation? As we have seen, this act assumed special importance in Rousseau’s scheme of things. Rousseau hoped through the use of “authentic” language to remain in immediate contact with himself even as he communicated with others. Being himself and acting seemed inex­ tricably associated; the self exposed itself and invented itself at the same time. Recounting his own life both affirmed the unique value of personal experience and presented that experience as being of universal interest and a matter for universal judgment. Rousseau wrote the Confessions both to demonstrate his singularity and to solicit general “recognition,” in other words, so that his innocence could be confirmed by unanimous decree. But first he had to win an audience and persuade his readers to pronounce judgment. After the public reading of his Confessions, however, Rousseau encountered silence—the ultimate obstacle, the mystery of iniquity. The wall of darkness was reinforced by an obstinate circle of silence. Jean-Jacques had bared his soul, shown himself to his fellow men as he believed he appeared to God, intus et in cute, in order to force them to speak, either to grant him pardon or make their charges known. He hoped finally to learn what people had against him. In the first preamble to the Confessions he foresaw some hostile reaction and indeed explicitly insisted on it: “I look forward to public speeches and to harsh judgments pronounced out loud, and I submit to my fate.”42 How much more bearable the “frivolous clamor of slander” would have been than “plots hatched and orchestrated in profound silencel”43 But in the final paragraph of the Confessions Rousseau has this to say: “Thus I concluded my reading, and eveiyone was silent. Mme d’Egmont was the only person who seemed moved. She trem-

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bled visibly but quickly controlled herself, and remained quiet, as did the rest of the company/1,14 Thus the final lines of the Confessions erect a wall of silence around the entire work, after such strenuous efforts to conquer the silence of others. Over the surface of the silence a momentary trembling passes: a woman is moved by what she has heard, and for a brief moment hope is awakened in Jean-Jacques only to be dashed instantly. Here we see the perversion of the dream of a silence permeated by signs, the locus of a happiness that human language was pow­ erless to achieve. In La nouvelle Héloïse the “English morning” was charming precisely because of these tremblings, signs, and glances exchanged in silence, which enabled sensitive souls to communicate more reliably and more rapidly than by any other means. Now, however, signs are evil omens. Still worse, silence is no longer a “conducting medium” through which one mind is linked to an­ other; silence itself is the obstacle, signifying absolute separation. The Confessions end in silence. This same silence marks the point of departure of the Dialogues. Consider the preamble to that work: Profound silence, universal silence, no less inconceivable than the mystery it conceals, a mystery that for fifteen years people have hidden from me with effort that I shall refrain from character­ izing and success that is nothing short o f miraculous; this fright­ ening and terrible silence has prevented me from grasping the least clue to such strange attitudes.15

Why silence? All explanations are valid. Jean-Jacques has not been allowed to speak. He has spoken, but others have not listened to what he said. His works have been altered, so that his true motives have been overlooked. He has been judged without an opportunity to present his side of the case, and now his appeal is being rejected, his application for pardon dismissed. (Jean Guéhenno has quite rightly compared Rousseau’s situation to that described by Kafka in The Trial.)*6 Things might have turned out differently had JeanJacques’s silent persecutors not condemned him to silence. Instead he was sdfled and not allowed to state the truth, which might have broken the evil spells and dispelled the nightmare: “With one word he might have lifted veils that no other eyes could penetrate and shed light on stratagems that no other mortal will ever decipher.”17 But the Dialogues, which come on as yet another battle against silence, come to grief over the same obstacle. The work ends in a threefold silence, a threefold failure to force others to speak.

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By the time the third and final dialogue concludes, the French­ man has repented of his error. He is convinced that Jean-Jacques is not the monster he has been made out to be and confesses his regret at having been duped by “those gentlemen.” Yet he can say nothing in public in Jean-Jacques’s favor and, what is more, cannot reveal the horrible secret of the conspiracy to the persecuted victim: I therefore do not refuse to see him on occasion, with due pru­ dence and precaution. It is up to him if he wishes to find out that I share your sentiments concerning him. Although I cannot reveal the secrets of his enemies, he will see at least that, though compelled to remain silent, I do not seek to deceive him.48

Yet the concluding lines of the dialogue are consoling. The Frenchman cannot break the silence, but he will speak later on, in another age, when men have changed. He agrees to hold JeanJacques’s papers and swears to “spare no effort” to see to it that some day those papers are published. He even pledges to gather testimony “apt to reveal the truth.” Thus Rousseau renounces ac­ tion on his own behalf and leaves it to others to act in his stead. The public reading of the Confessions was an attempt to reveal the truth directly. But now the only hope that remains is to convey the truth indirectly to the men of another age. This task is not for Rousseau himself to carry out; he will have to rely on a trusted intermediary. Or, better yet, the job will be done by time or prov­ idence. Rousseau has abandoned hope of making himself heard during his lifetime. The only thing he can do is make sure that his papers are deposited in a safe place for a revelation at some later date, after he is gone. He will deposit his work to wait in silence. Yet Rousseau cannot resign himself to silence. After producing a manuscript in which he claims to renounce all further attempts to persuade his contemporaries, he asks himself whether there is anything to prevent him from using that manuscript immediately to break the silence of his enemies. Doesn’t the fact that he is willing to trust the rehabilitation of his reputation to the men of a “better generation” prove that he is fearless of the truth? Isn’t his refusal to act irrefutable proof of his clear conscience? The ultimate me­ diation: a book in which Jean-Jacques declares that he is utterly without means. He would like the silence to be broken in some dramatic way— by the voice of the king or of God, for instance. He feels that his persecutors stand between himself and judgment, and he wants to try to circumvent the obstacle in order to stand directly before his

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Judge. But he will not address his manuscript to the king. Once again, Jean-Jacques shirks the burden of action. He wants his pe­ tition to be made essentially without his participation. Consider the peculiar “History of the Previous Piece” which fol­ lows the Dialogues. Rousseau conceives the plan of depositing his manuscript on the high altar of Notre Dame Cathedral. He will “entrust it to providence.” A preamble to the manuscript states that Rousseau knows he has no right to expect a miracle; he leaves it to God to choose the time and the means. Yet even as he pretends to entrust his fate to God, he is eager to attract the attention of mortals. He hopes that “rumors of his deed bring his manuscript to the attention of the king.” An odd stratagem: though directed toward heaven, the gesture is made only in order to be observed by other men, in the hope of indirectly striking a blow strong enough to shake the convictions of men of integrity (if any such men are still to be found in France). At around this same time Rousseau began prefacing all his letters with this invocation to heaven: Pauvres aveugles que nous sommes! Ciel, démasque les imposteurs Et force leurs barbares coeurs A s’ouvrir aux regards des hommes. [What poor, blind creatures we are! Heaven, unmask the impostors And force their barbarous hearts To open to the gaze of man.]

Rousseau calls upon heaven to put an end to imposture and restore transparency to men’s hearts, but his appeal to God is made before witnesses. Yet the quatrain is not addressed directly to the recipient of the letter (as Rousseau explained if his correspondent expressed surprise or took offense). Jean-Jacques prays alone, os­ tentatiously demonstrating that his only resource lies elsewhere. This is also the meaning of his decision to entrust the manuscript of the Dialogues to providence. But the stratagem is a failure. Entering the cathedral through a side door, Rousseau encounters a grill that prevents him from reaching the choir. He suddenly discovers the material presence of the mythical image that has obsessed him for so long; he stands before the fatal veil, face to face with the insuperable obstacle. He

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confronts a sign, which tells him that even God will have nothing to do with him and has decided to remain silent: As soon as I saw that grill I became dizzy, like a man stricken by apoplexy; that dizziness was followed by an upheaval in the very depths of my soul unlike any I had ever experienced before. The church seemed so changed in appearance that, doubting I was in Notre Dame, I tried hard to take my bearings and make out what I was seeing. . . . Having said nothing of my plans to anyone I was all the more struck by this unforeseen obstacle, and in my initial emotion I thought I detected heaven’s complicity in the iniquity of men; the angry murmur that escaped my lips can be imagined only by someone capable of imagining himself in my place and excused only by someone capable of reading the secrets of the heart. I quickly left the church, resolved never to return, and surren­ dering to my agitation I ran for the rest of the day, roaming here and there without knowing where I was or where I was going, until, at the end of my tether, fatigue and darkness obliged me to return home exhausted and almost dazed with pain.49

The closed grill in the church reinforces the “triple wall of darkness” that Jean-Jacques’s enemies have built around him. The confusion that takes hold of him then is profoundly revealing. It proves that all worldly order and coherence vanished the moment Jean-Jacques saw his last hope of achieving a satisfactory relationship collapse. Once the possibility of human communication had foun­ dered, the only remaining possibility was a relationship with tran­ scendence. If God too had rejected him, there would have been nothing left, whence his aimless, disoriented race through a world become absolutely external, through space that no longer belonged to this world. When his final witness refuses to answer the sum­ mons, a frustrated Jean-Jacques runs amok until he collapses from fatigue. At this point Rousseau meets with a third silent refusal. He goes to see Condillac, to whom he intends to entrust the manuscript of the Dialogues. What he expects is not only that Condillac will accept the manuscript but also that he will read it, answer the question posed by every line of the text, and finally break the unbearable silence in which Jean-Jacques is imprisoned. Perhaps the veil can finally be lifted. But nothing happens. Condillac speaks of other things and avoids the question. On the essential question he remains silent. The silence grows heavy.

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Two weeks later I returned to his house, convinced that the mo­ ment had come, that the veil of darkness that had been held over my eyes for twenty years was about to fall, and that in one way or another the recipient would clarify things in a way that I sup­ posed would follow inevitably from the reading of my manuscript. Nothing of what I expected came to pass. He spoke about my piece as he would have spoken about a work of literature . . . but he said nothing of the effect that it had on him or what he thought of the author.50

Rousseau and his former companion at the Panier-Fleuri are now separated by a permanent silence: “Since then 1 have ceased to visit him. He paid two or three calls on me, during which we experienced a great deal of difficulty finding colorless words to pass the time, since I had nothing more to say to hi?n, and he wished to say nothing whatsoever to me."st After this triple encounter with silence, Rousseau attempts one final action, this time as direct as possible: he hands out leaflets in the street addressed “To any Frenchman who still loves justice and truth.” But passersby have been forewarned and refuse to accept Rousseau’s handbill: “I encountered an obstacle I had not foreseen in the refusal of those to whom I offered [the leaflet] to accept it.”52 Further effort to overcome the obstacle seems pointless; there is no way of getting to be better known by other people. The task is beyond his reach. Rousseau has no choice but to withdraw into the inward innocence that others refuse to recognize. Yet he has not abandoned all hope. A revelation will come, but not through any effort of his own. Once and for all he commits his fate to time, heaven, and providence. “Time can lift many veils.”53 He does not even count on his papers any more but relies on other powers. His only role is to live the truth, not to communicate it to others. If the truth comes out some day, it will not be his doing but the work of some transcendent power. When silence is finally vanquished, it will not be by his voice, nor will it be by the voice of people whose allegiance he no longer hopes to regain. He expects nothing further from men: no more returns. The only return on his mind is his own, back to his “source,” to his maker and judge, who created the order of the world and will some day restore the harmony that Jean-Jacques’s persecutors have destroyed. The only thing that will break the silence now is the trumpet of Judgment Day: “Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge.”54

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Inaction

Action has become futile. The world of action is impracticable. Jean-Jacques has only to begin doing something for his action to cease to be his own. Once begun, his exertion is taken over by an outside force and directed toward a mysterious goal of which he is doomed to remain forever ignorant. Nothing that he attempts can succeed as he hoped. If salvation is to be attained, only prov­ idence can attain it. Frequently Jean-Jacques’s persecutors turn his own actions against him. Is man born to act? Rousseau asserts that he is,55 but he always admitted his dislike of action. If only his intentions could have been realized directly! But that is the privilege of reverie, where the thought of an action immediately becomes an image of the com­ pleted act. This is a mere trick of images, however; consciousness never ventures beyond its own boundaries and makes do with a simulacrum of the outside world. When an intention seeks reali­ zation outside the mind, the result is different. Hope of immediate pleasure must be abandoned, the law of mediation must be ac­ cepted, instruments must be used, and unavoidable risks must be taken into account. Is further proof needed of Rousseau’s suspicion of all forms of mediated action? When he develops a utilitarian theory of human labor in Emile, he relates the utility of labor to the independence it brings; the measure of utility is autarchy, total self-sufficiency. A perfect example of this is the community at Clarens. If man must act, let him act with the smallest possible number of instruments. Let him make do with that immediate implement, his body, his own two hands. The only legitimate action is action based not on a preexisting culture or tool-making tradition but on intact nature, such as Robinson Crusoe discovers on his desert island: How many important lessons our Emile will derive from his Rob­ inson! What will he think when he discovers that the arts perfect themselves by subdividing, by endlessly multiplying the instruments used by each and every one? He will say: those people are foolishly ingenious. They must be afraid that their arms and fingers will not serve them, so diligent are they at inventing instruments as replacements. In order to exercise a single art they become the slaves of innumerable others; each worker requires an entire city. My friend and I put our genius into our dexterity; we make tools that we can carry wherever we go. All these people so proud o f their talents in Paris would be totally at a loss on our island!56

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The one justified action, according to Rousseau, is that which resembles the action of the first man inventing the first tool. Such an act of creation ex nihilo is entirely my own; it does not depend on the past history of the human race. Our actions should wholly belong to us, and therefore we should not use any instrument that we cannot construct ourselves. We should not use tools Lhat are given to us, because we do not want our actions to be linked to those of our predecessors. Thus, although Rousseau was one of the first writers to stress the dignity of labor and was at pains to “democratize” the image of the ideal man (Emile learns how to plow and to use a plane), he was also one of the first to protest against technology. The non sequitur is more apparent than real; the principle of individual liberty is the key. Labor makes the artisan independent, but technology ties us to tradition, to institutions, and above all to other men, who make our tools and complete our work. Unity of the individual corresponds to undivided labor. But if Rousseau favors action without antecedents, he also wants action without consequences. He never liked to be constrained by the consequences of his actions. Even before he accuses his enemies of distorting what he says and does, he could never resign himself to the fact that his actions often produced unanticipated conse­ quences, sometimes the opposite of what he intended. Any results not direedy under his control he regarded as unfortunate. Let him try to do good, and his good deed became an obligation. Let him try to do a favor, and it soon gave rise to “chains of continuing obli­ gation which I had not foreseen and which it was noxu impossible to shake off''*'1 There is no shortage of evidence that well before the onset of his paranoid delusions Rousseau felt a strange discomfort when­ ever he suspected that he was losing control of his actions. As the consequences of his behavior receded into the distance, they became alien. Jean-Jacques refused to assume responsibility for his actions, for who knew what dangers lay in store? He never agreed to rec­ ognize the long-term effects of what he did. He pursued only im­ mediate goals, hence he never wished for all the embarrassing repercussions and dishonorable aftermath. He put his children in a public orphanage, but only because they were unwanted conse­ quences of immediate pleasures savored in all innocence with Thérèse. He chose Thérèse to make her the servant of his im­ mediate needs, telling her that he wished neither to abandon her nor to marry her,58 in other words, that he wished to live with her in an eternal present, a series of moments without past or future. But nature here played a nasty trick on Jean-Jacques. The im-

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mediate pleasure of physical love creates a link to the future, a consequence: the child. But Rousseau was unwilling to recognize as his own a child that he had no intention of engendering. He repudiated this alienation, this other ego, even though it was his own work. Rousseau’s refusal of paternity is, I think, merely an expression, in one particular circumstance, of a more general fear of living in a world in which actions have unintended consequences. I should add that this repudiation of consequences also helps to explain the astonishing courage that Rousseau exhibited in a variety of situations. He says what he thinks, he expresses his present feelings, without thinking of what his frankness might cost him. What will be will be. Consequences are not his responsibility; he submits to them as to an alien misfortune, as one might submit to a hailstorm or a tempest. Jean-Jacques’s inability to control the consequences of his actions does not paralyze him but gives him the audacity to do some very peculiar things. He wants to believe that, once done, his action will no longer belong to him, that the tie will be severed. If the consequences of our actions are wholly beyond our control, then either we can do nothing or we can do everything. Our responsibility may seem so burdensome that we do not dare to do anything. Or we conclude that we have no re­ sponsibility at all. Thus at times Jean-Jacques gives in to the most irresponsible impulses, while at other times he refrains from acting, as though overwhelmed by the terrible burden of responsibility that he bears. He behaves sometimes as though any action, no matter how trivial, were a kind of trap, other times as though he were completely free. Jean-Jacques says that he is lazy and indolent, yet he also describes himself as active and hardworking. This appears to be a contra­ diction, but it soon becomes apparent that the activities to which he is attracted are different from those of which he is wary. If he must act, Rousseau wants his action to have no causes and no con­ sequences. He is unwilling to inherit anything from any action begun before him and unwilling to allow his action to continue without him, to spread its effects in the outside world. The activity for which he feels he was born is one in which he can expend his energy in a series of first impulses, without giving a thought to the consequences or ramifications. His nature and thought can be un­ ified, he believes, while still allowing his ideas and feelings to be temporally discontinuous. If his unity is based on immediacy, that is, on his repudiation of reflection and unwillingness to foresee consequences, it follows that all his actions must be governed by

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the primacy of the isolated instant. Rousseau admits this openly in a letter to Dorn Deschamps: You are very kind 10 scold me for the inaccuracies in my reasoning. Have you noticed that, although 1 see certain objects quite dearly, I am unable to compare them; that 1 am fairly fertile when it comes to producing propositions, yet never see the consequences; that order and method, which are your gods, are my furies; that nothing comes my way that is not isolated; and that radier dian constrain my ideas in my writings I use charlatanry in transitions.59

Although Rousseau pretends to be unable to see the conse­ quences of his propositions, he is obliged to endure the conse­ quences of his words—glory and persecution—which impinge upon him from outside. It is imprudent for me to speak out if I do not wish to be bound by the consequences of what I say. I had best remain silent; if I feel the need to act, I must try to confine the consequences of my action as much as possible to the ephemeral present. Rousseau increasingly falls back on actions that do not require him either to transgress the boundaries of, or reflect upon, the self: unreflective, intransitive actions. He walks and he strolls. He expends energy without transforming the world or engaging in conscious self-examination. Jean-Jacques’s strolls are at first merely a way of fleeing human society, of immersing himself in nature and contemplation. But, as is clear from various passages of Lhe Confes­ sions, the Dialogues, or the third letter to Malesherbes, walking even­ tually produces something like a hypnotic state; his body forgets itself. An “inexplicable void” develops; the mind losses its grip on reality and abandons itself to its own exuberance. Reveries unfold inwardly without involving the will. The body becomes absorbed in the rhythm of walking to such a degree that conscious reflection is curtailed or eliminated, allowing the images of the reverie to appear, as it were, spontaneously, gratuitously, effortlessly: Jean-Jacques is indolent and lazy, like all contemplatives; buL this laziness is only in his head. Thinking is always an effort tor him; it tires him, and anything Lhat forces him to think frightens him. . . . Still, in his own way, he is active and hardworking. He cannot stand to be completely idle; Aw hands, his feet, and his fingers must be active; his body needs to be in motion while his head remains at rest. Whence his love of strolling, for while walking his body is in motion, yet he is not obliged to think. In reverie one is not active. Images inscribe themselves in the brain and combine as in sleep without any effort o f the will; you let them follow their own course and enjoy the result without taking an active part. It is

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altogether different when you decide to stop and to identify, order, and arrange the objects that fill the mind. You put yourself into them. As soon as reasoning and reflection take a hand, the medi­ tation ceases to be restful and becomes a veiy difficult form of action. This is the difficulty of which Jean-Jacques is frightened, and the mere idea o f it overwhelms him and makes him lazy. I have never found him so except in tasks in which the mind is required to act in even the slightest degree. He is not stingy with his time or trou­ ble and cannot sit idle without suffering. He would willingly spend his life digging in a garden so as to dream at his leisure.60

The kinds of action in which Rousseau is willing to involve himself are those for which the will need not take responsibility: actions structured by their own regularity and requiring no mental effort. Digging in a garden is a perfect example. Note that Rousseau shows no concern about the ostensible purpose of digging; he does not dig because he is interested in the harvest. The only purpose of the action is to maintain a state of dreamy passivity. Repetitive, routine tasks may not accomplish much, but they engage the body in a monotonous rhythm, allowing the images of reverie to bubble up in the mind. The body is active, but that activity is experienced as passivity. The reveries that accompany routine acts are not always pleasant. Corancez, a witness to Rousseau’s last years, could tell from a certain rhythmical motion of Jean-Jacques’s arm when he had slipped into rapturous meditation: In this state, his gaze seemed to embrace all space and his eyes seemed to see everything at once. But in fact they saw nothing. He turned in his chair and draped his arm over the back. This suspended arm moved back and forth like the bob of a pendulum. I noticed this more than four years before his death, so that I had plenty o f time to observe it. Whenever I came and saw him assume this position, I felt a pang in my heart and expected to hear the most extravagant words; my expectations were never disappointed.61

In extreme cases, then, action is reduced to a mechanical motion; reverie, however delightful or disagreeable, coexists with an “almost automatic life.” Friendships among the Plants

In Naples on March 17, 1787, Goethe made the following note in his travel diary:

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I sometimes think o f Rousseau and his hypochondriacal distress. I can imagine perfectly well how such a fine mind could have become deranged. I would often consider myself mad if I did not take such a lively interest in the things o f nature, and if I failed to see that, despite the apparent confusion, a hundred different observations can be compared and put in order, just as the sur­ veyor, by laying down one line, verifies a large number of isolated measurements.62

What protects Goethe is his participation in the outside world; it is action, which is capable of measuring and establishing order amid chaos. The nature that saves him from his inner demons is not simply an object of contemplation; the mind must take an active role, establishing “charts” and discovering systems of relations where at first there seemed to be nothing but confusion. But Rousseau collected plants, wrote letters on botany, and began work on a botanical dictionary. Did he not engage spontaneously in therapeutic activity? Did he not distract himself from his obses­ sions by examining natural objects, observing their structure, and arranging them in a hierarchy? Rousseau did in fact find a tran­ quilizer in botany, but its effects were intermittent and incomplete. One possible reason for this is that the interludes between his pe­ riods of paranoid anxiety were relatively brief. It is clear, however, that Jean-Jacques’s interest in botany never involved him in the kind of search for the meaning of vital phenomena that might have engaged his mind in a concrete task. Goethe wrote the Metamor­ phoses of the Plants, while Rousseau made “pretty herbariums.”JeanJacques was a collector, not a naturalist. And collecting was an occupation, an amusement, not a true form of action. Again, his action does not bring him into contact with the world; he turns inward and drains his own substance. Curiously, Rousseau equates his interest in botany with his work as a copyist.63 The two activities shed light on one another. Both involve tasks limited to the assertion of identity. Rousseau identifies plants and recognizes the types de­ scribed by Linnaeus; he transcribes, from one sheet of ruled paper to another, identical lines of music. The work is salutary, but the mind’s only obligation is to serve as the transparent medium whereby a fragment of reality is copied without alteration. Actions they are, but not actions that bring anything new into the world. Reverie can be superimposed on these activities, occasionally disturbing them. More often, however, they take the place of reverie. When an aging Jean-Jacques fears that his imagination is running dry, he seeks something to compensate him for the loss, whether memories

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or semimechanical activities. These are idle occupations, but with­ out them the mind would be forced to confront its own emptiness: The deeper the solitude that surrounds me, the greater the need I feel at such times for something to fill this vacuum, and where my imagination cannot provide me with ideas or my memory rejects them, the earth makes up for this with the many objects that it produces spontaneously, without any human agency, and sets before my eyes on all sides.64

But this is to settle for second best. Rousseau asks nature for a rough equivalent of what his mind once provided: images that seem to be born of their own accord and need only to be gathered in. Through the emptiness and purity of a consciousness deeply un­ occupied, natural objects can be seen undistorted, in their true innocence. Rousseau, moreover, chooses the most innocent of all objects, plants, whose life does not contradict their innocence. “I do not seek to educate myself.”65 His activity is not intended to bring him either knowledge or practical power. Rousseau is not interested in the uses of plants; he refuses to see them as means, which would make them subject to some external purpose. The plant, he believes, is an end unto itself. The only nonimmediate goal he is willing to consider is the closed finality of the herbarium, the collection that duplicates the preestablished system, with one specimen for each species. Jean-Jacques does not care about the medicinal properties of plants. He lingers only briefly over the poisonous plants. (Didn’t his persecutors accuse him of knowing too much about them?) Plants, symbols of nature’s purity, purify Jean-Jacques; it is as though plants possessed the magic power to bestow their innocence on the person contemplating them. The dried plant becomes a mnemonic sign, which reminds Jean-Jacques of a landscape glimpsed in a beautiful light; a past mental state is recalled to present consciousness. In that sense the plant is useful, but for purely internal ends; it restores Jean-Jacques’s selfpossession. The mnemonic sign is a mediation, but its only purpose is to establish the immediate presence of memory. Let us call this ‘‘regressive mediation,” since it leads not to transcendence of sense experience but to reactivating it in its entirety. Rousseau relives previous moments as he lived them originally, without making (as Proust will make) the effort of understanding necessary to grasp the essence of time. More effectively than any reflection, the dried flower evokes a verdant image of the past in a mind that wants to remain passive. It reminds Jean-Jacques of his past happiness, of

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the beautiful day on which he set out to discover the rare specimen missing from his collection. Jean-Jacques looks for plants so that later he can look to his herbarium, thereby enabling himself to live through memory. He thus creates a memorized immediacy richer and warmer than the im­ mediacy of actual sensation. When his interest in the creatures of his imagination wanes, his expansive energies Mag, and his capacity for intensity and rapture diminishes, all that remains to him is the tangible objects that surround him. He feels compelled to content himself with just a remnant of life. He then discovers the inherent poverty of immediacy and complains that “my ideas are hardly more than sensations now, and my understanding cannot transcend the objects that form my immediate surroundings.”f,r’ Worse yet, the world of immediate perception has been corrupted by persecution, contaminated by evil. Exploring it brings him into contact with the mysterious enemy, or, more accurately, the mys­ terious absence of the enemy: “Submerged in an abyss of woes, 1 feel the sting of blows, I see the immediate instrument used to deliver them, but I do not see the hand that guides that instrument or the means by which it is moved.“*7 The sensuous quality of his surroundings diminished; more than that, every object can suddenly become a sign or instrument of persecution. The support that the elderly Rousseau derives from external reality is precarious in the extreme. Immediate sensation is lifeless and weak, incapable of yielding joy or comfort. Total emptiness threatens. What sustains Jean-Jacques is the memory of happiness and the anticipation of justice. He thinks back to ecstatic days in the bosom of nature and looks forward to the Day of Judgment: “My soul no longer Hies up without effort from its decaying prison of flesh, and were it not for the hope of a state to which I aspire because I feel that is mine by right, I should now live only in the past.”6* A strange weakness saps the present, a weakness from which the only escape is to invoke the past and the future. A legitimate artifice, the herbarium is a conservatory of the past and hence of happy fulfillment, which compensates for the void left in Jean-Jacques by the failure of imagination and sensation. Collecting herbs is an idle occupation, which distracts the mind from its own emptiness and from its persecution. When relived in memory, however, the bo­ tanical walk is an island of happiness. Once the dried plant has restored the presence of memory, its objective structure vanishes from the mind, clearing the way for an influx of pleasant remi-

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niscences. The collected flower is not merely an instance of a type but a sign, by means of which a feeling is wrested from oblivion and relived with all its original vivacity restored. Here we have a transparent world in which every object has its double; no deliberate effort of reflection is required. Rousseau limits his actions to those that constantly require him to start anew, each time retracing the same steps. Any true beginning, any real initiative, would lay him open to unforeseen dangers and lead to consequences that Jean-Jacques no longer feels capable of con­ fronting. His anxiety abates only when he is able to abandon himself to an activity that is neither inward in a bad sense (like reflection) nor dangerously external (like action that seeks an end outside itself). All that remains is the closed circle of repetition, the cycle that has no other meaning than its own reiteration.

9

Imprisoned for Life

Rousseau's belief that he was being persecuted suggests a secret desire on his part to be relieved of responsibility for actions and their consequences. Surrounded by enemies, he ceased to exercise control over the realm in which he might have been expected to act, hence was forced to “abstain from acting." If he made an effort and that effort failed, it was not his failure but their crime. No longer responsible, he felt an unshakable sense of relief. “Wanting to do good, I shall do evil." Since others take control of liis actions and pervert his aims, it is better to attempt nothing and withdraw into innocent inaction. Jean-Jacques is fully justified if he does nothing but herborize and dream. He would even have liked a more tan­ gible, more concrete justification for his inaction, such as being exiled to an island or sentenced to prison for life. Had he been locked up inside four stout walls, no one would have expected him to do anything but live his life and dream; no one would have expected him to do good or accused him of doing evil. He would have “only [to] want to be happy in order to be so."1By abandoning the outside world to others, we eliminate the impediments to self­ presence. Nothing external solicits our attention. Deprived of the means to act, we must confine our wants to what is immediately at hand. The proper end of our will lies within; we need not concern ourselves with the outside world. Hence if we want to be happy, we are happy, immediately. Rousseau asks the magistrates of Berne to sentence him to prison for life. He wants to be forced to enjoy tranquility, repose, and the happiness dial comes of expecting nothing he cannot supply him­ self. “1 dared wish for and suggest that it would be belter to sentence me to prison for life than to make me roam the eardi endlessly by expelling me one by one from every asylum I might have chosen.”2 The wandering life is a worse torture than prison. In prison, at least, diere is no false hope; the mind ceases to look to greener pastures and recognizes that all it has is inner resources. 239

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Rousseau describes life as a victim of persecution as though it were a kind of imprisonment. He is isolated, surrounded by fences and walls, and kept under surveillance. No fate could be more miserable. Persecution is the symbolic realization of Rousseau’s de­ sire to be “imprisoned for life,” a perfect imitation of prison life, down to the constant temptation to escape. A “vagabond victim,” Rousseau is forced to seek refuge within himself, in the impregn­ able asylum of his conscience. The word ambivalence comes to mind. Rousseau’s persecution is a bitter frustration, a painful denial of justice, a barbaric refusal of the recognition that is his due. Yet at the same time it enables the mind to savor its “inner delights.” Embattled against evil, Rous­ seau also portrays himself as acquiescing in his woes, in which he discovers a mysterious election that forces him to remain aloof from the rest of humanity. Achieved Intentions

Allowing for what is irrevocably alien in any form of insanity, we can still isolate specific intentional forms of behavior in Rousseau’s paranoid delusions. Such delusions are in general rigidly struc­ tured. The sick person erects a coherent system of motives and justifications in order to make his behavior seem logical and ra­ tional. These motives are always interesting to consider, because the paranoid takes them to be sound. Rather than attempt to point out how he is mistaken, the therapist, aware that the patient’s rea­ soning will retain its subjective validity in the face of all criticism, should attempt to discover the implicit intentions upon which the fantastic superstructure is based. In a phenomenological analysis of Rousseau, the problem is not so much to identify antecedent causes hidden in the unconscious but to isolate, in the persecutional system to which he consciously refers, meanings and desires of which he is unaware. Rather than attempt to reconstruct the “deep” mechanisms that in some obscure way produced Rousseau’s in­ terpretive system, let us hew as closely as possible to what he actually says and does; let us examine his words and actions until we un­ derstand their meaning, and the coherent intention within them, in a way that Jean-Jacques himself could not have done. Rousseau’s late writings reveal a variety of mutually reinforcing intentions and motives. It is hard to say which were primary and which secondary, for there was no constant hierarchy. Hence I prefer simply to give a list. To begin with, Rousseau wants to re-

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nounee possessions and to constrict his life as much as he possibly can. He is willing to give up all his belongings and sever all his ties to other people. He renounces property, communication, and ac­ tion. At the time of his personal reform, this renunciation was entirely voluntary. Having laid aside his sword and his fine linen and sold his watch, he ensconced himself in the proud cynicism of virtue and beat a lonely retreat from society. After his persecution begins, however, he sees renunciation as an ineluctable fate to which he resigns himself. “They [i.e., the conspirators]” strip him of all he owns, deprive him of friends, force him into hiding, and erect obscure obstacles in his path. Rousseau has willed none of this; destiny overwhelms him, and he has no choice but to submit to his fate. His life is no less ascetic than before, the only difference being that asceticism is now the result not of Jean-Jacque's conscious will but of the enmity of wicked men. Jean-Jacques remains faithful to his original intention, going so far as to strip himself of his own will. He has impoverished himself to such a degree that he no longer feels free to will his poverty. It is inflicted upon him from outside. When he speaks of his dereliction, it is in tones of pain and suf­ fering. The style in which Rousseau expresses this suffering em­ ploys a device that he uses repeatedly: it is a sort of litany, generally beginning with the word alone [siu/], followed by a series of terms preceded by the preposition without The result is an obsessive series in which a comma intervenes as a sigh; this stylistic device gives concrete expression to the absence of external support and control over things and to the irreparable condition of exile and abjection. Among innumerable examples, consider the following: Left alone, without friends, counsel, or experience, in a foreign country, serving a foreign nation . . .3 Alone, a foreigner, isolated, without support or family, dinging to nothing but my principles and my duties . . .4 Alone, without support, friends, or defenses, abandoned to the temerity of public judgment . . .5 A sirangcr, without relations, without support, alone, abandoned by all, betrayed by most, Jean-Jacques is in the worst possible position to be equitably judged.6

Yet privation makes Rousseau invulnerable. When finally stripped naked, when “nothing worse is possible,” Rousseau experiences a revelation: freedom is indestructible. Consciousness remains, and knows that it is indomitable. Dispossession becomes absolute pos-

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session; impotence is transformed into inalienable power: “All hu­ man power is henceforth powerless against me. . . . Master and King on earth, all who surround me are at my mercy; I can do anything to them, and they can no longer do anything to me.”7 In this turning of the tables nothing becomes everything. But such a reversal is possible only after Rousseau has been reduced to noth­ ing. Ultimate adversity triumphantly restores freedom, which issues from nothing other than itself. Thus, the will to renounce reveals a will to immediate freedom. At the height of adversity Rousseau discovers a part of his being in­ vulnerable to outside attack, a freedom that has no external re­ sponsibility because the outside world remains beyond its reach. The will refuses to do battle with dispossession and alienation, allowing them to take their natural course. Freedom is what re­ mains, inalienable, in spite of all alienation; it is what is left when one has been stripped of everything, the hidden center whose in­ dependence cannot be violated. Invulnerable to coercion, it is also beyond duty and responsibility. Stripped of means and instruments, what can it do? Jean-Jacques discovers within himself a limitless power: to be himself, unconditioned by any outside power, but only after all outside powers have been arrayed against him. Rather than seek to master ineluctable fate, he need only seek to be himself. Rousseau expresses this thought in a sentence that might have been written by Seneca: “Whoever wants to be free is free.”8 Confronting an insurmountable obstacle brings him face to face with his freedom. It is instantly and directly real, as if by magic. His goal, which is simply to assert his freedom, is immediately attained. Total darkness must reign in the outside world before Jean-Jacques can discover this inner refuge in which he is safe from attack, this ultimate fatherland from which, as one and only “citi­ zen,” he cannot be banished: “The moments of rapture and ecstasy that I sometimes experienced during these solitary walks were joys I owed to my persecutors; without them I should never have known or discovered the treasures that lay within me.”9 The will to immediate liberty might also be defined as a will to self-presence. Presence in an immutable present. Persecution, by mak­ ing things as black as possible, cuts off access not only to the outside world but also to the future. At the height of suffering time runs dry. “Delivered from the anxiety of hope,”10 Rousseau experiences “absolute calm.” No longer can he set out in search of a “better time.” The present is all he has left, and the present is already part of eternity. Montaigne, in the third book of the Essays, described a

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similar calm, which he possessed apart from any hope or worry about changing his life. When all is over and done, when the last act of the “comedy” has been played, “heaven is calm” and Montaigne feels that the burden of expectation has been lifted from his shoulders: “It is done with.”11 Rousseau says precisely the same thing: “What have I still to fear, since all is done?"12 Later he adds: “Everything is finished for me on this earth.”11' But when Montaigne says “it is done with,” he has in mind the full life he has already lived, whereas Rous­ seau is referring to the harm inflicted on him by his enemies, to which nothing more can be added. Everything is done, but it is other peo­ ple who have done it, inflicting all the harm they possibly could. JeanJacques has done nothing. In describing his past he almost never describes actions, only feelings, emotions, and intentions thwarted by destiny. Nothing more will happen; time has come to a halt in a present compounded of infinite resignation and total self-posses­ sion. The persecution has achieved its high-water mark, and noth­ ing more can be done to him. The men of the outside world are nothing to him, and he in turn is nothing to them. He inhabits an exotic world, a remote, obscure island outside the usual coordinates of space and time: “Wrenched somehow out of the natural order, I have been plunged into an incomprehensible chaos where I can make nothing out, and the more I think about my present situation, the less I can understand what has become of me.”11 Expelled from the human world and human time, Rousseau is cast into prison or buried alive. Yet as far from the center as he may be, he makes himself the center of an obstructionless expanse, the outside into which he is expelled becomes the inside of a world safe from attack by alien powers. The “first walk” admirably ex­ presses diis “coincidence of opposites”: “I have nothing left in the world to fear or hope for, and this leaves me in peace at the bottom of an abyss, a poor unfortunate mortal, but as unmoved as God himself.”15 Rousseau simultaneously describes himself as excluded from everything (he dwells in an abyss) and as die center of the universe (he compares himself to God). The nullity of the victim is suddenly converted into the possession of plenitude; misfortune becomes happiness, and infamy becomes glory. If persecution is carried to extremes (as Rousseau wants it to be), the victim can rely on no one but himself; he knows the bitter, godlike joy of absolute self-sufficiency. He withdraws into himself, never to emerge. All external relations having been rendered im­ possible, he is left with only the relation to himself, the plenitude of identity.

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Rousseau describes that plenitude sometimes as an inert object, perfectly obedient to external impulses, sometimes as a disembod­ ied spirit, impervious to the influence of any material force. In either case it is a plenitude of innocence. Thus, beyond the will to im­ mediate freedom we discover a claim of innocence. Only the stone is innocent, said Hegel. Faced with the machin­ ations of his persecutors, Rousseau turns himself into a stone; he petrifies himself. His innocence will be all the more apparent, he believes, if he performs no willful act, if he remains entirely at the mercy of external forces. Where there is no initiative, can there be sin? By robbing Rousseau of his actions and their consequences, his persecutors deliver him from even the possibility of guilt. Trap­ ped in the situation of victim or manipulated from without, how can he possibly do wrong? To put the final seal of certainty on his innocence, however, the transfer of responsibility must be per­ manent, hence Jean-Jacques’s enemies must leave him no way out of his predicament. The imagination’s expansive freedom was born of confrontation with the insuperable material obstacle; by the same token, innocence cannot achieve its full purity unless faced with universal hostility. Nothing can be certain until the contrast between good and evil is absolute, until pure white stands out against a background of darkest black. Hence in order to will his innocence Rousseau must also will himself the victim of the crudest possible persecution. He can relieve himself of the weight of responsibility only if crushed by the weight of persecution. Rousseau exonerates himself by leveling a finger of accusation: all sin lies on the heads of others, on the parties to the relentless conspiracy against him, and on the fate that governs his existence.16 To exclude any possibility of voluntary action (hence any risk of incurring guilt), Rousseau does not stop at blaming the members of the conspiracy but also accuses fate and his own “nature.” The wickedness of the conspirators is just an extreme form of external causality, of whose power over him Rousseau constantly com­ plained. He actually points to a whole system of constraints, both internal and external, and says that he is a slave of his “nature” or senses, as though this implied subjugation to an alien power. Blame attaches to his “overardent” (or overindolent) nature as well as to fate, which will not allow him to live “the life for which he was born.” He is the victim of his irrepressible spontaneity, of something beyond his control, yet he is also the plaything of external forces. In their case, whether a creature of impulse or a man tossed by the caprices of fate, his actions are not his own; he is compelled to

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act, his moves are dictated, and he cannot be held to account. Writing the Confessions, he seems eager to unburden himself as quickly as possible of responsibility for his life. “My birth was the first of my misfortunes.”17 As if to prove to himself that he is at the mercy of a cruel fate, he cites circumstance after circumstance as having “fixed his destiny” or marked the beginning of a series of misfortunes over which he had no control. One fatal catastrophe apparently is not enough; Rousseau requires a series of disasters from which there is no escape. Yet on occasion he is perfectly capable of criticizing his own attitude. Recounting the history of his conversion in book 2 of the Confessions, he writes: “I bemoaned the fate that had brought me to this point, as if that fate had not been my own work.”18 In other words, he is perfectly well aware that in blaming fate he is dishonestly shifting responsibility from his own shoulders; he knows that on one occasion, at least, he was quick to blame fate when his own initiative went wrong. He judges himself with lucid severity, only he fails to apply the same judgment to innumerable analogous situations. This is the only place in which Rousseau’s criticism of himself is so blunt. He knows that he is using destiny as an alibi in this case, yet this does not prevent him from doing the same thing repeatedly throughout the Confessions. The further he proceeds in the telling of his tale, the more ready he is to forget that he may, at least in part, be the author of his misfortunes. In order to prove to himself that he is innocent, Rous­ seau seems ready to sacrifice the principle of freedom itself, which he so forcefully advocated in his psychological theory and in social life. The paradox culminates in the Dialogues. After charging the materialists with believing that “everything . . . is the work of a blind necessity,”19 he asserts only a few pages later that his own behavior is a “simple impulse of temperament determined by ne­ cessity.” He seeks refuge in the innocence of a “mechanical” and “almost automatic life,”20 although he has just railed against the determinism of the philosophers, for whom human behavior is nothing more than a mechanism and there is no distinction between good and evil. Yet this passivity is not incompatible with the freedom that Rous­ seau claims. His is an inoperative freedom, paralyzed and idle, which wants nothing to do with anything outside itself and aban­ dons the rest to the injustices of fate, the whims of alien powers. Rousseau’s freedom is not freedom to act but freedom for self­ presence, a mere feeling. Nothing that happens in the outside world falls within its purview; its only means of confronting opposition

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is to allow that opposition to triumph in its own realm. Absolute passivity is the concomitant of this freedom, powerless as it is to affect the external world. A consciousness without means of af­ fecting the outside world is, despite the apparent contrast, quite like an object with no inner dimension, passively moved by outside forces. Thus, no matter whether Rousseau defines his life as a “series of feelings” or a “series of misfortunes,” he is saying the same thing, namely, that he is innocent. In the Confessions we see that life in two different perspectives: the past consists either of noble but ineffective sentiments or of all too effective misfortunes. The link between the subjective series of feelings and the mechan­ ical series of misfortunes is that external events are “occasional causes” of states of mind. Between the externality of fate and the innocent internality of sentiment there is no room for free action; it becomes impossible for Jean-Jacques ever to have sinned. Sen­ timent, as Rousseau defines it, is either a mere echo of an external accident or an intention that, in order to preserve its pure subjec­ tivity, will refuse to externalize itself in the form of concrete action. Between inactive purity and external hostility, nothing that Rous­ seau has done is sufficiently a part of him to be used as evidence against him. Using this defensive casuistry he has no difficulty at all distinguishing between action and intention. The decision to act is always extorted by an outside power. Whether he settles at the Hermitage or decides to move out, he does so in spite of himself.2' If he writes his Confessions, it is because he is “forced to speak in spite of himself.”22 His love for Sophie d’Houdetot is “criminal but involuntary,” an “involuntary and temporary weakness,” not to be confused with a “vicious character.”23 Rousseau constantly invokes this principle: “There are moments of a kind of madness, in which men must not be judged by their actions.”24 Action in such circum­ stances is no more voluntary than a shudder or a shiver—“neu­ rovégétative” reactions. If the essence of the self is preserved in the depths of the heart, if our being is essentially present in our feelings and nowhere else, then no act can compromise our in­ nocence. It remains as pure, as undistorted, as the face of Glaucus beneath the seaweed. Nothing can blemish it. (Thus Rousseau sees Mme de Warens as inalterably pure, despite many instances of misbehavior: “Your conduct was reprehensible, but your heart was always pure.”)25 At the instant intention becomes decision, Jean-Jacques vanishes; he always feels “subjugated before he has had time to choose.”26 But this subjugated Jean-Jacques is the same person who, assailed

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by Fate, declares that there are no limits to his Freedom. He needs to be subjugated in order to Feel Free. And he claims Freedom only in order to surrender Further to the forces that subjugate him. Any evil that Rousseau seems to have done is not real; it is but a fantastic appearance, a mirage risen in the void that stands between the implacable hostility of fate and the inviolate purity of his good intentions. In the end, the innocence of the stone and that of the noble soul seem to be equivalent; neither unused freedom nor inanimate matter can ever be at fault. But is Rousseau’s freedom really unused? Or is it used constantly to prove to itself that there is no way the outside world is open to it? In order to achieve innocence in inaction and pure self-presence, must not the will work actively to preclude any possibility of action, hence any prospect of error? Why does Jean-Jacques need to repeat constantly that he lives in resignation, at the mercy of fate and of involuntary impulses? In the Reveries, at each new step he seems to resign himself yet again to his fate; we seem to be constantly wit­ nessing the moment of decision in which he relinquishes the power to decide for himself and trusts his fate to providence. Rousseau has not yet conquered calm and innocence, since he still feels a persistent need to prove that he has. Again and again he repeats his indifference to persecution, hence he is constantly aware of its shape and presence. What else can he do, since he needs the dark mirror of persecution in order to see his face of shining innocence? Faced with stubborn hostility, a pure Rousseau reclaims possession of his “essence.” Evil, that is, the gaze of others, claims to see evil in Jean-Jacques. It follows that the real Jean-Jacques is something essentially different: “If others wish to see me other than as I am, what difference does it make? Is the essence of my being in their looks?”27 They have no power over him. Their slander is directed at someone else, to whom they have given his name. It is someone else whom they have judged and are so cunningly doing to death. But in order for Jean-Jacques to establish his difference (which is tantamount to his innocence), his thoughts must constantly embrace the presence of those hostile forces that force him to seek refuge within himself. Rousseau, we saw earlier, can no longer recognize his own re­ flection; neither can he recognize his own choices, his own actions, his own errors. Anxious, obsessed by sin, tormented by reflection, and feverishly active, Rousseau tries to calm himself by constructing the myth of an idle Jean-Jacques, incapable of reflection or action,

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who never willingly followed die path of evil. But he does not see this myth as his own creation. It fascinates him to such a degree that he identifies with it and ceases to be aware of his duplicity. Jean-Jacques is subjugated before having had time to choose; but Rousseau does not wish to recognize diat he has chosen this situ­ ation, in which choice is prevented by destiny and there is no choice but to resign himself to adversity. He proclaims his surrender to the powers that besiege him, but he does so widi such energy as to belie the passivity in which he has sought refuge. The mere fact of his continuing to write proves that his passivity is not perfect. He says that he is totally resigned to his fate, yet he says so in a voice still filled with anxiety—anxiety that he fails to notice. He speaks as though he were incapable of understanding that the act of speaking in itself contradicts the meaning he ascribes to his words. He declares Lhat he has never been able to assert his will. Then whose will is behind his declaration that the involuntary out­ weighs the voluntary? Rousseau’s, of course. But, unable to rec­ ognize himself, he is convinced that he no longer has a will. What he wants is innocence, but he is unaware that he seeks innocence by means of passivity, and passivity by means of persecution. Per­ secution is the means by which Rousseau takes possession of his innocence. Yet he is unwilling to admit his willing employment of such means; he wants his innocence to be immediate and primor­ dial. He wants it to be his not through any effort of his own but as a gratuitous gift, part of his indestructible “essence” or “sub­ stance,” possession of which can never be taken away from him. Hence his task is not simply to overcome evil or to fight against the possibility of sin; to do so would be to admit that he was vul­ nerable to sin, that his innocence was at the mercy of an error or a weakness. Rather, his task is to ensure that, by his very nature, sin can never be laid at his door; it must always be something alien: the sin of others, the caprices of fate, the involuntary mechanism of emotion, the anonymous curse of false appearances. His delu­ sions crown this magical maneuver with success; other people and alien powers are blamed for failings that Rousseau refuses to rec­ ognize as his own. It is not by his will that he surrenders passively to adversity; it is by the will of those who conspire against him, who govern his actions and watch his movements. He not only relieves himself of responsibility but shifts all possibility of error, implicit in any exercise of free will, onto the shoulders of others. He is incorruptibly pure because they are ineluctably wicked.

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But what is the nature of the sin that Rousseau projects onto others? Is it his birth (which cost his mother her life)? Is it the abandonment of his children? Yes and no. His feelings of guilt are not a result of his mother’s death or his children’s abandonment. They stem, rather, from the same source that caused him to aban­ don his children and to interpret his mother’s death as a crime for which he was to blame. Given the wray in which he renounces his will, his reflection, his freedom of action, and his ties 10 other people, it seems reasonable to say that he senses guilt in any action in which he is forced to confront an external world that he does not control. Freedom is risky, and among its risks is the possibility that, in availing myself of it, I will do wrong. That risk is an inex­ tricable part of my freedom, and I can avoid it only by renouncing my freedom to act or, in other words, by opting for the innocence of the stone or the idle consciousness. Action entails consequences beyond our control and possibly foreign to our intentions. There is always the danger of doing harm by willing the good. There is always is “drift” we cannot control; our actions are more fertile than we imagine. It is this risk that Rousseau is afraid to confront. Our actions leave permanent traces, which distort our intentions and expose us to the risk of misunderstanding. We may be judged on the basis of appearances that do not accurately reflect our inner reality. But those appearances, for which we are only half respon­ sible, are nevertheless appearances of evil and sin. As for reflection, we saw earlier that it was a kind of original sin: through reflection evil enters the world. Reflection enables the mind to discover that it is different from other minds; comparison leads to the desire for superiority. Man then makes himself the slave of appearances, that is, of his image of others and others’ image of him. Here again, sin takes the form of openness to the outside world, of difference. Finally, Rousseau foresees a risk of misunderstanding in all com­ munication with others. He cannot convince others of things that he knows in the bottom of his heart to be true. He cannot preclude the possibility of his being mistaken for a wicked person. In the presence of others there is always an uncertainty, which can never be eliminated entirely. At any moment others may see him as guilty. Truth is constantly in danger whenever there is communication, and when communication fails Rousseau runs the risk of being accused of wrongdoing. Even before action creates a specific instance of wrongdoing, the possibility of sin lurks at the heart of existence, because we cannot

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live without exposing ourselves to forces that transcend us. That possibility of sin is indeed ours, inextricable from our openness to the world. Our guilt is not a theological guilt, part and parcel of life itself, but only a risk, which, once we become conscious of it, cries out to be dominated. Yet complete domination is impossible, because we do not control the world to which we are committed. If I want to recapture my innocence in all its fullness, I must eliminate the “inner” risk that stems from openness to “outer” reality. I must either abolish or expel it from my mind. I must reject those ambiguous powers that make me dependent upon the outside world. For Rousseau, the fundamental strategy of exoneration is to interpret his uncertainty about his possible guilt as the result of certain machinations directed at him from outside. In consequence, sin is not an intangible risk that haunts all communication with others but a crushing and immutable reality situated outside him­ self. The source of the evil that envelops Rousseau lies elsewhere. The possibility that he is at fault, which haunted his conscience, has been transformed into a massive plot, an alien obstacle with the weight of a material object. The enemy forces array themselves on the other side of the divide, reflecting upon Jean-Jacques an in­ nocence that also has the substantial solidity of an object. Rousseau’s anxiety-ridden relations with others give way to implacable hostility. Certainty of persecution anchors all the floating possibilities of guilt that Jean-Jacques could not bear to contemplate. To be sure, sin becomes more concrete, more serious, when it takes the form of an absolute evil of which Jean-Jacques is the innocent victim. In projecting his guilt onto others, he accuses them of crimes far blacker than any of his own. But he does so in order to grant himself, as the victim of injustice, absolute justification. He offers his neck to the sacrificial knife in order to acquire the purity of the victim. Rousseau exonerates himself yet continues to feel accused. He has projected his fault onto others, but in such a way that their wickedness expresses itself by making him the target of calumny and slander. His enemies paint him as the object of universal hatred. But isn’t this Jean-Jacques’s self-accusation and self-punishment? Isn’t he turning his aggression against himself?28 Rousseau is not unaware that his major fault lies in his breaking off communications with others, even though his intention is to establish his lonely innocence. Thus, even in the very act of exonerating himself, he commits a sin that requires expiation; his stratagem for freeing himself from guilt makes him guilty. Far from alleviating his con-

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science, the narcissism of innocence makes him feel perpetually uneasy. The cycle is never ending, a kind of perpetuum mobile. His sin is never finally eradicated, hence his persecution can never end; he is therefore never absolutely certain of his innocence, and his purification is never complete. The Two Tribunals

Ultimately Jean-Jacques hopes that his mind can be self-sufficient. But can it? Diderot put an important question to Rousseau: “I know that, whatever you do, the testimony of your conscience will be in your favor. But is that testimony by itself enough, and is it legitimate beyond a certain point to neglect that of other men?”2“ No one can establish his own innocence on the basis of his own testimony alone. If I want to be certain of my innocence, it has to be established by an outside judgment of some sort. When an inner value is to be affirmed, immediate, inner conviction needs outside guarantees. The mediation of outside judgment must be accepted; I need an outside witness to declare that I am myself. The author of the Reveries has ceased to address himself to others. He no longer cares to make himself known and has no interest in hiding, or in showing to others, the pages he continues to cover with words. Yet he expects to be judged; he looks forward to the moment when his innocence will be confirmed by the gaze of God. After overturning “the insane judgments of men,” in whose faces he reads the signs of an undeserved condemnation, Jean-Jacques takes his case to another tribunal, making his appeal to God. His conscience is not satisfied to be its own witness; it wants to be seen to be transparent. In the invocation with which the Confessions be­ gins, for instance, Rousseau imagines being found innocent before a universal tribunal: “I have displayed myself as I was, as vile and despicable when my behavior was such, as good, generous, and noble when I was so. I have bared my secret soul as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Being! So let the numberless legion of my fellow men gather round me, and hear my confessions.”H0 Strong as the temptation was, in other circumstances, to compare himself to God, intense as was his desire to achieve mystical (or pantheistic) fusion with the divine, Rousseau could not do without a vengeful God before whom each man must render his accounts. Before God the individual does not disappear (or humble himself) but stands gloriously transfixed in his true being. It is not God that Jean-Jacques seeks in his maker but the Absolute Gaze that will

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finally confirm his identity and render the verdict that will grant him possession of his transparency. In the moment of absolution he expects to be granted ownership of what he has always claimed in vain: his stable self and his innocence, hitherto shrouded in darkness. What seemed to be a claim to the full autonomy of the individual appears pointless. His freedom, formerly based on the inalienability of consciousness, now must rely on a transcendent judge. The self cannot adequately provide its own support.31 Unaided, it cannot escape from the dizzying possibilities and therefore from the an­ guish of evil. When the mind confronts other minds over which it has no control, it feels a similar sensation of dizziness. How can the possibility of misunderstanding be eliminated? How can the like­ lihood of a monstrously false judgment be avoided? Others are free to see Rousseau as wicked; he has no privilege that would enable him to avoid this risk. By contrast, his fellow men enjoy the per­ manent privilege of castigating him as they see fit. Normal social intercourse does not preclude deception and misunderstanding. Consciousness is defined in Rousseau’s terms by a “dual relation,” but there is nothing to prevent that dual relation from becoming a dual illusion. Veils and masks are everywhere. As soon as I am no longer free to define the meaning of people and things, as soon as they claim meanings of their own along with the right to define mine, there is only one way for me to escape the resulting dizzying array of possibilities: opting for the worst— deciding that everything outside my control is permanently hostile to me. The pathology in Jean-Jacques’s communication with others stems from his need to rely on absolutes, even if those absolutes are negative. He needs an immutable God and a “congealed” evil. Once the hostility of others is established, Rousseau can then call upon that other fixed term in his scheme of things, the judgment of God, which will establish the opposite of human judgment: that Jean-Jacques is essentially innocent. He finds absolutely certain witnesses on both sides, for and against; their verdicts, though radically opposed, are both irrevocable. The two tribunals express in an extreme form the ambivalence evident in Jean-Jacques from the beginning: his need to bejudged and his anxiety overjudgment.32 Rather than live in uncertainty among men, rather than accept the obligations of the human condition, in which the possibility of communication is always counterbalanced by the risk of obstruction and misunderstanding, Rousseau splits the ambivalence in two and makes the resulting terms into absolute, immutable opposites. Rather than confront the uncertainty of life and the dangers of active

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freedom, he prefers to appear before two tribunals whose judgment is known in advance, before judges who he can be sure will pro­ nounce a loud and irrevocable Yes or No—judgments never en­ countered in the pure form in ordinary human experience. For Rousseau there is bitter solace in the knowledge that, if he has nothing more to expect from mankind, his compensation lies in the certainty that he has everything to expect from God.

10 The Transparency of Crystal

Rousseau tirelessly reaffirms his transparency. “He walked in the light of the sun.”1 Or “they may well cast aside the clear water pond” [i.e., Rousseau himself, in a vivid material metaphor].2Light, translucent clarity—these are Jean-Jacques’s lot. Others inhabit the realm of darkness. Rousseau’s heart is like crystal: His heart, transparent as crystal, can hide nothing o f what goes on inside. Every emotion he feels is transmitted to his eyes and face.3 Are their hearts tender, open, trusting, quick to overflow? Where would such secrets hide in mine, transparent as crystal, which im­ mediately causes my eyes and my face to reflect every emotion that affects it?4 The obscure labyrinth of their hearts is impenetrable by me, whose heart, transparent as crystal, cannot hide any o f its emotions.5

Rousseau’s heart is transparent, yet others see him as different from what he really is. What prevents him from revealing the truth? Nothing under his control. If others wished to see him properly, they could do so readily. But they persist in distorting his appear­ ance. It is in them that appearance and reality diverge and the accursed veil triumphs. Desperately, Jean-Jacques proclaims his own transparency. Out­ side, however, the veil has fallen and everything is swallowed in shadow. We have encountered this simultaneous triumph of trans­ parency and the veil before, at the end of La nouvelle Héloïse, when Julie entered the Kingdom of God, the realm of immediate com­ munication. In doing so, however, she had to sacrifice her life; her face had to disappear forever behind the mask of death. Rousseau’s own experience comes to the same end, except that the division between light and darkness is made while he is still alive. He actually experiences the state that, in the novel, is associated with death. (Rousseau often defines his situation as one of living death. To achieve true transparency one must die.) 254

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In an extreme sense, transparency is equivalent to perfect invis­ ibility. Others see me as different from what I am, hence they do not see me. I am invisible to them. They make me opaque by attaching masks to my face that do not resemble me. If only 1 could rob them altogether of my presence and prevent them from giving me an appearance! Reverie turns to myths of magic: Had I been invisible and powerful like God, I would also have been good and benevolent. . . . Had I possessed the ring o f Gyges [supposed to render the wearer invisible], it would have made me independent of men and made them dependent on me. I have often wondered, in my castles in the air, how I would have used this ring.6

Invisibility converts the nullity of being into unlimited power. Armed with the ring of Gyges, Rousseau would have moved from inaction to action; he would have done good and possessed women. Deliv­ ered from his appearance, he would have been delivered, too, from paralyzing impediment. The sixth reverie also reveals that the most awesome and insuperable of all obstacles is none other than die false image of Jean-Jacques that exists in the minds of others and robs him of his transparency. For a man who feels caught in a state of besieged transparency, to be given invisibility for a moment amounts to having access to unobstructed vision; it is truly to “be­ come a living eye” and regain possession of a world that had become inaccessible. Transparent as crystal. Of all stones only crystal is innocent; though hard as rock, it allows light to pass. The gaze penetrates it, but the stone itself is a gaze, a very pure gaze that penetrates and traverses other objects. Crystal is a petrified gaze. Is it a pure material object or solidified spirit? The metaphors can be taken both ways. It is not surprising to discover that vitrification is an operation to which Rousseau pays the closest attention in his Institutions chimiques. Many an “experiment“ is set up for the purpose of making beaudful glass or crystal. One can carry this speculation still further: in a science whose basic concepts were still subject to the vagaries of the “ma­ terial imagination,“7 the technique of vitrificadon is inextricably associated with dreams of innocence and immortality. The ability to transform a cadaver into translucent glass consdtutes a victory over death and decay, a step toward eternal life: It is not only in the mineral kingdom that Becher8 finds his vitrifiable earth. He finds a very similar substance in the ashes of plants . . . and a third and even more marvelous form in animals.

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He assures us that animals contain an easily meltable, verifiable earth from which it is possible to make vases preferable to the finest porcelain. Using procedures that he keeps shrouded in much mystery, he has carried out experiments that have convinced him that man, as well as all the animals, is glass and can return to glass. This leads him to the most entertaining reflections on the trouble the ancients took to burn or embalm the dead, and on ways in which one might preserve the ashes o f one’s ancestors by means of a few hours’ work, replacing hideous and disgusting cadavers with clean, shiny vases of beautiful, transparent glass, tinted not with the characteristic green of glass made from plants but with a milky white color heightened by a slight tinge o f narcissus.9

What is the physical cause of transparency? How is it that certain substances allow rays of light to pass? Rousseau has an answer to this question. The property common to all transparent substances, he says, is fluidity. In a chapter entitled “On the Cause of the Co­ hesion of Bodies and of Their Transparency,” he mentions first “water and liquids among whose parts their transparency shows an immediate union.”10 In other words, in the physical world immediacy and transparency are correlative notions. Light can pass through certain substances because those substances possess the perfection of immediacy. The hypothesis may be “chemical,” but it expresses a psychological necessity. The solidity of glass and transparent stones, moreover, is not inconsistent with fluidity. The transparency of solids is immobilized fluidity, which comes about when a molten substance “takes” or solidifies into a hard mass. In its inner nature crystal is fluid; it remains a liquid [liqueur]. In fact, Rousseau goes so far as to assert that “fluidity is the cause of the solidity of sub­ stances.” The Institutions chimiques teaches us to recognize the moral value of melting and dissolution: In all likelihood fluidity is also the cause o f transparency, and . . . no substance would be opaque if all its parts had been subjected equally to the fluidity of either melting or dissolution. The unity of fluid particles is in fact very easily disrupted, yet it is still perfect; the result o f this is that, since light rays do not have to penetrate many different surfaces, which would force them to refract or deviate in a myriad o f ways, they pass through the liquid with only slight alterations. By contrast, pulverized crystal and glass become opaque because the light, forced to turn to the right and the left and around the surfaces of particles o f many different sizes and shapes, loses itself in an infinity o f detours. Furthermore, experience teaches us that dissolved substances unite with the solvent to such a degree that the two form a single diaphanous

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and transparent whole, until the introduction of a further sub­ stance causes them to separate; this immediately turns the liquid cloudy and opaque. Similarly, stones, sands, and even metals, when baked to remove Lheir phlogiston, acquire through vitrifi­ cation an arrangement of their parts such that, though previously opaque, they become diaphanous.11

If fluidity is the cause of transparency, the relation between the metaphors “crystal” and “clear water” is closer than we might have thought. In both cases it is inner unity that permits light to pass. Rousseau compares his heart to crystal, that is, to a congealed fluid, a fluidity that has ceased to flow and hence achieved stability for all time. In the final phase of Rousseau’s thought, this crystalline solidi­ fication has its negative counterpart: pulverization, which makes bodies opaque and reduces human society to an indistinct and impenetrable mass. No exchange is possible between opposites: Jean-Jacques’s transparency is static, the darkness outside him is congealed. The veil, too, has changed: no longer thin and flutter­ ing, it has turned solid and clamped down on the world it once hid. But only the human world turns opaque. Nature remains close to Jean-Jacques, in the realm of transparency, where he looks to fluid substances for assistance. In Rousseau’s ideal surroundings the air is clear and the colors vivid. He also needs water: Lovely sounds, a beautiful sky, a handsome landscape, a pretty lake, flowers, fragrances, beautiful eyes and a gentle regard—all of this produced such a strong effect on his senses only after somehow penetrating straight to his heart. I have seen him travel two leagues daily almost throughout the spring to listen to the nightingale at Bercy. He needed water, greenery, solitude, and woods to make that bird’s song touching to his ear.12

Jean-Jacques also needs water in order to feel, in a state of blissful nothingness from which thought is totally absent, a “sentiment of existence,” which he describes as a “pleasure sufficient, perfect, and full”: Such is the state that I often experienced on the Island o f SaintPierre in my solitary reveries, whether I lay in a boat and drifted where the water carried me, or sat by the shores of the stormy lake, or elsewhere, on the banks of a lovely river or a stream murmuring over the stones.13

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Beyond the moving fluidity, the “continual flux“14of earthly things, Rousseau has the sense that existence is like a static, timeless fluid. He feels a profound affinity for the transparency of the country­ side, but does he identify with it? No, because the water is in motion, whereas the soul aspires to a present that “runs on in­ definitely but [whose] duration goes unnoticed.”15 His notion is that existence is static and crystalline, something different from the changing, flowing clarity of running water. Yet he needs the babbling stream in order to perceive the stability of his state of repletion. He welcomes constant motion, the rocking of the cradle, only as a means of making himself feel more acutely his inner tranquillity. Transparency needs darkness to set it off; it can be seen to stand still only against a moving background, which it ignores and dominates: “From time to time some brief and in­ substantial reflection arose concerning the instability of the things of this world, whose image I saw in the surface of the water.”16 Insubstantial as this reflection may be, it is nevertheless a cloud in the midst of transparent perfection. Yet nothing reveals trans­ parency better than a fleeting cloud passing through it “from time to time.” Perfect translucency is perfect nothingness, for the trans­ parency of consciousness exists only to allow some object to appear. (“Thought forms in the soul as clouds form in the air,” as Joubert put it.)17 Consciousness is a transparent medium in which vague shapes arise; we recognize glass by its reflections or by the mist that forms on its surface. In the very act of revealing itself, there­ fore, transparency is compromised. Rousseau’s ecstasy begins when the mist of the perceived world fades, permitting the tranquillity of existence in the pure state to manifest itself. This pure state of existence is the primitive background beyond thought and feeling; it is at once total emptiness (because devoid of content) and utter plenitude (because sufficient unto itself). It almost makes no dif­ ference whether this is expressed as extinction of the self or as ecstasy whose object lies wholly within the self. Yet even when Rousseau has achieved this perfect state of repletion and nothing remains but awareness of existence, he cannot do without images of the external world. He needs a scene to rivet his attention, as in hypnosis. He experiences existence as pure presence, but around him he requires a babbling brook, waves lapping the bank, the starry firmament above—a fluid environment, as in the womb. When he regains consciousness after his fall at Ménilmontant, his sensations are like an infant’s: there is no distinction between himself and the world around him. He is simultaneously aware of

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the world and of his own existence, and no effort is required of his mind. Coming to his senses, he has “no distinct notion" of a self.1" What he discovers with delight when he first comes to is not himself “as a person" but the dark of night, against which a few leaves stand out. The peculiar pleasure he feels upon awakening confounds self and external world in a shared weightlessness (the self prior to consciousness of personal identity and the external world prior to contact with other people). Jean-Jacques savors his own transparency through glimpses of the world. In describing his ecstasies at the Lake of Bienne, Jean-Jacques lets the sensible world become a far-off accompaniment, with the light sound of the to and fro movement of the waves. The mind’s activity is reduced to the point where it simply allows the self to experience its own presence. There is a close correspondence be­ tween the attenuation of thought and the tranquil murmur of the waters. Neither mental activity nor the world’s presence is abol­ ished, however, although bodi are drastically curtailed. Jean-Jacques draws his sense of existence from this double attenuation, which is almost a double annihilation, except that it stops on the brink of silence and nothingness. What remains visible of things and the self is not their secret, profound essence but their surface—widi its innocent, precarious tranquillity. (Misfortune resumes the mo­ ment the “depths" are stirred.) The condition of ecstasy is described as a slight, superficial agitation that develops simultaneously in objects and the mind. The surface is supported by a mysterious, simple force, which ensures diat the mind will remain fully sadsfied and at rest, as though the only way to comprehend presence—that is, existence—is by making oneself as absent as possible. Let us reread the text of the fifth reverie. At one point Rousseau speaks of eliminating everything that is not part of the “feeling of existence" in its most crystalline, most naked state: thought and the sensible world are superfluous. Sensation itself is a possible obstacle. Far from yielding immediate pleasure, it separates us from a purer, more central but formless and shapeless immediacy. For existence is a felt immediacy that precedes the shimmering diversity of sense experience. As if deliberately choosing an ascetic style, Rousseau eschews images and attempts to put his finger on something more primidve and frugal: The feeling o f existence unmixed with any other emotion is in itself a precious feeling o f peace and contentment, which would be enough to make this mode o f being loved and cherished by anyone who could guard against all the earthly and sensual influences

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that are constantly distracting us from it in this life and troubling the joy it could give us.19

But a few lines later Rousseau reintroduces the sensible world, whose presence he again needs for his “sweet ecstasies.” We must, he says, surrender to the magic of surface sensations, paying no attention to either the full reality of the external world or the depths of our soul: The heart must be at peace and its calm untroubled by any pas­ sion. The person in question must be suitably disposed and the surrounding objects conducive to his happiness. There must be neither a total calm nor too much movement, but a steady and moderate motion, with no jolts or breaks. Without any movement life is mere lethargy. If the movement is irregular or too violent it arouses us from our dreams; recalling us to an awareness of the surrounding objects, it destroys the charm of reverie and tears us from our inner selfy bowing us once again beneath the yoke o f fortune and man­ kind and reviving a sense of our misfortunes. Complete silence induces melancholy; it is an image of death. In such cases the assistance o f a happy imagination is needed, and it comes naturally to those whom Heaven has blessed with it. The movement that does not come from outside us arises within us at such times. Our tranquillity is less complete, it is true, but it is also more agreeable when pleasant and insubstantial ideas barely touch the surface of the soul, so to speak, and do not stir its depths.20

The imagination and the senses, of which Rousseau had seemed to want to rid himself entirely, are here rehabilitated on the grounds that they contribute to the feeling of existence. Previously he had seemed afraid of all distractions, but now he develops a veritable theory of distraction from which it follows that we should surrender to surrounding objects without presenting ourselves to them. (They must be “conducive to our happiness,” but woe unto him who allows too violent a movement to “recall their presence.”) We must not allow anything to wrest us from our inner selves, yet nothing may stir the depths of the soul. It is as if the feeling of existence wells up not as the reward for close attention to ourselves and to the world but as the miraculous fruit of allowing the self and the world to fall into oblivion. Supreme pleasure and ultimate wisdom come from surrendering to fascination with superficial appearance; if we do this, the depths will reveal their presence. In order to compre­ hend the transparency of the crystal or the lake, we must trust in their surface reflections, even though the presence of reflections betrays a lack of transparency.

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Judgments

In Lettres morales (1758) and Emile Rousseau defined consciousness as a “dual relation to oneself and one’s fellow man.”21 At about the same time he formulated this dual relation in the following terms: “Unable to disguise myself with anyone, how could I disguise myself with my friends? No, even if they must esteem me less as a result, I want them always to see me as I am, so dial they may help me to become as I ought to be."22 But in the end he is left with a double verdict. On the one hand, communication with his fellow man has ended; his relation to others is now one of sterile confrontation, static opposition. On the other hand, the feeling of existence is a pleasure complete and adequate unto itself, a pleasure whose object is “in no way external." Rousseau expects nothing more from other people; he “feeds on his own substance.” Accordingly, conscious­ ness is no longer the harmonious “dual relation” of Rousseau's definition. It has sought refuge at one extreme and no longer knows anything outside itself. True, the external scenery is still present, but as nothing more than a complacent natural landscape almost without human figures. The self has surrendered to its ecstasies; it has replaced the whole of the imagined world, or perhaps, no less self-indulgently, it has fixed its attention on superficial sights and sounds and lost interest in everything else. Yet not even this agreeable plenitude can reconcile the two halves of the divided world. Access to reality is cut off by insurmountable obstacles. Since things are all against him, Rousseau thrusts himself into a world in which the self has no antagonists. Having surrendered to the sentiment of existence, consciousness savors its singularity, in which it thinks it finds compensation for the unity that reality will not yield. The same man who claims to have been condemned by “an entire generation” merges rapturously with the “system of crea­ tures" (among whom his persecutors are not included). Rousseau imagines two worlds in which action makes no sense: in the one because it is irremediably divided, in the other because it is already perfect. In either case, nothing is to be done, there is no “dual relation” to be hazarded. At times the only possibility is to resign oneself to obscure hostility; at other times it is to lose oneself in the transparency of the great Being, in presence, in existence. But true unity is compromised by the alternation of these contradictory states. Does the experience of inner singularity, which occurs only at certain special moments, compensate for the impossibility of achiev­ ing real unity with myself and others? Can the failure of the dual

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relation be repaired through enraptured imagination of wholeness? What is the value of symbolic unity when in fact the mind is estranged from the world? Is symbolism powerful enough to negate and overcome alienation or is it merely a foolish illusion, a futile con­ solation? Hegel judged the “beautiful soul” severely: the object that it thinks it holds before it is in reality only itself. When it conceives of wholeness it conceives only of its own transparency and, in the end, its own emptiness: “As consciousness, it is divided by the op­ position between the self and the object that is its essence, but that object is nothing other than its perfect transparency, its self, and its consciousness is only knowledge of itself. All of life and all spiritual essences are absorbed in this self.”23 The beautiful soul creates a pure world out of language, an echo of itself that it perceives immediately. But “in this transparent purity” it “vanishes like a shape­ less mist that dissolves in the air.” Shedding all reality, it feeds on itself and evaporates into extreme abstraction. For Hegel, who is undoubtedly thinking of Novalis and (through his influence on Novalis) of the Rousseau of the Rêveries, transparency means loss of selfhood; it is a sterile reassertion of the tautology, 1 = 1. Hölderlin’s poetic interpretation is quite different. As depicted in Hölderlin’s hymn “The Rhine”24 Rousseau is a “son of the earth,” a demigod who speaks in a divine frenzy, like Dionysus. Effortlessly able to embrace the whole, he is one of the elect who bear on their shoulders the weight of heaven, of divine joy. In his ode on Rous­ seau Hölderlin likens the wretched victim of persecution to a shadow but later sets him in the light of a far-off sun.25 Rousseau is “solitary speech” awaiting the new men who will be able to understand him. He is a “poor man” who wanders in restless silence like the “un­ buried dead.” This image of mad flight is followed, however, by images of a Dionysiae feast and of a tree that “springs from the soil of the fatherland.” The latter, an image of profound stability, contrasts sharply with the image of restless wandering. An organic metaphor, the tree also refers to a “vitalism” reminiscent of Schelling. The tree represents expansive growth, but soon that growth will end (its branches and crown are already sadly drooping). The tree is cut off from the surrounding infinity. Yet that infinity is soaked up within the tree and contributes to the maturation of its fruit, as the sixth verse of the poem tells us: “Life’s overabundance, the infinity that rises all around him like a dawn—these he will never grasp. But they live in him, a warm and fecund presence, and the fruit grows and falls away from him.” Despite the unhappy alienation from the real world, all existence is reconstituted organ-

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ically; concentrated within, it ultimately falls away in the form of fruit. The tree cannot grasp the overabundance that surrounds it, but it can possess all of life inwardly. Life penetrates Lhe tree only to abandon it later, as fruit—effective language returned to the world. An abyss separates Hegel’s judgment from Hölderlin’s poem. This abyss reflects, of course, the different outlooks of the philos­ opher of the absolute and the poet of return—the one rejecting, the other accepting, Jean-Jacques’s “natural mysticism.” But the ambiguity of Rousseau’s late writings is also to blame, for in them it is possible to find support for both interpretations. On the one hand, Rousseau refuses to confront the world’s obstacles; he avoids “action in the world, which culminates in loss of the self.”26 For him it is enough to endlessly reaffirm his transparency. On the other hand, there is wealth in poverty and endless good fortune in misery. This good fortune is unjustifiable, according to the Rêveries and the Confessions, yet these same works also state that it is justified beyond human justice. In his “stupid” and “pointless” reveries at the Lake of Bienne, Rousseau perceives the immediacy of his own existence (Fifth Walk); in other words, he sees what is so primary and central a part of his being that no veil can stand between him and it. As he drifts on the lake his individuality vanishes to the point where he sees and hears nothing but the faint sounds of life’s fountainhead and the empty sky on which his gaze is fixed. In immediate contact with himself, he is also in immediate contact with all nature. What he describes in the Fifth Walk as the sentiment of existence appears as a pantheist rapture in the Confessions. Jean-Jacques experiences direct, unmediated contact with a cosmic force: “Sometimes I cried out with emotion: ‘O nature! O mother, here I am under your sole protection. No shrewd and clever fellow is around to stand between you and me.’ ”27 Assuming that the two passages describe the same rapture, it appears that the self understood “at the level of the source” (or of the sentiment of existence) was identified with the maternal om­ nipotence of nature to the point where the two terms became in­ terchangeable. Extreme poverty and extreme wealth merge in a vertiginous “coincidence of opposites.” Depersonalization through excess and depersonalization through lack cease to be distinguish­ able.26This is what Hölderlin takes to be a surprise, which “frightens mortal man” by overwhelming him with divine favor.2*' It is precisely this identification of the self with apotheosized nature (both im-

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mediately perceptible) that Hegel objects to. Rousseau savors his happiness at the cost of retreating from the community, avoiding reflection, and refusing to accept absolute difference. But he knows that his “contemplative” attitude is a means not of transcending but of evading action, and he feels compelled to justify himself. The pleasure that he enjoys in solitude cannot be held up as a universal example. To men living within the established order it is a forbidden pleasure, which Jean-Jacques is entitled to enjoy only because he has been cast out, the victim of a unique and monstrous fate. His happiness is unjustifiable in human terms because its only justification is the (unjustifiable) injustice visited upon him by his persecutors. It is only because their misdeeds have muddied the waters that the ecstasy of transparency becomes legitimate: It would not be desirable in our present state o f affairs that the avid desire for these sweet ecstasies should give people a distaste for the active life that their constantly recurring needs impose upon them. But an unfortunate man who has been excluded from human society and can do nothing more in this world to serve or benefit himself or others may be allowed to seek in this state a compensation for human joys, a compensation that neither for­ tune nor mankind can take away from him.30

As though anticipating Hegel’s judgment, Rousseau defends himself by insisting that he did not retire from active life or re­ nounce free will. He was cast out and isolated; others refused to let him act and forced him to make do with his own society. He was prepared to follow the path that leads to the self via the me­ diation of others, but he was immediately assailed and forced to seek refuge in the only asylum left him: immediate pleasure, direct contact with himself and nature, the imaginary unity that takes the place of the real unity he sought but was not permitted to attain. His “sweet ecstasies,” he knows, are “compensation” for the loss of something essential. What he discovers on the banks of Bienne is something better, as Hölderlin might say, but Rousseau allows him­ self the right to enjoy this something “better” only because the worst has been inflicted on him. His happiness is inseparable from sin: the sin that weighs on this deceptive world and on the “shrewd and clever” men whose existence Rousseau cannot forget, even as he rejoices in their absence by throwing himself on the breast of Mother Nature. The ecstasy of unity therefore does not imply that a real reconciliation has taken place; a fundamental and mysterious discord remains. Rousseau seems afraid that, lacking sufficient eth­ ical justification, his “life of immediacy” may be judged culpable of

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ignoring the duties incumbent upon men in society. His life cannot be totally innocent unless others bear a heavy burden of guilt. But he projects the guilt he feels in taking his solitary pleasure upon those who prevent him from acting and who cut off his access to the outside world. The beautiful soul has a bad conscience but imputes all evil to the world of illusions. Ecstatic knowledge of the identity of the universal and the particular repairs none of the damage. Indeed, all hopes of concrete unity must be abandoned before the ecstatic “compensation” becomes legitimate. “Sweet ec­ stasy” is better only in the absence of the best: friendship, the union of souls, the feast in which mind meets mind in the bright light of day. But since the rest of the world has fallen under a shadow, what can be done but row on a beautiful lake? Even as he surrenders to the ideal universality of nature, to the sentiment of existence, Rous­ seau cannot forget the human universal from which he feels un­ justly excluded. If he were not the victim who turns to accuse his accusers, he would not be the solitary man sufficient unto himself, “like God.” His retreat into inner life was associated, as we saw earlier, with his attacks on an unjust society. This is true even in his late writings, where the ills of society are expressed in ever more fantastic imagery. Even in Rousseau’s most “mystical” texts, which can legitimately be read as advocating “inner experience” in the Romantic vein, we also find a rejection of corrupt society, a resis­ tance, a challenge hurled in the face of the powers that be. Two avenues are thus open to Jean-Jacques’s commentators and ad­ mirers. He is both a political hero and a sentimental hero, as those who made him a cult figure in the late eighteenth century were dimly aware. Some will see him as the prophet of a purely inward revelation, while others will hail the new man, the unbowed victim of the ancien régime, the indomitable and ultimately victorious adversary of an unjust and unreasonable system. Nothing can be isolated. Rousseau is a belle âme who loses himself in his own transparency but whose plaintive voice changed the world. And that voice is never more powerful than in those passages where it seems to renounce all power. For refusing to take action against his persecutors, perhaps Rousseau received, in some mys­ terious fashion, the gift of multiplying his action a hundredfold. For Hegel the beautiful soul comes to nothing, “like a shapeless mist that dissolves in the air.” Yet Hölderlin compares Rousseau to an eagle soaring heavenward to meet the storm. Probably the most accurate image here is that of the heavy storm cloud, the Revolu­ tion, and the “onrushing gods”:

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Bold spirit, he soars aloft Like an eagle to meet the storm, Prophesying his onrushing gods.31

“Alone on Earth”

Let us take a last look at the man who wrote the Rêveries. He stands between the hostility of mankind and the Last Judgment to come, cut off from all human relations. Cold overtakes him. He must write, he must talk to himself, or else consciousness will be utterly empty. He cannot resign himself to abandoning his place; he cannot be himself in silence. As long as he speaks he can be certain that the last vestige of freedom has not been annihilated, that his ene­ mies are still at bay. This last vestige of freedom does not lead to action of any kind; it merely stakes a claim to inner peace and declares that Rousseau remains capable of speech in spite of everything. Nothing outside him is true or real. Everything is a sign of per­ secution. He has only the fullness of being to rely on. Because the impoverished present offers no support, he must constantly evoke images of other times: of the past and of the distant future, after his death. He will continue to speak, therefore, in order to hold on to images of the past and of the final judgment that will justify his existence. Language is illuminated by the glow of past happiness and calls to witness a still-hidden God who will one day reveal his face. To deplore the drying up of inner resources, the aridity of a life reduced to reflexes, Rousseau hits upon a style that testifies to the presence of inexhaustible resources, a prodigious capacity to ex­ plore the recesses of the imagination. A nullity, he wields lyrical prose as an instrument capable of expressing his nothingness to the full. Nothing in himself, by expressing that nothingness he makes himself transparent to the eye of God. His days of ardent passion are over, but as ardor wanes a former self speaks of past ecstasy and rapture. Idle, he explains to himself, in writing, the reasons for his idleness and darkens countless pages with his pen. This apparently inexhaustible energy reveals a secret strength, an almost infinite capacity to snatch himself back from the jaws of nothingness. Rousseau imagines himself confronting malice and scorn and, standing before his judges, insists upon his innocence. The shadowy presence of a hostile world is another prop that Rousseau needs in order to give himself completely to transparency.

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The admirable perseverance of both Rousseau and his discourse without audience, whose purpose is to save his threatened existence, counteracts his equally persistent madness. In the Rêveries we find monotonous repetition of insane beliefs intertwined with a mildsounding defense of the soul against forces threatening its destruc­ tion. The voice is mad, yet it resists and responds to its madness, and its response reveals an inner strength capable of surviving the mind’s aberration. (Perhaps this and nothing else deserves to be called reason.) The world, in some mysterious way that Rousseau cannot fathom, has changed its meaning around him, yet the self survives and stubbornly insists on its permanence. In his mad zeal to interpret signs, he encounters only shadows and figures wearing masks. The only meaning he can make out is that of threat, surveillance, and filthy slander. Henceforth nothing he can do is enough, nothing he can say is true; his words and actions respond to an imaginary menace. Yet as profound as was his error, as naïve as is his image of final “retribution,” as tenuous as are the arguments he puts forward in self-defense, we hear, in his language, a melody that redeems his mistake. The veil, the impossibility of communication, is present even in the desperate words proclaiming Rousseau’s in­ nocence, in notebook pages filled with line after line in his regular hand, in the obsessive use of certain venomous words. The same words that weave the veil enunciate the clarity of transparency. Where the power comes from we do not know, but we hear the beat of the waves, the crystalline motion. Existence, finally unveiled, pierces the clouds for one brief but timeless moment.

Essays on Rousseau

^

Rousseau and the Search fo r Origins

He is a subject of perennial interest. Reading him, we must con­ stantly start afresh; we must reorient—or disorient—ourselves so as to forget the ready-made notions and images that make him such a familiar figure and reassuringly persuade us that when it comes to Rousseau, we know all there is to know. Each generation discovers a new Rousseau, finding in him an exemplar of either what it wishes to be or what it passionately rejects. The variety and instability of interpretations of Rousseau are related to certain characteristics of his work. He says too much and too little. Combining philosophy and autobiography, closely rea­ soned dialectic and lyrical effusion, fiction and constitutional the­ ory, Rousseau ranges widely and astonishes us with the versatility of his style. We may reasonably describe portions of his work as the products of a thinker or a dreamer, a politician or a victim of persecution, a musician or a novelist. But any such description is incomplete, not only because it is always unsatisfactory to consider an author's work exclusively from one point of view but also because Rousseau’s personality and passion are present even in his most rigorously constructed pieces, implicit influences on what he ex­ plicitly says. We are forced to confront the pure intention that serves as both justification and alibi for his words and actions—an inten­ tion uniquely individual yet yearning for universality, self-assured yet elusive, heartfelt yet ineffable. He asks us not only to read and admire what he writes but also to admire him in what he writes and to trust the person he was and is, before and beyond his book. Every sentence reminds us of the tacit conviction that precedes and justifies it. I am right, he says, because in following the path of rigorous rational thought I have always enjoyed the silent approval Originally published in Cahiers du Sud 367 (1962).

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of feeling’s infallible inner voice. Or: I may be wrong, but my in­ tentions have always been pure, and no honestjudge can find against me if only he will look beyond external contingencies and judge my true self. Not just in Rousseau’s autobiographical writings but in all his work this suggestion of subjectivity points to the presence of a central flame: the “law of the heart” burns behind the smoke of words. The reader accordingly senses both strength and incompleteness in Rousseau’s work. His sentences, in their moral tension or mne­ monic “melody,” oscillate between literal structure and a horizon evoked by desire. His words teem with meaning, to be sure, but beyond the strict contour of the sentence they point to something additional. The contents of the text are surrounded by an aura, as it were, so that every sentence is supersaturated with significance. The continuity of Rousseau’s writing depends not so much on logic (which is less absent from his work than some commentators main­ tain) as on these harmonies. André Gide has compared the French classical style to a piano without pedal. Rousseau, we must say, added the pedal and the harmonic overtones. Any stylistic analysis or “textual criticism” of Rousseau must explain how his words point beyond what they signify in strict logic, toward a vague warmth that transcends and exalts their meaning. Rousseau is probably the first writer to exploit silence in this way; he uses it to prolong the sound of his voice, to propagate its echoes. A sympathetic reading should therefore point us toward this “something additional,” this something beyond the printed page, toward passion’s inception and culmination, toward first stimulus and ultimate conviction, toward the mute source or the silent sum­ mit of language. What Rousseau’s words express is surrounded by something inexpressible, which justifies the expression and suggests the ex­ istence of an immediate certainty in the depths of consciousness. (This is what Schopenhauer means when he calls Rousseau an “enthymematic” writer: his reasoning is based on unstated prem­ ises.) Rousseau asks us to trust him, and he cites the ineffable sources and purposes of his writing as reasons why we should. He tells us repeatedly, moreover, that a fully developed argument is a culpable compromise, an alienation of the self in the deceptive world of appearances; articulated language is an ineffective me­ diation that inevitably traduces the immediate purity of conviction. Rousseau excuses himself for using language as he might excuse himself for committing a crime. He claims to be a man made for an obscure but public-spirited life, for silent virtue, for feelings

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that are iheir own reward. According to him, his starting to write was a fatal disaster (into which he was pushed by false friends, especially Diderot); it exposed him to misunderstandings of all kinds. For punishment he is condemned to embark upon the end­ less task of dispelling, by means of autobiographical texts, the mis­ understandings that his “literary*’ writings have fostered. After his Letters to Malesherbes he will write little that is not intended to rectify the image of himself that he has previously given to the world and that his enemies have seized upon for their own ends. People will forgive his error if only they agree to read this postscript, in which he shows what kind of man he was before becoming a man of letters and what kind of man he is now that he has resolved to keep silent and content himself with the wordless pleasure of reverie. Yet there is irony in diis recourse to language in order to escape the curse of language, this use of literature to proclaim renunciation of literature. There is tension between the language that indicts language and the silence that must ensue if the indictment is to be proved true. Jean-Jacques’s voice remains a prisoner of the literary deception it denounces. It demonstrates the power of the spell that holds it bound. Indeed, by repeatedly proclaiming his determi­ nation to free himself from that spell, Rousseau ensures that he will never make the necessary sacrifice, that he will never impose silence upon himself in order to allow sentiment to triumph in its undivided purity. The voice says that it wants peace but remains caught up in conflict, its natural climate. The critic is sometimes tempted to state in clear terms what is only allusion or presentiment in Rousseau. One looks for the element of clarity, the systematic connections, that would give his work the polished, seamless luster of the great philosophical systems. This search for a single meaning follows a path that Rousseau himself has laid out for us; it is difficult not to be tempted. Everything is related to everything else, he says: so many links in a continuous chain. All his work derives from a few great principles. Quite true. Rousseau wanted to state a philosophy, to write a continuous treatise on man—his origins, his history, and his institutions. Emile is a genetic psychology upon which he erects a theory of education, a theory of religion (or “religiosity”), and a theory of politics. The elements of this discourse are less contradictory than has been said. Yet there are gaps in the argument that seem to be waiting to be filled in. The connections between the parts are missing, and in­ terpreters, anxious to defend Rousseau’s reputation, have felt en-

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titled to provide them. Extrapolating what Rousseau actually says, they construct a philosophy more systematic than Rousseau’s and worthy of taking its place alongside other eighteenth-century sys­ tems. Hence they neglect the fact that Rousseau conceived his sys­ tem in opposition to all systems. They overlook his horror of purely rational discourse (despite his unquestioned competence to engage in it) and forget that he refused to call what he was doing “phi­ losophy.” The discontinuity of the theoretical discourse forces us to look to the continuity of the underlying ego to fill the gaps. Rousseau’s thought cannot be called inconsistent, but it is so un­ systematic that his aim cannot have been to construct an unassailable philosophical edifice. The incompleteness of his arguments sug­ gests that he was unable or unwilling to make his ideas fully explicit. The ego and its ideals transcend the work. The self is the beginning and the end, always capable of pulling back from its expression in language, from its “system,” in order to savor the pleasure of being what it is. Out of respect for the real Jean-Jacques, therefore, we must be careful not to fill gaps in his arguments. Rousseau himself was satisfied that he had created a unified theory. We must take him at his word, for he never felt the need to provide detailed proof. Late in life he does feel a need to “fully develop the original causes in order to bring out their interrelated effects,” but this is not until he comes to write the Confessions, and here he is no longer concerned with philosophical proof. His intention is to explain not why Rous­ seau thinks what he thinks but why he is what he is. There is a deep affinity between the discontinuities evident in Rousseau’s theoretical writings and the pathetic obstinacy evident in his self-portrait. The absorption in the self and its past, the concern to give narrative order to personal experience that we find in the Confessions—an absorption and a concern required and stimulated by the need to confront per­ secution that affects his very image—help to elucidate the philoso­ phy by explaining its origins. From 1762 on, Rousseau tells his own story so that people may at last come to know his loving and benev­ olent soul. He will explain the origins of writings that his enemies and their dupes have characterized as the work of an adversary of the human race. From the first Rousseau reacted to criticisms of his theories as attacks on him personally. His academic Discourses, which both ex­ pressed and compromised his character, had left him feeling vul­ nerable, and he replies in the form of a personal apology, invoking not just the history of his ideas (such as we read in his letter to

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Christophe de Beaumont) but the history of his life. His aim is nothing less than to make people aware of the inner authority on which all his work has been based. He must therefore trace all his beliefs back to their source and beyond, to a primordial personality, a “nature” kept hidden behind a facade of theories, concepts, and works of literature. The author stands aside and allows the man to speak. Rousseau produces a second body of work in order to reveal the feelings, passions, and desires that gave rise to the first. He asks us to consider his intentions not merely as justification for his ideas but as something more fundamental. He therefore speaks of the Discourses and the Social Contract not as attempts to change the world through philosophy but as effusions of feeling as he searches for his ideal. In rejecting the corrupt morals of modern society and describing the goodness of nature he had given vent to his fantasies and sketched a first self-portrait. His system may have been mis­ taken, but he painted himself from life. Were his speculations wrong a thousand times over, he never abandoned his truth. And he still defends that “sad and great system” because his soul is authentically present in it. His first books were confessions before the fact, mir­ rors of the self, whose true meaning can now be interpreted in the light of the Confessions. In other words, the feeling subsumes the work (which was never really an oeuvre, in the sense of an activity in which the ego forgets itself in what it accomplishes). The self withdraws from the work its exteriority and transitivity, that is, its status as work. Strictly speaking, Rousseau no more wants to have produced a work than he wants to have produced children. What he does want is to savor the pleasure of being himself, to subsist in unity, to enjoy the silent pleasure of presence in the bosom of a maternal nature. The concern with origins already plays a major role in the works that constitute Rousseau’s “system.” In them he describes man’s primitive state: his idle, agreeable solitude, his desires perfectly attuned to his needs, his appetites immediately satisfied by nature. Such is the primordial balance of nature, the interminable “measure for nothing” that precedes the beginning of the piece; time stands still, the waters do not flow, history has yet to begin. Why did this prehistoric peripd come to an end? What destroyed the primordial equilibrium and perfect plenitude of the state of nature and thereby launched human history? Only philosophical speculation can re­ construct the event. Perfectible man, developing all his resources to the full, thereafter becomes the slave of time. Adrift on the tide

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of history, he becomes sociable and wicked. He acquires science but becomes the slave of deceptive appearances. He pays for his mastery over nature by sacrificing his own nature. Rousseau paints the origins of society, speculates on the origins of language, and delves into the experience of the child. Always he looks for a genealogical explanation, an initial cause from which a whole series of conse­ quences inevitably follows. In this he is in harmony with the spirit of his times. These speculative efforts form the bulk of his philo­ sophical work. His later, autobiographical work is concerned es­ sentially with laying bare the subjective origins of those philosophical labors. Thus in the chronological development of Rousseau’s writ­ ings the search for origins figures twice: he first discusses objectively the origins of mankind and then, revealing the inner sources of that philosophical discussion, he exhibits himself as the secret model on which his portrait of natural man is based. Where could the painter and apologist of nature, today so disfig­ ured and reviled, have found his model, if not in his own heart? He described nature as he felt it within himself. The prejudices to which he was not subject, the sham passions of which he was not the victim did not blind him as they have blinded others to those generally forgotten or ignored primary traits.1

Nature is not an object posited and explored by discursive reason; it is inextricably bound up with the inner life of the talking subject. Nature is self, and the task Rousseau assigns himself is no longer to argue with philosophers, jurists, and theologians over the defi­ nition of nature but to tell his own story. This approach can only be called regressive (the psychological overtones of the term are intentional). The result depends on the nature of the text. Some reveal a poetic voice utterly new in French literature, others a man who precipitates his own failure by retreating deeper and deeper into isolation from a world that his diseased imagination sees as inhabited by hate-filled puppets. The quest for origins is a move­ ment toward the central positions of the self, but in a situation increasingly eccentric and marginal with respect to other human beings. In Hegel’s terms, the man governed by the law of the heart moves closer and closer to the “mania of presumption.” The transitive function of language decreases steadily as we fol­ low the chronological evolution of Rousseau’s major texts. In the first Discourse, the Letter on Spectacles, the Social Contract, and Emile, the author directly addresses an audience (respectively, the Acad­ emy of Dijon, the Republic of Geneva, d’Alembert, the “Public,”

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and “mankind”). Note that already the intended recipient is more imagined than perceived as a concrete personality. Taking up his pen frees Rousseau from the embarrassment he feels when facing his interlocutor direcdy in intimate conversation. Still, in the books that constitute the heart of his philosophical system, communication is fully transitive. Rousseau explains to the world personal beliefs with a bearing on the interests of mankind in general. Of course the man behind the author is keen to distinguish himself from other men; it pleases him to think—and to tell his audience—that no one else thinks what he thinks. The ego is passionately involved in the exposition of the reasons for its convictions. Yet it speaks of something other than itself; it addresses itself to others. These early works may presage what is yet to come. Rousseau wants not only to win the intellectual assent of his audience but also to gain their love and admiration, and to that extent the pur­ pose of his writing is to focus attention on himself while seeming to focus it on objects of universal interest. His discourse is never hidden under anonymity or pseudonymity, as Voltaire’s was. His eloquent language arouses the reader’s passion and focuses his enthusiasm on Jean-Jacques. In this sense Rousseau’s style is cir­ cular: its source and its destination coincide. Transitive language serves reflexive desire. Rousseau became a novelist just as his relations with others were becoming more complicated. The novelistic form interposes an imaginary world between the writer and his audience. The tran­ sitive function of language is delayed but not eliminated. (Its ef­ fectiveness is thereby enhanced, because the delay allows time for fantasy to come into play.) La nouvelle Héloïse, a lyrical effusion and daydream, is a model of oblique communication. By 1762, when he wrote the Letters to Malesherbes, Rousseau felt the need to justify himself and to dispel the misunderstandings and slanders that had gathered around his name. Now his theme becomes himself. The self becomes the object of his discourse. Increasingly he will attempt to understand himself as both speaker and subject. But at the same time, as if the internal law governing this evolution required it, communication itself becomes increas­ ingly problematic. Rousseau’s contemporaries can no longer un­ derstand him. In his madness Rousseau is quite convinced of this; the orders issued by M. de Sartine, lieutenant of police, are the objective correlative of this belief. From the Letters to Malesherbes to the Confessions and from the Confessions to the Dialogues, Rousseau’s relations with his audience become increasingly tenuous. Finally,

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in the Rêveries he says that he is cured of all hope and anxiety; his plea is now a monologue. Not only is the self the exclusive “referent” of his discourse, it is also the only possible recipient in the short term. Of course the perfection and harmony of the style suggest a virtual witness. Rousseau has not lost hope completely: some day, he thinks, his monologue will find impartial readers whom his persecutors will not have infected with their prejudices. Yet it will be so long before this becomes possible that Rousseau prefers to say that he has absolutely no chance of being understood. This lack of opportunity creates an immense void, which, defying his lack of an audience, he fills with a lyrical outpouring of language, pro­ jecting certitude beyond despair. Language (whose “normal” func­ tion is to link self and others on the common ground of meaning) is thus diverted from its object (or perhaps one should say per­ verted) until it becomes nothing more than a representation of self to self, a representation that subsists in a sovereign transparency which is also an ultimate estrangement. By reappropriating his lost self in this fashion, Rousseau believes he has found peace. But his resigned happiness is also consummate alienation: Let me therefore detach my mind from these afflicting sights; they would only cause me pain, and to no end. Alone for the rest of my life, since it is only in myself that I find consolation, hope, and peace of mind, my only remaining duty is toward myself and this is all I desire. This is my state o f mind as I return to the rigorous and sincere self-examination that I formerly called my Confessions. I am devoting my last days to studying myself and preparing the account that I shall shortly have to render. Let me give myself over entirely to the pleasure o f conversing with my soul, since this is the only pleasure that men cannot take away from me. . . . My enterprise is like Montaigne’s, but my motive is entirely different, for he wrote his essays only for others to read, whereas I am writing down my reveries for myself alone. If, as I hope, I retain the same disposition of mind in my extreme old age, when the time of my departure draws near, I shall recall in reading them the pleasure I have in writing them and by thus reviving times past I shall as it were double the space of my existence. In spite of men I shall still enjoy the charms o f company, and in my decrepitude I shall live with my earlier self as I might with a younger friend.2

The lapse of time between writing and reading enables JeanJacques to enter into pseudoexternal relations with a future version of himself. The page written today is intended to be read tomorrow, when Rousseau will have become another person, avid for traces

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of his past. The externalization of language is thus justified by expectation. The author of the Reveries imagines his future self as a feebler, poorer version of the man he is now—a man forced to live on memories, for whom he prepares future solace in the form of a record of past thoughts and feelings. Though content today simply to experience those thoughts and feelings, the self must give them form in language if it wishes to savor its memories in the future. Writing is necessary in order to store up a supply of images before the expected dry spell sets in. Rousseau here stakes a claim to the absolute. Consciousness seeks to internalize and subsume transcendence in all its forms. Writing is preparation for the coming rendering of accounts to the Creator. The preamble to the Confessions sets the tone: Rousseau imagines himself appearing before the supreme tribunal. He enacts in his own mind a dress rehearsal of the Last Judgment. This is no mere image but a fundamental attitude of mind. Having examined the depths of his heart, Jean-Jacques wants to pronounce judgment. The simple man trusts God's justice and stands before him “in fear and trembling.“ Rousseau expects to be judged after his death, but he insists upon knowing the verdict here and now. He cannot rest easy until he knows he is innocent, so he usurps the place of the judge and imagines how he will appear in God’s eye. The Last Judgment requires an appearance before the first Cre­ ator: each man must account for those acts of will by which he transformed his original nature. In the scales of judgment the beginning and the end are compared; each man is compared at the end of life with what he was when he left his Creator's hands and isjudged according to his likeness (or unlikeness) to the original (with the implicit assumption that man’s original state is one of innocence). Rousseau claims that he more than any other man has preserved the goodness of the state of nature. Any vices that have been laid at his door are mere accidents. His failings are due to outside forces, to “fate,” “circumstances,” “society,” and so on. He may have done wrong, but only against his will. His inner nature remains unchanged, for in his heart he has always been pure. The poetic language here requires all the powers of imagination to sustain two fictions. First, intransitive language (which reveals the problematic transitivity of poetiy) mimics and internalizes the role of the supreme judge, whose verdict is rendered at the end of each man’s life. Language arrogates to itself the privilege of sovereign knowledge. Compare Rousseau’s attitude with that of the simple man of religion, who knows that God knows him but would

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never dream of claiming on that account that he knows himself. The gaze of the autobiographer replaces the eye of God, who “trieth the hearts and reins” (Ps. 7:10). Jean-Jacques wants to see his des­ tiny frozen before his eyes; he wants time to come to a stop. Second, this clarity at the end of life is said to be identical with the clarity of the beginning. Nothing has changed in Jean-Jacques’s heart. He remains in harmony with his original nature. He entrusts his life’s story to language only to eliminate any suggestion that he is a changed, lapsed, or fallen man. In his heart of hearts history does not exist. To be sure, Jean-Jacques is born in paradise only to fall into a world of woe. But he has done nothing to deserve this fate. He can calmly maintain his innocence, his unshakable faith in his original purity. Before the judgment of the last hour his face ra­ diates the purity of the newborn. In one sentence at the beginning of the Confessions, Rousseau mentions the unique mold in which nature cast him, and in the very next sentence he calls forth the Trumpet of Judgment. Faithful to his origins and faithful to his originality: the two are the same. For the self that internalizes the Judge also internalizes the Creator: the self is its own origin, or, rather, it retains a memory of its origin and in that memory self and origin are one and the same. And that memory is never more perfect than in reverie, where all material things ar e forgotten. Hegel is right: this is an extreme form of error. But Rousseau’s greatness lies in his having carried his mistake so far as to conceive the am­ bition of combining in himself the alpha and the omega.

The Discourse on Inequality Four years after the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, the Academy of Dijon posed another question, which provided Rousseau with the opportunity to elaborate his principles still further. Once again we must admire the result of this encounter of genius with con­ straint. In the inception of the work, circumstances played precisely the role that Rousseau saw them as playing in the evolution of humanity: man’s potential for perfectibility is realized only as cir­ cumstances require, that is, only when adversity requires men to use all their strength and all their faculties in order to survive. The new competition spurred Rousseau’s efforts, resulting in a significant intellectual advance. This time his object was not to gain the votes of Dijon’s academicians: he was already known, and win­ ning the prize hardly mattered. His aim was to stand out and apart from the crowd in another way, for the breadth, coherence, and, in a word, intransigence of his thesis. The first Discourse contained a few couplets intended to impress the judges, but the second, harsh and uncompromising, seems to scorn the precautions and conces­ sions that might have won the Academy’s applause. It spurned the conventions, brevity first of all. Its thesis flew in the face of prejudice and was not calculated to win easy acceptance. By challenging ac­ cepted wisdom so directly, Rousseau hoped to show that his approach to the great philosophical issues was utterly new. A note in the minutes of the Academy of Dijon for the session during which Rousseau’s second Discourse was examined reveals just how unendurable some contemporaries found the work: “The reading was not completed because of the length of the text and its improper submission, etc.”1 The competition came at just the right time. Rousseau was pre­ sented with an opportunity to clarify the thesis of the first Discourse, which adversaries had said was riddled with paradox and sophistry, and to support his position with detailed argument. The new trea­ tise was intended to demonstrate that Rousseau’s critique of social corruption was in fact the logical culmination of researches con­ ducted according to the strict rules of philosophical discourse (or scientific discourse, there being no clear-cut distinction at the time between philosophy and science). In this second Discourse JeanJacques attempted to confine his passion within the mold estabOriginally published as the introduction to the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in Œuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 3 (Paris: Pléiade, 1964).

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lished by previously neglected rules of rhetoric; he offered histor­ ical evidence in support of the revelation he experienced on the road to Vincennes. What the first Discourse had sketched in warm but vague terms, what Rousseau had learned or divined in the course of writing his polemic on the arts and sciences, he would now make fully explicit; his case would be stated with as full a panoply of supporting facts, observations, and arguments as the most demanding reader could wish. The new treatise would prove that the voice of the “musician Rousseau” was fully mature and capable not only of moralistic rhapsody but of contending with the “philosophers” and “men of letters,” with Buffon and Condillac, on their own terrain. The primary source of evil is inequality: so Rousseau said in his response to Stanislas.2 Now he felt the need to press this point further, to “dig down to the root.” If inequality is the source of evil, what is the source of inequality? In order to discover the true origin of evil he had to identify the origin of inequality. Later, Rousseau would interpret the growth of his literary repu­ tation in much the same terms he used to describe the progress of mankind, in the second Discourse: progress was both inevitable and unfortunate; with better luck it might have been slowed, but now the result must be faced, for there is no hope of turning back. The Discourse on Inequality was an essay written for a particular occasion, yet it was also an inevitable product of a profound tendency in Rousseau’s character. It describes, in world-historical terms, the danger but also the profit in confronting circumstances. The book contains a magnified image of its own inception, an illustration, as it were, of the risk to which it owes its existence. Before writing about inequality, Jean-Jacques of course experi­ enced it in life. He was a citizen of Geneva but one of those who ranked lower than the privileged patricians and who, accordingly, lived in the lower sections of the city. From his father he had received, along with lessons on the pride of the Romans, knowledge of bitter resentment and unsatisfied demands. He had been abused as an apprentice and served as a lackey, a tutor, a secretary, and a musician of dubious credentials astray in the salons of wealthy farmers-general: so many subordinate positions, so many humili­ ations endured, so much experience under his belt. With Mme de Warens he was happy, yet he could never entirely overcome his uneasiness at being dependent on her for his material needs. A

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man who would one day defend himself against would-be bene­ factors (while occasionally accepting hospitality obligingly offered to him), Rousseau’s conscience was troubled by the idea of owing everything to his “benefactress.” Sentimental dependence was his ideal, but he would not have it without financial independence. Thus it is not simply a taste for music and literature that impels him to begin his solitary apprenticeship as musician and man of letters at Chambéry and Les Charmettes. He hopes some day to earn an honorable living and pay off his debt. Once he is com­ fortably well off, he will prove to “Mama” that she was not wrong to have taken him in and seen to his needs. Letters written in his youth prove that he was very early anxious to “live without help from other people.”3 Whenever he is made to feel his social infe­ riority he also feels a compensatory need to answer back, to take his revenge. From the first he rejects equivocal expedients that many others would have accepted and that the privileged classes, themselves parasitic, would have tolerated. He wants to free himself through serious labor and independent effort. He is aware of his value (indeed, his value lies in his feelings) and sees the disparity between what he is and what fate has made him. Perhaps he de­ serves more, but it is almost a mathematical law that the product of wealth and merit is a constant. Jean-Jacques consoles himself for his poverty with thoughts of his sensibility: Why, Madame, are some hearts sensitive to what is great, sublime, and full o f pathos, while others seem made only to crawl about in the baseness of their feelings? Fortune seems to be a kind of compensation for this. By raising the latter, it seeks to place them on the same level o f greatness as the others.4

Yet this consolation is only verbal and does not lead Rousseau to resign himself to the established order. Young Jean-Jacques’s tone is usually one of complaint, in which it is hard to distinguish between rebelliousness and a romantic urge to make himself interesting through misfortune: “It is hard for a man of feeling who thinks as I do to be forced for want of other resources to beg for help and assistance.”5 Would he reconcile himself to his fate if by a stroke of good fortune he suddenly found himself on the other side of the divide between rich and poor? He made up his mind quite early: he had suffered too much from inequality ever to make his peace with it. He became increasingly convinced that the poverty of which he complained so much in his youth put him on the right side of the

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divide, and he prides himself on it. Inequality is not something that he experiences alone, and it is more than simply a feeling of in­ feriority. It is a fate shared with most of his fellows, and he ex­ periences it in solidarity with others. Rousseau was permanently “sensitized” by what he had seen of rural and urban poverty. The celebrated pages of the fourth book of the Confessions are confirmed by letters written when Jean-Jacques was still a youth. At Mont­ pellier in 1737 he saw what many Frenchmen at that time could not see and was astonished by things that astonished almost no one else: These streets are lined by superb town houses interspersed with wretched cottages filled with mud and dung. Half the inhabitants are very rich, the other half excessively miserable. But all are equally beggars for living in the vilest and filthiest manner imaginable.6

Note that, in denouncing the equality in beggary of rich and poor, Rousseau anticipates the conclusion of the second Discourse: when inequality becomes extreme, all men—the privileged as well as the oppressed—are confounded in the equality of misery and violence. When M. de Francueil offers him a position as cashier and a career in finance, Rousseau, after a moment’s hesitation, vigorously rejects the offer. He falls ill, as though even his body were crying out in protest against the mere prospect of handling money and profiting from inequality. Rousseau formulated the principle on which he based his decision in a letter to his father written when he was nineteen: “I value obscure freedom above brilliant slavery.”7 The sentiment is of course a bookish cliché derived from Plu­ tarch. But Rousseau was naïve enough and genius enough to take it quite seriously: his originality lies not in the principle itself but in his faithful observance of it. On this point he would never waver. When he undertakes his personal reform, he exploits his literary success to make an ostentatious display of poverty and indepen­ dence. His goal is not merely to draw attention to himself. His demonstration of virtue, in the manner of the Stoics (or Cynics), is intended to be of general and far-reaching significance. By dis­ tinguishing himself in public and assuming the role of the pauper, the lonely moralist will teach all mankind a lesson. Contemptuous of hypocritical proprieties, Rousseau voluntarily accepts poverty in order to challenge inequality and warn others of its dangers. Nu­ merous critics have used statements in the Confessions to convict Rousseau of theatrical and exaggerated behavior. But he is not

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engaging in a gratuitous sham; his conduct is in the nature of a “demonstration.” If there is playacting in what he does, psychol­ ogists can find similar histrionics in any serious and deliberate com­ mitment. For what is commitment but the adoption of a conviction that rescues the mind from the flux of irresolute existence. “Busi­ ness as usual” becomes impossible after such a choice, “extreme” by its very nature. Rousseau’s choice corresponds to a deeply felt need: to keep faith with his social origins, with the class into which he was born. At the moment when a change of status becomes possible, when he might convert literary renown into social advancement, Rousseau chooses to remain poor as a challenge to society. He is not content simply to endure his life as a penny-a-liner; he claims that life as his own in order to prove to his wealthy readers that, society being what it is, a dignified and morally justified existence is possible only on the brink of poverty. Jean-Jacques claims that he alone is living in accord with valid ideals, obliging the great and rich of this world to question their position. Their wealth and the power that flows from it are usurped. When the celebrated Jean-Jacques chooses to earn his living as a copyist, the evil and injustice of wealth are made apparent for all to see. Rousseau’s decision demonstrates the elec­ tive affinity, the necessary connection between social inferiority and moral superiority. Inequality is a consequence of a deluded and vain concern for appearances. Anyone who casts off the spell and opens his eyes can see it for what it is: the curse of unreality. The aberrant behavior of men taken in by appearances corrupts the reality of everyday life. Ultimately, illusory appearances translate into suffering and crime. In the famous ciphered letter to Mme Dupin de Francueil in which Rousseau explains why he abandoned his children, he blames institutions for his mistake: “It is the rich man’s estate, your estate, that steals from my estate the bread of my children.”8 Here Rousseau exonerates himself by accusing others, not with­ out bad faith. The wrong of which he stands accused was, he says, committed by a wicked society that used him as its agent; hence he is a victim, doubly humiliated in that he must endure both inequality and moral censure. Rousseau wants to remain a victim so that he can claim the rights of one. His disadvantages are a blessing of his estate. Yet how difficult it is to maintain his blessed status! How many offers must he reject in outrage, how many quarrels must he endure, to preserve his freedom! Rousseau spurns gifts, pen­ sions, and honoraria so as not to be compelled to feel gratitude, so

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as not to be forced into one of those dubious friendships with a would-be benefactor in which both parties hypocritically deny the fact of inequality. To accept a gift is to admit one’s inferiority; it is to incur an obligation to people whose kindness is a way of signaling social distance while insincerely glossing it over. Jean-Jacques pro­ claims his ingratitude. The equality he wants—the reciprocity of free minds—excludes dependence of any kind, and in the first place the dependence created by the kindness of the benevolent. (Note, however, that Emile and the Wolmars engage in precisely the kind of charitable assistance that Rousseau stubbornly rejected.) His de­ cision was firm: accept nothing in order to owe nothing. Poor, dignified, and on display to an astonished public, Rousseau made visible—and even enviable—the previously unnoticed existence of the frugal artisan. When Diogenes renounces everything he owns down to his soup bowl, the rich can no longer look unashamed upon the superfluous luxury in which they live. Entangled in a gilded web of boredom, they feel unhappy. They want to cross the divide. At that moment they are ready to hear the message of the Discourse on Inequality. Logic requires that a distinction be made between inequality of wealth and condition on the one hand and political and juridical inequality on the other. Yet all these forms of inequality are related. More than any other man Rousseau was sensitive to the connections among them; having experienced them himself as a young man, he was in a position to analyze them in later life. The result of a remarkable intellectual effort, the second Discourse is more than just a recasting of rebellious emotions in a systematic, analytical form. Rousseau transcended personal experience to cre­ ate a universal model. His earlier writings, though full of pregnant statements, are relatively limited in scope; they lack a broad the­ oretical foundation or are too closely related to Jean-Jacques’s per­ sonal misfortunes. The second Discourse, however, is a work which in every way transcends Rousseau’s conscious or unconscious intentions. If his purpose was to win the votes of Dijon’s academicians, he went about it in an extremely clumsy manner. If he meant only to make an ostentadous proclamation of principles before returning to the fold, he went much too far. The extremism of the work would have compromised him and made the desired reconciliation unlikely. By invoking his cidzenship and addressing himself to the Republic of Geneva, Rousseau invited the attention of his fellow men, hoping

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that they would admire the dialogue between the prodigal son and the fatherland to which he now returned. But the tumult carried much further than Rousseau could have anticipated. In any case there was a great deal in the essay not likely to bring about a reconciliation with his fellow citizens. Genevans admire quiet manners. For Jean-Jacques, at the height of his controversial celebrity, to announce ostentatiously that he was reclaiming his Genevan citizenship seemed quite immodest to those who remem­ bered the thieving little apprentice. Worse yet, the dedication, with its flattering portrait of Genevan institutions, presumed to teach Genevans a lesson. And it was addressed to the Republic as a whole, when it might more fittingly have paid homage to the patricians of the Small Council. These were deliberate gaffes on Rousseau’s part. He had resolved to love Geneva in his own way, extravagantly, at the risk of causing displeasure and putting himself in the wrong (or, what comes to the same thing, of putting others in the wrong by making them feel the full extent of the gap between his flam­ boyant patriotism and their tepid moderation and want of courage). Etiquette required that he submit his dedication to its intended recipients prior to publication. Rousseau, unsure of the welcome his work would receive, did not do this. In fact, he feared a hostile reception enough to justify himself in advance to Genevan correspondents : Isolated by men, attached to nothing in society, stripped o f all pretension, and seeking my very happiness only in that of others, I believe that I am at least exempt from those class prejudices [préjugés d'état] that cause the wisest men to judge according to maxims of benefit to themselves.9

Thus, just a few weeks after succumbing to “republican enthu­ siasm” during a stay in Geneva, Rousseau again stands aloof: he speaks from the outside. Although the title page proudly attaches the epithet “citizen of Geneva” to the name Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the dedication is dated from the town of Chambéry in Savoy, a precaution—says the author of the Confessions—“againsl any pos­ sible chicanery” in France or Geneva. Rousseau needs Lhis peculiar form of absence: he addresses the citizens of Geneva from outside the city, but to Europe he speaks as a citizen of Geneva. Thus he is a foreigner twice over. Everywhere he is a man who speaks from somewhere else, not restrained or intimidated by any consideration of respect. He makes common cause with no one, only with ne­ glected truth and exiled virtue. He looks to a different future,

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responds to a different need, belongs to a different country from other men: his ideal fatherland is not the real France or the real Geneva. Rousseau was well aware of the weakness (and error) that his estrangement from a homeland produced, yet he felt that his weakness could be transformed into a peculiar kind of strength, as he says in, among other places, his fourth letter to Malesherbes: Well may your men of letters shout that a solitary man is useless to all the world and fails to fulfill his obligations to society. . . . It is something to set an example for men of the life they all ought to lead. It is something when one no longer has the strength or the health to work with one’s hands to dare from retirement to speak in the voice of truth. It is something to warn men of the folly in opinions that make them miserable. . . . If I had lived in Geneva, I would never have been able to publish the dedicatory letter of the Discourse on Inequality, nor would I have been able to speak out against the establishment of the theater in the tone that I took. I would be far less useful to my compatriots living in their midst than I can be on occasion from retirement. What does it matter where I live if I act as I ought to act?10

Having made himself a stranger to all established societies, Rous­ seau becomes, in the second Discourse, the spokesman for the hum­ ble and oppressed, the representative of all who are condemned to live as strangers in their own land, whether in Geneva or France or elsewhere. From the depths of the forest of Saint-Germain he speaks to all men, determined through his writings and his life to set an example, to make himself the model of the whole man. He has cut himself off from society and distinguished himself from other men in order to exemplify more fully the ideal man and his duties. Banished from the community and having severed all im­ mediate bonds to other human beings, he sets himself the task of imagining the bases on which a more just community and a more satisfying form of intimacy could be set up. Rousseau has hit upon his grand style. Let us admire his mature mastery as its full range is revealed. Rousseau’s earnest genius has found the tone that suited it. It is one of proud eloquence grappling with lofty issues and capable of accommodating impassioned rhet­ oric, close argument, polemic, and a considerable amount of erudite information while leaving plenty of scope for the imagination. The writing is animated, moreover, by matchless intellectual fervor. Never mind that Rousseau drew heavily on philosophers, jurists, natu-

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ralists, and explorers. By integrating his borrowings into his work, he conjures away his predecessors and frees us from the need to consult them. Scholars can identify sources for the Discourse on Inequality to their hearts’ content. The work itself is a source to which one could trace, if one wished, all modern thought about the nature of society. Clearly Rousseau was determined to display his thought to the public fully armed. The second Discourse is a fortress of a book, and the reader quickly becomes aware of batteries aimed in every direction. Some of the endnotes are very heavy-caliber weapons indeed. Peremptory, incisive in assertion as well as negation, filled with images of peculiar power, Rousseau’s style employs every pos­ sible means of persuasion. The second Discourse is not merely an indictment, like the first; it is an investigation (the word, new at the time [to French], was established in the language by Rousseau). His passion pours itself out in extreme formulations that catch the attention and scandalize the imagination. But the reader should also pay close attention to the reservations, to the taps on the rudder that alter the course of the argument. Simply by shifting his em­ phasis Rousseau gave his work a “dialectical” structure, thesis con­ fronting antithesis. The second Discourse has given rise to innumerable misunderstandings because it has been read in a su­ perficial and piecemeal manner; critics have concentrated on ve­ hement assertions that Rousseau himself withdraws or corrects a few pages later. He has been attacked most commonly for portions of his argument, not for his true philosophy. Rousseau begins with great solemnity. The dedication, preface, and exordium form a triple portal through which we make our way slowly, as though Rousseau wished to express symbolically the dis­ tance between us and man’s true beginnings. A few images serve to guide us: from contemporary Geneva we move on to an evocation of Plato and the Lyceum of Athens and finally to the primeval forest, the source of all human history. Before describing the silence of primitive man, Jean-Jacques places himself on stage in the at­ titude of an orator and arrays his audience around him. He ad­ dresses himself at first to a real audience, then, raising his voice, to an imaginary one: first the citizens of Geneva, then the great Athenians, then all mankind. “Men, whatever your country, what­ ever your opinions, listen, here is your history.” His tone is that of a mystic revealing great secrets.

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Of all Rousseau’s writings this book has least to say about his Christian beliefs. This is not merely because it is marked by the spirit of the Encyclopedia and the influence of Diderot but also because it is conceived as a revelation of the human; it is a thor­ oughly religious work, but of a very particular kind, a substitute for sacred history. Rousseau has rewritten Genesis as a work of philosophy, complete with Garden of Eden, original sin, and the confusion of tongues. This is a secularized, “demystified” version of the origins of mankind, which repeats the Scripture that it re­ places in another tongue. Rousseau’s language is that of philo­ sophical speculation, and all mention of the supernatural has been eliminated. Yet Christian theology, though not present explicitly, shapes the structure of Rousseau’s argument. Primitive man, lead­ ing what is scarcely more than an animal existence, is happy; he lives in paradise and will remain there until the opportunity arises to use his reason. Once be begins to reflect, however, he acquires knowledge of good and evil. The anxious mind of man discovers the misfortune of a divided existence: mankind has therefore ex­ perienced a fall “This is your history!” But the history that Rousseau relates is not the history of the historians. Rather than discuss the fate of empires, he resolves to take a broader view. The Academy of Dijon had posed “a question of political right,” and Rousseau was determined to “confine himself within the limits of a general and purely phil­ osophical discussion, without personalities and without applica­ tions.”11 This philosophical discussion was concerned not with the events of history but with the process by which man, at first a stranger to history, gradually became a historical creature. What altered man’s animal nature and made him the subject and agent of history? In the absence of evidence, any answer must be conjectural. Documentary sources tell us only about what happened to mankind in later stages of development, after the forward march of history had begun. Rousseau proposes to look at a much earlier time. Setting aside the evidence of the Bible and convinced that the proper place to begin is with the hypothetical notion of primitive man, not much more intelligent than the animals, he is determined to “ignore all the facts.” For the facts are man’s historical record; they bind us to history. Hence to stick to the facts is to mire oneself in an epoch far from that in which mankind began. We must escape from history in order to witness the birth of history. What guides shall we choose? The accounts of travelers who have witnessed the

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life of the savages? Admittedly, none of the societies they describe show us natural man in all his glory. For Rousseau, the Caribs and Hottentots are already “denatured,” differentiated by culture. Yet they are so far behind us that if we focus our attention on them we are at least looking in the right direction, back toward the be­ ginning of time. Beyond these savages covered with feathers and paint we glimpse the image of naked and solitary man. Helped and guided by ethnographic data, the imagination is free to extrapolate boldly. Jean-Jacques relies on still another guide: to describe man’s orig­ inal constitution he examines his own heart. Without a doubt he is still a man of nature, or at any rate a man in whom the memory of nature survives. In this he is an exception. Rousseau does not hesitate at times to claim extraordinary privileges for himself, in particular that he is the only “initiate” (the word occurs in the first Dialogue). Hence in writing the Discourse in the forest of SaintGermain he is free to consult his imagination. Even if primitive man is a figment of his imagination, one of the “creatures after his own heart” about which he liked to fantasize, he cannot be wrong because his heart bears nature’s indelible imprint. Fancy does not lie. The beginning,^the remotest point in tirrie^ corresiponds, by a $troke-of good fortune, to the deepest layers of Jean-Jacquesjyjjner life. Where other philosophers might content themselves with dry speculation, Rousseau draws upon intimate, poetic intuition. For him, primitive life is not a pretext for intellectual amusement but an image deeply imprinted on his consciousness. The state of na­ ture is in the first place something he has experienced, a fantasy of prolonged childhood, and Rousseau describes it as though he can see it before his eyes: “Where could the painler and apologist of nature, today so disfigured and slandered, have found his model if not in his own heart? He described nature as he felt himself.”12 Thus the truth of Rousseau’s fundamental conjecture is inwardly apparent. As soon as prejudice and passion are j>et aside and the inessential gifts of progress are forgotten .light dawns in the depths oFuine7 man appears as an almost ’purely se~nsuous being, distin­ guished from the animal and the automaton only by still undevel­ oped faculties and a still unused freedom. Flic discovery is like the discovery of the true image of Glaucus beneath die incrustation of brine and seaweed on the statue fished from the sea. Subtraction and negation are therefore the keys to discovering man’s origins. Locke, Condillac, and Buffon had also stripped the mind bare so as to examine a still empty consciousness at the mo-

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ment of awakening, devoid of even the simplest ideas and aston­ ished at receiving the signals that it would hoard as the treasure of the faculty of reflection. Everything begins in stupor. But Locke and Condillac, in a hurry to reconstruct and clothe their model, set the mind to work actively combining sense data. The idea of projecting their hypothesis into the remotest depths of human his­ tory does not interest them. For Locke, children, imbeciles, and savages are equivalent examples of the tabula rasa. If we want to speak to them and teach them, we need only make sure that they are capable of reflection; soon they will be talking like little phi­ losophers. Rousseau, without changing the substance of the hy­ pothesis, focuses on two aspects to which his predecessors had failed to devote adequate consideration. First, the collective aspect:_it is not enough to consider the hypothetical origins of a single con­ sciousness; one must also look to the childhood of humanity. Sec­ ond, it is consequently impossible to reconstruct the natural sequence of events in abstract time. Any valid explanation of contemporary humanity must take account of the whole duration of man’s history. Thus Rousseau added both temporal and social dimensions to pre­ vious philosophical speculation. Rejecting providentialist interpre­ tations, he was the brilliant founder of what would later be called historical sociology, whose two main tenets are that we cannot un­ derstand man without understanding the society that educated him and we cannot understand society without knowing how it was constituted. For Rousseau the answer lies in tracing everything back to the beginning, that is, to the hypothetical moment at which previously isolated individuals joined together to form groups. By delving as deeply as possible into the past, we enable ourselves to survey at a glance the “multitude of centuries” during which man’s relations with nature and his fellow man gradually changed. (There may just possibly be a connection between Rousseau’s slow and haphazard intellectual development and the fact that he felt it necessary to insist that the maturation of reason required an im­ mensely long time.) As history unfolds, man develops his latent potential. Not a reasoning animal to begin with, he acquires reason as he sheds his animal nature. But in losing his animal nature, man also lost certain prerogatives. Physically, natural man is healthy; morally, his life is one of “im­ mediacy,” of spontaneous sympathy and love of self. Primitive man, according to Rousseau, lives in scattered isolation; he shares no bond with his fellows, nor is he subject to their will. Feeling no

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desire to communicate, he has no sense of separation. No meta­ physical divide separates consciousness from objects in the world. Man lives in perfect equilibrium with his environment: he is part of the world and the world is part of him. Need, desire, and the world are all in harmony.^Desire, circumscribed by the present moment, never exceeds need, and need, inspired by nothing other than nature, is so quickly satisfied that feelings of want never arise. The primeval forest supplies all needs. It is a symbol of happiness. Solitary, idle, barely awake, desiring little, easily satisfied, primitive man dwells in the “measure for nothing” before the music of history begins. Spurred by nostalgia to describe this paradise, Rousseau marshaled themes that had filled idyllic dreams for thousands of years: in all times and places men facing death have imagined a paradise before time to which time itself put an end. If man cannot be happy except in this condition of elementary equilibrium, then anything that alters human nature, even if it seems to increase man’s power and well-being, is in fact a cause of misfortune. In the state of nature, history is dammed up, as it were; but the least breach in nature’s perfection allows the pent-up waters to pour forth. Intellectual progress is accompanied by a growing imbalance between desire and the objects of desire, which causes man to suffer. By attempting to impose his own order on nature, man sows the seeds of disorder and war. Blurring certain distinc­ tions, man’s intellectual and technological advance can be likened to the fall in Genesis. In this process, which is literally a dislocation, man loses his primitive amorality and becomes moral, but only in order to think that he is doing good when in fact he is doing harm. Inequality begins when primitive stasis is disrupted by historical change. Each new stage in social progress brings still greater depravation. Progress is ambivalent. But once a society has abandoned the state of nature, it is impossible to go back. The transformation is irreversible. Only dreamers can follow the path back to the source. No matter how overwhelming the desire, regression is not allowed. The best we can do is to keep the memory of the state of nature alive. Such a memory can serve as what Eric Weil has called a “comparative concept,” that is, a fixed point or measuring rod against which we can measure how far a given state of civilization is from the state of nature. By defining minimal criteria for humanness we can gauge the ways in which we have improved or gone wrong. Any variation from the ideal poverty of the primitive sLate must be seen as a human invention, a cultural fact, a modification of

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man by his own hand. Then we can judge where the man of nature ends and the man of culture begins. Not enough attention has been paid to the way Rousseau shifts responsibility to man where tra­ dition saw nothing but gifts from nature or God: articulated lan­ guage; durable marriage; society, property, and laws; and morality, once it goes beyond the simple instinct of self-preservation and spontaneous sympathy and bases itself on reason—for Rousseau, all these are human creations. AJ1these achievements require the existence of latent faculties, buL development of those faculties is not inevitable. For Rousseau, there is nothing necessary about the transformation of perfectibility into perfection. Man is free to ac­ cept or reject, to hasten progress or slow it down. The state of nature, Rousseau tells us, may never have existed. No matter. It is still a necessary hypothesis, since it is impossible to measure historical distance until a “zero point” has been established. In any case we know that for Rousseau, much given to reverie, “nothing is beautiful except that which does not exist.” Imaginary things command attention precisely because they are impossible. Note that the state of nature is not a moral imperative. Rousseau does not propose it as a norm to which man should conform in practice. It is a theoretical hypothesis that takes on almost concrete reality thanks to a style capable of making imaginary things seem real. Rousseau’s impassioned description of the state of nature has led some readers to believe that he was determined to lead a savage existence. “He wants to walk on all fours,” as Voltaire put it. But Rousseau is well aware that a savage existence is impossible. He makes the image of primitive times so attractive in order to heighten our regret that this past has vanished forever. Despite his nostalgia, Rousseau is not a “primitivist.”13 While it might have been better if man had never abandoned his primitive condition, the choice has been made; it is no longer up to us. Rousseau repeats this point several times. In Emile he says that “much art is necessary if social man is to be kept from becoming altogether artificial.”14 In other words, harmony with nature can be reestablished through culti­ vation (and hence further denaturing). This second nature, a prod­ uct of art, is no longer a question of unreflective, instinctive equilibrium between man and his environment. It is illuminated by reason and sustained by moral sentiment, of which the brute savage knows nothing. The antithesis between nature and culture can be resolved: this is Kant’s and Cassirer’s reading of Rousseau, which they would develop in their own philosophical works.

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In the second Discourse, which is the preamble to Rousseau’s “system,” this comforting prospect is for the most part kept hidden from view'. Rousseau’s point here is to show how man deprived himself of harmony with nature. In his extremist manner he traces human history to a catastrophic end. As the curtain falls, the scene is one of anarchy and chaos. But this is only the end of the first act. Although it is no longer possible to construct a just society (as Sparta and Geneva once were), it is still possible to educate a child to live in harmony with nature’s requirements. The historical pes­ simism of the Discourse is counterbalanced by the anthropological optimism that is a constant of Rousseau’s thought. “Man is naturally good.” Has that natural goodness been lost forever? Yes, if we are looking at man in society; no, if we are looking at individuals. Evil is not in human nature but in social structures. In René Hubert’s words, “If differentiation is contingent relative to man’s original nature, the evils to which it gives rise are not irremediable.” It is possible to conceive of educating a child in such a way as to prevent and undo the harmful influence of a corrupt society. But the ed­ ucator must either know nature or be a man of nature himself, like Rousseau. Hence it is essential to have not only an image of man’s primitive nature but also an accurate understanding of how that nature was altered by time. To physicians of the soul and society, the Discourse offered definitions of health (now lost) and descrip­ tions of the course of the disease. For Rousseau, inequality and evil are almost synonymous. The sec­ ond Discourse is a theodicy. God is incapable of willing the existence of evil (as in Nature). Is man guilty? Did he sin? If he is naturally good, how did he become wicked? He became wicked because he surrendered to history, and this happened because of his struggle with nature, his attempt to over­ come adversity through labor. Man became wicked without willing evil (just as, in the Confessions, Rousseau does evil but his heart remains pure). In some mysterious way something between man and the world becomes distorted. Something has been discon­ nected. Need and gratification are no longer on the same plane. Hence man can no longer live in direct contact with nature. This disparity, which ultimately becomes antagonism, is a source of en­ ergy but also of woe. The sdmuliis was external. In certain regions of the world man faced “sterile years, long, harsh winters, and scorching summers.”

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Nature ceased to protect him and created obstacles for him to overcome. Plunged into insecurity and forced to do his utmost in order to survive, man left his lazy happiness behind. Weaned from Mother Nature, he found himself dependent on the external world. He had accepted nature’s gifts almost passively; now he would have to fight for them. And he discovered that he was capable of over­ coming adversity by dint of constant effort. When a man works, time is structured by the object of his labor. The faculty of reflection does the structuring. In the active con­ frontation with inert matter, man becomes aware of what differ­ entiates him from things. He compares himself with something other than himself, and reason is born in the moment of compar­ ison. But he pays for his newfound power over the world with the loss of direct contact with nature, the source of his initial happiness. All his relations become mediated and instrumental. Tools come between man and violated nature. Cracks appear in the flawless sphere of immediate existence as man takes possession of a distinct identity. His primordial state was a closed unity; inside and outside were undifferentiated. This is now lost. The sense of existing here and now no longer exhausts all man’s feelings. He encounters his fellow men and realizes that he is different from them, just as he is different from the nature that threatens his life and thwarts his desires, and just as he is different from what he was and what he will become. Separation, difference, the passage of time, the pos­ sibility of death—all of these man discovers as he becomes aware of his power over the world. He achieves mastery only to find himself dependent. The faculty of comparison (or reflection) that makes him aware of his superiority over the world also enables him to foresee his suffering and death. In a few brief but admirable pages Rousseau shows us how laboFdelivers man from the con­ dition of the animals only to reveal to him the conflict of opposites: outside and inside, self and other, appearance and reality, good and evil, power and servitude. If this philosophy is not dialectical, what is? Each term calls forth its opposite and develops through conflict. The inner man is transformed as his relations with the outside world are altered. Moral change and technological progress are interdependent aspects of the historical process. No economic change (i.e., change in the modes of production and consumption) fails to alter man’s intellectual equipment and emotional attitudes. In this process cause and effect are indistinguishable; roles are continually reversed.

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The debate over the first Discourse had taught Rousseau that the genealogy of evil is complex and that one cannot simply blame science and technology. Evil is what the Stoics called an unquiet mind and what we call alienation: loss of identity, living for the opinion of others, wanting more than simple recognition. Its source is external and its essence is passion for the external. As soon as man abandons the autarchy of the state of nature, he feels vul­ nerable; he wants to manipulate his appearance for purposes of self­ protection. The development of certain economic practices and the spread of luxury stem from psychological causes: civilized man wants more than just security and satisfaction of fundamental needs; he wants excess, he wants to command the desire of others, he wants to fascinate them by displaying his strength or beauty. Alien­ ation due to money and monetary relations completes the prior alienation of consciousness that comes from taking an instrumental attitude toward the world. Between the loss of the primitive state and the beginning of the civilized state is an immense gap, according to Rousseau. Strictly speaking, the state of nature ends only when men establish political communities and governments. Hence there must be what Rous­ seau calls a “second state of nature,” in which man is already dena­ tured but not yet civilized. Hence a part of history precedes civilization; there is progress, but there are also crises. This history divides into several stages, punctuated by major revolutions. Rous­ seau sees the following pattern. 1. Man, originally idle, is compelled by external circumstances to discover the usefulness and necessity of work. Although men still live in isolation, need leads them to join together for the ac­ complishment of some task. But their collaboration is temporary, and the anarchic hordes they form do not endure. 2. Next comes what Rousseau calls the first revolution, a result of technological advance. Man learns to build himself shelter, en­ abling families to remain together. Humanity enters the patriarchal age. Villages are built, but the land still has no owner. Group needs are met primarily through hunting and gathering. Rousseau’s de­ scription, inspired by travelers’ accounts and by the Bible, is not unlike our image of the Paleolithic age. If there is a golden age whose loss we should regret, this is it. It really did exist, and the continued existence of savage tribes proves that mankind could have remained at this stage. Occupying a central place in history,

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this is the “veritable youth of the world,” beyond which lies decay. Natural man was but a necessary hypothesis, a fantasy of desire; the patriarchal and communistic societies are a concrete image of the happiness that man has allowed to slip through his fingers as he reached for illusory compensations. Had history been arrested at the stage of “nascent society,” man would have spared himself innumerable miseries. Here, for the last time until the conclusion of the Discourse, Rousseau creates a glowing image full of the blan­ dishments with which he so skillfully endows past glories. This is by way of heightening the contrast with the somber destiny that awaits us. 3. First man gave up the idleness of paradise, falling into a world of labor and reflective thought. Now he falls again, losing the hap­ piness of patriarchal society. Through an “unfortunate accident” men discover the advantages of the division of labor, which enables them to make the transition from a subsistence economy to a pro­ duction economy. (I am deliberately using modern terms unknown to Rousseau. But even without the words he describes the things perfectly.) Men are now assigned distinct tasks: some are black­ smiths, others plowmen. The development of agriculture and met­ allurgy, Rousseau says, was a major revolution. Minor inconsistencies aside, he is describing what we now call the Neolithic revolution. “Iron and wheat civilized men and ruined mankind.” Why this unfortunate consequence? Because men, able now to produce more than they really need, fight over possession of the surplus. They want not just to enjoy the fruits of their labor but to own them. And they want not only actual goods but the abstract signs of possible or future goods. For Rousseau, there is a close correlation between man’s loss of unity in the division of labor and his pas­ sionate quest for compensation in the form of ownership. This compensation does not restore the lost equilibrium but further compromises it. In order to own land man is forced to establish and defend boundaries. Fields are enclosed because ownership requires exclusion of nonowners. Those who are less clever or less violent are driven out and reduced to poverty. 4. The first occupant of a plot of land can declare himself the owner, but ownership as yet carries no legal force, and this leads to war. “Nascent society gave way to the most frightful state of war.” On this point Rousseau is in agreement with Hobbes. He differs with Hobbes only in his contention that in the original state of nature men were too dispersed to attack one another. As Eric Weil has observed, Rousseau contradicts Hobbes only because he ad-

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heres to an extreme form of the Hobbesian doctrine that man’s presocial existence was “atomistic.” As a result, Rousseau laid it down as a fundamental premise that man is naturally good (or, rather, naturally amoral). Man is now in an untenable position: the war of all against all makes it necessary to establish a civic order. The second state of nature ends because man, already denatured, engages in a struggle to the death with his fellows. In this way Rousseau leaves the honor of natural man (and of human nature) intact, even though the situation he describes is precisely that which Hobbes described as conflict between individuals in a state of nature. Order is preferable to violence; the appearance ofjustice is better than anarchy. These are the premises on which the civilized state is based. Men respond to the threat to their security by creating societies, by entering into a social contract. But it is a wicked con­ tract, which instead of founding a just society concludes what Pierre Burgelin has called a “vicious process of socialization.” Rousseau has representative characters play out a scene laden with symbolism. The rich man is “reflective” (hence wicked) and addresses a rude and gullible crowd. Inequality, aggravated by deception, is palpably evident in this mystification of the many by the one. Conceived in a state of inequality, this social contract consolidates the rich man’s advantages and institutionalizes inequality: economic usurpation becomes political power while draping itself in the trappings of legality and peace. The rich man asserts a property right that did not exist before and thereby assures himself a position of domi­ nation. Not a spontaneous product of the will of the “group in fusion,” this contract is a caricature of the true social compact, a product of ruse and seduction. Yet it is the basis of our society and characteristic of a determinant stage in our history. We are the heirs of this fool’s bargain, which eliminated overt violence by ending the war of all against all but replaced it with die hypocritical violence of conventions favorable to the rich. States, moreover, behave to­ ward one another as individuals did before entering into this con­ tract. Warfare between individuals has been replaced by even more destructive warfare between nations. In this vehement polemic Rousseau exemplifies the tendency of Enlightenment philosophers to blame oppressive institutions on deceit. The deceivers and the deceived, the fast talkers and the dupes: these are the characters in the “primal scene” created and re-created by political thinkers. The victims of the social order, suddenly roused to rebellion, interpret their situation as the con-

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sequence of a deliberate plot, hatched in the past and perpetuated by a conspiracy of the powerful. Philosophy conceives its task as one of passing round the password of a counterplot, a liberating conspiracy. The purpose of rational analysis is to show that the social order is of human origin and not, as the impostors claim, of divine origin. The task is one of “demystification,” and the method is to reveal the mystification by which the oppressors first came to power. Rebellion is but the delayed dawning of an anger that should have been aroused right from the start. What is and what should be are contrasted in order to drive home the criticism of the existing state of affairs. At this point in the Discourse Rousseau abandons his quasi-chronological account in order to give a rapid sketch of the principles of political justice, which he must state carefully in order to criticize the “ways of the world.” Accordingly, he attempts to give an abstract account of the conditions of political legitimacy. Here it is not the historian who speaks but the author of Political Institutions. For a few pages he ceases to explore the origins of society and the depths of time in order to establish the true principles on which any healthy society must be based. Rousseau calls this “digging down to the root.” Unlike many of his predecessors, Rousseau is careful to distinguish between what is chronologically first and what is analytically fundamental. It is abundantly clear that, for Rousseau, reason, which lays down analytical principles, is inseparable from criticism, which attacks an intolerable state of affairs. J h e principles of political justice serve as an antithesis. So do the images of primitive man and of patriar­ chal society, but these Rousseau depicted as really existing in the past yet out of our reach. The just society, on the other hand, is presented as an extrahistorical possibility; even if it never existed in the past, it is a hypothetical possibility, which could exist in the future. In the discussion of fundamental notions, polemic plays an im­ portant role: paternal authority is not the basis of right; the obe­ dience of the vanquished does not confer legitimacy upon the victor; nor is the union of the weak an acceptable basis for society. A contract is, but not the contract of subjection described previously. The kind of contract that Rousseau recommends in the Discourse is still described in classical terms as a “double contract.” But Rous­ seau says that on this point his theory remains provisional; his “research” is not yet complete. The purpose of an ideal social con­ tract is to make clear what was mystifying about the actual historical

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social contract; now we are free to “examine the facts in the light of justice” and to measure the distance between what is equitable and what man has had to endure because his history got off to a bad start. Thus there are two terms of reference in the Discourse: nature, from which history has caused man to depart, and justice, or law, which reveals the size of the gap. Obviously Rousseau has split the classical notion of “natural law” in two. Natural law was not a matter of justice; it was rather the law that natural man (now vanished) spontaneously obeyed. Far from being in contradiction with natural law, civil law reestablishes it on different bases: reason, reflection, enlightened will. Because man is naturally good, the whole edifice of justice can be based entirely on man’s will. This section of the Discourse contains the seeds of the Social Con­ tract. By reading these pages carefully and noticing where Rousseau inserts them in his argument, we gain a clearer understanding of the role that the idea of a. legitimate contract played in his thought. The legitimate contract establishes a norm. (Being a norm suited only to young nations and small states, it may not be very likely to succeed in the real world, but never mind—its value as a norm remains universal.) Any social system can be compared with the ideal contractually based society and condemned to the extent that it fails to measure up. What is more, the notion of a social ideal serves to justify Rousseau’s attitude to the society of his own time. That society being manifestly unjust, it is impossible to maintain that Rousseau’s rebelliousness is merely a quirk of personality, a sign of misanthropy. In fact, it is justified on both scientific and moral grounds. Rousseau’s rejection of society has a basis in reason. After the digression on political justice, the hypothetical historical narrative resumes at an accelerated pace. Rousseau brings in each of his major themes a number of times, like a contrapuntalist writ­ ing the final stretto of a fugue. The history he has described and contrasted to the ideal contractual society is our history; having begun badly, it also ends badly. History, which began as slow change, culminates in catastrophe. Inspired no doubt by Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Rousseau describes the succession of different types of government, the institution of hereditary nobility, and the grow­ ing arbitrariness of monarchy. As the pace becomes more and more dizzying, Rousseau begins to omit details of the argument. In his haste to conclude he says only a small part of what he might have said; he outlines yet another book. We are shown all the wretched­ ness of a world subjected to the corrupting influence of money and

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opinion. The reader feels as though he has fallen into an abyss: history ends in blood and anarchy. Universal warfare resumes, but now man is abject, suffering from an equality reminiscent of Vico’s “second barbarism.” A “new state of nature” begins in which, as in Hobbes, the law is that of the jungle: the strongest prevails. Society succumbs to riot and rebellion as every man takes arms against his brother. The solitude and isolation of the first state of nature are out of reach; man needs other men, if only as mortal enemies, and can no longer live alone. Hatred survives where all other social bonds have failed. One other possibility remains, however. As history plunges toward its nadir, it is just possible that social upheaval and revolution result in a government that is “closer” to “the legitimate institution.” This is a possibility, not a necessity. For Rousseau, man never ceases to be free, to do good as well as evil. The return to legitimate gov­ ernment (an idea suggested, perhaps, by Machiavelli) is a glimmer of hope in an age of barbarism. The chance of success is too small to foster belief in inevitable progress or in the idea that a nation that has done nothing to deserve it will somehow be saved by grace. Engels saw in the conclusion of the Discourse a “negation of the negation.” What Rousseau had in mind, however, was by no means a law of history but a reward for those virtuous enough to escape corruption and strong enough to lead other men down the path of renewal. He is not very specific about the conditions of salvation. For him, history is essentially decay. Salvation therefore cannot come in or through history but only in opposition to history’s de­ structiveness. Praising Geneva and offering himself as an example, Jean-Jacques suggests that in the midst of general corruption an exception can be made for small cities that remain faithful to their principles and for courageous minds prepared to withdraw from society. To escape one must avoid being caught up in the whirl of civilization. Rousseau’s testimony is the most important of his time concerning the discovery of history and temporality, not because he offers a theory of progress but because he recoils in horror from the danger, but also from the fecundity, of temporal existence. Yet his suspicion of history, it must be noted, did not prevent his thought from influencing the course of history. The conclusion of the Discourse is remarkable in two respects. First, Rousseau makes rather surreptitious mention of his doctrine of civic equality. He asks not for social leveling but simply for a proportioning of civic inequality to the natural inequality of talents.

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Second, by contrasting the savage widi Lhe corrupt man, he con­ fronts the reader with an unacceptable alternative: the life of the savage cannot be recaptured, and the life of the “civilized” man is unacceptable. Happiness lies in the past, and we cannot go back­ ward in time; present-day society is evil, and anyone who becomes aware of this can no longer accept the status quo. The myths of the savage and of a society based on contract bolster the negative critique by contrasting the existing state of affairs with plausible images of a better world and a better human being. If a return to nature is impossible and if society proves incorrigible, then the man who sees clearly how things are is condemned to solitude. The only activity still open to him is the education of an individual, as in Emile. But Emile himself is a stranger among men, a savage made to live in cities. Significantly, Rousseau traces Emile’s education to the point where he becomes a hermit like Jean-Jacques. The hap­ piness of childhood is lost forever, and the world is a world of adversity. In imitation of the savage, Jean-Jacques attempts to live moment by moment. Yet he is capable of meditating his decision and of explaining his intentions. To have intentions, even if they do not extend beyond living life moment by moment, is the opposite of living as only the savage can, exclusively in the present. Nothing is more mediated than the artificial rediscovery of immediacy that Rousseau attempts at the end of his life. What he finds is not spontaneous happiness but a carefully contrived compensation for unhappiness. The natural life is the refuge of the unhappy con­ sciousness. Rousseau cannot be unaware that in saying that the natural life is the good life he is destroying the silence of nature, alienating us from nature with words. The pure happiness of nat­ ural existence is no longer within our reach; no sooner is it de­ scribed than it disappears. What remains is negativity, the rejection of modern life, a rebellious mind’s refusal to accept a society that has betrayed both natural law and the civic ideal.

Rousseau and the Origin of Languages Language is one of Rousseau’s major concerns. A theory of lan­ guage forms an integral part of his philosophical works concerning the history of society and the education of modern man. Further­ more, the problem of communication, the choice of means of expression, is of concern to Rousseau the musician, artist, novelist, and, above all, autobiographer. Rousseau was the first to attach emotional significance to a theory of human relations. Hence it is not surprising to find him taking language as one of his major themes. In many respects his emphasis on language helped to unify a body of work that has all too often been accused of lacking unity. In this essay, therefore, I propose to pay close attention to Rous­ seau’s theory of language. Furthermore, given the importance he attaches to the genealogy of human institutions, I want to examine, in particular, what he thought about the origin of languages. Two texts will claim our attention: the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and the Essay on the Origin of Languages. These comple­ mentary if occasionally somewhat dissonant texts propose two ver­ sions of the same story. The Discourse on Inequality places a history of language within the larger context of a history of society. Con­ versely, the Essay on the Origin of Languages introduces a history of society into the history of language and of music. For Rousseau, man is not by nature a social being, or at any rate he is not originally a social being. He becomes one by reason of his perfectibility. But Rousseau regards man’s perfectibility as an innate possession, a sort of gift of nature. The social institution is therefore not unrelated to nature: it is the deferred consequence of a primitive disposition, whose effects reveal themselves very slowly as unusual conditions stimulate the development of latent faculties. These sec­ ondary causes are external obstacles, impediments to man’s will. Rousseau blames physical “circumstances” that might well not have occurred; once encountered, however, they bring latent faculties to the fore. In the Discourse Rousseau assumes that the primitive human pop­ ulation is growing slowly. A few individuals abandon the temperate zone for more difficult climates and are forced to do battle with nature. The effort to overcome the various obstacles that man encounters when he confronts “scorching summers” and “long, First published in Europäische Aufklärung: Festschrift für Herbert Dieckmann (Munich: Fink, 1966).

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harsh winters” gives rise to intelligence, technology, and history.1 In the Essay on the Origin of Languages the same idea is expressed more enigmatically in terms of a cosmological symbol, the inequality of the seasons: “He who wanted man to be a social being touched the axis of the earth with his finger and set it at an angle to the axis of the universe.”2 Language and society are intimately related, as in the classical tradition and in Hobbes—so intimately related, in fact, that if we concede that man was at first asocial and then became social, it follows that he had no language originally and acquired one only later on. This acquisition was made possible, however, by dispositions present from the beginning but long al­ lowed to lie idle. Of all the creatures man is the only one who by nature has the power to rise above his primitive condition. Like society, language is a late effect of an innate faculty, the result of a deferred development. Natural in origin, it evolves into an an­ tinature. It is man’s dangerous privilege to possess in his own nature the powers by which he combats that nature and nature itself. “Language being the first social institution, it owes its form to natural causes alone.”3 In the long run society contradicts “natural law.” But society is an antinature that grows out of nature. The Voice of Nature

The preface to the Discourse on Inequality raises a question of def­ inition: in order to determine whether inequality is or is not con­ sistent with natural law, we must first determine the meaning of the phrase “natural law.” The question can be reformulated as a question of language: How does natural law speak? How is it perceived? Rousseau initially emphasizes a negative characteristic of natural law: its precepts, he says, are not couched in the language of phil­ osophical reflection. To heed them, no knowledge is necessary. Hence no prior language is required. Natural law is not a matter of conventional rules or discursive argument. Rousseau rejects the notion that natural law depends, as most philosophers assume, on a convention or contract. He makes fun of the idea: “Theorists begin by thinking out the rules that it would be opportune for men to establish among themselves for the common interest.”4 Thus Rousseau is dismissive of the discursive constructs that philosophers substitute for the true natural law they are trying to define. He rejects as overly learned and cultivated the assertions of those who want natural law to speak in the same language as constituted reason

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and suggests that we examine instead a realm prior to speech. To be sure, he himself gives us a “discourse,” but his only purpose is to make audible a voice that precedes all discourse. In order for natural law to be natural, “it must be spoken directly by the voice of nature.”5 By definition, the voice of nature precedes all human speech. Tacit and imperious, this voice dictates the spon­ taneous feelings of self-love and pity, “two principles antecedent to reason.”6 But in speaking here of a voice, isn’t Rousseau simply using a metaphor? Nature’s dictation is scarcely different from a reflex, an instinct, or an idelible “imprint.” Yet Rousseau sees it as something quite distinct from all of these: it is an injunction that involves the moral being, that is, man’s free will, his ability to disobey nature’s law. “Nature commands all animals, and the beast obeys. Man receives the same impulsion, but he recognizes himself as free to acquiesce or resist.”7 If natural man does not disobey, it is because his will is not yet fully formed; he has not had sufficient opportunity to exercise his freedom. For man, then, natural law is like an instinct that loses its mechanical character and becomes simply an intimation. Even before primitive man begins to reflect and to use language, nature ceases to be simply a matter of physical conditioning. No longer an irresistible “impulse,” it becomes an internal language, a language to which man pays heed because it is spoken within him. The fact of perceiving that language is the first sign of morality, which distinguishes man from the animals even though their be­ havior remains identical. Man is defined in the first instance not by his ability to speak but by his ability to listen. For him, the voice of nature is information not directly implicit in behavior. Yet that voice uses no conventional signs and does not need to be “decoded” in order to be understood. The voice of nature whispers so close to man’s ear that it is confused with his inner voice. Hence it cannot be compared to the transmission of a message, in which a statement is formulated by a sender and transmitted in a distinctive form to a recipient. As long as man remains a man of nature, he perceives the voice of nature within himself. Nature speaks inside him because he himself is in nature. Freedom is still a latent possibility. For civilized man, the voice of nature becomes distant and for­ lorn. It is outside him. He loses the ability to hear or recognize it (the only exception being those few “initiates” whom Rousseau mentions in the Dialogues8 and among whom he counts himself). By abandoning nature and working against it and by interposing between himself and nature a language of his own invention, man makes himself deaf to the language that spoke to him at his incep-

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tion. Moral life is no longer governed by natural law; man must promulgate “positive” laws, conventions, contracts. Reasoned ar­ gument becomes necessary if man is to recover the voice of nature by means of a kind of interpretive archaeology. Man must devise artificial substitutes for the “immediate impulses” that ensured re­ spect for others and preservation of his own life. The ends of mo­ rality remain what they always were, but now explicit rules are required to enforce them. It follows that the growing historical importance of discursive language is inversely proportional to the intensity of the voice of nature; the latter diminishes to the extent that articulated language is perfected. Accordingly, the philoso­ pher, as the interpreter of a voice other men can no longer hear, becomes necessary to society. His feelings reveal what other men can no longer remember. The philosophical Discourse reminds man of the authority that preceded all discourse. Silent Man

The first part of the Discourse describes natural man, who, devoid of language, scarcely communicates with his fellows. Yet Rousseau includes in this part a long digression on the development of lan­ guage, which logically belongs in the second part, concerned as it is with historical progress—a curious metathesis. He is looking ahead, but in a negative sense. Rather than adumbrate the future devel­ opment of man’s faculties, he lists the factors that prevent natural man from changing. He broaches the question of language only to point out all the things that conspire to deprive the savage of lan­ guage and keep him in his status of infans. In other words, Rousseau deliberately creates a paradox. For it is paradoxical to explain why language can never come into being when we know—because we are using language—that it does in fact exist. Rousseau is conscious of what he is doing. In order to make us understand that speech was a late development, he piles difficulty upon difficulty to the point where he seems to be arguing that man never learned to speak. The hyperbole is apparent. Rous­ seau propounds a stronger thesis in order to prove a weaker one. By listing innumerable impediments to the invention of language, he forces us to see that an immensely long period of time must have intervened between the age of primitive man and die first use of language. It then becomes reasonable to conjecture that die state of nature was not just hypothetical but actually lasted for a very long time and that man lived for thousands of centuries as a silent

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nomad. Rousseau can then allude to the “immense divide that separates the pure state of nature from the need for language.”9 He makes us feel the lapse of time: “The more we reflect on this subject, the more the distance between pure sensation and the simplest knowledge enlarges before our eyes.”10 In the first part of the Discourse Rousseau is concerned with formulating a negative anthropology: natural man is defined by the absence of every specific property of civilized man. Rousseau’s method is to pare away all the “artificial” attributes that man has acquired over the course of history. He forms a “negative image” of the man of nature. Negations figure prominently in the sentence that sums up the whole first part of the Discourse: “We conclude, then, that savage man, wandering in the forests, without work, without speech, without a home, without war, and without rela­ tionships, was equally without any need of his fellow men and without any desire to hurt them.”11 The whole passage concerning the origin of languages is contained in this negative section. Rous­ seau’s point is not so much to trace the rise of language as to illustrate the “impediments” to its development. Because of these impediments, duration enters human history—an immense span of time. Condillac compresses linguistic history into a few gener­ ations, whereas Rousseau emphasizes the “inconceivable difficulty” of inventing language. He thus makes plausible the notion that man’s prehistory (i.e., his primitive condition, prior to the advent of agriculture and industry) lasted for a very long time. For “thou­ sands of centuries” man knows neither need nor passion. Having no technology, he bequeaths none to posterity.12 Needs, passions, and technologies might have made language necessary, but natural man does not experience the lack that is at the heart of passion and need. Idle, he does nothing yet does not thereby court death. Hence he has no occasion to acquire know-how. “The first [difficulty] that arises is to imagine how languages might have become necessary,” says Rousseau. It is a question, he argues, of chicken and egg, a series of vicious circles. Any number of obstacles impede the be­ ginnings of “culture” and retain man in the bosom of nature.13 Consider Rousseau’s criticism of Condillac. In his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge the latter had speculated that language was invented by two children who survived the flood. But Rousseau objects that Condillac is assuming a “society already established among the inventors of language.”14 Condillac’s hypothesis is for­ mally incorrect, based as it is on a hysteron proteron (assuming what

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is to be proved). Rousseau attempts to catch us in the vise of two negations: natural man can have no language because he has no society, and he has no society because he is incapable of using language. Even if mothers and children improvise a language dur­ ing the brief period of the child's dependency, it would necessarily be an idiosyncratic and ephemeral tongue.15 Suppose, however, that language is necessary (a hypothesis Rous­ seau pretends to consider gratuitous). Problems of causality persist, and Rousseau states them in a provocative manner: “If men needed language in order to think, they needed even more to think in order to discover the art of using language.” Accordingly, “language appears to have been quite necessary for establishing the use of language.” Rousseau continues: “I leave to anyone who will un­ dertake it the discussion of the following difficult problem: Which was the more necessary, a society already established for the invention of language, or language already invented for the estab­ lishment of society?”16 Rousseau leaves room for the traditional hypothesis that language was a divine revelation, not so much to accredit the notion as to add still more depth to the mystery of how language came into being. In many respects, of course, Rousseau simply borrows the views of Condillac, who derived them from a tradition that can be traced back all the way to Plato. Like Condillac, Rousseau held that lan­ guage began with the “cries of nature” and developed further with the language of action (gestures) until finally a conventional lan­ guage was established. Like Condillac and Maupertuis, Rousseau argued that names for concrete objects and onomatopoetic sounds preceded abstract signs and conventional terms: communication was first established via the immediate symptoms of emotion; me­ diating signs were brought in only later. Rousseau is original in part for introducing a number of embarrassing contradictions where Condillac sees only gentle transitions.17 His originality also lies in his discovery of innumerable correlations and implications that were omitted in Condillac’s doctrine. The sensualists spoke con­ stantly of the role of experience, yet for them experience was noth­ ing more than a series of abstract moments. Rousseau, on the other hand, added a temporal dimension to experience, gave it duration and history. He believed, moreover, that language does not develop in isolation. Its evolution both fosters and reflects other transfor­ mations of man and society. For Rousseau, the evolution of lan­ guage is clearly inseparable from the history of desire and sexuality;

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it is intimately associated with the process of socialization; and it is closely connected with the various modes of production and consumption. Idle Words

Rousseau is explicit about where the history of language begins and ends. It begins in silence and ends in politics, in the use of language to “make persuasive speeches to assemblies of men,”18 to win their consent, and to “influence society.”19 The society of the Social Contract requires, when a legislator has to intervene, all the eloquent force language can muster. But no sooner has Rousseau established his frame of reference than he invites us to consider the possible perversion of language, which can prevent it from at­ taining its full eloquence or, after a period of eloquence, lead to decadence. Language decays or is corrupted into abusive discourse, a venomous weapon, and simultaneously man himself goes wrong, behaving as a wicked deceiver. If the inception of society corre­ sponds to the birth of language, social decline corresponds to lin­ guistic depravity. Abuse of language is a danger constantly on Rousseau’s mind. Deceptive language figures largely among the dark forces that Rousseau dimly makes out behind the abuses of his time. How did this darkness come to supplant the light of the natural world? The rhetorical devices that Rousseau uses in the Discourse on Inequality tell us a great deal. The second part of the work (in which we see man emerge from the state of nature, set to work, abandon equality, acquire language, fall victim to amour propre, and so on) begins with a statement of possession: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ . . .”20 (Here Rousseau is using the device of prosopopoeia: reporting the alleged words of a fictitious person.) The first man that Rousseau shows in the act of using language is saying something pernicious. Rousseau then imagines what someone else might have said to this first speaker (but in fact did not say). An answer, a sign of resistance, a counterproposition might have been made but was not.21 The usurper triumphs unjustly by deceiving those “simple enough to believe him.” And the rich man proposes an unfair contract to “men easily beguiled.”22 Cunning language does hidden violence. Here we see language used for a social purpose, but to do wrong, to institute inequality.

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When we examine other passages in part two of the Discourse in which Rousseau ascribes words to his characters, we find that the vast majority exhibit pernicious uses of language: dissimulation, lying, gossip. Language is used to obtain an unjust advantage or for evil ends or for no purpose at all.23 How ironic Rousseau is when he reports the words of the prince who addresses the “least of men” to say, “Be great, with all your posterity!” The words are fraudulent, used to foster an illusion. These ennobling words are enough to make the man seem “great in the eyes of all the world as well as in his own eyes.”24 Among society’s present ills Rousseau emphasizes the “burning desire to be talked about”25 and the emp­ tiness of the words in which the vain opinions that do so much harm to civilized men are expressed. Ineluctable evil perverts so­ ciety and makes cultivated language a virulent germ, sowing fraud wherever it spreads. From this scourge no one escapes unscathed (except, by miracle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Lies, fictions, and il­ lusions fill the very atmosphere in which civilized society evolves. Glittering like gold, language itself becomes a currency of exchange that renders man a stranger unto himself. Elementary Language and Perfected Language

Underlying Rousseau’s work on language is the notion that there is an end to language as there is an end to history, both disastrous. Change corrupts. According to Rousseau the history of language begins in an initial silence and ends in an idle murmur, tantamount to a final silence. At the beginning of what Rousseau calls the “second state of nature” (the vast expanse of time between the “first state of nature” and the institution of society), men encounter obstacles for the first time and occasionally help one another overcome them. From time to time they band together in “hordes.” The language of the horde is a language of material need, used to call for help. It begins with the “cry of nature,” still inarticulate, and is above all a language of action, composed of deictic or imitative gestures. Vocal language develops as onomatopoeia (the vocal form of the language of ac­ tion). Occasionally an element of articulation or convention is added to the language, which is obviously “crude and imperfect” yet still “universal.” The universality of this first language is the last echo of the universality of the “voice of nature.” An effect of a physical cause,

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the first language is spoken in the same way by all men. But this language is without logical devices; it has no distinct parts of speech and does not lend itself to abstraction: “They gave each word the meaning of a whole proposition.”26 Rich in concrete designations and composed almost entirely of proper nouns and infinitives, the first language is concerned with the particular: objects are described not in terms of universalizable qualities but in all their fleeting individuality, their “this-ness.” Hence the universality of man’s first language is not yet a universality of concepts; it pertains to the speaking subjects, not to the objects of which they speak. The prim­ itive language that all men share consists in the universally shared possibility of designating particular objects by virtually similar means. The benefit of this universality is for the most part lost, because men at this stage have not yet acknowledged one another; such associations as they have are still very loose. Although they can, in principle, understand one another wherever they are, they remain nearly as dispersed as they were originally. At this stage, Rousseau concedes, language is a “poor instru­ ment.” Yet he insists that it is highly expressive. Although it is not very useful for identifying universalizable qualities of the object, it faithfully reveals the emotions of the speaking subject. Primitive language establishes a relation between an individual consciousness and a particular object; it speaks poorly of the object but powerfully expresses the presence of the individual. Linguistics speaks of the signifier and the signified but lacks a term for what I shall call the significator,27 the person who creates meaning—the dominant ele­ ment in primitive language. Primitive language is capable of con­ veying, in an immediately obvious manner, the feelings of distress or need experienced by the subject. Language changes in important ways with the transition from the stage of the horde to that of the family, from a nomadic to a sedentary existence. Men join together to provide for common needs. Small social groups form, and the bonds between human beings become closer. The reign of need (reflected in a language predominantly composed of gestures) gives way to the reign of desire and passion (reflected in the melodious inflections of artic­ ulate language). When families come together (con-venire, partici­ pate in a convention), conventional elements are free to develop and become established parts of language. Particular idioms arise. In order to explain why there are so many languages,28 Rousseau invokes such physical causes as natural disasters (earthquakes and

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floods) and arid climates, which Lend to isolate groups of people in a limited region of space: on an island, say, or in a valley, or around a body of water. Worth noticing in Rousseau’s conjectures is the way he treats the notion of separation. Originally the earth is sparsely populated; men live as solitary equals. First the “voice of nature” and later the “cry of nature” and even the language of action are still universal languages. Eventually, however, men aban­ don the solitary life and come together to form groups; greater internal understanding is purchased at the cost of the universal similarity characteristic of the state of nature. Groups develop their own idioms and cultural peculiarities and therefore resemble one another less than the solitary individuals of the state of nature. Greater internal coherence is counterbalanced by separation and, before long, by bellicose rivalry between tribes (or nations). Rous­ seau seems to suggest that a certain “coefficient of separation” remains constant. Socialization, which reduces separation in one sense, inevitably increases it in another. Primitive man, helpless against nature, used language to call for assistance; modern man, no longer helpless, cunningly uses lan­ guage to subjugate and deceive. The physical separation of prim­ itive life has been converted into moral separation, inequality, and “alienation.” The people of Paris, who seem to be united because they speak the same cultivated language, are in fact strangers to one another. Their ability to feel spontaneous sympathy or pity has all but with­ ered, although among common folk some trace may survive. Merely speaking and writing the same language does not bring men close to one another. Yet even if language cannot bring about communion, it can be remarkably effective as a means of action. Even if it does not allow individuals to share their feelings, it is useful as a precision instrument, a medium for designating the abstract universal. Fur­ ther progress is required before language can fully satisfy the re­ quirements of logic, but already a large number of general ideas can be formulated. The importance of the instrumental qualities of language thus surpasses the importance of the expressive qual­ ities. No longer does language reveal subjective truth. The indi­ vidual is subsumed in the impersonality of the concept. In writing,29 that characteristic feature of modern societies, language becomes disembodied, an alien product, detached from the living being. Men become incapable of feeling Lrue passions, and at the same time language loses the capacity to express them.

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The Essay on the Origin of Languages, like the Discourse on Inequality, ends on a note of disaster: the civilized world is invaded by idle talk, boastfulness, gossip. Sophisticated and subtle, contemporary idioms no longer convey any passionate or vibrant content. French, for Rousseau, is an extenuated language, devoid of any genuine accent and all but inaudible: our languages “are made for the hum of the drawing room. Our preachers torment themselves and break out in a sweat in the temples, yet no one has any idea what they said.”30 A spell is cast over the human voice, and the life is choked out of it. In civilized societies it is as though the speaker is eliminated from his speech. Impersonal discourse reigns in absentia, like a tyrant issuing judgments from which there is no appeal: Societies have assumed their final form; nothing can be changed except with cannon and cash. And since no one has anything more to say to the common people except “Hand over your money,” it is said with placards on the streetcorners or soldiers in the houses. There is no need to bring people together; on the con­ trary, subjects must be kept apart.31

Human communication is supplanted by intimations of arbitrary violence. Money, placards, and cannon reduce the soul to silence. Under coercion nothing is exchanged but abstract signs. History ends, according to the Discourse on Inequality, in the disorder of a “new state of nature,” the “fruit of an excess of corruption.”32 In the Essay on the Origin of Languages it ends in a new state of silence. The dispersion of primitive man is reinstated: “subjects must be kept apart.” The savage lived moment by moment, in idleness; Parisians, too, live moment by moment, but busily occupied. The end of history is a parody of its beginning. Savage man “dwells only in the sensation of his present existence.”33 The Frenchmen whom Rousseau meets in Päris “feel that they are expressing themselves to you, but this feeling goes as easily as it comes. When they speak to you, they are full of you; when they see you no more, they forget you. Nothing in their hearts is permanent. Everything is the work of the moment.”34 In the history of language as in the history of society, there is an “extreme term that closes the circle and meets the point from which we started.”35 Happiness at the Halfway Point

I have focused on the extreme, antithetical terms: language that gives pride of place to the subject versus language that emphasizes the universal aspects of the object. But between the crude language

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of the horde and the extenuated language of the civilized there is the language of the sedentary age, Lhe language invented by pa­ triarchal society. This stage lias already been discussed briefly. Now I want to dwell on it at greater length, for it is a point of equilibrium, a moment of happiness, not only in the history of language but in other respects as well. In the Discourse on Inequality this period appears as a golden age, the “true youth of Lhe world. ”SGIts hap­ piness has been preserved among the savage inhabitants of other continents and enchanted islands discovered hy European explorers. Rousseau's description of the age of patriarchy is one of the best examples of the close correspondence he sees between the evolution of language and the development of society. Every stage in social history has the language appropriate to it: “Languages are naturally based on men's needs; they change and alter according to changes in those same needs.”*7 The shift from a nomadic to a sedentary existence brought with it man's first victory over material need. By working together, men could meet their common requirements more readily than by work­ ing alone. With survival assured, they could take time out from their work; the passions at last found room to grow. Brought closer together by their joint labors, men compared themselves to one another and formed preferences; vanity ensued. Midway between a state of nature and civilization, the patriarchal family discovered the ambiguities of human emotion. Men experienced love and ri­ valry. This was an important moment in the history of sexuality, standing midway between two ages of emotional separation. Prim­ itive man’s sexuality was instinctive, fleeting, not passionate; civi­ lized men fell into vain dissipation, frivolity, and inconsequential promiscuity. Once again the end of history is a parody of the be­ ginning: the fickle loves of “cultivated” men are like the fleeting encounters of male and female in the primeval forest. Just as the history of language runs from silence to silence, the history of sexuality runs from promiscuity to promiscuity. In between, how­ ever, lies a moment of plenitude, for language as well as feeling. Love is no longer free: the incest taboo has been established.™ Language, too, is henceforth bound by convention, but man’s shackles do not yet impair his happiness. The chains of convention bind together the discontinuous moments of primitive existence: man takes possession of duration. Language becomes discourse. Gesture was enough for man to express his needs. But in order to express his feelings he must make use of the inflections and accents of his voice. A person who merely wants to indicate that

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he is hungry or thirsty can do so with a brief gesture. But in order to arouse amorous interest, to “move the heart and inflame the passions,” sounds must be linked together in a time invented by speech. Discourse offers a series of impressions, one after the other, arous­ ing a different emotion than the presence o f the object itself, which can be taken in at a glance. Imagine a familiar sight of suffering. Merely seeing the afflicted person is not likely to move you to pity. But allow him the time to tell you what he feels and you will soon burst into tears. This is the way tragedy works. Pantomime alone, without speech, will leave you almost unmoved. Speech without action will bring forth tears. The passions have their gestures, but they also have their accents.39

Plainly, Rousseau is not unaware of the powers of gesture; at times he prefers gesture to speech. But he clearly sees that what differentiates speech from gesture is temporal duration. In this he anticipates Ferdinand de Saussure: “That the elements of a word form a sequence should not be seen as an obvious but uninteresting fact, but as the central principle of all useful speculation about words.”40 For man in the first state of nature, living in immediacy, the absence of language corresponded to the absence of a consciousness of duration. The man of the horde, barely emerged from primitive savagery, exerted himself only sporadically; his language, consisting mainly of gestures used to call for assistance, did not yet incorporate time, hence it was not really a language. Man first became aware of time with the development of vocal language (i.e., of discourse developed over a connected interval of time), which coincided with his settling in a fixed location and his involvement in extended emotional relations and continuous labor. He began to worry about the once-invisible future and its hidden risks. Man can no longer live moment by moment; he begins to store supplies as a hedge against uncertainty. Conventional language offers the symbols he needs for dealing with time. Like stored supplies, those symbols attest to past work and serve to foresee future activities. Rhythm and accent are the most important ingredients of the first languages. These do not reflect material needs but are related to man’s new feelings and desires. They originate not in the course of productive activity but during moments of leisure. Rousseau’s originality lies in his belief that language stems from the emotions,

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as Edouard Claparède has pointed out. “ Work (not yet servitude) halts temporarily and celebrations are improvised. Rhythm and accent are intimately associated with physical excitement: In this happy age, when nothing marked time or obliged man to count the hours, the only measure o f time’s passage was man’s amusement and boredom. Beneath old oaks, victors over the years, ardent youth gradually forgot its ferocity. Little by little men tamed one another. Striving to make themselves understood, they learned how to explain. The first festivals were celebrated. Feet jumped for joy. Rapid gestures were no longer enough. The voice accom­ panied them with impassioned accents. Pleasure and desire, in­ distinguishable one from the other, made themselves felt simultaneously. This was the true cradle of nations, and from the pure crystal of the fountains surged the first flames of love.42

At this stage, music is not an “art entirely distinct from speech.” Accent, melody, and poetry are closely related at the inception of language: Because man’s first reasons for speaking were passions, his first expressions were tropes. Figurative language was the first to be born; the proper sense o f words was discovered last.43 The first languages were musical and impassioned before becoming simple and methodical.44

In order to ascribe superiority to primitive and southern lan­ guages, Rousseau hits upon an ingenious distinction between ar­ ticulations (consonants) and accents (associated with vowel sounds and rhythms). Northern languages, he says, are rich in articula­ tions; these are the languages of need and rational argument. Pas­ sion is expressed through melody and accent. “People would sing rather than speak.“15The first speech is not “Help me!” but “Love me!“’,° Others before Rousseau had maintained that the first languages were poetic. Rousseau explicitly invokes the authority of Strabo. Other predecessors include Vico, Abbé Fleury, Warburton, and Blackwell. Again, Rousseau’s originality depends noL on isolated assertions but on the correlations he sees and elaborates upon. Although language develops during a break in work, its inception is closely related to a stable technological situation. Prior to the advent of metallurgy and agriculture, man has only rudimentary tools requiring no division of labor. The use of implements does not yet result in “alienation“; men are not slaves of their means of

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production. If inequality exists in this rudimentary society, it is neither economic inequality (there being neither rich nor poor) nor political inequality (there being neither oppressors nor oppressed). Social inequality is still a consequence of natural inequality: some men are handsomer than others. Man acquires the unfortunate habit of comparing himself to others, but he continues to be pres­ ent, visible to himself and to others. Language establishes relations between persons. Instruments es­ tablish relations between man and nature. It is not surprising that the style of both types of relations should be the same. Man in patriarchal society has taken his distance from nature; he has moved closer to other men, abandoned his original silence, and expanded his language beyond a series of brief cries. But that language, still musical and poetic, is not yet an agent of division. It enables men to convey their feelings to one another, to understand one another fully. Such a language allows for talents to unfold (aggravating inequalities based on the unequal distribution of natural talents). It also enables men to manipulate illusions and prestige. But it does not yet generate absence; it continues to serve the cause of presence. The subject is not yet the victim of the means (“mediations”) that he has developed, which will later impose themselves between man and man. In patriarchal society’s celebrations, language, associated with dance and song, is inherent in the body of every passionate individual. It is not only a gesture, a specific form of behavior, but a sign that refers back to the “significator.” Patriarchal language preserves the memory and power of archaic onomatopoeia. It has the immediate persuasive power of the cry of nature. But it is also something else: a language capable of designating, beyond the speaking subject, the independent existence of a conceptualized reality. The expressive and the referential functions are not yet separated. Though cast out of the realm of immediacy by history, man still wields an instrument capable of restoring immediacy. Through melodic speech the individual communicates without re­ linquishing his individuality. He ventures beyond the boundaries of the self only to offer himself to others through language. And he becomes conscious of his own existence through the constant emotional presence that animates his speech. The unarticulated, uninflected cry of primitive man is behind us, but we are still a long way from the impersonal language of civilization—from lan­ guage subsumed in the generality of the signified, language that deserts the speaking subject, impersonal language, perverted by its instrumental function and forced to serve external ends.

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Eloquence and Signs

Such was the linguistic ideal appropriate to a happy but “rudi­ mentary society.” Man cannot regress, however. The golden age, in which language, music, dance, and poetry were inextricably in­ tertwined, can never be restored. Once die first modulated speech has appeared, the history recounted in the Essay on the Origin of Languages becomes one of irreversible and growing alienation. Lan­ guage loses it vitality, its accent and inflections, and becomes cold and monotonous logic. Music follows its own course of develop­ ment: the supremacy of melody, expression of the soul, is threat­ ened by the harmonic virtuosity of modern musicians. Poetry, now couched in writing, loses the sovereign power it possessed in the age of Homer and in the great works of oral tradition. Progress involves the loss of something essential. If melodious language is characteristic of society in its nascent state, another sort of language typifies the society of the social contract: the language of eloquence, the instrument with which the individual citizen takes part in communal deliberations. Here again, the structure of language reflects the structure of society. High oratorical style is inseparable from the civic ideal. Unlike the patriarchal society of the golden age, however, the society of the social contract is not an obsolete relic of the past. The problem it raises is not one of historical origins but of fun­ damental justification. Such a society is possible. It is a model that actual societies aspire to emulate, a model that has nowhere been fully realized. It defines a norm, not an existing state of affairs. The corruption of actual societies can be judged by measuring the degree to which they deviate from this norm. Despotic states fail to measure up in every respect. Those states that come closest to the norm are the Geneva of the recent past and republican Rome, hence these are the models to which Rousseau declares his allegiance.47 There are two forms of eloquence: an ideal form, useful for setting forth political principles, and a desperate, polemical form, useful for deploring deviations from those principles and for ex­ plaining why such deviations have occurred. In the Social Contract Rousseau adopts the former. In the two Discourses and Emile he adopts the latter; reminding his readers of their neglect of the law, he sets forth the ineluctable consequences of that neglect. The language of patriarchal society, more highly evolved than the archaic language of primitive man, incorporated the brief cries

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and gestures of the later into its fluid discourse. Similarly, the el­ oquence of the ideal society incorporates both the gestures of primitive language and the melodic forms of patriarchal language. The gesture, the visible sign, is an important component of true elo­ quence. In the Essay on the Origin of Languages Rousseau argued that speech (which unfolds in time) is better at arousing emotion than “the presence of the object itself.” But in Emile he appears to give priority to the visible object: One o f the errors o f our age is to use rational argument in too bald a fashion, as if men were pure intellect. By neglecting the language of signs, which speak to the imagination, we have lost the most energetic of languages. The impression of words is al­ ways faint, and we can speak to the heart more readily through the eyes than through the ears. By attempting to express every­ thing in rational terms, we have reduced our precepts to words and put nothing into actions. . . . I have observed that in modern times men have no influence over other men except through force and self-interest, whereas the ancients acted much more through persuasion, through the affections o f the soul, because they did not neglect the language of signs. . . . How attentive were the Romans to the language of signs! Men of different ages and conditions wore different clothing; togae, saga, praetextae, bullae, laticlaves, thrones, lictors, fasces, axes, golden crowns, plants, leaves, ovations, triumphs—with them everything was pomp, show, and ceremony; everything made an impression on the hearts of citizens. . . . Warriors did not boast o f their exploits, they showed their wounds. Upon the death of Caesar I imagine one o f our orators attempting to move the people by employing all the common­ places o f the art in a pathetic description of his wounds, his blood, his cadaver. Antony, though an eloquent man, did nothing of the sort; he had the body exhibited. What rhetoric!48

Although Rousseau appears to contradict himself, he in fact does not. In the Essay on the Origin of Languages he says that expressive power is increased when the isolated gesture surpasses itself to be­ come part of a continuous discourse. In the passage just cited he praises the power of speech that is cleave enough to resort to gesture when necessary, speech that remembers the power of the presented (or represented) object to fascinate an audience. Language needs to draw on additional sources of energy. The man who uses sign language needs to invent speech. The man who uses speech needs

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to remember the power of signs. Rousseau, in 1751, hung up his sword and sold his watch. On the one hand Rousseau re-creates the beginnings and imag­ ines subsequent acquisitions. On the other hand he places himself at the center and imagines what has been lost; he evokes past powers, dissipated energies, and betrayed virtues. In thinking about the history of man his mind works in terms of the “not yet” and the “never again.” The conclusions of Emile and the Essay on the Origin of Languages are identical: true eloquence has vanished, leav­ ing the way clear for violence, cunning, and self-interest. Jean-Jacques’s Language

Nevertheless, Jean-Jacques does not forgo the use of language. He uses language in what he deems to be a hopeless historical situation. “Ordinary language has become almost as useless as eloquence.”49 He presents himself as a man making one last effort, issuing a warning as human language totters on the brink of insignificance. The last orator, he heralds the death of language. Après moi, le silence. In the dedication to the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau himself addresses his fellow citizens. Then, in the preface that immediately follows, he gathers around him an audience of philosophers (from the Lyceum of Athens), whose ranks quickly swell to embrace all mankind. A solitary man addresses humanity, correcting the errors of the philosophers who have gone before. A marvelously heroic situation—too beautiful, given Rousseau’s temperament, to be any­ thing other than a daydream, what he calls a chimera, an ideal situation of the sort to which his imagination would transport him many more times. To the largest possible audience he expresses what he feels in order to bear witness to a neglected truth. Let me consider each of these points in greater detail: 1. He expresses what he feels. Language must manifest the uniqueness of the individual. Primitive language invariably did so, according to Rousseau’s theory, and he, with his spontaneity of feeling, claims to possess this ability. A musician and poet, he has not forgotten the language of nascent society; he is still an “inhab­ itant of the enchanted world.”50 In short, he is Jean-Jacques. 2. He addresses the largest possible audience. The Rousseau of the second Discourse wishes to be heard by all men. His words are addressed to an unlimited audience. The Rousseau of the Dialogues

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believes that he is surrounded by a wall of silence. In both cases he desires universality, but in the former it is seen as possible, in the latter as impossible. The civic ideal of contractual society re­ quires that every city provide a public square, a forum, at its center. Rousseau imagines himself speaking in this forum and winning the allegiance of the assembled citizenry. He legislates; he speaks the language of contractual society. He is a citizen: Jean-Jacques Rous­ seau, citizen of Geneva. But if Geneva disavows him and no one listens to what he says, he remains free to become, in solitary retreat, that paradoxical individual whose isolation symbolizes the loss of community. 3. He bears witness to the truth. In other words, he judges man, conscience, and society in the light of perfect knowledge. Rousseau engages in rational argument. He brings to bear all the discoveries of modern science. He permits himself to resort if necessary to the language of abstract reasoning. Indeed, he attempts to make him­ self more adept than others at handling this instrument, which exhibits its object in the light of the universal and is subsumed therein. Rousseau speaks the language of cultivated society if only to denounce its cultivation. He is a French writer. Rousseau is convinced that he is the only man capable of ex­ pressing the universal truth of man’s lost origins. His eloquence is that of a man who possesses nothing, who has no credentials to offer other than his love of truth, and whose only weapon is his pen. He wants to be heard as the one man in whom, despite the general corruption, the voice of nature has survived, in whom self-love and sympathy remain alive. He is able to evoke the primeval language because this language still speaks in him. He is at once the taciturn man of nature, the musician-poet of the golden age, and the re­ publican orator of the virtuous society. He epitomizes the entire history of language. Yet he perpetuates the languages of old only in order to castigate the society of today, to rail against its idle talk, its drawing-room chatter, its pointless gossip. He has absorbed all the languages of the past and learned all their functions in order to give voice to a new language: the language of protest.51

Rousseau and Buffon In the Discourse on Inequality and especially in the notes to that work, Rousseau draws overtly on Buffon’s Natural History. On all questions of science Buffon’s authority is constantly invoked, and Rosseau does not hesitate to state his admiration for the great naturalist: “From the outset I confidently rely on one of those authorities respected by philosophers because they speak from a solid and sublime reason which philosophers alone know how to discover and recognize.”1 At first sight, the intentions behind the work of these two men could not be more dissimilar. Rousseau is the rebellious spirit, char­ acteristically negative and critical. When he speaks of nature, it is to draw a contrast with regimented modern society. Nature is a critical weapon directed against the social values of his day. Buffon, on the other hand, sees no dramatic contrast between nature and culture. He knows that nature can be altered by human art, that animals can be made to degenerate, but in these facts he sees con­ firmation of reason’s sovereign powers. Nature has made man a creature of reason and encouraged him to create civilizations. Buf­ fon’s attention is focused on the world’s variety—a variety infinite yet not refractory to patient observation. The spectacle of the uni­ verse is satisfying to watch, flawless and untroubled by conflict. Vast as reality is, it is not beyond description. An intelligent observer can make out the subtle differences between one creature and another, from man at the top of the great chain of being all the way down to the minerals. So different are the temperaments and works of Rousseau and Buffon that they have yet to be systematically compared. Yet such a comparison is worth making,2 not only because Rosseau drew from Buffon’s Natural History arguments and facts to support his own theories (concerning, for example, the importance of the sense of touch, the longevity of the horse, human life expectancy, diet, and swaddling), but also because he found Buffon an image of man, or, if you will, a philosophical anthropology, which he was able in large part to accept, despite differences on a number of major points. The similarities and differences between Rousseau and Buffon are best understood by examining their views on the human condition. No mistake about it: the first sentence of Rousseau’s preface tells us that he has been reading Buffon’s Natural History: “The most Originally delivered as a paper at the Colloque de Paris, October 1962.

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useful and the least developed of all the sciences seems to me to be that of man.”3 A note appended to this passage cites Buffon at length, beginning with the sentence: “However much it is in our interest to know ourselves, I wonder if we do not know better everything that is not ourselves.“4 As the citizen of Geneva begins his “historical study of morals,“ he is glad to have the support of the great naturalist. Both men agree that the science of man does not yet measure up to the other exact sciences. Although Buffon stops short of considering the problems of social life, his Natural History is, for Rousseau, an invaluable precedent, an example of a “naturalistic“ study of the human condition from which, as a matter of methodology, theological premises are excluded. Furthermore, the long chapter entitled “Varieties within the Human Species“ marks a considerable broadening of the scientific horizon, encour­ aging historical explanations of observed physical differences among the races of men: The totality o f the evidence . . . proves that the human race is not composed of species essentially different from one another. Orig­ inally there was but one species of men, which multiplied and spread over the earth’s surface. As a result, this species was sub­ jected to various changes through the influence of climate, dif­ ferences in diet and way of life, and epidemic diseases, and owing also to the infinitely varied mixture o f more or less similar individuals.5

Such an assertion could hardly be missed by a writer out to prove that the social system of civilized Europeans is neither the only nor the best possible social order and that it is the product of a cor­ rupting history. In discussing the difficulty of distinguishing be­ tween what is original in man’s nature and what is artificial, Rosseau follows Buffon’s lead: Savage man is . . . of all the animals the most unusual, the least well known, and the most difficult to describe. But we so little distinguish between what Nature alone has given us and what education, art, and example have communicated, or else we so well confound the two, that it would not be surprising if we com­ pletely failed to recognize ourselves in the portrait of a savage, assuming that such a portrait was presented in its true colors and with the natural features that ought to characterize it. An abso­ lutely savage savage . . . [would be] a curious spectacle for the philosopher, who, by observing his savage, could accurately mea­ sure the force o f natural appetites; he could see the naked soul and discover all its natural movements, perhaps finding in it more

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gentleness, tranquillity, and calm L h a i i in his own soul. And per­ haps he would find that virtue belongs to savage man more than to civilized man and that vice was born only in society.6

Here we have an abbreviated version of Rousseau’s definition of the man of nature (in which “goodness” is substituted for Buffon’s “virtue”). With the precedent of Buffon’s work providing august support for his position, how could Rousseau fail to take a bold line? In Buffon’s scientific immodesty Rousseau may have found encouragement for his own audacity, just as the hypotheses in the Theory of the Earth encouraged him to resort to “hypothetical and conditional arguments . . . similar to those used every day by our physicists to explain the formation of the earth.”7 For all Buffon’s speculate about the respect for the facts, he did not hesitate composition of the solar sysLem and the nature of life. Hence it is hardly surprising to find his name linked with Rousseau’s as a speculative writer. In August I75fi Fortney wrote that “M. Rousseau is rather of his kind what M. de Buffon is of his; he handles men as this Philosopher handles Nature and the Universe. He forms hypotheses about Society as the Academician does about the Globes of the Universe and the origin of the Planets.”8 Rousseau’s method resembles Buffon’s in that both begin by describing an elementary form of existence as exhaustively as pos­ sible; they then identify what is due to the subsequent development of higher faculties by comparing the developed with the elementary form. In the Discourse on the Nature of Animals (1753), Buffon, who employs (possibly for expository convenience) a dualistic Cartesian framework, carefully describes the operations of which organized matter is capable soley by virtue of the mechanical laws of nature. Living things enjoy no special position in the thought of Buffon or Descartes: “The living and the animate are not metaphysical degrees of being but physical properties of matter.”9The important metaphysical division falls between the material mechanics of the living body and the activity of the “reasoning soul.” To know with certainty what is human about man, we must first determine the limits of his animal powers. For this, a careful study of “material inward sensibility” is useful: lo

Let us see what this material inward sensibility can produce. Once we have established the extent o f its activity, whatever is not in­ cluded within that sphere must belong to the spiritual sensibility: the soul will do whatever this material sensibility cannot do. If we establish definite boundaries between these two faculties, we will know clearly what belongs to each. We will be able to distinguish

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easily between what the animals have in common with us, and what we have over them.10

What do we find? That man alone is capable of judgment, that is, of comparison. And that man alone is capable of anticipating the future and remembering the past. Further, animals, even at their most ingenious, infallibly obey their instincts, repeating the same actions without modification; only man has the power to per­ fect himself, to progress: If [animals] were endowed with the power o f reflection to even the slightest degree, they would be capable o f some kind o f progress; they would acquire greater industry. They invent nothing and perfect nothing, hence they reflect on nothing. They only do the same things in the same way."

All of this can be found in the second Discourse and the Profession of Faith. Not that Rousseau borrowed all his ideas from Buffon. The point is rather that, even where Rousseau is not in Buffon’s debt, both men drew on the same sources; both were adherents of Cartesianism as modified by Locke. One difference between them is not inconsequential, however. For Buffon, man’s spirituality lies in his understanding. For Rousseau, it has to do essentially with his freedom. In any case, when Rousseau alluded to man’s “perfectibil­ ity,” some of his readers had read enough Buffon not to be surprised by the neologism. Buffon is not a transformist. He does acknowledge the existence of evolution, but only in the sense of degeneration, and even then in a limited context, involving the few species that man has do­ mesticated. In his important chapter entitled “The Ass,” Buffon considers the possibility that the various species all derived from one great family of living beings. But in the end he rejects this hypothesis, remaining (perhaps out of prudence) a fixist, that is, one who believes that all the species of animals have always coex­ isted. Hence the gradations and subtle distinctions that he observes everywhere have no causal, historical basis; they exist simulta­ neously. The great community of nature is not subject to historical change. What is more, there is a sharp, qualitative jump between the most perfect of animals and man. Now, it may well be that Buffon, in making this point, was merely seeking to placate the religious authorities; he may have been attempting to protect him­ self against another attack like the one provoked by his Theory of the Earth. Rousseau, undoubtedly more sincere, insists on his own metaphysical distinction: the animal, he says, is nothing more than

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“an ingenious machine,”12 whereas man is endowed with freedom. Yet he locates the dividing line at a lower level of die chain of being. As an adversary of materialism, he recognizes a radical difference between man and the apes, thus making himself an opponent of such bold ideas as La Mettrie’s. Yet he wonders whether the or­ angutan and mandrill are really apes. In doubt, he answers in the negative. Perhaps they are not apes at all but primitive men, com­ parable to the satyrs of the ancients and the “forest people” dis­ cussed by scholars in the Renaissance. Rousseau was not alone among his contemporaries in thus expanding the limits of mankind. Linnaeus classified certain anthropoids, to which he gave the name Homo nocturnus, as part of the human species. By including creatures so different from civilized man in the human race, Rousseau pointed to the existence of a huge gap between primitive man and the disciplined European. This gap could be explained only by history, which altered and transformed if not man’s nature then at least his “constitution.” This made man a particularly eloquent example of the restricted transformism whose stages Buffon had so ably described for those species modified by human husbandry. The opening sentences of Emile make clear that Rousseau saw no essential difference between man’s transformation of himself and his transformation of such natural species as dogs and horses. Buffon, in his Epochs of Nature, also emphasized man’s simultaneous action on nature and himself. He saw this as a good thing. Rational knowledge and resulting technologies could educate and correct nature for the good of humanity, enabling man to perfect himself. This is a long way from Rousseau’s view that “every­ thing degenerates in man’s hands.” Buffon does not see history as a risky adventure. Man, he be­ lieves, gradually learns, with each new stage of history, how to make better use of his native powers, until he achieves sovereignty over all nature’s riches. Civilization, for Buffon, is therefore the normal flourishing of man’s humanity. Understanding, intelligence, and society are in his view not historical acquisitions but essential prop­ erties of man, already possessed by the savage. Hence he sees no sharp contrast between the state of nature and the state of civilization. For Rousseau, on the other hand, the distance between the two states is as great as the distance between man and the animals. Buffon’s comparative analysis distinguished between man and an­ imals by ascribing to the former a “spiritual sensibility” consisting of whatever could noL be accommodated under the head of “ma­ terial inward sensibility,” which men and animals share. Rousseau

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shifts the focus of the comparison. In the second Discourse he de­ scribes natural man in minute detail, morally as well as physically, so as to place in sharp relief those additional capacities and qualities that man has acquired through his own activity. Rousseau’s method is thus like Buffon’s, except that for Rousseau the principal contrast is between the man of today and the man of the distant past (the beginning and the end of human evolution) rather than between man and the animals. “It is necessary to have sound ideas” of man’s original condition “if we are to judge our present state satisfac­ torily.”13 A major difference between Rousseau and Buffon is ev­ ident here. Buffon attempts to distinguish between operations of the body and operations of the soul, independent of temporal considerations. Rousseau replaces this metaphysical difference with a historical one. In Rousseau’s work there is a historical dimension that is lacking in Buffon’s. The whole first part of the Discourse on Inequality is taken up with the description of natural man, who has yet to use his faculties to surmount external obstacles or transform himself. This description is useful, Rousseau believes, because it helps us to recognize which of our qualities can be ascribed to nature and which are properties of “man’s man.” Between the state of nature and the state of civ­ ilization a dramatic transformation has occurred; Rousseau wants to write the history of that transformation. Having adapted Buffon’s method to his own purposes, Rousseau forgets nothing of what Buffon had said about the nature of ani­ mals. The physical pleasure that Buffon ascribes to animals Rous­ seau ascribes to natural man. At first sight there would seem to be no contradiction in that. For Buffon, whatever animals possess, man also possesses. Infants and imbeciles have the same faculties as the animals and little more. Similarly, for Rosseau, savage man can satisfy all his needs without using his powers of understanding, which Buffon regarded as the specific, distinctive characteristic of the human soul. Rousseau’s savage is fully human despite the ab­ sence of any intellectual or technical activity. The only thing that distinguishes him from the animals is his freedom, yet that freedom remains unused since man has yet to engage in any practical activity. In a sense, Rousseau creates his portrait of the man of nature by animalizing and deintellectualizing man as described by Buffon. Yet at the same time he humanizes and idealizes sentiments that Buffon relegated to the obscure realm of “material inward sensibility.”

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According to Buffon, man’s sense of existence is sharpened as memories of past existence are added to the feeling of existing in the present: Consciousness of existence, that inner feeling that constitutes the self, is composed o f the sensation of our present existence and the memory of our past existence. This memory is as present a sensation as the other; sometimes it occupies us more and affects us more powerfully than present sensations. Furthermore, since these two kinds of sensations are different, and since our soul has the faculty o f comparing and forming ideas about them, the more often we represent things past to ourselves, and the more of them there are, the more certain and extensive is our consciousness of existence. . . . It is evident that the more ideas we have, the more sure we are o f our existence; the more intelligent we are, the more we exist; and finally, that it is through the soul’s power of reflection, and through it alone, that we are certain of our past and foresee our future life.14

Rousseau disagrees. Contrary to what Buffon says here, natural man can be aware of his existence without forming any ideas, and so can Jean-Jacques. In fact, the less man reflects, the more aware he is of his existence: “His soul, which nothing disturbs, dwells only in the sensation of its present existence, without any idea of the future, however close that might be.”15 Buffon agrees that present existence is what the animal perceives, but that is why he regards the animal’s consciousness as imperfect and limited compared with man’s fuller consciousness of his existence: Animals are aware o f their present existence but not of their past existence. . . . Because animals have been denied the power of reflection, it is certain that they cannot form ideas and hence that their awareness of existence is less sure and less extensive than ours. For they cannot have any idea of time, any knowledge of the past, or any notion of the future. Their consciousness of existence is simple. It depends solely on present sensations and consists in the inner feelings that those sensations produce. . . . They do not know that they exist, but they feel it.10

Strikingly, Buffon compares “this consciousness of existence in animals” with “the state in which we find ourselves when we are greatly occupied with some object or violently agitated by some passion that does not permit us to reflect upon ourselves. We ex­ press the idea of such a state by saying that we are beside ourselves, and indeed we are beside ourselves when we are occupied solely with present sensations.”17 For Buffon, true inwardness, or at any

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rate self-possession, is associated with active, voluntary memory, which links us to the past; it is also associated with anticipation of the future. In sharp contrast, Rousseau holds that we are turned away from self-knowledge by active contemplation of the past and, even more, by concern for the future. When we reflect, we compare objects and moments of our experience and as a result distinguish between ourselves and others and look to others to confirm our sense of ourselves. In other words, reflection is alienating. Rousseau therefore maintains that “the savage lives within himself; social man lives always outside himself; he knows how to live only in the opin­ ion of others. It is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he derives the sense of his own existence.”18 If living within the sense of present existence is also living within oneself, then natural man spontaneously attains an ideal of independence that civilized man can attain only after lengthy philosophical exertion: natural man “desires only to live and stay idle, and even the ataraxia of the Stoic does not approach his profound indifference to every other ob­ ject.”19The harmful effects of passion are accordingly seen as con­ sequences not of our restless animal nature but of reflection, which arouses desires out of all proportion to our natural needs. Con­ sequently, Rousseau can subscribe to Buffon’s well-known views on love: “Only the physical aspect of this passion is good. . . . The moral is worthless, notwithstanding what people in love may say. What in fact is the moral aspect of love? Vanity.”20 In particular, Rousseau can apply Buffon’s account of the harmonious equilib­ rium of animal desire to natural man: Animals are not subject to all these woes. They seek no pleasures where there can be none. Guided by sentiment alone, they never make the wrong choice. Their desires are always in proportion to their power to feel pleasure; their sensation is equal to their pleasure, and their pleasure cannot exceed their sensation. By contrast, man, by striving to invent pleasures, has only spoiled nature. By striving to force his feelings, he has only abused his being and created a hollow in his heart that nothing can fill.21

Rousseau’s system is in fact more in harmony with these lines of Buffon’s than is Buffon’s superficial dualism. Buffon is inconsistent in asserting that only the physical aspect of love is good, given that a few pages later he states that the “spiritual principle” is a “pure light” accompanied by “calm and serenity,” whereas the material principle “is a false light that shines only in tempest and obscurity, an impetuous torrent that brings passions and errors in its train.”22 Rousseau, who regards reflection as an ambivalent power that per-

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fects man but also alienates him, is free to view the animality of the savage as wholly innocent: evil stems from the “overwrought intelligence.”*3 The picture of civilized man’s misfortunes that Buffon paints in the Discourse on the Nature of Animals is out of keeping with the satisfaction he displays in the rest of his work whenever he evokes man’s domination over nature. The portrait of man in his misery is a more fitting illustration of Rousseau’s historical pes­ simism than of Buffon’s rationalist optimism. It is more consistent to ascribe man’s misfortune to his specific faculties than to incrim­ inate the “disruption of our material inward sensibility”** without specifying the source of that disruption. All of Buffon’s vehement polemic can be fitted into Rousseau’s scheme merely by introducing a different cause of evil: Physical pleasure and pain are but the least part o f man’s pleasures and pains: his imagination, continually at work, does everything, or, rather, does nothing but contribute to his unhappiness. For it offers the soul nothing but idle phantoms and exaggerated im­ ages. . . . Therefore we prepare our pains whenever we seek plea­ sure. We are unhappy the moment we desire greater happiness. In the physical there is infinitely more good than evil. It is not reality that is to be feared, but chimera. It is not bodily pain or illness or death that should make us tremble, but agitation of the soul, passion, and boredom. . . . When we attempt to force nature, we destroy ourselves. We know too little about what is good for us and what is harmful. We are only dimly aware of the effects of different kinds of nourishment. We disdain simple foods and prefer complicated dishes, because we have corrupted our taste and turned a sensation of pleasure into an organ of debauch that is pleased only by what irritates it.25

Jean-Jacques does not accept Buffon’s explanation, however: “Our soul was given to us only to know, yet we would use it only to feel.”*0 If, as Buffon maintains, there is infinitely more good than evil in the physical, how could evil possible stem from our desire to feel sen­ sations, which is the same as confining ourselves to the physical? Rousseau’s proposed morality of sensibility proves that he conceived die good life as a matter of reintegrating man into die sensible world, once suitably arranged by reason. Rousseau attempts to resolve di­ alectically the contradiction in Buffon’s position. He regards reflecdon initially as the disturbing element and source of evil. Later, however, when understanding has become enlightened reason, the faculty of reflection acquires powers of reconciliation. The idea of unity, so important to Rousseau, also has its place in Buffon’s writings: “The wise man is undoubtedly the happiest

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creature in nature. He combines the pleasures of the body, shared with the animals, with the joys of the spirit, his alone. He has two ways of being happy, and these mutually assist and support one another.”27 Yet Rousseau, though he also sees man as divided, is not content to insist that the hegemony of reason is necessary. Wisdom, which is unity regained, can only be the end result of a process of change, in which reason triumphs over and transforms itself while striving to maintain intact (or at least preserve the mem­ ory of) an image of lost nature and quietude; ultimately these will be restored, but on the higher plane of moral and social life. Buffon responded to Rousseau before reading Emile. In the preface to his Natural History of Carnivores (1758) he refuted Rousseau’s assumptions about natural man. In this he was merely confirming his own previous positions. In the Discourse on the Nature of Animals he had maintained that “man is man only because he has been able to cooperate with man” and that “everything conspired to make man sociable.”28 He had also repeated the traditional argument that a minimum of society (the family) is necessary to keep an infant alive until it is ready to live on its own, as well as to teach it language. In the Discourse and afterward Rousseau attacked these arguments, at times borrowing illustrative examples from Buffon in support of his hypothesis that mankind lived in a state of extreme disper­ sion. This was the point that Buffon rejected in his book on the carnivores, unable to accept either the assumption that natural man lives in solitude or the evolutionary view of human history: We have before our eyes not the ideal but the real state o f nature. Is the savage who lives in the wilderness a tranquil animal? Is he a happy man? We cannot agree with one philosopher, one of the proudest censors of our humanity, that there is greater distance between man in pure nature and the savage than between the savage and us, and that the ages that elapsed before the art of speech was invented were longer than the centuries required to perfect signs and languages, because it seems to me that if we wish to reason with facts, we must eliminate all presuppositions and make it a firm rule never to resort to hypotheses until we have exhausted all that nature has to offer.29

Buffon resolves to rely only on presently verifiable facts. Al­ though he himself had resorted to hypothesis in tracing the physical history of the earth, he is reluctant to allow a similar conjectural approach to the history of the human species. Buffon’s resistance is our best measure of the speculative boldness of the Discourse on Inequality.

Fiction and Boundaries The Swiss-French Writer: French with a Difference

Anyone who attempts to characterize the literature of the Frenchspeaking parts of Switzerland quickly loses his way in a labyrinth of distinctions. As the name implies» French-speaking Switzerland is both a part of the geographic region in which the French lan­ guage is spoken and a portion of the country Switzerland. Thus it is doubly included and doubly excluded. Before speaking of lit­ erature we must consider the language, culture, political institu­ tions, and religious peculiarities of the region. Linguistically, there is no divide between French-speaking Switzer­ land and France, apart from certain provincialisms for which equiv­ alents can be found within the borders of France itself. The francophone zone took shape long before the boundaries of modern states were fixed. In the region that lies between the Jura and the Alps, French is so to speak a natural presence, not a borrowed lan­ guage. It bears no trace of conquest or national expansion and con­ stitutes a timeless element of the environment. Notwithstanding the comments of Ramuz, who was pleading in favor of his personal style, the inhabitants of the now-francophone region of Switzerland did not find it overly difficult to shed their first language, rather similar to Franco-Provençal, and conform to the rules of “good French.” True, they inhabit the eastern fringe of the francophone zone. At times they have felt threatened by Germanisms and reacted by car­ rying purity of diction to excess. But repressive, bookish purism led to artificiality and soon provoked a corrective counterreaction. It is difficult to say precisely how the French Swiss ought to speak when speaking naturally. Writers have every latitude in this regard: it is up to them to invent rhythms that sound right. Perhaps this leads to some uncertainty, since relying on instinctive spontaneity is unlikely to establish effective standards. Difficult as the search for an “authentic” style may be, I do not think that any Swiss-French writers (no matter how fiercely loyal to their origins) would accept that their work be considered foreign to the French literary community; the question simply does not arise. Similarly, French writers are not read as foreign authors in Geneva or Lausanne. The French Swiss claim the right to be them­ selves yet have no desire to impose boundaries. As far as language Originally published as a preface to La nouvelle Héloïse in the Switzerland and Europe series published by Rencontre of Lausanne, 1970.

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is concerned, they are too closely involved in French literary life to feel those sentiments usually linked with nationalism, pride, or inferiority. It is simplistic to see any literature as reflecting the spirit of its literary capital; every literature is polyphonic, and the voice of French Switzerland plays a dignified part in the symphony of French literature (perhaps somewhat too dignified a part, but that is another question). Hence the Swiss are not very happy when a textbook or literary history relegates them to an appendix, to the ill-charted realms of “francophone literature,” along with peoples for whom the French language is a legacy of colonialism. Yet they are no happier to be simply subsumed in the French phenomenom, to be annexed and equated with French provincial or regional writers. They want their right to first-class citizenship recognized while insisting that there is an essential difference between Swiss literature and the literature of this or that region of France. Is this asking too much? Are these desires too contradictory to be legitimately satisfied? At first sight it may seem almost outra­ geous to refuse to be integrated into France while at the same time wanting not to be excluded. By asking too much (some will say), we get nothing. Yet this paradox sustains the life of Swiss-French literature. Paradox? Perhaps not. For language is not the only factor in­ volved. There is also history, and political institutions. Nationalist romantics concocted impressive theories according to which the soul of a nation is identical with the spirit of its language. Yet it is today a truism that political and linguistic boundaries need not coincide—and that there is no absurdity if they do not. Up to the eighteenth century religious boundaries were more important than linguistic ones. In the nineteenth century, when the citizens of Geneva, Vaud, and Neuchâtel joined the Swiss Confederation, they felt they had no alternative; they were too attached to their local liberties not to see what they would gain by joining a confederation whose well-tested principles afforded communes and cantons (and the university) greater autonomy than would have been possible in a large, centralized state. Swiss writers have therefore been able to form diverse attachments and to feel multiple loyalties, in which personal choice has played just as great a role as obligations stem­ ming from “roots.” This pluralism does not weaken or fragment the individual who knows how to make the best of it. On the con­ trary, it offers an opportunity for the exercise of freedom. There is no inconsistency if a person feels attached to his native city; if,

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in politics, he feels loyalty not only to Switzerland but also to an intellectual tendency of international scope; if, in literature, his attachment is to the French language and, in religion, to a neces­ sarily transnational community—no inconsistency provided that one is capable of overcoming unquestioning belief in the notions of undivided vocation and total allegiance. Still, the existence of a political boundary is not without conse­ quences for literature. French writers, who as I said are not for­ eigners in French Switzerland, have at times responded to events primarily of interest to the French political community. They have spoken out in their country’s moments of trial. They have taken positions on matters of mainly domestic interest. In short, they have written in political and social circumstances not directly related to those obtaining in French-speaking Switzerland. Swiss writers have read and even imitated their French counterparts, often taking positions on the same issues and continuing debate in a Swiss con­ text. In the present century Barrés and Maurras have found ad­ mirers and disciples in Switzerland. But so have Breton and Sartre. Nevertheless, warm as these second-hand passions may be, they lack genuine substance. It is difficult for the French Swiss to feel entirely on the “inside.” We watch the French scene as we would watch a play. To be sure, none of us is so naïve as to believe that we live in another world, safe from harm, protected against the slings of history. What goes on inside France is often too instructive for us not to draw our own morals. Yet we live apart. Our history has been different. We have not experienced the same glories or endured the same agonies as the French. We have lived quietly and milked our cows, as Victor Hugo’s phrase goes. Our caution has spared us both disaster and triumph. For some of us, this has been a source of frustration. Some people miss the opportunity to take risks and perform heroic deeds and prove their mettle. A few, tired of missing out on the action, have left home in search of intensity, adventure, even fame. Yet a gap remains, and, like all gaps, I believe this one to be fertile. For difference invariably provokes reaction: it must be either abolished or magnified, and this means getting down to work. There is, we sense, a “moral” divide between us and the French, even though our sharing a common language ensures a certain unky. The difference is at once plain to see and hard to grasp; the SwissFrench writer may congratulate himself on it or he may complain

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about it. Depending on how it is used, it can be either an advantage or a disadvantage. In some respects, it is a question of historical backwardness. To take just one example, Switzerland has no very large cities, and the social, literary, and artistic phenomena asso­ ciated with urban growth have been a long time reaching us. Yet the difference is not simply chronological. It also has epistemolog­ ical implications. Exteriority, independence, and comparative “dis­ interest1' are conditions propitious to judgment, understanding, and theory. Jakob Burckhardt was right Lo see our small country as one well suited to practical experimentation in politics and political thought. If other powers “make history,’1we experience it. We are observers ideally placed to view a number of different cultures. Thus we have avoided what has been called the “monoglot narcis­ sism” of the French, and on many occasions we have been the first to respond to what was happening in Italy, Germany, and even Great Britain and the United States. The gap I have been discussing can be interpreted and responded to in a variety of ways. We can take advantage of our situation, and our best writers have done just that. Indeed, in schematic terms, Swiss culture can be described as a series of poetic and philosophical ex­ plorations of difference, alternating between critical vigilance on die one hand and lyrical reflection upon intimate experience on the oilier. The Herald: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau was the first to experience to the full the situation of the “Swiss-French” writer in his relation to France. He plumbed the depths of the problem and appreciated its most important conse­ quences: his critical vocation was exemplary and his lyrical solitude extreme. Rousseau’s life and work prefigure the possibilities open to the Swiss-French writer and the forces that shape his work. More than that, Rousseau makes us see that the attitudes engendered by the situation are not provincial or idiosyncratic but of universal significance, summing up an enure era. Rousseau was genius enough to make an emblem of the conflict between the rebellious individual on the one hand and communal law imposed through style and culture on the other—in his case, the style and culture of the ancien régime. The national differences between the sovereign Republic of Ge­ neva and France were of course magnified and multiplied by the oddities of Rousseau’s temperament. Nevertheless, his rebellion is

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founded on those national differences. He was, as he proclaimed on the title pages of his books, a citizen of ticneva. Rousseau flaunted his foreignness, not out of loyalty to his tiny “fatherland” but as justification for his challenge to the great, corrupL nations. He valued being a republican, which enabled him to play the roles of both judge and prosecutor, to speak as one who had witnessed a purer politics at work. He wants people to know that he comes from another state, that his loyalties, duties, and pleasures lie else­ where. By proclaiming his allegiance to Geneva, he took on a clearly defined political identity and made this the basis of his rebellion. This is true, at any rate, of Rousseau’s early literary works, which embody his “sociocultural” criticism. Later, carried away by the passion of his rejection and the logic of his rebellion, he becomes a stranger in his own land. The man of Motiers, the dreamer of the Lake of Bienne, disappears into exile from the very places in which he had expected to find “asylum.” After the publication of Emile, Geneva, imitating Paris, issues a warrant for his arrest, and Rousseau renounces the nationality on which he had so long prided himself. From now on the only fatherland he wants is the truth, as his motto proclaimed: Vitam impendere vero. Truth that is of no place, no earthly city, but lives only in the heart of the sensitive man, of which no power can deprive him. Banished from his home­ land but determined to find in the mind a homeland at once nar­ rower and broader than the one he had left, Rousseau settles poetically, dreamily, in places where he is safe from persecution: in his own past or in the infinite vastness of the universe. The period during which Rousseau publicly lays claim to Ge­ nevan citizenship begins and ends in renunciation. The adolescent Rousseau renounces his old life and begins a time of vagabondage and apostasy. Later, the aging writer turns away from men and seeks his refuge within himself. Between the first renunciation, which opens the world, and the second, which begins a time of selfimposed solitude, Rousseau cannot be said to have lived at peace with his country. As a critic of Parisian society, he formulated re­ quirements so stringent that the real Geneva could hardly live up to them. Hence he was doubly a rebel: the myth of Geneva with which he attacked France became reason for dissatisfaction with Genevan reality. Rousseau’s rebellion quickly cuL off all retreat, leaving only the inner resources of feeling and language, only lit­ erature to fall back on. In this, too, he prefigured in important ways the fate of the Swiss-French writer in general.

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The Appeal of the Novel

Novels played an important part in Rousseau’s life in two periods of his childhood. His awakening to the world of fiction coincided with the awakening of consciousness itself: I know nothing of myself till I was five or six. 1 do not know how I learned to read. I only remember my first books and their effect upon me; it is from my earliest reading that I date the unbroken consciousness o f my existence. My mother had possessed some novels, and my father and I began to read them after our supper.1

Thus, by a “dangerous method,” Jean-Jacques learned not about the world, not about things, but about the infinite resources of sentiment, about the fictive realm in which affections of the heart are free to develop as they will. Imagination described an ideal space which Rousseau would endeavor always to maintain intact. Forced to endure a difficult apprenticeship, he would again take refuge in the realm of the imaginary. But his earlier reading had been authorized by his father’s complicity; now reading became a clandestine activity, a shameful and punishable diversion. In the eyes of Rousseau’s employer, reading was wasted time, stolen time. Too passionate to read only during authorized leisure hours, Rous­ seau read when he should have been working. In his account the world of the imagination becomes subversive; it symbolizes oppo­ sition to the world of labor and social respectability: My comrades’ amusements bored me; when too much constraint made my work repulsive too, I grew weary of everything. In that state I reacquired my love of reading, which I had long ago lost. The time for books I stole from my work, and that brought me fresh punishments. But, spurred on by opposition, this taste soon became a furious passion. Mme La Tribu’s famous lending library provided reading o f all sorts.2

Once again, reading is substituted for the real world, whose ob­ ligations and temptations Rousseau rejects. Rather than seek out girls, rather than fall in love with creatures of the flesh, JeanJacques spends his enthusiasm on imaginary creatures from the pages of books. Gratification of desire is severely forbidden, en­ couraging sublimation of passion in a world of fancy: My senses, which had been roused long ago, demanded delights of which I could not even guess the nature. I was as far from the reality as if I had been entirely lacking in sexuality. Already pu-

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bescent and sensitive, I sometimes thought of my past eccentric­ ities, but 1 could not see beyond them. In this strange situation my restless imagination took a hand which saved me from myself and calmed my growing sensuality. What it did was to nourish itself on situations that had interested me in reading, recalling them, varying them, combining them, and giving me so great a part in them that I became one of the characters I imagined and saw myself always in the pleasantest situations o f my own choosing. So, in the end, the fictions I succeeded in building up made me forget my real condition, which so dissatisfied me. My love for imaginary objects and my facility in lending myself to them ended by disillusioning me with everything around me, and determined that love o f solitude which I have retained ever since that time.3

Strange daydreams, in which Rousseau loses his identity yet savors fully (as he tells us elsewhere) the pleasure of being himself. Far from being ashamed of his disgust with reality, he describes it as the road to salvation. Indeed, he sees the flight into the imaginary as a legitimate way of avoiding the dangers that come from dis­ covering too early the pleasures of “sensuality.” (And in Emile he expressly recommends the use of this method.) Rousseau seems to regard sexuality as a perilous and abject condition, from which imagination rescues him in die nick of time. Today we may take a different view. In the language of contemporary psychology, the novels that fire the imagination of the young apprentice free him from an intolerable social constraint but repress the free operation of die libido. Rousseau’s reading of novels signifies his incomplete rebellion; it is a compromise between his refusal to accept the con­ straints of apprenticeship and his acceptance (and indeed reinforce­ ment) of the moral prohibition against carnal love. If novels turn the adolescent apprentice away from his workbench, they also turn him away from impurity. The novelisdc world is associated with guilt: reading is a “crime,” a violation of the laws of labor which allows the substitution of the free play of desire for the reality principle. Yet it is also associated with innocence: by seeking grat­ ification in fiction, the dreamer avoids the taint of contact with females. The novel, as Rousseau experiences it, is essentially am­ biguous. Reading novels coincides with an illicit surge of desire, yet that desire is diverted, suspended, held back indefinitely in the realm of images. The morality of work and discipline is challenged, but sexual morality is fully satisfied, though not without conceding in the imagination what is not allowed in reality, and not without paying a large tribute to autoeroticism.

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In the Confessions the story of the flight from Geneva is told in the ironic tone of Don Quixote and the picaresque novel. We see an adolescent intoxicated by his reading of novels and romantic pas­ toral venture into the unknown in the hope of finding castles, maidens, and opportunities for adventure. His imagination of the future has been shaped by his reading. His very expectations are couched in the language of the novel, that inexhaustible source of illusions. Rousseau’s extraordinary good fortune is that in Mme de Warens he meets the woman of his novel-nourished desires. This makes up in large part for the disillusionment of Turin. In any case, hope springs eternal in the young Rousseau’s breast. He quickly overcomes all disappointments and again imagines himself enjoying distinguished company and sharing in endless pleasures. His daydreams are like the primordial cloud out of which constellations are born. In his juvenile reveries there is much room for confusion between what the imaginary present offers and what the imagined future promises. Imaginary adventures offer both present gratifi­ cation and a possible destiny, a plan for future action. Fiction, already delightful merely as fiction, arouses hopes of being lived out “in reality.” Romantic dreams feed on still unassuaged desire, which wants to “change life” and turn dream into reality. What was simply a compensation (a substitute for or “supplement” to an unsatisfactory state of affairs) becomes an active hope, thereby altering reality. An illusion intended to serve as a substitute gen­ erates energy that produces profound change. The Charmettes episode, despite its depressing ending, looks forward to the future time of Parisian glory, proving that the romantic imagination, fired by the reading of novels, can indeed have consequences in “real life,” although this of course requires a conversion, a disciplined transformation of the object of desire. At the dangerous height of the glory to which his effervescent imagination had brought him, Rousseau, writing his Confessions, retraces his steps. He imagines what his fate would have been had he remained in Geneva, had his dreams not taken him beyond the walls, had he grown up to be a humble artisan. At the end of book 1 of the Confessions he imagines the modest life he would have led, alternating between a regular occupation and innocent flights of reverie: Nothing suited my character better nor was more likely to make me happy than the calm and obscure life o f a good craftsman, particularly in a superior trade like that of an engraver at Geneva. The work, which was lucrative enough to yield a man an easy

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subsistence but not sufficiently rewarding to lead to fortune, would have limited my ambition till the end of my days and left me honest leisure to cultivate simple tastes. It would have kept me in my sphere and offered me no incans o f escaping from it. Since my imagination was rich enough to embellish any state with il­ lusions and powerful enough to transport me, so to speak, ac­ cording to my whim, from one state to another, it mattered very little to me in what walk of life I actually was. Never mind how great the distance between my position and the nearest castle in Spain, I had no difficulty taking up residence there.4

Was this not to reconcile the irreconcilable through illusion? The romantic dreams of Jean-Jacques’s youth were incompatible with the narrow limits of a small city, an occupation, and a family. Had he fallen, as he says he would have wished, into “the hands of a better master,“ his impetuous desire would nevertheless have led him astray. His imagination was responsible for his rejection of the simple life, his flight, his adventure, his exorbitant hopes. Full of desire, his dreams were powerless to escape the pull of their own excess. Many years later, the image of a stable, circumscribed life becomes attractive by virtue of its very impossibility. Return to the mother country thus becomes yet another direction for romantic fantasy. In the distance looms an image of happiness: a life that was never lived. Regret intensifies over the years. Rousseau dreams of time wasted and opportunities lost. Memory tends to drive out hope. During the years of maturity, however, an equilibrium is achieved between feverish anticipation and emotional retrospec­ tion. Life then consists of moments rich with the treasure of past existence, with hope directed toward a still-open future. La nouvelle Héloïse was conceived, it seems to me, when the reverie of hope and the reverie of regret had achieved such equilibrium, when illusory anticipation still had the power to project memory's images into the future. With help from the Confessions we can iden­ tify the various stages and motives involved in the writing. Rousseau himself is clear about die chronology, and it is important to trace the sequence of composition, not out of simple scholarly curiosity but because this is the way Lo identify the forces of desire at work in the novel’s construction. Everything begins with painful awareness of want, of emotional emptiness, of lack of fulfillment, and of disappointment in family and friends. This emptiness must somehow be filled; a compen­ sation or “supplement" is required. The imagination, shaded by the leafy boughs of the forest of Montmorency, will rise to the

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challenge. The initial impetus comes from regret: “Amidst the bless­ ings I had most eagerly desired, I found no pure enjoyment, and I turned my thoughts back by fits and starts to the clear skies of my youth, exclaiming to myself sometimes with a sigh: ‘Ah, this is not what life was like at Les Charmettes!’ ”5 Dissatisfaction, the feeling of never having found a “determinate object” worthy of his heart, and the idea of having to leave the world “without having lived” impel Rousseau to seek consolation in a magical reverie capable of reviving the memory of lost op­ portunities, unconsummated loves, and brief encounters. At other times in his life similar feminine images, wreathed in dreamy ex­ pectation, had arisen in response to romantic desire. The heroines Jean-Jacques pursued in his imagination he took to be like the heroines of fiction. He had “projected” onto real women feelings whose source lay in d’Urfé’s Astrée and the pastoral novel. Now these same images recur as an integral part of his past, wrapped in the poignant charm of the almost possessed yet forever beyond reach. Once-real women whom Rousseau had barely touched are now reduced to images, as free, as vain, and as available as the images of women in a novel. They lead Rousseau back into the fluid state of reverie. In these women the bookish ideal had seemed for a moment to become reality. But now they are obsessive fan­ tasies, insistent seductresses, helping Jean-Jacques to flee disap­ pointing reality for a land of illusion. They plunge him back into a confused but effervescent state of mind. He once again becomes an “extravagant shepherd” (the term belongs to the lexicon of the baroque novel and indicates its quixotic origins). Inventing crea­ tures of perfection, he throws himself body and soul into an uplift­ ing paradise. The impossibility o f attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land o f chimeras; seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world that my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart. Never was this resource more opportune, and never did it prove more fertile. In my continual ecstasies I intoxicated myself with draughts o f the most exquisite sentiments that have ever entered the heart o f a man. Altogether ignoring the human race, I created for myself societies of perfect creatures celestial in their virtue and in their beauty, and of reliable, tender, and faithful friends such as I had never found here below.6

Frenetic fabulation, no longer in any sense retrospective, carries Jean-Jacques toward an “empyrean” beyond the human condition.

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But he does not record these dazzling visions; doubtless he could not; they are merely a pretext for inner effusions, which remain as confused as they are enrapturing. Subsequently, Rousseau comes back down to earth and adapts his dream to contemporary social conditions. Before this there is a “literary” episode whose theme is not without importance. Feeling a need to respond to Voltaire’s poem On the Lisbon Disaster, Rousseau has been meditating on phys­ ical and moral evil. Voltaire had said that man is not happy; Rous­ seau rejoined that man’s unhappiness was the fault of man, not God. The question of misfortune undoubtedly added ballast to Rousseau’s reverie, helping to confine it within narrower limits and introducing the themes of want and suffering, of which the reverie was initially the stunned negation; My ideas were a little less exalted and this time remained upon earth. But they made so exquisite a choice among all the charming things o f every kind that could be found there that it was not much less chimerical than the chimerical world I had deserted.7

Rousseau’s ideas gradually become clearer, and he thinks in par­ ticular of “two charming friends.” But he still has only a “vague” plan. Then he hits upon a precise locale; In order to place my characters in a suitable setting, I passed in review the loveliest places I had seen in my travels. But I found no woodland fresh enough, no countryside moving enough to suit me. The valleys o f Thessaly would have satisfied me, if I had seen them; but my imagination was tired of inventing and wanted some real locality to serve as a basis and to create for the inhab­ itants I intended to place there the illusion of real existence. I thought for some time of the Borromean Islands, the delicious sight o f which had enraptured me; but I found too much orna­ ment and artifice about them for my inhabitants. I needed a lake, however, and finally I chose that lake around which my heart has never ceased to wander. I fixed on that part o f its shores which my wishes long ago chose as my dwelling place in that imaginary state o f bliss which is all that fate has allowed me. My poor Mama’s birthplace had still a special attraction for me. Its contrasting features, the richness and variety or its landscape, the magnifi­ cence and majesty of the whole, which charms the senses, moves the heart, and elevates the soul, finally determined me, and I established my young pupils at Vevey.8

Thus, as the tide of enthusiasm for unreal places begins to ebb, Rousseau’s novel begins to take shape. He looks to the real world for a “basis,” which will quickly acquire considerable importance in

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the novel’s further development. Only then does writing become possible. Letters are outlined, emotions are written down, and Rousseau is not entirely hypocritical when he says that he is merely the transcriber and editor of his characters’ feelings. The novel begins to progress, it seems, only after the author agrees to abandon those mental realms in which the perfection of nature or art is too steady. It needs to establish itself in a more concrete locale, asso­ ciated with memories of past travels and less sheltered from evil than the imaginary paradise yet bathed, as it were, in its reflected light. The decision not to set the novel in Thessaly is of the utmost importance. Rousseau blames the fatigue of his imagination, but the Thessaly he knew was purely fictional, and had he set his story there he would have produced nothing but a dated echo of earlier pastoral fiction. By choosing Vevey and Clarens instead and relying on memory to paint their portrait, Rousseau returns to the “human race,” from which his initial burst of enthusiasm had distracted him. Though closer to reality, Vevey is nevetheless a powerful in­ stigator of dreamy projections. It reminds the one-time guest at the Hermitage of places remote in time and space, and it also impels him to imagine Mme de Warens in adolescence: the innocent awak­ ening of a heart he knew only later, after it had been distorted by the lessons of a harsh world. The fiction of Vevey enabled JeanJacques to stand in, in his imagination, for the first lover of LouiseEleonor de la Tour. Rousseau was able to set his retrospective fantasy against a back­ ground capable of satisfying the public appetite for everyday reality, which Richardson had whetted. The dream of paradise could be reconciled with the illusion of realism. Rousseau’s meeting with Mme de Warens, originally a romantic fantasy, becomes many years later a pretext for satisfying nostalgic desire through realism. Pas­ sion, disappointment, memory, and writing intervene in complex ways between the fictitious world of the novel in which Jean-Jacques immersed himself as a child and the novel that he himself sets out to write. There is no break in continuity; we see how reverberations of the novels of an earlier age lead Rousseau to invent an entirely new type of novel. Decisive change is the result of fierce loyalty to the past. A youth intoxicated by old novels becomes the basic ma­ terial of a new novel. Invention is inextricably associated with the desire for repetition. Consider one example. As an adolescent, Rousseau sought in real life confirmation of the imaginary adven­ tures he experienced in dreams and books. As a novelist, he sought in real life counterparts of his fictional characters. In Sophie d’Hou-

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detot he thought he had found an example of the qualities with which he had endowed his character Julie. Having conquered the powers of writing, he attempted to revive through his own work the rapture aroused in him by the works of others some thirty years earlier. He wants to become his own reader, to read himself, and he wants to experience, in his passion for Sophie, a real counterpart for his imaginary transports. Rousseau’s love for Sophie d’Houdetot would be of minor in­ terest if it did not reveal his insatiable desire to abolish the differ­ ence between the novel and reality, to make the novel’s ideality the leaven of life. How could Rousseau have entertained such a desire in 1757? Did not Cervantes’ Don Quixote denounce once and for all the illusion inherent in any att empt to revive the fiction of a bygone era? And did not nearly all Rousseau’s romantic hopes meet with failure in the course of his troubled adolescence? Had he not seen the Lignon, not as in Astrée irrigating fertile meadows, but flowing through a depressing industrial zone of smoky forges? All of this survives in Rousseau’s memory. Hence in writing La nouvelle Héloïse he eliminates everything that, in the old novel, increased the gap between the fictional world and reality: extraordinary adventures, legendary site, fabulous cults, and so on. The world of La nouvelle Héloïse was conceived, by Rousseau’s own admission, so as to retain nothing of the traditional novel but its emotive quintessence, its sentimental spirit. Actually, Rousseau pared away even more of the tradition: he forbade himself to depict hateful, wicked passions. Nothing is more revealing than the way he brings the novel closer to life. Books and life inform one another. Yet a certain distance remains. Vevey is not Thessaly, but it is not France, either, and surely not Paris. It is, in a sense, a middle term between a utopia of pure fantasy and a disappointing here and now. Rousseau cal­ culates this distance with a sure instinct. After considering the Borromean Islands for a moment, he rejects them as too ornate and exotic. Choosing them for locale would also have made letters writ­ ten in French rather implausible. It was better to choose a site on the fringes of the francophone zone. This enabled him not only to revisit the temples of his youth but also to offer Parisian readers a portrait of “extraordinary” life relatively close to home. This ad­ mirable place was but a few days’ coach ride from Paris! The light of Vevey could be enjoyed by anyone willing to make the effort. The characters, though shrouded in mystery, are familiar enough to permit identification, provided the reader is willing to undergo a sort of inner revolution. Rousseau himself lived out the role of

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Saint-Preux in his relations with Mme d’Houdetot; many readers similarly became involved in the fate of the novel’s characters. Two noblewomen tried to imitate the “two charming friends” and in­ volve Rousseau in their game. Innumerable trips to Switzerland were undertaken as pilgrimages to the place where Julie loved, was loved, and died. Rousseau seduced his readers, in other words. As in any seduction, the prize is made more attractive by being kept just out of reach; an offer is made only to be withdrawn at once. It is not by chance that all the poetry cited in La nouvelle Héloïse is Italian (Petrarch, Metastasio, Tasso); moments of lyrical exaltation depend on the prestige of a foreign tongue. The distance to Vevey is amplified by the further distance of Italian language and music, which create a sort of bluish backdrop of harmonious repletion and Platonic purity. Near as it is, the world of La nouvelle Héloise is still an absent world. The duality of ficton and empirical reality, of the novel and daily life, is thus preserved. The Exploitation of Difference

By making the “small town at the foot of the Alps” and its inhabitants as plausible as possible, Rousseau succeeded in writing a contem­ porary novel, a bourgeois novel. In creating his Swiss setting, he thought of the fashionable Parisians who would read his book and painted for them the troubling beauty of a world that was not their own. His impulse to write required a “different world,” and that difference remains. But it is not a fabulous world that we see; there is no superhuman perfection, no supernatural adventure. What Rousseau’s imaginary world demonstrates is that honesty, passion, and authentic virtue survive outside the big city. Hence the distance between Vevey and Paris is not merely the distance between fiction and reality; it also implies a degree of criticism. (This criticism is made explicit in the prefaces and the letters concerning Päris in the second part of the novel.) The traditional contrast between fiction and reality is inverted: it is the real Parisians who live in a world of illusion, falsehood, and deceptive appearances. The novel is supposed to represent a world of truthfulness: a small society governed by sincere virtue and open to the truth of feeling. The Swiss landscape works in concert with the resolutely foreign quality of Rousseau’s language to reveal a radical symbolic contrast. These young people, Rousseau tells us, write badly but feel properly, exactly the opposite of the fashionable Parisians, who express them­ selves elegantly but whose feelings are entirely artificial. The letters

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of which the novel is composed stand for passionate subjectivity; distance causes the writers to suffer, and they strive to abolish it. The letters also serve a polemical function: they stand for moral profundity, ethical earnestness, a quality unknown to the men and women of high society. The letter writers possess faculties that have withered away among the wealthy. They are emotional people, unafraid to reveal themselves. As such they offer implicit criticism of the vanity of a world of brilliant salons in which “no man can be himself” and society “marionettes” treat feelings as nothing more than a pretext for sophisticated “maxims.” The distance between Vevey and Paris is thus tantamount to a challenge. The idea of a “contest” is implicit in the difference between the sometimes in­ correct rhetoric of the two lovers and the “jargon,” the “vain for­ mulary” that Saint-Preux and Rousseau associate with Parisian conversation. Also of great importance is the proposal to study and criticize societies on a comparative basis, as formulated in letter 16 of part 2: The characters o f nations can be determined only through their differences. . . . If I wished to study a people, I would observe them in remote provinces whose inhabitants have retained their natural inclinations. I would slowly and carefully travel through a number o f these provinces, as far from one another as possible. The differences I observed would reveal to me the peculiar genius of each. Whatever they shared in common that other peoples did not share would constitute the national genius, and whatever could be found everywhere would belong to man in general. . . . My purpose is to know man, and my method to study him in various relations. I have seen him till now only in small, scattered societies, almost isolated from one another. I am now going to consider him crowded together in multitudes in one place and in this way begin to judge the true effects of society. For if society always makes men better, then the more there are and the closer together, the better they should be, and morals, for example, should be purer in Paris than in Valais; if one discovered the opposite, it would be necessary to draw the opposite conclusion. This method could, I maintain, still lead me to knowledge of different peoples, but the path would be so long and arduous that I might never in all my life be in a position to say anything about any o f them. I must begin by observing everything in that people among whom I find myself; then I shall assign differences as I travel through other countries; I shall compare France with each of them, as one might compare an olive tree with a willow or a palm with a fir, and I shall refrain from judging the first people I observe until I have observed all the others.

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This comparative method, borrowed from the taxonomy of Rousseau’s day, anticipates twentieth-century structuralism. SaintPreux travels around the world, and we have no reason to believe he did not pursue his inquiries quite a long way. The key, however, is still the contrast between Vevey and Paris, of which the letters on Paris reveal several aspects: differences in economic organiza­ tion, sources of power, manners, amusements, ways of loving, and, epitomizing all the others, language and music. The passionately romantic language of Vevey, prior to all philosophy, has cultural and social significance: it suggests an aptitude for feeling that the inhabitants of big cities have lost. The stylistic difference between Paris and Vevey, with its lyricism, pathos, musical rhythms, and “diction,” is here not only a symbol of uncommonly intense psy­ chological experience but also a mark of social and moral superi­ ority (sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes merely implied). Rousseau worked hard to make this contrast with Paris intelligible to Parisians themselves. For the comparison to work, the attraction of the foreign locale must be felt even by those who are the objects of reproach and criticism. Secretly, therefore, we must connive with those who live in the world of falsehood; we must continue to speak their language. Saint-Preux, in Paris, becomes acutely aware of this. He is alarmed by the thought that he himself was almost unwittingly contaminated by the spirit of the capital and is afraid that his critique of Paris might have been oddly distorted: “Am I not at present myself an inhabitant of Paris? Perhaps without knowing it I have already contributed to the disorder I find here.. . . Unaware, I judge and reason as I hear everyone else judging and reasoning.” There is striking complicity between Rousseau and the world he is combating. “True life” is to be found at Vevey, he says, but he always says so to Parisians, and in a style calculated to move them. For although Rousseau remarks in his preface that his novel will appeal only to provincials, its success was largely a Parisian phe­ nomenon, and it is impossible to believe that this was not the au­ thor’s intention. The Confessions tell us of the book’s welcome, and Rousseau astutely attributes his success to feelings of want on the part of his readers, to his eloquent representation of Parisian de­ sires: Contrary to my expectation, [the book] was least successful in Switzerland and most in Paris. Do friendship, love, and virtue prevail in Paris, then, to a greater extent than elsewhere? No indeed! But there still prevails there the delicate sensibility that moves the heart when these things are displayed and that makes

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us cherish those pure, tender, and honest feelings in others that we no longer possess ourselves.9

This is an important observation. Rousseau’s book was received as an expression of absent virtue and happiness. It could not have been understood in this way, moreover, had it not exacerbated the lack, made it apparent, given it voice, displayed it in a “touching” manner, and profoundly affected the very people whose lives Rous­ seau believed subject to the worst illusions. By writing a novel had he not played into the hands of the powers of evil and surrendered to artifice and sham? Rousseau does not hesitate to plead guilty to this charge. He has compromised himself, made a pact with the devil, but only out of necessity: he had no choice but to fight fire with fire. The only way to reach people lost in the alienated universe of representation is by speaking their language. If La nouvelle Héloïse attempted to seduce the people of Paris, it was not to offer them the pernicious pleasures of fiction but to heal them, to heroically administer a drug, a last-ditch remedy, via the pleasure of the text: “Novels are perhaps the final lesson left to administer to a people so corrupt that all others lessons are futile.”10 This statement of Saint- Preux’s is directly applicable to the novel of which he is the hero. It shows that the novel was intended not simply to be polemical but to perform a moral function. At first sight this is merely the classical principle of utilitarian (edifying) literature: scarcely a single work in this century, including the most pointless and perverse, did not justify itself on the grounds of offering instruction. Rousseau is more sincere. We can take him at his word when he declares that he wanted his novel to serve “mo­ rality and marital fidelity, which are at the root of all social order,” as well as “harmony and the public peace.”11 Apart from its critical function, then, the novel aspires to effect a reconciliation and to intervene in history. Ai Clarens a young girl, culpable and weak, becomes an irreproachable wife, and a virtuous atheist becomes the leader of a group of sensitive souls and believers. All this takes place between the covers of a book, offering a fascinating model to die people of Päris: the mirage of salvation, the promise of regeneration. This great novel about changes in the heart is also, in its critical dimension, a utopian novel about changing the world. By our standards the book is excessively moralistic; in reading it, however, we must try to see the generous effort first to denounce and then to resolve the world’s contradictions by demonstrating how characters who represent various tendencies and temptations in the mind of their author can eventually come to live in harmony.

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The Course of the Novel La nouvelle Héloïse follows a pleasing temporal arc, guided by desire, denial, and reunion. From the opening pages the book is borne along by the force of desire. As soon as desire is gratified in the flesh, however, it encounters a social taboo, aristocratic prejudice, which precludes the possibility of accommodating it within the es­ tablished order. Though legitimate in its essence, passion is in effect declared disorderly by society: it is deemed a crime by the sovereign judge, the father, Baron d’Etanges. The social obstacle has been braved but not broken. The forces of order win their case; Julie agrees to marry the man for whom her father intended her, and she will be a faithful wife. Is this really a triumph of conventional morality, a consecration of the existing social order? No. The lovers internalize the baron’s refusal and voluntarily sacrifice their im­ mediate happiness, but they do not cease to love; their passion grows even stronger. Society’s denial of permission is subsumed in passion itself, guaranteeing an eventual reversal of the situation and ultimate reunion. Love is resurrected (through repression, as we would now say); at the same time a new society, a superior social order, comes into being. Where conventional society had van­ quished free passion, now regenerated passion vanquishes conven­ tional society. At Clarens a republic of the elite is founded and from the heights looks down on the surrounding world. The inhabitants of this republic are “beautiful souls” who have resolved to share a common destiny; Clarens is their “political” creation. The new or­ der (more paternalistic than democratic and not at all egalitarian) is not hostile to desire; it is desire’s late fruit (after pruning, as it were, and sublimation). Similarly, the world’s “false wisdom,” de­ nied by passion, gives way to a superior wisdom, a product of passion itself, clarified by an arduous “repressive” discipline. Am­ orous and virtuous Julie is as much a new Diotima as a new Eloisa (or Laura). Clarens also gives birth to a new philosophy, a new theology, and a new pedagogy—no longer futile book learning but forces capable of combating and rebuilding conventional morality. The new pedagogy has been tried by feeling, has bestowed upon feeling the mark of authenticity. The new philosophy is not the sterile maundering of the schools but thought as it springs from superior minds. And the dogmas of this new theology spring from love. Nevertheless, Clarens’s happiness, born of a resolution of wordly conflict and healing of wounds, is too full of passion and dissatis­ faction to survive within the mold of confining formal institutions.

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Threatened by a disastrous return of carnal desire, it must seek refuge in what is at once irrevocable separation and ultimate union: death, which symbolizes both the fulfillment of passion and the failure of every attempt to create a new political order on earth. The course of the novel leads us toward an end that lies beyond human reason. Begun in the murky depths of lust (as Rousseau makes clear, despite the chaste rhetoric of love), the spirit thrusts upward from sacrifice lo sacrifice toward the hereafter. A religious novel? Yes, btu only to the extent that faith and adoration are avatars of desire, metamorphoses of eros, whose various stages and faces are revealed as the novel follows its leisurely course. To be sure, religious language is exploited throughout to give noble exprèssion to seething sentiment. This use of sacred language has been denounced as a hypocritical disguise for the most selfish of passions. But Rousseau is right to urge us to consider his novel as a whole and not to separate Julie’s “weakness” from her redemption. It is not unreasonable to say that, far from lending deceptive legitimacy to sexual appetite, the use of religious language in the most ardent moments of physical desire prefigures the future transformation of Lhat appetite. Because they have used sacred language in the midst of sexual passion, Julie and Saint-Preux place their hope in religion when they are forced to separate; they can change their behavior but not their language. The sacralized vocabulary of pas­ sion already contains all the necessary terms of virtuous sacrifice (often with masochistic connotation). This language rules the lovers' hearts and dictates the changes they will undergo. The same can be said for the symbolism of certain localities. The seductiveness of places like Le Valais, the Bosquet, the Chalet, and Julie’s Elysium, and of an event like the harvest festival, comes from the remem­ bered myth of a paradise of abundance and transparency. These places and events symbolize unity. All the contraries created by man’s bitter history are miraculously reunited: love and innocence, art and nature, solitude and community. Shamelessly obeying the dictates of his desire, Rousseau projected onto the Swiss landscape a préfiguration of heaven and a souvenir of Eden. To places he had visited he attached eschatological significance. Using religious symbolism he created a private myth. What else? The private myth thus constructed is a good bet to become a collective myth for the next generation.

Ç

Reverie and Transmutation

The Reveries of a Solitary Walker contain few reveries in the proper sense o f the word. They are not an intimate diary, a “shapeless journal.“ It is not so easy to break with centuries of rhetorical discourse. — Marcel Raymond1

For whom did Rousseau write the Rêveries? For himself and no one else. What does he discuss in this ultimate work? His destiny. Having chosen himself as recipient of his work, the author also chooses himself as theme. He pursues no outside end and avoids mentioning a possible audience. Rousseau has convinced himself that the world has turned a deaf ear to him; his mind is made up. His plea is hopeless, hence his words will circulate only within his own mind. They will reflect their author, and only their author will absorb their import. It is as if the author’s mind were split in two, into a discursive consciousness and a receptive consciousness, an addressee feeding on its own substance. The radical solitude of this singular attitude is only remotely and partially anticipated by Montaigne and the soliloquies of certain mystics. Rousseau accordingly feels the need to justify his novel and grotesque en­ terprise. His utterly unprecedented situation is grotesque, he says, forcing him to adopt an unprecedented manner. Throughout the Rêveries he seeks to justify his decision to end all relations with other human beings and relate only to himself; ultimately the justification supplants the intimate dialogue it is supposed to in­ troduce. (Many pages of the Rêveries are declarations of intention, lengthy preparations for the business of dreaming. This is true of the First Walk, which serves as a kind of preamble. But long passages of the Second and Seventh Walks might also be subtitled “Why I Decided to Write My Reveries.”) Is this dreaming? I doubt it. Pure reverie is inward and silent; the transitory fascination of the dream is utterly absorbing. When the dreamer stops to express himself outwardly, he stops dreaming. More than once Rousseau expresses mild regret that he did not stop to record ideas and images that occurred to him during his walks; his reveries were therefore sufficiently absorbing not to have left any verbal trace.2 (It is the same with dreams, the most mar­ velous of which are invariably lost for language; we must resign Originally published in De Ronsard à Breton: Hommages à Marcel Raymond (Paris: Corti, 1967).

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ourselves to reconstructing an approximate equivalent after wak­ ing.) Let us grant, nevertheless, LliaL there is such a thing as a language of dreams, composed of words that emerge into con­ sciousness as the dream proceeds. Is this the language of ihe Rev­ eries? In reading that work we encounter a vigilant consciousness. We are therefore entitled to ask whether what we are reading is really reverie or free rumination on the pleasure of dreaming. Rousseau’s reveries are supposed to prove that his mind is sufficient unto itself; hence it is rather surprising to find them written down. Self-sufficiency should have remained tacit, certified by ineffable feeling alone. To write, even if only to address oneself, is to con­ demn oneself to exteriority, to solicit reading by a third party, and above all to rely on those conventional signs that, in the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau regards as irremediably alien to the vital truth of feeling. Anyone who resorts to writing lapses into the wretched world of opaque objects and means. At first sight, the prose of the Rêveries seems to be condemned in a paradoxical way to exteriority. In the first place it is external to the time of reverie; a fatal distance separates the writing from the exalted moment described therein. The ecstasy of the Second Walk is recalled some weeks after it occurred. The pleasures of Saint-Pierre Island are retraced after a lapse of twelve years. Quite often, moreover, Rousseau deplores his current inability to dream. In the second place the prose is external to the dreamer’s inward certitude and silent conviction. Rousseau’s discourse seems destined to unfold at some distance from the state it designates as most precious. In order to justify reverie the writer must concede that the reverie is over or not yet begun. The prose proclaims the in­ violability of the dreamer’s inward certainty but does so outside the inwardness of consciousness. Inevitably inadequate, the written word refers us to something we cannot grasp, to inner transcendence born of temporal or qualitative difference. Whether speaking of past happiness or present feeling, the words fall in some alien zone. The fleeting reverie, the deep emotion, remain out of reach. Yet this reverie and this emotion are repeatedly invoked. Is Rousseau condemned to inauthenticity for attempting to denote what cannot be denoted? A severe reader would be tempted to answer this question in the affirmative. Yet this is precisely the judgment that Rousseau is trying to refute. He argues that writing is not merely an act of reflection, of remembering at a distance, but also one of resuscitation. To write is to revive. If writing is not dreaming, all Rousseau’s effort

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goes to eliminating the difference between language and what it expresses. By nature this effort is poetic, although it takes on the aspect of poetic prose only rarely and intermittently. A sort of magical activation of language takes place, whose purpose is to reconquer the elusive essence of the ineffable past. Rousseau does everything he can to ensure that intimate transcendence and “inner distance” are nullified and subsumed within a restored immanence. Rousseau claims to be “writing his reveries.” Let us take him at his word. He says that he wants to “fix them in writing” and that he is determined to record them in a “journal” or “register.” The language is not that of the original reverie but its delayed echo or double: a dream of a dream. Not, as Rousseau sometimes insists, a faithful replica but a voice that, moved by the memory of an initial reverie (whose inspiration cannot be recaptured), allows itself to drift, to be swept away in a second reverie as descriptive reflection progresses. The memory of reverie thus becomes another reverie in a process to be repeated ad infinitum as Rousseau rereads what he has written: “I shall recall in reading them the pleasure I have in writing them and by thus reviving times past I shall as it were double the space of my existence.”3 The doubling through writing precedes and conditions the doubling through reading. “I shall apply the barometer to my soul.” The implication, as Marcel Raymond has shown, is that the variations in the soul of the dreamer are at once as unpredictable and as subject to strict natural laws as are the variations in the atmosphere; they are be­ yond the control of the human will. The statement also suggests that reverie can be described as accurately as the atmospheric pres­ sure, which in effect describes itself once the instrument is properly calibrated; no human intervention or calculation is required. The soul passively submits to change, just as the barometer passively records change. But the movements of the barometer are not them­ selves the variations in the atmospheric pressure but merely pro­ portional to those variations. In any case, Rousseau fails to adhere strictly to the barometric ideal. How could the relation between the primary and secondary reveries be kept constant? During the sec­ ondary reverie the fluctuations of the first are not merely tran­ scribed; they are interpreted and modified. The Fourth Walk, which claims the right to resort to fiction (innocent fiction, to be distin­ guished from falsehood in that it does no harm to anyone), is revealing in this regard. Here Rousseau makes the large (probably too large) claim that memory can be creative without ceasing to be truthful. What he says about the Confessions can easily be applied

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to the Rêveries themselves: “1 wrote them from memory. My memory often failed me or provided me with an incomplete picture, and I filled the gaps with details that I dreamed up to complete my memories, but that never contradicted them.”4 Rather than see the distance between present sentiment and past sentiment as a sign of irrevocable difference, and rather than divine failure in the disparity between the written word and its elusive object, Rousseau boasts of a double success: he claims not to have betrayed the past in exploring it from the vantage of the present and, further, that he has expressed the truth of the present by bringing it to life with the aid of memory. “By abandoning myself to both the memory of impressions received and to present feeling, 1 shall paint my state of mind twice over, as it was at the moment when an event occurred and as it was in the moment I described it.”5 Rousseau accords to the written word a privilege (for us the privilege of “literature” or, better, of poetry) that rescues it from inadequacy. Consciousness arrogates the right to invent itself without betraying the truth. Rousseau is convinced that the imagination can run unbridled to the brink of folly without ever committing a falsehood. In so doing, he says, the truth is merely multiplied. To read the Reveries is therefore to immerse oneself in the virtually continuous stream of a second reverie. This involves us in a series of disparate events, variously situated in the landscape of the past. These events are the building blocks, the objective basis of the secondary reverie. This secondary reverie sometimes takes the form of a smooth surface in which we see a reflection of some primary reverie (as in the Fifth Walk). Sometimes the secondary reverie recounts in an ironic tone the abrupt end of a primary reverie (as when Jean-Jacques is collecting plants on the Robaila and comes unexpectedly upon a stocking factory). Sometimes it lists the activ­ ities in which Rousseau engages as substitutes when fancy deserts him and his reveries cease. Sometimes, evoking an event whose effect was to delay the writing, Rousseau unforgettably retraces the ecstasy he feels as he comes to after having been knocked uncon­ scious (Second Walk). But always the secondary reverie comes back to the circumstances that compelled Rousseau to look outside hu­ man society for an atmosphere in which he could breathe. He traces the machinations of the plotters, the stratagems of the universal conspiracy against him. Clearly, the job of the secondary reverie is to combine incommensurate elements. These are caught up in the flow' of the writing, in the even rhythm of a mind determined to

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ward off all spells and ensure its own invulnerability. Thus the function of the secondary reverie is to subsume the multiplicity and discontinuity of lived experience in a leveling, compensating, and unifying discourse. Unity, once regained, can be projected backward on past life, to the point where, for creative memory, the past is restructured to resemble the work in progress, taking on its even rhythm and tranquil continuity, punctuated by the regular activity of the walks. “My entire life has been nothing but one long reverie, divided into chapters by the walks I took each day.” This simplification and unification are possible only as the result of transmutation. The mind must transform its surroundings and horizon as it transforms itself. Indeed, if reverie (in the sense of fable-making fancy) is a transmutation of images under the direction of desire, there is also an ascetic or impoverished form of reverie, which forgoes images and develops as a pure transmutation of feeling. Still more abstractly, using the tone of reflection or medi­ tation, reverie can begin with an idea of a situation (itself a product of the imagination) whose interpretation and significance it grad­ ually alters. In each case carrying out the transmutation is the dreamer’s essential aim. To say “transmutation” is not enough; all dreamers wish for some kind of metamorphosis. According to Rousseau the specific characteristic of reverie is that it is a clarifying transmutation. Whether its objects are imaginary figures, feelings, or ideas, the self is always the protagonist, and the psychic work of reverie always involves moving from a state of confusion and conflict to one of limpid simplicity. This is the common denominator of all forms of reverie. In this respect secondary reverie is just as good as primary reverie. It is inferior only in the sense that the primary reverie operates in the heat of th e present moment, whereas the secondary one operates in the relative cool of “secondary intentions,” in the memory or regret of cherished images, in the delayed representation of feelings. Fur­ thermore, the distinction is not absolute, because primary reverie, in its most intense moments, constantly resorts to reflection to stay ahead of lower levels of intellectual experience. Images and feelings whereby the mind raises itself to transparency must be eradicated or relegated to the past; the mind must continue to think of what was in order to fully savor, by contrast, the ecstasy of the present. On the other hand, secondary reverie would not develop unless some present feeling (malaise, anxiety, uncertainty, etc.) required recourse to a distant reality: the untouchable past, bygone ecstasies,

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impossible pleasures, ghosts of emotions, a past decision to write. It would not develop but for the purpose of creating, here and now, in the words that the dreamer strings together, the bittersweet conviction of serenity regained. In the First Walk Rousseau attempts to state his purposes in a long paragraph that exemplifies what I mean by secondary reverie and clarifying transmutation: Everything external is henceforth foreign to me. I no longer have any neighbors, fellow men, or brothers in this world. I live on earth as on some strange planet onto which I have fallen from the one 1 knew. All around me I can recognize nothing but objects thaL afflict and wound my heart, and I cannot look at anything that is close to me or round about me without discovering some subject for indignant scorn or painful emotion. Let me therefore detach my mind from these afflicting sights; they would only cause me pain, and to no end. Alone for the rest o f my life, since it is only in myself that I find consolation, hope, and peace of mind, my only remaining duty is toward myself and this is all I desire. This is my state o f mind as I return to the rigorous and sincere self-examination that I formerly called my Confessions. I am de­ voting my last days to studying myself and preparing the account that I shall shortly have to render. Let me give myself over entirely to the pleasure o f conversing with my soul, since this is the only pleasure that men cannot take away from me. If by meditating on my inner life I am able to order it better and remedy the faults that may remain there, my meditations will not be entirely in vain, and although I am now good for nothing on this earth, I shall not have totally wasted my last days. The free hours o f my daily walks have often been filled with delightful contemplations which I am sorry to have forgotten. Such reflections as I have in the future I shall preserve in writing; every time 1 read diem they will recall my original ecstasy. Thinking of the prize my heart deserved, I shall forget my misfortunes, my persecutors, and my disgrace.*’

This paragraph sums up the general progression of the First Walk, which begins with the words “Here I am alone in the world” and ends with Rousseau’s expressing his hope that he may “enjoy [his] innocence and finish [his] days peacef ully in spite of them.” Other paragraphs follow the same line, beginning with an evocation of solitude and injustice and ending with a promise of inner peace. The reverie flows in a series of waves, all tending in the same

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direction and nearly always repeating the same magical act of clar­ ifying transmutation. Here, the part abbreviates the whole. In many respects the First Walk observes the traditional precepts of classical rhetoric. Rhetoric prescribes that an orator consider the state (status, stasis) of a well-dehned question. He should begin by considering himself, then the person being judged, and finally the audience (whether judge, populace, or public in general). Who am I to speak about such a subject to such an audience. This is the question with which Rousseau begins the Discourse on Inequality. Here the same question is reexamined from the standpoint of the audience of reverie, namely, the self. Rousseau states his situation and then explains why he must take the parts not only of author but also of judge and accused. Along the way, however, a gradual transformation takes place: from exteriority to interiority, alien­ ation to intimacy, opacity to transparency, malaise to euphoria. This monologue is directed not toward the world but toward the self; the words are spoken to no outside audience, but they are spoken before us, the audience Rousseau has rejected. The first sentence of the paragraph calmly establishes the ex­ treme difference between the self and the outside world. It is a pathos-infused version of the Stoic theme of adiaphoria. The in­ dividual circumscribes his existence; objects outside himself are mentioned only to be summarily dismissed. For the expression “is foreign to me” is not a pure statement of fact: the shift from “ex­ ternal” to “foreign” exhibits a negative transmutation. It is the mind, in its predicative act, that determines the transition from a spatial sense (externality) to a moral one (absence of relations). From the subject (“everything external”) to the predicate (“for­ eign”) the attribute turns negative. In French the sentence is “Tout ce qui m’est extérieur m’est étranger désormais.” The predicate structure of the noun phrase (m'est extérieur) is the same as that of the verb phrase (m’est étranger); both use the same verb (est) and the same personal pronoun in the dative, (m'est), indicating concerned subjectivity and the persistent power of interpretive reflection. The adverb henceforth further adds to the subjective dimension of the sentence, but without dispelling the pervasive ambiguity between subjective and objective. The sentence seems merely to be taking note of an irreversible situation. Henceforth frequently connotes an act of will, a decision made at the present time that establishes a dividing line between past and future conduct. The decision is not apparent in the verb but hides in the adverb. Thus the factual statement merges into vague prediction and dissimulated will, un-

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dermining its objectivity; the observation seems to correspond not to a true state of fact but to an operation of the mind. Rousseau is not alone; he isolates himself, he creates his solitude. Abject res­ ignation creates the situation of alienation. Feeling surreptitiously arranges the facts. Because Rousseau never admits responsibility, however, he prefers objective forms that make his situation seem to be something that he endures rather than wills. Subsequent sentences explain this state of affairs. Note the use of expressions such as “in this world” and “on earth," obviously borrowed from the vocabulary of religion. These, by connoting exile, strengthen the idea of separation and give it specific: content. The space around Rousseau is depicted according to the norms of religious topology; its human population is gradually eliminated, leaving only hostile and inhuman presences. We move from a (neg­ ative) evocation of neighbors to one of objects that afflict . . . the heart. The image of the foreign planet is a hyperbole of spatial dislocation. The concrete surroundings are perceived in stupor. The idea of a fall (“onto which I have fallen”) suggests sudden and irreversible change. On a strange planet, objects no longer have the familiar, reassuring meaning that comes of having shared a common past. Henceforth, everything thal is “close or round about” is not only foreign but also a source of pain. By the fourth sentence we have shifted from a tone of resignation to one of plaint. The sentences are also longer. The soul’s suffering builds toward a crescendo, and the fourth sentence ends with “in­ dignant scorn” and “painful emotion.” A dark humor has overtaken the suffering soul. A feeling of melancholy, awakened by resig­ nation and solitude, has been festering within. Rousseau is moved by the plaintive sound of his own voice. But once this point of desperation is reached, clarifying reverie intervenes and works in the opposite direcdon. Between the fourth and fifth sentences a reversal occurs. Melancholy is swept away by a psychic current that seeks to restore the threatened integrity of the individual. The first gesture in this direction is the acdve re­ jection of the hostile world: “Let me therefore detach my mind from these afflicting sights.” Here, the imperative suggests the al­ most magical nature of the act of will. The world is of no impor­ tance. More precisely, the mind exercises its sovereign power to withdraw. Of the two contending lorces—the world and the self— one (the world) will disappear as a result of the acdon of the other (the self). Conflict is now but a memory. Yet since conflict is nec­ essary if healing is to occur (clarification must begin in obscurity),

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some trace of latent conflict must remain. Even as Rousseau prom­ ises himself to “forget his misfortunes,” he is calling them to mind. Intending to forget is not true forgetting. Even in the final sentence of the First Walk, when Rousseau speaks of the peace in which he hopes his life will end, he cannot refrain from contrasting this hoped-for beatitude with his enemies’ futile efforts to foil it: “at peace in spite of them.” “Afflicting sights” do not vanish; they are set aside, less abolished than denied. Their hostility is not lost but spent harmlessly in the distance. Rousseau disarms his enemies by declaring that he is beyond their reach. The mind discovers that it can escape a hostile world simply by ceasing to be concerned with it. The decisive conversion is marked by repetition of the verb s'occuper, as thought swings from depressed extroversion to joyful introversion: (a) “les pénibles objets dont je m'occuperais aussi dou­ loureusement qu’inutilement,” and (b) “je ne dois ni ne veux plus m'occuper que de moi.” Just as religious topology helped define the meaning of external space (“this world,” “on earth”), religious notions such as consola­ tion, hope, and peace are brought in to justify Rousseau’s preoc­ cupation with himself. Of course Rousseau stacks the deck in his favor when he allows himself to dispense graces, which believers would say can be dispensed only by God. The forward rush of the prose is slowed by the juxtaposition of these three nouns. They give Rousseau’s sentence a feeling of calm abundance (without redundancy). Signifying beatitude, they contrast with other triads in the second and last sentences of the paragraph: (a) “neighbors, fellow men, or brothers,” and (b) “misfortune, persecutors, and disgrace.” Still more important, note that consolation, hope, and peace indicate the soul’s reconciliation with the three dimensions of time: the past (through consolation), the future (through hope), and the present (in peace) once more become habitable. The development of reverie here corresponds to a narrowing of space. The self withdraws from the world. But in compensation it accords itself the power to travel freely through time. It rediscovers its past and anticipates its future. In two successive sentences Rous­ seau mentions his desire to continue his earlier experiment in au­ tobiography and his expectation of appearing soon before God’s judgment. To be concerned with oneself, then, is first of all to reestablish inner continuity. Clarifying transmutation rescues the self from hostile territory, where it is under attack from all sides, and brings it into the refuge of private time, where the mind is free to explore without impediment. From that moment a new

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space is free to develop: a temporalized space, with the self at the center, and animated and populated by expansive feeling. It is through this space that Rousseau strolls. For the time being, as Rousseau writes the page we are reading, inner continuity has yet to be effectively reestablished. It is only a project, which takes shape within his reverie and tends to assume Ihe force of reality, just as, a short while earlier, the image of total alienation assumed the force of reality for inner conviction. Reverie takes up the idea of self-concern and develops it in a number of ways. Different senses of the word concern are tried out. The second part of the paragraph examines the various possible purposes of “conversing with oneself.” First there is a self-knowledge, self-examination, self-study. But self-knowledge is immediately sub­ ordinated to a personal eschatology; its purpose is to permit a more faithful rendering of accounts to the supreme judge. Is this the end of reverie? Rousseau alludes to other purposes. A more im­ mediate moral goal is to amend and correct his inner attitudes. The idea that he is “now good for nothing on this earth” almost immediately defuses the moral purpose, however. As the reverie progresses, it is as if all the goals ascribed to future activity are abandoned one by one. Each is mentioned only to permit progress to the next stage. The aim is to advance to a place beyond all goals and to shun that which, in any goal, subordinates the individual to external authority. To offer oneself to God’s judgment, to amend one’s ways, is still to remain subject to the requirements of an Other, or of morality, which governs action among others. Self-knowledge in itself, when elaborated qua knowledge, presupposes an internal difference between the consciousness that knows and the person known. Rousseau’s reverie endeavors to eliminate this exteriority, to erase this difference. To converse with oneself is not a means to a remote ultimate end but a supreme end in itself, a final goal. And the written word, which fixes reverie, becomes the foundation of this encounter of self with self. 'File ultimate end of clarifying transmutation is the prospect of ecstasy, repeated indefinitely through reading. Note the gradation of* terms marking the gradual illu­ mination of the soul as this train of thought proceeds: “pleasure of conversing,” “delightful contemplations,” “will recall my original ec­ s ta s y Clearly the peak of happiness comes just as the mind is about to turn and recognize itself in its fixed image. Rereading and in­ definitely repeating the past offers the possibility of pure selfpossession, safe from both change and the world’s hostility. Para­ doxically, in reverie memory is awakened and forgetfulness made

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easy. It offers a utopian prophesy of an end to all labor and a return to a personal golden age, to a time of absolute abandon, passivity, and relaxation. Jean-Jacques effortlessly savors the perpetuated presence of bygone contemplations. He effortlessly escapes from his misfortunes and from the malice of his persecutors. This sus­ pension of time, this preservation of the present safe from all du­ ration, is the peace that Rousseau has mentioned a few lines earlier, after consolation (oriented toward the past) and hope (oriented toward the future). Inner presence is replete, separated from the evil outside by an unbreachable gap: these are the luxuries that Rousseau promises himself. He does not possess them yet, which is why reverie laboriously seeks to obtain them through that welling up of desire whereby it becomes aware of their existence. In fact, none of the subsequent nine walks offers a pure image, taken from life, of a sustained and continuous “delightful contem­ plation” during the course of a promenade. None maintains an atmosphere of happiness throughout. Happy moments stand out as rays of light against a dark background, just as in the First Walk. It is as if reverie can only begin in confrontation with the hostile world of “afflicting objects.” Rousseau makes this point quite clearly in the preamble to the Eighth Walk: The various periods of short-lived prosperity that I have enjoyed have left me with almost no agreeable memories of deep and lasting impressions. By contrast, in all the hardships of my life I was invariably full of tender, touching, and delightful emotions, which poured a healing balm over the wounds o f my broken heart and seemed to change its pains into pleasures.7

To change pain into pleasure: that is surely the best way of de­ scribing the alchemy of desire that I have been calling clarifying transmutation. Darkness and pain are its raw materials. Reverie grows warm and memorable only by contrast with the oppressive feelings from which it delivers the dreamer. Jean-Jacques’s “inner weather” is unstable, a succession of fair days and foul, not only because his feelings are labile and his happiness ephemeral but also because that happiness is sustained by a sense of misfortune. Rous­ seau needs to reexperience pain in order to savor the pleasure of liberating himself from it. In none of the ten walks does Rousseau forget entirely about evil and experience total peace. Rereading them, he may never have experienced the perfect pleasure he promised himself. Evil is

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omnipresent in an ambiguous dual role; it is a cloud hanging over Rousseau’s happiness but also an essential pretext for the exorcism of clarifying reverie. The reveries may be “walks” in the sense that the writing ambles along at a leisurely pace, but they are surely not a record of Rousseau’s thoughts while walking, not even a “formless record.”8 In writing Jean-Jacques is occupied with interpretation and emotion born of interpretation, but the event or sensation he is interpreting rarely stems from the period immediately preceding the writing. It comes from a much more distant past. Rousseau requires a certain distance before he can interpret the facts. As he often repeated, events take on their meaning in reminiscence (and that meaning is often retouched or even invented out of whole cloth by Jean-Jacques). The most recent event mentioned explicitly is “yesterday’s walk” (Fourth Walk). Other instances pertain to visits paid to him a few days earlier (Ninth Walk). In that time Rousseau arranged the details of the event and subjected them to his own exegesis. The only time he says “today” is at the beginning of the Tenth Walk, and his point is to date the writing precisely with respect to the major event that occurred fifty years earlier: his meeting with Mme de Warens. The last walk is concerned with the memory of the miraculous interview that ended Rousseau’s flight from Geneva, the inaugural “walk,” so to speak, of Jean-Jacques’s life. The lapse of time between event and meditation is in this case particularly long. Thus, the passage we have been discussing sets forth a plan that would never be fully realized. To suspend time and create a timeless reflection of one’s life in writing, fixing happiness in a written image, is the expression of a wish to escape from the confusion and imperfection of the present; reverie never realizes this wish, yet it never ceases to strive in that direction. Significantly, the su­ preme state, in which “time is nothing” for the soul, is evoked in the Fifth Walk by a man situated in an oppressive time who turns nostalgically toward the past. Note the use of die past tense: “Such is die state in which I found myself.” As he writes this sentence, the author of the Rêveries stands in relation to the ecstatic contemplator of the Saint-Pierre Island as Orpheus stands in relation to Eurydice, estranged yet full of desire, looking back as Eurydice follows, for­ ever out of reach. I hope that these remarks have made clear what I mean by clarifying transmutation. Against a dark background of anguish and hostility,

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reverie simultaneously produces and deploys a series of arguments, images, and feelings, but only in order to exhaust and nullify them all, save one: the feeling of an unalterable and limpid presence. Feeling of existence, Great Being, and perfect self-sufficiency: strictly speaking these are not equivalents. If Rousseau uses them interchangeably, the reason is that they all designate the point at which the movement of transmutation ends, the intransmutable, that which neither history nor thought can ever change, and which, in the depths of consciousness or the world is at once the source of all power and the residue that remains when all power has been abdicated. Rousseau uses reflection to overcome the reflexive division into subject and object; he seeks a position wherein consciousness both possesses and abandons itself in unreflective immediacy. Similarly, clarifying transmutation consists in a series of metamorphoses tend­ ing toward the immutable, desire for which guides and animates the whole process. But “everything on earth is in constant flux.” To feel such intense desire for peace, transparency, and repose is to become involved in endless efforts of pacification, in ceaseless movement toward unattainable nonmovement. Passion for the im­ mutable requires that reverie continually start anew.

g

On Rousseau’s Illness I was almost born dead, and they had little hope o i saving me. I brought with me the seed o f a disorder which has grown stronger with the years, and now gives me only occasional intervals of relief in which to suffer more painfully in some other way. But one of my father’s sisters, a nice sensible woman, took such good care of me dial I survived.1

But the author of Emile shows less solicitude toward sickly children: He who takes charge o f a sickly and valetudinarian pupil changes his office from that o f tutor to nurse. In caring for a useless life he squanders the time intended to increase its value. . . . I would not take responsibility for a sickly and dyspeptic child, even if he were to live to be eighty.2

We find the same harshness toward the weak in the second Dis­ course. In stating the principles of the state of nature Rousseau says, with no hint of regret, that “nature treats” children “exactly as the Law of Sparta treated the children of its citizens: it makes those who are well constituted strong and robust and makes the others die/ ’3 The contrast between the two attitudes is striking. Rousseau speaks to us as both a born valetudinarian and an aposde of merciless natural selection. On the one hand he is alive only by miracle; his life is nothing more than a precarious postponement of death. On the other hand he accepts with tranquil indifference (or, rather, with approving admiration) the sacrifice of the sickly, as if unaware that he himself would have numbered among the victims. In the end, though, the very symmetry of these two anithetical aspects of Rousseau allows them to be treated as a single problem; both are expressions of the same torment. For convenience I shall use psychoanalytic terminology and speak of a sadomasochistic per­ sonality structure: inverted, the pained cry of the sickly child be­ comes cold, cruel severity toward the weak. Contempt for weakness becomes further grounds for deploring a life marked by illness from the beginning. There is in Rousseau an obvious appetite for suffering and talk of suffering. Nevertheless, he is sincere when he advocates eliminating the weak in order to perfect the health of mankind. Rousseau feels pleasure mixed with pain whenever he is wounded or wounding. Because of his fragile health, moreover. First published in Yale French Studies 28 (1962).

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his ideal of robustness embodied everything he lacked. Perpetually afraid of relapse, he had his urinary tract probed frequently for obstructions. His governess more often than not served him as a nurse. Ultimately he dismissed all his doctors, but his refusal of medical treatment was just the obverse of his earlier anxious quest for assistance. (He once traveled to Montpellier for a consultation.) How could he have avoided wishing his health were better? How could he have avoided dreaming that somehow the spontaneous powers of the body and nature, miraculously in harmony, might prove sufficient to keep him healthy, without his having to worry about his fragile condition? The ability of the organism to maintain itself without art was so rare that Rousseau included it among the lost privileges of the state of nature. In paradise man knew no fear of death because he had not yet discovered reflection. As soon as he progressed beyond this stage of animal happiness and re­ nounced his brutish insouciance, however, he acquired the ability to anticipate the future: he saw himself dying, and death became a permanent feature of his consciousness. At the same time man learned to imagine; but in wanting to satisfy his imaginary needs, he lost the primitive equilibrium. All artificial needs are a source of illness. Thus imagination, which might have been nothing more than an innocent anticipation of life, became in fact an anticipation of death. To live like an animal, moment by moment, is to enjoy essential health; it is to ignore amour propre and not to worry about the opinions of others, work, or accumulation. These are the superfluous things that ultimately come to compose our consciousness of our mortal destiny. It has not been sufficiently noted that Rousseau’s well-known condemnation of reflection is pronounced in the name of health: “If nature intended us to be healthy, I almost dare to assert that the state of reflection is a state against nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.” What does he mean by this? His concern, I think, is not so much to condemn reflection (an ambivalent power, which he sees elsewhere as part of the ground of man’s spirituality) as to emphasize the good fortune of natural man, still incapable of using his reason. Reflection and imagination bring not only benefits but also toxic effects, hence there is no reason to fear their absence. The man of nature wants for nothing. Devoid as he is of technology and tools, survival is easy for him; only enough time need be wrested from the pleasure of sleep to gather up the abundant fruits of the primeval forest. Desire knows no excess, and man’s well-being is durable. No moral force or shame

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impedes the spontaneous expression of his wants, which remain within limits compatible with lasting happiness. Though limited, this happiness might have been eternal had man not transgressed his proper boundaries. Natural man, only dimly and confusedly aware of his health, had no history. He remained the same for thousands of years until “circumstances” required him to make use of his dormant perfectibility. Thus begins the history of reflection, imagination, and labor: history is a disease. But how is man to heal himself of history? Not by rejecting it. The answer is found in Emile and the Social Contract, works in which man (individually or com­ munally) dedicates himself to overcoming history by means of art. In the myth that grew up around Rousseau the man, these aspects of his thought certainly played a key role. In the West and elsewhere the figure of the suffering healer is treated with unusual respect. The image of Christ (with whom Rousseau, as R M. Masson re­ minds us, is often linked)4 is but one of many expressions of a universal archetype. Mankind, tormented by anguish and disease, likes to hear words of salvation and liberation from a man who has been stigmatized and singled out by pain. A powerful charisma attaches to extreme isolation, and profound suffering further en­ courages consecration. This is one aspect of the god Dionysus, and it is perhaps this that attracted Hölderlin, the poet of Dionysus, to Rousseau. Underlying the myth of the suffering healer is the con­ viction that painful isolation is the price to be paid for achieving the greatest presence, the most efficacious proximity. Shamans, we know, become healers only after enduring an initiation-malady in solitude, sometimes for a period of years. The astonishing success of Mary Baker Eddy owes much to her bout with paralysis. Similar examples are legion. It would be impudent to claim that Rousseau tried consciously to impose this image of himself. Prestige of this kind cannot be won by calculation; it results from blind complicity with the expectations of the public. A vague collective hope is re­ ceived as a call by a person who comes increasingly to embody the ideal of the stigmatized savior.5 In any case, it is certain that many of Rousseatfs admirers saw him and loved him as a suffering man. For all his weakness he was the one who proclaimed the punishment of a guilty society and the “healing of ills.” The afflictions of his body were converted into a strange and radiant sovereignty. Con­ versely, as in his ecstatic experience on the road to Vincennes, the most overwhelming intellectual intuitions left the body defeated, in tears, confused and bewildered.

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Yet the historian wants to know more about Rousseau’s malady. This is a risky undertaking, and we must resign ourselves in advance to the possibility of failure or, at best, partial success. If we assume that the documents will give a clear-cut answer, we will make them say what we went to hear; knowledge will hardly be advanced. I confess that I do not much like the curiosity that people often exhibit about the ailments of illustrious men—men who had bodies and died, which makes them just like everyone else. For all they might have wished to be pure art and language, to hide behind the perfection of the work, death caught up with them. There is noth­ ing illegitimate about considering great men as mortals, as we do when we examine their ills: the great, too, suffer from tooth decay, indigestion, and fits of coughing and are plagued by the spirochete. Posterity cunningly takes its revenge, discovers the obscene pres­ ence of viscera, and dwells on the miseries of the flesh. Enough admiration, enough spreading of incense: serious men, wearing protective aprons, announce that the time has come to understand, and shove a cadaver at you across the autopsy table, as though preparing to find in some tissue lesion the secret source of works produced by once free and vital beings. Some “pathographers” have been naïve enough to think that Baudelaire can be explained by his syphilis, Chopin by his tuberculosis, and El Greco by his astig­ matism. Everyone is whittled down to size. But a question remains: Why aren’t all sick people geniuses? Every artist leaves behind his mortal remains, but in them we will never find the source of art. The question of Rousseau’s malady has been highly controversial. More than just the validity of the diagnosis is at stake. For JeanJacques has always been on trial before the bar of history, and a lucky diagnosis might just decide the case. Bien-pensants writers in the late nineteenth century argued doggedly that Rousseau was a “degenerate” who bore all the stigmata of the “neuropathic con­ stitution,” not to say of “moral insanity.” If so, the case is closed: Rousseau is discredited, he is a “morbid genius,” and his work, corrupt at its very source, is worthless. Granted, he may be inter­ esting as a symptom, but he is unworthy of serious study. So much for Robespierre, who did take Rousseau seriously. The other side argues that Rousseau’s illness was not of such central and primary importance. It was a wound, an accident, a calamity whose source was external. The problem then becomes to distinguish between the authentic Rousseau and the man driven into madness and depression by a steadily worsening case of uremia. The admirable

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writer, social reformer, and educator is the real Rousseau; the para­ noiac and obsessive is the victim of nephritis. The follies of his youth were merely the psychological consequences of a malformed urethra. Rousseau was admittedly insane at various times in his life, but he was not responsible for his insanity. Diagnosis: in­ terpretive delusions secondary to uremia. Dr. Elosu is absolutely certain of it.6 Her hypothesis has been welcomed enthusiastically by commentators eager to exonerate Rousseau. The determination to argue either for or against Rousseau results in considerable distortion. Is it essential that medical examination yield a verdict: guilty or not guilty? Admittedly, Rousseau himself tries to force us to choose; he asks to be judged by posterity. Wellmeaning physicians are only too delighted, for all their grave de­ meanor, to be called as expert witnesses. If there is passion in this case, the accused himself set the tone. At the risk of infidelity to Rousseau, I think it better to avoid this trap. The contradictory diagnoses mentioned above are both funda­ mentally flawed. They regard disease as a monolithic essence, an independent being, and disagree only about its place in Rousseau’s life. Experts for the prosecution see the malady at the heart of Rousseau’s personality, a central alteration, while experts for the defense see it as radically alien, a sort of parasite on the organism. But the name of the disease exists only in the mind, and the only concrete reality is the behavior of the afflicted individual. In at­ tempting to render a scientific judgment, our physicians have merely applied a “modern” nosological concept to a confused situation that cannot be described so neatly. In any case, the “modernity” of the diagnosis is open to question. Consider the rather amusing list of diagnoses thought at one time or another to be definitive. During his own lifetime, Rousseau defended himself against the charge that he was suffering from melancholia (in the medical sense of the term).7 Lypemania and depressive monomania were thought, around 1830, to be more precise terms.8 No sooner had neurosis and degeneracy become fashionable than they were applied to Rousseau.9 Then came the notions of interpretive delusion and paranoia.10 Pierre Janet saw Rousseau as an exemplary “psychas­ thenic,” a notion coined by Janet himself.11 One clinician, looking for a sonorous diagnosis, came up with “obsessive spasmodic neur­ asthenia, arteriosclerosis, and progressive cerebral atrophy second­ ary to neuroarthritis.”12 The concept of schizophrenia was vague enough to embrace Rousseau’s symptoms.13 The psychoanalyst René Laforgue saw Rousseau as a latent homosexual with hysteriform

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obsessions and reactions.14Dr. Elosu, as I mentioned, blames uremic poisoning for Rousseau’s delusions.15 More recent experts have accepted the diagnosis of “paranoid delusions” as defiined by Kretschmer.16 And what about the urinary disorder? Many believe that an organic constriction was the cause of Rousseau’s urine re­ tention. This still leaves the question of where in the urinary tract the malformation was located. A phimosis? A constriction of the urethra where it passes through the prostate. A valvular malfor­ mation where the urethra joins the bladder? For Poncet and Leriche, whose paper17 is the foundation of Elosu’s book, “the constriction occurred in the bulbo-membranous region, one of the primary sites for this anatomical defect.” Thus the texts point to innumerable possibilities, none of which can be verified. Still bolder commentators suggest that Rousseau was hypospadiae [that is, suffering from a deformity of the penis in which the urethra opens on its under surface—T r a n s .] .18 None of the five children he had placed in public orphanages was fath­ ered by him, and perhaps Thérèse merely simulated pregnancy to make sure of Jean-Jacques’s affections. But the notion of functional spasm also has its defenders. As early as the eighteenth century it was suspected that Rousseau’s problems with micturition were ner­ vous in origin. Régis pointed to urinary neuropathy. Psychiatrists who diagnose Rousseau as paranoid see his urinary complaints for the most part as manifestations of the hypochondriacal phase that generally precedes the development of paranoid delusions. And indeed, as soon as the delusions take the upper hand and Rousseau becomes obsessed with the idea of a plot against him, we hear less about difficulties of micturition and repeated probes.19 These varied opinions and diagnoses have much to teach us about the evolution of medical thinking from 1800 to 1970, but we learn little about Rousseau. It is hardly surprising to find believers in somatic origins of mental disorders pitted against proponents of psychic etiology. In order to forestall the inevitable objections, both sides concede many points to their opponents. The urinary dis­ orders stem from an anatomical malformation, some say, but we must not rule out the possibility of a heavy “cortical overload.” Others insist that the urinary problems have a psychic cause but admit that a man who has himself probed daily may well contract a urinary infection even if there was originally no organic lesion. Let us return to the texts, but not in order to propose yet another diagnosis. We can hardly expect to do better than so many excellent

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physicians. The first point to notice is that Rousseaus medical his­ tory, rich as it is, contains liule evidence apart from Lhe patient’s own declarations. Verification is impossible. The best “clinical in­ stinct” in the world is useless when the facts cannot be checked. When the patient is absent, doctors can only speculate. What more can we do? First of all, we can ask what the disease meant to Rousseau. It is not enough to know exactly what ailments a man suffered from. We must also ask how he tolerated those ailments. Was he or was he not on good terms with the disease? Did he succumb to his suffering or pretend to ignore it? In the absence of a precise diagnosis, we can still ask how Rousseau ex­ perienced his affliction and how it affected his life and writing. Rousseau was for all practical purposes unaware of being men­ tally ill. Once or twice, early in the development of his “persecution complex,” he blames his wild imagination for deluding him. But for the most part Rousseau in his final years holds the most aberrant convictions without the least suspicion of their pathological nature. His urinary disorder was another matter. This disease he minutely observed, described on numerous occasions, exhibited to anyone and everyone, and almost coddled. Why was he so attentive to the ailment, and why was he so eager to tell others about it? Other men have attempted to conceal similar torments. We can be more certain that Boileau had a urethral problem than we can that Rousseau did. Indirect evidence confirms it in Boileau’s case, but not a word is said about it in his own work. Rousseau tells all. Why? Was he an exhibitionist? Was he trying to imitate Montaigne, who hid noth­ ing about his kidney stones? The literary precedent may not be insignificant, but it is still a fairly superficial motive. A more sub­ stantial reason is that by confessing his most intimate miseries right away, Jean-Jacques gives proof of his sincerity. If he has the courage to bare his wounds and to talk openly about his follies and his most wicked actions (the stolen ribbon, his masochistic predilections, his abandoned children), then we have no reason to suspect the less compromising details. We can trust him when he speaks of his intentions, ever pure, and his feelings, always benevolent and kind. The things that are difficult to confess prove the veracity of all the rest. If he had other “crimes” or shameful acts on his conscience, what modesty, what hypocrisy, would cause him to hold back? He has veered so far into indecency that we can be sure he has painted himself whole, intus et in cute. Now, this is precisely what he wants us to believe: the Confessions are die plea of a hunted man, who feels, rightly and wrongly, that terrible accusations hang over him.

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The purpose of the book is to reestablish for posterity a true image of Jean-Jacques, which for the time being has been supplanted by a monstrous image created by his persecutors. What are the charges against him? Consider the anonymous tract attacking Rousseau that was circulated by Voltaire, the Sentiment des Citoyens: Päinfully, blushingly, we confess that he is a man who still bears the ominous marks o f debauchery and who, disguised as a circus performer, drags about from Village to Village and Mountain to Mountain the unfortunate woman whose mother he killed and whose children he exposed at the gates o f a hospital.

The calumny and slander were clearly real, but in Rousseau’s imag­ ination they were magnified until they became a universal hue and cry directed against him. To this there was only one possible re­ sponse: to reveal the exact nature of his illness down to the smallest details, to explain why he carried his probing apparatus wherever he went, and to say why he was compelled to dress in an Armenian costume. Rousseau had his Paris publisher print copies of the slan­ derous tract (which he wrongly attributed to Pästor Jacob Vernes of Geneva) with corrective notes: I want to make, as simply as I can, the statement that this article seems to require. Never has any disease o f the kind mentioned here by the author, great or small, tainted my body. The disease with which I am afflicted bears not the slightest relation to it. It was born with me, as persons still living who took care of me in childhood can attest. This disease is known to Messieurs Malouin, Morand, Thyerri, Daran, and Brother Come. If it suggests the slightest sign of debauchery, I beg them to contradict me.20

Even earlier, in his testament of 1763, written before the Sentiment des citoyens, Rousseau had been at pains to refute in great detail the charge that he was suffering from a venereal disease. It is worth citing from this singular document at length: The strange malady that has consumed me for thirty years and in all likelihood will end my days is so different from all other diseases o f the same genus and with which it has long been con­ fused by physicians and surgeons that I think it is a matter of public welfare that it should be examined after my death in its very seat. That is why I wish for my body to be opened if possible by skilled men and for the state o f the seat o f the malady to be carefully observed; I have attached hereto a note of instruction to the surgeons. The suffering parts must be affected in an ex-

On Rousseau*s Illness 373

traordinary way, because everything that has been done by the most skilled and learned artists for the past twenty years to relieve my suffering has done nothing but irritate it. I further state that I have never had any o f the diseases that often give rise to maladies of this kind, for which I confess I have only my good fortune to thank. I am certain of what I say, and I insist on this point, because some physicians and surgeons have refused to believe me, and they are wrong. It is important that they not search for the cause of the disease where none lies. . . . For twenty years I have been tormented by retention of urine, from which I suffered even in childhood and which I long attributed to a stone. Because neither M. Morand nor the most skilled surgeons were ever able to probe me, I remained unsure of this cause until finally Brother Come managed to introduce a very thin algali, with which he determined that there was no stone.

(Let me interrupt at this point to remark that if none of the phy­ sicians managed to push the probe into the bladder, many of Rous­ seau’s attempts to probe himself were probably not complete either.) My urine retention was not occasional, as with those who suffer from stones, who can urinate with a full stream and then suddenly not be able to urinate at all. My ailment is a chronic condition. My urine never flows in a full stream, and it is never entirely cut off; the flow is simply more or less obstructed and is never entirely free, so that I experience an anxiety, an almost constant need, which I can never satisfy. I note, apart from this unevenness of flow, a constant tendency for the urine to diminish from year to year, which suggests to me that sooner or later it will stop altogether. It has seemed to me that the obstacle . . . was penetrating deeper and deeper into the bladder, so that each year longer bougies had to be used; most recently, unable to find bougies long enough, I decided to make longer ones. Baths, diuretics, and all the other remedies that usually bring relief in cases of this kind have never done anything but aggravate mine; bleeding has never brought the slightest relief. The physi­ cians and surgeons have never done anything but reason about my case in a vague way intended more to console than to enlighten me. Unable to heal the body, they have tried to heal the spirit. Their treatments have done no good for either. I have lived far more peacefully since I made up my mind to do without their services. Brother Come claims to have found the prostate enlarged and hard and scirrhous. The seat o f the malady is surely in the prostate or the neck of the bladder or the urethra and probably in all three. By examining these parts, the cause can very likely be ascertained.

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This cause has nothing to do with the effects o f an old venereal disease. I declare that I have never suffered from a disease of this kind. I told this to the doctors who treated me. I judged that several o f them did not believe me. They were wrong.21

In every respect Rousseau wants to be exceptional. His disease, like his character and destiny, is without parallel. Nature broke the mold in which she made him. Above all, no one should insinuate that he led a life of debauch. To this charge, with which he is obviously obsessed, he would respond by writing the Confessions, with their detailed account of his loves and adventures; everyone can see that his conquests are hardly of the sort to boast about. Other memoir writers brag of their victories; Rousseau is interested mainly in demonstrating and defending his timidity. Recounting without shame his autoerotic behavior and his failures with women (such as his strange behavior in Venice with the charming Zulietta), he proves that he ran little risk of catching a venereal disease. The one time he did approach a courtesan with greater success, he immediately believed himself to be contaminated and hastened to consult a surgeon, who reassured him by saying that he was “so peculiarly made that I could not easily catch an infection.”22 The congenital defect that sets him apart from other men and condemns him to long suffering also helps protect him against defamatory accusations. Against the enemies who say that he is “rotten with pox,” Rousseau enlists his illness as an ally. In order to contradict the slander he is secretly willing to accept impotence and infirmity. And that is not all. The charge is not merely that he is syphilitic; he is convinced (see the Dialogues) that he is universally regarded as a satyr, who rapes any woman who falls under his power. He believes that he is seen as aggressively and brutally virile. Vehement as his enemies’ hatred was, this charge was never raised; Rousseau invents it out of whole cloth, only to refute it at length and in great detail. He thereby reveals, I think, the anxiety he felt in connection with all forms of direct sexual gratification. What is the source of this anxiety? It undoubtedly dates from the time he was a child in Geneva. He was taught above all else that physical love is repulsive: Not only had I not till adolescence any clear ideas concerning sexual intercourse, but my muddled thoughts on the subject al­ ways assumed odious and disgusting shapes. I had a horror of prostitutes which has never left me, and I could not look on a debauchee without contempt and even fear. Such has been my horror of immorality, ever since the day when, on my way to Petit Saconex along the sunken road, I saw the holes in the earth on

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either side where I was told such people performed their forni­ cations. When I thought of this I was always reminded of the coupling of dogs, and my stomach turned over at the very thought.23

Desire and carnal satisfaction were severely condemned. Any sensual gratification was illegitimate and wrong. What was Rous­ seau to do? Between chaste obedience to the letter of the law and cynical transgression there was a variety of intermediate solutions, all more or less consciously unsatisfactory: fantasy, perverse be­ havior, “incomplete” gratification, sublimation of desire, and ag­ gressiveness toward oneself. Among the presumed effects on Rousseau are passivity, onanism, sprees, and exhibitionism, as well as those “feminine” traits that have led some observers to speculate about “latent homosexuality.” The sensitive soul, given more to dreams and passive endurance than to action, finds in sickness an excellent excuse for isolation and introversion. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that the repeated probing of Rous­ seau s urinary tract suggests a “receptive urethral eroticism,” a hy­ pothesis that should not be dismissed as ridiculous.24 In any case, Rousseau exhibits an infirmity, as much physical as it is psycholog­ ical, that serves as an alibi for wrongful acts he might have com­ mitted. Rather than be suspected of such acts, he prefers to mutilate himself symbolically or to make himself seem ridiculous in love. A willing cadaver, he offers himself in advance to the surgeons who will discover his anatomical defect. He is eager to submit to this final aggression, this opening of his body. Clearly, then, even if his urinary problems originally had a so­ matic cause, Rousseau uses them to express his refusal of and anguish over sexuality. He wants to retreat from “normal” sexual behavior, and his disease providentially obliges him to do so. It has been observed that his pollakiuria is worst when he is in “society,” particularly in the presence of women: This infirmity was mainly responsible for my avoidance o f the salon circles and prevented me from being alone with women. The mere idea of the state into which I could be plunged by this urge was capable o f giving it to me so badly that I feared I would cause a scandal, and I would rather have died than that.25

The malady clearly seems to be the somatic expression of a proud and anxious negation. Note, further, that nearly all Rousseau’s acute attacks come as he enters or is on the brink of entering into a situation of social dependency: at the beginning of his stay in Venice, when he must obey Lhe orders of a capricious and tyrannical

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ambassador; when M. de Francueil, the collector-general of taxes, offers him a position as bookkeeper; and when he is to be pre­ sented to the king to receive a pension. Each time, Rousseau, who accepts no compromise, no subjugation, says No! with his entire body. The disease is much more than a pretext: it is a form of behavior. The need to urinate and the refusal to accept an intol­ erable situation of dependence are identical. Almost always with Rousseau, the body speaks first. Listen to the following extraor­ dinary lines, which Rousseau thought of sending to the Marquis de Mirabeau: I still tremble at the thought o f myself in a circle of women, forced to wait uniil some fine talker has had his say, not daring to leave until someone asked if I was going, finding in a well-lit staircase other beautiful women who held me back, a court full of carriages in ceaseless motion ready to run me down, chambermaids staring at me, and lackeys lining the walls making fun of me; unable to find a wall, a nook, or a wretched little corner to hide in; in a word unable to piss without making a spectacle of myself and on some noble leg clad in white stockings.26

No anatomical evidence can tell us what use a man made of his malady. Rousseau’s autopsy, for all its disappointing inadequacy, could hardly be more instructive. At Ermenonville on July 3, 1778, the day after Rousseau’s death, the doctors opened his body. What abnormalities did they find? UA very considerable quantity (more than eight ounces) of fluid [sérosité] flowed between the brain tissue and the surrounding membranes.” Rousseau, the doctors con­ cluded, had died of “serous apoplexy.” This diagnosis has long since vanished from our medical texts. What about the urinary tract? Here is the note: We were unable to find in the kidneys, bladder, ureters, or ur­ ethra, nor in die seminiferous organs and ducts, any part or point that was unhealthy or contrary to nature. The volume, capacity, and consistency o f all the internal parts of the lower abdomen were perfectly sound. . . . Thus, there is reason to believe that the pains in the region o f the bladder and difficulties with urination that M. Rousseau experienced, especially in the earliest years of his life, originated in spasms o f the parts adjacent to the neck of the bladder and o f the neck itself, or from an increase in the volume of the prostate, which causes were alleviated as the body grew weak and thin in old age.27

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To be sure, the autopsy technique was most likely rudimentary. “All Rousseau’s medical history argues against such negative post­ mortem findings,’* insist Poncet and Leriche. But all Rousseau’s emotional and moral history gives reason for pause. Unique in­ dividuals always die unremarkable deaths.-8

ifè Notes

Chapter One 1. Discours sur les sciences et les arts, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1959), III: 7. Subsequent citations will use the abbreviated form O.C., III, 7. 2. Ibid. 3. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, “Ode à la fortune,“ Odes, II, 6, 12th stanza. 4. Confessions, book 8, O.C., I, 352 (328). Numbers in parentheses indicate page number in English editions listed in translator’s note. 5. O.C., III, 14. 6. Horace, De arte poetica, line 25. 7. O.C., III, 8 -9 . 8. Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, O.C., IV, 966. 9. O.C., I, 1165. 10. Confessions, book 1, O.C., I, 5(17). 11. Confessions, first draft. Annales Jean f aeques Rousseau (Geneva) 4 (1908): 3; O.C., I, 1149. 12. Confessions, book 1, O.C., I, 8 (19). 13. Ibid., 9 (20-21). 14. Ibid., 8 (20). 15. Ibid., 5 (17). 16. Ibid., 20 (30). 17. Ibid., 1 8 -2 0 (28-30). 18. Ibid., 19 (29). 19. Ibid., 1 9 -2 0 (3 0 —31). On the theme o f transparency in Rousseau, see P. Burgelin, La philosophie de l’existence de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris, 1952), 293-95 and passim. 20. Ibid. 21. Emile, book 3, O.C., IV, 431. 22. Confessio?is, book 1, O.C., I, 21 (31). 23. Lettres morales, O.C., IV, 1092. 24. It may be objected that use o f the Confessions should be avoided if we are looking for evidence about Rousseau’s initial experiences. The Confessions were written in response to slanderous accusations, and the theme of unjustified accusation may be not an authentic part of Rousseau’s 379

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P a g e s 11 — 1 6

childhood but a projection into the past o f his paranoid obsessions. But it so happens that the earliest surviving example o f Rousseau’s writing, a letter written to a cousin before he was twenty, was written to exonerate the writer: “All of this tells you something about the accursed character of the person who encouraged you to reproach me as you have done. . . . May this portrait reveal to you the baseness o f his behavior and help you overcome the prejudices against me that you have made your own” Cor­ respondance générale de J.-J. Rousseau, annotated by Théophile Defour and edited by Pierre-Paul Plan (Paris, 1924—34), 20 vols, (hereafter referred to as Correspondance générale DP); Correspondance générale de J.-J. Rousseau, ed. R. A. Leigh (Geneva, 1955), 12 vols (hereafter referred to as Corres­ pondance générale L). The letter begins by recognizing that a misunderstanding has compro­ mised the friendship between Rousseau and his cousin: “Although you write to me as you would write to a stranger, I shall not refrain from answering in our usual manner, and this is the tone I shall take in at­ tempting to refute the criticisms contained in your letter.” An astonishing debut: Rousseau expresses in a crude but unmistakable way the sense of alienation and misunderstanding that he would later make known to all his contemporaries. 25. O.C., III, 22. 26. Ibid., 8. 27. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, O.C., III, 133 (79). 28. Ibid. 29. Préface de Narcisse, O.C., II, 9 7 1 -7 2 . 30. Dialogues II, O.C., I, 829. 31. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Rousseau,” in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1953), 2: 12—13. 32. O.C., III, 122 (67). Cf. Plato, Republic X, 611. 33. O.C., III, 123 (68). 34. Certain aspects o f Rousseau’s political conservatism, at first sight surprising, follow from his judgment that change in the structure o f a state almost inevitably leads to decadence: “Imagine the danger of stirring up the enormous masses that compose the French monarchy! Once set in motion, who can hold them back, and who can predict what may follow?. . . Whether the present government is the same as governments past or has gradually changed in nature over the centuries, it is imprudent to tinker with it. If it is the same, it must be respected; if it has degenerated, the change was due to time and circumstance, and human wisdom can do nothing to alter the fact” ( Jugement sur la polysynodie, O.C., III, 638). In this respect Rousseau’s thought is similar to Montesquieu’s. Both men are prudent; both imagine that the only alternative to conservation o f an original institution is decadence; and both hesitate to conclude that action means progress.

Notes to Pages 1 7 - 2 7

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35. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 3, O.C., II, 564. Even earlier, in the Epitre à Parisot, we read: II n’est rien, que le temps ne corrompe à la fin Tout jusqu* à la sagessse est sujet au déclin. [There is nothing that lime does not corrupt in the end; every­ thing, even wisdom, is subject to decline] O.C., II, 1138. 36. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 3, letter 16, O.C., II, 336. 37. Confessions, book 1, O.C., I, 30—31(39). 38. Rêveries, Sixth Walk, O.C., I, 1055 (99). 39. Ibid., 1054(98). 40. Ibid., First Walk, O.C., I, 996 (27). 4 L La nouvelle Héloïse, part 3, letter 22, O.C., II, 389. 42. Dialogues III, O.C., I, 936. 4 3 . Cf. H. Gouhier, “Nature et Histoire chez Rousseau,“ Annales J.-J. Rousseau 33, (1953-55); reprinted in Les Méditations métaphysiques de JeanJacques Rousseau (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 11-34. 44. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, O.C., III, 132—33 (78). 45. Ernst Cassirer, “Das problem Jean-Jacques Rousseau,“ Archiv fü r Geschichte der philosophie, 1932. 46. Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, O.C., IV, 967. 47. Préface de Narcisse, O.C., II, 969. 48. See book 4 of Emile for Rousseau’s position on the idea o f progress. O.C., IV, 676.

Chapter Two 1. Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, O.C., IV, 9 6 6 -67. 2. Préface de Narcisse, O.C., II, 968. 3. Social Contract, book 1, chap 2, O.C., III, 353 (51). 4. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, O.C., III, 143—44 (89—90). 5. Emile, book 2, O.C., IV, 370. The comparison between Emile and the savage of the second Discourse was suggested by Georges Poulet in Etudes sur le temps humain. Note that the Jean-Jacques o f the Dialogues— “indolent,” “good” yet incapable o f the effort required for “virtue”—resembles the “savage” in more than one way. 6 . Etienne Condillac, Essai sur l'ongine des connaissances humaines, 1.1.2.11. 7. Rousseau did not always believe in the “truth o f sensations.” In his “Plantoni2ing” moments he viewed the senses as sources o f error: “They are, if you will, five windows to which our minds look for light. But the windows are small, the glass is clouded, the wall thick, and the house very badly lighted.“ Lettres morales, O.C., IV, 1092. 8 . Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, O.C., III, 1 65-65 (109-10). 9. Ibid., 165(110). 10. Ibid., 165-66(110).

382

N o t e s t o P a g e s 27—32

1 1 . Ibid., 138 (85). 12. Ibid., 169(114). 13. Ibid., 174(119). 14. Rousseau draws a parallel between the “repose and freedom” of savage man and the “ataraxia of the Stoic.” Ibid., 192. 15. Ibid., 174-75(119). 16. Ibid., 191 (134). 17. Freiedrich Engels, Anti-Diihring (Zurich, 1886), 131. 18. Discours on the Origin of Inequality, O.C., III, 191(135). 19. Note, however, this brief but clear indication of a more favorable outcome: these “new revolutions either dissolve the government entirely or bring it closer to the form of the legitimate institution.” O.C., III, 187 (131). 20. Cf. Emile, book 5, O.C., IV, 837. Rousseau is certainly sincere in his claim that he never wanted to disturb the established order or overthrow the French monarchy. In Letters from the Mountain (part 1, letter 6 ), he points out that the Social Contract simply describes the Republic of Geneva before its corruption by political upheaval and does not propose a new society to replace the existing one. In the Confessions, on the other hand, the Social Contract is described as a work of abstract philosophy, for which Rousseau never intended to “seek an application.” He merely made full use of the right to think that is shared by all men. Bear in mind, however, that the Confessions, Dialogues, and Reveries depict the past in a deliberately innocent light. Rousseau is innocent, and so are all his works. Viewed in this way, the political works seem to lose their grandeur; they are no more than the record of one man’s emotions. What had been political theory is now interpreted as self-expression: “His system may have been false, but in developing it he painted himself in his true colors” (Dialogues III, O.C., I, 934). Everything is absorbed in the poetry o f personal confession. Rous­ seau no longer wants his works to point the way to possible action. They point only to their author, of whom they present an indirect portrait. The picture they give is a generous one, but it should not be assumed that they had real political consequences. 21. In a 1786 essay entitled Muthmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte (Conjectures on the beginnings o f human history), in Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Reimber, 1912), 8 : 107ff. 22. Cassirer, “Das Problem Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” 23. Eric Weil calls attention to the same idea: “Man can live in natural independence; he can live in total dependence on the law, which is freedom because it is immediate dependence on the necessity o f reason, much as man’s natural dependence was immediate on nature.” See “Jean-Jacques Rousseau et sa politique,” Critique 56 (January 1952): 9. 24. Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, O.C., III, 30. But in the first version o f the Social Contract the synthetic ideal is formulated more clearly. Rousseau encourages us to see “in perfected art the remedy for the harm that rudimentary art did to nature.” O.C., III, 288.

Notes to Pages 3 3 —44

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Chapter Three 1. More precisely, the end of excessive inequality, because Rousseau favored "proportionate," or, if you prefer, “meritocratic." inequality, that is, a system in which advantages would be distributed according to merit and service to the fatherland. 2. Dialogues III, O.C., I, 936. 3. Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, O.C., III, 19. 4. Confessions, book 8 , O.C., I, 351(328). 5. Shortly after writing the letter in which he renounced his Genevan citizenship, Rousseau asked Du Pcyrou to call him “citizen." 6 . Confessions, book 8 , O.C., I, 362 (337). 7. Ibid., 364 -6 5 (340). 8 . See, in particular, book 9 of the Confessions, where Rousseau criticizes the "sophistry" with which he sought to excuse his love for Mme d’Houdetol. 9. Recall Joubert’s remark: "In the writing of J.-J. Rousseau, for example, the soul is always mixed up with the body, never distinct from it” (Carnets, ed. A. Beaunier, 2: 496). With a slight note of derision, however, he also says: "Rousseau gave guts and tits to words” (ibid., 729). 10. On the role assigned to reason, see Robert Derathé, Le rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau (l^ris, 1948). 11. Correspondance générale, DP, XVI, 239. 12. Rêveries, Third Walk, O.C., I, 1015 (52). 13. Ibid. 14. Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 455 (425). 15. On the distinction between sensuous immediacy and rational im­ mediacy, see Jean Wahl, Traité de métaphysùpie (Paris: Payot, 1953), 498ff. 16. Rêveries, Third Walk, O.C., 1, 1015 (52). 17. Ibid., Eighth Walk, O.C., I, 1083 (133-34). 18. Third Letter to Malesherbes, OX'., I, 1139—40. 19. Confessions, book 8 , O.C., I, 388 (362). 20. Kierkegaard, Journal (1849), trans. Ferlov and Gateau (Paris: Galli­ mard, 1955), 3: 15. 21. It is paradoxical for a man who has renounced the world to speak in public, but less so if that man is dying. Rousseau believes that he is dying, hence he speaks as a man who has been granted a brief respite before the final hour: "I did not begin to live until I looked upon myself as a dead man!” (Confessions, book 6 , O.C., I, 228[218]). Whenever this hypochondriac takes up his pen, he sincerely believes that he is writing his last words. Hence he has the right to speak: a swan song is not an act of social vanity. He wants others to pay attention to his ultima verba. This is not merely a pathetic act o f seduction but a way of excusing his behavior to himself. The imminence o f death makes the break wilh the world inevitable. 22. To M. de Saint-Germain, 26 February 1770, Correspondance générale, DP, XIX, 261.

384

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 4 —63

23. Kierkegaard, Journal. But Rousseau's suffering does not seem deep enough to Kierkegaard: “What he lacks is the ideal, the Christian ideal, to humble him and teach him how little he suffers compared with the saints, and to sustain his efforts by preventing him from falling into the reverie and sloth o f the poet. Here is an example that shows us how hard it is for a man to die to the world” (4: 252—53). On Kierkegaard and Rousseau see Ronald Grimsley, Söre?i Kierkegaard and French Literature (Car­ diff University o f Wales Press, 1966). 24. The title o f this section comes from Rêveries, Third Walk, O.C., I, 1016 (53). Rousseau adds: “Let me remain for the rest of my life what mature consideration tells me I should be.” 25. The expression is from the second letter to Malesherbes, O.C. I, 1136. 26. Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 244; see O.C., I, 1164. 27. Epictetus, Manual XVII. 28. Confessions, book 8 , O.C., I, 363 (339). 29. Ibid., 378 (352). 30. Ibid., 351 (327). 31. Ibid., 351 (328). 32. Ibid., book 9, 416 (388). 33. Le persifleur, O.C,, I, 1108-9. 34. Ibid., 1109-10. 35. Dialogues II, O.C., I, 8 1 7 -1 8 . 36. Ibid., 865. 37. The importance o f these “atmospheric comparisons” was pointed out by Marcel Raymond, “J.-J. Rousseau: Deux aspects de sa view intér­ ieure,” Annales J.-J. Rousseau 29 (1941—42); reprinted in Jean-Jacques Rous­ seau: La quête de soi et la rêverie (Paris: Corti, 1962), 3 Iff. 38. Dialogues II, O.C., I, 795. 39. Ibid., 865. 40. Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 417 (388). 41. Ibid. See the comments by B. Munteano, “La solitude de J.-J. Rous­ seau,” Annales J.-J. Rousseau 31 (1946-49). 42. Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 416 (388). 43. Raymond, “J.-J. Rousseau,” 21. 44. Vaussore is an anagram for Rousseau, while Villeneuve is the “noble title” (probably invented) o f the musician Venture, who strongly influenced Rousseau. Rousseau grafts an imaginary image o f himself onto the name o f a person he admires. 45. Raymond, “J.-J. Rousseau,” 22. 46. To Mme de Luxembourg, 17 June 1762, Correspondance générale, DP, VII, 304. 47. Confessions, book 8 , O.C. I, 351(328). 48. Annales J.-J. Rousseau, 4 (1908): 244; see O.C., I, 1164. 49. Confessions, book 8 , O.C., I, 368—69 (343—44). 50. Correspondance générale, DP, III, 101; L, V, 2.

Notes to Pages 6 5 —83

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Chapter Four 1 . G. Streckeisen-Moultou, ed., Œuvres et correspondance inédites de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris, 1861), 171 ff.; see O.C., IV, 1044-54. 2. Emile, book 4, O.C., IV, 626. 3. Ibid. 4. Pierre Burgelin, La philosophie de l'existence de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), p. 434. 5. Emile, book 4, O.C., IV, 600. Rousseau changed his mind several times about the wording; he first wrote inner feeling, then active, inner principle, and finally immediate principle of consciousness. See P.-M. Masson, La profession de foi du vicaire savoyard (Fribourg, 1914). 6 . Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, O.C., IV, 994. 7. Pygmalion, O.C., II, 1224-31. 8 . Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit in Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1863), 4: 180. 9. Dialogues III, O.C., I, 934. 10. Ibid., I, O.C., I, 6 8 8 . 11. Schiller, “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung,” in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1838), 12: 206. 12. Emile, book 4, O.C., IV, 560. 13. Dialogues III, O.C., I, 971. 14. Correspondance générale, DP, XVIII, 295. 15. Emile, book 4, O.C., IV, 525. 16. Pygmalion, O.C., II, 1230. 17. Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, O.C., III, 15. 18. To M. de Franquières, Correspondance générale, DP, XIX, 52; see O.C., IV, 1137. 19. Reveries, Third Walk, O.C., I, 1023 (61). 20. To M. de Franquières, Correspondance générale, DP, XIX, 51; see also O.C., IV, 1136-37. 21. Third letter to Malesherbes, O.C., I, 1141. 22. Correspondance générale, DP, XI, 56—59. 23. Confessions, book 1, O.C., I, 21(31). 24. First draft of the Confessions, Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 2; see O.C., I, 1149. 25. Letter to Abbé Raynal, O.C., III, 33. 26. Emile, book 4, O.C., IV, 6 0 4 -5 .

Chapter Five 1. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 1, letter 23, O.C., II, 79. 2. Dialogues I, O.C., I, 6 6 8 . 3. La nouvelle Héloïse, pan 1, letter 23, O.C., II, 78. 4. To Mirabeau, 3 I January 1767, Correspondance générale, DP, XVI, 248. 5. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 1, letter 23, O.C., II, 78. 6 . Ibid., letter 38, O.C., II, 116.

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8 4 -8 9

7. To Mme de la Tour, 29 May 1762, Correspondance générale, DP, VII, 253; L, X, 310. 8 . Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 431(401). 9 . La nouvelle Héloïse, part 1, letter 49, O.C., II, 136. 10. Ibid., part 4, letter 12, O.C., II, 496. 11. Ibid., 491. 12. Ibid., part 5, letter 3, Ö.C., II, 584. 13. Ibid., part 1, letter 53, O.C., II, 145. 14. Ibid., letter 54, O.C., II 146. 15. Ibid., part 3, letter 1, O.C., II, 309. 16. Ibid., part 6 , letter 8 , O.C., II, 689. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., Second Preface, O.C., II, 28. 19. On the importance o f influence in Rousseau’s work, see Burgelin, La philosophie, 162-68. He cites the following passage: “Souls o f a certain stamp . . . transform others into themselves, so to speak. They have a sphere of activity within which nothing can resist them. One cannot know them without wanting to imitate them, and from their sublime height they attract all that surrounds them toward themselves” (La nouvelle Héloïse, part 2, letter 5, O.C., 11, 204). Burgelin rightly sees this as proof o f Julie's “me­ diating character.” The purpose o f Julie's mediation is to establish (or restore) the right of immediate communication. Julie’s death will restore Wolmar’s faith and brings Julie herself the joy o f immediate communi­ cation with God. Rousseau seems unable to accept mediation unless it is accompanied by conquest o f immediacy. 20. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 6 , letter 8 , O.C., II, 689. 21. Ibid., part 3, letter 18, O.C., II, 344. 22. “Unisson,” in Dictionnaire de musique, 0,C. (Paris: Furne, 1835), III, 851. 23. “Romance,” ibid., 795. 24. “Unité de mélodie, ibid., 852. 25. La Nouvelle Héloïse, part 1, letter 48, O.C., II, 132. 26. Ibid., 131. 27. “Mélodies,” in Dictionnaire de musique, O.C. (Furne ed.), III, 724. 28. In his writings on music, Rousseau makes a much sharper distinction between the mind and the senses (or feeling and sensation) than he does elsewhere, but he also sets forth a synthetic notion that overcomes the an­ tithesis. Just as the Social Contract reconciles natural man with “man’s man” and La nouvelle Héloïse reconciles passion with virtue, the writings on music suggest a reconciliation o f melody-feeling with harmony-sensation : the syn­ thesis takes place within the “unity of melody,” a notion that merits and ar­ ticle in the Dictionary of Music: “Harmony, which could easily suffocate the melody, animates, reinforces, and controls it. Without absorbing one an­ other the different parts contribute to the same effect. Although each seems to have its own song, the ear hears only one song.” This unity may be com-

Notes to Pages 90—101

387

pared with that of the society that surrounds the melodious Julie. The plea­ sures of the senses and the joys of feeling have been reconciled in a perfect fusion: the unity of melody bestows upon sensual harmony and contra­ puntal artifice a value that in themselves these things do not possess. 29. “Musique,” in Dictionnaire de musique, O.C., (Furne ed.), Ill, 744. 30. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 7, O.C., II, 609. 31. Schiller, Über naive und sentimentnlische Dichtung, in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1838), 12: 167. 32. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 7, O.C., II, 609. 33. Ibid., 604. 34. A. Aulard, Les orateurs de la révolution (ftiris: Cornély, 1906—7). 35. Lettre à d'Alembert (I^ris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), 248. For Rous­ seau, the Genevan celebration, evoked in a lengthy note, reproduces the “hardworking idleness” o f Spartan celebrations taken as a model in the body of the text. 36. Ibid., 2 3 3 -3 4 . 37. Ibid., 6 6 . 38. Ibid., 7 9 -8 0 . 39. Ibid., 249. 40. Rêveries, Ninth Walk, O.C., I, 1085. 41. Social Contract, book 1, chap. 6 , O.C., III, 361. 42. Le devin du village, scene 8 , O.C., II, 1113. 43. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 7, O.C., II, 607. 44. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 4, letter 10, O.C., II, 458—59. Because the servants do not form a hostile “class,” Rousseau is able to maintain a society with different “ranks” that do not constitute partial subgroups, thus not compromising the community’s plenitude, 45. Ibid., 468. 46. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 7, O.C., II, 611. 47. Ctmsidêrations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, chap. 3, O.C., III, 963. 48. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 7, O.C., II, 608. 49. Ibid. 50. In drafting his Political histilutions, Rousseau seems to have been wary of allowing feelings to have sway in political matters: “The prosperity o f a state should not be judge . . . by the citizens’ feelings of happiness and hence not even by their happiness.” Streckeisen-Moultou, Œuvres et cor­ respondance inédites, 227; see also O.C,, III, 513. 51 .L a nouvelle Héloïse, part 4. letter 10, O.C., II, 453. Weil, in “J.-J. Rousseau et sa politique,” comments: “The servants exist only for their master and in him; lacking reason they have no freedom and cannot be educated to freedom. They are, in Aristotle’s phrase, born slaves.” 52. Emile, book 4, O.C., IV, 509. 53. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 7, O.C., II, 604. 54. H. F. Amiel Rousseau jugé par les Genevois d'aujourd’hw (Geneva, 1879), 37.

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N o te s t o P ag es 101-16

55. Exclusive, in Rousseau’s vocabulary, is a pejorative term only when it denotes that which separates the members o f a community. It becomes a term o f praise when it denotes that which distinguishes a social group from the rest o f the world. In proposing feasts to the Poles, Rousseau wants “nothing exclusive for the great and wealthy, if possible.” Yet in the same work he praises ancient legislators for having instituted “religious ceremonies that by their nature were always exclusive and national.” See also the beginning o f Emile: “Every partial society which is narrow and unified alienates itself from the larger society.” 56. Third letter to Malesherbes, O.C., I, 1141. 57. Lettre à d'Alembert, 238ff. 58. Rêveries, Ninth Walk, O.C., I, 1091. 59. Ibid., 1092. 60. Ibid., 1093. 61 .L a nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 7, O.C., II, 608. 62. Ibid., 603. 63. Ibid., part 5, letter 2, O.C., II, 548. A similar ideal of a closed, autarchic, essentially agricultural economy is proposed in Emile: “This white bread that you like so much comes from the wheat harvested by this peasant. His wine, dark and crude but thirst-quenching and healthy, comes from his vineyards. His clothes come from his hemp, which his wife, daugh­ ters, and servant spin during the winter. The dishes on his table are pre­ pared by no one outside his own family. The nearest mill and the nearest market are the limits o f his world” (Emile, book 3, O.C., IV, 464). It is immoral to buy anthing; only barter is allowed. 64. Confessions, book 1, O.C., I, 36—37. 65. Ibid., 38. 6 6 . La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 2, O.C., II, 547— 48. 67. Ibid., part 4, letter 11, O.C., II, 470. 6 8 . Confessions, book 8 , O.C., I, 363. 69. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 2, O.C., II, 550. 70. Ibid., letter 7, O.C., II, 606. 71. Ibid., part 4, letter 11, O.C., II, 471. 72. Ibid., letter 10, O.C., II, 4 6 6 -6 7 . 73. Yvon Beiaval, “La crise de la géométrisation de l’univers dans la' philosophie des lumières,” Revue internationale de philosophie 21(1952):354, 74. Rêveries, Fifth Walk, O.C., I, 1047. On the comparison with God, see Marcel Raymond, “Introduction,” in Rêveries (Geneva: Droz, 1948), xxxiiixxxvi; see also Raymond, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 150. 75. Denis de Rougemont, Lamour et Voccident (Faris: Plon, 1939), 2 0 5 9. 76. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 9, O.C., II, 615. 77. Ibid., part 6 , letter 12, O.C., II, 743. 78. Weil, “J.-J. Rousseau et sa politique,” 1 1 . 79. La nouvelle Héloïse, I^rt 5, letter 5, O.C., II, 592.

Notes to Pages 116—2 8 3^9

80. Ibid., part 4, letter 14, O.C., II, 509. 81. Ibid., part 5, letter 5. O.C., II, 594. 82. Ibid., 592. 83. Ibid., 595. 84. Ibid., 594. 85. Ibid., part 6 , letter 8 , O.C., II, 699. 8 6 . Ibid., part 5, letter 5, O.C., II, 590. 87. Ibid. Julie is suspicious o f mysticism, however: “1 criticized the ec­ stasies of the mystics. I criticize them, too, when they make us forget our duties and, filling us with distaste for the active life through the charms of contemplation, lead us to quietism, which you think I am so close to and I think I am as far away from as you are.” Ibid., part 6 , letter 8 , G.C., II, 695. 8 8 . Ibid., part 6 , letter II, O.C., II, 728. 89. Ibid., letter 13, O.C. II, 744. 90. Ibid., part 5, letter 9, O.C., II, 616. 91. Robert Osinont, “Remarques sur la genèse et la composition de la nouvelle Héloïse,” Annales J.-J. Rousseau, 33 (1953-55): 126. 92. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 9, O.C., II, 618. 93. Ibid., part 6 , letter 11, O.C., II, 737.

Chapter Six 1. Confessions, book 2, O.C., I, 85 (87). 2. Ibid., book 9, O.C. I, 417 (388). 3. Ibid., book 3, O.C., I, 115 (114-15). 4. Ibid. 5. “Mon portrait,” Annales J,-J. Rousseau, 4 (1908): 265; see O.C., I, 1123. 6 . Ibid. 7. Confessions, book 2, O.C., I, 48 (54). 8 . Ibid., book 3, O.C., I, 116 (115-16). 9. Ibid., 116(116). 10. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 6 , letter 8 , O.C., II, 693. 11. The return o f Fanchon’s husband is done in the tone and tradition of pastoral idyll. It mimics the return o f Colin, which formed ihe subject of the Village Soothsayer: Rousseau may have had another return in mind, however: that of his father Isaac Rousseau, who, as watchmaker to the sultan of Constantinople, was long separated from his wife. “I was the mournful fruit of his return,” Rousseau adds. - 12. Emile, book 5, O.C., IV, 859. 13. Emile et Sophie, O.C., IV, 887. 14. Ibid., 912. 15. Ibid., 905. Turning inward is the narcissistic form of return. 16. Ibid., 887. On the projected conclusion o f Emile et Sophie, see Charles Wirz, “Note sur Emile et Sophie ou Les solitaires,“ Annales /.-/. Rousseau, 36: 291—303.

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17. Fourth Letter to Malesherbes, O.C., I, 1146. 18. Confessions, book 2, O.C., I, 49 (55—56). 19. Ibid., book 3, O.C., I, 107 (107). 20. Ibid., 103. To see the similarity between Jean-Jacques’s return and Saint-Preux’s, note the following passage, a few lines later: “I saw my small bag brought into the room that had been given to me, almost like SaintPreux watching his chair put away at Mme de Wolmar’s.” 21. Ibid., book 5, O.C., I, 191. 22. Rêveries, Tenth Walk, O.C., I, 1098-99 (153-54). 23. Confessions, book 5, O.C., I, 106 (106). 24. Reveries, Tenth Walk, O.C., I, 1098 (153). 25. Confessions, books 3—4, O.C., I, 130—32 (128—30).Note that the abrupt transition from book 3 to book 4 indicates the disappointment of the failed return. 26. Ibid., book 6 , O.C., I, 261 (247). 27. Ibid., 263 (249). 28. Ibid., 270 (255-56). 29. Letter to Moultou, 25 April 1762, Correspondance générale, DP, VII, 191; L, X, 210. 30. Letter to Voltaire, 17 June 1760, Correspondance générale, DP, V, 135; L, VII, 136. 31. Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 406 (378). 32. Ibid., book 1, O.C., I, 17 (28). 33. Letter to Mme d’Epinay, Correspondance générale, DP, III, 43; L, IV, 197ff. 34. Letter to Mme de Luxembourg, 5 June 1764, Correspondance générale, DP, XI, 123. 35. Mme de Luxembourg to Rousseau, 10 June 1764, Correspondance générale, DP, XI, 123. 36. To Mme de Luxembourg, 17 June 1764, Correspondance générale, DP, XI, 141. 37. To Mme d’Epinay, Correspondance générale, DP, III, 332; L, IV, 183. 38. To Hume, 10 July 1766, Correspondance générale, DP, XV, 324. 39. Ibid., 308. 40. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 2, letter 10, O.C., II, 219. 41. Dialogues III, O.C., I, 973. 42. To Mme d’Epinay, Correspondance générale, DP, III, 45; L, IV, 198. 43. See Rêveries, First Walk: “As soon as I began to glimpse the full extent of the plot, I lost forever all notions of bringing the public back to me during my lifetime. Indeed, such a return would not be useful to me, since it could no longer be reciprocal. My fellow men might return to me, but I would no longer be there to meet them.” O.C., I, 997—98 (30). 44. Emile, book 2, O.C., IV, 3 3 3 -3 4 . 45. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 2, letter 10, O.C., II, 219. 46. Confessions, book 12, O.C., I, 642. 47. Ibid., book 3, O.C., I, 113 (113).

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48. Jean-Paul Sartre, Esquisse dune théorie des émotions (Raris: Hermann, 1939). 49. René Laforgue, "Etude sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” Revue française de Psychanalyse, November 1927. 50. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 3, letter 13, O.C., II, 330. 51. Malebranche, Entretiens sur la Métaphysique, 3: 3. 52. Emile, book 4, O.C., IV, 593. 53. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover, 1959), 2: 8 . 54. Streckeisen-Moultou, Œuvres et correspondance inédites, 299; see O.C., II, 1249. 55. Rêveries, First Walk, O.C., I, 1001 (34). 56. "In order to judge the true purpose of these books, I did not set about examining here and there scattered and isolated sentences. Rather, 1 consulted myself both during my reading and after it was complete; and 1 examined . . . the dispositions o f soul that ihat reading caused and pro­ duced, judging . . . that this was the best way to penetrate the disposition of the author’s soul as he was writing, and the effect that he aimed to produce." Dialogues III, O.C., I, 930. 57. To Mme de Verdelin, 4 February 1760, Correspondance générale, DP, V, 42—43; L, VII, 32. 58. To Mme de Verdelin, 5 November 1970, Correspondance générale, DP, V, 243; L, VII, 293. 59. Correspondance générale, DP, VII, 3; L, IX, 341. 60. In the hymn "Der Rhein,” in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1953), 2: 153. 61. O.C., (Furne ed.), III, 448. 62.1 shall omit comment on Rousseau's critique o f money, which he also sees as a conventional sign to which people attach more importance then to the thing represented by that sign, namely, real wealth, produced by labor. 63. "Projet concernant de nouveaux signes,” O.C., III, 448. 64. Dissertation sur la musique moderne, O.C., III, 460. 65. Ibid., 458. 6 6 . Ibid., 459. 67. Ibid., 475. 6 8 . Emile, book 2, O.C., IV, 321. 69. Ibid., 347. 70. Ibid., book 3, O.C., IV, 434. 71. Ibid., book 4, O.C., IV, 565. 72. Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité, O.C., III, 147 (92). 73. Ibid., 151 (97). 74. Essai sur l'origine des langues, chap. 2, O.C. (Furne ed.), III, 498. 75. Plato, Cratylus 391a. [Here cited after the Jowctt translation in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, cds.. The Collected Dialogues of Plato (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 428 — T r a n s . |

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76. Essai sur l'origine des langues, chap. 4, O.C. (Furne ed.), Ill, 499.

77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. See Burgelin, La philosophie, 246. Ernst Cassirer compares Rous­ seau’s theory o f language with that o f Vico. See his Philosophie der symbol­ ischen Formen (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1954), 1: 90-95. 7 9 . Essai sur Vorigine des langues, chap. 5, 501. 80. Ibid., chap 4, 498. 81. Discours sur Vorigine de l'inégalité. O.C., III, 149 (94). Discursive lan­ guage is incapable o f expressing momentary emotion; it stretches emotions over the time required for anaytic utterance. Diderot expresses the same idea: “The mind’s state in an indivisible instant was represented by a multitude of terms required by the precision o f language, thereby dividing a total impression into parts.” Lettre sur les sourds et les muets, O.C., II, 543. 82. Essai sur l'origine des langues, chap. 5, O.C. (Furne ed.), III, 501 —2. On the importance o f punctuation in Rousseau, see Raymond, “Intro­ duction,” in Rêveries (Droz ed.), lviii-lix. 83. Condillac, “Du langage et de la méthode,” chap. 1, section 1, in Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, part 2 . 84. Dialogues II, O.C., I, 825. 85. Ibid., 860-6 1 . 8 6 . Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité, note 13, O.C., III, 218 (166 note M). The Latin translates: “It would in no way diminish the happiness o f man­ kind if, banishing the deadly and confusing multiplicity of languages, all men were to cultivate one single and uniform art—and be able to express themselves on all subjects by means o f signs, movements, and gestures.” 87. First draft of the Confessions, Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 3; see O.C., I, 1149. 8 8 . Dialogues I, O.C., I, 672. 89. Ibid., II, O.C., I, 862. 90. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 5, letter 3, O.C., II, 560. 91. Ibid., 558. 92. Ibid., 599. 93. “Sujets d’estampes pour La nouvelle Héloïse," O.C., II 769. On ex­ pansion and influence, see Burgelin, La philosophie, 149—90. 94. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, La vie et les ouvrages de J.-J. Rousseau, ed. M. Souriau (Päris, 1907), 94. 95. According to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jean-Jacques is interrupted by an intruder as he is about to fall on his knees before Mme Basile. According to the Confessions he remains on his knees for two minutes. A further discrepancy is that, according to the final version o f the Confessions, Jean-Jacques did not dare to touch Mme Basile. But in an earlier draft we find him more audacious: “If I sometimes had the temerity to lay my hand on her knee, I did so so gently that in my simplicity I thought she was not aware o f it.” Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 236—37. 96. Note that the physical reaction (trembling), the “natural sign” (the cry), and the gesture (Jean-Jacques throws himself down) occur simulta-

Notes to Pages 154-70

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neously. This hyperexpressivity manifests itself in every possible way, except for speech. 97. Confessions, book 2, O.C., I, 7 5 -7 6 (78). 98. Ibid., 7 6 -7 7 (80). 99. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 2:13. 100. Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 422 (393). 101. Ibid., book 1, O.C., I, 42 (49). 102. Ibid., book 3, O.C., I, 115 (114). 103. Ibid., book 7, O.C., I 3 2 1 -2 2 (301). 104. Correspondance générale, DP, XV, 308. 105. Ibid., XVI, 56. 106. Ibid., XVII, 341. 107. Ibid., XVIII, 292. 108. Confessions, book 10, O.C., I, 505 (468). 109. Ibid., book 11, O.C., I, 556 (522-23). Cf. Reveries, Second Walk: ‘‘I have always hated shadows. They have always inspired in me a horror that has not been lessened by the gloom they have created around me for so many years now.” O.C., I, 1007 (41). 110. A “speculative cobweb,” to use Coleridge’s phrase. See Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 308. 111. “Notes written on playing cards.” Rêveries (Droz ed.), 173; see O.C., 1,1170. 112. A. Hesnard, Lunivers morbide de lafaute (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), 95-96. 113. Rêveries, Ninth Walk, O.C,, I, 1094 (148). 114. Ibid., 1095-96(149-150). 115. Ibid., Eighth Walk, O.C., I, 1077. 116. “Musique,” in Dictionnaire de musique, Ö.C., (Furne ed.) Ill, 744. On mnemonic signs, see Georges Poulet’s essay on Rousseau in Etudes sur le temps humain (Paris: Plon, 1950). 117. Lettres élémentaires sur la botanique, O.C., IV, 1191. 118. Lettres sur la botanique, O.C. (Furne ed.), III, 395—96. 119. Rêveries, Seventh Walk, O.C., I, 1073 (120). 120. “Histoire du précédent écrit, in Dialogues, O.C., I, 983. 121. Ibid., 984. 122. Dialogues II, O.C., I, 818. 123. Confessions, book 6 , O.C., I, 243 (231). 124. Ibid., book 2, O.C., I, 45 (52). 125. Ibid., book 3, O.C., I, 8 8 (90). 126. Ibid., 107(107). 127. Ibid., 108(108). 128. Ibid., book 5, O.C., I, 222 (213). 129. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris' Gallimard, 1945), part 2 , chap. 5: “Le corps comme être sexué.” 130. Confessions, book 1, O.C., I, 7 (19).

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131. Milk and milk products recur frequently in Jean-Jacques’s erotic dreams. On the road to Turin he imagines “delicious fruits on the trees; voluptuous conversations in their shadows; and on the mountaintops vats of milk and cream." Or again, recall the curious scene in the Petit Savoyard, rather in the manner o f ancient pastorals, in which the pretty peasant girl defends her honor by pouring a pitcher o f milk on the somewhat too enterprising young lord. The latter, “soaked and even hurt, only became more animated.” What a treasure trove for lovers of symbols! 132. Confessionsy book 3, O.C., I, 8 8 (90). 133. Ibid., book 2, O.C., I, 8 6 (8 8 ). 134. Ibid., book 3, O.C., I, 89 (90). 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., 89 (91). 137. Ibid., book 5, O.C., I, 181. 138. Annales J.-J. Rousseau, 4 (1908): 228; see O.C., I, 1164. 139 Confessions, book 8 , O.C., I, 379 (353). 140. Dictionnaire de musique, O.C. (Furne ed.), Ill, 810—11. 141. Emile, book 5, O.C., IV, 867. 142. The reader may also wish to consider the attempt to educate Vintzenried: Confessions, book 6 , O.C., 264—65. 143. Les amours de milord Edouard Bomston, O.C., II, 760. 144. “Now I am the confidant o f my two fine people, and the mediator of their love” {Emile, book 5, O.C., IV, 788). O f Sophie and Saint-Lambert Rousseau says: “I found it as pleasant to be the confidant as to be the object of her love” (Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 462). 145. On Rousseau and Socrates, see Burgelin, La philosophie, 61 —70. Hölderlin compares Rousseau to Dionysus in the hymn “Der Rhein.” 146. Confessions, book 7, O.C., I, 332 (311). 147. Ibid., book 3, O.C., I, 109 (108—9). In psychoanalysis, autoeroticism is taken as a correlate o f defective “object relations.” The real object of Jean-Jacques’s sexual enery is his ego (usually disguised) rather than the external object toward which normal sexuality is directed. Within the terms of psychoanalytic theory it is reasonable to see the whole structure of Rousseau’s sexual life, as well as its attendant guilt, in terms of an “infantile fixation”—or even a “pregenital,” that is, oral or anal, fixation. It is not difficult to relate the various pathological aspects of Jean-Jacques’s behavior to a common cause, including his urinary disorders, repeated probes (re­ ceptive urethral eroticism), Armenian robe (latent homosexuality), and even the paranoia o f his last years. It is particularly instructive in this connection to consider the intersection of two critical methods, two different interpretive approaches. Where Freudians would say that the “choice of object” regressed on the self, one can also say, in Hegelian terms, that Rousseau's subjectivity refused to “alienate itself” in an external activity. Narcissism and infantile fixation are psychoanayltic terms corresponding to a choice in favor of immediacy.

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But it is wrong to speak o f Jean-Jacques’s narcissism without caveat: Narcissus needs images. His desire does not settle directly on himself or others but on imaginary figures, reflections, fantasies to which he attributes illusory independence. In Rousseau’s play, Valère does not really become Narcissus until he sees a portrait of a figure in female custume and fails to recognize it as himself. He falls in love with an image that is himself but that exhibits a hidden femininity o f which he is unaware. This failure to recognize oneself is essential if narcissistic passion is to come to the fore: “Because o f his delicacy and affected dress, Valère is a woman in man’s clothing; the portrait of him as a woman seemed not so much to disguise him as to return him to his natural state" (O.G\, II, 977). This portrait is ol the utmost importance. If it reveals Valère’s hidden femininity and openly exhibits the young man’s autoerotic nature, it also provokes the final crisis whereby Narcissus is delivered from his narcissism. Valère, re­ stored to himself, returns (yet another return!) to the tender fiancée he had spurned. Angélique triumphs in the end over the portrait; Narcissus has found his “object.” In La nouvelle Héloïse the unveiling o f the image (the portrait that Julie sends to Saint-Preux in exile in Paris) produces an emotional reaction as intense as physical possession itself: “I felt my heart palpitate with each paper that I removed, and I soon felt so oppressed that I was forced to breathe a moment before removing the final envelope. Julie! O my Ju­ lie! . . . The veil is torn. . . . I see you. . . . I see your divine allure!” (part 2, letter 23). Julie’s portrait is a mnemonic, and each paper wrapper that is removed eliminates a layer o f time. Saint-Preux is plunged into the ecstasy of past possession. But it is the object, Julie, who is distant and in the past; the lover’s emotion is in the present, Present transparency o f past happiness, relived by means of an image; bittersweet bliss that requires only the figurative presence o f the love object. The portrait is a sign de­ tached from Julie that allows the distant lovers to make contact. The por­ trait reestablishes the pure sentiment o f presence without involving real presence in the flesh: “O Julie! If only it were true that the rapture and illusion of my senses could be transmitted to yours! . . . But why can’t it be? Why can’t impressions that the soul carries with it travel as far as the soul itself?” But the portrait requires an artist. What sets Jean-Jacques apart from an ordinary neurotic is that his fantasy does not consume itself but insists upon being developed in a real work; it stimulates a desire to write, to seduce the public, and so forth. The choice o f immediacy becomes a literary work and betrays itself insofar as it becomes manifest. Everything starts from the internal contradiction: the desired repose becomes movement, private bliss becomes anxious reflection. Rousseau is propelled in spite o f himself into the world o f means, and in the case o f this one exceptional man, at least, one is forced to admit that pathological regression is not incompatible with philosophical progress.

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Chapter Seven 1. Confessions, book 1, O.C., 1, 5 (17). 2. First Letter to Malesherbes, O.C., I, 1133. 3. Rêveries, First Walk, O.C., I, 995 (27). 4. Ibid., Fourth Walk, O.C., I, 1024 (63). 5. Confessions, book 12, O.C., I, 622. 6 . Ibid., book 9, O.C., I, 446 (415). 7. First letter to Malesherbes, O.C., I, 1133. 8 . Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 263; see also O.C., I, 1121. 9. Correspondance générale, DP, XX, 46. 10. Confessions, book 4, O.C., I, 175. 11. Rêveries, Fourth Walk, O.C., I, 1032 (72). 12. “Mon portrait,” Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 262-63; see O.C., I, 1120 .

13. Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 4—5; see O.C., I, 1150. 14. Ibid., 1150-51. 15. Ibid., 1149. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Confessions, book 1, O.C., I, 6 (17). 19. Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908) :2; see O.C., I, 1148. 20. Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 2; see O.C., I, 1149. 21. Correspondance générale, DP, XIX, 310. 22. Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 9; see O.C., I, 1153. 23. Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 10; O.C., I, 153. 24. Confessions, book 4, O.C., I, 175. 25. Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908):264-65; see O.C., I, 1122. 26. Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 10; O.C., I, 1153. 27. Confessions, book 2, O.C., I, 5 9 -6 0 (65). 28. Ibid., book 7, O.C., I, 279 (263). 29. Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 9 —10; see O.C., I, 1153. 30. Emile et Sophie, letter 1, O.C., IV, 905. 31. Confessions, book 4, O.C., I, 162. 32. Ibid., 174-75. 33. Annales J.-J. Rousseau 4 (1908): 10—11; see O.C., I, 1154. 34. Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de Vesprit de Hegel (Paris: Aubier, 1946), 494—95.’ 35. Confessions, book 7, O.C., I, 278 (262—63). 36. Annales J.-J. Rousseau, book 7; O.C., I, 1174. 37. Confessions, book 4, O.C., I, 174. 38. Second letter to Malesherbes, O.C., I, 1135. 39. Letter to Dom Deschamps, 12 September 1761, Correspondance gén­ érale, DP, VI, 209; L, IX, 120. 40. In the fourth Rêverie Rousseau attempts to distinguish between fiction and falsehood. Fiction is innocent; it injures no one; it is pure invention.

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41. One should not underestimate Rousseau’s effort to establish a co­ herent doctrine and abide by it. He was keen to fix his ideas, whose proof derived from the dictamen o f conscience and in return authorized him to surrender to the truth o f feeling.

Chapter Eight 1. See especially Ernst Kretschmer, Der sensitive Beziehungswahn (BerlinTübingen: Springer, 1918.) [The unstable vocabulary o f psychiatry makes translation of psychiatric terms particularly difficult. T he author suggests that paranoid delusions is perhaps the best English approximation to Kretschmer’s sensitive Beziehungswahn, and I have followed his recommen­ dation. The important point is that delusion in no way implies halluci­ nation. For further information see Michael Shepherd, ed.. Handbook of Psychiatiy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 74—75.—T r a n s.] See below, pp. 365ff., for further discussion o f Rousseau’s illness. 2. Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 427 (398). 3. Emile, book 5, O.C., IV, 796. In a curious passage in La nouvelle Héloïse (part 6 , letter 6 ), Julie uses the same word to warn Saint-Preux o f the dangers he faces in settling at Clarens. Enlacé is here ambiguous, char­ acterizing the situation of the lover as well as the victim: Saint-Preux will have to cope with "all that may rekindle still-smoldering passions. He will become ensnared [s'enlacer\ in traps of which he should be most fearful.” 4. La nouvelle Héloùe, part 1, letter 2, O.C., II, 35. 5. Rêveries, Eighth Walk, O.C., I, 1077 (126). 6 . I examine this problem further in "Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le péril de la réflexion,” in Uoeil vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); 94—188. 7. For further details, see my notes on this problem in Pléiade edition: O.C., III, 131 Off. 8 . Emile, part 4, O.C., IV, 571. 9. Ibid., 573. 10. Ibid. 11. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 6 , letter 8 , O.C., II, 698. 12. See chap. 4 of this volume: "The Theory o f Unveiling.” Also recall Rousseau’s letter to Dorn Deschamps of 25 June 1761, Correspondance Gén­ érale, DP, VI, 160;, L, IX, 28: "The truth that I love is not so much meta­ physical as moral.” 13. Dialogues I, O.C., I, 668-69. 14. Ibid., II, O.C., I, 805. 15. Ibid., Ill, O.C., I, 927. 16. Ibid., II, O.C., I, 861. 17. Ibid., 824-25. 18. Rêveries, Seventh Walk, O.C., I, 1061-62 (107). 19. Correspondance générale, DP, XVII, 2—3. 20. Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, O.C., III, 155. 21. Dialogues, II, O.C., IV, 805.

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22. Ibid., O.C., I, 665. 23. Ibid., 799. 24. Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 409 (381). 25. See chap. 3 o f this volume. 26. Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 409 (381). 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Emile, book 2, O.C., IV, 359. 30. Ibid., 3 62-63. 31. Dialogues I, O.C., I, 706. 32. Ibid., 710. Cf. Burgelin, La philosophie, 300: “Emile’s education was based on artifice. Natural man can develop only in cleverly contrived sur­ roundings; his virtue is the product o f conspiracy.” 33. Social Contract, book 1, chap. 6 , O.C., III, 360 (59). In Emile the teacher’s advice is to “offer only physical obstacles to [the pupil’s] immod­ erate desires.” See book 2, O.C., IV, 311. 34. Dialogues I, O.C., I, 669. 35. “Every shock sets up a vigorous and short-lived motion in me, but as soon as the shock is over the motion vanishes, and nothing that comes from outside can be prolonged within me.” Reveries, Eighth Walk, O.C., I, 1084 (134). 36. Dialogues II, O.C., I, 857. 37. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 6 , letter 8 , O.C., II, 693. 38. Rêveries, Sixth Walk, O.C., I, 1056 (99). 39. Dialogues, O.C., I, 713. 40. Rêveries, First Walk, O.C., I, 1000 (33). 41. Ibid., Sixth Walk, O.C., I, 1051 (94). 42. Annales J.-J. Rousseeau 4 (1908): 12; see O.C., I, 1155. 43. Correspondance générale, DP, XIX, 292. 44. Confessions, book 12, O.C., I, 656 (606). 45. “Du sujet et de la forme de cet écrit,” in Dialogues, O.C., I, 662. 46. Jean Guéhenno, Jean-Jacques: Grandeur et misère d'un esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1952). 47. Dialogues I, O.C., I, 734. 48. Ibid., I ll, O.C., I, 975. 49. “Histoire du précédent écrit,” in Dialogues, O.C,, I, 980. 50. Ibid., 982. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 984. 53. Confessions, book 6 , O.C., I, 272. 54. Ibid., book 1, O.C., I, 5(17). 55. Man “is born to act and to think, not to reflect” (Préface de Narcisse, O.C., II, 970. 56. Emile, book 3, O.C., IV, 460. 57. Rêveries, Sixth Walk, O.C., I, 1051 (95). A little further on (p. 1054 [981]) he says: “After so many unhappy experiences I have learned to

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foresee the consequences o f following my immediate inclinations, and I have often abstained from a good deed that I was able and anxious to do, fearing the enslavement that I would bring upon myself if I gave way to it unthinkingly/’ 58. Confessions, book 7, O.C., I, 331 (311). 59. Letter to Dorn Deschamps, 12 September 1761, Correspondance Gén­ érale, DP, VI, 209; L, IX, 120-21. 60. Dialogues II, O.C., IV, 845. 61. Reveries (Droz ed.), 191. 62. Goethe, Werke, 4: 336. 63. Dialogues II, O.C., I, 793—94. 64. Rêveries, Seventh Walk, O.C., I, 1070 (117). 65. Ibid., 1068(115). 6 6 . Ibid., 1066(112). 67. Confessions, book 12, O.C., I, 589. 6 8 . Rêveries, Second Walk, O.C., I, 1002 (35).

Chapter Nine 1. Confessions, book 12, O.C., I, 646. 2. Ibid., 647. 3. Ibid., book 7, O.C., 301 (283). 4. Ibid., book 10, O.C., I, 492 (456). 5. Correspondance générale, DP, XV, 171. 6 . Dialogues I, O.C., I, 734. The frequent occurence of the adjective seul at the start of a sentence was pointed out by Basil Munteano in "La solitude de Rousseau," AnnalesJ.-J. Rousseau 31:132. At the beginning o f the Confes­ sions we find the same stylistic device used to express the exact opposite of psychic pain, namely, a feeling o f expansion and repletion: "Young, vigorous, full o f health, security, and confidence in myself and others, I was in the midst o f that brief but precious moment of life when the ex­ pansive plenitude of things enlarges us, as it were, by means of all our sensations." Book 2, O.C., I, 5 7 -5 8 . 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Phrases écrites sur des cartes à jouer,” in Rêveries, (Dorz ed.), 173—74; see O.C., I, 1171. 8 . Correspondance générale, DP, XVI, 77. 9. Rêveries, Second Walk, O.C., I, 1003 (36). 10. Ibid., First Walk, O.C., I, 997 (29). 11. Montaigne, Essais, book 3, 3. 12. Rêveries, First Walk, O.C., I, 997 (29). 13. Ibid., 999 (31). 14. Ibid., 995 (27). 15. Ibid., 999 (31). 16. Note that Rousseau never responded violently to those he considered aggressors. He sent his contribution for the statue of Voltaire. All his aggression is directed against Iiimself, by means o f projection.

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17. Confessions, book 1, O.C., I, 7 (19). 18. Ibid., book 2, O.C., I, 63 (6 8 ). Rousseau is telling the story of his conversion. 19. Dialogues II, O.C., I, 842. 20. Ibid., 849. 21. “My fate was to enter there in spite o f myself and to leave in the same way.” Confessions, book 9, O.C., I, 488 (453). 22. Ibid., book 7, O.C., I, 279 (262). 23. Ibid., book 9, O.C., I, 448 and 462. 24. Ibid., book 1, O.C., I, 39. 25. Ibid., book 6 , O.C., I, 262 (248). 26. Dialogues II, O.C., I, 847. 27. “Histoire du précédent écrit,” in Dialogues, O.C., I, 985. Cf. Rêveries, Eighth Walk: “However men choose to regard me, they cannot change my essential being, and for all their power and all their secret plots I shall continue, whatever they do, to be what I am in spite o f them.” O.C., I, 1080 (130). 28. On the role o f self-accusation, see Hesnard, Lunivers morbide de la faute. See also the thesis o f Jacques Lacan, De la psychose dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (Paris: Le François, 1932). 29. Correspondance générale, DP, III, 133; L, IV, 192. 30. Confessions, book 1, O.C., I, 5(17). 31. Joubert makes precisely this point: “Rousseau situates the rule o f duty in the depths o f the conscience. In so doing he takes as his standard o f measurement that which is most various, changeable, and inconstant.” See André Beaunier, ed., Les carnets de Joseph Joubert (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 1:216. 32. The situation is obscurely sexualized: Jean-Jacques submits to the double verdict in much the same way as he submitted to Mile Lambercier’s spanking and as he anticpated Mme de Warens’s reception.

Chapter Ten 1. Correspondance générale, DP, XIX, 258. 2. Ibid., 82. 3. Dialogues II, O.C., I, 860. 4. Correspondance générale, DP, XIX, 237. 5. Ibid., XX, 4 3 -4 4 . 6 . Rêveries, Sixth Walk, O.C., I, 1057 (101-2). 7. Gaston Bachelard, La formation de Vesprit scientifique (Paris, 1938), 44— 45, where Becher (note 8 ) is cited and commented on. 8 . Johann Joachim Becher (1635—1695), German physicist and adven­ turer and author o f the Physica subterranea (1669), in which he claims to be able to change one metal into another. 9. Annales Rousseau 12 (1918—19): 16—17. 10. Ibid., 34.

Notes to Pages 2 5 7 —83

401

11. Ibid., 36. 12. Dialogues 1, O.C., 1, 807. On Jean-Jacques's attraction to water, see Raymond, "Introduction,” in Rweries (Droz ed.), xxix; reprinted in idem, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. See also Michel Butor, Répertoire III (Paris: Editions ‘de Minuit, 1968), 59-101. 13. Reveries, Fifth Walk, O.C., I, 1046-47 (8 8 ). 14. Ibid., 1046(88). 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 1045 (87). 17. Beau nier, Les carnets de Josefth Jouhert, 1: 64. 18. Rêveries, Second Walk, O.C., I, 1005 (39). 19. Ibid., Fifth Walk, O.C., I, 1047 (89). 20. Ibid., 1047-48 (89-90). 21. O.C., IV, 600 and 1109. 22. To Mme d’Houdetot, 15 January 1758, Correspondance générale, DP, III, 266; L, V, 19. 23. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Leipzig: Philosophische Bibliothek, 1911), 4 2 2 -2 5 [my English translation—Trans.]. 24. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 149-56. See the Commentary by Bernhard Böschenstein, Hölderlins Rheinhymne (Zurich: Atlantis, 1959). 25. Böschenstein, Hölderlins Rheinhymne, 12—13. 26. Hegel, Phänomenlogie. 27. Confessions, book 12, O.C., I, 644. 28. See Raymond, Jean-Jacques Roxisseau, 179. 29. In "The Rhine," Hölderlin’s expression die Last der Freude (the burden of joy) corresponds exactly to Rousseau's use o f the term accablé (over­ whelmed). Consider the third letter to Malcsherbes: "I felt, with a kind o f rapture, overwhelmed by the weight of the universe.” Or the invocation to God in Emile: "It is my mind's rapture and my weakness's delight to feel overwhelmed by your greatness.” Sec Book 4, O.C., IV, 594. 30. Rêveries, Fifth Walk, O.C., I, 1047 (89). 31. Hölderlin, "Rousseau,” final stanza, in Sämtliche Werke, 2:13.

Essays on Rousseau Rousseau and the Search for Origins 1. Dialogues III, O.C., I, 936. 2. Rêveries, First Walk, O.C., I, 999-1 0 0 1 (3 2 -3 4 ). This passage is further analyzed below.

Discourse on Inequality 1. Roger Tisserand, Les concurrents de Rousseau à VAcadémie de Dijon (Päris 1936). 2. O.C., III, 49. 3. Letter to his father, 1731, Correspondance générale, DP, I, 13; L, I, 13.

402

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P ages 2 8 3 - 3 0 9

4. Letter to Mme de Warens, 13 September 1737, Correspondance générale, DP, I, 58; L, 1, 49. 5. Mémoire au gouverneur de Savoie, March 1739, O.C., I, 1217. 6 . Letter to J.-A. Charbonnel, 1737, Correspondance générale, DP, I, 70; L, 1, 61. 7. Letter to his father, 1731, Correspondance générale, DP, I, 13; L, I, 13. 8 . Correspondance générale, DP, I, 308; L, II, 143. 9. Letter to J. Perdriau, 28 November 1754, Correspondance générale, DP, II, 132; L, III, 57. 10. O.C., I, 1143. 11. Letter to Mme de Créqui, 8 September 1755, Correspondance générale, DP, II, 213; L, III, 170. 12. Dialogue III, O.C., I, 936. 13. See A. O. Lovejoy, “The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau,” in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948). 14. Book 4, O.C., IV, 640.

Rousseau and the Origin of Languages 1. O.C., III, 165. 2. Essay on the Origin of Languages, chap. 9, O.C., III (Paris: Furne, 1835), 508. [Subsequent references to the Essay will be to this edition.] 3. Ibid., 495. 4. O.C., III, 125 (70). 5. Ibid. 6 . Ibid., 126 (70). 7. Ibid., 141-42 (8 8 ). 8 . Ibid., I, 6 6 8 ff. 9. Ibid., Ill, 147 (93). 10. Ibid., 144 (90). 11. Ibid., 160 (104). 12. The whole digression on the problem of language hinges on a neg­ ative phrase, which figures at the end o f a paragraph: without speaking to one another [$aru se parler]. O.C., III, 146 (91). 13. Ibid., 146 (92). 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 147 (93): “Which multiplies languages by as many times as there are individuals to speak them.” 16. Ibid., 151 (96-97). 17. For Condillac, for example, the problem o f thought and language raises no embarrassing question of priority. Condillac stresses the reciprocal influence o f each on the other: “The use o f signs gradually extended the operations o f the mind. And the mind, thanks to this increased exercise, perfected signs and made their use more familiar” (Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, part 2, section 1, chap. 1, paragraph 4). Similarly, Con­ dillac traces step by step the evolution from silence to natural cries to

Notes to Pages 3 1 0 -1 6

4°3

gestures to conventional signs. He sees a getuly ascending staircase where Rousseau sees a series o f insurmountable obstacles. Rousseau draws a sharp contrast between man living in silence without any need for language and the fully evolved state that seems to be the result o f a linguistic convention, in which certain arbitrary sounds correspond to certain ideas. But such a linguistic '‘contract*’ could not have been agreed upon without a prior language* and that language in turn would have required another prior language, and so on, ad infinitum. Any precise “convention" implies an antecedent language for defining ideas and relations between signs and ideas. Again, a vicious circle. Yet we do speak; language does exist. So Rousseau must, at another point in the agrument, concede what he initially refuses to concede in order to drive home his point. 18. O.C., III, 148 (93). 19. Ibid., 151 (97). 20. Ibid., 164(109). 21. “How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this impostor.’ " Ibid. 22. Ibid., 177. 23. The only exceptions are the strong speeches of Pliny and Brasidas (ibid., 181). But these are judgments pronounced by auctoritates, borrowed for the purpose. 24. Ibid., I, 188(132). 25. Ibid., I ll, 189(133). 26. Ibid., 149 (94). 27. The French is signifieur (as opposed to signifiant and signifié). The author notes that he prefers signifieur in this context to émetteur, locuteur, and destinateuT.—T r a n s . 28. A very old problem, whose history has been traced by Arno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel, 6 vols. (Stuttgart, 1957—1962). 29. Essay on the Origin of Languages, chap. 5. 30. Ibid., chap. 20. 31. Ibid. 32. O.C., III, 191(135). 33. Ibid., 144 (90). 34. Confessions, book 4, O.C., I, 160. 35. O.C., III, 191(134). 36. Ibid., 171(115). 37. Essay on the Origin of Languages, chap. 20. 38. Ibid., chap. 9. To defer the satisfaction of desire is to enter the realm of difference and inequality. Social order requires man to defer/differ [in French: différer] by renouncing the immediate and at the same time by accepting the differentiated role that the law assigns each person. 39. Ibid., chap. 1.

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P ages 3 1 6 - 2 9

40. Jean Starobinski, “Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure,” Mer­ cure de France, February 1964, 254. 41. “Rousseau et l’origine du langage,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 24: 95—119. 42. Essay on the Origin of Languages, chap. 9. 43. Ibid., chap. 3. 44. Ibid., chap. 2. See also the articles on music, accent, and melody in the Dictionnaire de musique. 45. Essay on the Origin of Languages, chap. 4. 46. Ibid., chap. 10. 47. The relation between the ideal state described in the Social Contract and actual societies is explained most clearly in book 5 of Emile. 48. Emile, book 4, O.C, IV, 645—48. 49. Essay on the Origin of Languages, chap. 20. 50. Dialogue I, O.C., I, 672. 51. Since this essay was hrst published, Rousseau’s views on language have been the focus of much research. See especially Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967); and idem, “La linguis­ tique de Rousseau,” Revue internationale de philosophie 82, no. 4 (1967). This same issue contains essays by Geneviève Rodis-Lewis on Rousseau and Bernard Lamy and by Michèle Duchet and Michel Launay on the Essay on the Origin of Languages and second Discourse. Charles Porset has published a good critical edition o f Essai sur l'origine des langues (Bordeaux, 1968).

Rousseau and Buffon 1. O.C., III, 195 (139). 2. I am indebted to Jean Morel, “Recherches sur les sources du Discours sur l'inégalitéAnnales Jean-Jacques Rousseau 5, (1909): 119—98, and espe­ cially to Otis Fellows, “Buffon and Rousseau: Aspects of a Realtionship,” Proceedings of the Modem Language Association, June 1960, 184—96, for hav­ ing indicated the most important points o f commonality. 3. O.C.y III, 123 (67). 4. Ibid., 195 (139); cf. Buffon, Œuvres complètes (Päris: Gamier, n.d.), 2: 1. All subsequent references to Buffon are to this edition. 5. Buffon, 2: 221. 6 . Ibid., 200-201. 7. O.C., III, 133 (78). 8 . Formey, Bibliothèque impartiale, pour les mois de juillet et août 1756, XIV, part 1 (Göttingen and Leyden, 1756), 62. 9. Buffon, 1:434. 10. Ibid., 2: 327 -2 8 . 11. Ibid., 7; see also 2:355ff. 12. O.C., III, 141(87). 13. Ibid., 123 (6 8 ) 14. Buffon, 2:336-37.

Notes to Pages 3 2 9 —6 5 405

15. O.C., III, 144(90). 16. Buffon, 2: 3 3 6 -3 8. 17. Ibid., 338. 18. O.C., III, 193 (136). 19. Ibid., 192 (136). 20. Buffon, 2:352. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 346. 23. O.C., III, 122. 24. Buffon, 2:335. 25. Ibid., 3 3 2 -3 5 . 26. Ibid., 333. 27. Ibid., 334. 28. Ibid., 359. 29. Ibid., 566ff. On Buffon's thought, see Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIlIe siècle (Paris, 1963).

Fiction and Boundaries 1. Confessions, book 1 , O.C., I, 8 (19). 2. Ibid., 39 (47). 3. Ibid., 41 (48). 4. Ibid., 43 (50). 5. Ibid., book 9, O.C., I, 425 (396). 6 . Ibid., 4 2 7 -2 8 (398). 7. Ibid., 430 (400). 8 . Ibid., 4 3 0 -3 1 (401). 9. Ibid., book 11, O.C, I, 5 4 5 -4 6 (504). 10. La nouvelle Héloïse, part 2, letter 21, O.C., II, 277. 11. Confessions, book 9, O.C, I, 435 (405).

Reverie and Transmutation 1. Marcel Raymond, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La quête de soi et la rêverie (Paris: Corti, 1962), 197. 2. “As I tried to recall so many sweet reveries, 1 relived them instead of describing them." Rêveries, Second Walk, O.C, I, 1003 (36). 3. Ibid., First Walk. O.C, 1, 1000-1001(34). 4. Ibid., Fourth Walk, O.C., I, 1035 (76). 5. Ebauches des Confessions, O.C., I, 1154. 6 . O.C., I, 9 9 9 (3 1 -3 2 ). 7. Ibid., I, 1074 (123). 8 . Rêveries, First Walk, O.C., I, 1000 (32).

On Rousseau’s Illness 1. Confessions, book 1, O.C., I, 7 - 8 (19). 2. Emile I, O.C., IV, 268.

4o6

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otes to

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365-75

3. Discourse on Inequality, O.C., III, 135 (82). 4. P. M. Masson, La religion de J.-J. Rousseau, 3 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1913). 5. Rousseau’s attitude is clearly delineated in a letter to Pastor Jean Perdriau dated 28 November 1754: “If the detachment of a heart uncon­ cerned about glory, fortune, or even life can render it worthy to herald the truth, I presume to think that I am called to that sublime vocation.” Correspondance générale, DP, II, 135; L, III, 59. 6 . S. Elosu, La maladie de Rousseau (Paris: Fischbacher, 1929). 7. “You think that I am unhappy and consumed by melancholy. Oh, Sir, how mistaken you are! In Paris I was unhappy; in Paris a black bile ate away my heart.” First Letter to Malesherbes, O.C., I, 1131. 8 . E. Esquirol, Des maladies mentales (Brussels, 1838), 1:212. The diagnosis of melancholia is applied to Muhammad, Luther, Tasso, Cato, Pascal, Chat­ terton, Alfieri, and Gilbert. Pascal numbered among Pinel’s melancholics. 9. C. Lombroso, L'homme de génie (Paris, 1889). 10. P. J. Möbius, Rousseaus Krankheitsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1889). The author staLes that Rousseau suffered from the combinatorial form of interpretive delusion. This opinion is shared by Dr. Châtelain, La folie de J.-J. Rousseau (Neuchâtel, 1890). Rousseau exemplifies “the resigned variety of interpre­ tive delusion” in P Sérieux and J. Capgras, Les folies raisonnantes: Le délire d'interprétation (Paris, 1909). I myself employed the notion of paranoia in an earlier edition o f this book. 11. Pierre Janet, De l'angoisse à l'extase, 2 vols. (Paris, 1928), passim. 12. E. Régis, “Etude médicale sur J.-J. Rousseau,” Chronique médicale, 1900, nos. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 12, and 13; idem, “La phase de présénilité chez J.-J. Rousseau,” L encéphale, August 1907. 13. V. Demole, “Analyse psychiatrique des Confessions de J.-J. Rousseau,” Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie (Zurich) 2, no.2 (1918): 270— 304. 14. R. Laforgue, “Etude sur J.-J. Rousseau,” Revue française de Psychan­ alyse, November 1927, reprinted in Psychopathologie de l'échec (Paris, 1944). 15. Elosu, La maladie. 16. E. Kretschmer, Der sensitive Beziehungswahn (Berlin, 1918). See above, chap. 8 , n. 1, and translator’s note. 17. A. Poncet and R. Leriche, “La maladie de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” Bulletin de l'Académie de Médecine (session o f 31 December 1907). 18. F. MacDonald, La légende de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris, 1909). 19. Psychosomatic alternation culminates ultimately in delusion. 20. Correspondance générale, DP, XII, 366ff. 21. O.C., I, 1223-25. 22. Confessions, book 7, O.C., I, 317 (298). 23. Ibid., book 1, O.C., I, 16 (27). 24. For a psychoanalytic view o f Rousseau’s urinary problem, see Hans Christoffel, Trieb und Kultur (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1944).

Notes to Pages 3 7 5 - 7 7

407

25. Confessions, book 8, O.C., I, 379 (354). 26. Correspondance générale, DP, XVII, 3—4. 27. Le Bègue de Presle, Relation ou notice des derniers jours de Monsieur Jean-Jacques Rousseau (London, 1778), 18—19. 28. The circumstances o f Rousseau’s death have given rise to the most extravagant interpretation. The hypotheses of suicide and murder (by Thérèse) have found ardent defenders. A man like Rousseau cannot die without becoming the object of the most contradictory possible projections. Pfeople found it difficult to accept that the “man o f nature” could have died of natural causes.

ÿ Index

Accidental signs, 163—64 Accumulation, 1 0 4 -5 Action: in idle occupation, 234—38; renunciation of, 230—34, 239, 244-51, 2 6 1 -6 5 Adiaphoria, 358 Agriculture, 298, 317 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d \ 2 7 6 -7 7 . See also Letters to d'Alembert Alienation: evil as, 297; o f reflection, 330; in Rousseau, 49, 212, 232, 242; in society, 28, 41. See also Evil; Society, Solitude Amiel, H. E, 101 Amour-propre. See Self-love Anet, Claude, 139 Animals, 6 6 , 325—32 Apes, and men, 327 Appearance and reality, xv, xxxixxxiii, 34, 62—63, 156, 249; discovery of, in Confessions, 6 —11; and inequality, 285; and language, 122-25, 147, 150, 151; and loss o f state of nature, 296, 297; and obstacles, 2 2 2 ; and reflection, 208; and sentiment o f existence, 260; social order and disparity between, 22, 23, 27—28; as theme in first Discourse, 3—6; and unveiling, 65, 73. See also Existence; Truth Art(s), 351—52, 323; conflict between nature and, 23, 31, 32; nature through, 110-11, 294; in Pygmalion,71-72; rise of, 3 Articulations, and accents, 317 Astrée (d’Urfé), 342, 345 Atheism, 111-13, 116-18 Athens, 289, 321

Augustine, St., 19, 47, 140, 184 Autarchy, 25. 1 0 4 -1 1 , 230, 353, 364. See also Dependency Authenticity, 1 9 8 -200, 224 Autobiography, 1 8 0 -200, 3 6 0 -6 1 ; justification for, 180-86; method o f telling all in, 188—200; self­ description in, 186—88 Autoeroticism, 179, 374, 394 n.147 Barrés, Maurice, 335 Basile, Mme de, 153—55, 165—66, 392 n.95 Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, 368 Beaumont, Christophe de, 274—75 Beautiful soul, the, 36, 350; Hegel and Hölderlin on, 262—65. See also Nouvelle Héloïse, La (Rousseau) Becher, Johann Joachim, 2 5 5 -5 6 Being. See Appearance and reality; Existence Beiaval, Yvon, 112 Belle âme. See Beautiful soul Berthier, Father, 160 Bible, 290, 295, 297 Blackwell, Thomas, 317 Boileau, Nicolas, 50, 371 Boothby, Brooke, 165 Bossey, incident at, 7—9, 11, 17, 42, 77, 81, 122, 129, 130, 183, 204 Boswell, James, 179 Botany, 234—38 Breton, André, 335 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de, xvi, 282, 291-92, 32 3 -3 3 Burckhardt, Jacob, 336 Burgclin, Pierre, 70, 100—101, 299, 386 n.19

410

Caribs, 291 Cassirer, Ernst, 20, 3 0 -3 1 , 294 Childhood, 101, 130, 167, 303; illness in, 365; and language origins, 308—9; learning o f signs in, 145; loss o f unity in, 9 -1 1 ; sensation and reflection in, 206; and state of nature, 1 1-12, 26, 291, 292 Christ, 63, 117, 367; in Morceau allégorique, 68—70, 78, 79, 95 Christianity, 3 9 -4 0 , 69—70, 116, 290 Civilization. See Society Claparède, Edouard, 3 16-1 7 Cochin, Charles-Nicolas, the Younger, 6 6 Communication, 32; amorous, 167-69; immediate, 139-47; impossibility of, 5, 8 , 23, 41; misunderstanding of, 122-26, 249; by natural signs, 167—69; o f souls, 8 6 ; in state o f nature, 147, 3 0 7-10, 313. See also Immediacy; Language; Transparency; Writing Comparative concept, 293 Condillac, Etienne, 72, 149, 206, 209, 282; on error, 26; Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge, 308—9; on language, 308-9, 402 n.17; on origin of consciousness, 291-92; silence of, 2 2 8 -2 9 Confessions (Rousseau), 6 , 38, 42, 53, 8 6 , 233, 277, 278, 287, 295, 355, 357, 379 n.24; account o f personal reform in, 48—50, 55—57, amorous communication in, 167-69; on decision to write, 125; on discovery of false appearances, 7—11, 17; on economy, 106, 108; exhibitionism in, 170-73, 176; on Geneva life, 341; on inequality, 284; justification of autobiography in, 184—86; on Last Judgment, 279, 280; on method of autobiography, 189-97; on need for recognition, 124; on La nouvelle Héloïse, writing of, 341—44, 348-49; public reading of, 224-26; purpose of, 182, 3 7 1 -7 2 , 374; on reading o f novels, 338-40; return and welcome in, 128—32; and Rousseau’s “system,” 274-75; on self-

Index

knowledge, 6 -7 , 180; sentiment of existence in, 263; on signs, 153-55, 1 5 7-59, 165-66, 392 n.95; on sources o f misfortunes, 245, 246; seul as used in, 399 n.6 ; supplément as used in, 179; universal tribune in, 251 Confidence, 9, 10, 32, 112 Conscience, 207 Consciousness, xxxiii, 82, 92, 291-92; dual relationship in, 261; of existence, 329-30; reflection and development of, 2 0 5 -7 ; transparency of, 258; unveiling of, 78—79. See also Reflection; Reason; Soul Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (Rousseau), 9 9 -1 0 0 Consolation, 360 Conversation, 122-25 Conversion hysteria, 138 Cratylus (Plato), 147 Critical gaze, xix—xxii, xxv, xxviii, xxxi Culture. See Society Cynicism, 284

Death, 79, 132, 260, 266, 296, 331, 351, 365; of Julie, 91, 113-21, 127, 139, 207, 254; knowledge after, 76; o f Rousseau, 3 7 6 -7 7 , 383 n.21, 407 n.28; o f Rousseau’s mother, 249 Democracy, 99 Dependency, 282—83, 375-76. See also Autarchy Derrida, Jacques, xxv Descartes, René, 40—41, 325, 326 Deschamps, Dom, 198, 233 Despotism, 2 9 -3 0 , 319 Destiny. See Fate Determinism, 245 Deus absconditus, 117 Devin du village, Le (Rousseau), 60, 97, 175-76, 389 n .ll Dialectic, 87, 114-15, 289 Dialogues (Rousseau), 45, 6 6 , 101, 180, 198, 277, 306, 3 2 1 -2 2 , 374, 382 n. 2 0 ; on changeable character o f Rousseau, 51-53; on critical unveiling, 73; and delusion, 202,

Index 4 11

204-5; “History o f the Previous Piece” on, 227—29; on inaction, 233—34; on necessity, 245; on obstacles, 219; on reflection, 205, 207-18; on restoration o f transparency, 18; return in, 135; search for origins in, 276; on signs, 149, 151-52, 165; on silence, 225; transparency o f nature in, 257 Dictionary of Music. See Dictionnaire de musique (Rousseau) Dictionnaire de musique (Rousseau), 88-90. 164, 176, 386 n.28 Diderot, Denis, 40, 4 8 -4 9 , 51, 273, 290, 392 n.81; Encyclopédie, 35, 65, 149, 163, 290; on Rousseau’s innocence, 251; Rousseau’s reconciliation with, 134 Dijon Academy, 32, 49, 143—44, 2 7 6 -7 7 , 281, 2 8 6 -8 7 , 290 Dilthey, Wilhelm, xv Dionysus, 176, 179, 262, 367 Discourse on the Nature of Animals (Buffon), 3 2 5 -2 6 , 331, 332 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Rousseau), xxiv, 34, 60, 73, 274—75, 2 8 1 - 303, 358; account o f history in, 290-301; Buffon’s influence on, 323-33; conclusion of, 30 2 -3 ; economy in, 106—7; extremism of, 286—88; on language, 146-47, 150, 304-14, 319, 321; Marxist interpretation of, 29—31; on naturesociety conflict, 23, 24, 28; objectives of, 281-82; on obstacles, 219; original equality in, 97; on reflection, 2 0 5 -6 , 210; and Rousseau's experience o f inequality, 2 8 2 - 86; on sickly children, 365; style of, 288-89; on time of transparency, 14 Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (Rousseau), xiv, 3—21, 34, 60, 73, 91-92, 274, 275, 281, 319; appearance and reality in, 3 -6 , 65; function of language in, 296; Glaucus myth in, 15—16; on loss o f transparency, 11 —14; on naturesociety conflict, 23, 32; on reflection, 2 1 1

Dissertation on Modem Music (Rousseau), 150 Division o f labor, 298, 317 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 340, Dreams, 353, 354 “Dudding,” 59, 61

345

Écart, xvii—xix Economy, 103-11. See also Money Eddy, Mary Baker, 367 Education, 7, 13, 84, 1 0 1 , 273; and conventional signs, 143-46; of Emile, 177-79, 2 1 5 -1 8 , 303; and reflection, 206, 2 15-18; synthesis through, 3 0 -3 2 , 295, 303 Egmont, Mme de, 2 2 4 -2 5 Ego, 6 8 -7 0 , 72, 77, 78, 95. See also Consciousness Elegiac feeling, 90—92 Eloquence, 310, 31 9 -2 1 Elosu, Dr. S., 369, 370 Elysium, 110-11, 351 Emile (Rousseau), 13, 23, 26, 31, 80, 94, 101, 286, 332, 337; consciousness in, 261; delay in publication of, 160-61, 166; economy in, 388 n.63; education o f Emile in, 177-79, 2 1 5 -1 8 , 303; enlacé as used in, 304—5, 397 n.3; interpretation of, 273; on language o f eloquence, 3 1 9 -21; man’s transformation in, 327; reflection in, 206, 207, 210, 215—18; returns in, 127, 135-36; sickly children in, 365; on signs, 145—46, 150; utility in, 230 Emotion, 5. 6 , 6 1 -6 2 , 8 6 , 100, 123, 27 1 -7 2 ; and autobiography, 1 8 4 85, 194-99; communication through, 137-39, 146-55, 309, 312, 315-21; involuntary, 246; and music, 89; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 344, 347, 348, 350—51; and reflection, 41, 206, 2 0 9 - 10; in reverie, 353— 57, 363; and self-awareness, 7, 180, 188; and sentiment of existence, 2 5 7-67; and signs, 162; transparency of, 181, 254 Enchanted world, 155, 211, 222, 321 Encyclopédie, 35, 65, 149, 163, 290 Engels, Friedrich, 2 9 -3 1 , 302

412

Enlightenment, the, xiv, xxv, 6 8 , 112, 185, 299 Epictetus, 48 Epinay, Mme d’, 133 Epochs of Nature (Buffon), 327 Equality: of despotism, 29; restoration of, 29, 31; Rousseau’s ideal of, 286, 302—3. See also Inequality E quisse d'une théorie des émotions (Sartre), 138 Essay concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 140-41 Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (Condillac), 3 0 8 -9 Essay on the Origin of Languages (Rousseau), xxiv, 146—48, 196, 304, 3 1 4 -2 1 , 353 Evil, 166, 237, 244, 252, 296, 343; and beautiful soul, 264-65; externality of, 17—21; o f false appearances, 3—11; inaction and vulnerability to, 247-51; o f inequality, 282, 285, 295; o f language, 311; o f obstacles, 223; and primitive man, 25; o f reflection, 207 -1 9 , 249, 331-32; and reverie, 363; reversibility of, 12—13, 16-17; self-interest as, 74; of signs, 156-63, 165; society as root of, 2 2 -2 5 , 32, 3 4 -3 6 , 297, 303; o f theater, 93-95; unveiling of, 6 6 -7 5 Evolution, 326—27 Exhibitionism, 170-77, 375 Existence: man’s awareness of, 329-30; sentiment of, 2 5 7 -6 7 , 364. See also Appearance and reality Fall of man, 12, 27, 290, 293 Fanaticism, 6 8 Fate, 47, 53, 60; and signs, 157, 166-67; submission to, 193—94, 205, 241, 2 4 3 -4 7 Fatherland, 35, 337 Festivals, 88-91, 317, 351; and equality, 9 7 -1 0 1 , 104; ideal of, 92-97; originator of, 102—3 Fleury, Abbé, 317 Fluidity, 2 5 6 -5 7 Folly, 51, 5 8 -5 9 Foucault, Michel, xxv France, 287—88, 333—36. See also Raris

Index

Francis o f Assisi, St., 117-18 Francueil, M. de, 284, 3 7 5 -7 6 Francueil, Mme Dupin de, 285 Franquières, M. de, 7 6 -7 7 Freedom, xxii, 266, 306; autobiography as act of, 194; and historical process, 302; and inequality, 284, 285; and innocence of inaction, 244-51; and man’s spirituality, 326—28; and need for transcendent judgment, 252; and technology, 231; will to immediate, 2 4 1 -4 2 French language, 148, 314, 3 3 3 -3 5 French Revolution, xiv, 22, 93, 265 Freud, Sigmund, xxx, 115 Galatea, 7 0 -7 2 , 75, 7 8 -7 9 , 95, 195,

221-22 Galley, Mile, 168 General will, 30, 44, 85, 96-97, 99, 205 Genesis, Book of, 290, 295 Geneva, 36, 5 8 -5 9 , 157, 276-77, 282, 319, 322, 324, 334, 374; and Discourse on Inequality, 2 8 6-89, 295, 302; and France, relationship between, 3 3 7 -3 8 , 345-50; Rousseau’s flight from, 3 4 0-41, 363; Rousseau’s return to, 132 Gerusalemma liberata (Tasso), 59 Gesture, 309, 312, 3 1 5 -2 0 Gide, Andre, 272 Glaucus myth, 15-18, 75, 196, 246, 291 God, xxxiii, 20, 45, 65, 70, 224, 243, 255, 265, 266, 294; judgment of, 183-84, 22 6 -2 9 , 2 5 1 -5 3 , 2 7 9 -8 0 , 360—61; immediate relationship with, 1 1 3 -2 1 , 139-40; knowledge of, 7 6 -7 7 ; paterfamilias as, 1 1 1 —13; and theodicy, 2 0 -2 1 , 295 Gods, time o f the, 11, 19, 155, 167 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 21; Metamorphosis of the Plants, 235; on Rousseau’s Pygmalion, 71 —72; on Rousseau’s madness, 23 4 -3 5 Good(ness), 4, 21, 166, 204, 212, 244, 290, 296, 331; o f man, 25 -2 6 , 295, 299; in Morceau allégorique, 6 8 ; signs

Index of, 165-67; o f solitude, 40. See also Innocence; Virtue Graffenried, Mlle de, 168 Grotius, Hugo, 24 Guéhenno, Jean, 225 Guilt, 171, 265, 339; apparent, 7—11; of historical change, 2 1 ; possibility of, 244, 2 4 9-51; and reflection, 212, 219. See also Evil; Innocence; Persecution Gyges, ring of, 225 Happiness, 33, 169, 202, 331, 341; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 82, 92-93, 95, 97, 1 01-3, 120, 350-51 ; of patriarchal age, 298, 314-18; o f reverie, 361-64; and sentiment o f existence, 260, 263-64; and signs, 150, 154-55, 157, 236-37; in state of nature, 12, 192, 296, 303; and will to self-presence, 243; of wise man, 332 Harmony, 8 8 -8 9 , 319 Hegel, G. W. F., 24, 28, 34, 183, 199, 244, 276, 280; on the beautiful soul, 92, 262-65; on language, 195 Heidegger, Martin, xv Herbarium, as sign, 164, 2 3 4 -3 8 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 8 8 Heroism, 176-79 Hesnard, A., 162 Historical sociology, 292 History, 24, 92, 201, 280, 324, 349; Buffon on, 327; end to, 30, 3 0 1 -2 , 311, 314; and man’s essence, 15-21; origin of, 11-15, 290—92, 30 4 -5 ; patriarchal era of, 297-98, 3 1 4-19; Rousseau’s concern with, 33—34; Rousseau’s influence on, 45. See also Society; State of nature “History o f the Previous Piece’’ (Rousseau), 227—29 Hobbes, Thomas, 298—99, 302, 305 Holbach, Baron d \ 74 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 143, 367; The Rhine, 2 6 2 -6 6 , 401 n.39; Rousseau, 15, 155, 167 Homer, 319 Homo nocturnus, 327 Homosexuality, 369—70, 375

4*3 Hope, 360, 362 Hottentots, 291 Houdetot, Sophie d’, 63, 177 246 345, 346 Hubert, René, 295 Hugo, Victor, 335 Human nature, 293; Buffon and Rousseau on, 3 2 3-33; knowledge of. 7 4 -7 5 ; and loss o f transparency, 1 5-21. See also Society; Soul; State o f nature Hume, David, 134-37, 159 Husserl, Edmund, xx, xxvii Illness, 47, 138-39, 201, 36 5 -7 7 . See also Madness; Urinary disorder o f Rousseau Illusion. See Appearance and reality Images, transmutation of, 3 5 6 -6 4 Imagination, 198, 371; and evil signs, 160-61; failure of, 2 3 5-38; and reflection, 210. See also Reverie Immediacy. 23—24, 43, 8 8 -8 9 , 128, 251; and communication, 137, 139-40, 155, 156, 199-200, 2 3 6 37, 318; and illusion of nature in art, 111; and inaction, 230-34; and money, 105—6; o f music, 88—89; in possession o f truth, 41, 69, 70, 77, 78; and reflection, 207, 2 0 9 -1 3 , 216, 224, 364; in relationship between God and man, 69, 70, 11721; and sexuality, 169; of spectacle, 96, 97; of state o f nature, 292, 303; and things, 23—24; and transparency, 256, 259, 263 Incest, 315 Inequality: evil of, 282, 285, 295; and natural law, 305; in La nouvelle Héloïse. 94, 9 7 -1 0 1 , 104, 107; origin of, 27, 33, 293, 2 98-300, 313, 318; Rousseau’s experience of, 282—86. See also Equality; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Rousseau) Infantile fixation, 394 n.147 Injustice. See Justice; Persecution Innocence, 279—80, 350—51, 358; age of, 1 2 ; autobiography as declaration of, 183-84, 188-89; o f the beautiful soul, 2 64-65; civilization

414

Innocence (continued) and loss of, 24; and discovery of false accusation, 7—11; God’s judgment of, 183-84, 226-29, 251 -5 3 , 2 7 9 -8 0 , 360-61; of inaction, 244-51; indestructibility of, 20-2 1 ; and language, 122, 137; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 85, 87, 91—92, 97, 101; o f novel reading, 339-40; and obstacles, 220; o f plants, 236; primordial, 25—26, 192; and reflection, 209-12; o f spectacle, 9 5 96. See also Persecution Insanity. See Madness Institutions chimiques (Rousseau), 2 55-57 Institutions politiques (Rousseau), 13 Insularity, 1 01-2 Interpretation o f signs, 155—67 Intuition, 4 0 -4 1 , 140 Invisibility, as transparency, 255 Italy, 336, 346 Janet, Pierre, 369 Jansenism, 117 Jesuits, 160 Joubert, Joseph, 258 Julie (character). See Nouvelle Héloïse, La (Rousseau) Justice, 21, 30, 183, 237, 240, 279; appearance of, in social order, 299; false image of, 4, 7 -1 0 ; political, 300-301. See also Innocence Kafka, Franz, 225 Kant, Immanuel, xxxiii, 28, 76, 111, 206, 294; idealist interpretation o f Rousseau by, 30—31; and La nouvelle Héloïse, 114-15 Kierkegaard, Sdren, 34, 43, 44, 384 n.23 Knowledge; immediacy in, 41, 140; o f physical nature, 7 4 -7 5 . See also Selfknowledge; Truth Kretschmer, E., 370 Labor, 25, 230-31; division of, 298, 317; imagination versus world of, 338, 339; and language development, 317; in La nouvelle

Index

Héloïse, 107—9; origin of, 25—26, 10 6 -7 , 296-98 Laforgue, René, 139, 177, 369—70 Lambercier, Mile, 7 -9 , 122, 123, 172 La Mettrie, Julien Offray, 327 Language, xxiv-xxv, 25, 262, 294, 332; abuse of, 310—11; attempt to transcend, 2 7 2-74, 276-80; authentic, 224; in autobiography, 182, 191—200; elementary, 311 —13; of eloquence, 319-21; French, 148, 314, 333-35; o f the horde, 311, 312, 316; mediation of, 137, 139-47, 155, 156, 199-200; and misunderstanding, 122—26, 129, 142-43; origin of, 146-49, 196, 276, 304—22; in patriarchal era, 31 4 -1 9 ; perfected, 313-14; return and abolition of, 136-39; of Rousseau, 321—22. See also Autobiography; Communication; Signs; Writing Lamage, Mme de, 130, 169 Last Judgment, 2 7 9 -8 0 Lausanne, 60, 334 Law: civil, 31, 96-97, 294, 300-301, 319; natural, 301, 3 0 5 -6 Leriche, R., 370, 377 Letter on Spectacles (Rousseau), 2 7 6 -7 7 Letters from the Mountain (Rousseau, 132, 382 n .2 0 Letters to Malesherbes (Rousseau), 137, 197, 207, 233, 273, 277, 401 n.29; autobiography in, 183; on insularity, 102; on publication of Discourse on Inequality, 288; on unveiling of nature, 77 Letter to Sophie (Rousseau), 153 Letter to d’Alembert (Rousseau), 93—95, 102, 132 Levasseur, Thérèse, xxiii, 34, 179, 231, 370 Liberty. See Freedom Linnaeus, 235, 327 Literature, French-Swiss, 333—36. See also Novels; Poetry; Writing Living Eye, The (Starobinski), xxi Locke, John, 7 4 -7 5 , 206, 209, 326; Essay concerning Human Understanding, 140-41; on origin of consciousness, 291—92

Index Love, 153, 315; moral and physical aspects of, 330-31; and natural signs, 153—54; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 8 3 -8 7 , 113-15, 120, 350-52; and persecution, 204—5; repudiation of consequences of, 231-32 ; self-, 208, 306, 322, 366; and the tutor, 177-79. See also Sexuality Lucifer, 140 Luxembourg, Maréchal de, 128, 133 Luxembourg, Mme de, 174 Machiavelli, Niccolö, 301, 302 Madness, 59, 61, 135, 138, 156, 2 0 1 -5 , 240, 267, 3 6 8 -7 1 . See also Paranoid delusion; Persecution Magic, 83, 214, 255; o f emotion, 138; evil, of signs, 156—63, 165; and obstacles, 2 2 0 - 2 1 ; and personal reform of Rousseau, 58—63; of presence, 173-75, 179; of representation, 175; unveiling of truth through, 69, 72, 77 Malebranche, Nicolas de, 4 0 —41, 7 4 -7 5 , 140 Malesherbes, Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de. See Letters to Malesherbes (Rousseau) Manufacturing, 108 Marion, 122, 171-72 Marriage, 294, 349 Martyrdom, 4 3 -4 4 , 60 Marx, Karl, 24 Masochism, 170, 172—73, 176, 205, 351, 3 6 5 -6 6 Masson, P. M., 367 Masturbation. See Autoeroticism Materialism, 74, 206, 245, 327 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de, 309 Maurras, Charles, 335 Mediation. See Immediacy Medusa, 95, 158 Melody, 89, 144, 148, 164, 317-20, 386 n.28 Memory, 279; and autobiography, 181, 194-98; and consciousness o f existence, 329, 330; and reflection, 210; and reverie, 354, 356, 362 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, xx, xxxvii n. 40

4 15 Metallurgy, 298, 317 Metamorphosis of the Plants (Goethe) 235 '* Metaphysics, 213 Metastasio, Pietro, 346 Method, xvii-xviii, xxxv n .9 Mirabeau, Marquis de, 3 9 , 83, 376 Misunderstanding, 252; and autobiography. 181-84, 190; fear of, 122-26, 142-43; and return, 126, 137. See also Appearance and reality; Persecution Mnemonic signs. 163-67 Money, 1 03-6, 104-6, 112, 297, 3 0 1 -2 ,3 1 4 Montaigne, Michel de, xxxi, 19, 3 7 , 51, 57, 184, 187, 278, 352, 371; Essays, 2 4 2 -4 3 Montaigne in Motion (Starobinski), xxxi Montesquieu, 301, 380 n.34 Morality, 294, 331, 361; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 3 49-50; origin of, 306, 307; pity as basis of, 2 1 0 ; of sensibility, 56, 212—16; as synthesis, 206. See also Good (ness); Virtue Morceau allégorique (Rousseau), 65 —70, 72, 73, 7 8 -7 9 , 95 Music, 108, 125, 283, 386 n.28; copying of, 235; imitation in, 176; and language, 148, 304, 317-19; as mnemonic, 164; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 88—90, 94; signs in, 143—45. See also Harmony ; Melody Naïve and sentimental, distinction between, 90 Narcissism, 138, 167, 2 5 0 -5 1 , 394 n. 147 Natural History (Buffon), 32 3 -3 3 Natural History of Carnivores (Buffon), 332 Natural law, 301, 3 0 5 -6 Natural signs, 149—55, 163 Nature, 1 0 -1 2 , 42, 46, 48, 351—52; and botany, 23 4 -3 8 ; Buffon versus Rousseau on, 323; conflict between society and, 4 —5, 19—20, 37, 294—96, 301, 323; and music, 90; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 82, 91, 114; reconciliation between society and, 30—32, 109—10, 294; o f Rousseau,

4i6 Nature (continued) 4 7 -5 8 ; as self, 276; and transparency, 257, 263—65; unveiling of, 74—78. See also Natural law; Natural signs; State o f nature Neolithic revolution, 298 Nephritis, 368—69 Neuchâtel, 334 Newton, Isaac, 111 Notre Dame Cathedral, 2 2 7 -2 8 Nouvelle Héloïse, La (Rousseau), xxi, xxiii, 60, 8 1 -1 2 1 , 141, 175, 185, 3 4 1 -5 2 , 397 n.3; apotheosis in, 111 —13; conception of, 341-46; contrast between Paris and Geneva in, 346—50; course of, 350—52; death o f Julie in, 91, 113-21, 127, 139, 207, 254; despondency theme in, 205; economy in, 104-11; elegiac feeling in, 90—92; equality in, 97— 104; festival in, 92—97; mediation of action in, 230; music in, 88—90; natural signs in, 152—53, 159; reflection in, 207, 215; returns in, 126, 134; seductive magic in, 178; silence in, 225; transitive function of language in, 277; transparency theme in, 8 1 -8 8 , 254; unveiling o f portrait in, 395 n.147 Novalis, 262 Novels, 277; Rousseau’s reading of, 167, 3 3 8-41 Obstacle(s), 241, 255, 311; and freedom, 242; overcoming o f natural, 26—27, 218-19; and reflection, 205, 207—8, 218—24; sensation as, 117, 259; o f silence, 2 2 4 -2 9 Obstructions. See Obstacles Oedipus complex, 171 “Old ballad,” cliché o f the, 88 -9 0 Omens, 143, 156-63, 165, 220, 222, 225, 237 Onomatopoeia, 311, 318 On the Lisbon Disaster (Voltaire), 343 Origin, myth of, 15—17 Orpheus and Eurydice, 196, 363 Osmont, Robert, 119 Otherness, xxii—xxxii

Index

Painting, 186, 187, 189, 198 Paleolithic age, 297-98 Paranoid delusion, 156, 201—4, 231, 235, 240, 397 n .l. See also Madness; Persecution Paris, 313, 314, 3 37 -3 8 , 340, 3 4 5 -5 0 Passion, 52. See also Emotion Paternalism, 98 Patriarchal era, 297-98, 3 1 4 -1 9 Peace, 360—64 Perception, 162, 237 Perfectibility of man, 12, 147, 205, 218, 3 0 4 -5 Persecution, 5, 17, 43, 47, 53, 122, 139, 149, 185, 211, 233, 237, 255, 371; and appeal to God’s judgment, 2 5 1 -5 3 ; and Bossey episode, 7 -1 1 ; and evil signs, 161-63; as imprisonment, 239-40; and innocence in inaction, 244-51; and mental illness, 202—4; in Morceau allégorique, 67; and obstacles, 2 2 2 -2 4 ; and reflection, 215-18; and renunciation, 241-42; and reverie, 356, 360; and sentiment o f existence, 261—66; silence as, 224—29; and will to self-presence, 242—44. See also Misunderstanding; Paranoid delusion Persifleur, Le (Rousseau), 5 0 -5 3 Petit Savoyard (Rousseau), 394 n.131 Petrarch, 346 Philology, xvii—xviii Philosophes, 3 4 -3 5 , 6 8 , 7 3 -7 4 , 112 Philosophy, 28, 34, 45; in Discourse on Inequality, 2 8 1 -8 2 , 289; on natural law, 305; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 350—51; proper function of, 213, 307; Rousseau’s criticism of, 23, 34— 35; Rousseau’s work as, 271, 273— 77; and social order, 300 Pity, 210, 306, 322 Plato, xxxiii, 16, 289, 309; Cratylus, 147 Platonism, xxxiii, 11, 100 Plutarch, 59, 284 Poetry, 3 1 7 -1 9 Poland, 9 9 -1 0 0 , 388 n.55 Political Institutions (Rousseau), 13, 44, 300 Poncet, A., 370, 377

Index 417

Poulet, Georges, xx, xxvi-xxvii, xxxiv Poverty, 241, 263, 2 8 3 -8 6 , 293-94. See also Inequality Practical reason, 76, 206 Pride, 12, 27, 3 8 -4 0 , 46, 58, 208. See also Self-love Primitive man. See State o f nature Profession of Faith (Rousseau), 326 Progress, 16, 21, 293, 302, 319. See also Society “Project concerning New Signs for Music” (Rousseau), 143-45 Property, 27, 98, 1 06-7, 241, 294, 298-99 Proust, Marcel, 181, 236 Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, 117-18 Psychoanalysis, xvii, xxix—xxx, 394 n.147 Punishment, 136, 183; need for, 133, 172-73, 176. See also Persecution Pygmalion (Rousseau), xxiii, 70—72, 75, 7 8 -7 9 , 95, 111, 195, 2 2 1 -2 2 Ramuz, C.-F., 333 Raymond, Marcel, xxvi, xxxiv, 59, 60, 352, 354 Reading, xxvi, xxviii, 6—7, 338—41 Realism, 74 Reason, 30, 34, 107, 140, 267, 294, 307; Buffon on, 323, 325-26; hegemony of, 332; and natural law, 305-6; and political justice, 300, 301; practical, 76; Rousseau’s criticism of, 38—39, 41; and sentiment, 185. See also Reflection Reconciliation. See Return Reflection, 90, 178, 179, 2 0 1 -3 8 , 264, 292; and consciousness o f existence, 329-30; evil of, 2 0 7 -1 9 , 249, 331-32; and inaction, 247-49; origin of, 2 6 -2 7 , 2 0 5 -7 , 290, 296, 298; and reverie, 354, 356, 364; and sincerity, 199; and walking, 233. See also Reason; Reverie Régis, E., 370 Regression, 138 Religion, 35, 3 9 -4 0 , 213, 273, 279-8 0, 326—27, 335; Christianity, 3 9 -4 0 , 6 9 -7 0 , 116, 290; in La

wuri 113—21

.

philosophes, 7 3 - 7 4 1 1 9 . Rêveries, 359, 360 ' d Renunciation, 2 4 0 -4 2 , 3 3 7 Return, 126-36, 1 7 5 Revelation. 77, 1 1 7 , 206 Reverie. 294, 352-64; and idle occupations, 235-38* : ngo V , . 7 ' and faction, 233-34; on invisibility, 255; and U nouvelle Héloïse, conception of, 342—46; and obstacles, 221—22; and paranoia o f Rousseau, 2 0 2 ; and reading, 33 8 -4 1; restoration o f transparency through, 1 8 - 1 9 ; scntimenL of existence in, 2 5 7 -6 0 263; and sexuality, 168-69, 174-75; transmutation o f images in, 35 6 -6 4 . See also Imagination; Reflection Rêveries du prommeur solitaire. Les (Rousseau), xxi, 42, 45, 180, 181, 213, 251, 255, 262, 266-67, J£52—64, 382 n.20; and delusion, 202, 204—5; on festival, 103; function o f language in, 277—79; knowledge of unveiled truth in, 76; purpose of, 352—55; rapturous meditation in, 234; resignation to fate in, 247; on Rousseau’s unchanging nature, 17; on selfsufficiency and divine feeling, 113; on sentiment o f existence, 257—60; on signs, 162-64; will to self­ presence in, 243; and writing as mediation, 141—42 Reveries of a Solitary Walker. See Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. Les (Rousseau) Revolution (s), 382 n.20; French, xiv, 22, 93, 265; in history, 2 9 -3 1 , 297, 302 Rhetoric, 358 Rhine, The (Hölderlin), 262-66, 401 n.29 Rhythm, 3 1 6 -1 7 Richardson, Samuel, 344 Robespierre, 368 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 109, 230 Rome, ancient, 4, 59, 319 Rougemont, Denis de, 114 Rousseu (Hölderlin), 15, 155, 167 Rousseau, Isaac, 389 n . l l

4 i8

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: abandoned children of, 2 3 1 -3 2 , 249, 285, 370, 371; and autobiography, 180-200; as beautiful soul, 261-66; birth of, 170, 245, 249, 365; and Bossey episode, 7 -9 , 1 1 , 17, 42, 77, 81, 122, 129, 130, 183, 204; and Buffon, 323—33; on cause o f transparency, 255—57; Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, 99—100; and dairy products, 171, 394 n.131; death of, 3 76-77, 383 n.21, 407 n.28; Le devin du village, 60, 97, 175-76, 389 n .ll; Dictionnaire de la musique, 88-90, 164, 176, 386 n .ll; Dissertation on Modem Music, 150; and emotional communication, 1 3 6 39; Essay on the Origin of Languages, xxiv, 146-48, 196, 304, 314-21 353; “exclusive” as used by, 388 n.55; exhibitionism of, 170-77, 375; false appearances theme in, 3—11; on festivals, 93-97; and the FrenchSwiss writer, 336—38; “History o f the Previous Piece,” 227-2 9 ; idealist interpretation of, 30—32; idle occupations of, 234-38; and inaction, 230—34, 244-51; inequality in life of, 282-86; “influence” as used by, 386 n.19; inner conflict of, 53—58; Institutions chimiques, 255—57; Institutions politiques, 13; on language origins, 146-49, 196, 276, 304-22; Letter on Spectacles, 276—77; Letters from the Mountain, 132, 382 n.20; Letters to Sophie, 153; Letters to d'Alembert, 93— 95, 102, 132; Lettres morales, 177, 261; on loss of transparency, 11 —15; madness of, 59, 61, 135, 138, 156, 2 0 1 -5 , 240, 256, 368-71; magical behavior by, 5 8 -6 4 ; Marxist interpretation of, 29-31; as mentor, 177—79; and misunderstanding, fear of, 122—26; and Mme de Warens, 128-32, 136, 139, 169-71, 246, 2 82-83 , 340, 344, 363; Morceau allégorique, 65—70, 72, 73, 78—79, 95; on music and transparency, 8 8 90; and need for unity, 45-47; on obstacles, 218—24; and persecution

Index

as imprisonment, 239—40; Le persifleur, 50 -5 3 ; Petit Savoyard, 394 n.131; and philosophes, 3 4 -3 5 , 6 8 , 73—74, 112; political conservatism of, 380 n.34; on primordial innocence, 22—25; Profession of Faith, 326; “Project concerning New Signs for Music,” 143-45; Pygmalion, 7 0 72, 75, 7 8 -7 9 , 95, 111, 195, 2 2 1 22; reading by, 6 —7, 338-41; on reflection, 20 5 -1 8 ; and renunciation, 240-42; on restoration o f transparency, 15-20; return as theme in, 126—36; and reverie, 352—64; on rise o f social order, 26—29; and search for origins, 2 71-80; and sentiment of existence, 257—67; and sexuality, 167-79, 3 3 8 -4 2 , 3 7 4-75, 394 n.147; and signs, power of, 139-67; silence in réponse to writings of, 224—29; on society as root o f evil, 20 -2 1 ; Les solitaires, 127-28, 192; and solitude, 33-6 4 ; spontaneous nature of, 4 7 -5 3 ; theodicy of, 2 0 -2 1 ; and Thérèse, xxiii, 34, 179, 231, 370; as thief, 106, 121, 171; and two tribunals, 251—53; and unveiling, 73—80; urinary disorder of, 138-39, 201, 365-77; and will to self-presence, 242—44. See also Confessions; Dialogues; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality; Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts; Emile; Letters to Malesherbes; Nouvelle Héloïse, La; Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Les

Sadomasochism. See Masochism Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 153, 165-66, 199, 392 n.95 Saint-Preux (character). See Nouvelle Héloïse, La (Rousseau) Sameness, xxii, xxvii, xxxii Sartine, M. de, 277 Sartre, Jean-Päul, xxvii, 138, 335 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 316 Schelling, Friedrich, 262 Schiller, Friedrich, 73, 90, 91, 111 Schizophrenia, 203, 369

Index Schopenhauer, Arthur, 272 Science (s), 255, 282, 322; conflict between nature and, 23, 32; origin of, 3, 218. See also Technology Self-consciousness. See Self-knowledge Self-interest, 74, 321 Self-knowledge, 72, 180-82, 188; Buffon versus Rousseau on, 329-30; origin of, 6 -7 ; and restoration of transparency, 18-19; in reverie, 3 6 1 -6 2 Self-love, 27, 208, 306, 322. See also Pride Self-presence, will to, 242—44, 247 Self-sufficiency. See Autarchy Seneca, 37, 242 Sensation, 82, 8 6 , 147, 381 n.7; failure of, 237; mediation of, 117; and music, 8 8 , 89; as obstruction, 117, 259; primitive immediacy of, 2 5 -2 6 , 31; and reflection, 206, 209, 212-16; and sentiment o f existence, 259—60; and sexuality, 169 Sensibility, 52; morality of, 56, 2 1 2 -1 6 Sensitive soul, the, 149, 152, 178, 375 Sentiment des Citoyens (Voltaire), 372 Sexuality: and language evolution, 309—10, 315—16; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 350-52; and Rousseau, 167-79, 338 -4 2 , 374 -7 5 , 394 n.147. See also Love Signs, 139-67, 181, 191, 332; accidental or mnemonic, 163-67, 236-3 8; in education, 143—45; interpretation of, 155-67; and language of eloquence, 319-21; and language origins, 146—49, 309, 318; natural, 149-55, 163; negative (omens), 156-63, 165, 220, 222, 225, 237; theory of, 139-41. See also Language Silence, 36, 40, 146, 212, 233, 272, 273, 321; and communication, 147, 152-55; obstacle of, 224—29; as omen, 143; of primitive man, 307 -1 0 , 314, 315. See also Solitude Sin. See Evil; Guilt Sincerity, 63—64, 199 Social contract, 33, 96-97, 205; ideal, 300—301; idealist interpretation of, 30-3 1 ; language of, 319; Marxist

419

interpretation of, 29—31; origin of, 299, 310 Social Contract (Rousseau), xxiii, 13, 275, 276, 382 n.20, 386 n28; idealist interpretation of, 30—31; on language, 310, 319; on legitimate social contract, 301; Marxist interpretation of, 2 9 -3 1 ; and La nouvelle Héloïse compared, 85, 96-99; on obstacles, 218—19; on as used in, 205 Society, 107, 123, 265; Buffon versus Rousseau on, 323-33; conflict between nature and, 4 - 5 , 19-20, 37, 295-96, 301, 323; and language origins, 304—7, 310—21; negation of, 37; origin of, 2 6 -2 9 , 2 7 5 -7 6 , 290-302; in patriarchal era, 297-98, 314—19; reconciliation between nature and, 30—32, 10 9 10, 294; reflection and development of, 205—7; and revolution, 29—31; as root o f evil, 2 2 -2 5 , 32, 3 4 -3 6 , 297, 303; and sincerity, 64; state of nature contrasted with, 25—26, 308 Socrates, 67, 6 9 -7 0 , 7 3 -7 4 , 179 Solitaires, Les (Rousseau), 127—28, 192 Solitude, 79, 96, 97, 163, 174, 183, 26 4 -6 5 , 303, 313, 336, 337; of autarchy, 109; of Christ, 69; and inner conflict, 53-5 8 ; justification for, 3 3 -4 5 , 79, 125-26, 183; and madness, 2 0 2 -4 ; and magical behavior, 58—64; and need for unification, 45—47; and return, 127, 135; and reverie, 352, 359; and spontaneous nature o f Rosseau, 4 7 -5 3 Soul: Buffon on reasoning, 3 2 5 -2 6 , 328; communal, 97; disposition of, 142; and immediate communication, 140; knowledge of, 76; and music, 89; sensitive, 149, 152, 178, 375. See also Beautiful soul, the; Human nature Sparta, 295, 365 Species, and the human race, 324 Spitzer, Leo, xvii-xviii, xxvi, xxxiv State of nature, 279, 365; abandonment of, 2 6 -2 9 , 2 1 8 -1 9 , 27 5 -7 6 , 291-97; actuality of,

420

State o f Nature (continued) 14-15, 18, 294; appearance and reality in, 12; Buffon versus Rousseau on, 324-29; communication in, 147, 30 7 -1 0 , 313; economy in, 106-7, 110—11; festival and evocation of, 92; new, 302, 314; primordial innocence of, 2 5 -2 6 , 31; second, 294, 297-99, 311. See also Nature Stoicism, 25, 28, 37, 48, 104-5, 109, 284, 297, 330, 358 Structuralism, xviii, 348 Suffering healer, figure o f the, 367 Supplement, xxiii, 179 Switzerland, 3 3 3 -3 6 Sympathy. See Pity Tartuffe (Molière), 3 Tasso, Torquato, 59, 346 Technology, 24, 32, 231, 308; and inequality, 107, 296, 297; and language development, 317—18; origin of, 218, 3 0 4 -5 ; and reflection, 26, 205. See also Science(s) Theater, 9 3-96 Theft, 106, 122, 171 Theodicy, 2 0 -2 1 , 295 ’Theory of the Earth (Buffon), 325—27 Things: mediation of, 23—24; truth in, 7 4 -7 5 Time: concept of, 316; divided, 11 —14; and language development, 307—9; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 87; and reverie, 353, 3 6 0 -6 1 , 363. See also History Tools. See Technology Transmutation o f images, 3 5 6 -6 4 Transparency, 196, 222, 227, 238, 251 -5 2 , 2 5 4 -6 7 , 278, 358, 364; and autobiography, 181-83; and civilization, 23, 24; and festival, 93, 95-96, 99; loss of, in childhood, 10—11; and music, 88—90; and negative signs, 157, 161; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 81 —121 passim, 152, 351; physical, causes of, 255-57; restoration of, 11—21; and return, 127, 129, 135-36; and sentiment o f existence, 257—67; solitude as return to, 4 1 -4 4 , 53; and unveiling, 68, 70

Index

Trey torrens, M. de, 145 Trail, The (Kafka), 225 Tristan, 114 Trust, 85, 152 Truth, 322, 337; o f autobiography, 182-83, 187-91, 194, 198-200; and break with society, 125; inner, 4 7 —48; life in accordance with, 40— 47, 62; o f names, 147; of natural signs, 149—50; o f reverie, 355; of self-knowledge, 180—81; in state o f nature, 26; unveiling of, 65—80. See also Appearance and reality; Existence Turin, 122, 170, 340 Unity, xxiii, 257, 351; and autobiography, 188-89; Buffon on, 332; o f childhood, 9—10; ecstasy of, 261—65; inner conflict over absence of, 5 3 -5 8 , 61; o f melody, 3 8 6 -8 7 n.28; need for, 45—47, 115; and reflection, 206, 232—33; restoration of, 33 -3 4 ; and reverie, 356; and Rousseau’s true nature, 4 7 —53 Unveiling, theory of, 7 3 -7 8 . See also Veil Urfé, Honoré d ’: Astrée, 342, 345 Urinary disorder of Rousseau, 138-39, 201, 3 6 5 -7 7 Utility, 230 Vaud, 334 Veil, 4 1 -4 2 , 6 5 -8 0 , 95, 101, 129, 252, 254, 257, 267; evil as, 21; o f illusion, 4 —5, 9 —11, 13; in Morceau allégorique, 65—68, 72; and negative signs, 161—62; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 8 1 -8 8 , 115-20; of obstacles, 221, 223; in Pygmalion, 72; of reflection, 207; o f silent refusal, 227—29; and theory o f unveiling, 73—80 Venereal disease, 37 2 -7 4 Vercellis, Mme de, 172 Verdelin, Mme de, 142 Vernes, Jacob, 372 Vevey, 344—48 Vico, Giambattista, 302, 317 Village Soothsayer, The. See Devin du village. Le (Rousseau) “Villeneuve, Vaussore de,” 59—61

421

Index Vintzenreid, 130—32 Virtue, 32, 79, 284; intoxication with, 58—60; magical attainment of, 62—63; in La nouvelle Héloïse, 85, 91—92, 114; of solitude, 36—38, 43. See also Good (ness); Morality Vitalism, 262 Vitrification, 255—56 Voltaire, 36, 277, 294, 399 n.16; On the Lisbon Disaster, 343; Rousseau compared with, 22; Rousseau’s replacement by, 132; Sentiment des Citoyens, 372 Vossius, Isaac, 150 Walking, 233, 242, 363. See also Reverie War, 293, 298-99 Warens, Mme de, 128-32, 136, 139, 169, 170-71, 246, 282 -8 3 , 340, 344, 363

Water, transparency of, 256—58 Wealth, 105, 108, 263, 285, 286 Weil, Eric, 115, 293, 2 9 8-99 Will, 301, 304; general, 30, 44, 85, 96—97, 99, 205; and reverie, 354, 355, 3 5 9 -6 0 Wisdom, 332 Work. See Labor Writing, xxiv-xxv, 138, 266; and delusion, 203; disembodied knowledge in, 313; French-Swiss, 333-36; and language development, 148-49; misfortune of, 36, 49, 52, 55—57, 273; and passivity, 248; purpose of, 125-26, 141-43, 175-76, 279; and reflection, 209, 211; and reverie, 3 5 3 -5 5 , 361; and solitude, 36, 39. See also Autobiography; Language Zulietta, 158-59, 374