The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville 9780674274969

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Harvard Historical Studies Published under the auspices of the Department of History from the income of the Paul Revere Frothingham Bequest Robert Louis Stroock Fund Henry Warren Torrey Fund

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The Conversion of Imagination From Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville

Matthew W. Maguire

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

2006

Copyright  2006 by the president and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maguire, Matthew W. The conversion of imagination : from Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville / Matthew W. Maguire. p. cm.—(Harvard historical studies ; 151) Based on the author’s thesis (Ph. D.—Harvard University, 1999) presented under the title: The conversion of Enlightenment. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–674–02188–6 (alk. paper) 1. Imagination (Philosophy)—History. 2. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712– 1778. 3. Pascal, Blaise, 1623–1662. 4. Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805– 1859. I. Title. II. Series. B2138.I45M34 2006 128'.3—dc22 2005052740

To my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix

1

1

Pascal: Imagining Memory

17

2

The Imagination of Reason

50

3

Rousseau and the Revolution of Enlightenment

4

Illusion’s Reflection: Rousseau’s Julie

5

The Consuming Infinite

6

Rousseau and Restoration: Imagination and Memory

7

The Gravity of Illusion: Alexis de Tocqueville Conclusion Notes

225

Index

279

221

70

111

135

185

159

Acknowledgments

First, I offer much gratitude and owe special thanks to my graduate advisor, Patrice Higonnet, whose generosity, patience, and expertise have been an essential part of this project from the beginning. I would also like to thank Mark Kishlansky and Donald Fleming for their encouragement. Louis Miller’s reading of the manuscript produced many improvements for which I am sincerely grateful. Thanks are also extended to the anonymous readers at Harvard University Press for their suggestions and to my colleagues at Kenyon College, with particular thanks to those who read excerpts from the manuscript, including Fred Baumann, Reed Browning, Tim Spiekerman, and Devin Stauffer. At Harvard University Press, I owe special thanks to Kathleen McDermott. I would also like to express my thanks for the intellectual stimulation and ideas presented by many students, including Jacqueline Newmyer, Elizabeth Oelsner, and especially David Beecher. Many friends and colleagues have offered very helpful comment, support, and encouragement over several years. Among them are Jon and Michelle Ray, Hugh McNeal, Jeff Collins, Nathan Alexander, Eric and Karen Scheffler, Josh Millet, Amber Carpenter, Christian Illies, Blair Hickey, Mark Strassman, Michael Goldstein, Stephen Karge`re, Michaela Giesenkirchen, and many others. I can only offer my thanks and gratitude to all of them. I owe Meghan Donahue thanks for her kindness, courage, and integrity. Julie Newhall’s care for the manuscript and its author have been extraordinarily generous, as have her unfailing good humor and companionship. Many thanks are also given to my brother, Thomas Maguire, and Patty Dempsey for their confidence and encouragement. My parents, Thomas and Beatrice Maguire, have shown deep and steady faith in this project. For this and much else, I dedicate this book to them.

The Conversion of Imagination

Introduction

After many years, I stumbled my way toward a lived understanding— rather than an obligatory intellectual cognition—of how our hopes and attachments, our experiences and encounters with the world, are marked by the ways that we understand their emergence or way of belonging to our minds. The mental faculties and modes to which we attribute and refer our experiences (to, say, reason, imagination, will, and memory) work to shape how and in what way beauty, meaning, desire, truth, alterity, morality, selfhood, freedom, and happiness will be available and manifested to us, or dwell in us. These designations of mental places, or modes of manifestation, mark what most deeply reaches us of speech, writing, and gesture, of art and science, of learning and conversation, all drawn from an abundance of life—as much from playground afternoons as seminar rooms. In this way, the subject of designating encounters to, or meeting experiences in, different mental faculties is at once encompassingly general and constantly immediate. This led me to historical research prompted by two questions. How have means and faculties been conceived by which minds receive or come to the world’s most powerful encounters and experiences? What points of rupture and transformation might there be in this history, and how might they have conditioned or given form to several important aspects of modern experience? At first glance, these questions appear to be a rhetorical indulgence that broaches the meretricious on behalf of the mundane. Yet if nothing else, I hope that these questions may introduce a promisingly labile selfconsciousness about asking how we “imagine” the manifestations, places, and faculties of meaning, order, and value: for to assume that we imagine them is to provide answers to the questions before they are asked. It is, then, of real importance that imagination holds an honored and 1

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The Conversion of Imagination

often preeminent place in contemporary accounts of our faculties, our experiences and encounters alike, articulating distinct assumptions that do not often turn to interrogate their source. One receives the force of imagination, but often without sustained examination, like a dark energy that differentiates and expands what is, permitting life and the emergence of worlds, but whose ultimate source and powers are called upon rather than comprehended. There are many intimations of imagination’s strength and its prerogatives. To place “imagination” next to any word—to “desire,” to “power”—is to charge it with a perceptible glow. One now hears constant appeals to the imagination in the most diverse reaches of our culture, from the most recondite literary and cultural criticism to global advertising campaigns. We read about passing our lives in “imagined communities”1 and we gaze at the single word “imagine” splayed across billboards and screens, as if it were the evident sum of desired meaning, while scholars of all descriptions yearn to be thought “imaginative”—and a throng of spiritual writers speak without conspicuous precision about the powers of the “religious imagination.” Of course references are still made to “figments of imagination” and to something being “all in his head”; but they sound increasingly pedestrian, even quaintly pedantic. Terry Eagleton has recently observed that in contemporary literary hermeneutics, there is “no term” that is “more unreservedly positive” than imagination.2 For the most erudite critics and for the most passive consumers of popular culture alike, there is a formidable and often preconscious conviction that the imagination is where beauty, possibility, transcendence, and freedom dwell. To appeal to the imagination is to evoke an encounter that creates, sustains, and exceeds the boundaries of the self, of the communicable, of the temporal. Hence in popular culture, imagination often appears to function as a medium or marker for what might, in more philosophical terms, be called the sublime. Yet for a thinker like Gilles Deleuze, imagination also permits an efflorescence of lyricism, a kind of opening to and medium for an experience of the sublime, for “it is the imagination that traverses domains, orders and levels, breaks down partitions, coextensive with the world, guiding our bodies and inspiring our souls, apprehending the unity of nature and the mind, embryonic consciousness going ceaselessly from science to dream and back.”3 Such thoughts are hardly limited to the more ecstatic interludes of soixante-huit speculation. In the sober pages of modern scholarship, the powers of imagination are received and proclaimed with incongruous abandon. Thus Mary Warnock, in her analysis of imagination from the

Introduction

3

1970s—in which she interprets the place of imagination in the philosophy of Hume and Kant, then follows it through Romanticism and Existentialism—writes without qualification in the closing lines of her book that the faculty of imagination “is quite literally what gives value to our world.”4 For the philosopher John Sallis, it is imagination that constitutes time itself.5 If it is almost too easy to tabulate panegyrics to imagination in late twentieth-century theory, philosophy, and art, their antecedents are similarly profuse and diverse in over two centuries of modern culture. One expects the Romantics to serve as heralds for the power of imagination, and they oblige; for William Blake the imagination is nothing less than “Human existence itself.”6 But the phenomenon hardly ends with the Romantics. A poet like Wallace Stevens would seem to have a speculative aesthetic radically distinct from Blake—or for that matter from Deleuze, or from the global culture of spectacle—but he too finds in imagination a power that expands infinitely beyond its assistance to his art. For Stevens, whatever progenitors of meaning or “philosophic assassins” emerge victorious in history will “sing, in the high imagination, triumphantly.”7 Perhaps the assassin sings where imagination images its unity with the divine: elsewhere Stevens can say for others, “we say God and the imagination are one.”8 This rapid sketch of imagination’s remarkable status in modern Western culture—indeed, a status inconceivable in the history that precedes modernity—is perhaps useful only for its permitting the observation that imagination’s eminence should by no means be simply categorized according to conventional demarcations as a popular or theoretical artifact, as inevitably modern or postmodern. In addition to what it would lack in fidelity to the breadth of the phenomenon it describes, it must be said that an attribution of this kind would impose an excruciating itineration upon any history of imagination. For example, to call this exalted imagination postmodern would provoke, among other things, an extended reckoning with Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard’s critique of conjoined political “fantasy” and “terror,”9 or Jacques Lacan’s perspectival distinction of subjectivity within the imaginary and the symbolic. The very ubiquity of imagination would impose similar limits on other accounts of imagination. A history of the early modern imagination as a whole would surely linger over Vico, just as a history of twentieth-century phenomenologies of imagination would turn to Sartre—and to Gaston Bachelard.10 To willingly alight upon imagination as a whole, in “modern” or “post-

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modern” terms, would require a separate history, rather than opening the possibility that many accounts of imagination most familiar to us receive a measure of their force from another history. In this way, the history offered here may offer some assistance to those who seek to understand the ways in which imagination has been articulated to them in various strains of modern culture—in particular, how various understandings of modern selves that exalt the imagination often exhibit a strange, spasmic oscillation between demiurgic self-assertion and acquiescent liquefaction in a perceived historical, linguistic, or ontological flux. Whatever its uses or limitations for interpreting other accounts of imagination, one powerful movement in the history of imagination has often gone unnoticed. It deserves to be part of our cultural reflections about imagination, all the more so in historical terms because it precedes, and yet leaves its mark upon, the most common points of origin for the emergence of imagination in modernity—before Romanticism and before the philosophical and aesthetic alignments surrounding Kant’s “Copernican revolution.” This historical point of departure may encounter a certain resistance. To go back still further than Kant in search of imagination’s modern emergence may seem irrelevant for any understanding of the modern imagination, even as its beginning has been sought as far back as the late Middle Ages.11 Yet a hint of what lies before Kant can be found in unexpected places, including Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. The book ends with a direct quotation from Rousseau, in which Rousseau boldly acknowledges that his philosophical reflections as such are a kind of “dream” and that he “gives [his] dreams as dreams.”12 In a book of intricate opacity, this ending, in which Derrida’s writing suddenly yields to Rousseau’s without deconstruction, is a revealing passage, not least for what it suggests about a little-known path that leads into our own fascination with imagination. Yet if Derrida found in Rousseau’s writings a dream of philosophy, these writings do not begin this history. Pascal, too often misunderstood as a simple and sweeping critic of imagination,13 presents a new and powerful configuration of language about imagination that gives a perceptible impetus to many subsequent accounts and experiences of imagination, including Rousseau’s. This leads to further questions: How does Pascal’s exaltation of imagination appear within his thought, as well as in a more general intellectual context? How does Pascal transform a faculty so long subordinate to sense impressions, reason and the will into a master faculty of human beings’ experience of the world?

Introduction

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After Pascal, his account of imagination’s power is developed, qualified, and expanded by Malebranche, Montesquieu, Condillac, La Mettrie, and others. These changes will receive special attention in the second chapter of this book. It is above all Rousseau, however, who radicalizes the concept of imagination crystallized in Pascal. This book will show that a careful reading of Rousseau soon establishes the central importance of imagination for his writing. It allows us to understand the unique trajectory of Rousseau’s writings, from the early political discourses to the autobiographical reveries, and gives a more complete understanding of Rousseau’s contribution to modern thought. If Rousseau does not begin this history, nor does he end it. To understand the history of imagination that follows Rousseau, it is most rewarding to turn to Rousseau’s careful post-revolutionary readers like Benjamin Constant, Maine de Biran, Stendhal, and above all Tocqueville, who articulates the transformation of imagination from a supreme faculty of human happiness, oriented toward general happiness, to a preeminent faculty of human freedom. This book is thus a history of imagination in French thought from Pascal to Tocqueville. This project will offer a distinct history of imagination, one that is variously a prehistory and a parallel history to histories of the critical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical imagination. But amidst these rather broad aspirations, a history of ideas must bluntly address a basic question. What do its three primary authors—Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville—have to do with one another? It is not generally recognized that the relevant historical sources contain intriguing evidence for studying the work of Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville together. First and most importantly, they participate in a shared, precise, and dynamic configuration of language within and surrounding imagination in French thought—born from the peculiar mixture of Cartesian philosophy, Augustinian anthropology, Jansenist theology, and Pascalian psychology in the middle of the seventeenth century, reconfigured at the center of the Enlightenment, and given new inflection by the French Revolution, persisting to the point where this history ends, in the middle of the nineteenth century. This configuration appears in diverse works of literature and philosophy, as well as in political, social, and religious thought. Furthermore, the three bodies of writing that are the primary occupation of this book can be read together through what can only be called powerful and cumulative textual connections. To put the matter simply, each author proceeds in a sequence of prolonged and fascinated close

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reading, in which predecessors are read and interpreted by a subsequent author or authors, opening up innovations that partake of both an immediate historical situation and an encounter with a text that is not entirely enclosed within it. Rousseau, for instance, often reticent about his reading, surprisingly acknowledged that he read the Jansenists with great care. He even claimed that in a crucial period of his intellectual development, Jansenist authors were the ones he read “most frequently,”14 indeed that he “devoured” the authors of the Oratory and Port-Royal15 and that he became “half a Jansenist” as a result.16 Characteristically, Rousseau makes himself intellectually vulnerable only to distance himself from the vulnerability, by turning to a humorous anecdote about the puerile soteriological anxieties to which this reading gave rise.17 Yet the admission is both rare and significant for an author who wished to constitute an origin for new ways of experience, and thus would rarely risk the possibility of being mistaken for an epigone. Rousseau did much of his varied Jansenist reading as a young man in the library at Les Charmettes, and among these readings, Pascal was among the writers singled out for praise in youthful verse describing his intellectual development.18 Pascal was not the only Jansenist to attract Rousseau’s attention in those days; but years later, when Rousseau was a renowned author preparing himself to take leave of human society for a life of reflective isolation, he purchased three books to accompany him on his way. One of them was a return to his youthful reading: a copy of the Pense´es.19 Despite this intriguing information about Rousseau’s sustained fascination with Jansenism in general and his reading of Pascal in particular, few scholars have studied the relation between Pascal’s and Rousseau’s thought on imagination in anything but broad terms (Patrick Riley has comprehensively studied the connection between Pascal and Rousseau through the concept of the General Will).20 In comparison to the literature on the important relation between the political thought of Rousseau and Hobbes, for example, it is relatively exiguous.21 The connection of one author to the other is cited occasionally but rarely serves as the subject of direct analysis and interpretation.22 Tocqueville shares Rousseau’s pronounced distaste for writing or speaking about his reading. Until very recently, there were legitimate grounds for debate on the question of whether Tocqueville ever read even a critical early-nineteenth-century French liberal like Benjamin Constant, a question only recently solved by Robert Gannett’s analysis of Tocque-

Introduction

7

ville’s private notes and papers.23 This uncertainty of “influence” is not itself decisive, of course; there are important shared aspirations and anxieties among Constant’s and Tocqueville’s writings, and these will reward careful reading in this book. Yet historians can also profitably turn to Tocqueville’s acknowledgment in his personal correspondence that he read Pascal and Rousseau “each day” while writing Democracy in America.24 Given that he both sought and believed himself to express a consistency of thought throughout his career,25 the ways in which Tocqueville received and appropriated Pascal and Rousseau are well worth careful study, study that has heretofore been valuable but sometimes limited in scope and specificity.26 Scholars of the modern imagination have had remarkably little to say about Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville alike. James Engell’s book The Creative Imagination27 explicitly removes French philosophy and literature from its purview at the outset, on the grounds of its putative irrelevance. Mary Warnock’s well-known Imagination never mentions Pascal, Rousseau, or Tocqueville. (Montesquieu, Stendhal, and others in this book are also not discussed.) Other scholarship is only slightly more attentive to the presence of imagination in the historical sequence presented in these pages. The Force of Imagination, a phenomenology of imagination by John Sallis, does not mention Pascal; Rousseau appears only briefly, in order to gesture toward the imagination’s capacity to move toward the infinite,28 and to establish the elemental power of the seasons upon the imagination. The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance, Eva Brann’s impressive interdisciplinary study of the imagination from Plato to Wittgenstein and beyond, has a few short, passing references to Pascal and Rousseau29 (Rousseau is discussed largely with reference to imaging rather than imagination as he himself most often used the term), but Pascal’s and Rousseau’s analyses of and appeals to the imagination receive little attention. John Llewelyn’s recent experimental analysis, The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas,30 contains still fewer passing references to Pascal and Rousseau; Pascal is only mentioned with reference to Levinasian reflections on usurpation. The collection of essays in Robinson and Rundell’s Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity addresses Pascal in a single sentence (repeated once later in the book),31 and there are no references to imagination in Rousseau. Given the frequent and potent recourse to imagination in Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, their absence from histories of the imagination is an important one, both for what it allows us to understand about their

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The Conversion of Imagination

respective bodies of thought and for the perspective it affords on a more general modern fascination with imagination. The pages that follow argue that if these authors are read without reference to the intense reading in the possibilities of imagination that both surround and precede their own writing, an indispensable dimension of their thought is lost. Nothing is easier to misunderstand than Rousseau on “nature,” or Tocqueville on “freedom,” if one does not understand how deeply and how closely each author thought through the question of imagination in relation both to their reading and to their immediate historical experience, and how the dilemmas presented in one body of work are not merely transposed in pedestrian fashion, but are taken up, deferred, transformed, and reconfigured in a subsequent body of work. Even in a partial account of the imagination like this one, respect for this sequence will be necessary to find one’s way to insights worth having. Indeed, it is only in this sequence that the essential notion of conversion— as a fundamental transformation in and through which human existence seeks its meaning—retains its coherence. Though this history is in many ways about modern accounts of the self and about these selves’ relations to the world—and thus often connected to philosophical anthropologies of various kinds—it is nonetheless distinct from many philosophical accounts of imagination and the self in early modern Continental philosophy. In Descartes, for example—or, to a lesser extent, in Kant—imagination is represented as quintessentially elusive, or at least too inscrutable to be fully integrated into their accounts of knowledge and above all morality.32 The authors in this history agree with the assumption behind this prudence, that is, that a philosophy grounded in reason cannot give a complete account of imagination; but for them this reveals the necessity of ascribing limits to the powers of reason. Thus their account of human experience decisively favors a sustained and varied effort to variously analyze, inspire, restrain, or call upon the imagination and its assumed powers. This is one of the most useful perspectives through which to understand the ambiguous relationship of Pascal’s, Rousseau’s, and Tocqueville’s writings to the traditional disciplinary boundaries of philosophy. All these various reflections, questions and paradoxes about the power and ubiquity of imagination rest uneasily upon another, still more fundamental question: What is the imagination? Does it fascinate for its vagueness, for its lack of definition? At first glance, it appears that the imagination is all the more powerful for its ability to elude all delineations

Introduction

9

of its boundaries. For Pascal it is the “mistress of error and falsity,” the “dominant part of man,”33 but its powers are suggested by example rather than precisely defined by their function or their source. Rousseau claims that “the real world has its limits, the imaginary world is infinite; not being able to enlarge the one we shrink the other; for all the troubles that make us truly unhappy are only born from their difference.”34 Yet he offers no comprehensive account of what the imagination is or its singular functions or capacities. Tocqueville has very frequent recourse to imaginer, imaginaire, and imagination in his writing; Democracy in America includes nearly one hundred references to these terms, but imagination never becomes an explicit object of reflection. Tocqueville himself appears to have taken care not to define the terms that mattered to him most, and imagination, like freedom, is never given a precise definition. Only crucial, functionally necessary—but not transcendent—terms like “mores” or “association” are given precise denotations that bound rather than evoke their meanings.35 There is as yet no answer to the question of what imagination is—but is an answer even possible? How can one define something that so often appears to be indispensable, ubiquitous, infinite, and unknowable? Here, as elsewhere, reflection upon imagination reveals profound affinities with reflection about God. This affinity does not surprise a reader of Pascal. In his writings, the exaltation of imagination quite explicitly finds its origins in a post-lapsarian flux, where imagination constantly impersonates and contravenes the economies of creation and salvation. Nonetheless, for Pascal the imagination is not a spiritual or divine faculty (even if this aspiration is for him the negative mark of something divine or of divine origin). In Pascal and in those who follow his thought on imagination, including Rousseau and Tocqueville, one can assume that imagination is elusive without reducing any account of it to apophatic language. That said, in this history—in contrast to, for example, strains within empiricism—the imagination functions only rarely as a formal epistemological term. Thus it does not primarily serve as a way to explain the processes of conceiving sense impressions, or mixtures of sense impressions, in the absence of that which resembles or elicits, in whole or in part, these impressions. The capacity of imagination that elicits precise and deliberate language, as well as concentrated reflection from Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, is that which articulates desire and creates meaning before—and then within—an apparent infinite. Although this pre´cis cannot do full justice

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to the historical development of imagination in their work, it is nonetheless true that from Pascal’s Pense´es to Tocqueville’s analyses of revolutionary ferment, the imagination appears as the faculty that sustains, shapes, magnifies, and intensifies all forms of desire, invariably extending them beyond the point of all satisfaction or satiation outside the imagination. For Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, in the very act of imagining, there is a movement or at least an aspiration toward the infinite that returns to the self in the form of a psychological movement to constitute (i.e., through imagination) one’s self or—through the collective imagining of opinion—the collective self to which one belongs as a unifying origin. This origin is a preeminent source of meaning and value, in relation to which all extrinsic limits or prospective limits become a sign of contradiction and often of a constrictive finitude. Yet this expansive movement can come to a countermovement, where the self comes to be understood as one more illusion, limiting the power of imagination that constitutes it. In this history imagination is thus the faculty that largely or entirely controls access to and articulations of the self within temporal experience, either toward a self-constituted origin and with it a factitious dimension of meaning and value, or toward a vertiginous absence of contact with an origin and apparently infinite imagined spaces. Imagination exercises its powers upon everything in the world and perhaps another world. It is what makes it possible for human beings to evaluate, experience, and desire beyond measure. It gives voice, force, and specificity to those desires, if not necessarily to the means by which they will manifest themselves outside the imagination. Given its unique capacity to allow human beings to constitute an origin of meaning and value, for Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville imagination is above all the necessary medium and expression of the desire for surpassing control of oneself and others, or pride, a pride that imagination shapes and sustains in turn. In this way, a set of relations in language, whose earliest locus is Pascal’s Pense´es, serves to locate the aspiration and possibility of imagination for an extended tradition of French thought. Were one to describe it very crudely, with full recognition of the elaboration required to substantiate it, it might be rendered thus: imagination and opinion create a self in time that subsists on nonpresence, indifferent or hostile to truth; associated at once with pride and with beauty, it is the basis of the self’s appearance in the world, as well as the primary medium of relation between

Introduction

11

the self and others. Imagination is the agent of persuasion and often the creator of law, justice, and happiness in the world, especially through acts of writing and reading. With this initial configuration of the term in mind, a series of developments in French thought can be more completely and deeply, and at times properly, understood. If an exalted imagination maintains a certain protean constancy from Pascal through Tocqueville, this constancy instantiates itself in very different historical circumstances. This history begins in the mid-seventeenth century, toward the end of a turn to a constructive model of knowledge, a history brilliantly developed in Amos Funkenstein’s Theology and the Scientific Imagination.36 Within a more specific strain of writing, preeminently in France, the imagination emerges not only as a form of knowledge, but as a crucial faculty of temporal experience in debates about selfhood and knowledge in Descartes, Montaigne, and early modern Augustinianism—arguments that produce a radical reassessment of imagination in the writings of Pascal. In order to overcome the spiritually constrictive “certitude” (Descartes) or at least “habitable” security (Montaigne) located in these early modern notions of the self, Pascal, like many of his contemporaries, resolves the dilemmas posed to him in his reading through quasi-Augustinian categories, while transforming these categories from within.37 From his appropriated Augustine, Pascal endows the imagination with the spiritual and psychological prerogatives attributed by Augustine to the faculty of memory, adumbrated in the Confessions (a notion of memory strikingly different from many contemporary accounts of memory and identity).38 This turn from memory to an expansive modern imagination makes Pascal’s oft-cited Augustinianism an innovative and powerful force in the history of thought. Pascal’s account of imagination undergoes considerable development in subsequent French thought through the Enlightenment, extending the logic of Pascal’s account of imagination and with it, opinion, in unexpected ways, reorienting it more determinedly toward the power of text to shape imagination and desire, with a special emphasis on erotic desire. In Montesquieu—deepening a long tradition that extends from Machiavelli—the textual formation of imagination can be further mediated through a le´gislateur, or lawgiver, who governs through opinion and faith as well as political laws, and opens the possibility that certain forms of writing and politics can secure the happiness of others. To understand the transformation of imagination in the eighteenth

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The Conversion of Imagination

century, however, it is essential to turn to a close reading of Rousseau’s writing. It is above all Rousseau’s account of imagination that motivates his extraordinary authorial development and makes for a new understanding of imagination in modern thought. Rousseau’s experience with, or within, imagination is at the center of this book. With Rousseau, the imagination no longer finds a limit in the infinite or in the alterity of God; it is itself infinite. This infinite imagination engulfs meaning and value as such, a power Rousseau exerts in its most radical forms, including its power as a medium for religious transcendence.39 It is the task of many of Rousseau’s political and educational writings to argue that this imaginative power must receive a hidden limit from shared illusions that impart energy and form to the expression of imagined desires, and both mediate and suppress the conflict of desires with one another. Rousseau’s novel Julie, however, inaugurates a distinct transformation of imagination, one with complicated historical aspirations. Increasingly within the pages of Julie, illusion—understood as such, indifferent to the truth of its contents—becomes the explicit ordering form of imagination. As part of his own writing on behalf of this exalted imagining, Rousseau indeed “gives his dreams as dreams,” coming to the conclusion that in an age of enlightenment, illusions are more compelling and persuasive, not less so, when revealed as such. Finally, in his late works—the Confessions, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker—Rousseau begins to explore and then to surrender to the possibility of an exalted imagination that “truly” knows its own infinity. This imagining thus refuses any illusory limit or encounter with others outside the imagination, in favor of a factitious experience that consumes the substance of the self.40 For Rousseau’s early-nineteenth-century readers, however, this infinite imagination soon finds a limit in politics; the notion of imagination undergoes a far-reaching transformation after the French Revolution. Authors of different aspirations and genres jointly testify to a deep fascination with Rousseauvian notions of imagination. It is a fascination alternately tempered and radicalized by a shared tendency to posit a close relation between an exalted imagination and revolutionary excess—and as a consequence of this excess, the emergence of a regime of general opinion inimical to the transcendent desires of imagination. In the nineteenth century, Benjamin Constant, Maine de Biran, and Stendhal are in different ways both drawn to Rousseau’s account of imagination and drawn away from it by its association with revolutionary violence, psychological and

Introduction

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spiritual disorder, and their aftermath. These authors are therefore placed in a dilemma vis-a`-vis the imagination that fascinates them. Either they can oppose the exalted imagination to a modern regime of opinion that surrounds them, or limit the modern prerogatives of imagination. It is above all Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings, however, that most completely articulate the post-revolutionary possibilities and constrictions of imagination in French thought—drawing from a sovereign faculty of human order and happiness the medium for a transcendent if fragile freedom, always tested and often imperiled by modern notions of order and happiness, notions that are for Tocqueville, at least in fundamental structure, inalterable. In Tocqueville’s writing, illusions, energized by the proud imagination itself, are the source of freedom in history. For Tocqueville, imagined freedom can no longer seek its origin and end in a truly common or general happiness: for him, a common happiness grounded in modern opinion has an imperfect and often hostile relationship to freedom. He is tempted to observe various forms of violence as a kind of aesthetic revolt against an increasingly pervasive and prudently acquisitive contentment he experiences around him. To account for the perceived disjunction between the freedom of the proud imagination and the order of general happiness, Tocqueville develops a dualistic and quasi-Pascalian anthropology in which transcendence, including freedom, is explicitly defined in opposition to the material cosmos and the desire for secure comfort and earthly well-being that shapes modern opinion. Yet this dualism in Tocqueville persistently resolves itself in favor of those forces opposed to transcendence, against Tocqueville’s stated intentions. The history of imagination from Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville is a fascinating, crucial, and heretofore frequently overlooked moment in the history of modern thought. It is important not least for its conclusion: in Tocqueville, the exalted imagination is prudentially preserved as much as is compatible with its continued existence, with the temptation to foment and above all to witness the abrogation of these limits, a temptation that in Tocqueville’s reading, modernity can suppress but cannot resolve—and whose acceptance he can endorse only through a rigorous abnegation, demanded by a providential justice beyond imagining. This book both agrees with and departs from precedents in scholarship on the imagination, from the history of ideas, philosophy, and literature. I share a sense of promise about the experiences and encounters generally

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associated with imagination. Yet this book offers a history of imagination distinct from accounts of imagination available in other books on the subject, not least for the texts at its center and the history it draws from them. This trajectory leads to new reflections on aspirations that appear repeatedly in scholarship on imagination, especially the notion that imagination can serve as a vivifying source of meaning in modernity and postmodernity. In historical terms, however, the hopes surrounding imagination have not always been vindicated. It has not been sufficiently recognized that the modern fascination with the imagination—in which imagination is represented as an apparently infinite dimension of positive mediation in perception, of creative possibility and desire, of manifold openings to higher meanings and modes of value and being—coincides in historical terms with an explosion of writing addressed to the pervasive disenchantment of experience, with a sense of profound alienation, and especially from the middle of the nineteenth century forward, with powerful anxieties about creative and cultural exhaustion. This alienation from transcendence in various forms often goes by other names, not least the names of reason (usually in its instrumental or scientific manifestations) and technology, a connection that receives some of its earliest and most forceful exposition in Rousseau. Yet this book will argue that there is something to be learned from directing our eyes toward the meteoric ascent of imagination itself. Among the benefits of this reconsideration may be the opportunity to consider that imagination is not always best understood as an emancipatory faculty that moves separately from or against scientific rationality, or through a kind of supplemental fulfillment separate from that rationality’s own tendencies and historical development. Rather, as Amos Funkenstein showed in his tour de force, a variant of an exalted imagination— that is, one that seeks to construct or make a reality from admittedly imprecise or “imperfect” but nonetheless “real” measurement of matter in motion—was a historical precondition of these very ambitions in late medieval and early modern Europe. A “constructive theory of knowledge” allows for the possibility that the forms and boundaries of our political lives together are similarly constructed, as Hobbes believed. For Funkenstein, this way of thinking achieves a new scope in Vico, in whose writings “our capacity to imagine gods, our constructive imagination, is the only driving force of history.”41 As Funkenstein observes, this cumulative magnification of imaginative power would inevitably allow human beings to imagine their relations

Introduction

15

and attitudes toward and with other beings, and with the world itself— for as he remarks at the end of his book, “applying knowledge-throughconstruction to the whole was as inevitable as it was dangerous. It was dangerous because it makes mankind be ‘like god, knowing good and evil.’ ”42 The full value of Funkenstein’s allusion to Genesis 3 is only apparent once one seeks out a detailed modern history addressed to the experience of living within and under an imagination to which these powers are explicitly attributed, in which the scientific possibilities of constructive knowledge are transposed into the very scriptural consciousness to which Funkenstein alludes. For this full and initial exaltation of imagination—well before Vico—Pascal is an indispensable point of departure. Unlike the confirmable constructions of matter in motion, the resulting constellation of language emerging from this transposition of knowledge as construction can only be securely represented to others as a configuration of language. The ultimate reality or truth of this linguistic configuration and the full legitimacy of its alternatives are metaphysical in nature, and will only be “grounded” or be given “secure foundations” with what is known in German as “the youngest day.” Grounded or not, to undertake this history is to depart from a broad scholarly consensus about imagination. A glance at contemporary scholarship—even at the titles of books and conference papers—reveals that this work is often decisively informed by the contention that ultimate ideas about meaning, orders of value, selfhood, beauty, freedom, community, transcendence, and desire belong to imagination, and that imagination itself both shapes and is “always already” shaped by historically contingent strata of opinion. The various assumptions within these assumptions are expressed in different ways. In some places, they underwrite an expression, even a celebration, of the provisionality or plasticity of knowledge; in others, they appear as a quasi-Kantian means toward dispassionate scholarly judgment, in which imagination’s capacity to represent an object as absent makes its evaluation possible.43 A historian of imagination must acknowledge that all these assumptions about imagination’s relation to order, value, and meaning are themselves the product of a history. To seek out some of the historical sources and relations connected to this ascent, there must be an attempt to maintain a critical engagement with these governing assumptions, rather than being governed by them. An abundance of insight is to be found in the outstanding scholarship that accompanies the subjects of this book. I have signaled in text and

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notes that scholarship that has been a particularly great help, by way of agreement and disagreement, and there are a great many authors to thank. Whatever good this book may offer its readers owes unpayable debts to many authors, readers, students, and teachers from different points of departure. I hope these pages serve as a form of thanks.

1 Pascal: Imagining Memory

Amidst Pascal’s posthumously published Pense´es, one fragment begins with exceptional sweep: Imagination. This is the dominant part of man, this mistress of error and of falsity, and still more treacherous since it is not always so; for it would be an infallible rule of truth if it were an infallible rule of lies. But, being most often false, it gives no mark of its quality, marking the true and the false with the same character. I am not speaking of the mad, I am speaking of the most wise; and it is among them that imagination has the great right [droit] to persuade men. Reason can protest in vain; it cannot confer value [prix] on things.1 In these lines, Pascal articulates a new account of the self, though to understand the nature of this account requires care. It is not simply that the imagination has the power to deceive—though for Pascal it certainly tends to do so; rather, its distinguishing power lies in its capacity to render falsehood and truth indistinguishable from one another. The true and false may still exist separately, but here they receive the same mark. Who receives or reads this mark? Humankind, though strangely among them it is “the wise” who are most able to make use of the identical markings placed on truth and falsehood, or perhaps they are most able to arrange these markings in different orders for the purpose of persuasion. Reason—which apparently is not, in Pascal, to be considered the supreme prerogative of the wise—can “protest,” presumably at the mark that has rendered indistinguishable what reason wishes to distinguish; but its protest is vain because it cannot assign value, or a price, to “things.” This is all very vague. What “things” are at issue, and what kind of 17

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“value”? The following passage presents a somewhat more precise, if dauntingly expansive, notion about them in particular: This proud power, enemy of reason, pleases itself in controlling and dominating it, to show how it can in all things establish a second nature in Man. It has its happy persons and its miserable persons; its healthy, its sick, its rich, and its poor. It makes reason believe, doubt and deny; it suspends the senses and it makes them sense [sentir]; it has its madmen and its sages; and nothing makes us more vexed than to see that it fills its adherents with another satisfaction entirely more full and complete than reason. The skillful by imagination please themselves in an entirely different way than the prudent can reasonably please themselves. They look at men haughtily; they argue with daring and confidence; others, with fear and distrust. Their glad expression often gives them the advantage in the opinions of their listeners, since the wise in imagination are favored by judges of the same nature.2 Hence the “things” to which imagination can assign value are limited only by the profusion of beings within nature itself; imagination has its own second nature, and even if this nature must have some mimetic relation to a first nature, it is sufficiently creative to lay claim to a fundamental distinction from nature itself, and sufficiently encompassing to call itself a second nature. Imagination appears to have something like demiurgic power; it commands the senses rather than being limited by or dependent on sense impressions; it predetermines the judgment that reason will make on its behalf. In this way, Pascal’s imagination, though it certainly draws from a history associated with science, suggests something more radical than the bracketing of “value” in imagination after the rise of an autonomous scientific rationality. Rather, it suggests that the desire for scientific knowledge is itself generated by imagination. The latter parts of the fragment suggest, however, that the imagination does not have an unwavering end in view for itself, or a kind of person it preeminently conceives, but only tendencies. If the wise persuade by the “grand droit” of imagination, there are also fools of imagination. There are also those the imagination makes unhappy, even though just as imagination generally deceives but does not always deceive, so imagination generally offers a much more complete and enjoyable satisfaction, and a kind of success, that is far more difficult to experience without the force of imagination.

Pascal

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Furthermore, Pascal’s use of the phrase “please themselves” does not suggest that the imagination takes pleasure or happiness in giving one’s self to others or in some moral or spiritual good, but pleasure in an expansive self-regard toward which imagination tends, often to great effect, in the life of the self. There is in the Pascalian imagination a kind of pride that exalts in the extension of the imagination, or the self in which it moves, into the not-self, above all the world of other selves—hence Pascal’s steady recourse in this fragment to language that describes imagination as a kind of violence in relation to others, engaged in “control,” “domination,” “haughtiness,” and “daring.” Given this language, it is hardly surprising that for Pascal imagination is, in subjective terms, inevitably a “proud power” [superbe puissance].3 Pride, for the Christian Pascal, is the supreme spiritual disorder. For him, an exalted imagination, more than anything else, appears as the medium that sustains pride. Pascal presents other sources of error—novelty, tradition, illness, self-interest—yet none of them impels Pascal to anything like the length and intensity of his meditations upon imagination. It appears as the faculty of human estrangement from truth—in which even the distinctive mark of truth can be effaced or obscured. It is quite different from those notions of mental activity in which memory and imagination are united to apprehend a deeper and more unified vision of truth, as in Bruno.4 Given this estrangement, it is all the more remarkable when Pascal, slightly later in the fragment, offers the strange qualification that imagination is “this deceitful faculty that seems to be given to us expressly to induce us into necessary error.” The caveat about imagination’s “necessary” error appears immediately after Pascal has introduced some further description of the imagination, only to seamlessly move into the power of opinion, “queen of the world.”5 The reference to opinion and monde turns the reader away from the imagination as an inner space and presents imagination as a force exerting itself and receiving its contents to and from collective desires and bodies that are either given value and (perhaps) form by imagination. The connection between the power of imagination in the self and in a world of others is rapidly drawn in a few lines: It [imagination] cannot make fools wise; but it can make them happy, more so than reason, which can only make its friends miserable, one covering them with glory, the other with shame. Who dispenses reputation? Who gives respect and veneration to

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The Conversion of Imagination

people, to works, to laws, to the great, if not this imagining faculty? How inadequate are all the riches of the world without its consent!6 Remarkably, in this passage there is no reality that interrupts the happiness of imagination, that forces the imagination to encounter its limit in what it has not made or fashioned for itself. Imagination’s happiness appears to persist through time, “covered” in glory (and this glory presumably requires approval or opinion) even as reason serves to limit imagination only by becoming its ineffectual and shame-inducing antithesis, if not its amanuensis. Given the importance that Pascal attaches to happiness elsewhere—for him, the achievement of happiness is the unifying anthropological imperative, for “all men want to be happy; this is without exception”—the imagination’s connection to happiness is potentially disruptive of Pascal’s entire apology.7 The imagination also variously “dispenses” reputation, “gives respect” to “laws,” and with its “consent” allows the “riches of the world” to be adequate. In all these phrases there is a suggestion that reputation, respect, and riches exist beyond imagining, but that these relational experiences of life with others—of material and political bodies, of cultural and social orders and ranks of meaning—depend on imagination, without which they would lose their force and value. This reference to imagination as the faculty of attachment, value, and power sheds its qualifications later in the fragment, and it is at this point that imagination finds its express, collective counterpart in opinion: Imagination has everything at its disposal. It makes beauty, justice and happiness, which is the whole of the world. I would very much like to see the Italian book of which I know only the title and that is worth several books in itself: Della opinion regina del mondo. I approve of it without knowing it, except the evil in it, if it has any. The proposal that beauty, justice, and happiness are at the disposal of imagination brings Pascal to his most radical formulation—that the imagination “makes” them, and by making and sustaining them, imagination rules the relational world of human beings, in itself, or through its collective concrescence in opinion.8 It is significant that opinion is a queen and not a king; for Pascal the imagination’s powers in opinion are subtly associated with an illusion of legitimate feminine power that both beguiles and persuades, even as the imagination dominates and proudly dares. In political terms, elsewhere Pascal declares that it is “force” that is the con-

Pascal

21

stant tyrant of the world, even as imagination makes it possible for the tyrant to desire the dominion he wants and to legitimate his desire in the world of others.9 More should be said of the imagination that appears in the Pense´es, but at this point, this reading needs to take heed of what appears to be its profound presumption (to use a Pascalian word). Is the narrator of this fragment actually Pascal, or is it an imaginary interlocutor who is refuted elsewhere in the manuscript? Might not the “three orders” concept indicate that Pascal’s fragment on imagination belongs only to the carnal order, or at most to the carnal and intellectual order—and thus that an analysis of this kind neglects the order of charity, the true order that transcends the false orders drawn from or articulated by imagination? If we answer in the affirmative, Pascal’s account of imagination would be drastically qualified by its subordination to other faculties in the Pense´es. In this way, one could endorse the presentation of Pascal’s thought in On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, in which Jean-Luc Marion argues that the order of charity renders carnal and philosophic order destitute.10 Nicholas Hammond has insightfully argued that there is a linguistic dialectic in Pascal through which unstable words receive their ultimate and spiritual meanings from the constancy of God, a reality beyond finite expression.11 Presumably imagination exists as a moment, at best a propaedeutic one within Pascal’s orders, or within his dialectic, or simply within the fallen end of humanity’s dual nature, distinguished in experience from a general love of the truth, at once for Pascal the “greatest of all Christian virtues” and the “greatest of Christian truths.”12 From these perspectives, to present the imagination at the center of Pascal’s thought would be absurd. This possibility only begins to describe the presumption of an interpretation of this kind. The Pense´es is hardly the only text to invoke an expansive imagination, in epistemological, political, or axiological terms; it ignores the increasing importance of the imagination in seventeenthcentury philosophy. In Pascal’s general historical context, Hobbes is hardly reticent upon the powers of imagination any more than Bacon, Spinoza or Gassendi. Why single out Pascal? It must be said, before responding to these objections, that there is indeed a history in which the imagination that appears in the Pense´es becomes possible; but that history had to await the task of establishing the Pascalian account of imagination. It should also be said that I am in deep sympathy with Marion’s reading and, in many ways, with Hammond’s as well. It is in no way my intention to produce a skeptical Pascal that would

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reproduce some of the readings of Pascal that attended the reception of his thought in the eighteenth century and beyond, from d’Alembert and Condorcet to Victor Cousin.13 Neither is this an argument about Pascal’s faith, the sincerity of which is not in question here (nor would I incline to contest it elsewhere). What I would argue is that the Pense´es, as a text, allows the imagination to expand without limit by any discernible order of human experience. Although the order of charity supersedes the carnal and intellectual order, it is also true that in addition to the imagination’s capacity to sustain its own happiness and orders of meaning and value without the order of charity intruding upon its sway, the text allows imagination to impersonate faith itself, and thus to appear at any level of human experience, including the order of charity. Hence another fragment asserts that “Men often take their imagination for their heart, and they believe themselves converted when they think to convert themselves.”14 In one fragment, Pascal writes that “it is necessary to put our faith in sentiment, otherwise it will always be vacillating.”15 Yet, in another passage the reader finds that “all our reasoning is reduced to ceding to sentiment. But fantasy is similar and contrary to sentiment, in a way that one cannot distinguish between these contraries. One says that my sentiment is fantasy, and another that his fantasy is sentiment. One must have a rule. Reason offers itself, but it is flexible in every direction, and in this way, there is none.”16 Of course, it is not that Pascal does not exhort the reader to affirm charity as the supreme order; but there is no refutation of imagination’s power within the world, including its power to sustain itself apart from the real. It is not simply that Pascal is obviously more skeptical than prominent Christian predecessors—Thomas Aquinas, or Augustine—on the capacity of reason both to order the imagination and to prepare and sustain the way of faith.17 In Pascal, faith, at the level of immediate experience, cannot be recognized by its fruits (even if it can be known by the historical “fruit” borne by the persistence of the Jewish people and the Christian Church through their sacred texts). In the Pense´es, as Pierre Force has rightly observed, “the world is silent”; only the text speaks.18 One might add that for Pascal the silence of nature marks faith and falsehood equivocally in the world. Imagination can thus imagine the self as wise or foolish, holy or profane, within its own second nature. It is not that the decipherment of biblical figures, Pascal’s Wager, and other fragments or series of fragments do not have a serious apologetic intent and power; they rightly occupy the greater part of Pascal’s presence

Pascal

23

in the history of Christian thought. (One should add to them his theology of tolerance; in the tradition of Lactantius, he repudiates the Augustinian compelle intrare, and with it coercion in matters of faith.)19 It is simply that the powers of imagination articulated in the Pense´es are neither limited by any counterargumentative process of deduction, nor a direct parabolic formulation that would allow readers to “see” its limit in their experience of the world (as shown below, the single limit Pascal imposes on imagination is beyond what can be seen). In Pascal, the biblical tension between the visibility and invisibility of human charity and God’s presence in the world makes a forceful turn toward invisibility in the world.20 This in turn permits imagination an expanse it had heretofore not enjoyed, drawn to and often encompassing several other forces and fields of activity (pride, wisdom, politics, happiness, and faith) where it had not been similarly drawn or encompassing before. This only brings us to the second objection: the imagination itself has a history, and with it a marked ascent in early modern thought, in which imagination is an increasingly important faculty in diverse accounts of desire, cognition, and assessments of value. Certainly, imagination expands to fill a myriad of functions in early modern accounts of human experience. For Hobbes, “the imagination is the first internal beginning of all voluntary motion.” These motions are in turn divided between desires and aversions, that subsequently lead to all the passions.21 In Gassendi, according to Lisa Sarasohn, there is a similarly “close connection” between a certain kind of imagination and “human appetite” that surfaces in diverse activities, including affections and moral judgment.22 Spinoza posits an important connection between imaginative activity and action in the world: “the mind, as far as it can, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid our power of acting.”23 If imagination has such power over desire, volition, and action, this power manifests itself everywhere in human beings’ relations with the world, and perhaps above all in any relation to what is experienced in some way beyond it. For Hobbes, religion is a practice where “men stand in awe of their own imaginations” and “from the innumerable variety of Fancy, men have created in the world innumerable sorts of Gods.”24 Similarly, Spinoza’s critique of prophecy rests on its status as an imaginative activity, indeed on his conclusion that prophecy “depends solely on imagination.”25 Given their assessment of imagination’s generative religious and spiritual power, it is hardly surprising that imagination can be, for Hobbes

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and Spinoza alike, a source of moral and political desire and law. Hobbes’s account of good and evil very clearly relies on the vagaries of desire and aversion, both of which emerge within the imagination.26 This cannot be ignored in political life or in the history of politics: Hobbes’s lawgiver appeals to the imaginations of human beings through their religious passions to teach them the laws, as well as good and evil.27 Similarly, Spinoza also asserts that imagination has what Pascal called the “great right” to “persuade.” For Spinoza, a certain kind of political order can be secured through imagination more easily than reason, that is, in the task of giving laws, while good, evil, and beauty alike can belong to imagination—if only for those who judge their experience by “their ignorance.”28 How are we to read Pascal in relation to this ascent? He appears considerably less distinctive in relation to expansive accounts of imagination elsewhere, and one could easily allow various affinities to overwhelm the argument. But this would be to read too broadly; Spinoza, Hobbes, and Gassendi alike offer a much more modest account of imagination than Pascal’s. First, for Hobbes, Gassendi, and Spinoza, imagination is most often bound by the senses rather than commanding them in Pascalian fashion. In Leviathan, the imagination is “nothing but decaying sense.”29 In Gassendi’s Institutio Logica, it is axiomatic that imagination depends on the senses, and the ideas of imagination can be referred to sense impressions to establish their accuracy.30 As Antony McKenna has noted, in Gassendi the function of imagination can mediate between sense impressions and intellect, but is hardly the master of either: “fantasy translates sensations in images that ground the inductive work of the intellect.”31 On these questions at least, Gassendi’s argument about a mediating role for imagination between the senses and intellect can be found in any number of medieval and early modern sources (even in those less likely to be associated with Gassendi, i.e., in Ficino’s Neoplatonism).32 Spinoza writes in only a slightly broader fashion about imagining as the observation of images, drawn from the “affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us . . . though they do not reproduce the figures of things.”33 Still more importantly, in other early modern accounts of imagination, the highest mode of knowledge or human experience almost always relies on an imagination mastered by reason. Gassendi’s division of the soul posits a “rational soul” superior to an irrational dimension of the soul that includes imagination.34 Similarly, Spinoza discounts prophecy’s imag-

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inative power, since it “does not, of its nature, involve any certainty.” This certainty must come from “reasoning,” which controls and moderates imagination.35 For Spinoza, imagination is natural, yet in its manifest inferiority to reason, imagination reveals its ultimate limits. At times these limits are drawn very starkly: at one point, Spinoza explicitly connects imagination to a terrifying experience of powerlessness that seeks arbitrary assurances rather than rational mastery.36 Similarly, though Bacon is willing to grant great power to imagination through “the idols of the mind,” he does so to emphasize the real possibility of overcoming it through reason and knowledge. Thus he claims he will “stress . . . again and again, that the human sense and understanding, for all their weakness, must not have their authority disparaged, but should rather be supported” in order to build “the kingdom of man.”37 In the Ethics, Spinoza makes reason a supreme authority for life: “there is no singular thing in Nature which is more useful to man than a man who lives according to the guidance of reason,” and he adds that the greatest self-esteem arises from reason.38 This confidence in reason allows Spinoza to favor a particular kind of political order—republicanism39—a step Pascal never took. For him, varied forms of political legitimacy beyond raw force were a necessary, if largely arbitrary, function of imagination.40 Politics aside, Gassendi agrees with Spinoza on the general subordination of imagination to reason. For Gassendi, furthermore, the rationally discernible master motive of all mental activity—including imagination—is pleasure, from which he constructs a hedonistic ethics.41 Beyond Pascal, Hobbes is perhaps the most complicated thinker on the relation between imagination and reason, since for him thoughts are always “Scouts, and Spies” for desires, themselves given shape and motion in the imagination.42 Yet even stipulating a reading of Hobbes in which imagination and its articulated desires and passions are the master of reason, it remains true that for Hobbes imagination is not a pure disorder, nor is it a “proud power” that serves as a sign and medium for our alienation from an original nature. For Pascal, pride and presumption often take their bearings from a desire to resemble God; for Hobbes pride, for all its power, can be defined in temporal terms as a failure to recognize natural equality.43 The Pascalian imagination commands and vivifies the senses, whereas Hobbes specifically objects to the notion that the imagination can work upon its own power, apart from sense impressions.44 Most importantly, for Hobbes the imagination emerges from the

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senses, and thus the passions aroused in the imagination can and should be most easily or directly satisfied by goods perceptible to the senses. Despite Hobbes’ pervasive sensitivity to the political dangers of seeking glory, imagination can be described within a system of human cognition and experience in which material affections and aversions—including the pursuit of material wealth, but above all the fear of death—can lastingly subordinate the most diverse imaginative activity to itself. An imagination prompted by the senses can thus seek its most powerful satisfaction in that which sustains or is made directly manifest to them. Hence for Hobbes, imagination is both natural and naturally associated with a kind of aversion that magnifies the weakness or vulnerability rather than the strength of the self (i.e., acquisitiveness, and above all fear inflamed by knowledge of one’s mortality). The Pascalian imagination is in no way limited as these rival early modern notions of imaginations clearly are. It is a proud excess that begets instability and violence as well as (factitious) security and safety without any reliable means to persuade it to follow an ongoing imperative to selfpreservation. There is no set of sense experiences, no rationality, and most importantly no simple passion or temporal desire that can serve to bound the imagination to itself. Rather, the senses, reason, and every temporal desire can be shaped and extended within an imagination that surpasses them. In this way, the exalted imagination that appears in the Pense´es does not function as a single variation satisfactorily encompassed by a broader historical context, even as it certainly partakes of broader interests and preoccupations in early modern thought. That said, the account of imagination in the Pense´es does have a rich contextual history. It is just not simply a broad one—or for that matter, an entirely narrow one. It would be natural enough, not having found this precise rendering of imagination further afield, to turn to Port-Royal and to seek the Pascalian imagination amidst the writings of Pascal’s Jansenist associates. But this most immediate context is as illuminating for its absences as for its marks of correspondence and affinity with the imagination of the Pense´es. The simultaneous uneasiness and admiration that Jansenists experienced upon reading Pascal expressed itself in the task of simultaneously softening and publicizing Pascal’s thoughts after his death. Above all, it was the connection between wisdom and imagination, and between imagination and law, that most worried Pascal’s Jansenist friends and posthumous editors. In his correspondence, Antoine Arnauld expressed his anx-

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iety that Pascal left no room for the idea of natural law in an Augustinian sense (a law that undergirds and regulates political departures from revealed truth) and for a contingent but nonetheless morally sanctioned temporal political order based on that law. As he remarked upon reading Pascal, “it is false and very dangerous to say that there is nothing essentially just among men.” Pierre Nicole’s writings (including the Lettres de Morale) repeatedly articulate similar misgivings, leaving much more room for legitimate and authentic temporal attachments and powers than Pascal, despite Nicole’s well-documented and fervent admiration for Pascal.45 In the early editions of the Pense´es, Jansenist ambivalence about Pascal’s more dangerous thoughts took the direct form of extensive if erratic redaction, especially at the point where Pascal’s thoughts on the arbitrary power of imagination and power are applied directly to political life. These thoughts were often excised in posthumous editions of Pascal’s writings because they did not seem “Jansenist” to the Jansenists themselves. As Dale Van Kley has shown, Pascal’s political thoughts, with their radical skepticism about political rationality and justice, in no way advocated a unanimous or even a widely accepted Jansenist position.46 The Port-Royal edition edited by Pascal’s Jansenist allies (issued in 1670 and 1678) censors the majority of Pascal’s explicitly political pense´es, and his reflections on the special powers of imagination for effective wisdom. Yet the editors’ admiration for Pascal—and their palpable reluctance to serve as “interested” censors for his ideas47 —allows Pascal’s most radical ideas to appear in the Port-Royal edition, if only implicitly or in smaller fragments. One can learn a great deal about Pascal and the depth of his insights about imagination by reading his full and uncensored thoughts; but to trace the possibilities this thought presented to Rousseau and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the analysis must concentrate primarily on fragments included in the Port-Royal edition—the only edition of the Pense´es available for most of the eighteenth century, and the one that most of the philosophes, and with them Rousseau, actually read. An example of the scope and limitations of Port-Royal’s editorial control is clearly apparent in the edited version of Pascal’s fragment on imagination from the Port-Royal edition, in which imagination is initially renamed “fantasy and opinion.” Pascal’s allies were uncomfortable with the connection between wisdom and imagination, so that only the “sages imaginaires” survive their editorial redactions, not “the wise” as such; and the apparently more general, less personal force of “opinion” is now the power that gives respect to people, works, and the great, instead of imag-

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ination itself. Yet opinion could not be trusted with giving respect to laws, and Pascal’s explicit statement about the necessary connection between imagination and the authority of law is omitted altogether (even as Pascal’s reference elsewhere to the “fantasy” that generates certain kinds of law escapes the editor’s pen).48 The reservations that attended the publication of the Port-Royal edition find direct expression in the earlier Port-Royal Logique. In Arnauld’s and Nicole’s own text, the imagination is frequently cited, but the authors (as their title implies) declare reason’s control over imagination with a confidence absent from the Pense´es. In the Logique, the imagination’s power does not give truth and falsehood the same mark, nor is it the prerogative of “the wise”; it is simply an easy and opportunistic producer of falsehood (when philosophers do figure in the discussion, the Cartesian sympathies of the authors are indirectly expressed: Aristotle is a frequent victim of the authors’ accusations regarding the falsehoods produced by imaginative activity in philosophy).49 The contention that reason can expose and correct errors in thought, including those of the imagination, is the book’s reason for being. Even imagination’s real powers are changed in nature. For if Arnauld and Nicole suggest that imagination’s power over lived experience is considerable in scope, in the Logique imagination is not presented as a proud power creating a new nature. Instead it is often motivated by a banal vanity, as in the case of a man who builds an unnecessarily large house to show off for his neighbors.50 Yet Jansenism remains an indispensable guide for a history of the Pascalian imagination—not for the explicit assertions of its most illustrious representatives on the powers of imagination, but for its concatenation of philosophical and theological sources. If Augustine was the theologian to whom Port-Royal proclaimed its fealty (against what was thought to be the implicit apostasy of many of its coreligionists), it is likewise in Augustine—whose writings Pascal read throughout his adult life and that were the subject of intense reading and study among his friends and family51—that there is a dimension of understanding, thought, feeling, and value that Pascal will read through his ongoing intellectual struggle with the ideas of Descartes and Montaigne. Descartes and Montaigne were controversial (though not to the same degree) within French Jansenism, but they are cited and read with care throughout the work of Port-Royal. All these sources are indispensable on Pascal’s way to the configuration of imagination in the Pense´es. Above all, it is by reading Augustine—especially Book X of the Confessions, whose pages Pascal cites

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directly in his own writing52—that Pascal will encounter a form of excess and with it, a language for an exalted imagination. At first glance, the role of the imagination in the respective projects of Descartes and Montaigne seems peripheral. Despite their importance for Pascal’s intellectual development and for the controversies about the self that surround him,53 they initially appear no more promising than their Jansenist readers as a source for Pascal’s account of imagination. Descartes famously remarked that “this power of imagining that is in me, such that it differs from the power to conceive, is in no way necessary to my nature or my essence, that is to say the nature of my mind [esprit].”54 Montaigne’s Essais, a source of many of Pascal’s allusions and argumentative points of departure, includes a brief essay, “On the Power of Imagination,” but it is short, playful, and digressive even for Montaigne, his thought careening into the vicissitudes of sexual potency and the emotional susceptibility of dogs.55 Descartes often marginalizes the imagination altogether, as Dennis Sepper and others have argued with reference to the explicit arguments of his “canonical” works, characterized by “a shift that was intended to circumvent and displace the problematics of imagination.”56 For Descartes, the task of limiting the imagination is well within the power of the will and reason, and here he seems to place comprehensive limits on the imagination. Reason in Descartes is the judge of imaginative power and its constructions; and Descartes’ examples suggest that as a constructive power (rather than as a power of comprehensive negation), imagination relies on sense impressions, as in the image of a fantastic beast.57 And while it is true that imagination has power over the passions in Cartesian psychology, this is a power that can be limited by the will and by reason.58 Descartes’ full and often implicit account of imagination, however, reveals something deeper and more subtle than appears at first glance, even though it is precisely the imagination’s power of establishing an appearance that gives it great value for Descartes, and severs imagination from its dependence on sense impressions. In the “evil demon” argument in the first two Meditations, Descartes posits the power of imagination to create all his perceptions (“j’emploie tous mes soins a` me tromper moi-meˆme, feignant que toutes ces pense´es sont fausses et imaginaires”)59 rendering uncertain the perception of all body, figure, and movement to preclude the possibility of an immediate knowl-

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edge of the world. What remains after this change is the thinking self (understood not just as a conceiving or rational self, but in “doubting, conceiving, affirming, denying, wanting, not wanting, imagining, feeling”).60 Designating all experience of the world as imaginary illumines the singular certitude of the cogito and makes it appear to itself. Yet the cogito itself includes imagining among its constituent faculties. Imagination’s capacity to alienate the self from the world of experience, to potentially deceive the self comprehensively in relation to a reality beyond itself, offers a new relation between imagination and the self: imagination cannot yet generate a second nature, but it can affect a comprehensive negation of a first nature understood as one’s whole experience of the external world. The self illumined by this negation is not relational, nor does it receive its illumination from without, but by its light, the world and its maker become illuminated after imagination had set them in darkness. It is only from this clear and distinct idea of self that Descartes can establish the existence of God, and finally the plenitude of beings beyond the self that had been earlier denied in the interest of the cogito’s affirmation.61 Yet Descartes repeatedly suggests that even after this subject has been securely established and conveyed, the fables of imagination and their falsifying powers are necessary to communicate effectively Descartes’ substantive philosophical achievements. Hence imaginative power becomes part of certain kinds of philosophical communication, in part through its power to stimulate pride. In the Discourse on Method, the method in question relies on the imagination as its medium of expression. Descartes calls his discourse a “history [histoire] or, if you prefer . . . a fable,”62 with useful examples to follow (or “perhaps many others that it will be right not to follow”). Descartes expresses the hope that as a history or fable, he will not be responsible for the errors that might be made in applying the book to the world, and thus that “it will be useful to some without being harmful to any one.”63 Even allowing for a desire to avoid responsibility for the effect of his book, why would Descartes have need of a history (or story) and fable in order to speak of his philosophy at all? The literate audience he has in mind is hardly “the ignorant” in need of superstitions discussed by Spinoza. The question appears to be resolved when Descartes broaches the subject of history and fables with reference to his own education at La Fle`che. He first observes that the “gentleness of fables awakens the mind; that the memorable actions of histories uplifts it, and being read with discretion, they aid in forming judgment.”64

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Yet this explanation hardly accounts for why imaginative forms are needed to awaken the mind and, still more strangely, to assist in judgment. The problem only becomes more complicated when Descartes goes on to disparage each genre’s relation as such to truth, above all because of its dependence on imagination. Fables “make us imagine that many events are possible which are not; and even the most faithful histories, if they neither change nor augment the value of things, to make them more worthy of being read, at least almost always omit the most base and least illustrious circumstances” from the story. This in turn leads those inspired by them to “fall into the extravagance of our paladins and our novels, and conceive plans that exceed their strength.”65 Both fable’s power to “make us imagine” and history, according to Descartes, will induce many readers to fall into an—apparently necessary—error, misunderstanding reality and their place in it in order to attempt what is not possible, a possibility that Descartes acknowledges is a plausible result of his history or fable, without finding another way to persuade his readers, except through these forms of imaginative stimulation. Both history and fable are clearly outside Descartes’ own method, introducing a certain tension between the forms and the matter of persuasion in the Discourse. If fable necessarily goes beyond the real and the indubitable, writing a fable traverses the line set by Descartes’ first methodological rule—to take nothing as true that is not beyond doubt. If history almost invariably omits certain circumstances, Descartes’ history must take leave of his fourth and final rule, that the method omits nothing.66 Descartes warns his readers away from the dangers of his writing; nonetheless, he does not really explain why, despite their common dangers, his readers still encounter a history, or a fable in a Discourse famously intended to open the possibility of conquering nature and making human beings its master through the cumulative power of clear and secure knowledge. In this way, imagination becomes the most powerful medium for persuasion of readers through writing, even as Descartes both hopes for and decries its various likely effects. As Descartes faults Scholastic theologians for their diverse imaginings,67 Descartes himself, in the very midst of his turn away from fantasy to “the book of the world,”68 calls upon imagination to create a world of imaginatively inspired readers, in which they can conceive the world as a book of secure knowledge waiting for them to decipher it. Descartes asks for prevailing opinion to do its work apart from his method. He intends to follow the “laws and customs of my country” par

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provision, attending the construction of something more durable. This is hardly an endorsement of the compatibility of contemporary law, custom, and morality with true knowledge. Descartes seeks simply to accommodate their power, to assert that they are very different elsewhere,69 and begin the fable and history of his method. These collective customs and opinions do limit the course of the passions, however, and this is necessary to prevent a life lived by passion rather than reason, even as Descartes extends the possibility that once properly disciplined and trained, the desires for health of mind and body, and perhaps even the limit of mortality itself, are best addressed through the offices of reason, above all through medical research.70 The prospect that medicine will push back or transcend the limits of human existence is very difficult to reconcile with anything but a very narrow reading of the third principle of Descartes’ provisional morality, in which he promises to “vanquish himself rather than fortune,” and accept that only thoughts are “entirely in our power.” He writes that thus, he and his readers “being ill, would no longer desire to be healthy.”71 Yet as health emerges in Part VI of the Discourse, “without doubt” as the “first good and the foundation of all the other goods of this life,” as part of a call for human beings to become the “masters of nature,”72 Descartes implies that his provisional morality (and that of his ambient culture) is inadequate. He implicitly raises the possibility that his imaginative fable or history will generate new practices, customs, orders of knowledge, and morals in the future to replace the prevailing ones, if present ones do not conduce to the most effective pursuit of this supreme good. Descartes’ treatment of the thinking self’s constituent faculties, the conditions of the self’s appearance as certain knowledge, as well as the conditions of effective communication of this knowledge and its consequences for morals, customs, and opinion, leads to a substantial estimate of imagination’s individual and—through writing—collective powers. Descartes’ explicit limits on the powers of imagination are in no way insincere; he clearly does believe that reason can control imagination. Nonetheless, imagination has a far more important role in Descartes’ philosophy, and above all the appearance of that philosophy in writing and history, than his explicit statements on imagination allow. Similarly, Montaigne’s whimsical reflections on imagination are much more substantial than they may seem. Montaigne’s own short essay on “On the Power of Imagination” is above all concerned with the imagination as the presiding communicative faculty among the senses, the passions and body, but he soon broadens his inquiry.

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For Montaigne, imagination produces suggestion and association, and these can, for example, make men impotent or cure their impotence. Montaigne observes that medical cures in general often succeed by suggestion, often represented by sensible objects; that babies can bear the physical imprint of their mothers’ imaginations; that when Montaigne sees illness he feels ill himself; that dogs lose their beloved owners to death, and in their sorrow they themselves fall ill and die.73 Here imagination appears to be something closer to human beings’ animal nature, indeed a faculty explicitly thought to be shared with animals.74 For Montaigne, in humans and animals alike, imagination often occupies the “narrow seam between the mind [esprit] and the body communicating their fortunes to one another” or alternately, permits desire or the will to exert itself upon other bodies.75 Montaigne does not say that the unmediated powers of imagination are most forcefully expressed among “the wise,” and at one point he suggests that it is strongest among their antipodes, especially on spiritual questions, where miracles and visions inevitably affect imaginings within “the softer souls of the vulgar.”76 Whatever its suggestive implications, Montaigne’s essay on imagination is not his complete statement on the subject; imagination is at the center of his famous extended essay “Of Experience.” In this essay, imagination expands in scope, bringing Montaigne’s readers (not least Pascal) into a space where the problem of imagination becomes a central human problem, above all the eudaemonic problem. Toward the beginning of the essay, Montaigne advances a more ambitious thesis than any in his essay on imagination. Imagination has no rival in the making or unmaking of happiness and misery: “what does it take to make the imagination [la fantaisie] content? In my opinion this thing is the most important of all, at least beyond all others. The most serious and ordinary evils are those that fantasy enjoins on us.”77 The preoccupation with imagination’s eudaemonic powers—at once pervasive and capricious—will be a major theme of the essay, and serves as a starting point for Pascal’s own reflections on the imagination’s power over earthly happiness, including its autonomy from any reality that “corrects” a factitious happiness. Imagination proves itself the source not only of diverse reasonings, but of thoughts and experiences that do not rely entirely on sense perceptions internal or external to the self. Instead, they depend on “diverse persuasions and counsels: how often the imagination [imagination] burdens them [on its own] without the body!”78 As he suggests in one suggestive phrase, “the pure pleasures of the imagination, as well as its ills, are the

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greatest.”79 Montaigne even suggests that he lives in something that sounds like the imagination as mediator between desire, sense, and reason, and implies that this quasi-imaginative mode of being is a universal medium for human beings’ experience of the world—what he calls “the human and general law, intellectually sensorial [sensible], sensorially [sensiblement] intellectual.”80 Montaigne’s imagination encounters a limit of its own, however—not in reason or knowledge of self, but in a kind of shrewd manipulation of imagination through thinking rationally directed toward happiness. It draws deeply on the imagination to contain imagination, allowing the self to quietly control its own imagination’s movement and thus to secure a provisionally stable contentment. He claims that he “treats my imagination as gently as I can . . . one must assist and flatter it, and deceive it if possible.”81 Montaigne’s directed imaginings are deeply contextual, fungible, and immediate: he desires a capacity to accept his bodily pains, and thus he imagines that his suffering is suitable for noble natures, that he must show his strength to others, that he must prepare for death. In this way, “by such arguments I try to stupefy and amuse my imagination, and dress its wounds. If they worsen tomorrow, tomorrow we will seek other means of escape.”82 Even in sleep, where this sort of intervention is no longer possible, Montaigne assures his readers that he has met with success in his effort to constrict the impulsions of imagination: in sleep “imagination has given me nothing to complain about.”83 The reference to sleep is telling: in his reflections on imagination, Montaigne argues for a kind of lucid dreaming in which the desire for contentment allows a reasonable will to direct imaginative activity, without being able to entirely contain it. The imagination is persistent and powerful, but in the Essais it is a power that not only deceives but can be deceived, and it is part of the task of a good life to undertake this deception, reducing imagination to a kind of bemused quiescence that works toward and supremely desires its own contented serenity. In this way, Descartes and Montaigne lift imagination well beyond its place as a useful, subordinate faculty; their thought serves to make the imagination a serious problem in the constitution of the self, in writing, in social and moral order, and in the making of happiness. Yet there are ultimate limits to the imagination in Montaigne and Descartes alike. In Descartes, the imagination is ultimately the servant of reason and its pursuit of secure knowledge. Although Montaigne is not as confident of reason’s power over imagination, he too finds in imagination something

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less than a supreme and dominant faculty; for him it is a mental capacity of diverse creatures, in constant and erratic movement within the ambit of one’s experience (especially bodily experience). Montaigne’s desire for quotidian happiness allows the imagination to be assisted and deceived with its own connivance. For Montaigne and Descartes alike, the expansion of imagination’s power permits a break with a world assumed to be known by the senses, and allows, in various forms, for the constitution of the self, “a knowing self ” (in the different senses each author would give this phrase). This act of constitution both has an initial need for a magnification of imaginative power and must subsequently assign limits to imagination in order to sustain the ambitions—historical, scientific, eudaemonic—that required a powerful imagination. This limited notion of imagination in Descartes and Montaigne offers an introductory historical opening into the function of imagination in Pascal’s apology. Pascal directs his attention to an ambiguous and powerful faculty in Descartes’ and Montaigne’s thinking about the self that makes it impossible for these selves to function as written. Pascal’s account radicalizes the inner, initial logic of this self’s constitution, so that the imagination becomes not the licensed agent of self-constitution but its very ground, from which the direction of reason and the desire for temporal happiness can and often do emanate. Hence for Pascal the triune God appears alone before human beings as the source of true and secure order in a self and in a world—and an experience of the world—of supreme and nearly irremediable disorder. If this were a full account of the Pascalian imagination, it would be tempting to shelve Pascal’s imagination next to any number of philosophical and theological denunciations of the “world” and the desires and ambitions implicated in it. One could start with some forms of Stoicism before, in the interests of precision, turning to an ascetic tendency in Christian thought traced over half a millennium by Jean Delumeau, or still more directly to the dour and vehement homiletic tendencies in early modern France so insightfully interpreted by Bernard Groethuysen.84 What makes Pascal distinctive, however, is his startling revision of inner experience, value, and cognition that goes far beyond mere otherworldliness. In a traditional state of contemptus mundi, the converted self can nonetheless know, for example, action and desire in a fallen world by its fruits, and with faith know the penultimate legitimacy of many earthly vocations and affections.

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Pascal’s radicalization of imaginative power goes well beyond this familiar otherworldliness. An exalted imagination requires Pascal to simultaneously draw upon and break with the anthropology inherent in the theological order he most admired. For Pascal’s account of imagination— as origin of a second nature, replete with its integrative modes of manifestation, its synthesizing and productive power, and the sheer scope of its control over temporal value, meaning, and attachment—transforms a psychology familiar to him from his reading of Augustine. In Augustine— most evident in Book X of the Confessions85—it is memory that constitutes a depth without end and a variety without measure, relating to others and to God in a unique and boundless form,86 whose dynamic and dialogic properties depart from Platonist and Neoplatonic precedents to reveal a “profound and infinite multiplicity.”87 In the Confessions, it is memory that records, enlarges, or diminishes sense impressions and represents them in their absence. It is in memory, as Augustine says, that he encounters and confirms the unique order and form of the self, the relational identity where “I meet with myself.” The capacity to meet with himself is by no means fortuitous; for memory in Augustine is constantly relational. In the sequence that leads Augustine to memory, he questions the beings of the world in a dialogue between the self and the beings of creation: “my questioning with them was my thought, and their answer was their beauty.”88 Through this dialogue, he finds that the real beauty before him is not ultimate. He is then led to know himself through his relation to himself in memory; he is led through memory to God, who in turn manifests himself within and without memory. Similarly, the writing Augustine shares with his readers is offered as a charitable relation that allows the author to speak without dissimulation to “fellow pilgrims,” those who are “sharers of my joy and partners in mortality with me.”89 Given this order of meaning in Augustine, there is something schematic in Hans Blumenberg’s well-known reading of this process, in which the beings of the world and their presentation to the self are “warded off and damned up” so that the sacred order of memory can present itself. While Augustine finds the supreme manifestation of the divine in the mysteries of being human, to see this only as a turn away from the world is to ignore the relationality brought out by questioning of the beings of the world, as well as its cumulative molem, that allows still deeper relations to become present,90 in a way of peace rather than violence (i.e., Blumenberg’s “warded off and damned up”). Rather, for Augustine it is in

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memory that world and self come together in a divine order of charity.91 As Blumenberg rightly observes, it is precisely its propensity to presumptive violence and its denial of gratitude for the world’s beauty that often sustains Augustine’s skepticism about curiositas,92 a skepticism toward which Blumenberg is sometimes justifiably skeptical. For Augustine, the self is neither complete nor coherent in itself. But it is irradiated, overwhelmed by its own capacities, through its participation (by both analogy and mediation) with divine energy. Memory is itself a kind of excess (it is magna nimis),93 a force beyond comprehension. Its “infinite multiplicity”94 reveals that the mind cannot contain itself, for Augustine cannot “plummet the bottom of it” and “where could that be which cannot contain itself?”95 This is at once a moment of supreme humility, as the mind fails to fathom itself, and a liberation, through memory’s capacity to take leave of the limits imposed by ambient space and time, and thus free the mind from a kind of cogitative diachrony. Yet if memory holds a kind of excess within itself, at once liberating and humbling, it is part of a still greater excess in God, further beyond comprehension than the mind, more full of an awe that reduces the mind’s pretensions and liberates an increasingly precise and variegated infinity of thought and experience. It indeed permits Augustine to turn away from earthly beauty and light when they manifest themselves apart from the divine,96 just as it can immediately turn toward that light in responsive synaesthesia, to sing the praises of earthly light when it is a manifestation of God.97 In this hymn, divine beauty orders earthly beauty at the boundary of representation. The senses are not abrogated but crossed and fulfilled at the uncovering of transcendence within what is gratuitously given to the senses. This dynamism of relation, manifest above all in the way that God’s love permits the love of creatures for God, and the love among creatures through God, is for Augustine the “ground” of the self’s unity. That this relationality is constantly exceeding itself is not a source of fragmentation, but an intimation of the divine’s infinite and constant excess, at once beyond change and beyond limit. To exchange this relationality for an exalted imagination, or for a certain and secure self, is a crucial change. Augustine’s own argument for self-certainty—in some ways strikingly similar to Descartes’—finds in charity the relational bond between the self and the knowledge it has of itself.98 If memory and charity allow the self to meet with itself, memory also allows the self to carry understanding into infinite depths whose order

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sustains itself beyond what can be expressed or grasped. It is memory that learning requires, as well as language, for what humans know is represented in memory and communicated in learned signs despite its abstraction or absence.99 Augustine calls upon prevailing usage to observe that memory and mind are often used interchangeably, and that in Latin, cogitare means both to think and to gather.100 It is precisely the integrative function of memory—preserving and arranging differences collected by the mind—that surfaces repeatedly in Augustine’s reflections, in which thinking and language and self are inextricably entwined and mutually expressed within the infinity of memory. In the Confessions, it is memory’s expansive powers that extend beyond knowledge and communication to the emotions, desire, and meaning. For Augustine, imagination can inhibit a turn to faithful understanding by disordering the passions,101 but he can nonetheless write without reserve that the “affections of my mind” dwell in memory when they do not fill the mind and, in this way, it is memory, rather than imagination, that expresses and potentially integrates the contradictions of desire in the world. Memory makes it possible to feel sadness and joy together, in the remembrance of past joys in times of sorrow, or sorrow in times of happiness.102 Similarly, it is memory that establishes the Pascalian “mark” of truth or the “price” of everything, or to use Augustine’s words, it is in memory that he works to “value everything according to its proper worth.”103 For Augustine it is also in memory that human beings are recalled to some desire for and realizable hope of happiness: “Known therefore unto all . . . could they [humankind] with one voice be demanded, whether they would be happy or no? Without doubt they would all answer that they would. And this could not be, unless the thing itself expressed by this name were still reserved in memory.”104 In Augustine, as these passages from Book X of the Confessions show, not only happiness but truth is in memory, for human beings “would not love [truth], were not some knowledge of it remaining in their memory.”105 For Augustine even God, who exceeds all faculties and is omnipresent, consents to “dwell” in memory, and Augustine is recalled to God through the memory of his faith.106 Although Augustine’s memory is certainly not a secure or certain “container” for God, memories can serve to help human beings recognize God. Augustine writes of tracing memory in the sense that is “common to me and beasts” (by making “images of corporeal things”) and discovers that God is not there.

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Nor is he in “the affections of my mind,” nor in “the mind itself”: yet all of these inquiries help him on his way, until he can write to God that among all the places where he is, in memory also “you dwell; if only for this reason, that I preserved the memory of you since the time that I first learned of you: and so I find you in it, whenever I call you to remembrance.”107 Given the relational plenitude of Augustine’s memory, it is striking that Pascal’s account of imagination shares so much with its predecessor on the self’s relation to itself, to desire, and to the world. Both Augustine’s memory and the Pascalian account of imagination allow the self to recognize itself in a world of others. Each faculty surpasses reason and the senses in an apparent infinity of presentation and representation, in which time and space are themselves reconfigured.108 Augustine’s memory and Pascal’s imagination are, respectively, able to give value to the world and to the self, to provide a medium for happiness, order, wisdom, and beauty, and to order and experience desire. But Pascal’s conversion of memory to imagination leads to the most profound consequences, and turns Pascal’s apology for Christian faith away from the faith its author intends to affirm. Although Pascal occasionally turns to a memory of past happiness, or past grandeur, in Augustinian fashion,109 these scattered references are severed from the constituent faculties of desire, value, and experience that gave them their integrative fullness in Augustine. Whereas Augustine posits a profound and constantly available continuity through memory, integrating sense impressions and imaging with desire, and desire with happiness and truth, and all of them with God, Pascal’s representation of imagination ruptures this implicit and, for Augustine, ultimate concord. By giving a stark explicit reading of subtle, implicit contemporary reflections about the possible unreliability of all images, sense impressions, and desire intended to vindicate a constituting self via a powerful but not exalted imagination, Pascalian anthropology marks a radical and often violent shift of desire, imaging, meaning, and a possible worldly happiness to imagination. In a remarkable negation, this account separates truth and God, and indeed any authentic relation, from diverse human capacities, desires, and hopes. In this way, Pascal’s writing of imagination subverts the modern constitutions of the self around him. Yet by working through Augustine’s account of inner life and modern philosophies of the self within a partial transformation of imagination in early modern thought, Pascal’s intervention accomplishes an encompassing subversion far beyond its initial apol-

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ogetic intent. It opens a void for meaning in the world, filled neither by Augustinian memory nor modern constituted selves. It is in this space that Pascal’s imaginative power exceeds its precedents, and sets a new direction for excess—of meaning, of desire, of order and its overturning. Most importantly, after this transformation, the imagination—despite its apparent limitlessness and lack of form—is nonetheless a faculty given impetus by pride, and hence for all its sudden reversals and caprice in relation to the force that expands within it, for Pascal imagination is a “proud power.” Thus not only is the power of this exalted imagination separate from God, but imagination is quite specifically aligned against God and created being. Once again, Augustine’s account of pride is strikingly different. In the Confessions, for example, pride is not necessarily connected to any human faculty or desire, or alternately, it can be potentially connected to all of them. Even the desire to be recognized by others for some superiority is not in itself a source of pride, though it can become one if it is sought for itself—that is, if praise allows human beings to impersonate a divine origin, “pleasing ourselves with being loved and feared, not for your sake, but in your stead.”110 If any experience or desire finds itself associated with pride in Augustine’s account of memory, it is a kind of pure violence and ineluctably violent desire—Augustine’s examples of pride at work in the Confessions are usually specific instances of vengeance or usurpation.111 Since the love of happiness is connected to memory, and God has created it and our worldly desires, Augustine’s account of worldly making, of vocations, of earthly affection and the pleasures of the senses, ultimately points to what is from God in temporal existence, even within the limits of constructed realities. Whatever their limitations, the making of “feigned images” and other human creations give testimony to God, since “those beautiful patterns which through men’s souls are conveyed into their cunning hands, all descend from that beauty which is above our souls, which my soul day and night sighs after.”112 In this way, desire and action bear some vestige of God’s beauty and goodness; they are all potentially dangerous, but also potential paths to their origin. Imagination has no ultimate power over desire in Augustine: even when Augustine talks about the power of dreams and their chimeras, it is to assert that they are most powerful in the absence of waking reason, and that God can overcome them.113 Pascal’s account of imagination refuses this subordination of imagination to reason and to the abundance

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of creation in favor of a potential refusal of the human capacity for making and imaging; God is almost without testimony in our senses, in our reason, in desire or in the world itself—and these are all within the purview of the “proud power.” In fact, for Pascal, imagination is only limited by an infinite space without apparent content. When human beings are brought to contemplate infinity, they understand that “it is one of the greatest sensible aspects of the omnipotence of God that our imagination gets lost in this thought.”114 The positing of imagination’s incapacity to conceive the infinite was not a move unique to Pascal; the same assumption was made by Hobbes.115 It is only with Rousseau that the relationship between imagination and infinity undergoes a decisive change. Yet even after positing its finitude, Pascal is hardly expansive on any redemptive order for imagination.116 This is remarkable; for other human desires and faculties, he upholds this redemptive possibility. For Pascal, even amour-propre returns to amour de soi in a true conversion.117 It is all the more important, then, that imagination, the proud power that “dominates” so much of human experience, stands alone and unredeemed in Pascal’s apology. Although in a few fragments, Pascal writes in broad Augustinian terms about an “instinct”118 that reminds human beings of their earlier happiness, his extensive treatment of imagination presents human happiness in the world as estranged from reason, the sensible world, and a genuine experience of the divine. In this way, Augustine’s analogical and dialogical structures of memory, desire, and meaning are overturned by his reader Pascal. The divine infinite becomes increasingly remote and unattainable within his psychology, approachable only through an imaginative negation of creaturely life so comprehensive that Pascal’s own Jansenist allies distanced themselves from it. How does this exalted imaginative power not find itself much more assertively limited by the relationality of memory in Pascal? There can be no doubt, certainly, that accounts of memory surrounding Pascal, or located in his reading, had diminished the status of memory, both absolutely and in relation to more subtle and far-reaching assessments of imagination. Hobbes and Spinoza tend to reduce memory to the record of sense impressions. For Hobbes, memory and imagination are “but one thing”—for if imagination is decaying sense, when we “signifie that the Sense is fading, old and past, it is called Memory.”119 In broadly similar terms, memory in Spinoza is a constructed correspondence to what is

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beyond the body according to the body, or in his words, memory is “nothing other than a certain connection of ideas involving the nature of things which are outside the human body—a connection which is in the mind according to the order and connection of the affections of the human body.”120 Descartes presents only small variations from this general movement. His tendency to marginalize the powers of memory expands beyond a decided lack of admiration for the late medieval notions of artificial memory associated with Ramon Lull.121 In The Passions of the Soul, for example, Descartes gives a very brief, physiological account of memory. Memory is driven to store knowledge through passion, without which human beings easily remain in ignorance.122 In the Fifth Meditation, the limitations of this storage capacity are clear: memory cannot hold clear and secure truths without knowledge of God—a knowledge that does not work through or dwell in memory but allows the “opinions” recalled in memory to validate themselves as true and certain knowledge.123 Memory in Descartes does not have the range of functions and powers he implicitly ascribes to imagination; it often appears to be a passive receptacle. In the Discourse on Method, Descartes can summarize his work in Le Monde by making imagination an active power of alteration and creation of ideas, as well as external motion; memory only keeps or conserves ideas.124 This capacity for storing ideas is not always presented favorably: memory holds the impress of random associations that mark a self for life, associations that are sometimes integrated neither with reason nor with understanding, as in the case of phobias, even when the origins of these associations cannot be recalled.125 Upon the question of memory, Montaigne is adamant on its weaknesses and failures, evident in his claims about his own feeble memory.126 But for Montaigne this is hardly a flaw; for him, like Descartes, the memory is a receptacle rather than an active faculty of integration and understanding. He observes that “the magazine of my memory is more easily furnished with matter than with invention” and that “excellent memories are easily joined to weak judgments.”127 Even when Montaigne alludes to the formidable powers of memory by citing Plato,128 it is hard to argue with Ermanno Bencivenga’s remark that here, as elsewhere, “though conceding, as is his wont, to traditional value judgments, Montaigne is working in fact to undercut them, or to change their meaning.” Montaigne makes an implicit distinction between memory as habit, free of volition, and memory as a faculty of knowledge, with the latter decidedly inferior to the former.129 Elsewhere, in his essay “Of Presumption,”

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Montaigne cites his weak memory in a discussion of the ways in which thinking and action are weakened by necessity and compulsion, above all among those who have “a more passionate and powerful imagination.”130 The weakness of memory and other mental activities are here quite clearly connected to the power of imagination, which resists constraint and limit, the very qualities that appear to evoke the essence of memory for Montaigne. Most importantly, Augustine’s notion of memory had not always fared well, as it were, in itself, manifest in specifically Christian citations and translations of memory, meant to endorse Augustine’s own understanding. It is obviously not true that Christian authors had long represented Augustine’s memory in the manner of Descartes or Spinoza. But there was a tendency to transfigure Augustine’s memory into something far more limited in scope and wonder, bounded by its internality, constituted by a refusal of any vivifying analogy to creation—a tendency that can be glimpsed at the very moment of the epistemological turn of late medieval thought documented by Blumenberg and Funkenstein. That something has changed in the experience of memory as multiplicitous integration can be perceived in Petrarch’s account of his encounter with Book X of the Confessions in his Ascent of Mount Ventoux. For Petrarch, Augustine’s renunciation of concupiscence and its tendency to be beguiled by the world is presented as the supreme lesson of the Confessions. From a passage in Book X that warns the self against abandoning itself to the grandeur of creation (from which Augustine proceeds to wonder at the wondrous capacity of memory to reproduce the wonders of the created world),131 Petrarch concludes that a radical turn inward should cut the self off from creation and permit the self a penetrating gaze into itself. The passage thus inspires Petrarch to be “angry with myself for continuing to admire the things of this world.” He groups Augustine with “pagan philosophers” who taught “that nothing is admirable but the soul beside whose greatness nothing can be as great.” The “infinite multiplicity” that evokes Augustine’s rigorous ardor in conversation with God and his reader does not appear to his eye, and Petrarch believes the passage he encountered was “written for me and for no one else.” These reflections find their proper expression neither in questioning conversation with what he sees nor with others (his brother is with him on Ventoux), nor in praise, but in silence: “having seen enough of the mountain I turned an inward eye upon myself, and from that moment on not a syllable passed my lips until we reached the bottom.”132 This movement to render Augustine’s memory as a unique interior

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space, without dialogue or analogy in creation, is visible at a distance in Petrarch, but is by no means absent from Pascal’s intellectual ambit, most notably in the 1649 French translation of Augustine’s Confessions by the Jansenist Arnauld d’Andilly. Pascal’s Latin made the original available to him; d’Andilly’s work is most revealing for its decisions about language. Significantly, d’Andilly’s translation alters Augustine’s nimis vis (excessive or immoderate force, or power) to something more ordered: a “puissance” described as “grande” (great power).133 Like memory, Augustine’s own nature’s variability is “exceedingly immense,”134 whereas in d’Andilly it is softened to something that can be thought without abandoning the possibility of ordered measure: it has “an incredible variety in its operations and in the vast extent of its powers.”135 Although d’Andilly faithfully renders memory’s opening unto the infinite—and thus its power remaining beyond human comprehension—his translation reveals a persistent tendency to endow memory and nature with a comprehensible order and to make memory a more purely interior space, without the excessive measure of relationality and analogy expressed by Augustine’s original text. As Nicholas Paige has observed, d’Andilly also renders the “inner man” of Pauline and with some adjustments, Augustinian thought into something very different. For d’Andilly, the “inner man,” which in Paul and Augustine had been sufficiently close an analogue to the outer man to be endowed with senses, is now an interior space in comprehensive contrast to rather than corresponding to an exterior.136 Thus d’Andilly translates Augustine’s description of loving God from the “inner man, where that light shines into my soul, which no place can receive” as something quite different. The inner man is now “the bottom of my heart, in this part of myself that is completely interior and completely invisible.”137 In both Augustine’s original and d’Andilly’s translation, there is a mystery of the self manifest in its relation to God; however in d’Andilly, that mystery does not suffuse an integrated, whole inner being with a spiritual light, but appears in a recessive interior of the self, a “part” of the self bound not by analogy to the body and its perceptions of the world but identified by their absence. Marked by this general movement in early modern accounts of memory both within and without explicitly Augustinian reflections, Pascal’s account of memory is truncated, and its powers are limited. To be sure, as Edouard Morot-Sir observes, Pascal offers a pedagogy of substitution based on memory and imagination alike, in which the memory of Christ’s sacrifice elicits and contains imaginative activity. Yet as Morot-Sir ac-

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knowledges, references to this pedagogy are sparse, and coexist with a palpable anguish in Pascal’s writing about the weakness of memory.138 Pascal asserts at one point that memory is “necessary for all the operations of reason,”139 yet he repeatedly offers memory as a mere resource for the self, and a faltering one at that, rather than the infinite space of its constituting relation. While Augustine understands memory as that which subsists in the very fact of forgetting, which remembers an absence (and thus marks the absence as a kind of presence despite itself ),140 Pascal is repeatedly drawn to forgetting as a pure and irremediable absence. He forgets his thought and cannot recover it, and this proves his thoughts are a product of “chance.” Furthermore, his forgetting ultimately presents nothing; after reminding him of his “weakness,” it only marks his “nothingness [ne´ant].”141 Rather than being manifest in memory, love is particularly vulnerable to forgetting, evident not only in the vicissitudes of romantic love but in the forgetting of a loved one’s death in diversion.142 Memory in Pascal has lost its power to integrate, to value, to sustain presence in absence, to open to the infinite; it has become a useful faculty for knowledge and insight, often incapable of withstanding the flux of imagination and its desires, and the factitious self that for him, so easily dwells within it. This turn in the argument, however, only points to a final difficulty with the interpretation offered here. Pascal’s apologetic argument intends to show that diversion reveals the poverty of imagined existence, either because the happiness and self-affirmation sought by imagination never arrive or because they arrive in absurd ways. If imagination is to have an effect in the world—above all the creation of a purely temporal happiness, with the offices of the “wise” or no—it must reckon with the contradictions of imagined desire’s extension into the world of others and objects. Yet the objection is not as imposing as it first appears. Just as imagination can be read as a false (but accessible) alternative to the order of charity, Pascal’s reflections on imagination and happiness can offer an alternative way of thinking about human happiness. For a reader within the world of an exalted imagination, without an experience of Pascal’s faith, Pascal’s own writing suggests a duality within temporal experience, with the benefit of imagination and without it. For this reader, the Pascalian dual condition of humanity in its greatness and wretchedness would not rest on the conflict between his natural existence and his supernatural origin, but between the “real” world of uncertainty, chaos, ignorance,

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arbitrary law and morality, and death, and the world of imagination and illusion, in which confidence, hope, action, assured conviction, and happiness are possible. This reader would think in Pascal’s terms, but toward ends radically distinct from Pascal’s. For even if the imagination offers a happiness for which Pascal has contempt, it is for this reader a possible happiness, as opposed to the happiness of faith, with which this reader may have no experience—or which he experiences (and Pascal acknowledges this possibility) only as a species of imaginary happiness. The creation of imaginary happiness, however, is by no means a possibility unknown to Pascal, and he warns the reader away from the possibility by showing its difficulties. In the account of human existence without faith in the Pense´es, the search for imaginary happiness will be met by daunting and insoluble paradoxes as soon as anyone acts upon his earthly, “fantastic” hopes. A fragment included in the Port-Royal edition expands on one of them: “we never live; but we hope to live; and always disposing ourselves to be happy, it is certain that we will never be happy.”143 For Pascal, hope becomes a form of futility if it is not directed toward God, and thus true happiness is only found in attaching no value or “price” to the things of this world. The necessity of this renunciation begins with the Fall, after which human beings can never find the marriage of temporal contraries necessary for their own happiness: One believes one searches sincerely for repose; and in effect one seeks only agitation. Men have a secret instinct that leads them to search for diversion and occupation outside themselves, which comes from their experience of their continual misery. And they have another secret instinct which remains from the grandeur of the first nature, which makes known to them that happiness is truly only in repose. And these two contradictory instincts make for a confused project, hidden from their view in the depths of their soul, and leads them to tend to repose by agitation, and to always anticipate, that the satisfactions they don’t have will come, if, by surmounting some difficulties that they envisage, they can open the door to peace. So goes the whole of life.144 If the sole universal desire of human beings is for happiness in peace, for Pascal this universal desire manifests itself on earth in two general forms: repose, which is true and original, and agitation, which proceeds from man’s alienation from his true nature in history. Repose is projected

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outward toward a future state of peace, to which the present self is denied access for what appear to be remediable, circumstantial reasons, yet the objects thought to bestow peace are themselves only a chimera of peace. If repose constitutes an original happiness for human beings, Pascal acknowledges that repose cannot be the lasting condition of human happiness on earth. In one fragment, Pascal observes that Pyrrhus, eager to conquer the world, is confronted by counselors who advise him to enjoy the rest that he would win after having conquered it, without troubling with any adventures. The advice was unsuccessful,145 and for good reason: for Pascal, human beings can hold neither to rest nor to agitation, but only to the prospect of repose from within agitation. The repose must present itself as an achievement, even if it is not an achievement they would wish for themselves in the absence of the struggle to achieve it, for that is why gaming and the conversation of women, war and great offices of state are so sought after. It is not that happiness lies in such things, nor that we suppose that true beatitude comes from the money we can win at the gaming table or hunting the hare; no one would accept such things as a gift. We are not looking for this soft, peaceful existence which allows us to think about our unfortunate condition, nor the dangers of war or the burden of office, but the bustle which distracts and amuses us.146 At this moment in the Pense´es, diversion broadens to take in all human activities that seek what in Pascal’s ordering of the soul would be called a carnal good—not just amusement but political power, earthly love, and good fortune in every sense. This extraordinarily expansive definition of diversion leaves most human activity under the general dilemma of happiness created under the dispensation of imagination. For Pascal, the self living in imagination seeks to fully engage all its desires in agitation seeking repose, so that it avoids any reflection on its actual situation, above all its proximity to death. For Pascal, resistance to the knowledge of death inspires the full extension of diversion’s powers: in his fragments on diversion, he repeatedly turns to its capacity to turn human beings from the thought of death. A grieving father forgets the death of his only son upon the prospect of catching his quarry in the hunt,147 and elsewhere diversion distracts human beings from all knowledge of death, for in the words of the Port-Royal edition, “diversion deceives us, amuses us, and makes us arrive insensibly at death.”148 To accomplish the prodigious task of giving meaning to experience and ob-

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scuring any awareness of one’s own death, diversion must be a process unto death. Even kings need constant diversion to avoid any knowledge of their true condition that might emerge from any encounter with boredom without diversion.149 For all the challenges Pascal poses for imaginary happiness, however, it can easily be read as a more plausible eudaemonic project than his account of faith. Pascal himself has at least clarified the difficulties. Diversion must agitate toward repose; yet repose must never still diversion’s agitation. Imagination must not lose its capacity to agitate desire because it despairs of reaching its self-created goals. The imagination must find a kind of repose in agitation, and agitation in repose, so that a self constituted by imagination can experience a constant happiness through the second nature created by imagination. The paradox of Pascalian diversion can be provisionally solved as follows. For happiness to be possible in a Pascalian world without faith, presence (present pleasures, present repose) must be present only through absence, and absence must never make itself felt except as a pure, factitious, imagined presence superior to mere actual presence, in which desire is both possible and plausible without an unimagined encounter with its real object, the goal toward which it first intended or purports to intend. For if the knowledge of the falseness of present pleasures and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures cause inconstancy150 and unhappiness, a pleasure that oscillates between or simultaneously occupies presence and absence may give an illusory facsimile of happiness in a radically fallen world devoid of perceptible and secure happiness. Within Pascal, there are two intriguing fragments, included in the PortRoyal edition, that can further address the problem of happiness amidst the contradictions of experience. The first unifies people into a collective body through writing. In an apparent allusion to Scripture, Pascal raises the “difference between a book received by a people, or which forms a people” and a book “that itself makes a people.”151 If creating collective identities through text should be a prerogative of the Bible for Pascal, it is not explicitly limited to the Bible. Forming or unifying people through writing could be taken over by imagination toward the end of happiness, just as imagination’s conversion can be mistaken for faith. The second possible resolution to the dilemmas of happiness in the world does not turn to unity, but radical solitude: “I have often said that all the misfortunes of man come from one thing: he does not know how to remain at rest in a room.”152 At first, it appears for Pascal that even in

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solitary repose the search for happiness precludes happiness. But for an appreciative reader of Pascal without Pascal’s faith, this very solitude may be the final answer to the dilemmas of imagination and diversion. If imagination is indeed (as Pascal wrote) capable of satisfying and pleasing itself, and thus of generating its own equilibrium of agitation and repose from within—without the interminable paradoxes of active desire in the world that Pascal has described at such length—it can make in solitude its own secure, imaginary happiness. Whatever their possible contradictions, the powers of the Pascalian imagination will be configured in new ways—alternately reduced and at times, surprisingly magnified—in the century after the publication of Pascal’s Pense´es. It is to these changes that we now turn.

2 The Imagination of Reason

To assume that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment entailed the ascendancy of critical rationality over the powers of imagination—however tempting it may be to do so—is to miss a critical moment in the history of imagination. The following pages will argue that the Enlightenment both conveys and transfigures several tendencies in modern thinking about imagination, and that various anxieties and enthusiasms about imagination figure prominently in the work of some of the most important writers of the Enlightenment. A broad description of reason’s relation to imagination in the eighteenth century is a daunting enterprise. Certainly many accounts of experience and cognition in the Enlightenment manifest an ascendancy of reason, often accompanied by the at least ostensible diminution of imagination. Yet this diminution in no way takes the same forms. At times it implies the simple and almost unreserved mastery of imagination by reason; at others there is a marked change of emphasis, and the imagination is subordinate to immediate desires that resist reason, even if they can themselves be ordered in more or less rational ways. Within and among these differences, it is most important to understand the pattern of representation, or division of capacities, that expresses the subordination of imagination to reason or to rationally ordered desires. All of these considerations deserve attention in the pages that follow. Of course, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment enjoyed no monopoly on the theme of imagination, and certainly not in Rousseau’s broader ambit of reading. The possibility that imagination can be a necessary or even preeminent faculty in human experience finds surprising expression in authors like Malebranche and Bernard Lamy. This possible ascendancy of imagination in relation to reason will lead to a very different way of reading history and politics, which Rousseau will find traced out in Plu50

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tarch, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu. All these readings will reconfigure the exalted imagination in Rousseau. Within several eighteenth-century accounts of human experience, reason’s apparent mastery over imagination is sometimes expressed with great confidence. In his Discours pre´liminaire de L’Encylope´die, for example, d’Alembert treats imagination with a certain haste in a survey of mental faculties: history is connected to memory, philosophy to reason, and fine arts to imagination. D’Alembert concedes that metaphysics, rhetoric, and geometry might find imagination necessary but that nonetheless “reason . . . in some way directs imagination.” If reason directs imagination, the imagination itself is also once again grounded in the senses, and this dependence leads d’Alembert to place imagination beneath reason in his account of mental faculties.”1 In general, a substantial number of the philosophes would argue that imagination is useful and charming, but without great relevance to their own projects. If anything, for them imagination belongs to history before the Enlightenment, as the inevitable faculty of influence and persuasion in ages of superstition. With varying degrees of wistfulness and vindication, this is the position of not only d’Alembert, but also of Turgot,2 and Helve´tius. D’Alembert remarks that “men seldom acquire any new knowledge without losing some pleasing illusion; so that our enlightenment takes place at the expense of our pleasures.”3 Helve´tius has none of d’Alembert’s gentle melancholy, observing that imagination “once played a great role in the world,” but it is now constricted by the inexorable increase of reason and knowledge.4 Yet there is a more powerful sense in other philosophes that the faculties and desires of the human experience are not so easily ordered, and that human experience will always be accompanied by disorders of the imagination, even if (and this is crucial) this disorder can be controlled. In his entry on imagination in the Encylope´die, for instance, Voltaire introduces several anxieties about imagination, only to limit their consequences throughout the entry. He initially claims that the imagination is dependent on the senses and memory, but soon adds that imagination is also responsible for ideas, and with a touch of irony, “even the most metaphysical ones.” In a few lines at the beginning of the entry, Voltaire goes still further—for example, he suggests that imagination allows human beings to conceive justice and injustice. But he soon introduces a distinction that limits the vertiginous possibilities of this thought. For

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Voltaire, it is “passive imagination” that is the source of “passions” and “errors” that are able to control the will. This genre of “servile imagination,” more common among “ignorant people,” is easily manipulated by those with “strong imaginations.” But this imaginative disorder is not a danger of imagination as such, or one that his readers must necessarily fear for themselves. Voltaire contrasts this dangerous form of imagining prevalent among the ignorant with an “active imagination.” An active imagination draws upon memory, reflection, and judgment to contribute to personal and collective well-being. Through its capacity for scientific innovation and artistic achievement, active imagination is judicious in selection, overwhelmed neither by a profusion of bizarre imaginings nor by the potentially crushing weight of memory.5 Voltaire’s account of imagination (and with it, opinion) was by no means always so straightforward as the account he offered in the Encyclope´die. He was also given to declaring the power of opinion in explicitly Pascalian terms, a power that would be controlled by an enlightened elite. Hence his remark in a letter to d’Alembert that “people rail against the philosophes. They’re right to do so, for if opinion is queen of the world, then the philosophes govern that queen. You would not believe the extent of their dominion.”6 In later books like the Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire repeatedly suggests that the exercise of this opinion-making power includes disseminating the implicit notion of imagination as a faculty of projection, prone to casting human egotism onto others and onto the universe itself, an imperative perhaps most clearly manifest in religious faith. This is evident in, for example, the entry on God, where beetles make a God in their own image,7 just as Montesquieu’s triangles, if they could make a God, would have one with three sides.8 Voltaire’s entry on “love” suggests that love is sexual love and that sexual love is really a disguised rendering of self-love that seeks through “amour-propre” to enjoy the self’s projective extension through the possession of another, in which “a crowd of illusions are the ornaments of this work whose basis is nature” (i.e., sexual desire).9 Similarly, in his entry on beauty, the paradigmatic beauty is a sexually complementary image of one’s own form, whether that beholder is human or frog.10 The reader is hardly surprised to learn in the entry on self-love that “those who have said that the love of ourselves is the base of all our sentiments and of all our actions have therefore been right in India, in Spain and in all the habitable world.”11 In these examples of Voltairean anthropology, imagination plays an indispensable role in the extension of self-love to its “objects” in and beyond the world.

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Yet for all the implicit use he made of imagination, Voltaire did not think through the possibility that the self is an artifact of imagination. Rather, imagination is the servant of a self-love that seeks out direct and usually immediate, often bodily satisfactions in the world of others. Nor did Voltaire develop a theoretical account of imagination’s role in this process, or describe the powers of imagination in any particular detail, even when he appears to have had an opportunity to do so (e.g., in his consideration of Pascal in the Philosophical Letters).12 Furthermore, even amidst the apparent extending and embroidering power of imagination in relation to self-love, Voltaire repeatedly has recourse to a bon sens that accepts the limitations of what human beings can know, and he urges human beings to make use of a practical reason that allows desire to hold imagination to earth, rather than seeking to fantasize one’s way to some personal glory, or to metaphysical or revealed truths beyond the sensible world. This finds expression not only in the famous il faut cultiver notre jardin of Candide, but in a tale like Microme´gas, where the kindly, benevolent Microme´gas finds the prideful presumptions of human philosophers absurd. These philosophers do not enjoy the “great right to persuade” but a kind of comical and pathetic amour-propre,13 rightly avoided by sensible creatures who recognize their limitations, and the vanity that suffuses human desire. Living with this recognition, Voltaire’s most sympathetic characters are often tolerant of this vanity’s less presumptuous manifestations in others (philosophical and theological learning count for Voltaire as its most presumptuous manifestations). If for Voltaire, the philosophes govern the queen of the world, he does not believe opinion need constitute the imagined self. Rather, he expresses some confidence that an enlightened regime of opinion can circumscribe the fairly direct, quotidian fulfillment of the self’s desires in a way that precludes the vain presumptions that most depend on the transcendent desires attributed to imagination. With much more ambivalence, Diderot takes a similar position in his posthumously published dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau. There imagination is a finite, mimetic power, placed in the service of what Rameau’s Nephew has already seen in the general movements of desire among others and in prevailing opinion. He would like to use what he has seen to directly satisfy his most immediate and insistent passions in the social world around him, where with varying degrees of concealment, he and everyone he knows seek the satisfaction of these passions. Rameau’s Nephew desires the same limited course of desire for those closest to him: for example, he wishes for his son to be happy, or “what comes to the same thing,

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honored, rich, and powerful.” But if he is not, he will “get by like many others.” As his interlocutor remarks immediately after this speech, he was “frank” about his many small and undignified vices,14 rather than exalting himself. The Nephew’s imagination does not give shape to the world. Diderot suggests that human beings who know their own very earthly desires will live in society without hypocrisy. A possible and perhaps general effect of this development will be a preoccupation with social vanity and material desires, a prospect that by the end of the dialogue, the philosopher (the Nephew’s interlocutor), accepts with a mixture of amusement, apprehension, and resignation. Here as elsewhere in his work, Diderot’s concept of imagination is not an exalted one, but one that works within a world of pre-established, often material natures and selves.15 One notices a certain confluent movement of opinion and imagination within desire in these writings of Diderot and Voltaire. But how can imagination be so easily accommodated to the limits of the world? In these writings, imagination is not a “proud power,” nor is it “imperious.” To present imagination in less intimidating terms, both authors draw on a long tradition of writing that reaches its pinnacle in the mid-eighteenth century, in which imagination appears as a social and as an erotic power. This movement is further complemented by an increasing tendency to identify imagination as a feminine power. In this way, authors represent imagination as necessary, dangerous, but also pliable and ultimately subordinate to other faculties. The presiding analogies of the mental faculties had long ceased to be theological (e.g., memory, will, and intellect as an image of the circumincession of the Trinity in Augustine). The analogies, at least for imagination, had become political and sexual. These are long-standing tendencies that transcend the boundaries of French thought. In the Renaissance, for example, imaginations and bodies were thought to be especially vulnerable to the imaginings and passions of the mother during gestation, an idea that continued to prosper in the work of Malebranche and others, well into the eighteenth century.16 The femininity of the imagination is assumed in other early modern writings, including Franc¸ois Bernier’s Abre´ge´ of the Philosophy of Gassendi, which declares “phantasie” the “mistress” of the soul.17 Pascal’s Pense´es often participates in this tradition: there imagination is a “mistress,” and opinion is, as Voltaire’s epistolary allusion confirmed, a “queen.” But even as mistress and queen, the femininity and sexuality of the imagination are not usually at the center of

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Pascal’s account of imagination, though he is aware of imagination’s power in these areas, especially in the theater.18 This broad early modern configuration of imagination becomes more prominent in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bayle, for example, writes of imagination with reference to its erotic power, through sexual images and the obscene.19 In an uncharacteristic foray into fashion, even Malebranche condemns the power of imagination through its erotic manifestations in women’s immodest dress. “Where the imagination is mistress of reason” one finds “bizarre” fashions. The fashion that reveals this imaginative power is, he instructs the reader, not found in remote countries that his readers will associate with the exotic, but in France, where women expose their breasts in public, contrary to morals and common sense.20 Fashions serve as a definitive sign of the crisis that Malebranche and his contemporaries must confront, for they indicate “the character of an age . . . in which nothing is sufficiently powerful to moderate the disorder of the imagination.”21 By the time of Montesquieu’s publication of the Persian Letters in 1721, imagination’s subordination to desire, especially erotic desire, has become something less to be ironized and decried than a founding principle for political and social order. In her impressive book Erotic Liberalism, Diana Schaub has written about how the judicious liberation of sexual desire, especially women’s desire, allows for a more prosperous, stable, and happy political economy in the Letters.22 This often proceeds, however, by way of a limited imagination, understood not as a space in which desire moves (as in Pascal), but as images working under the power of various, usually material and above all erotic, desires. This bounded imagination—that serves rather than elicits and extends desire—is expressed most directly in the voice of a woman writer within the Letters (an erotic, feminine imagination thus finds its appropriate voice). As the protagonist Usbek travels to Europe from the Middle East, he receives a letter from one of his wives in which she tells him that “I remember those happy times, where you came into my arms; a flattering dream, that seduces me . . . my imagination loses itself in its desires, as it flatters itself in its hopes.”23 As this passage suggests, the imagination does not move according to pride in the letters; as in Voltaire, it is constrained by subordinate passions, or as the letter to Usbek puts it, “I would give control of the world for a single one of your kisses.”24 Throughout the Letters, the possible reconciliation of empire and de´sir through the relaxed expression of the latter is a constant theme; the ty-

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rants are often the sexually repressed, including the unhappily exiled Usbek and the eunuchs who supervise his seraglio at home. Through their story and the alternative stories that appear within the Letters, Montesquieu offers the prospect that domination, imaginative or otherwise, can give way to freedom with the liberation of desire. Since “the imagination folds into the mores of the country where it is,” Usbek concludes that the government “best conformed to reason” is not one that represses or transforms desire, but one that “leads men in the manner most suited to their penchants and inclinations.”25 Beyond Montesquieu’s Letters, a broader and more rigorously philosophical mode of writing persistently associates imagination with the erotic and the feminine, or more generally with appealing and endearing beauty (though these themes are often freely blended together). Such is most certainly the case with Condillac’s Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge, published in 1746. It should be emphasized that Condillac’s imagination does not participate in the exalted language of imagination, though there are brief gestures in this direction. Condillac claims at one point that imagination’s powers are without “limit” and capable of augmenting pleasure and pain.26 But in fact in his mental typology it is a subsidiary faculty that can be very useful when properly controlled. On the subject of imagination’s limits, he claims that “imagination changes everything it touches, and it often succeeds when it is merely trying to please. But it can only fail beyond that. Its influence [empire] ends where that of analysis begins.”27 Reason necessarily “crowns” understanding, leading to political wisdom and truth.28 For Condillac, however, imagination is repeatedly offered as the faculty of erotic and aesthetic persuasion. The feminine power and beauty of imagination is not always decried, as in Malebranche. It is explicitly linked to the necessary task of persuasion and most importantly to writing. For Condillac, the limits of imagination’s capacity to “change everything,” for example, are articulated within the example of women’s ability to receive and attract attention.29 In a concluding statement about imagination’s uses, Condillac again turns to erotic attraction to circumscribe the capacities of imagination: “imagination is to truth what jewelry is to a beautiful woman. It should lend every help to set her off to best advantage.”30 For Condillac, as in many putatively scientific accounts of imagination in the eighteenth century, women’s imaginations are particularly (and perilously) susceptible to art and other imaginative creations—thus, for example, young women can easily find their imaginations shaped by novels.31

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In another passage, Condillac argues that the sensations we experience are more easily recalled and powerful to the imagination when they are beautiful, returning the imagination to the image of beauty. It is precisely this point that the Encyclope´die emphasizes in the entry on memory, an essay that generally follows Condillac word for word. (Given the history of the relation between memory and imagination encountered heretofore, it is not surprising that the entry on memory in the Encyclope´die is as much about imagination as memory.) Within it, imagination is defined, following Condillac, as the very act of perception, and memory as the recall of signs and symbols associated with perception. The Encyclope´die observes that imagination’s perception eagerly attends to “order and symmetry” which allow it to make rapid connections among distinct parts. The prototypical example of this order and symmetry at work is in a “beautiful face.”32 While the imagination’s feminine and erotic power is very forcefully expressed in French thought and literature, the imagination’s aesthetic power was also of great interest in a broader ambit of Enlightenment thinking beyond France, evident, for example, in the Scottish Enlightenment. This interest permits a broader contextual reading of imagination, rather than one in which Rousseau directly participated, at least beyond his famously vexed friendship with Hume. In the case of Adam Smith, a reading of Rousseau may well have prompted some of his thoughts on imagination.33 Adam Smith assumed a profound relationship between imagination and aesthetics. “The principles of imagination,” he observes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), are those “upon which our sense of beauty depends.” This makes aesthetic sensibilities more easily altered (than, e.g., the moral sense) by “habit and education.”34 Emma Rothschild has shown that for Smith, imagination not only presides over aesthetic experience strictly conceived—say, in the evaluation of sense impressions—but powerfully suggests the truth or allows for the persuasive power of theory, including the notion of the market’s invisible hand.35 Hume’s account of the imagination also assumes an immediate connection between imagination and beauty, with beauty as a communicative power that brings a larger public admiration for the potentially rebarbative truths of philosophy. For Hume aesthetic and creative powers are not needed to inspire readers to some exalted ambition (as in Descartes’ Discourse on Method), but to make philosophical teaching appealing, or simply palatable. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), Hume

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argues that philosophy is not properly compared to painting but to anatomy, and it must be acknowledged that the philosopher’s “accurate dissections” reveal “something hideous, or at least minute in the views of things, which he presents; and ’tis necessary the objects should be set more at a distance, and be more cover’d up from sight, to make them engaging to the eye and imagination.”36 Thus the philosophical “anatomist” should “give advice to a painter,” in order that the real and the beautiful might find some rapprochement.37 For Smith and Hume’s mature philosophy, there is no question of the imagination’s powers being without limit, especially in relation to reason.38 If beauty belongs to imagination, reason and morality do not. For Smith, beauty’s imaginative associations make it amenable to change by habit and education, but “the sentiments of moral approbation and disapprobation are found on the strongest and most vigorous passions of human nature; and though they may be somewhat warpt, cannot be entirely perverted.”39 In Hume’s writing, earthly justice and morals rely only in part on the artifices of imagination; they are ultimately grounded on “nature” and “natural sentiments.”40 In both Smith and Hume, imagination has a role (though a limited one) in abstract thinking, as a way to construct an understanding of the information we receive and to organize it, including prior constructions of knowledge.41 Hume in particular makes attributions of cause an effect of imagination drawn from sense impressions, as well as the basis for sympathy.42 But with increasing forcefulness in his writings, Hume distinguishes an empirical imagination from a “warm imagination,” which is not entirely compatible with philosophy,43 and even simple judgment. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748, Hume writes that the imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote and extraordinary, running, without control into the most distant parts of space and time in order to avoid the object, which custom has rendered too familiar to it. A correct Judgment observes a contrary method, and avoiding all distant and high inquiries, confines itself to common life, and to such subjects as fall under a daily practice and experience; leaving the more sublime topics to the embellishment of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians.44 Hume intends to distinguish good judgment from the more imaginative aspirations of poets, orators, priests, and politicians: with a judicious

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skepticism, correct judgment should “never be tempted to go beyond common life.”45 Yet poets, priests, orators, and politicians are hardly insignificant groups in the making of meaning, value, and human experience as a whole. Hume’s attribution of their powers to imagination is intended to marginalize imagination from reason and with it the “common” and “familiar,” but it can be read with equal force as marking off enlightened good judgment from the deepest desires and most powerful experiences of human beings. Hume’s move indicates that a thoroughgoing commitment to reason founded upon empiricism is by no means inimical to the power of imagination. As he and various philosophes seek to ground experience in what is explicitly defined against the “imaginary” realms of the transcendent and exalted, they can sometimes magnify the faculty they seek to subordinate (or at least accommodate) to reason.46 Hume obviously partakes in rather than begins a tendency to attribute general human exaltation and “distant and high inquiries” to imagination, while marking the truly “natural” as a space in firm alliance with the unimagined. Even in his early writings, when imagination threatens to overwhelm him, with the help of habit and diversion he secures himself, and he turns to philosophy as the “safest and most agreeable” of life’s possible guides.47 Yet by consistently offering less in the way of a “high” experience of the “soul” that can be distinguished from imagination, Hume opens the possibility that with the exception of human beings’ modest, “natural” moral feeling, the soul simply is the imagination (and even this, through the extension of sympathy, requires imagination). He himself does not draw this consequence in the Enquiry, though Smith will do so.48 The boldest declaration of this kind, however, appears in 1748, the same year as Hume’s Enquiry—and only two years before the publication of Rousseau’s First Discourse—in the bibulous exclamations of La Mettrie’s materialist L’Homme-Machine.49 La Mettrie defines the soul in strikingly different and at times mutually exclusive ways throughout the book.50 His rhetoric also leaps, not always nimbly, from physiology and the rhetoric of lobes and nerves to surges of energetic prose that owe less to science than to poetry. Yet as La Mettrie seeks some exaltation within a purely material account of human existence, imagination becomes a faculty of encompassing transcendence that permits a poetry of materialism. It is imagination that makes “the sciences flourish, the arts beautiful, the woods speak, echoes sigh, rocks cry, marble breathe, that draws life from inanimate bodies.”51 La Mettrie exclaims that “I always use the word imaginer, because I believe all is imagined, and that all the parts of the soul can be reduced

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to just the imagination alone, that forms all of them; and that in this way, judgment, reasoning, and memory are only parts of the soul in no way absolute.”52 For “in the end it forms the learned like the orators and the poets.”53 Imagination “is the soul, since it does everything it does.”54 Once La Mettrie announces the identity of soul and imagination, however, he still has need at the end of his polemic for a space in which imagination and its desires can move toward the infinite, a prospect not easily reconciled with his materialism. He believes this space will best be secured by ignorance and uncertainty, above all ignorance of the origin and possible spiritual destiny of human beings, as if given the imagination’s transcendence, the truth could only disappoint it: “Let us submit therefore to an invincible ignorance, on which our happiness depends.”55 La Mettrie’s rhapsody on imagination stands out for more than its passion. By identifying imagination with the soul, La Mettrie explicitly proclaims a thoroughgoing commitment to the regime of “reason” and “nature” along with imagination. For La Mettrie, if the soul is imaginary and material matter in motion is real, then his readers can live comfortably with their ignorance about some questions while learning the secrets of the material world as their moral lives are regulated by the “natural law” of the Golden Rule, free of the disputes that bedevil the devout. (This is La Mettrie’s conclusion at the end of L’Homme-Machine.)56 Amidst his excitement at the prospect of a new human future, however, La Mettrie does not consider the possibility that if an imaginary soul does not accept a clearly evangelical “law of nature,” it will face a formidable temptation. If all human capacities and desires—including reason—have their origin, exercise, and expansive power in imagination, then strictly speaking the world outside imagination has no meaning, no value, and no beauty beyond what imagination assigns it, and thus no intrinsic claim on the self. An imaginary soul thus confronted with the demands of this world may in turn demand a sacrifice of real limitations on behalf of unlimited imaginings, created by an inner power of powers that now “knows” itself. At this point, this argument has several possibilities, all of which would permit a deeper understanding of imagination in modern culture, or of Rousseau’s thought in particular. There is no shortage of excellent recent scholarship from which to choose. Helena Rosenblatt has persuasively argued for Rousseau’s abiding debt to a Genevan Calvinism that emphasized practical morality and egalitarian politics.57 Jan Goldstein has re-

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cently given insightful attention to a broader fascination with imagination in France in the decades before the Revolution, as corporate society began to fragment into new orders of economy, politics, and culture58 (though of course, readers of this book will appreciate that a profound engagement with a precise language surrounding imagination in French thought predates the declining decades of the ancien re´gime). Yet for all the insight to be had in these arguments, Rousseau’s unique account of imagination—not to mention its implications for the unique trajectory of his work—demands a different path. Drawing upon Rousseau’s own fondly recounted reading, the following pages argue that this reading provided a template for Rousseau’s understanding of the relationship between reason and the communication of knowledge, and some suggestive ideas for thinking about the charged connection between writing and imagination. This reading also presented several, not always easily reconcilable, ways in which happiness could be shared with others through various forms of political and moral instruction—forms to which Rousseau later proved most receptive, despite their contradictions. In short, to understand the significance of Rousseau’s writing about imagination, and to understand where this writing will go—as well as to understand where it will end—one must look closely at the readings with which he began in his youth. As various writers within the Enlightenment turn and return to the problems and possibilities of imagination, this early reading will help Rousseau to make his singular and in many ways revolutionary contribution to ongoing philosophical and cultural arguments about imagination.59 A few books from Rousseau’s reading deserve especially close examination as the possibility of imagination’s giving meaning and value to experience reemerges—with various qualifications—within the mideighteenth-century Enlightenment. In Bernard Lamy’s Entretiens sur les sciences (a book that Rousseau claimed to have “read and reread a hundred times”)60 and La rhe´torique ou l’art de parler, Rousseau and some of Rousseau’s readers would be prepared for different applications of imaginative power. The agent and scope of this power would find an endorsement in De la recherche de la ve´rite´ by Malebranche—an author for whom Rousseau expressed gratitude as one of his early authorial teachers.61 Malebranche devotes the entirety of Book II of De la recherche de la ve´rite´ to imagination. For him, it is a faculty of the brain, in which events and desires leave traces and affect fibers and nerves within the brain and the body as a whole.62 Habits can certainly affect the imagination and at

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least partially limit and direct its activity over time. Malebranche, following Montaigne and others, associates habit with memory: it is “clear” that there are “many similarities between memory and habit.”63 It should be added that it is also in Book II that Malebranche—who devotes such care to the diverse influences on and the surprising powers of imagination—brings the decline of Augustinian memory to what appears to be its terminus. Within his very extensive (approximately two hundred page) account of imagination, Malebranche describes in a brief passage “the fibers of the brain, having once received certain impressions by the course of the animal spirits, and by the action of objects, keep for a considerable time some facility for receiving the same impressions. Now memory consists only in this facility, since one thinks of the same things, when the brain receives the same impressions.” This, Malebranche concludes, is the faculty responsible for “all the surprising effects of memory, of which Saint Augustine speaks with so much admiration in the tenth book of the Confessions.”64 In contrast to his physiology of memory, Malebranche’s complete account of the imagination offers the possibility of uncertainty and excess, even in circumstances that seem least propitious for imagination. This is not apparent at first glance: if for Malebranche, imagination is a faculty easily stimulated by striking impressions upon the senses, it would appear that writing, as a system of abstract signs by an absent author, would not be well suited to move imagination. Yet Malebranche, with a palpable reluctance, concludes that the problem is far more complicated than this reasoning implies. If strong imaginations persuade other imaginations to accede to their visions, as Malebranche develops his thoughts on strong imaginations, he concludes that writing can allow imagination to become a kind of ongoing contagion that passes from one imagination to others across time and space. De la recherche de la ve´rite´ includes an entire chapter about “the contagious communication of strong imaginations” in which Malebranche argues at length that a certain sort of mind is able to persuade others without reasoning,65 and all of his developed examples depend on writing to extend and illustrate imaginative power. Using the writings of Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne as examples, Malebranche hopes to show how “strong and vigorous imaginations dominate weak and unenlightened minds, not by the strength nor by the evidence of reasons that make

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the productions of the mind, but by the turn and the lively manner of expression, that depends upon the strength of the imagination.”66 The power of strong imaginations arises directly from the interpersonal dimensions of experience: to understand this power, it is necessary to know that “men have need of one another” and that from this follows an easy facility for imitation.67 By representing their passions with great vivacity, strong imaginations can induce others to imitate and accede to the passions they have represented, especially given that powerful imaginations are typically endowed with exceptional gifts of expression that make it easier to please and to persuade.68 Authors of strong imagination can create what Malebranche calls “dead” (i.e., on the page) words of great power. “They enter, they penetrate, they dominate the soul in a matter so imperious, that they make themselves obeyed without being understood, and we deliver ourselves to their orders without knowing them.”69 Yet even as he condemns it, the force of contagious imaginations elicits Malebranche’s reluctant admiration, notably in the case of Montaigne, above all on aesthetic grounds—even as the aesthetic here is closely related to an illegitimate power. It was the beauty of Montaigne’s prose that overwhelmed his readers: “his ideas are false, but beautiful. His expressions irregular or audacious, but appealing.” Malebranche concludes his thought by asserting that Montaigne held sway over his readers through the “constantly victorious vivacity of his dominant imagination.”70 For Malebranche, this domination is a function of a reciprocal relation between pride and laziness. In phrases strikingly reminiscent of Pascal, he asserts that strong imaginations have a “certain free and proud [ fier] air that dominates.” Strong imaginations are both the beneficiaries and victims of their own lassitude: for people “much prefer to be touched by the sensible pleasure of mood and expression, than to tire themselves with the examination of reasons; it is evident that these minds [dominated by imagination] must carry the day over others, and in this way communicate their errors and their malignity by the power that they have on the imaginations of other men.”71 Malebranche concludes that this power is perhaps even stronger than his general reflections indicate. In additional reflections on imagination, he concludes that it is possibly a faculty with denaturing power: “it is perhaps true that the imagination has so much power that it weakens reason, and can even change nature.”72 At first glance, Bernard Lamy’s Entretiens appears to offer a partial an-

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tidote to these rather urgent and reluctantly admiring misgivings about imagination in Malebranche. Lamy is in some ways a characteristically Jansenist author; Rousseau himself classifies his reading of the Entretiens amidst the moments where he was fascinated by the writings of “the Oratory and Port-Royal.”73 Along with many other Jansenists, Lamy generally endorses a Cartesian account of the self and of knowledge.74 As an author sympathetic to Descartes, Lamy need not scruple about fables, and he does not. For example, Lamy discourages the reader from thinking about whether the Entretiens actually occurred but about their lesson, just as Xenophon’s Cyropaedia was written “to give the idea of a great prince, not to narrate things that truly happened.”75 The empirical historical truth is less important than the moral truth within. Truth of all kinds, however, meets a great barrier in imagination, for “those who make use of this faculty alone are always outside themselves, and do not see what is in their soul.”76 Yet to bring people back within themselves, the wise must first make their appeal to them on non-rational grounds: for if it has been true that “the people were happy when they had the wise think wisely for them,” wise thoughts “were useless, if they were not made sensible” through “eloquence”77 that cannot be limited to reasoning. Reinforced by Rousseau’s many readings, Lamy’s insistent distinction between wisdom and its communicative demands would have opened a certain line of interpretation for Rousseau’s study of Plato, among others. For Lamy, however, it should also be emphasized that there is no question of proud deception or of an exalted imagination. Pride is an obstacle to knowledge and understanding,78 and fables are dangerous (at least for the young, and presumably for the old) in the absence of truth.79 On the question of imagination and writing, Lamy adheres with little qualification to the belief that a strong imagination is less effective in writing than in speech.80 Yet unlike a later figure like La Mettrie, Lamy is certain that human beings have need of secure truth upon many questions—including the ultimate ones of human destiny—and that truth of all kinds cannot be obtained through the expected faculties. Memory cannot hold it.81 Nor can secure truth be identified by reason alone, for reason can only establish relations and connections between propositions. In all areas of knowledge, including faith and morality, to reason well one must have a “head filled with incontestable maxims.”82 For Lamy, in ultimate terms these maxims must be derived from re-

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vealed faith, and more generally from the Cartesian criteria of clear and distinct ideas.83 But his formulations are sometimes abstract and suggest the possibility that creating the founding principles of thought, feeling, and action—placing them beyond dispute—is an important and necessary task. In the absence of faith in divine revelation or in Cartesian certitude, Lamy’s demand that reason and morality be secured by unshakable maxims and unquestioned principles raises an urgent question: How can uncertain meanings and values come to be beyond question? Given his reading from his youngest days, in his reading of Lamy, Rousseau would be particularly receptive to the power of historical fables—like Xenophon’s treatise cited by Lamy—to inspire adherence to these founding maximes incontestables. Rousseau had cherished the stories of ancient heroes and great statesmen from his earliest years of reading. Yet of the various stories and histories in which he delighted in childhood, none charmed him so much as Plutarch’s Lives. Rousseau first encountered Plutarch in early childhood, and it was his “favorite reading.”84 He claimed he knew Plutarch by heart at the age of eight.85 Plutarch and the virtues of his heroes became, as Rousseau remarked, among the early historical reading that gave shape to his character, allowing him to fantasize himself into the lives of the illustrious figures portrayed on the pages that filled his head.86 Rousseau was given to writing in especially admiring tones about Lycurgus,87 the at-least-half-legendary legislator of Sparta. Plutarch himself acknowledged that his life of Lycurgus was something of a fable: the most basic biographical information about him was in constant dispute.88 Rousseau’s delighted and sustained reading of Plutarch would turn his own thoughts toward the power of text to inspire and shape imagination, and his admiration for Lycurgus toward the specific ways in which an order for desire might be made through politics. Lycurgus, according to Plutarch, was a man desirous of “quietness and peace”89 who constructed a political order in which the strictest laws spread happiness and virtue among the citizens, constituting a unified body, who would “make themselves one with the public good.”90 To this end, a rigorous education for citizens was of great importance for Lycurgus,91 who kept his citizens physically occupied, in strict obedience to the laws, and limited to the simplest diversions.92 Meals and entertainment in common kept inequality and fractiousness from impinging on the unity of the state.

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A great challenge to this unity must come from sexuality and family life. To this end, Lycurgus saw that sexuality in Sparta was tightly, at times violently, regulated through extremes of exposure and concealment, indulgence, and renunciation. Young women were displayed naked in processions, and at marriage were carried off by force. Courtship and nuptial rites were to become part of rather than interfere with the male’s duties of citizenship. The man and woman were united, but their meetings, as Plutarch briefly describes them, were “difficult and rare,” allowing them to be “unsated and undulled by easy access and long continuance with each other.”93 To more effectively persuade his people, Lycurgus, as Rousseau later observed,94 was willing to use indirect political tactics and even deception to achieve his ends,95 rather than ever impose his will on the citizens by violence. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus in no way sought to endow himself with visible powers or orders of rank that would separate him from the people. Nor did he make every or even many decisions for the citizens of Sparta; the basic customs, morals, and laws were affected by his work, but quotidian politics and civil matters were left to their deliberation. For his suasive power and his incorruptible restraint in exercising formal power, Plutarch describes Lycurgus as a miraculous compound of divine expansiveness and self-limitation, comparing him to a God who creates a world.96 Of course, the legislator that Rousseau encountered in Plutarch could be plausibly dismissed as a regressive fantasy, a mark of Rousseau’s puerility rather than his authorial maturity (though Rousseau’s subsequent account of his self’s origin in his early reading and in imagination would advise against an easy division of this kind).97 But the model of Lycurgus and the possibilities of the legislator would not have remained encased for him within a fondly remembered historical fable. The ideal of the legislator is a theme—with a continuing element of the fabulous—within central texts of modern political thought with which Rousseau was very closely acquainted: Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy and Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws include extended reflections on the prospect of lawgiving. In The Social Contract, Rousseau’s discussion of the legislator cites both of these books.98 In Machiavelli’s Discourses, the legislator Numa of ancient Rome is above all concerned with religion rather than law strictly conceived; “he turned to religion as a thing altogether necessary if he wished to maintain a civilization.”99 Religion is necessary, according to Machiavelli, because

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reason is too weak to spread and protect what is truly desirable for human beings: “a prudent individual knows many goods that do not have in themselves evident reasons with which one can persuade others. Thus wise men who wish to take away this difficulty have recourse to God,”100 as Lycurgus, Solon, and Numa did. Machiavelli’s rendering of the legislator contains a palpable selfassertion that appropriates the divine for human ends, even if, as in Numa’s case, this is undertaken with a desire for peace. For Machiavelli, Numa “pretends” to have an experience of the supernatural that becomes binding for others, as a fictitious encounter with the divine is hallowed by memory and tradition. This assertion allows even the sharpest resentments and internecine conflicts to be subsumed under religious obligations.101 In Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, lawgiving is at once a broader and a more modest enterprise, manifest in several scattered but intriguing reflections throughout the text. Montesquieu, unlike Machiavelli, does not limit the lawgiving task of the le´gislateur to religion, political laws, and mores. Furthermore, for Montesquieu, as Thomas Pangle observes, a legislator need not confine his work to his own nation.102 A spiritual teacher and guide that transcends the boundaries of civic religion (Montesquieu uses the example of Buddha)103 is a legislator. Most intriguingly, in Montesquieu authors who offer a comprehensive and powerful account of how a person or people should live may also be said to partake in the legislator’s work, including Aristotle, Plato, Machiavelli himself, Thomas More, and Harrington.104 Montesquieu’s notion of lawgiving is broader than Machiavelli’s, but in another sense it is more circumspect than its analogue in the Discourses on Livy. Montesquieu observes that “Solon was asked if the laws that he had given to the Athenians were the best: ‘I gave them, he answered, the best that they could bear.”105 Far from emphasizing the audacity of the legislator to the reader, as Machiavelli does, Montesquieu is eager to uphold the need for a legislator’s moderation. He reluctantly concedes that legislators must sometimes fight nature itself,106 while ceding to nature whenever possible. In the end, Montesquieu emphasizes the virtue of moderation in immoderate terms: “I say it, and it seems that I have written this work only to demonstrate it: the spirit of moderation must be the spirit of the le´gislateur; political good, like moral good, is always found between two limits.” 107 Hence what Plutarch considered the “divine” power of the legislator is

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configured differently in Machiavelli and Montesquieu. If Machiavelli’s legislator is a daring impostor (even on behalf of peace), Montesquieu’s can be a writer or thinker engaged in the task of systematic moderation who works with the existing mores, customs, laws, and predispositions of those under his (possibly authorial) authority, where instruction appears in easy accord with prevailing inclinations. The tension between different kinds of legislators is by no means the only tension within either the thought of Rousseau’s contemporaries on imagination or within his broader reading. Nothing would be more misleading than to assume that Rousseau simply assembles this reading to compose his own writings, for these precedents resist easy combination or even mutual coherence. For example, Rousseau’s imagination was perceptibly stimulated (and one suspects comforted) by political-historical fables of stern classical virtue and lawgiving. Yet it is obvious that an erotic and feminine imagination is not easily reconcilable with the achievements of Plutarch’s heroes. Similarly, in Malebranche, writing can allow imaginative contagion to stimulate the dangerous desires of readers, manifest in his turn to the language of pride, domination, and victory. But in Plutarch’s history of Lycurgus that Rousseau so enjoyed, the best and most enduring laws thoroughly discipline and moderate individual desire, especially sexual desire, to allow for an unqualified collective unity. For Voltaire and the Montesquieu of the Persian Letters, however, imagination should be encouraged to move within immediate, usually selfish social, material, and erotic desire to guarantee individual satisfaction, tolerance, and prosperity. Finally, for many of Rousseau’s contemporaries, imagination is conclusively, if imperfectly, mastered by reason and a true knowledge of nature. Yet this mastery attributes increasing quantities of unmasterable and exalted human experience to imagination, so that the imagination increasingly becomes almost or entirely indistinguishable from the soul. Even when various writers strictly circumscribe imaginative power, they often call upon imagination to construct and to communicate the regimes of “reason” and “nature”—for which imagination, among other things, must provide an aesthetic emollient for what its partisans find distressing or ugly within them. Some of these diverse preoccupations and contrasts will find subtle resolutions in Rousseau; others will persist in his writing to the end. Yet all of them are read within an account of an exalted imagination. Rousseau’s

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account and experience of imagination will ultimately exceed even the imagination of Pascal’s fragments. For no one before Rousseau had accepted as radically as he the aspiration to inhabit a world of imagination, in relation to which he is variously author and reader, legislator and vagabond, sovereign and object.

3 Rousseau and the Revolution of Enlightenment

Whatever Rousseau’s account of imagination might be, it can easily be assumed that it is flatly contradicted somewhere else. The argument over Rousseau’s consistency or inconsistency, philosophical or otherwise, has many precedents in an uninterrupted conversation over two centuries of interpretation, appropriation, and commentary. Rousseau is variously divided by discipline, or by genre of writing (i.e., political philosophy as opposed to autobiographical reverie, Rousseau vs. Jean-Jacques), or unified by a system, or by an inescapable psychological situation. Kant was among the first to take up the argument, claiming that within Rousseau’s writings there was a foundation of ethical law characterized by order and objectivity.1 Scholars have since entered every side of the debate, working through a body of writing that seems to allow for every conceivable perspective but that cannot be reduced to any of them. The problem of interpretation begins not just after Rousseau but in Rousseau. At the beginning of his career as an author, Rousseau claimed that he offered the world a “system,”2 or what he called “a sad and great system” or “a true but distressing system.”3 In Emile, he refers to a “method” and “ends” explained by his excursus on Sophie.4 He concedes elsewhere in Emile that “it is impossible in a long work to always give the same sense to the same words,” but he at least wants to exonerate himself from the charge of self-contradiction: explaining that he uses different terms to express similar ideas, he contends that “I do not believe that by doing this I contradict myself in my ideas” but only in expressing them.5 Yet in another section of Emile, Rousseau explicitly disclaims any systemic intent,6 despite having repeatedly used the word in an earlier writing to describe his work in general. The preface to Emile, the book he considers his masterpiece,7 intensifies rather than resolves these tensions with 70

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the opening statement that not only is there no system in his masterpiece, but there is no order at all: “this collection of reflections and observations” is “without order and almost incoherent.” Yet the same preface also declares that there is a part of the book that will be perceived by others as “systematic,” and Rousseau asserts on the same page that the book contains “maxims” “whose truth or falsehood is important to know, and which make the happiness or misery of humankind.”8 Rousseau assures his readers that to understand the truth of what he writes is essential to human happiness, and yet the fundamental question of a proper approach to his writings is maddeningly unresolved. Even in his later works, Rousseau’s answers are unclear, even on the basic question of his writings’ inner coherence. In the Confessions, he mentions that in the Preface to Narcisse, which was “one of my good writings,” he had more clearly shown his “principes.” 9 In the same book, he caustically observes that assertions about his mistress and teacher will lead him to being “accused of contradiction as usual, and with as much reason.”10 Yet not long before he began to write the Confessions, and during the years in which he wrote and published Emile and The Social Contract, he wrote a private letter conceding that the connections from one idea to another in his writings could not be relied upon, and rather than embracing a thoroughgoing order, he dreaded it: “You are very kind to scold me for the inaccuracies in my reasoning . . . I 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 . . . nothing comes my way that is not isolated; and that rather than constrain my ideas in my writings I use charlatanry in transitions.”11 A thinker who apparently cannot decide whether he is systematic, whether his ideas are in order, or even whether their arrangement is coherent, should not be haphazardly accused of having a method or a system. But any amount of “charlatanry in transitions” does not imply fundamental contradiction or an abandonment of one’s consistent principles or method. Even to acknowledge, or appear to acknowledge, something “almost incoherent” in one’s proclaimed masterpiece is to stop short of denying a consistent purpose and a consistent means of attaining this purpose. As if the question of unity in principle or method—or simple coherence—was not sufficiently complicated by Rousseau’s inconsistent statements about his consistency, he repeatedly proclaims that an impression of incoherence, lack of order, or absence of argument is in fact part of a

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deeper coherence deliberately hidden from most readers. After writing the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Rousseau observed that the “majority of his readers” must have often “found my discourse badly connected and almost entirely disjointed, failing to perceive the trunk of which I showed them only the branches. But this was enough for those who know how to understand, and I never wanted to talk to the others.”12 Of course, the First Discourse is an early work, which Rousseau and many since have criticized for its argumentative lapses. One could easily ascribe this statement to a neophyte’s desire to make a virtue of obvious flaws in his argument. Similarly, although the reference to “my principles” in the Confessions during its discussion of Preface to Narcisse implies that his principles had not always been available to the undiscerning eye (“in the Preface, which is one of my good writings, I began to uncover my principles a bit more than I had up to that point”),13 the passage actually says little about concealment in his work as a whole. The Preface was written in 1752, and thus the passage at least implies a constancy of principle from this early date up to the writing of the Preface. But since Rousseau had written very little prior to 1752, this may indicate only that these principles were hidden in a small number of early writings. It is most important, however, that the contention that ideas—indeed, apparently essential ideas—are not explicitly or unambiguously set forth is also found in an indispensable text like the Second Discourse, or the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Rousseau concludes Part I of the Second Discourse by commenting on different kinds of knowledge and the task of speculative philosophy, and he closes with the observation that “it satisfies me to offer these things for the consideration of my judges; it satisfies me to have done it in such a way so that ordinary readers do not need to consider them.”14 This statement is all the more important since Rousseau had previously named his judges in the Discourse: they were not the forces of enlightened public opinion represented by the members of the Dijon Academy, but the philosophers of Antiquity. “I will suppose myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters, having the likes of Plato and Xenocrates for Judges, and humankind for an audience.”15 In subsequent writings, the problem of saying everything or speaking too much about what one believes is repeatedly raised, often with direct reference to the intended audience of a given text. The Letter to d’Alembert includes the remark that when Rousseau speaks to “the public” he must say “fewer things with more words.”16 In Emile, he addresses the reader

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explicitly on the question of what he must write: “reader, spare me words; if you are made to understand me, you will follow my principles well enough in my details.”17 Similarly, the tutor Jean-Jacques claims that “maxims need not be developed nor even spoken” to a student, since the “amour-propre” of a teacher must leave something for the student’s amourpropre to do. “It is necessary to be understood always, but it is not always necessary to say everything; the one who says everything says few things, for in the end people cease to listen.”18 In a variant note to Emile, Rousseau considered an explicit declaration to the reader about what was left implicit in the text; like Emile, the reader is asked to make inferences beyond what is explicitly written. After Emile receives a scolding from the “Performer-Socrates,” Rousseau considered adding a question for his reader: “must I suppose some reader stupid enough not to have sensed in this reprimand a speech dictated word for word by the tutor to achieve his plans?”19 Rousseau’s reader is not given an easy way out of this dilemma: faced with a wide-ranging body of writing full of apparent contradiction and ambiguity, many readers quite understandably wish to stay close to the most straightforward and direct interpretation of the work before them. Yet Rousseau repeatedly tells his readers that his meaning will not always be found there, perhaps especially on points that constitute the “trunk” of his argument. The idea does not begin with Rousseau; as Christopher Kelly’s excellent book has recently shown, the possibility that discussing certain kinds of philosophical questions demanded a kind of selective concealment was repeatedly raised in the eighteenth century, as an assumed imperative of thought in pagan antiquity, modern China, and elsewhere.20 Whatever its source, its first implications seem clear: Rousseau instructs his readers to remain very careful with the details in his writing. Of course, readers of Rousseau can argue that he is an inconsistent thinker whose ideas change from book to book. Perhaps a study of each book might lead to some order, dependent on biography and immediate intellectual context. This, too, is at once true and misleading; to embark on an entirely sequential biographical approach would sacrifice the remarkable cross-references in Rousseau’s writings. Arguments from The Social Contract make an extended appearance at the end of Emile, and brief but generally very favorable references to his earlier work are placed throughout the Confessions; his later autobiographical writings discuss the content, methods, and aspirations of his philosophical writings at length—

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for example, Rousseau’s Reveries includes important reflections on his philosophical assumptions. Furthermore, an avowed purpose of early autobiographical writings, particularly the enigmatic Rousseau, Judge of JeanJacques, is to explain and to justify not only Rousseau’s life, but aspects of his pre-autobiographical writings to future readers. Even in the most immediate contextual terms, it is worth noting that Emile, Julie, The Social Contract, and the Second Discourse were published within seven years of one another, between 1755 and 1762 (and the first three of these books were published in 1761 and 1762). Furthermore, Rousseau sometimes resolves ambiguities within one work by commenting on them at length in a later work. He also, as we shall see, claims that the same book or different books present the same argument with different words. These intertextual connections are sufficiently rewarding to make them an indispensable part of interpreting Rousseau. But this should not be mistaken for an effort to make of Rousseau’s difficult and protean thought a rigid unity. Rousseau’s thought indeed develops over time—it cannot be understood without this historical dimension—but his thought is itself subject to revolutions (or “violent shocks” as he understood the term). In a mind so taken with the possibility of method or system, and so singularly incapable of devising one that satisfied him, it is all the more intriguing to explore the themes and principles that are repeated and extended throughout his work. For example, as Pierre Burgelin observed, Jean-Jacques, the tutor of Emile, and Wolmar, the master of Clarens in Julie, bear a striking resemblance to the le´gislateur (the legislator) in The Social Contract.21 The discussion of fables in the Reveries offers fascinating insights into Rousseau’s own authorial position as a certain kind of le´gislateur. What might we learn both from treating Wolmar and Julie as part of a broader theme across Rousseau’s work and as a unique instance of its purposes within a given historical moment, written for a distinct audience and for a distinct purpose? If his writings are read this way, they present a varied but coherent multiplicity of effects and meanings, placed within a history marked by ideas that become increasingly explicit throughout his work, whose gradual unfolding opens upon depths of meaning and inspiration that resonate throughout his writings. This unity in movement allows for a reading that is fair both to Rousseau’s enduring preoccupations and convictions and to the dramatic changes to which they led. In the pages that follow, readers will note an emphasis on those aspects of Rousseau’s thought that speak of its careful translucency and opacity,

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and those ideas that often appear to be most in contrast to the alternative picture of Rousseau as the prophet of transparency, sincerity, and natural goodness. This prominence could easily appear as gratuitously suspicious. I think, however, that it can be derived from the following preliminary (though incomplete) reasoning. An author sincerely and invariably devoted to transparency and total honesty rarely speaks of his concealment and of telling fables when writing for himself or for others; an author who does conceal ideas and tell fables may well assert his honesty at great length—perhaps occasionally to himself, and more often to his readers. This general kind of interpretation will be familiar through the work of Straussian scholars. Yet this work does not, to my knowledge, account for why Rousseau would be explicit about his acts of deliberate concealment or his obscurity in the very writings that make use of concealment or deliberate obscurity. Thus the matter requires considerable interpretive care. It is not that what appears to be concealed invariably indicates his deepest convictions—though it often does that—but that the presence of these statements indicates a deep dissatisfaction with the rhetorical positions that surround them, a dissatisfaction that he wishes to share with his readers even as he occasionally exults in their alleged inability to understand its source or its relevance to his work. It is this dissatisfaction— which often manifests itself as a desire for the “truth” about imagination within experiences decisively mediated by and through imagination—that drives Rousseau’s writing toward a unique conclusion, in which he aspires to radically spontaneous writing that conceals less and less of his imagination’s internal motion. Amidst Rousseau’s voluminous writings, those that were intended to be most popular are sometimes most revealing for a historian. Often, to use two of Rousseau’s favorite metaphors, it is the “covering” or “adornment” of his ideas that is of great historical importance. Thus considerable attention will be given to his astonishingly popular romance novel, Julie. Yet for Rousseau, the effusions of Julie and Saint-Preux are careful, deliberate responses both to a specific historical situation and to what he perceives as an ongoing human situation. In the history of Rousseau’s writing, this is a situation of manifold consequences, and an exalted imagination follows in its wake. This chapter will discuss Rousseau’s assumptions about this imagination—and its importance for politics, freedom, love, and happiness. For Rousseau, there is no secure order or meaning in the world. From Emile to Julie to the Reveries, Rousseau repeatedly expresses his deep im-

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pression that “everything is in continual flux on earth; nothing stays in a constant form . . . there is nothing solid to which the heart can attach itself.”22 The world is movement without enduring form, especially any form that could give enduring shape to human desire: “everything is mixed in this life, one does not taste any pure feeling in it, one does not stay two moments in the same state. The affections of our souls as well as the conditions of our bodies are in continual flux.”23 Amidst this bewildering and ceaseless movement, Rousseau perceives an “agreement . . . between my immortal nature and the constitution of this world and the physical order,” but he quickly adds that this intuition of ultimate form cannot be made known or experienced with any certainty, and is inevitably swayed by “childhood prejudices and the secret wishes of my heart.” Reason can “adopt” these judgments but cannot produce them; the heart cannot inspire but only “confirm” them; an “interior assent in the silence of the passions” approves them without, it seems, making these judgments on its own.24 Yet amidst the flux of the world and the uncertainty of order, there is an immediate order that covers the bare, inscrutable movement of things, manifest in the cover or veil of beauty, above all natural beauty. In the Reveries, “trees, shrubs, and plants are the finery and clothing of the earth”; they are a “wedding gown” amidst “flowing water and the songs of birds” whose mellifluous union is the “only spectacle in the world” that never wearies him. “Nature which has put so much elegance into all its distribution, has above all taken particular care to cover the nudity of the earth with a decorative beauty [parure] so rich and so varied that it charms the eyes and surprises the imagination.”25 Rousseau is consistently uncertain, and often averse, to penetrating the covering of beauty. His account of the dangers associated with piercing it, and the philosophical and political moves that follow from it, are most concisely expressed in his Fiction, ou Morceau alle´gorique sur la Re´ve´lation. In this relatively early fragment—most likely from 175626 —Rousseau begins with “a beautiful summer night.” It is amidst this beauty that “the first man who tried to philosophize” finds himself “abandoned to a profound and exquisite reverie” in which he wants to encounter the whole of the universe. He will do this by “raising his reflection up to the sanctuary of Nature” seeking to take “human thought” as far as it will go. For Rousseau, the philosopher responds first to the summons of beauty, and its intimation of an ultimate order to what he perceives around him. The first philosopher follows its initial appearance with a

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lyrical passage on the beauties of nightfall in high summer, and on the serene contentment it brings to him. But beauty’s appearance is a lure that leads him beyond the surface. The beauty of “murmuring streams” and “the first beams of moonlight” lead him gradually to look toward the sky, where a “multitude of globes roll in silence.” Their mute motion and inscrutable grandeur lead the philosopher to questions about the ordering principles of the universe, the movement of matter, the power of thought, and the possibility of free will.27 The philosopher can find no certainty here; he is lost in anxiety, torn apart by “systems without proofs and objections without reply,” lost in the “fantasy” of explaining nature and its origin through reason, which can only be used to “confirm” but not to “discover” truth.28 Near despair, tormented by “a thousand confused ideas,” the promise of beauty has lured him into an encounter with an uncertain and unending flux, which precludes any capacity to “enjoy” the “spectacle that had first enchanted him.”29 This intellectual anxiety, and through it, aesthetic and eudaemonic crises, can only be avoided by abandoning philosophy strictly conceived at an ultimate point. At this moment, the philosopher perceives an ultimate order associated at first with what are called “sublime truths” that man cannot know, and that reason can only confirm. In the lines that follow, however, these truths of an ultimate divine order appear as a linguistic ground with beneficent consequences rather than as an assertion with determinate content. Rousseau associates the order he now perceives around him with “the most sublime ideas that we attach to this word God.”30 It is this linguistic association that gives the first philosopher repose in the possibility of an order for mind and matter alike. It now “became possible for him to conceive everything as the work of a powerful Being, director of all things.”31 For Rousseau’s philosopher, this possibility of order grows out of his experience of an impassive and abstract divine order. It is then given secure status in language, if not outside of it. The ideas associated with “the word” God make it “possible for him to conceive” an ultimate order to infinite spaces. Flux is made opaque by the use of the ideas associated with a word; beauty then returns as a kind of mantle that prevents beauty from dissipating in an infinite darkness. For the first philosopher, this assumption or intimation of order offers redemptive possibilities for the happiness and virtue of humankind, in which human beings will be united in joy and fraternal love.32 But here

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Rousseau intervenes to characterize the striking effect of this assumed knowledge: “it was in these thoughts so flattering to human pride and so sweet for all loving and sensitive beings that he awaited the return of the day,” and so he waits, “impatient” to spread his knowledge.33 Far from avoiding pride, the philosopher’s thoughts stimulate a pride strangely flattered by the “grace” of his new understanding.34 Yet his pride, unlike the pride that had once threatened him in abstract reflection, makes him want to help others rather than turn away from them in doubt and disappointment.35 Despite the desire to turn toward others, however, the philosopher remains alone and does not seek out others. His impatience to have a direct and transformative impact upon the lives of others subsists, but despite both his extraordinary revelation and his impatience to help, he is overcome by fatigue. The philosopher falls asleep, and all that follows from his revelation is the record of a dream. The philosopher’s dream is nothing less than the moral history of humankind, with the prominent interventions of Socrates and Jesus, in relation to which the first philosopher is both a spectator within the dream and its creator. The original philosopher quickly turns to exercise his imagination rather than his reason; his dream of history offers no arguments. Within it, imagination not only serves as the medium for a philosophical understanding of history, but configures historical memory, understood as a faculty of relational integration within the self, between the self and the world, and between past and present. Imagination’s transformation, or at times, even invention of memory is a frequent theme in Rousseau’s writings. Emile “remembers” his love for Sophie when he meets her, because his tutor Jean-Jacques has prepared him to meet her by having him talk and fantasize about a desirable woman named Sophie.36 In The Social Contract, the legislator will give to his people his own wisdom under the guise of a return to a primal origin, to the immutable laws of God or the gods.37 For Rousseau, human history as a whole becomes open to imaginative reconfiguration in which certain kinds of desirable truths can be transmitted through the presentation of an uncertain or mythic past. As Rousseau writes in Emile, for “sensible men,” historical truth is irrelevant, for human history is best regarded “as a tissue of fables whose moral is very suitable to the human heart.”38 In Rousseau’s allegorical fragment, the philosopher dreams a world that begins as a mixture of despotism and chaos. At the beginning of the dream, a throng of people is in an immense building, worshipping the simulacra of its passions, represented by statues, that serve as a base for

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an eighth statue, constantly veiled. Upon it, people with disordered imaginations worship as a divinity the imperatives of their own desires, or in Rousseau’s words, “the imagination of its worshippers represents it to them after their characters and their passions.” For each person, imaginative devotion “only places under this veil the idol of his heart.”39 Amidst this idolatry, manipulated by priests, there is a world of violence, a “monstrous mixture of murder and prostitution.”40 The first philosopher is horrified and wants to leave his dream, but a being within the dream forbids him to leave. The Socrates figure appears, approaches the altar, and unveils the statue. He urges the people to abandon their worship. Yet afterwards, despite the opposition of his companions, he agrees to accept the penalty for his action and drink hemlock. The first philosopher himself is left ambivalent by the heroism of this figure, whose final respect for the authority he unveiled as illegitimate is ambiguously allegorical and political, and appears to be in “contradiction” with the act of unveiling that preceded it.41 Socrates is followed by the “Son of Man.” The Son of Man throws over the statue and stands on its pedestal. He is enthusiastically received by the people. Using “fables,” “apologues,” and “common conversations,” he “describes the love of men and all the virtues with features so touching and colors so lovable” that all but the priests of the idolatrous temple are moved. The fragment ends with the narrator’s observation about the Son of Man: “one sensed that the language of the truth cost him nothing because he had the source of it in himself.”42 Within this moment of incarnate truth, however, there remains a need for effective persuasion—a “language of truth” that has its source in the self, that through apologues and fables, gives “features” and “colors” to what is true. This could simply be Rousseau’s way of speaking about parables, in which truth presents itself to others in sensible narrative forms. Nonetheless the representation of this incarnate truth undergoes several important changes from its biblical origin to its appearance in the philosopher’s dream. There is no intimation that the parables of the dreaming philosopher’s Son of Man challenge or disturb the crowds around him. Furthermore, as Jean Starobinski has observed, the Son of Man who appears in the first philosopher’s dream undergoes no Passion.43 The dreaming philosopher’s Son of Man speaks truths that do not offend and are disassociated from suffering and rejection; they, to use Rousseau’s words, “cost him nothing” in more senses than one. Within the philosopher’s oneiric world, the Son of Man teaches the philosopher the most

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perfect and authoritative form of persuasion: the life of the persuader, who persuades because his person and the source of his truth are one. In this short fragment, imagination, stimulated by pride, allows the first philosopher to understand the ways in which order can be made from disorder, especially for those who have themselves been previously dominated by disordered imaginations. Merely revealing what is false in the desires or convictions of others can be dangerous, confusing, and at least partially ineffectual, as in the case of the dreaming philosopher’s rendering of Socrates. Yet a wise imagination can fashion from history an origin, a source of beauty, unity, law, and general happiness amidst pervasive suffering, injustice, and uncertainty, without this wisdom demanding a sacrifice of suffering for its champion or his audience. Rousseau, however, does not allow his diverse writings to call upon a Pascalian language about imagination that he has not made his own. He modifies it drastically by attributing to imagination an infinity that, in Pascal and Hobbes, served as its limit. For Rousseau understands the relation of imagination and infinity not as a relation of unbounded space and time to imagination, but infinity as a property of imagination itself. To convey the consequences of this transformation, Rousseau devotes an extended passage to it in Emile: In what then consists human wisdom or the road to true happiness? It is not precisely to diminish our desires; for if they were below our power, a part of our faculties would remain idle, and we would not enjoy our whole being. Neither is it to expand our faculties, for if our desires expand more at the same time and in proportion, we would only become miserable by them. But it is by diminishing the excess of desires above the faculties, and to put in perfect equality power and will. It is then that, all the forces of the soul being in action, the soul will nonetheless remain tranquil and man will be well-ordered. It is in this way that nature, that makes everything for the best, established him from the first. She only gives immediately to man the desires necessary for his conservation, and the faculties sufficient to satisfy them. She put all the others as if in reserve, at the bottom of the soul, to develop there as needed. It is only in this primitive state that the equilibrium of power and desire is met and man is not unhappy. As soon as the potential faculties are put in action, the imagination, the most active of all, awakens and outdistances them.

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It is the imagination that expands for us the measure of the possible either for good or for evil, and which consequently excites and nourishes the desires by the hope of satisfying them. But the object that appears at first at hand flees more quickly than one can pursue it; when one believes one’s self to have reached it, it transforms itself and shows itself far ahead of us. No longer seeing the country we have already traversed, we count it for nothing; the one that remains to be traversed grows, and expands without ceasing; in this way one exhausts one’s self without arriving at the end and the more we gain enjoyment, the more happiness moves away from us. . . . The real world has its limits, the imaginary world is infinite; not being able to enlarge the one let us restrict the other; for it is only from their difference that all the pains that make us truly unhappy are born. Remove strength, health, the good witness of the self, all the goods of this life are in opinion; remove the pains of the body and the remorse of the conscience, all our evils are imaginary.44 Even as Rousseau dramatically revises Pascal’s account of imagination, Rousseau’s extended reflection on imagination follows him exactly by blurring imagination and opinion together, as if to treat one were to broach the other without the need for any explicit argumentative transition. In this passage, an isolated, undisciplined imagination is associated with evil, and opinion with good. In Rousseau’s political writings (including his account of education for life in society), imagination as a generative faculty of collective accord through opinion is to be preferred to imagination as a faculty of individuating desire. For Rousseau, however, unlike Pascal, imagination not only does not encounter its limit in infinity, but the imaginary “world” is itself infinite and the “real world” is finite. Its infinity constantly generates finite forms through desire, which spur the self to action. The imagination is, in this way, the infinite space in which the finite self can identify and extend its desires. This constitution of imagination—as an infinite power that shapes the finite possibilities of the self—will have extremely diverse and powerful applications in Rousseau. It will also have a considerable legacy, not only in Romanticism but through Kant, in its contribution to speculative accounts of the self in Fichte and still later, in Kierkegaard.45 Rousseau pulls back in this passage from an imagination without limitation from anything beyond itself, placing strength, health, pain, and conscience outside imagination. Yet within the pages of Emile and else-

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where, these, too, will be qualified, not least by the legislator’s capacity to “denature” the human heart.46 Such were the accomplishments of Sparta’s Lycurgus or the Roman Republic. In Rousseau’s admiring account in Emile—so admiring that Rousseau places Lycurgus above Plato—Sparta and Rome were able, through opinion and the mores and laws it generates, to uproot and reshape desires closely connected to the desires presented here as the most natural ones: to avoid suffering, to give shape to moral perception and action, to prefer the well-being and survival of one’s children, and to seek one’s own health and self-preservation.47 Yet how can one limit the infinity of imagination without diminishing the energies associated with it? Given Rousseau’s notion of imagination, it appears to be impossible. Human beings’ greatest and most fundamental need, as the passage implies, is happiness. Upon this question, Rousseau consistently identifies himself with what he understands as most fundamentally human—and with a need he not only feels, but one he believes he can address and relieve in others.48 Even in his final solitude, Rousseau wrote that he wished above all to see “all hearts content” and “only the sight of public happiness could touch my heart with a permanent feeling, and the ardent desire to contribute to it had been my most constant passion.”49 If Rousseau’s thinking is stimulated by the prospect of general happiness, his turn to a restricted imagination as a means to attain happiness immediately encounters an anthropological dilemma. Imagination is the infinite faculty that surpasses all others by extending desire beyond all possible ends; thus it begets a disequilibrium inimical to happiness. For the deepest human desire thrives on an equilibrium between discrete desire and the actual, between what is desired and what can be fulfilled. The most fundamental desire of human beings (happiness) is imperiled by the imagination’s infinite dominion over the manifold desires through which this fundamental desire is sought. One could, of course, simply struggle against the very presence of these manifold desires and impose an equilibrium by force; but to diminish these desires would diminish the full eudaemonic vitality of the self, a vitality associated with the infinite power of the imagination. The happiness that would result from striking down desire would be small and incomplete. Rousseau is eager to resolve the dilemma, however, rather than simply point to it. Here his reflections on nature in the Second Discourse are particularly suggestive for understanding the resolutions Rousseau will pursue. Rousseau freely, if erratically, acknowledges the element of the fab-

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ulous in his account of nature throughout the Second Discourse, even as it offers a eudaemonic equilibrium of desire and the actual that, for Rousseau, is a necessary and timely truth. Rousseau takes pains to tell his reader that his account of nature may not be historically true; it remains apart from the facts, in “hypothetical and conditional reasoning.”50 Later, he claims that in addition to omissions attributable to the constraints of time, he has left out those aspects of human existence between nature and civilization that “imagination did not suggest to me.”51 Yet elsewhere in the Discourse, Rousseau will apostrophize humankind (who are not among his judges, but his audience) upon the truth of nature, which never lies.52 Thus before we can even get to his argument about nature, imagination, and happiness, Rousseau demands that his readers consider the problem of how to read his writings about them. There are several layers to Rousseau’s contradictory claims. Rousseau clearly hopes that the readers who belong to his “audience” will take his quasi-historical account of nature more literally than readers suitable to be his “judges.” Since for Rousseau history is properly understood as fable, for one kind of reader, Rousseau’s account of the state of nature and its historical disintegration will offer a vivid narrative that brings his reader to a better understanding of happiness, and allows that reader to set himself against the pernicious illusions of his historical moment (there will be more on these below). For others who identify themselves with Rousseau’s judges, their understanding of the work’s inner logic, hidden to so-called “ordinary readers,” will be a source of pride that does not necessarily demand expression in the world. That said, these categories of readers are fragile in Rousseau’s imagination; already made vulnerable by repeatedly announcing their existence, they will break down later in Rousseau’s work. There it will become increasingly desirable for truth and falsehood to have the same mark regardless of limiting order, and the orders of reading will become more complicated. We are getting ahead of ourselves, however. For now, it is most important to observe two turns in Rousseau’s fable of natural man. First, in nature imagination is entirely quiescent: “his imagination paints nothing to him” and “imagination, that makes such havoc among us, does not speak to savage hearts.”53 The infinite imagination is apparently not necessary or natural. Second, Rousseau’s fable attributes certain basic desires to natural man. But as one begins to compare the account of nature and imagination in the Discourse with that of Emile, Rousseau seems once again to be in

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contradiction with himself. Natural man is endowed by nature (and thus in part defined) by the absence of imagination. Yet he does possess a capacity for pity.54 In Emile, however, pity belongs to imagination: In this way pity is born, the first relative sentiment that touches the human heart according to the order of nature. To become sensitive and pitying it is necessary that the child know that there are beings similar to him, who suffer what he has suffered, who feel the afflictions that he has felt, and others, of which he must have the idea of being able to feel them also. In effect, how can we let ourselves be moved by pity, if it is not by transporting ourselves outside of ourselves and identifying ourselves with the suffering animal, in taking leave, so to speak, of our own being to take his? We only suffer as much as we judge that he suffers; it is not in us, it is in him that we suffer. Thus no one becomes sensitive until his imagination is quickened and starts to transport him out of himself.55 Is this simply a flat contradiction of the Second Discourse? It is tempting to impute an obvious contradiction to Rousseau and have done with it. But this would preclude a careful reading of pity in Rousseau’s fable of nature. First, within the Discourse, Rousseau concedes that pity is not unconnected to extended perceptions of the self, for it “inspires a natural repugnance to see perish or suffer all sensitive beings and principally our kind [semblables],” or as he puts it later in the Discourse, “an innate repugnance to see our kind suffer.”56 Furthermore, the examples of natural pity within the Discourse begin with animals who sense a potential threat to their own well-being, or to the well-being of their progeny, or to another member of their own species (and thus quite possibly to themselves).57 The contention that pity is natural, universal, and prior to social existence is thus put in question by Rousseau’s own examples, a tendency that becomes stronger when Rousseau turns to human pity. Rousseau offers two human examples of natural pity, and they are both clearly from life after nature, where according to Rousseau imagination must operate. An imprisoned or otherwise confined man (un homme enferme´, which presupposes social existence or settled structures, and with them authority and subjugation) experiences pity while watching animals attack a young child and mother while he is unable to help. In another incongruous example, this one in an argument about how difficult it is

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to destroy these “natural sentiments,” Rousseau turns to weeping spectators at “nos spectacles” that take pity upon the misfortunes of fictional characters.58 That is, they experience pity in the space that Rousseau identifies in Letter to d’Alembert as the epicenter of imaginative license. Rousseau’s own examples of natural pity in the Discourse seem to minimize it as a truly natural force, above all in human beings. If pity is the “first relative sentiment” to emerge “according to the order of nature,” as Rousseau puts it in Emile, then it can only be a potential capacity to avoid harm to ourselves and to those with whom we identify via imaginative activity, an activity that remains latent in pure nature. Rousseau’s own examples present no argument that pity is natural in the strong sense of necessarily manifesting itself in human beings in the state of nature, or that pity does not require the mediation of mental faculties associated in his fable with humankind’s estrangement from nature. If the first relative sentiment (i.e., the sentiment that, among other things, connects human beings to others) emerges from imagination, Rousseau repeatedly refers the sentiments that follow it to imagination. Rousseau wishes to place pity outside imagination, however, for if it of all sentiments is natural (while, for example, hierarchy and domination are unnatural), then his fable can present a far more radical critique of his historical moment.59 It is not the case, however, that Rousseau’s fable is simply untrue; rather, for Rousseau it usefully indicates the extent to which imagination (and with it, history) can transform inner experience and the conditions of human existence, rather than assuming a certain course of history, and with it its evils, as inevitable. Thus, while Rousseau observes, as noted below, that his principles lead to sad and upsetting conclusions,60 he makes a very different and much gentler claim about arguments that emphasize the historical plasticity of human evil. In his early Preface to Narcisse, he claims that to show that vices do not “belong so much to man, as to man badly governed” is “a very consoling and very useful thing.”61 In the Second Discourse, however, the relation between sentiments and the world is made more complex by the introduction of a third notion, a new word in the vocabulary of imagination and desire. Rousseau makes a distinction between sentiments, desires, and passions, and the faculty that makes them active in the world, for which he creates a neologism— perfectibility. Perfectibility is the faculty that “with the aid of circumstances, develops successively all the others, and resides among us as much in the species, as in the individual.” Although an animal does not change

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over the course of its life, and its species over a thousand years, perfectibility allows human beings to learn and thus to change dramatically through time.62 Rousseau writes of perfectibility that it would be sad for us to be forced to agree, that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty, is the source of all the misfortunes of man; that it draws him, in time, from this original condition, under which he would pass his days in tranquil innocence: that it, giving rise with the centuries to his enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues, makes him in the end the tyrant of himself and of Nature. It would be frightful to be obliged to praise as a beneficent being the one who first suggested to the inhabitant of the banks of the Orinoco the use of these slates that he applies to the temples of his children, and that assure them of at least a part of their imbecility, and of their original happiness.63 This is a strange passage. If a faculty gives rise to both virtues and vices in history, one expects to learn that they will constantly struggle against one another, or in a more practical fashion, to learn how virtue might defeat or at least minimize the powers of vice. Here, however, Rousseau announces that “in the end” perfectibility leads to universal tyranny; it is hard not to interpret this as the final victory of vice. It is “sad” to acknowledge the trajectory of history, but Rousseau repeatedly acknowledged that the inner logic of his thought was not encouraging.64 This turns the reader back to the faculty itself. What is perfectibility? It would be easy to call it reason; but reason does not act by itself, nor could reason by itself beget cumulative change in individuals and in history without memory. To be responsible for the cumulative transformation of human experience tending toward ever greater power (for tyranny over human beings and nature would not be possible without cumulative increases in power), perfectibility appears to draw upon memory, language, and reason, as well as their physical and intellectual artifacts. But what sets memory, language, and reason in motion? Here too, there is an easy but incomplete answer: imagination.65 Since it can articulate desires into infinity, it requires ever greater power in order to satisfy desires that constantly exceed their objects. But it does not seem especially likely that Rousseau would have created a new word simply to duplicate one that he uses with great alacrity in all his writings. The reading appears to reach an impasse. Yet this impasse can be broken if one recognizes the distinction that

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Rousseau is making with his neologism. Imagination extends desire into the infinite, and thus past the point of any finite satiation, but Rousseau uses the word perfectibility to distinguish the articulation of desires in imagination from the desire to realize desire, rather than the act of desiring itself, within imagination. It is the desire to satisfy all desires in what Rousseau calls “the real world” that demands an increase in power, and thus the “perfectibility” of humankind begins a cumulative process in which human beings are increasingly able to realize all their desires in the world. Since imagination makes desires infinite, this realization of complete power in a finite world will not be the culmination of human happiness, but the advent of tyranny over himself (for desires are no longer mastered but are masters, without being legitimate masters who are able to make their subjects, i.e., desiring selves, happy) and the tyrant of nature (which increasingly becomes nothing more than a resource constantly exploited and reconfigured to serve human desires). Here Rousseau almost exactly reverses the judgment implied by Descartes’ invitation for human beings to become “masters and proprietors of nature.”66 As the desire to realize desire, perfectibility partakes of imagination for its energy, as all desire does in Rousseau,67 but it is not simply imagination. It ultimately draws together all human faculties in the quest to do away with the disproportion between desire and the world by taking control of the self and the world. By using this new term, Rousseau’s thought opens a possibility to explain how one might draw upon the power of imagination and perfectibility without moving toward the tyranny of unlimited perfectibility. If imagination does not necessarily move into the real—if the perfective faculty’s natural orientation toward the finitude of the real can be separated from the force of desire itself, and thus the imaginative articulation of desire can be selectively or even systematically separated from the “desire to realize desire” outside itself—then a durable, if fragile, equilibrium between imagination and the real is possible after imagination has become active. It raises the possibility that desires can be realized as desires within the imagination—which is really the only place they can be satisfied, since it is imagination that has the infinite scope desire will ultimately seek. Yet people must live in the world; at least at this point, for Rousseau it is not possible to live in imagination alone. Thus Rousseau is interested in the various ways through which an infinite imagination can be given limiting shapes that it willingly desires, so that its desires are sufficiently constrained to be in lasting equilibrium with others and with the goods

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of the world, and yet not simply crushed. Thus human beings can “enjoy” their “whole being” without the imaginary “excess” that inevitably follows the pursuit of unregulated desires in the world, and eventually leads to the tyranny of humankind over itself and nature. This requires constant regulation, for Rousseau suggests that any satisfied desire in the world will extend the imagination. This leads to a further conclusion. It is at this point that perfectibility— the desire to realize desire—can give rise to virtues. When it is “naturally” turned outward toward the satisfaction of a myriad of desires constantly exceeding themselves, it promotes vice; when it is turned inward, or “denatured” toward shaping the imagination, so that the satisfaction of desire comes from within, with only minimal stimulation of the most insistent and necessary desires, it prepares the way for virtue. When denatured perfectibility allows a human being to live with others in a way that stabilizes the flux of imagination and gives it a lasting form capable of contributing to the happiness of others in a common unity, then it is virtuous. For Rousseau, “virtues” will carefully constrict the scope of perfectibility’s historical extension into the world; vices will tend to expand it. This leads Rousseau to associate virtue with strength, specifically the strength to restrain desire to a small number of licit activities, without diminishing the energies of imagination. For Rousseau, virtue’s connection to strength is not one of an ontological good to its enabling condition in the world, but two words quite close in meaning. The tutor JeanJacques thus tells his charge in Emile that “the word virtue comes from strength; strength is the base of all virtue.” God is not virtuous “because he has no need of effort to do good.” For humans, the “need [for virtue] comes when the passions awaken.”68 Yet as Rousseau remarks earlier in Emile, it is “only with the fire of the imagination that the passions are lit.”69 Virtue in this way consists in channeling and containing the fire of imagination, ordering the passions by the exertion of strength. In contrast to virtue, “all wickedness comes from weakness.” Human beings can be made good by becoming “strong” since “he who can do everything can never do evil.”70 Yet an infinite imagination precludes the possibility that human beings can ever be in a position to do everything they desire. Thus in this passage, Rousseau’s example of one who can “do all” and is free from weakness and wickedness is not a human being but God. The question of perfectibility denatured raises several difficulties. If human beings’ lived reality is best understood as flux, and our imaginative world consists of infinite movements in and through desires, sentiments,

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and passions, how can perfectibility or any other mental activity bring about an equilibrium from this constant and inexhaustible motion, and where can human beings find the strength to abide by it? In his later writings, Rousseau will find an equilibrium that labors to acknowledge an omnipresent flux within and without the imagination. For now, however, Rousseau posits the utility of illusions, or as he sometimes calls them, chimeras, or fables. For Rousseau, these are words that, in the proper context, can be endowed with the happiest and most positive connotations. For example, in Emile, Rousseau writes of illusions as a necessary part of all perception beyond ourselves: “even illusions of perspective are necessary for us to achieve a knowledge of extension and to compare its parts. Without false appearances we would not see anything at its proper distance.”71 The perception of beauty is also often (though as will become clear, not always) attributed to illusion: at the conclusion of Pygmalion, for example, the protagonist cries “Ah, ravishing illusion . . . never leave my senses!”72 Rousseau’s esteem for illusions does not stop with sensory perception. They, at least, can allow for a certain kind of true knowledge of what is being perceived. In matters less amenable to certitude, illusion becomes crucial for Rousseau, precisely because illusions do not take part in the finitude of the real or the flux of infinite desire. If human beings saw reality unadorned, for example, romantic love would not exist,73 for “everything is only illusion in love, I admit it,” but without it men would become debauched.74 Rousseau goes still further: even if a real beloved is perfect, he says, the love itself must remain in imagination.75 Similarly, the legislator’s claim to have heard directly from the gods uses an ordered imagining to unify and sanctify his people and their way of living.76 Rousseau sometimes qualifies these ideas, but his qualifications are often themselves qualified. In a passage about love as an illusion in Emile, Rousseau reintroduces the theme of beauty, arguing that illusory love “animates us for the true beauty that it makes us love.” Yet Rousseau quickly turns to emphasize and expound upon the power of imagination, emphasizing that this “true beauty” is “the work of our errors” and that as long as those under the illusion of love are able to move toward virtue, it does not matter that their virtue is motivated by an illusion. The “true beauty” in question is understood to depend upon illusion for its realization in experience.77 In Julie, the very notion of “true” beauty will be enveloped by imagination: beauty will belong to the “land of chimeras.”78 Rousseau seems unsure where to place beauty in relation to imagina-

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tion, but it is just this ambiguity that makes it possible for beauty to give limiting shape to imagination. Beauty both awakens desire and limits it to an object or set of objects in the world: a city, a land, a person. From within or without imagination, as a chimera or not, it can arrest imaginative flux. That said, the first philosopher’s experience of beauty in the Morceau alle´gorique indicates that beauty in itself is not enough to make secure happiness possible. Beauty itself may not be able to follow what it desires if it is to remain beautiful. It holds within itself the desire to seek origins and truth amidst flux. Thus the beauty of chimeras makes a necessary but incomplete contribution to limiting imagination and to the denaturing of perfectibility, and in this way a limited contribution to happiness and virtue. Beyond their beauty, what differentiates a eudaemonic illusion or a virtuous chimera from disordered imagining? Rousseau suggests that harmful illusions can develop spontaneously from the effects of the passions, but they do not bring lasting happiness. Illusions should be a limiting, coherent form for desire, presented (at least in Rousseau’s political and educational writings) to others as a stable and self-satisfying form from outside imagination, giving order and constancy to imagination’s movement and its desires in the world, even as it is a product of imagination itself. It is therefore helpful for virtue if this illusory beauty is a beauty of artifice, above all those artifices associated with opinion, and thus amenable to limit and configuration by the imagination itself. For example, the virtues of the citizen in Rousseau’s writings are often fortified by colorful festivals, civic rites, and honors (even if these sometimes must rely on individual vanity, at least in part).79 These civic activities hold the promise of a unifying beauty within a factitious unity, in which routine and regularity give shape to limited realizable desires. In Letter to d’Alembert, for example, Rousseau uses the example of festivals among the Spartans, whose festivals had a “sweet uniformity” and whose public entertainments were part of a ritualistic routine enacted “each evening”80 rather than the novelties associated with modern theater, which continually roil the passions and extend imagination’s desires. These Spartan diversions contain difference within them—the citizens gather as young and old—but this difference is still collective rather than individual, affirming their identity as one people moving through time.81 Men and women are kept separate in public; for Rousseau, this, too, furthers an energetic unity; by restricting contact, desires are both disci-

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plined and strengthened, so that husbands and wives are faithful to one another and more appreciative of one another amidst their daily responsibilities, content to live in “domestic peace.”82 The need for routines—the regular duties and rituals of citizenship, the domestic regularity of Clarens in Julie—suggests another dimension of illusions, or chimeras, or fables, in the positive sense of the terms. As stable imaginings, illusions subdue the force of imagination with useful habits—and thus a kind of habitual, rather than relational, memory. Rousseau is explicit about this relation in Emile: while the fire of imagination lights the passions, “in all things habit kills imagination.” Well used, this power is indispensable, even as habit opposed to a governing illusion or its future articulation should be avoided.83 Ideally, habit should become memory: amid the objects one “sees every day, it is no longer the imagination that acts, it is memory.”84 Education itself, so long associated with the release or acquisition of memory, is profoundly associated with habit in Emile, since Rousseau tells his reader that “we are told nature is only habit” but without immediately resolving the question, Rousseau hyperbolically responds that “education is certainly only habit.”85 If imagination is to be constricted, habitual memory will be needed, even as other kinds of memory will have to be effaced or suppressed. Memory thus often serves as a kind of stabilizing, automatic recognition. In Emile, for example, the tutor Jean-Jacques cures Emile of his fear of the dark by creating games of various kinds that habituate the imagination to the night,86 just as the young Emile learns not to be afraid of masks by seeing his tutor wear one mask after another87 (a suggestion of how Jean-Jacques will educate Emile through different kinds of concealment in the future). Even with the artifice of beauty mediated through custom and opinion, with differences (of gender, of age) sustaining a common unity, with memory as habit, for Rousseau still more can be done. The strongest illusions, whenever possible, avoid thwarting a fully articulated desire (i.e., one that has entered conscious thought) by perceptibly imposing another’s desire or will upon it. In Emile, Rousseau admonishes his reader that “as long as children only experience resistance from things and never from wills, they will not become disobedient or ill-tempered and keep themselves in good health.” He returns to the same theme as late as the Reveries: while he claims to have entered a kind of terminal indifference to the intentions of others, he remarks of people in general that “in all the evils that happen to us, we look more closely at the intention than

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the effect. A tile that falls from a roof can wound us more but we will not be as distressed as when a stone is intentionally thrown by a malicious hand.”88 Attributing imaginative limits and thwarted desires to chance or discrete inanimate objects would, for Rousseau, be only a partial solution to giving limiting, energizing form to imagination. Rather, limits are better attributed to a benevolent nature, or to a transcendent force like “conscience,” or best of all to God when religion and politics are unified.89 For Rousseau these forces—including conscience—also allow their adherents to enjoy an intense sense of self-possession, oblivious for a time to the flux of the world, while inspiring them to spread happiness to others.90 As with the first philosopher and the feelings of benevolence associated with “human pride,”91 for Rousseau there is a close connection between a certain kind of amour-propre and virtue, which in its quiet selfsufficiency can and must be distinguished from both blind self-assertion and a calculating self-interest. It is this possibility that Rousseau repeatedly articulates in the extended ethical reflections intended for Sophie d’Houdetot in Lettres Morales.92 The best illusions create a unified body out of many individuals, who live under fundamental laws that enjoy the unreserved support of the other members of the community and the sanction of God or gods. Laws and mores become habits, and channel imaginative power in well-defined boundaries that satisfy the citizens by perpetuating their happiness, in part by their active participation in the ongoing vitality of the state.93 Anything that diminishes this unity is inferior to it; thus Rousseau claims in The Social Contract that “everything that ruptures social unity is worthless; all the institutions that put man in contradiction with himself are worthless.”94 For Rousseau, romantic love and domestic happiness are lower illusions, both because they are more easily subject to imaginative fluctuation and to direct contact with the finitude of the real, and because they are far less encompassing in the scope of the happiness they provide. This is why Rousseau speaks critically of romantic love as a low but legitimate form of meaning and value for corrupt peoples, both in Letter to d’Alembert and the prefaces to Julie.95 But even if the political forms of citizenship are superior to the more personal and unstable illusions of romantic love, they are both superior to the flux of imagination that under the imperative of the perfective faculty, seeks to draw upon memory and reason and ceaselessly enter the world on behalf of a welter of selfish

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desires. This is precisely what, for Rousseau, the Enlightenment has failed to understand, and makes it for him an inaugural age in the universal despotism of humankind over itself and nature. Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment manifests itself in nearly all his writings, but it never becomes the focus of a single text. This is itself significant; Rousseau does not want simply to scold, or to be overly explicit, and thus risk the fate—as he put it in Emile—of no one listening to him. But he persistently engages in a forceful critique of the prevailing opinions of his times, and above all of the ultimate principles he perceives behind these opinions. Given Rousseau’s fundamental anthropological and political principles, the Enlightenment must be considered a potentially catastrophic error. Even if the Enlightenment can be described as a “great and beautiful spectacle,”96 as Rousseau describes it at the opening of the First Discourse, it releases what had previously been concealed, as the rest of the Discourse somewhat laboriously argues. To put it in the terms of the Second Discourse, for the first time in history, the perfective faculty is unleashed upon reality without discernible limit. Dispensing with the limiting illusions of national distinction, small communities that enforce their mores upon all their members and above all religion, for Rousseau the Enlightenment urges a general pursuit of self-interested desires through the manipulation of nature and other human beings.97 For Rousseau, his “century” fails to understand that reason—or the understanding and ordering of the actual motives that guide human beings—must be the preserve of the few, whose pride leads them to penetrate pernicious illusions and perhaps create fables for the sake of general happiness.98 Instead, it creates a public opinion that presumes to judge the wise few by their own judgment, or as Rousseau puts it in an ugly passage from a letter to Voltaire: “in this wise century one sees only the crippled [“the crippled souls”] wanting to teach walking to others. The people receive the writings of the wise to judge and not to instruct themselves.”99 The participants in a general Enlightenment believe themselves to be above instruction by the wise, according to Rousseau, and thus they reject the authorities by which their imagination might be given shape. For Rousseau, the compulsion to judge “the wise” did not appear in the ancient world, for they did not abandon ultimate wisdom about human happiness; they were “lesser reasoners and wiser than us.”100 Even in the persecution of wisdom, for Rousseau antiquity gave honor to the wise

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by fearing their power—manifest most clearly in the decision to sentence Socrates to death. Among modern peoples, Rousseau claims, Socrates would not be persecuted but the subject of ridicule; he would suffer “contempt a hundred times worse than death.”101 For Rousseau, to reason is not necessarily to encounter anything conducive to justice and happiness; nor can reason formulate any moral principle. “By reason alone, independent of conscience, one can establish no natural law” that is not based on “a natural need of the human heart.”102 But left to themselves, without educative and political illusion, various natural needs will expand in an infinite imagination. Thus for Rousseau, the entire project of realizing human desire in the world is flawed because desire will only expand further with every advance in human power. The tutor Jean-Jacques in Emile thus denounces the perverse imaginative fecundity of reason without limiting illusions, even as he believes himself to speak reasonably (this paradox will be taken up below). “It is important at every age to clothe reason in forms that will make it loved . . . do not combat . . . desires with dryness, do not suffocate the imagination, guide it for fear that it will create monsters.”103 For Rousseau, unlike Goya, it is not the sleep of reason that creates monsters, but the neglect of infinite imagination complemented by an increase in human beings’ power over themselves and the world. According to Rousseau, what monsters might reason create with an unguided or suffocated imagination? First, reason, without unifying illusions, sinks human beings into a fissiparous egotism. The “reasoning and philosophical mind,” Rousseau writes in Emile, “withers souls, and concentrates all the passions in the baseness of individual interest, in the abjection of the human self [du moi humaine] and softly saps in this way the true foundations of all society.”104 Reason does not make the preponderance of people rational, but only skeptics, free to indulge their selfish passions by deceiving and exploiting others105—and in their contempt for any limits to their own desires, eventually making themselves miserable.106 In the Preface to Narcisse, Rousseau elaborates on this process of decline: once “philosophy has taught the people to scorn its customs, they soon find the secret of eluding the laws.”107 What is left after the general turn to philosophy and away from ordering imaginative forms (for Rousseau, above all religious faith) may be peaceful, but all is reduced to a “secret egotism.” What follows from it is Rousseau’s monster: the birth of a society that is at peace but without energy, without purpose or limiting form except the vagaries of selfish desire. It is a “tranquillity of the dead; it is more destructive than war itself.”108

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Rousseau believed that this process had emerged into the open in his own time: deceptive appearances inadequately covered the selfish interests that inspired them. These selfish interests were no longer a source of censure but of general approval, above all by the writers of Rousseau’s “century.”109 The attempt to educate and improve ever larger numbers of people did nothing to better the situation. According to Rousseau, it only creates multitudes who would have been happier in ignorance.110 In one letter from 1762, Rousseau dismisses the educative movement of his times entirely, claiming that the “books,” the “academies” and the “literary societies” are “good for nothing.”111 In the Second Discourse, Rousseau had suggested, as noted above, that the perfective faculty would end in a tyranny of man over himself and nature. Rousseau’s judgment about the growing desire for despotic control becomes even less qualified in his late writings. By the time of Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, Rousseau finds it difficult to see anything but error among his contemporaries and within the principles by which they act. In his own time, he says, “the proud despotism of modern philosophy has brought the egotism of amour-propre to its final phase.” The authors promoting its ascent were ruled by a “taste for domination.”112 Whatever Rousseau’s bracing animadversions on the errors of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, much of the reading of Rousseau thus far may seem unjust. To take only one line of criticism (others will be discussed toward the end of the chapter), it can rightly seem implausible that Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment includes such apparently sweeping and pervasive assumptions about the fragility of reason and individual autonomy alike. There is a long history of writing about Rousseau, beginning with Kant, manifest in Ernst Cassirer, and as recently as Susan Neiman, arguing that Rousseau is at least a partial advocate of individual autonomy, and with it a capacity to reason for one’s self.113 Surely there are grounds for conceiving of Rousseau as a thinker affirming a genuine and living alterity, and interested in the use of autonomous reason to improve morals and provide the conditions for general happiness. There is a sense in which these arguments are entirely true. It is simply incorrect to present Rousseau as unreservedly critical about reason. To mention only some prominent examples, he calls the Genevan Constitution a document “dictated by the most sublime reason,”114 and he makes frequent references to Emile’s growing capacity to reason, including the claim in Emile that “reason alone teaches us to know good and evil.”115

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Any argument about Rousseau’s critique of enlightened reason is only further vexed by Rousseau’s note in Emile, in which he expressed his frustration with an incapacity “in a long work, to always give the same meaning to the same words . . . sometimes I say that children are incapable of reasoning, sometimes I make them reason with considerable skill.”116 In this passage, Rousseau believes these assertions are a contradiction of expression rather than ideas, and he leaves his reader to discover how a consistency in ideas might lie underneath his diverse expressions. It must be emphasized—something fundamental is lost without it— that Rousseau is happy to grant reason the power to make decisions, adjudicate among options, discern good and evil, and more. But all of these depend on imagination and the passions extended by imagination— and their formation by illusion, opinion, and desire, as well as the personal prejudices of the reasoner. For example, Rousseau observes immediately after his assertion about reason allowing us to know good and evil that reason in the young is motivated by a different point of departure or orientation of desire than reason in the old (from outward aspiration to inward recollection), with different conclusions and consequences. Rousseau subsequently provides a series of maxims that are presented as a means of preventing the development of “prejudices and opinion.” All these rules allow children to attain Rousseau’s ultimate eudaemonic equilibrium and “restrict their desires to their powers.”117 So far, this is entirely compatible with the child’s increasing autonomy—he can perhaps learn to account for his prejudices and to make wise decisions for himself based on the equilibrium Rousseau has disclosed. The actual achievement of this equilibrium in Emile, however, is maintained by Jean-Jacques’s near-constant surveillance and manipulation of Emile, giving shape to various opinions and prejudices, from his learning to steady himself in the dark to the courtship of his future wife at the end of the book. Hence as his student begins to mix with men and their institutions, the tutor Jean-Jacques cannot leave his charge “neither by day nor by night.”118 It could be said that this supervision is merely a prolegomenon to Emile’s eventual emergence into a mature independence and a rational freedom. But within the confines of Emile’s written life, Emile and its drafted sequel, there is little support for this interpretation. After his education is complete and his courtship of Sophie is brought to a satisfactory conclusion, Emile ends with Emile begging his tutor to stay. His failure to do so leads to the misfortunes drafted in the opening letters of Emile

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et Sophie, in which after their departure from Jean-Jacques and the beginning of their lives in Paris, the couple give way to moral degradation and social (as well as material) destitution. Emile begs once more for his tutor’s return.119 It is very hard to read this development as a vindication of truly autonomous reason in a Kantian sense, an interpretation in which the education of Emile is a central narrative. The limits of reason are stated within the text of Emile itself and beyond it. It is not that reason does not exist; Rousseau suggests that reason can “complain,” as Pascal put it, but remains ineffective in the absence of what Lamy called maximes incontestables. On its own, “in vain serene reason makes us approve or blame, it is only passion that makes us act.”120 The unpublished notes from Emile give a similar, if still starker, even exaggerated formulation of the argument about unaided reason: “human reason is to my eyes an instrument so feeble and so wretched that I cannot even believe it is in a state to demonstrate its own weakness.”121 In a private letter to Franquie`res several years later, Rousseau would clarify his views on the limitations of reason, at least as a means of effective persuasion: “whoever cedes to the reasoning of another, something already very rare, cedes by prejudice, by authority, by affection, by laziness; rarely, never perhaps, by his own judgment.”122 Given his own assessment about the weakness of rational autonomy as an ultimate foundation for selfhood, morality, and happiness, what Rousseau understands as benign manipulation forms an indispensable part of his writings about politics and education. All these limits do not suggest that reason has no purpose at all for most people. Reason, Rousseau avers, is indispensable—both as a means to diminish the power of pernicious prejudices and opinions, and to allow others to work within given imaginative limits, creating a frame of meaning and value that allows wide-ranging debate and in a qualified sense, independent decision making with fixed points of reference and conviction. Reasoned debate, for example, is essential for the operation of the General Will, and once a common horizon for value and meaning is set, decisions can be made on the most diverse legislation, the passage of which can have great impact on the lives of the citizens. Debate and rational argument were certainly not absent from the Roman Republic or from Rome’s modern republican counterpart, Geneva.123 For Rousseau, the General Will must exercise continuous political sovereignty; however, once a polity’s longstanding and unquestioned laws and mores are experienced as a constraint upon its people, the state declines.124 Once a horizon of meaning and value is in place to limit the experience

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of flux within and without the imagination, reason can function within this horizon to most useful effect, even if ceding to it is at best “rarely” an act of rational judgment. Reason can do some good, but among its other limitations, for Rousseau, it requires enforcement by other means. Rousseau is thus interested in small communities, where behavior is under constant observation, and where both desire and memory can be controlled in Spartan or Roman republican fashion, rather than relying simply on reasoning and argument to enforce meaningful constrictions upon perfectibility (and through it, imagination) in the world. The tendency toward surveillance is evident not only in Emile, as we have seen, but in Rousseau’s later writings on Poland.125 Even in the idyllic and serene fictional estate of Clarens in Julie, a letter from the character Saint-Preux includes the admission that informers exist on the estate to secure its well-being. Saint-Preux remarks that “I cannot admire enough how Monsieur and Madame de Wolmar knew how to transform the vile me´tier of accuser into a function of zeal, of integrity, of courage; as noble, or at least as commendable, as it was amidst the Romans.”126 The theme of surveillance that perpetuates illusion finds a certain resonance in what might be considered the distant corners of Rousseau’s writings, including his reflections on music, where the effects of renouncing surveillance are expressed with reference to the fragility of limiting illusions. In opera, “the illusion . . . is always destroyed as soon as the author and actor leave the spectator a moment to himself.”127 If a given group is to form a common unity of laws, mores, habits, and morals, it cannot accomplish it by itself, any more than it can be deduced from reason alone. For the citizens cannot, according to Rousseau, properly see what it is that stands before, among, and within them and what they should do about it. As Rousseau puts it in The Social Contract, given the inevitability of a “blind multitude, it is necessary for the General Will to have a guide,” for “it is necessary to make it see objects as they are, sometimes as they should appear.”128 The language in this passage from The Social Contract is quite similar to the previously cited passage in Emile about the need for illusions in order for people to see properly. Here, however, there is the need for a guide beyond the illusions of vision, or the role of Emile’s tutor Jean-Jacques. The guide in The Social Contract is the legislator, and through him Rousseau suggests an important function of reason: by carefully considering their historical circumstances and the true bases of human happiness, legislators undertake the creation of a factitious horizon under which citizens can use reason and

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make deliberative decisions. Legislators are the creators of the illusions drawn from the flux of imagination, which give order to imagination’s movements and make general happiness possible. The idea of the legislator is a troubling concept, not least for the implication it carries of some putatively intrinsic hierarchy among human beings. Rousseau’s intermittent but persistent tendency to posit such a hierarchy is troubling; at times he is nearly as relentless on this point as Nietzsche. I understand the aspiration of some recent scholarship to focus studies of Rousseau’s thought on its at least apparently more relevant questions of representation (political, linguistic, subjective) and experience, but a historian loses something essential if he is not willing to engage the most diverse aspects of Rousseau’s thought; to understand Rousseau’s idea of the imagination as he understood it, the task is simply necessary. One must also acknowledge that many of Rousseau’s apparently most relevant ideas themselves emerge as a consequence of his most unsavory ideas. Such is clearly the case with the expansive imaginative experiences of his late writings, which grew out of a kind of disillusionment (if one may say so) with the limitations of illusions, appropriated and created for himself and for others. This history of Rousseau’s writing must acknowledge those sustained themes within it that appear not only discomfiting but lurid to contemporary readers. Rousseau’s descriptions of rank are not always troubled by objections of this kind (though by the Confessions he is so troubled, at least on occasion). In much of his work, however, he approaches the distinction between the “wise” and “others” with unsettling brio, which is apparent in his sometimes harsh distinctions between different kinds of readers in different texts. As he writes in Preface to Narcisse, “knowledge [science] is not made for man in general.” Alienating each human being from his present through thoughts of a happy future, knowledge “seduces by imagination and torments him by desires.” In the end, this relation of knowledge to imagination and desire often “spoils his reason.”129 For Rousseau, however, there are a few “sublime geniuses,” or “some privileged souls” that can “penetrate through the veils in which the truth is surrounded.”130 This “small number” and “they alone” should embark upon study. As for people who have mores and morals, they must “protect themselves against knowledge.”131 As an apparently rarefied instance of both wisdom and genius,132 Rousseau is willing to embark on a sustained course of hyperbolic rhetoric to sketch the importance of the legislator, drawing freely on Plutarch, Mach-

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iavelli, and others. For if “gods would be needed to give laws to men,” it is legislators like Moses, Lycurgus, and Numa who are willing to speak for gods. But for Rousseau, one must revere the legislator himself, for if he traffics in fables of the miraculous, “the great soul of the legislator is the true miracle which must validate his mission.”133 It is the legislator’s willingness to “honor the gods with their own wisdom” that allows people to attribute the illusory eudaemonic equilibrium created by imagination to the forces of divine providence and nature, and allegedly “rescues” them from the perils of a seduced imagination and the torments of desire that come with perfectibility. In this way, “peoples, submitted to the laws of the state as to the laws of nature . . . freely obey and docilely bear the yoke of public happiness.”134 In Rousseau’s imagining of the term, legislators are human beings who historically “saw all the passions of men and who felt none of them, who had no relation to our nature and had fathomed it to the bottom.”135 In a certain sense, they make use of the perfective faculty to shape other imaginations rather than to make the world answer to their own desires; thus they must wait for their reward from a posterity they will help to shape rather than extracting any vindication from the sensible world around them.136 Rousseau, like Montesquieu, is willing to count the greatest philosophers and religious leaders in an exalted company of this kind—thus the category of legislator appears to include Socrates, Moses, Lycurgus, Numa, Calvin, Mohammed, perhaps Machiavelli and Jesus.137 It is they who are able to “denature” humankind138 and to make order out of imaginative disorder: for “good social institutions are those that know best how to denature man, to take away his absolute existence and give him a relative one, and transport the self into the common unity.”139 This common unity joins together every fundamental human activity. If it seeks transcendent sanction in the attribution of human wisdom to God or the gods, it can and ideally should include not just religion and politics, but philosophy, law, love, and music—for Rousseau, it was the good fortune of ancient civilizations not to distinguish between them.140 The legislator thus creates the religious, political, and moral fables that give shape to a unity founded upon enduring sources of authority, without that authority being experienced as the oppression of one’s own imagined desires by the desiring imagination of another. This is the most “reasonable” response to human beings’ desire for happiness, given the power of imagination and perfectibility. It is essential that the legislator, like its ideal exemplar Lycurgus, renounces any formal power over the

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community to whom he gives laws.141 His prerogative is one of persuasion, not force. The legislator’s purview is mores, customs, and “above all opinion,” that “imperceptibly substitute the force of habit for that of authority.”142 Opinion, which for Rousseau as for Pascal is the “queen of the world,”143 forms along with custom and morals “the true constitution of the state.”144 To accomplish his task, the legislator must make no attempt to make his superiority manifest to others. He should “occupy himself in secret” with opinion while “appearing to restrict himself to particular regulations, which are only the band of the vault, in which mores, slower to emerge, form in the end the unshakable keystone.”145 The need for secrecy reinforces the need of various authority figures in Rousseau to conceal their purposes and their authority. Although for Rousseau the legislator is a historical figure, as noted above, his own preautobiographical work very often includes a figure of this kind, in diverse genres (for example, in Emile, or Julie). These figures present themselves as creating an egalitarian community, for in Rousseau’s ideal state, citizens “capable of being unequal in strength or genius . . . all become equal by convention and law.”146 If the legislator of The Social Contract undertakes his task in secret, the master of Rousseau’s idyllic community in Julie offers its residents a complete transparency that the careful reader comes to understand is, in a multitude of discreet ways, not transparent.147 In Emile, the tutor Jean-Jacques is still more explicit about the need to extend authority by hiding it under the appearance of equality. Emile includes what are, to our eyes, decidedly chilling pronouncements on the subject, among them the observation that “there is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom; in this way one even captures the will”148 and urging the reader to embrace the pedagogical injunction “be their brother and they will be your children.”149 Significantly, however, for Jean-Jacques this maxim of fraternity as a means to mastery must be a moral one, that enjoins profound and genuine care for the well-being and happiness of others.150 Rousseau is not an advocate of raw power of any kind. Even in these ethical exhortations, however, he often reveals that he hopes to create a general happiness based on a fairly direct egotism. In this passage, for example, Rousseau extols a very conspicuous and public preoccupation with morals, so that it becomes a display that rewards the moral agent, above all by disclosing a secret subordination (hence one’s supposed equals are now one’s children).151 To be sure, later in Emile, the tutor Jean-Jacques speaks of Emile

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obeying “reason,” but reason is difficult to distinguish from obedience to his tutor. The tutor claims that “it is true that I leave him the appearance of independence, but never was he better subjected to me, for it is because he wants to be.”152 He instructs his reader that in dealing with a pupil, one must “spare nothing to become his confidant, it is only under this title that you will be truly his master.” Afterward Emile offers his tutor a pledge of devotion and obedience in order to learn how to obey his own reason.153 The ironies of this pledge—total obedience in the name of autonomy, a desire to follow reason inspired by a continuing series of manipulated appearances—reveal more than a straightforward reading allows. Yet the initial ironies are made less stable by still deeper ones—the “real” (imaginatively experienced in time) happiness available to those who can create illusions for others without their knowledge, and the equally “real” happiness available to those who believe themselves to freely assent or even to create the factitious limits necessary for their happiness, created for them by others. Thus without fear of sounding like a tyrant, Rousseau writes about the “appearance of freedom” amidst a kind of “subjugation.”154 For all the alarms that this rhetoric rightly raises to his extended posterity, for Rousseau these maxims are justified by the general happiness they are intended to create and protect. This does not mitigate what is disturbing in them; but it is worth noting that he would be horrified not only by the brute coercion of modern totalitarianism, but also by covert manipulations of others in the interests of increased power divorced from general happiness. To maintain this happiness, a certain perceptible equality between the legislator, the guide, the tutor, and his charges must be evident at all times, even if it is a superficial equality (which is not to say it is simply false). One misunderstands Rousseau if one does not perceive that Rousseau’s legislator, or the authority of his comprehensive “guides,” does live in a perceptible equality with others. The great legislator Moses wanders in the desert with his people, just as in Julie, for all his machinations in relation to the servants, Wolmar occasionally works alongside them on his estate.155 The figure of authority also does not seek personal subservience. On many matters unrelated to the legislator’s or tutor’s task, citizens and pupils should act without his guidance. This mixture of detachment, authority, and equality promotes a profound attachment, mediated through imagination, between the authority and his charges, evident when the adult Emile asks Jean-Jacques to stay.

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In Rousseau’s work as a whole, no one is forced to obey the legislator or the “sage,” and their success can never be had by means other than language and gesture, nor measured by anything other than happiness, including its scope and duration. The use of violence, punishment, and material monuments to their power are signs of failure. This does not do away with superiority, however; in some ways it is intensified by being made more purely imaginative. The legislator or guide must understand that his superiority is a subtle and concealed one. Hence few terms generate more intriguing rhetorical contrasts in Rousseau’s work than his descriptions of legislators and citizens. After the grandiloquent praise bestowed upon legislators and lawgiving characters like Wolmar—comparing them to gods or God,156 their miraculous effects in the world, and so on—the citizen is the subject of more modest, though by no means false, approbation. Rousseau often praises the citizen’s virtue; but for him a citizen is an “honest common sort [me´diocrite´]”157 who is corrupted by neither luxury nor ambition. Although the legislator has an exalted imagination that dares to imagine the divine commands his people will revere, the citizen’s imagination is tightly constricted.158 The citizen may have any number of real and grave responsibilities, and may even be a great leader.159 It is only the fundamental shape of opinion, mores, and customs to which the legislator addresses himself, and the humble citizen and the great leaders of his state work within them.160 Again, however, one encounters another strange paradox in Rousseau’s writings. If inequality (especially intellectual and philosophical inequality) incurs resentment, and the appearance of fraternal care and equality are so important, why does Rousseau repeatedly announce that at several profound levels, equality and fraternal solicitude are a ruse? There is an initial, important, but very incomplete answer. Very few thinkers and writers other than Rousseau shared his confidence that he could write for at least two audiences at once. In this sense, Tracy Strong is completely correct to argue that Rousseau wants “to empower the reader” and to “authorize the understanding of the reader”161 rather than dominate over him with a single meaning (or fable). Yet for Rousseau this openness is not a full recognition of his egalitarian alterity with the reader. In an extended discussion of truth and fable in the Reveries, Rousseau remarks that justice demands that he give each what is truly his.162 Elsewhere, this maxim finds its logical counterpart in Rousseau’s advice to his readers. Rousseau believes that the reader’s proper relation to the

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text will reveal itself if each reader takes from his book what appeals to or strikes him most quickly and vividly, or as Rousseau instructs readers of Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques and of Julie, they must “abandon [their] soul to the impressions it will receive” from his writing.163 Thus for many readers of Rousseau, his books may offer the prospect of rustic simplicity, rigorous devotion to public duties, to the domestic responsibilities of the home, and to the natural goodness of nature and children, often expressed in evocative imagery. His descriptions of ancient festivals, the virtue of citizens, rural dances and the rhythms of pastoral beauty divert and enchant. His honesty as an author is beyond question, for he is willing to risk ridicule to defend what his century had (according to Rousseau) cast aside in favor of dishonest sophistry and learned contempt. Other readers recognize in Rousseau’s texts that human beings cannot reason their way to virtue or happiness, nor can authority make others happy if it imposes itself directly on their desires (as enlightened absolutism does) or if, in ultimate terms, it is unable to impose limits on their desires (i.e., by deferring to an autonomous rational individual). They will recognize and respond to the possibility of a will that is common, and the egalitarian deliberation that comes with it. For still other readers, Rousseau offers an argument that the Enlightenment has fundamentally misunderstood the human situation, above all by failing to acknowledge the power of imagination and the uncertainty of all ultimate principles in a general flux. In this reading, people are happy when they believe their desires to be uncontradicted by the world (above all other desires), and when their most fundamental orientation toward human existence and life with others has been given an energizing but limited imaginary shape through culture, mores, and opinion, above all those that are attributed to ultimate sources like nature or God. The shape of their imaginations then has a coherent and illusory form that evokes respect for its power and attachment through its beauty, and restricts imagination through illusion, rather than systematically neglecting or suffocating imagination as Rousseau’s “century” has done. Rousseau’s readers can receive drastically different but nonetheless “authorized” impressions and lessons from his texts, from the so-called “ordinary readers” to his so-called philosophical “judges,” from those who understand why he would claim that he wants to burn Julie to those who would most appreciate Rousseau’s conviction that it is a deeply moral book, and that affection for it signifies an exceptionally good heart.164

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Rousseau believes himself to have considerable control over these lessons, from hiding the trunk of his arguments to changing the form in which their author is perceived by the reader.165 Yet this account of various audiences in Rousseau’s readings implies that Rousseau himself told fables to his readers. He acknowledged this in the Reveries, when he believed that he wrote only for himself. There he claims that since there are only a few things that men need to know and that are “necessary to his happiness,” a truth that is not useful does not need to be told166 Hence the justification for silence, at least, in the interests of general happiness. Yet Rousseau does not only justify silence, but the active fashioning of “fictions”: “to lie without profit nor prejudice to one’s self nor to others is not to lie; it is not falsehood, it is fiction.” In this context, Rousseau seems only to allow himself an occasional embellishment in his autobiographical writings. Yet he quickly broadens the context considerably by endowing his fancies with a broad pedagogical purpose. For fictions that “have a moral object are called apologues or fables and their object is or must be only to surround useful truths in sensible and agreeable forms.”167 Rousseau admits with ambivalence, and some regret, that in this sense he had “often spun fables, but . . . very rarely lied.”168 Here as elsewhere, the standard for useful “truth” is a given assertion’s ability to move people toward morality, associated with truths “necessary” for human happiness. Yet this seems a very difficult assertion to sustain. If truth is a recognition of illusion’s ubiquity within the larger truth of imaginative and ontological flux, then why does Rousseau speak so often of truth, and claim even at a late point, well after his turn to personal confession, that “general and abstract truth is the most precious of all goods”?169 This must be understood properly. For Rousseau, reason does not seek truth as a correspondence with phenomena in the world—as in the Second Discourse, the facts of nature and history have nothing to do with the question170— but as a kind of power that increases with its level of abstraction toward the general end of understanding human beings and their most profound and persistent desires (in relation to their source, the desire for happiness), giving a philosophical account of their faculties, components, and imperatives. It is certainly not limited, as Rousseau acknowledges within this discussion of truth, by its relation to “particular and individual truth.”171 At least as a vow for writing and communication with others, Rousseau’s vitam impendere vero is thus not an expression of fidelity to empirical truths of experience, but to eudaemonic truth that pertains to human be-

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ings in general, whatever it costs Rousseau himself. Rousseau draws the distinction between these two notions of truth quite clearly in Julie. The excitable Lord Bomston declares that “the wisdom of mortals” can be found in the book “of nature,” and thus implies that wisdom lies in discovering what exists outside human desire. It is the legislator character Wolmar who corrects him, claiming that “the true book of nature is for me the hearts of men.”172 As Rousseau writes about the different means by which he can hope to turn his readers toward their happiness, the turn from the word illusion that appears in many of his earlier writings (as we will see, it will be everywhere in Julie) to the term fable in the Reveries, can seem disorienting. That said, there is a clear continuity of meaning—the words signify a difference in perspective. Rousseau often uses fable to describe an attractive, imaginative form of meaning from the perspective of a truth (i.e., not of “nature” but of the “heart”) useful for happiness. Illusion is the imaginative form itself, seen in contrast to the truth of flux in “nature.” For example, understood in relation to his readers’ desire for happiness, Rousseau’s novel of love, Julie, is a fable, whereas understood in relation to its supposed external “object” in the world, the love that SaintPreux feels for Julie is an illusion. Illusions, of course, must turn from reasoned eudaemonic truths to persuade imaginations, and Rousseau concedes this necessity in his own writing. For Rousseau the legislator’s or the sage’s truth expresses more and probes more deeply than fact and reasons based on what can be confirmed beyond imagination. As he writes in Emile, “to always reason is the mania of little minds. Strong souls have a very different language; it is by this language that one persuades and makes actions.” Rousseau’s language here is close to that of Malebranche and Condillac on the power of imaginative language, especially through the representation of striking sense impressions. For Rousseau, the language of the strong soul is in truth the language of sensible signs, which “speaks to the imagination.” As Rousseau puts it, without speaking to the imagination one has “lost the most energetic of languages.”173 By making use of the language of imagination, Rousseau authorizes various readings of his texts, which as a whole can be said to have begun a textual revolution within the Enlightenment and to have given his readers some direction for what might succeed that revolution. In Rousseau, revolution is not quite what would be intended by the Jacobins who posthumously claimed him as their own. In his writings, revolution re-

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turns peoples and individual persons to youthful plasticity and energy.174 It is a “violent shock”175 to individual or collective practices and expectations, after which a person or people is open to a new shape or order to their experience. By offering a new order of thinking about the human person, through fables and the ideas he has read in the human heart, Rousseau fulfills a revolutionary task of destruction against the pernicious illusions of his age, above all the release of the perfective faculty without illusory limit or form in the name of freedom and happiness. There can be no doubt that Rousseau saw this task as his own. As he writes with a certain poignancy in the Confessions, at the beginning of his life as a writer Rousseau “saw nothing beyond error and madness in the teaching of our wise men, and oppression and misery in our social order.” Animated by a pride he characterizes as simultaneously “noble” and “foolish,” he believed himself “made to dissipate these phantoms [prestiges].”176 The fantasy of serving as the origin of a grandiose historical correction stops short of suggesting that Rousseau himself is a legislator. Here he proposes to destroy, not to create, illusions and orders. This is one reason for the understandable skepticism, visible in a wide range of scholarship on Rousseau, that Rousseau ever saw himself as a legislator. For some scholars the whole notion of the legislator is a rather peripheral fantasy in his work.177 For still others, the legislator is a possible solution to Rousseau’s writing, but one that vitiates its deepest principles. Tracy Strong broaches the notion of Rousseau as legislator as “a tempting answer” to the presence of the legislator and related figures in Rousseau’s texts, and to Rousseau’s reasons for writing—but one that is nonetheless described as “quite wrong,” because it implies that Rousseau wishes to exert power through writing rather than distribute it.178 For all their insights, there are several difficulties with these arguments. As will be shown below, the legislator is a kind of fantasy; but at this point, it is clear that fantasy is hardly an empty category of meaning in Rousseau’s writing. Furthermore, to be a legislator is in some ways to give power to others, even if in ultimate terms the legislator has an ultimate or spiritual power that remains hidden. Finally, and most importantly, Rousseau acknowledges that he wanted to destroy the errors of his age, and it would be a striking violation of his own most deeply held assumptions if he were to destroy pernicious illusions without providing alternative and energizing limits for imagination. One of his most powerful criticisms of the Enlightenment is that it is primarily destructive,

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that “the literature and knowledge of our century tends much more to destroy than to edify,”179 and if he only did the same he would compound what he saw as one of the most damaging errors of his age (i.e., how its critical temper permitted imaginative indiscipline), rather than rectifying it. Rousseau himself repeatedly indicates that human happiness was the goal of his writing, rather than simple destruction of the pernicious illusions of his time.180 Finally, though Rousseau at times denies the possibility of modern lawgiving or his own identity as a legislator, by his own principles a legislator would be bound to do so.181 In his autobiographical dialogues, his remarks about the purpose of his previous writings suggest something very close to a legislator, and not only in his observations about fables. In Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, he claims that in his own years of “genius” he hoped not only to dispel the “prejudices and lies” around him with truth and reason, but to “make men wise in showing them their true interest,” and in that way he himself would “contribute” to “the future happiness of mankind.” To contribute to this future eudaemonic order, he would call upon a language “worthy of such a great enterprise.”182 As he says in this passage, the books that emerged from this effort “astonished Europe” and spoke with joyful strength to those who lived in “ethereal regions”183—his standard phrase for the realm of “imagination” in this extended passage.184 Rousseau’s work as an authorial legislator must be properly understood in its Rousseauvian context, deeply inflected by his reading of Montesquieu. The legislator’s task—who according to Montesquieu need not write for his own people, and who may be an author—is to give shape, without any direct coercion, to the ultimate meanings and values of human experience for others, in order to create the conditions for a more general and durable happiness. A reading of Rousseau’s writings, with its repeated references to correcting the errors of his century and singularly contributing to the general happiness of humankind through writing, makes it very difficult to argue that Rousseau did not see this task as his own. If Rousseau saw Moses and other legislators as a kind of family or group of “brothers,” as he suggests in an unpublished fragment,185 Rousseau—above all by his own principles, and secondarily because of his own acknowledged purposes—included himself among them for a considerable portion of his career as an author.186 Here, however, Rousseau’s talent for paradox takes on another dimension. For the truths of the heart are supposed to be anthropological truths,

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from which fables and illusions come. But in Rousseau’s writing, the legislator functions both as a truth and as a fable. That is, he advances a historical claim with some earnestness about the power of a small number of “strong souls” to give horizons to others’ experience; But several of the ultimate sources for this argument (e.g., Plutarch, or Livy’s legendary history of Rome’s founding discussed by Machiavelli) are often histories that are themselves uncertain. And even when they are not, when Rousseau writes of the need to attend to historical circumstances,187 written history as such for Rousseau is a fabulous discipline.188 Understood properly, Rousseau’s role as a legislator does not simply or invariably function as the tutor Jean-Jacques in relation to Emile, or as the legislator does to his citizens. The presence of these figures in Rousseau’s texts is as necessary for Rousseau as for the reader. To give shape to imaginative flux in a skeptical and philosophical age, he offers his own “historical” and at times quite openly fictional fables of a transcendent authority abstracted from determinate religious or political “content.” In order to extend his imagination outward toward the end of general happiness, the lawgiver no less than the citizen has need of an illusion, or fable, including that of the legislator. Allowing that the idea and fable of the legislator is necessary for Rousseau’s writing on many levels, this hardly ends the difficulties with the proposal that Rousseau can incarnate such an idea and fable in his own life, as Jesus embodies the truths he professes at the end of the Morceau alle´gorique.189 To whom does he give laws, and to whose opinions does he give shape? Rousseau repeatedly suggests that there may be no discrete nation to whom laws can be given. Even as he urges Poles to adopt distinct national institutions, Rousseau makes a broader judgment: “today there are no longer Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, or even Englishmen, whatever people say; there are only Europeans.”190 Earlier, in Emile, he wrote in similar terms that a certain kind of enlightened education puts its charge “always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his penchants and his duties, he will be neither man nor citizen; he will be good neither for himself nor for others. he will be one of the men of our days; a Frenchman, an Englishman, a Bourgeois; that is to say, nothing.”191 This suggests, at the least, that for Rousseau there is no question of ignoring Montesquieu’s broadening notion of the legislator to move beyond its earlier invocation in explicitly political, Plutarchian terms.192 But this does not preclude the possibility of being a uniquely modern legis-

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lator, who fantasizes an extraordinary capacity to read the demands of his moment and its tendencies, and speaks not merely to a national community, but to the situation of the “bourgeois,” the “modern,” and the “European,” as he variously describes his contemporaries. As Rousseau observes after the banning of Emile and The Social Contract in his letters regarding the situation in Geneva: ancient peoples are no longer a model for moderns . . . you are merchants, artisans, bourgeois, who are always occupied with their private interests, with their work, with their gain; people for whom liberty itself is only a means to acquire without obstacle and possess in safety. This situation demands that you have particular maxims.193 Geneva requires many of its own distinctive maxims based on the peculiarities of its history, just as Poland and Corsica do. But in these lines, Rousseau also clearly indicates that it is their general status as “moderns” (i.e., “merchants, artisans, bourgeois” with their “private interests”) that leads to distinct maxims. The plural of “maxims” is also important. Rousseau’s own efforts to incarnate his fable of the legislator will compel him to write in the most diverse genres and toward the most diverse levels of understanding. Rousseau does not primarily aspire to give a constitution of laws to specific countries, though the fantasy repeatedly intrigues him. But he does aspire to give shape to imaginations in varied writings by creating a nation of readers around his writings, both for his time and his posterity,194 in which, through imagination, his relation to his readers can undergo successive change.195 This leads to a final complication. As an authorial legislator, Rousseau offers his readers a revolution in their understanding of nature, history, politics, and the self. He urges them to make a dramatic turn away from the open pursuit of self-interest as a principle of order, a principle he believed was the central precept of his time.196 But to better reach his socalled “ordinary” readers, Rousseau dramatically alters his relation to them, and writes his novel Julie. In it, he takes up the daunting challenge of offering a new kind of illusory boundary to the flux of imagination. This limit must address what is for Rousseau an unprecedented historical situation, where perfectibility and the pursuit of individuating desires are explicitly affirmed, and unifying limits on an infinite imagination are rapidly falling away.

4 Illusion’s Reflection: Rousseau’s Julie

Given Rousseau’s previous forays into political philosophy, his turn to epistolary romantic novels may seem to be a decidedly awkward move. Yet appearances, as they are wont to do in Rousseau, hold more than a first glance permits the reader to see: Julie is at once a restatement, an application, a radicalization, and in the end, an incipient subversion of Rousseau’s philosophies of imagination, illusion, and happiness. For all that, it is not a novel beyond criticism, some of which comes from its author. Rousseau acknowledged that Julie was exasperatingly repetitive; but he added that it was not written for those who would notice its flaws.1 Whether readers failed to notice its failings or simply forgave them, it moved its readers as very few books do. Robert Darnton has shown how Rousseau’s novel, among the most popular written in the eighteenth century, “transformed the relation between writer and reader, between reader and text” in ways that would allow novels to be read with a spiritual intensity once reserved for the Bible itself.2 Darnton’s research reveals that the novel was often associated in the minds of readers with passionate intensity and simple virtue, embodied in images of familial and rural integrity that made a sharp contrast with the ironic, skeptical tone of some other philosophes on the questions of love, marriage, and family. It is beyond question that passionate intensity can be had in abundance in Julie. This chapter will explore the various forms that intensity takes—in friendship, in common life, in love, and in faith—to explain why Julie expresses both an extension and an important shift in Rousseau’s thought about imagination, and how this shift prepares the way for his autobiographical writings. But why write the novel at all? Rousseau remarks more than once that he would have liked to burn the manuscript.3 It is easy enough to read 111

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these repudiations of his own writing in psychological terms, as Rousseau’s effort to create some distance between his idealized conception of himself as a man thoroughly alienated from the passions of his age, and his contribution to a genre of popular writing about romantic love that clearly gave him pleasure. This, however, would be far too simple; for this pleasure belongs to the realm of imagination to which Rousseau was elsewhere devoting such concentrated attention. Julie also addresses the erotic and feminine dimension of imagination in a more concentrated and direct way than he had heretofore, meeting an imagination assumed to be captive within vanity and erotic desire (a notion so favored by many writers of the Enlightenment) in unexpected and complicated ways. In very broad outline, Julie is an epistolary romance. Rousseau, the “editor,” suggests that he has “discovered” a collection of letters. He is scrupulously ambiguous on whether he was their author, producing a preliminary suspension of the distinction between reality and imagination. Even if Rousseau himself were thought to be Saint-Preux, it would be instructive for his readers to observe that his passion led him to writing rather than marriage. The story recounts a love affair and the fates of the two lovers after their affair has ended. Julie and Saint-Preux first meet when Saint-Preux is Julie’s tutor at her father’s estate in Switzerland. They consummate their relationship in secret, but Julie’s father refuses to consider a marriage, since Julie belongs to a noble family and Saint-Preux is a commoner. Julie is ultimately married to Wolmar, a friend of Julie’s father from abroad. After a period of wandering with his British friend Lord Bomston, SaintPreux returns. Julie is now a mother, and she and Wolmar preside over an idealized life at their estate, Clarens, whose intimates eventually include her cousin and close friend from childhood, Claire. Saint-Preux is invited to join the couple, with the enthusiastic approval of Wolmar; the erstwhile tutor enjoys their company and instructs himself from their conjugal and communal happiness. While Saint-Preux is away, Julie, in the fullness of her contentment, dies a heroic death after having rescued one of her children from drowning. After a flurry of writing to Saint-Preux bearing explanations and a farewell from Julie, he is invited back to Clarens by Wolmar and Claire, to serve as tutor for Julie’s children. In his prefaces to Julie, Rousseau is hardly at pains to flatter the reader or to endorse the intrinsic importance of the novel’s substance. Once again, a reader of Rousseau learns that “love is only an illusion.”4 Yet the illusion is necessary, as is Rousseau’s turn to novel writing, for “when I

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tried to speak to men I was not heard; perhaps by speaking to children I will make myself better understood; and children do not enjoy the taste of naked reason any more than straight medicine.”5 The focus alters slightly in other passages: he claims in more specific terms that the kinds of unsophisticated, provincial readers he seeks will not derive any instruction from his moral or philosophical works.6 Yet a more general corruption in his times is clearly at issue: to change public mores, Rousseau argues, one must first attend to domestic mores. This focus, according to Rousseau, is itself corrupting in ages of robust civic virtue, but in “times of epidemic and infection” one must not prevent “the distribution of drugs good for the sick, under the pretext that they could harm healthy people.”7 The entire line of argument is strongly reminiscent of Rousseau’s observation in Letter to d’Alembert that “there are some countries where the mores are so bad that one would be only too happy to be able to bring them back up to love.”8 For Rousseau, the citizens of Geneva had no need for this remedy; but he had different ideas about many of his readers. Hence Julie is not addressed to his judges at the Lyceum of Athens, nor does the author affix the title “Citizen of Geneva” to his name at its front.9 The novel itself appears as a last resort, or as Saint-Preux will later write during his sojourn in Paris, “novels are perhaps the last form of instruction that is left to give to a people so corrupted that all others are useless to it.”10 Rousseau pulls back from the brink of alienating his readers altogether. When the interlocutor of the second preface remarks that the author thinks very little of his readers, Rousseau assures him that if he criticizes his contemporaries, he too is their contemporary.11 (In a sense, Rousseau’s subsequent writings will validate this peculiar assertion.) Throughout, however, Rousseau’s writing asks his readers to feel rather than to reason with him, as he embarks on a new mode of writing. To follow Rousseau’s own metaphor, what is the medicine of the text? Is it an appealing panegyric to the virtues of love? In part, and no doubt many of his readers enjoyed it for precisely this reason; but if this is Rousseau’s medicine, it was already a widely distributed one in eighteenth-century fiction, and it is not clear why Rousseau would have needed to begin with a declaration that love is an illusion, best suited for corrupt or decadent peoples. Is Julie meant to present the joys of simple desires in life among others, beyond the boundaries of personal romantic

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attachment, in a pastoral setting away from urban corruption? Certainly; but the management of Clarens is anything but simple, and it would be obvious to attentive readers that the economy of desire and imagination within it is extravagantly factitious. This is an important idea in itself, and will become crucial for a complete reading of the novel. In some immediate ways, the remedy Rousseau seeks will be familiar to readers of Pascal and others on the power of the passions, the peril of presence, and the functions of divertissement—even as Rousseau constantly upholds the need for seemingly superior persons to guide those who are more likely to follow desire into the real. For Julie and Saint-Preux, their love at first appears to transform the real like a revelation. It allows them to break free of all sorts of unhappy social and moral constraints in which neither had believed or desired; for example, in social ranks assigned by birth that would make their union inconceivable (for readers who felt themselves estranged from these orders, this would be a most powerful theme). Yet beyond social prejudice, this persistent, revelatory love sustains itself above all through a strange mixture of absence and presence. Saint-Preux and Julie are never entirely absent from each other’s lives, but they are very often absent; and as their feelings for one another are conveyed only through letters, the effusive declamations Julie and Saint-Preux impart to one another before the reader are always mediated through absence. For all its power, when this love has a possible fulfillment (i.e., before Julie’s marriage to Wolmar), neither Julie nor Saint-Preux is happy. Julie, torn apart by her will’s contradiction with her moral and social obligations—cries out that she is “misled by a thousand vain hopes,” and claims that she cannot “even enjoy the horrible serenity of despair!”12 For Julie, lasting happiness is out of their reach, for they are “base playthings of a blind fortune.”13 Saint-Preux, once so eloquent on the celestial blessings of their union, now asks Claire: “how has such a divine fire not purified my soul?”14 As these passages suggest, both lovers are at least partially lucid about the dangers associated with the passion that centers their lives. Julie writes that “without love, one can have the sublime sentiments of a strong soul; but a love like ours animates and sustains so long as it burns; as soon as it is extinguished it falls into languor and a worn out heart is no longer good for anything.”15 Later in the novel, Saint-Preux echoes her thoughts, remarking that “an extinguished love casts the soul into exhaustion.”16 To prevent this dissipation, both Saint-Preux and Julie turn for advice to

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others. As Julie will later put it, “better suited to receive good opinions than to take them from ourselves, we both need guides.”17 In this passage, Julie proposes that she and Saint-Preux can serve as each other’s guides; but throughout the novel both of them seek guidance not only or even primarily from one another, but from others who give advice and direction to their behavior, thoughts, and desires. So far, the reader encounters Rousseau on familiar ground. The guides—the legislator in The Social Contract, the tutor Jean-Jacques in Emile, the “devin” (or soothsayer, clever man) in Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du village—assure the happiness of others by winning their trust and giving shape to their imaginations. Guides even make an appearance in Rousseau’s youthful comedy Narcisse.18 Yet Julie adds heretofore unimagined layers and nuances to the role of guide. Julie’s use of the plural is significant: to clarify these layers and nuances, in this eudaemonic fantasy Rousseau produces several guides rather than one. This in turn allows Rousseau to reflect on different approaches to the problem of happiness and imagination. Lord Bomston understands that a conflict exists between the illusion of love and the demands of others (i.e., Julie’s father). But his first response is simply to remove the obstacle to illusion and allow it to become reality; he is, as Rousseau would put it, an enlightened man, who believes that the imagination should work within immediate desires, perhaps especially erotic desire, and seek fulfillment in a less socially and morally constricted world. Thus he suggests that Julie and Saint-Preux elope and live on his estate in England. When Julie—in part by her own counsel and in part through Claire’s persuasion—refuses his offer, Bomston offers a direct course of diversion to Saint-Preux to distance his desire from his experience. As the young tutor sinks into rumination on despair and death that brings him close to suicide, Bomston persuades him to embark on a long journey sailing around the world, distracted by a cascade of new and striking impressions that avoid reflection or reckoning with his passion. As Bomston puts it: “to return you to yourself, it is necessary that you go outside yourself [que vous sortiez au dedans de vous], and it is only in active agitation that you can find repose.”19 Although Bomston’s diversions are useful to Saint-Preux, Bomston cannot give his charge any sense that his diversions resolve his passion. He can only recommend that Saint-Preux attend to things outside his passion. Bomston’s personal limits as a guide are also evident. His desires and needs are legible to others while being opaque to himself—the reverse

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of the relation Rousseau posits between a legislator and those under his guidance. Claire and even Saint-Preux are able to descry the self-seeking, often preconscious weaknesses that direct Bomston’s speech and actions, though he himself cannot.20 In an “editor’s note,” Rousseau endorses their sharply qualified assessment of Bomston’s capacities by remarking that he “is never so philosophical than when he does some foolishness, and never reasons so well as when he does not know what he is saying.”21 Claire presents a far more sophisticated and subtle response to the relation between imagination and reality than Bomston does; Mira Morgenstern is right to suggest that Claire’s independence and intelligence have been consistently overlooked.22 Whereas Bomston offers either a satisfaction of imagined desire within the world or the triumph of the world’s diversity over imagined desire, Claire offers the possibility that imagined presence and temporal absence, desiring proximity and communicative distance must be constantly entwined with one another. Hence Claire advises Julie to send Saint-Preux away and to refuse Bomston’s offer to help the couple elope; yet for Claire, this should not end their love. The lovers’ ultimate satisfaction can only be had through an unceasing renunciation. Where Bomston advised perpetual agitation as a means to distract Saint-Preux, Claire makes the lovers’ attachment to one another impossible while keeping them ever mindful of it, not least through her correspondence. This is an entirely self-conscious position for Claire. A love made difficult and perpetually postponed is unblemished by time and sweetened by the imagination’s transfiguration of passions that remain within imagination. In this way, as she tells Saint-Preux, through the lovers’ “separation,” they will transcend the limits of the world and time, and “your hearts united unto the grave will prolong in an enchanting illusion your youth with your love.” Nor will this be a transcendence of self through imagination, in which they encounter one another without the imperfections of their selves: rather, Claire, unlike Bomston, assumes that imaginative activity must find its highest satisfaction in pride or expansive selflove. She assures her charges that their ongoing renunciation in the name of virtue will produce an “exquisite amour-propre” constantly renewed.23 Claire’s position is more radical than Bomston’s; she urges Saint-Preux and Julie to keep their love imaginary, congratulate themselves for not having made it real, and bounded by their prideful self-satisfaction, allow their love to become an imagining of memory, that neither ages nor dies. Claire’s language suggests that in her ideal equilibrium, imagination finds

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its energies given shape by past imaginings, fantasies that give meaning and value to the self precisely as long as they are not made real. Claire’s analysis does not encounter a reprimand from the editor of the letters, and she is deeply admired by those who benefit from her guidance. She tells Saint-Preux that “you still have need of a tutor and I want to be yours,” and he does not protest; Julie tells Claire that “you must be at all times my safeguard against myself, and Claire continues to serve as asked.24 Claire is almost, in Rousseau’s terms, a legislator. She distances herself from her own immediate desires, claiming that it is her “me´tier to reprimand” and that “all examination demands a sangfroid that one never has in looking at what one loves.”25 But Claire’s solution to the problem of happiness does not allow for a productive common life, as a legislator’s must. If Bomston insisted on keeping Saint-Preux out of himself to return him to himself, Claire insists that Saint-Preux and Julie will find satisfaction when they are safely kept within themselves. Certain that time would “join to the weariness of a long possession the progress of age and the decline of beauty,”26 she wishes them to dwell in their own imaginations without a truly common illusion that opens upon a more general happiness. Under the Pascalian assumption that imagination can make people happy but that both absent and present pleasures are empty, Claire can only counsel a lifelong if intimate separation, with no purpose or issue beyond itself. Claire has an additional limitation. Her attachment to Julie is both intense and, as presented in the text, a function of an origin beyond herself in time. In this way, Claire ultimately chooses the “religious” solution of finding intrinsic meaning outside herself, i.e., in Julie), rather than allowing her imagination to function in the manner of a legislator—that is, to constitute an origin, including a transcendent origin, for others. Not long into the novel, the reader learns that Claire loves Julie as much or more than her husband.27 When he dies, Claire resolves to spend the rest of her life at her friend’s side, declaring “my Julie, you are made to reign. Your empire is the most absolute I know. It extends up to wills, and I feel it more than anyone.”28 Yet Claire does not love Julie entirely or perhaps even primarily for who she is, but for the duration of their acquaintance from the very origin of her consciousness. Claire justifies her devotion by its origin: “the first thing I did was love you. From our first years my heart was absorbed in yours . . . I no longer knew how to love nor to feel by myself. All my

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sentiments came from you; for me, you alone stood for everything. I only lived to be your friend.”29 Claire’s imagination is thus limited by reverence for memories emerging from her own circumstances. For Rousseau, historical greatness through thinking and above all through thinking for others (a possibility on which Rousseau never ceases to offer his various reflections) is for him a prize reserved only for those who have in some sense severed their loyalties to their contingent loyalties and attachments. Claire has only partially accomplished this break. Although she virtually worships Julie (and does at least venerate her in the novel’s conclusion), she also claims the title of friend, and a close, long-standing friendship should be an honest and deep one. But the novel goes out of its way to diminish the power of genuine relationality between them. Claire’s friendship with Julie quite clearly includes manipulation and duplicity, which one would not associate with honest and deep friendship. Claire coolly observes that Julie is insincere and that she is often histrionic, verbose, and didactic.30 Cool as these judgments are, they would not invariably suggest a failure of friendship, and Claire does praise Julie’s heart. But she obviously finds this heart easily led, by herself and others, and shows little respect for her judgment. Consequently, it is not surprising that later in the novel, as we shall see, Julie’s husband Wolmar sends Claire a letter in which he openly describes the ways in which he is manipulating Julie and her former lover without them being aware of it, and Claire issues no protest. At this point, Rousseau’s readers have seen the lovers’ passion diverted and read the proposal for it to become a beautifully remembered imagining, but Julie and Saint-Preux still have no productive role among those near them, where they first met and fell in love. The role of citizen remains beyond them. It is only with Julie’s marriage to the future legislator of Clarens, Wolmar, that a “revolution” makes citizenship possible.31 In Rousseau’s terms, it is after revolutions that new opinions, mores, customs, and laws can give shape to imagination, or alternately for Rousseau, the soul. As Julie observes, “I should think that a soul once corrupted is corrupted always, and no longer returns to being good by itself; unless some sudden revolution, some abrupt change of fortune and situation suddenly changes its relations, and by a violent shock helps it to find a good foundation again.”32 Both husband and wife benefit from these “violent shocks.” Wolmar loses his lands in a foreign revolution,33 which frees him for life in Swit-

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zerland, on an estate with Julie. Julie’s revolution is an internal one: her despair weighs so heavily upon her that she considers adultery and remains indifferent to her own prospective marriage until she is transformed “internally [by] a revolution,” inspired by liturgy and scripture.34 She soon learns to bless the “happy revolution” that “showed me the horror of the crime that had tempted me, and reawakened in me the taste for wisdom,”35 and it leads her to earnest prayer for the first time.36 Inspired by her transformation, she promises Saint-Preux that he, too, will have a “sentimental revolution”37 that will lead him from passion to virtue. Wolmar’s and Julie’s revolutions are distinct in cause and outcome. A political revolution in the East serves to free Wolmar from inherited obligations and traditional social and political roles, but we are not told that this revolution has had any effect on him. It has simply made him available to a community other than the one in which he had previously lived. Julie’s revolution does not liberate her capacity to give shape to the lives of others, but makes possible the aspiration to control her own desires.38 But this does not explain the content of the anxious bride’s revolution—a sudden immersion in liturgy and scripture that makes manifest the joys of “Christian mores” that in turn “purify” the “lessons of philosophy.”39 These ceremonies are a traditional, frequently performed religious rite in the faith of Julie’s country; how can this be revolutionary, as Julie defines the term? Of what possible use is this alleged revolution to a legislator like Wolmar—himself a skeptic40—since this appears less as a “violent shock” than as a return to the very faith that Rousseau had criticized so strongly elsewhere, and whose decay he believed he saw everywhere around him?41 The preceding analysis establishes some relationship between Julie and Rousseau’s long-standing anthropological, political, and eudaemonic preoccupations. But this discussion has thus far avoided the question of Rousseau’s medicine: is a novelistic dramatization of these preoccupations itself therapeutic? After Julie’s marriage to Wolmar, Clarens is a model of domestic felicity, an elaborate and flourishing household of almost entirely untroubled comity. But it is a stretch to suggest that Rousseau writes Clarens as a model for life in a given community, in the sense that Rousseau’s writings on Poland and Corsica could arguably aspire to some direct correspondences between a given political body and a reformation of that body in text. Absent this correspondence, Rousseau’s novel would appear not to “cure” his readers’ imaginative disorder so much as divert

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them from it, by allowing them a brief imaginative engagement with a world distinguished at every level of experience from the one in which they live. But in the novel itself, diversion is an inferior medicine for the unhappy—if this were the ultimate consequence of Julie, it would make its author nothing more than a prolix Lord Bomston. Rousseau indeed offers something more than diversion, though it will take some further thinking to set out exactly what it is, that will start with some of the sections of the novel most remote from the theme of romantic love and religious faith, only to work back toward them. Given Rousseau’s assumptions about imagination, life with others is difficult and even dangerous. Comparison and rivalry, division, and the thwarting of desire by others’ desires, make the destruction of a shared horizon of meaning and value, or a common illusion (and thus unhappiness), a constant possibility. The difficulty of illusion’s duration is made more acute among Rousseau’s modern readers, who according to Rousseau are told that self-interest, and the realization of their desires in the world, is a principle of order rather than disorder. But Rousseau will offer several possible resolutions to this problem. First, Julie will argue for common spaces where personal interest is present but hidden. Pride in particular will be satisfied both by the knowledge of superiority and by the strength of will required to hide that superiority from one’s inferiors. Rousseau will disclose the illusory nature of life with others, but suggest that even as one knows that one lives within illusions, this illusory common life is superior to a life of fractious and disordered desire. Clarens is thus a community understood at two levels (perhaps a certain kind of reader will only or largely perceive the more unifying and aesthetically appealing one). At one level, life at Clarens is transparent, egalitarian, and filled with joyful and spontaneous diversions, in which all participate. There are meals with Saint-Preux, Wolmar, and Julie where all are transparent to one another and where nothing is hidden;42 hours of play where Wolmar and Julie supervise the workers’ games; even work can sometimes become a common task.43 However, as Joel Schwartz has argued, this transparency is often only apparent.44 The need for the appearance of transparency, and its actual absence, are understood most deeply as an attempt to contain the proud imagination without extinguishing its energies, to conceal the effects of pride that come at the expense of others while savoring them within the imagination. The means by which this is accomplished are subtle. Rousseau sets forth

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a rough hierarchy in the work, which becomes unstable only at its end. Wolmar, Claire, Bomston, Julie, and Saint-Preux are variously ordered in relation to their ability both to recognize and create illusions for themselves and others; but none of them lives an imagined life without illusory limits. Saint-Preux is an especially instructive example of pride, illusion, and happiness at work. Julie’s former tutor is willing to accept a certain kind of subordination to Wolmar, as his indisputable, functionally transcendent superior and judge. Significantly (and appropriately, given Rousseau’s apothegms on the legislator in The Social Contract), at one point he compares Wolmar’s role as domestic patriarch to that of God in the universe.45 But Saint-Preux is not therefore endowed with humility. The preponderance of the details the reader learns of Wolmar’s manipulative treatment of the servants are entrusted to Saint-Preux by Wolmar and Julie, and written by him. This is appropriate, since the only people at Clarens whom SaintPreux perceives as inferior to himself are the servants, and by learning how they are manipulated he can believe himself an intimate of Clarens’ masters. Saint-Preux comes to know that the servants are rigorously segregated by sex without explicit rules to do so,46 and that their increases in pay are appealing to them, but as Saint-Preux eagerly observes, these increases are “more apparent than real.”47 He relates how Wolmar, like all good masters, has been able to use coercion with his domestics, but to “hide this coercion under the veil of pleasure or interest, in such a way that they believe themselves to want what they are obliged to do.”48 The young man himself happily colludes in silence about how the servants are treated, despite or perhaps because he was the victim of social prejudice earlier in the novel. By learning about the managerial legerdemain at Clarens, Saint-Preux believes himself to be one of the elite who understand the inner workings of Clarens; thus Saint-Preux’s pride is mollified. He vindicates his status in this elite by not sharing his knowledge with those who are manipulated by it. Despite his admiration for Wolmar’s administration, Saint-Preux’s full subordination under this administration is kept from him. Saint-Preux conceives himself as a trusted intimate at Clarens, manifest in daily, spontaneous conservation with Wolmar and Julie. But Saint-Preux lives under an illusion (this one concealed). He is subject to a more interior and pervasive manipulation than the servants. If Claire insisted on a memory of imagination, in Saint-Preux Wolmar dares to make a frontal attack on

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memory and remembered imaginings. In a letter to Claire, Wolmar writes that to change Saint-Preux and remove his lingering love for Julie, he must “remove the memory [of his love for Julie], and he will no longer be in love.” It will not prove difficult: to Wolmar, Saint-Preux is “ardent, but weak and easy to subjugate.” Wolmar acknowledges that this allows him to shape his imagination, or as he puts it, he will achieve his goal “by duping his imagination.” Above all, the beloved image of Julie must be replaced in Saint-Preux’s imagination by images of her new situation: “I erase one painting with another, and cover the past with the present.”49 The means by which Wolmar attacks memory are revealing. Wolmar will “force” Saint-Preux to gaze constantly upon an image of Julie as loving wife and mother to conceal the image of Julie the beloved.50 SaintPreux’s passion for her remains unchanged; but it is no longer active in the world of reality. Nor is it preserved in a personal and imagined memory; rather, it is a kind of translucent palimpsest that continues to stimulate the energies of his imagination to be close to and associate with Julie, but only as part of a larger and more general whole that binds them, through Julie’s family and household, to a collective unity beyond the ultimate source of their desires. Wolmar, however, does not stop there; he both limits and incites Claire’s pride as he writes to her about manipulating Saint-Preux. In the same letter, he intersperses flattery about the efficacy of Claire’s advice to Julie and Julie’s virtue—exploiting what for Rousseau is Claire’s single vulnerability—to claim that despite the fragility of his plans, he is able to “know very well the strengths of both of them [i.e., both Saint-Preux and Julie], I only expose them to the trials they are able to bear.”51 These trials include a moment where in Wolmar’s absence, Julie briefly appears to Saint-Preux replete with “the image of my past happiness.” As memory and the memory of imagination return, Saint-Preux, as Christie McDonald observes, is overcome with violent emotion.52 But Wolmar does not err; he does not allow for trials beyond their control. The incident is quickly overcome, and the illusions of domestic tranquility reign. SaintPreux’s and Julie’s illusory passion is at once absent, for it cannot enter the real, above all in dialogue with the others who are its “objects,” and yet it is also present, for it imparts communally productive energy to their life together at Clarens.53 In his letter to Claire, Wolmar simultaneously claims to share Claire’s awe of Julie and presents himself as her equal in devotion to an imagined Julie, as he entrusts Claire with knowledge of the ways in which he con-

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trols Julie’s desires for another man—and Claire says nothing to her friend, despite Wolmar’s explicit offer that she do so.54 Her silence lends credence to the notion that she loves an imagined ideal rather than Julie herself. Rousseau will emphasize this tendency with Claire’s fetishistic treatment of Julie’s veil at the end of the novel. This interpretation, however, appears to founder upon the moral value of transparency in Julie. This transparency appears to be an honest attempt to advance moral autonomy and reciprocity, even if it is not perfectly realized at Clarens. Few intervals in Rousseau’s writings conduce more easily to a proto-Kantian reading, and the injunction to transparency seems rigorously ethical—transparency is at least an invitation to submit individual desire and will to the common judgment of all, and thus (for Rousseau) to make an altruistic sacrifice for communal happiness. Rousseau presents the notion of transparency in starkly moral terms: Wolmar instructs Saint-Preux that “a single precept of morality can take the place of all the others,” that is, “neither do nor say anything that you do not want everyone to see and hear; and for my part I have always regarded as the most admirable of men the Roman who wanted his house to be constructed in such a way that people saw everything done there.”55 But transparency in Julie finds itself motivated not by a good will, but by enjoying a superior’s approval and a command of one’s self. For example, when Saint-Preux is instructed to address Julie in the same way whether or not Wolmar is in the room (and thus to practice a kind of transparency), he is struck not by a moral duty as such, but, as he writes to Bomston, by “what sort of man [i.e., Wolmar] I had to deal with, and I firmly resolved to always maintain my heart in a state to be seen by him.”56 Later, when Saint-Preux enters the idyllic garden of Clarens, the Elise´e, he imagines Wolmar’s “penetrating and judicious eye pierce to the bottom of my heart and make me blush for it again.” But after his walk, he describes his moral reformation not as a genuine encounter with what is beyond himself, but as a supremely pleasurable, solitary interiority. For as he recounts his time in the garden, Saint-Preux reports that he “found that there is in meditation upon honest thoughts a kind of well-being that the wicked have never known; that of being pleased by oneself . . . I do not know what other pleasure could equal this one, for the enjoyment of virtue is entirely interior and is only perceptible to the one who feels it; but all the advantages of vice strike the eyes of others, and it is only he who has them who knows what they cost him.”57 Yet even if this transparency veers toward the reward of solitary gratification amidst social con-

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cealment, this seems to be feeble medicine. Why would Rousseau devote so many words to represent this imaginary common life, in which none of his readers can live, that appears to involve so much falsehood? Some readers no doubt took Rousseau’s injunction to harmonizing transparency very seriously indeed, as for Rousseau, they should have, if that is what moved them most. But this theme is so often undercut in the novel that it is difficult to believe it is its primary purpose. To establish this purpose, the word “revolution” will once more become important, properly understood in Rousseau’s own terms. To understand what this revolution entails, the interpretive focus must broaden slightly to address the status of Julie in relation to other writings. In the Confessions, Rousseau would assert that Julie’s religious views and those of the Savoyard Vicar in Emile are identical.58 In his final writings, he hoped that the ideas he associates with the Savoyard Vicar’s profession might “one day make a revolution among men.”59 Rousseau thus uses the term “revolution” to describe the ideas included in both Julie’s religious conversion and the Savoyard Vicar’s religious profession. But what is really revolutionary about Julie’s revolution, or the Savoyard Vicar’s? At the zenith of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Julie’s and the Savoyard Vicar’s professed devotion to simple, practical, and immediate moral obligations, accompanied by what is to all appearances a fairly vague Deism, is in itself a great distance from “revolution,” understood in Rousseau’s own texts as a violent shock that makes fundamental change possible, or allows for the creation of a new origin to direct and limit the infinite flux of imagination. Rousseau’s revolution, however, does not consist in positive, if minimal, theological propositions or maxims of conduct. It is the radical and explicit attribution of value, beauty, and attachment among human beings in love, in common life with others, and with God, to illusion or the possibility of illusion, in a gentle but persistent series of suggestions to the reader. In Julie, Rousseau undertakes a daring effort to remove the mask of illusion as truth in a popular work and to encourage a general audience of readers to, at the very least, inchoately feel the presence of illusion in meaning and value, and accept it as their own, with various degrees of indifference as to whether the desires expressed and experienced within it are true. This position lies well beyond what Jean-Pierre Dubost has called “the essentially retarding nature of love novels” that delay or preclude consummation in order to preserve some true meaning removed from or transcending desire.60 This is the more daring and most conspic-

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uous course of treatment in Rousseau: indifference toward truth, and at times even repudiation of truth, can become an imaginative liberation. Rousseau prepares the way for this liberation from the early sections of the novel. Even amidst the transports of their desire, Saint-Preux and Julie are willing to sacrifice so much for their love, and they write constantly about it to each other and to others. Yet throughout Julie, the experience of love and of beauty, as an illusion of passion (not a legislator’s illusion), will be everywhere heavily blended in with the “truth” of their love. Early in the novel, Julie writes Saint-Preux: “O how the illusions of love are lovable!”61 Julie will later describe her hopes for Saint-Preux’s love with a kind of hymn to illusion: “O sweet illusions! O chimeras, final reserves of the miserable! Ah, if it is possible take the place of reality for us.”62 Saint-Preux will occasionally declare the deep and irrefutable reality of their love, only to receive a locket from Julie and exclaim: “O Julie, if it was true that it could transmit to your senses the delirium and the illusion of mine.”63 The failure of the relationship to become one of ongoing and explicit mutuality is implicit here: the lovers themselves speak of their illusions, both common and personal, in the midst of their most passionate exclamations. Here many of the philosophes would agree; Voltaire’s reflections on love in the Philosophical Dictionary extended the possibility to his readers that love is an illusion. But there the illusion is absurd but necessary, and those under its sway are most often blind to it. In Rousseau the illusion of love, even a fluctuating one, is beautiful and necessary, and those under its sway are at least partially aware of it, without it diminishing their passion (though it may well diminish their capacity to believe that their passion must enter the world in fruitful and continuous consummation). Voltaire’s readers are encouraged to recognize the absurdity of profuse desires as they follow them into the world. Rousseau’s readers are encouraged to enjoy the same desires as illusions, from which perspective the Voltairean libertine appears cynical, and Voltaire’s religious critics cold and censorious. Not only illusions of love, but illusions as such are represented as objects of desire in the novel, in art and nature alike. On his travels, SaintPreux finds himself transfixed by the optical illusions he encounters while gazing at mountain vistas, and he describes the power that these illusions have “on our most lively passions.” On the spot, he scorns “philosophy” which does not have “as much power over the soul as a series of inanimate objects.”64 The subsequent passage appears to qualify this tribute to illu-

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sion, only to end with musings on his and Julie’s possible happiness in his current locale, and the remark that “I was happy in my chimeras: my happiness flees without them; what am I going to be in reality?”65 While in Paris, Saint-Preux acknowledges that the Paris Opera shows much “skill,” but fails to “flatter the heart, and nourish the illusion” and the appeal of skill in no way compensates for the absence of illusion.66 Rousseau does not stop with the simple awareness of illusion. For if human beings live, as Rousseau contends, in “continual flux,” imagination must constantly spill over into the real, and the real make its incursions into imagination, despite all efforts to secure imaginary happiness on its own terms. The realization of desire, however, is fatal for illusion. As Julie later observes, “the illusion ends where enjoyment begins.”67 She speaks from experience, and her religious reflections will be her most important answer to the problem of living in illusion amidst enjoyment. Within her love, however, her passionate illusions about love before her revolution easily give way to seeking the satisfaction of desire in the world, and the resulting disillusionment brings continual encounters with despair. When Julie had hoped for an eventual union with Saint-Preux, this “flattering illusion had supported me in my sorrows; I lost with it the strength to bear them.”68 When her father refuses to let her marry Saint-Preux, “a new illusion came to sweeten the bitterness of remorse”69 —that by sleeping with Saint-Preux she would have his child and would be compelled by honor to marry him—but ultimately this too was “vain” and Julie was “deceived again by such a sweet hope,”70 For Julie “recognized, but too late, the chimeras that had deceived me.”71 Rousseau’s response to the fragility of illusions offers a sense of how profound a cure he intends for his readers. It is still more audacious than writing a romance novel in the name of moral instruction, in which the two characters show a persistent awareness that their feelings for one another are illusory.72 But Rousseau is nothing if not persistent in his effort to secure an imaginary happiness. If the imagination is infinite, it is a source of constant excess that no domestic or political artifice, no matter how deft and multifaceted, can assuage. As Rousseau puts it in one of his “editor’s notes” to Julie, the human heart requires “an infinite object to fill it,” and thus seeks this “object” in God.73 But what God? And what will happen to the imagining self in an encounter with an infinite beyond itself? Rousseau’s Julie and the Savoyard Vicar offer a very qualified allegiance to a God of revelation in general,

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or to Christianity in particular. Here they do not depart from Rousseau’s views. Though at times Rousseau refers broadly to a Christianity as a force for justice and moderation, these observations are not always reliable. (As Leo Strauss observed, these remarks usually follow Rousseau’s persecution for his religious beliefs.)74 Even in one of these later writings, the Letters Written from the Mountain, Rousseau qualifies an endorsement of Christianity by observing that it “enervates the strength of the political drive, it complicates the movements of the machine, it ruptures the unity of the moral body.”75 Given Rousseau’s remark in The Social Contract that anything that ruptures a people’s unity is “worth nothing,” the political limitations of Christianity are clear.76 Rousseau expands on the point at some length in Book IV of The Social Contract. If, as he contends, the phrase “Christian republic” is an oxymoron,77 for Rousseau this does not exclude Christianity from a single regime but from any legitimate government, since Rousseau had earlier defined a republic as “all states governed by laws, whatever their form of administration might be.”78 This secures the foundation for Rousseau’s conclusion that “true Christians are made to be slaves.”79 Rousseau aspires to offer not slavery, but rather a peculiarly modern eudaemonic equilibrium to his nation of readers. Thus he must treat the apparent shortcomings of Christianity not through rigorous theological innovation, but through a change in the representation and experience of faith as such. This will avoid the imaginative difficulties of skepticism (whether in or outside churches) and religious devotion. This observation permits his reader to locate the first point of contact between Julie’s faith and the Savoyard Vicar’s profession. They assent to Christian rites and doctrine, without particular conviction—on the grounds that conviction, or to put it differently, an experience of truth, is at best irrelevant and at worst pernicious in the achievement of virtue and happiness. This is not presented as a sign of irreverence, or even of genial conformity amidst skepticism, but of a peculiar kind of satisfaction with a possibly imagined God. Julie says that her connections to God may not be “wise” and that she will not justify them, other than to say that they are “doux” and pleasurable; they help her to know and carry out her duties.80 The Savoyard Vicar affirms God as creator of the universe and divine immortality, but he adds qualifications about the utility of thinking about the content and intellectual implications of these ideas.81 This allows the Vicar to live with skepticism toward all revelations and proceed with a life of moral action,

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just as the first philosopher accepts the perception of beauty as a covering over the fathomless ambiguities of an ontological abyss. At times, Julie’s and the Vicar’s indifference to the truth is bluntly asserted. The Savoyard Vicar qualifies his occasional affirmations of his ideas as truth and declares that he promises not truth but “good faith” to the young Emile (his exhortation for the young man to search for truth himself is undercut by his thoughts about learning, shown below).82 Julie writes that “even if the immense Being with which [the heart] is occupied did not exist, it would still be good to be constantly so occupied to be better master of one’s self, stronger, happier and wiser.”83 Julie’s lengthy religious reflection justifies itself by its ability to awaken the conscience, and thus to make it possible to perform one’s duty with pleasure—but not by truth. For “conscience does not tell us the truth of things, but the rule of our duties,”84 regardless of what one believes. To secure this order of indifference to truth, Rousseau cannot appeal to reason. As he wrote to Franquie`res, “rarely, perhaps never” are people guided by their own rational judgment.85 Hence both the Savoyard Vicar and Julie are given to speaking of the tedium and weariness associated with philosophical and theological thinking. The Savoyard Vicar admonishes his charges to think of “how many languages it is necessary to learn” and the endless reading required to think about religious questions;86 Julie warns against “metaphysical abysses” that are ultimately a waste of time in a short life.87 Rousseau here reaffirms the notion that passions—including the passion for direct and unmediated truth that leads the first philosopher and his heirs into an encounter with inscrutable flux—can only be checked by other passions.88 The passion in question here is not a passion that requires a human being to realize desire in the world, but a passionate desire to rest from all striving on behalf of desire—that is, laziness, to which Rousseau reverts in his ongoing quest to limit the effects of the perfective faculty in the world. Julie and the Savoyard Vicar convey the laboriousness of faith or skepticism seeking understanding, because for Rousseau, human beings have a natural aversion to effort (especially effort with an uncertain outcome). In the Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau is very direct while making this point: “it is inconceivable to what extent man is naturally lazy . . . to do nothing is his first and strongest passion after self-preservation.”89 In the Second Discourse, human beings are “naturally lazy . . . and they refuse all kinds of tasks which are not an absolute necessity.”90 Even amidst the frantic bustle of modern states, “it is to

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achieve rest that each works; it is still laziness that makes us industrious.”91 Rousseau does criticize laziness at times, especially as a source of harmful habits among the young; in a footnote to Emile, Rousseau writes that lazy habits are only good for “weak souls.”92 But according to Wolmar, Saint-Preux is precisely that kind of soul, and Rousseau generally reserves the term “strong soul” for very few people. Rousseau’s characters inspire laziness while upholding the possibility of an immediate encounter with an undemanding holiness that flatters amour-propre: it goes beyond and is in some ways a judgment upon any specific revealed religion. Rousseau persistently suggests that his own ideas are not always as gentle and affirmative as theirs. He concludes the Savoyard Vicar’s profession, for example, with a very long footnote offering a philosophic and political defense of the religious views presented, devoid of the Vicar’s more emotional Deism.93 The abrupt change in tone is instructive. Julie’s more moderate professions will ultimately find themselves further qualified by one of Rousseau’s “editorial notes,” as we will see below. Even in its earlier formulations, Julie’s turn to God is framed as a need for happiness and moral living rather than the divine as such, and the possibility of God (not the same thing as God’s presence) is the only possibility commensurate with the “heart,” which in the context of Rousseau’s assessment about human attachment must partake in imagination’s infinity. Yet there is a danger in giving the imagination over to an infinity accepted as real; for this would be to invite conflict and yearning for the real, and with them disillusionment and unhappiness. Thus God must be made an encompassing absence, a possibility filling the imagination from within rather than an experience outside the imagination. Julie explains her experience of God as follows. Without God, Julie’s idyllic life at Clarens would be “deprived of the pleasure of desiring” that “supplements . . . the sentiment of happiness which exhausts itself . . . [and] fills the void of the soul.”94 The void is the difference between the potentially infinite expanse of desire and the near-total fulfillment available at Clarens, whose illusions are effective but merely temporal illusions, and limiting to those who manage them. For Julie, her God is not a God who judges the world, and according to Julie, those who find a God of judgment are themselves wicked; here Julie prefigures a passage from Rousseau’s Confessions, where, in the spirit of Montesquieu (and some years later, Voltaire) Rousseau asserts that faith is usually a form of imaginative projection: “in general believers

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make God as they are themselves, the good make him good, the wicked make him wicked.”95 Julie is an idealized creation of her author, and as a sweet-tempered woman, her own God confers upon her a “sweetness through my days and joy at the bottom of my heart.”96 Julie’s religious joy must be a moderate one that remains at the bottom of the heart, neither rising nor falling to divine infinity, but giving it a pleasing sense of contact with a desire beyond its reach in an otherwise contented life. At its purest moments, it appears to suspend the activity of the mind—including imagination—so that desire exists without the experience or desire for something beyond desire itself.97 Her faith is more properly a desire that fills the imagination, and it functions, as she acknowledges, quoting Wolmar, as “an opium for the soul.” It “cheers up, enlivens and supports when one takes a little of it: too strong a dose puts one to sleep, or makes one go berserk, or kills.” She hopes “not to go that far”: for her, faith is to be “a recreation” in days filled with quotidian duties.98 In Rousseau’s writing, these duties increasingly exclude thought. Before her spiritual revolution, Julie had been interested in both philosophy and religious devotion; after her revolution, she turns away from them. She renounces any interest in becoming a theological disputant or mystic who might be inspired to “compose devotional books”99—hence she will no longer write for a circle beyond her intimates. Once her life of pleasure in illusion has taken hold, even reading dwindles away, or as Saint-Preux observes, Julie “no longer studies, she no longer reads; she acts.”100 (It is thus only in a very specific sense that one can endorse Paul de Man’s description of Julie as Rousseau’s “best conceivable reader.”)101 She will act as a devoted maternal supervisor of life at Clarens. Her excess desire is met by an imagined infinity that suspends imaginative flux without itself becoming the ground of reading, writing, and action. Toward the end of the novel, the appeal of her life at Clarens, and of life itself, is no less surrounded by illusion, now fully aware of itself. For if Clarens is a beautiful idyll, by the end of the novel, Julie writes about the proper dwelling place for beauty: “in this world, the land of chimeras is the only one worthy of habitation, and such is the nothingness of human things, that outside the Being existing by himself, there is nothing beautiful except that which is not.”102 If Rousseau is urging his reader to live in the land of chimeras, it is important to observe how unreservedly he does so. He does not urge his readers to mortify the illusions born of immediate passions in favor of a

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life of true virtue (say, Marcus Aurelius), or of faith (Pascal). He does not whisper an assent to illusory customs or morals in order to acquire secure knowledge (Descartes), or to enjoy the simple goods of real friendship, learning, and the pleasures of the senses, while forestalling their pains (Montaigne). Nor does he suggest the good sense that pursues desires while laughing at their vanity, with acidic asides about bolder varieties of philosophy and theology (Voltaire). For Rousseau, the land of chimeras should be inhabited for itself, as itself, as the dwelling of infinite beauty against the constrictions and dangers of the real. Rousseau—who was very likely not an atheist—cannot resist going still further than Julie, allowing imagination to encompass everything, to place all that evokes beauty into the realm of imagination. Thus Rousseau, in an editor’s note, cannot help but amend the exception for the “Being existing by himself”—here, though not elsewhere, Julie herself makes the exception—by adding that Julie has made a grammatical error in her writing of the word “except” (she used qu’hors instead of the correct que hors).103 Again, this is not to say that Rousseau is instructing the reader in atheism; he has no interest in atheism. He finds it very possibly untrue and, infinitely more important for him, damaging to imaginative order and thus to general happiness. But he urges the reader to a revolutionary (and he hopes curative) indifference to truth and to acting upon insistent desires in the world beyond the self, resting all desire within the imagination through illusions acknowledged as such, to give order to modern imaginations he believes are seriously disordered. In this way, the concept of illusion will function as a stabilizing general illusion for people who are unable to believe in or to live happily with shared illusions that appear to bind them together under the mark of truth. Julie uses an appropriate narcotic metaphor—opium—to reveal the “medicine” of the novel, and Rousseau, in letters and notes alike, rigorously applies it to every fundamental human desire. Illusions known as illusions, Rousseau suggests, can also be beautiful; they too can fashion an equilibrium between desire and the real; they too can solve the problem of uncertain meanings within a horizon of founding assumptions. Announcing the concept of illusion as a functioning illusion may not be especially exalted for Rousseau’s nation of readers; it does not take them out of themselves as the work of Lycurgus took Spartans out of themselves and into a common unity. But Rousseau believes it is a stable illusion, which like Julie as a whole, is intended to address “corrupt” peo-

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ples. It limits imagination and avoids dissipation in powerful, divisive, and egotistical desires. Hence in his footnote to Julie’s thoughts on the land of chimeras, Rousseau called it a “harmonious” discourse. Significantly, in Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau defined harmony as the musical mode that deprives melody of its “energy and expression,” and precludes in particular the compelling expression of “strong and serious passions.”104 If the strong and serious passions can no longer be given shape through a thoroughgoing political order, they can be subdued by a revelation of their status as works of imagination, and an extended exhortation on behalf of living within illusions. Rousseau’s revolution is intended to change his readers and to provide the cure appropriate for them; but the ending of the novel intimates that the same cure has had a surprising effect on its author. It is hard to see at first. Predictably, Julie dies. One senses death’s approach when Julie has become a perfect Rousseauvian citizen: “my imagination has nothing more to do, I have nothing to desire; to feel [sentir] and to enjoy are the same thing.”105 Death has little impact on Julie,106 just as natural man scarcely notices his own death, in a world where imagination has no excess.107 Her death becomes instructive to the people of Clarens, as she becomes less a new He´loı¨se than a new Christ—the description of her illness and death by Wolmar is a pastiche of New Testament imagery and narrative.108 The reader is not meant to take this in earnest. She is obviously not Christ; her apparent resurrection is bogus, and the reader is intended to draw an analogy to the Gospels. Yet she is an “image” of Christ in a special Rousseauvan sense: she offers the redemption of imagination and its illusions against the passion—in every sense—of, or for, truth. As she is dying, she “realizes” that she has loved Saint-Preux all her life, throughout the years of her marriage to Wolmar (even as the reader can recall that this love was itself described as an illusion by both parties). Julie is anything but bitter to discover her illusion (which perhaps only conceals a previous illusion, or perhaps is a recognition of the truth beneath her illusions). At the end of the novel, the very words illusion and truth are increasingly blurred together; for example, Julie can urge SaintPreux to “banish at last his chimeras” and marry her cousin,109 even as in the same letter she boasts of her desire to live in the world of chimeras. In the end, she is grateful for the imagination’s ability to conceal the apparent truth of her love, for “this illusion was healthy for me.”110

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Near death, memory recalls Julie to a truth, or a remembered illusion, of love; either way, she expresses her good fortune at having lived in illusions free of memory’s burdens, free of a reckoning with truth that for Rousseau could only end in unhappiness and pain. The full account of Julie’s death is written by Wolmar. Alone among all the residents of Clarens, Wolmar, as the master of Clarens, is the voice of impassive if saddened observation, though one senses an incipient emotional and spiritual vulnerability related to his wife’s death, if not in direct response to it. Rousseau, in an editor’s note late in the novel, observes that a sovereign, in proportion to his power, is threatened by boredom [ennui]. In the end, Wolmar will ask Saint-Preux to return and save him from “troubles” or “pains” [ennuis], which are in part spiritual crises, but are also in part a plea from Wolmar to write and rewrite upon the imagination of the malleable Saint-Preux.111 This appears to be a satisfying end to Julie for Rousseau, but strangely the reactions of his most commanding, self-sufficient characters suggest otherwise. Neither Wolmar nor Claire, the two “strong souls” of the novel, are happy at its end. Wolmar requires, even craves, Saint-Preux’s presence, and for his return will owe him a debt, “perhaps more than anyone.”112 Claire is something close to a religiose fanatic, issuing commands to new adepts. At the end of the novel, it is not clear that the “master” or the preeminent “guide” are happy, satisfied, or even entirely their own masters. This ending points to an incipient transformation within Julie. At its end, the novel suggests a critique of the legislator’s position that goes to the very foundations of Rousseau’s illusory ambitions and his happiness. Wolmar’s and Claire’s restive melancholy at the end of the novel— especially their positive need for the previously manipulated Saint-Preux— suggests that Rousseau’s illusions have begun to more tightly restrict his imagination. There is a heavy hint at the novel’s end that the illusions of the Rousseauvian legislator—with his impassivity, his assumed distance from his own passions in the exercise of a hidden power for the happiness of others—are excessively limiting. In writing Julie, Rousseau moves toward the position that the role of the legislator is a constraint on his imaginative excess that precludes, among other things, the childlike imaginative fluctuations of a Saint-Preux, for whom Rousseau evinces an evident identification mingled with contempt.113 Driven by limits, contradictions, and disappointments in his encounters with the world and with writing for others, Rousseau will soon wish more

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and more to inhabit his own imagination without limit and thus without illusions. Living in imagination with ever less constraint, Rousseau will believe himself to be at once unique and to compose writing that would reveal the human as never before. At first he turns toward a pedagogy of infinite imagination, a radical move to address and reform contemporary opinion among his readers that goes beyond even the explicit selfconsciousness of illusion developed in Julie. Then, his imagination, driven by its own imperatives and by his increasing (both real and imagined) rejection by others, will increasingly seek not to shape, inspire, or defy opinion, but to ignore it. From the desire to live the truth of the infinite imagination, rather than inhabit its limiting illusions, will come a new and final revolution within his writing. It will put an end to the authorial illusions that, for Rousseau, had made it possible to address or acknowledge the full reality of others—and ultimately himself.

5 The Consuming Infinite

Rousseau’s Confessions begins with claims that his enterprise is utterly new. It is “the first piece of comparison for the study of men,”1 which will be “without precedent and its execution will have no imitator.” Whoever holds the manuscript should not destroy it, not only for its singularity but so as “not to remove from the honor of my memory the sole monument of my character that has not been disfigured by my enemies.” Rousseau will be vindicated, if not in this world than at the Last Judgment, where he will present the Confessions before “the sovereign judge.” He will testify to the truth of his book; his book will testify to his life. In his address to God, he will tell him that everything is true except occasional trivial elaborations to “fill a blank occasioned by my lapses of memory.” He will tell him that he has already seen his “interior” as God has seen it. God can gather humankind around him as he reads his Confessions. Each can then “uncover his heart” at God’s throne, and then “one can tell you, if he dares: I was better than that man.”2 In the subject of the book, Rousseau’s readers appear to encounter a revolution of its author: by writing the story of his own past to explain and justify himself to others, Rousseau has established memory as an indispensable source of moral authority, truth, and value, a tendency that seems to characterize all of Rousseau’s autobiographical writings. Yet this places the Confessions in an awkward position to Rousseau’s previous writings. Augustine’s Confessions can turn to memory as a source of authority and meaning for the very reason that Augustine’s memory is a legitimate repository of not only sense impressions and intellection, but meaning, value, and truth. None of this has heretofore been true for Rousseau. To further complicate the question, Rousseau records his confessions not only through speech (in contemporary readings, in imagined eschatological declarations) but writing. Given the history of writing and imagina135

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tion in Rousseau, drawing on the history presented in this book, the Confessions must broach the question of imaginative power in writing, in which Rousseau’s self is entered as an object as well as an exercising agent of this power. But given his own principles, how can Rousseau appeal to the authority of memory and imagination simultaneously as sources of value and truth? Wouldn’t the infinity of imagination undercut any appeal to the finitude of memory, and wouldn’t textual suasion itself demand imagination as its origin and medium? Rousseau’s opening lines themselves provide powerful clues that the status of memory will be contested or reconfigured in the text. In the brief foreword to and in the opening lines of the first book, Rousseau has already referred to memory twice: first, to the “honor” of his memory and then to “lapses of memory.” What do these references tell the reader about the function of memory in Rousseau’s confession? It is unusual to begin a memoir with a reference to the flaws of memory, but Rousseau does suggest that these lapses will be rare and inconsequential. Yet even were the reader to assume that Rousseau has opened a unique and unprecedented book with a trivial qualification, the lines that follow show that memory is not an order of integrative meaning for Rousseau that leads him out of himself. On the contrary, memory does not permit Rousseau to open to others, or God, even at the moment between time and eternity in which Rousseau sets his opening: the time of full presence, at the eschaton. For the writing of his memories have allowed Rousseau not to question or praise God, but to stand before him at the moment of judgment and tell him what he has seen of himself; and memory does not integrate his desires with the world and with others, but allows him to dare humankind as such to bring forth a single person who can claim to be better than he. Rousseau also appeals to the “honor” of his memory. This reference to memory is complicated by Rousseau’s assessment of honor. In his thought, few sentiments are more factitious than honor; as he observes in Letter to d’Alembert, for example, the expression of honor and offense (i.e., in duels), is entirely concerned with the perception of others, and thus public opinion, created and sustained by prevailing cultural and political orders of value and meaning.3 Honor, as a matter of opinion, clearly belongs to collective imagination. This assessment of honor, or reputation, does not undergo a revolution as Rousseau turns to writing an account of his own life. In the “Ebauches des Confessions,” which helped Rousseau to organize his thoughts for his autobiography, Rousseau ob-

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serves that his readers’ assessments of him and his reputation had heretofore been a matter for imagination: “as long as people only judged me by my books, according to the interests and taste of the readers, people only made of me a fantastic and imaginary being, that changed face with each writing I published.”4 Rousseau was in no way troubled by this relation to imagination: through writing, he could change his appearance in the imagination of his readers, at least in large part, according to his writing and his readers’ dispositions—as an advocate and exemplar of Catonic virtue, or of natural goodness in its premoral simplicity, or of the sanctified illusions of love and faith. Rousseau promises, however, to offer something more than another fantastic and imaginary being, or another illusion, to readers of the Confessions. He will tell the reader who he really was, and is. In the “Ebauches,” however, he defines one’s “real life” as one’s “manner of being interior.”5 It is not in every factual detail of his existence in the world (here memory will have its lapses) that his true self will emerge, but in an inside inaccessible to others—intus et in cute, to quote Rousseau’s epigraph in the Confessions.6 Yet what is this interior? And how can Rousseau represent it in text without illusions? In telling the story of his life, his own challenge is to inaugurate a distinct form of writing, “to untangle this immense chaos of such diverse sentiments, so contradictory, often so vile and sometimes so sublime with which I was unceasingly agitated.”7 The immediate expression of his being, the “manner of being interior,” his “real life” impresses itself upon him as profound disorder rather than order. Rousseau thus radicalizes Claire’s suggestion in Julie of living in a memory of imagination: here Rousseau will not order this memory, as Claire did, with an illusion of love undiminished by living mutuality. Rousseau will instead show that memory, the innermost interior of his being over the course of his life, is a record of imaginative flux. That is, Rousseau will truly represent the imagination as the source of the self’s truth, without limiting illusion. To do this, his style will eschew uniformity; he will simultaneously “abandon himself to the memory of the received impression and to the present sentiment” in writing. His writing is thus “sometimes rapid and sometimes diffuse, sometimes wise and sometimes mad.”8 Given the now venerable association of imagination and writing within Rousseau and in his reading, his inner “chaos” is associated with writing. Rousseau’s character, and its disorder, first appears through early reading,

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where he finds himself seized by “confused emotions” that gave him “bizarre and romanesque” notions of life that have never left him. His reading gives him a horror of injustice, but also an “untamable and proud [ fier] character.”9 He is, as it were, determined by the indeterminacy of a proud but infinitely variable imagination: “floating always between weakness and courage, between softness and virtue, put me in contradiction with myself to the bottom.”10 Even here, however, the supreme desire for happiness played a role. As Rousseau will put it in the Reveries, even in his early years he would no longer try to “search among men for the happiness that I sensed would not be found there; my ardent imagination had already jumped above the space of my life that had scarcely begun, as if upon a land that was already foreign to me, to rest on a tranquil foundation where I could settle myself.”11 The Confessions represent an effort to gather the past into this indeterminate space separate from life that had appeared to him paradoxically as a “tranquil foundation” that allowed him to remain “above” life. Rousseau puts it in slightly different terms within the Confessions: though imagination might be immediately associated with the future, and memory with the past, as Rousseau lives in his painful present (and as he writes of his life), the imagination does not turn to memory, but inverts itself by appropriating memory. As Ann Hartle observes, Rousseau claims that “my imagination, that in my youth always went ahead and now turns backward, compensates me with these sweet memories for the hope I have forever lost.”12 In general, Rousseau now turns away from illusory forms for relations with others, and into an interior space in which, through “fictions” he recommends to his reader a kind of enjoyment worth “a hundred times more” than those of “reality,” enjoyments that are “always in his power.”13 The notion that imagination would be a transcendent (i.e., “above” life) and happy foundation for his self (and for others) entails several paradoxes, none of which are apparent to Rousseau the youth, though the older, writing self will soon become intricately involved with them. At the outset, however, Rousseau’s romanesque notions of justice, equity, and mutual regard are echoed by his early life. Surrounded by his father and his relatives and neighbors, for example, he is happy in an ambient concord: it is only when he is put under a master that he discovers that this harmony “was only a fantasy.”14 At this early moment of disjunction between his happiness and an aspect of reality that challenges it, Rousseau places what is desired and good in imagination, as he repeatedly does elsewhere in the text.15

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Yet Rousseau’s record of imaginative flux is an intensely ambivalent one, as Christopher Kelly has expertly set forth in his book Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The Confessions as Political Philosophy.16 Even as Rousseau speaks of his character as “floating” and self-contradictory, he says that this has made it possible for “abstinence and enjoyment, pleasure and wisdom alike” to elude him.17 At other times, however, Rousseau can congratulate himself on the capacity of imagination to avoid recourse to the perfective faculty, by realizing desire in the world. His sexual desire, for example, tends toward a masochism and subordination that inflames his imagination but does not conduce to assertive action, and thus “has conserved my pure sentiments and honest morals.”18 As Kelly observes, in the course of the Confessions, and particularly in the early books, Rousseau is repeatedly given opportunities to live within an ordered community (in the terms of his more explicitly philosophic works, one that creates an equilibrium between imagination and the real through illusion and its attendant habits and beauty). He repeatedly rejects them, though with regret,19 because he cannot be content with the order he knows to be imposed upon him, that must be limiting. As Rousseau later remarks, “in all things hindrance and subjugation are unbearable to me; they would make me hate even pleasure.”20 This suggests a bifurcated intention in the Confessions. Rousseau can urge his readers to seek out a simple, stable, ordered community of meaning and value on the grounds that he would have been happier to live in one himself—even if for Rousseau these communities are both more fragile and more corrupt in enlightened Europe than they had previously been. For readers who are able to live partially within these ordered communities, that afford some happiness even if they fall short of citizenship, the Confessions will be at most a pleasing diversion. For them the text’s powers of diversion, and its general rejection of constraint in favor of interior desire rather than seeking satisfaction in the world may be, for Rousseau, the only help he can offer them. As he remarks in the Confessions, “the only morality within reach of the present century is the morality of the bilboquet.”21 Significantly, the bilboquet is a cup and ball game played by one’s self. For other readers, however, Rousseau’s incapacity for these ordered communities can be made their own as a kind of transcendence, yet bounded in its consequences. For in the Confessions, it is Rousseau’s distinction to have an exalted imagination that is able to liberate him from convention and custom, and most tellingly, at times from the desire to present his thinking to the reader, or to express any desire to communicate

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with others. He recalls being able to intoxicate himself—to move quickly from object to object in solitude and without constraint—as his most cherished state of being, and concludes with an ecstatic elegy on the joys of those moments: “readers, a public and all the earth, what did they matter to me as long as I soared in the sky?”22 For these readers, Rousseau’s imaginative flux can lead them to unsurpassed interior richness and mobility, constantly being formed and reformed, while stimulating their pride as extraordinary beings unsuited for the limits in which others live— a pride best expressed by movement and a turn to the interior. Rousseau will continue to vacillate between these imaginative possibilities—the ordered communities in which he could have been a happy part, his rebellion at all constraint—in different parts of the Confessions. What is remarkable, however, is not only what Rousseau includes in the writing of his life but what he excludes. For imaginative intensity and mobility (if not always richness) led Rousseau to philosophy and writing rather than a life as a simple citizen, or a life as an itinerant wanderer; for him, there was the possibility of infinite imagination desiring to shape the imaginations of others. If imaginative flux is to be an ideal, what of its capacity to produce Rousseau’s own philosophic arguments about imagination and its containment? In the Confessions Rousseau happily writes about his dramatic philosophic conversion on the road to Vincennes and the “effervescence” that sustained him in his writing,23 but he includes only a very vague, terse, and episodic account of his intellectual development—which must surely count as part of his “manner of being interior.” Rousseau offhandedly remarks that Emile is his “best” and “most important” book24 and that it required “twenty years of reflection,”25 but he never elaborates on the contents of those reflections. He claims that his principles are defined more clearly in the Preface to Narcisse,26 but he alludes to principles that are neither explained nor even named. Many of his brief descriptions of his own ideas are similarly hasty, almost cursory, and divorced from the methods by which they were made available to readers. If Rousseau invites the more ardent imaginations among his readers to identify with his own and to take pride in their imagined life, he does not want to offer any substantive or lucid account of the role that reflection and reason played in articulating and refining his own imaginative power in relation to others—this part of his interior will not be made transparent. In the Reveries, written for himself, Rousseau will discuss this dimension of his life, but he will not discuss his methods and assumptions about writing for others in a book that will be read by others.

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Furthermore, by writing of his ideas as creatures of circumstance—of everything from childhood experiences to fortuitous travels, contests, and promenades—Rousseau inaugurates another revolution in his own writing. Rousseau had repeatedly expressed both the desire and the capacity to write across times and places to philosophers based on his understanding of human beings as such—to write for judges like Plato and Xenocrates,27 or simply to write as one who “wants to live beyond one’s age.”28 Rousseau now presents his thought as radically dependent on time and place, and in this way, he inaugurates a psychological and historical account of philosophy. This is both a powerful disincentive to engage in philosophical reflection and a surrender of a philosophical order of exalted imagination into a flux that merges with its surroundings—a theme that will soon come to suffuse Rousseau’s writing. Remarkably, this psychological and historical account emboldens Rousseau to further describe the weakness and even the betrayal of memory, above all its failure to contain his great philosophical conversion on the road to Vincennes—one that so overwhelmed as he took shelter under a tree. Unlike the specific philosophic ideas about which he is vague in the Confessions, Rousseau wants both to recount the experience of their revelation to him and to have been able to draw on these ideas in his writings. Memory has thwarted both desires. In the Confessions, he claims it is hard for him to remember his revelatory experience because he had already written of it in Lettres a` Malesherbes. As Rousseau observes about this failure, writing consumes his memory, for “once I have written something, I no longer remember it at all.”29 Within the Lettres, memory is responsible for a far more profound failure to contain the cascade of divine truths that burst upon him by the roadside; here memory is charged only with recording rather than disclosing meaning, and it cannot perform even this task. In this passage the decades of thinking required by Rousseau’s best writing are absent.30 He tells Malesherbes that if he “had been able to write a quarter of what I saw and felt under this tree, with what clarity I would have shown all the contradictions of our social system, with what force I would have exposed all the deceptions of our institutions, with what simplicity I would have demonstrated that man is naturally good and that it is by his institutions alone that men become wicked.” But he did not write them down. His “crowd of great truths” could not abide in his memory, and so they are only “weakly scattered” in his three principal writings.31 Instead of offering what philosophical reflections remained or appeared subsequent to his experience on the way to Vincennes, Rousseau writes

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with a certain ambivalence about his desire to communicate his conclusions with others. At the apex of his creative “effervescence,” Rousseau acknowledges his own “illusion” that he could overcome the illusions of his own time, from its philosophical assumptions to the inequities of its social order. In the space of a few lines, he characterizes his illusion both as a “foolish pride” and as “the most noble pride.”32 But from what perspective can Rousseau’s pride be called foolish? Rousseau may regret the troubles his writings have brought upon him, in the form of political oppression and personal opprobrium, but this only testifies to the perhaps transient corruption of his age rather than his foolishness. What Rousseau increasingly regrets, without ever totally repudiating it, is the desire to persuade and beguile modern people to contain their imaginations, and thus to change the world he knows—either by undermining its own philosophical assumptions about human beings and their happiness, or by creating a factitious equilibrium between a powerful imagination and the real. For Rousseau—first fitfully, then more consistently, but never entirely—comes to conclude that there can now be no limiting equilibrium; imagination will not surrender its prerogatives over desire and meaning once imagination believes in its own infinity, as Rousseau (and to a large extent, his “century” do). His task was thus at once the product of a noble and foolish pride. The bilboquet morality within reach of his century points to Rousseau’s conclusion that a true eudaemonic equilibrium is possible for his contemporaries only at a trivial level. The Confessions moves into a deeper critique, however, when it suggests the ultimate motives for Rousseau’s own disequilibrium, motives that do not rest on the power of imagined desires to exceed the real, but on a refusal of reality’s uncertainty, an uncertainty that demands letting go of the control that makes equilibriums secure. This Rousseau cannot do, even when imagination does not exceed the real—a realization that comes to him in his account of a meeting with an Italian courtesan. Rousseau assures his readers that this particular episode will be a definitive account of who he is, and perhaps through him to know something more general: the story “paints my nature well . . . whoever you be who wants to know a man, dare to read the two or three pages that follow and you are going to fully comprehend Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”33 It is in this encounter with another that the apparently infinite spaces of the proud imagination become an individuating “nature”—that is, they are bounded into a form of isolated existence with distinct and painful limits.

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While working in Italy, Rousseau enters a beautiful Courtesan’s chamber “as in the sanctuary of love and beauty; I believed that there I saw divinity in it, in her person.” She is divine, because she meets all efforts of the imagination to surpass her; Rousseau explicitly instructs the reader to avoid any attempt to imagine her.34 Not only does the woman exceed the reader’s imagination, but she is one of the very rare instances of actual being that equals Rousseau’s imagination: she is “the most enchanting person of whom I could form an image.” Indeed, she is “perfect; she is as good and generous as she is lovable and beautiful.”35 Imagination and the real are in perfect equilibrium, not through illusion, but from a meeting between desire and its supreme fulfillment in the world through beauty. Rousseau resists. He thinks that there must be an illusion concealed by the reality before him. He lurches toward her and in an instant “a mortal chill ran through my veins.”36 He sits down and weeps, lost in a profusion of unspoken imaginings. Perhaps the Courtesan is too good for her position, and it is a tragedy that she is here with a man who has nothing; or alternately his “heart deceives itself” and she is “an unworthy slut”— or perhaps she has “some secret flaw,” a sickness that has made her less desirable—or perhaps she is of such extraordinary health that Rousseau himself is not healthy enough to be with her.37 In all these imaginary scenarios, Rousseau refuses to simply ask the Courtesan a question that might directly or indirectly resolve or dissolve his fantasies in reality. Instead he fantasizes two mutually exclusive, radical inequalities between himself and the Courtesan; an order of rank must lie concealed beneath this real mutuality, concealed by the illusion of egalitarian reciprocity. In either order of rank, the possibility of dialogic mutuality in the present does not exist, a hypothesis that his imagination confirms in the very act of relentlessly imagining these orders of rank. Rousseau starts to cry. Then, in a revealing passage, he describes a moment of perceived desire as the Courtesan walks “in front of her mirror,”38 which in turn allows Rousseau to try acting on his desire once more. The mirror is the only physical object that Rousseau offers in his account of his liaison with the Courtesan in her room. Even without seeing one another in the mirror, Rousseau remembers it and confesses its presence to his reader, intimating that not only the Courtesan’s observation of his arousal,39 but the possibility of an abstracted encounter or vision of her body is an indispensable part of his renewed ardor, in which what is desired appears as the meeting of two images rather than two

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beings. In his earlier failed encounter in the Confessions, with Madame Basile, there is a similar moment where a mirror appears to mediate between Rousseau and his desire. As Rousseau appears as an image in Madame Basile’s mirror, he receives a command from her that turns into an additional access of passion for him; though here too, there is no consummation.40 Yet at this moment with the Courtesan, at the very collision between his imagination and an actual present, he notices a minor discrepancy between the appearance of one of the Courtesan’s breasts and the other. Rousseau is once again imprisoned within himself, “searching in my head,” imagining whether she had some “natural defect” responsible for this oddity, finding he cannot help but “turn and return to this idea.” He is convinced that he held “in my arms . . . a kind of monster.” He tells us that “I carried my stupidity to the point of speaking to her about this.” The Courtesan’s kindness meets him where he is. She laughs and jokes with him about his nervousness. But Rousseau cannot be moved. At last, her patience exhausted, the Courtesan leaves him, saying only “Zanetto, lascia le Donne, e studia la matematica.” 41 Rousseau’s encounter with the Courtesan suggests the difficulty of an apparently infinite imagination finding any way out of itself. In the Confessions, Rousseau claims his imagination, “filling all voids suffices by itself to occupy me,”42 but an imagination that can fill all voids precludes their being filled by anything beyond imagining. Nor is this imagination entirely compatible with happiness, since as in his encounter with the Courtesan, a proud imagination, as long as it has any interested contact with the finite of the real (including the finitude of the self), oscillates between arrogance and abasement, mad daring and paralyzing fear.43 A genuine relationality to others is thus very hard for Rousseau, given his understanding of imagination. If it exists, it is easiest to relate to others almost as nullities that arrest motion without drawing upon the self, and thus that are not fully human in relation to the imagined self that associates with them. That Rousseau could describe his own companion and the mother of his five children with a measured respect and affection, alternating with abrupt and brutal references to her as “stupid” and as a “supplement,” is a direct manifestation of this tendency.44 But the loss of a possible relationality makes Rousseau aware that a truly exalted imagination is driven by a security and a proud power that may have promised happiness, but ultimately does not always allow for pleasure in a world of others. This occasions a regret that sears the

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memory and does not allow forgetting. Thus he writes after recounting his encounter with the Courtesan of his lost pleasure with her: “if I had known how to fully and completely taste it for a single moment!”45 Only an image—as in a mirror—or a covering that permits the creation of images, can permit Rousseau’s enthusiastic desire, but this precludes its actual realization in any present. This preference is by no means an isolated one. Throughout the Confessions, Rousseau prefers figurative and literal clothing and covering for beings apart from himself.46 He particularly delights in that sort of spiritual clothing draped over beings by his own imagination. While Rousseau was writing Julie, for example, he received a visit from Madame d’Houdetot, and he experiences her this way: “she came, I saw her, I was drunk with love without an object, this intoxication enchanted my sight; this aim [objet] fixed on her, I saw my Julie in Madame d’Houdetot, and so I no longer saw Madame d’Houdetot without her being dressed in all the perfections with which I had just decorated the idol of my heart.”47 For Rousseau, closeness, without images or coverings, requires a total unity of complementary opposites, an entry into the imaginative flux of one’s self, where two people could become one without remainder and without a dialogue that would necessarily either reveal desire’s imaginative disproportion with the real being desired, or force him to abandon his imaginary self for a self that risks being reconstituted by relationality. In keeping with his “century,” at times the first relationality that appeals to his imagination is an erotic one; but love is an illusion, and thus it is an impossible relation, unless different imaginations or selves could somehow be one without self-giving. He writes in the Confessions that his greatest need is to have “an intimate association and as intimate as it could be,” which can only exist with “a woman.” But he has discovered that “the closest union of bodies could not suffice for this; it would have been necessary to have two souls in the same body; without this I always felt the void.”48 Absent this impossible end to his void—for it is only the imagination that fills voids49 —Rousseau’s imaginative flux demands an end to relationality. He cannot “taste” his single moment with the Courtesan because an exalted imagination cannot exercise its assumed prerogatives over this encounter. Yet the Courtesan believes that Rousseau is unfit for her not because he belongs to imagination, but because he belongs to “mathematics.” The Courtesan vindicates Rousseau’s admiration of her person with the insight

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of these parting words. Rousseau’s fantasies are a distinct manifestation of the desire to experience a fully transformed and in many ways constructed reality, to which not only his fantasies but philosophical projects connected to modern mathematics—including Descartes’—also adhere.50 They tend to subordinate a responsive, dialogical reality that eludes comprehensive explanation to a project of construction and reconfiguration; the former reality appears as the inferior, uncertain, and inaccessible form of experience, to be avoided in favor of the possibilities and prospective certainty of the latter (but of course on questions of value, attachment, and ultimate meaning this certainty is especially elusive). Thus a life of imagination is not simply opposed to other modern projects of constructing the real; for all their differences, they can share a similar tendency to participate in nothing unmade by the mind. Yet if imagination cannot fully encounter the real, and also cannot write or rewrite the opinions of contemporaries—if Rousseau’s proud attempt to do so is noble but foolish—why write the Confessions? Rousseau’s conclusion indicates that his writing will have no effect on present opinion. In the spoken reading he gives of the Confessions in Paris, only one person in the assembled company is moved, and the general disapproval of the others forces her to suppress her emotion.51 At a superficial level, one can argue that in his reading, Rousseau is present, a living reality that interferes with the diverse imaginings in the minds of his readers, just as to a lesser extent Rousseau is present to his contemporaries in general. Rousseau continues to hope, however, that the future will be moved: his “name must endure among men.”52 In handling the Confessions and his dialogues, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, he takes pains to preserve his manuscript from his enemies, so that after his death each might reach receptive readers. With his death, the work of his own imagination will be more easily accepted; for he himself will be pure image in the imaginations of his readers, an image that gives “honor” to his memory. This is a very incomplete explanation for the composition of the Confessions, however. Rousseau’s desire to inhabit two temporalities simultaneously, to inhabit imaginative flux in the conjunction of present and past experiences and desires requires writing. It is through writing that he can transfigure memory into imagination without discussing this past with others or living in a present with others, or caring for the orders under which they live. In this way, Rousseau’s infinite imagination begins to detach itself from the limits of opinion and of life with others.

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Despite the appeal of writing as a way for Rousseau to encounter his own imaginative flux, he will not entirely set aside his ambitions to shape opinion himself, or discuss the manner in which laws might be given, for example, in his writings on Poland and Corsica. He will even, in the Reveries, act on his desire to create general happiness in small spaces, as in the park where he meets a group of schoolgirls gathered around a game and arranges with the game master that every girl will win the game and receive a treat for her victory.53 But these desires are less insistent and pervasive. As Rousseau says toward the end of the Confessions, he will now “undertake with enthusiasm a work of ten years, and abandon it without regret at the end of ten minutes.”54 In the Reveries, he will acknowledge that even when he was protesting against opinion, he still submitted to its “yoke” without perceiving it.55 Thus while Rousseau does intend the Confessions to have a pedagogical purpose, they provide not only instruction but matter for instruction. They will be “a first piece of comparison for the study of men” and a “book precious for philosophers.”56 Rousseau will begin to take leave of limiting illusion and enter an ever more isolating and apparently borderless imaginative world, in which writing and its representational, imaginative flux is the true self. In his revelation of what, to Rousseau, appears to be an infinite imagination, future philosophers will have a new basis upon which to explore and explain human experience. Over the course of his late writings, as Rousseau turns increasingly toward a solitary life of infinite imagination without limit, his writing oscillates, sometimes at the turn of a phrase, between a series of imaginative possibilities, given their first and quite vivid expression in the Lettres a` Malesherbes of 1762. At first, Rousseau wants his self to continue in imaginative flux, absent the use of an inter-imaginative perfective faculty and its governing illusions. Thus he writes to Malesherbes of going to an isolated woods—bearing no signs of human contact, and thus of “servitude and domination”—where he is alone with inanimate nature and its beauty.57 Amidst the abundant flora around him, he writes: My imagination did not long abandon an earth so adorned [pare´e]. I soon populated it with beings according to my heart, and casting out to a great distance all opinion, prejudice, all factitious passions, I transported into the refuge of nature men worthy of inhabiting it. I formed with them a delightful society. . . . I made a golden age according to my fantasy, and filling these beautiful days with all the

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scenes of my life that had left me sweet memories, with all those that my heart could still desire, I was moved to tears by the true pleasures of humanity, pleasures so lovely, so pure and that are now so far from men! O if in these moments some idea of Paris, of my century, of my petty authorial vainglory came up to disturb my reveries, with what disdain I cast it aside that instant to give myself up without distraction to the exquisite sentiments with which my soul was full. However, in the midst of all this, the nothingness of my chimeras sometimes chastened it suddenly. If all my dreams had become real they would not suffice for me; I would have imagined, dreamed, desired still. I found in me an inexplicable void that nothing would be able to fill; a certain sharp pain of the heart for another sort of joy [jouissance] about which I had no idea, of which I nonetheless felt the need. And still Monsieur, even this was joy, since I was penetrated with a lively feeling and an attractive sadness, that I would not have wanted not to have.58 It is a remarkable passage. The glory and beauty of inanimate nature is once more “adorned.” Rousseau takes leave of opinion and the passions— those forms and drives would limit or direct imagination toward an end among others. This liberates him to turn memory into free imagining— as at the close of Julie, only one’s fantasies are “worthy” of nature’s adornment. Rousseau’s self remains as both a creator and spectator of his imagination’s amplitude; his self takes joy in imagining to such an extent that nothing real, nothing desired in the world, could beguile him from his imagining. Yet the “golden age” that he imagines is drawn from “sweet memories” and the “true pleasures of humanity” that have been effaced or suppressed. Fantasy draws its content from memory, and the humanity that could enjoy the fantasy with him is absent and lost. But the very melancholy this inspires in Rousseau is itself to be imaginatively desired, for it indicates that the imagining self, though not entirely self-sufficient, can subsist on what is not present, on what requires no action and no relational reciprocity. It is a “lively” and “attractive” sadness, for it is a renunciation of that part of his desire that wishes to act upon his imaginings in the world, even in relation to other imaginations. This renunciation is in itself a kind of limit on imagination’s infinity and a cause for sadness. But it appeals to and enlivens Rousseau’s imagination because once accomplished, it offers the prospect that with this sacrifice, all other limits on imagination disappear.59

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Rousseau soon turns from the surface of the earth, raising his “ideas to all the beings of nature, to the universal system of things, to the incomprehensible being that embraces everything.”60 By associating God with a “universal system of things” and incomprehensibility, Rousseau points either to objects in the world or to his mental experience of the divine. It is a revealing and persistent tendency in Rousseau’s writing of the divine. In these and other passages, Rousseau’s general preference is to affirm the artifact or experience pointing to God rather than the divine itself—for example, in the sublime ideas associated with “the word” God in the Morceau alle´gorique. Similarly, Julie’s religion requires the mediation of sense and imagination, for “to imagine the immensity of the Great Being” is to risk her own annihilation. Instead, she “inserts sensible objects” between “divine majesty” and herself.61 Even in the Reveries, as he awaits a judgment that would vindicate his suffering, Rousseau’s reflection, or reverie, upon his belief in God will dwell upon the fact that he has once reasoned on the subject, and even if his thoughts were swayed by prejudice and desire and are perhaps incorrect, he is too old and intellectually feeble to do anything but affirm what he has once thought.62 It is to these artifacts and experiences that Rousseau repeatedly turns as signs of an infinite desire. Through imagination, the desire for the divine allows for the abandonment of self but not imagination. Hence as Rousseau turns to the divine, he says that he “abandoned himself with delight to the confusion of these great ideas” and then writes: “I loved to lose myself in imagination in space; my heart, squeezed into the limits of beings, found it too narrow there; I was suffocating in the universe, I somehow wanted to throw myself into the infinite.”63 Rousseau now finds in the imagination the possibility of losing the self altogether, along with the limit of the universe itself, though here he still shouts out to the “great being”—but without thought. “Imagination in space” is more than the limits of beings, his mind, and the universe itself can accommodate. More generally in his later writings, imagination requires that the self’s final action will be to throw itself out of itself (i.e., out of its status as a being among beings) into an unbounded space. But for Rousseau, this infinity is “true” in a sense that any determinate selfhood is not. The self capable of thought and action is a self that, with or without its knowledge, has placed limits on the infinite imagination. What remains of imagination after the self throws itself into infinite imagination in space? Afterward, Rousseau is able to “abandon himself to the impression of objects without thinking, without imagining,

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without doing anything beyond feeling the calm and the happiness of my situation.” He is at one with his present existence; he is almost the act of perception itself. But as he observes in retrospect, his happiness “testified” to his solitude, and his idyllic transports end with a familiar but distinct gesture. He rests on his bed, but he does not dream; he finds in a darkened solitude “a repose of body and soul a hundred times more sweet [doux] than sleep itself.”64 In the Lettres a` Malesherbes, Rousseau sketches an increasingly pervasive dynamic in his late writings. He turns to imagination to allow himself to subsist in imaginative flux away from opinion, passion, and others, and imagination’s direction comes from his immediate surroundings and the sweetness of imaginatively transfigured memories. He turns to a pure imaginative flux that dissolves the very notion of self. In this dissolution, he recounts moments of pure perception without identity, and therefore without a discernible difference between imagination and the perceptible real. The equilibrium between imagination and the real no longer maintains itself through illusion, or through living within an imagination marked by a living self, but through diminishing the self that accounts for the difference between imagination and the real. Perception now ideally emerges in a state where Rousseau “cannot mark the point of separation between fiction and reality”65 not only as a state of being for relations with others, but within his identity as a self. Throughout this imaginative dynamic, Rousseau wants both to escape the constriction of memory and to transfigure it. In his botanical activities, for example, he enjoys the absence of memory: toward the end of the Confessions, he contentedly recounts how because of his constant forgetting, he enjoys his botanical wanderings more intensely, and he says of this forgetting that it would allow him “to pass eternity without being able to be bored for a moment.”66 Similarly, in the Reveries he will delight in the loss of memory, and with it identity, after being knocked unconscious. In a moment of pure perception, he sees first the sky, some stars, and some greenery. At first he sees nothing animate, but only pure perception in the infinite expanse at and beyond the limits of the earth. It was, he says, a “delightful moment,” precisely because it allows his self to leave the limits of his being and diffuse into the limitless expanse before him: “it seemed to me that I filled with my insubstantial existence all the objects that I perceived.” He remembers that “I remembered nothing,” not even himself, including his name. His blood flowed away from him without his recognizing it as his own, and he felt a “ravishing calm” superior to any “known pleasure.”67

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Here Rousseau inhabits a state not unlike the one that he created in his fable of natural man. Yet it is more purely imagined: solitary perception is Rousseau’s own creation, and does not require him to relate himself to others. It is, however, itself a defined state of being to which Rousseau’s fluctuating imagination cannot hold. In those moments when Rousseau’s imagination is still bound to the limits of his living self and lived experience, he turns to a peculiar kind of memory—in which memory appears, as we have seen, transfigured by imagination.68 This resource is a dangerous one. The intractability of painful memories and the losses associated with them require these memories to be presented within the imagination rather than manifest to him directly as memories. Even so, they almost invariably recall the memories that do not compensate but punish him; the relational and associative properties of his memory makes it impossible for Rousseau to control it. For example, in the Seventh Walk of the Reveries, he writes of the pleasant memories associated with botany. Significantly, he describes these memories as ones he “recalls to [his] imagination” that make him “forget” human cruelty and his own sufferings—but the very memory of what these memories suppress returns to him as he writes, and he concludes that he has suffered “the saddest fate that has ever befallen a mortal.”69 The same sequence occurs in the following Walk, where Rousseau begins with a genre of “adorable memory” shorn of “misfortunes.” These adorable memories are of states of mind that allowed him to “forget himself.”70 But this quickly reminds him of his misfortunes and of himself, and he embarks on a long discussion of his afflictions. Finally, as memory becomes a resource for his imagination, the destructive relationship between imagination and memory intensifies. Memory, constricted to the needs of the imagination, becomes consumable rather than generative and loses its depths. Yet without the continuity of self rooted in the record of memory and without the order of illusion, imagination’s dissipation in perceived flux frequently appears to Rousseau from another perspective as an absence of imagination. Imagination no longer energized by the “object that animates it” is thus “dried up.” It no longer “peopled my solitude with beings according to my heart.”71 The imagination without memory, and thus without selfhood, is ubiquitous and absent at once, and is deprived of the energy that comes from the limits it had previously encountered. Rousseau’s turn to memory is therefore a kind of consumption of what remains of his finite self rather than a boundary for it. Rousseau compares

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the process repeatedly to consuming himself: in the Reveries, he says, “it is true that I nourish myself on my own substance” before ruminating on his past.72 Elsewhere, Rousseau writes that he has a hope for the future, presumably in a salvation that he has earned. Without it, he “would subsist only by memory.” Yet his hope for the future does not entirely forestall this fate: a few lines further down, Rousseau claims that his diminished imagination requires his “heart” to “feed off its own substance and find all its nourishment inside me,” and dwell in the past, several years before his present decline.73 Consuming himself in an infinite imagination, experienced as a force without energy amidst perception, appears to lead, however, to a crucial modification in Rousseau’s account of imagination. Rousseau’s abandoning himself to imaginative flux certainly resembles an abandonment of prideful exaltation, and thus it seems that the configuration of language that has motivated Rousseau’s thought falls away. He apparently no longer fears or desires, and thus, to some readers, he is able to perceive things as they are, without the excess of imagination.74 Rousseau’s own language, however, indicates the opposite. His pride has only reached the point where it no longer needs other beings, or a full self engaged in memory and action, to validate the superiority of a self identified with imagination (less and less through imagination) in relation to others. Having reached this state achieved by delivering himself to an infinite and thus quiescent imagination, Rousseau’s contemporaries increasingly appear to him as less than human. When he does feel sympathy for them, it is as a self-consciously imaginative act—his contemporaries leave no trace in his memory, but he can spontaneously feel for them as if they were “characters in a play.” In general, however, he acknowledges that his pity in this context may show that “pride is perhaps mixed in with these judgments” since “I feel myself too far above them to hate them.”75 Later in the Reveries, his estrangement from other human beings (alive, and with whom he can communicate) becomes still stronger: “I understood that my contemporaries were in relation to me only mechanical beings that only acted by impulse and whose actions I could only calculate by the laws of motion.”76 His turn to paranoia in his later years also shows a kind of inversion of the previously adumbrated imperatives of imagination (a phenomenon that Stendhal will later call imagination renverse´e).77 The fullness of a proud imagination believing that it exerted its hidden powers on his contemporaries (the legislator to Enlightenment) collapses into the conviction

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that his contemporaries exert hidden powers over himself (the universal conspiracy against him).78 An exaltation of self that compares itself to a celestial legislating power and a destroyer of pernicious illusions (“born” to rectify the errors of his age)”79 retreats into divine impassivity. He is “serene at the bottom of the abyss, poor unfortunate mortal, but impassive like God himself.”80 The inversions of the proud imagination alternately torture and console Rousseau. He sees reminders of the conspiracy against him everywhere, even in the faces of passersby and acquaintances; the benevolence of others is merely a lure to get him to submit, to deliver himself to their manipulative care. What he needs in order to avoid a return to thinking about his “afflictions” is reverie. With the help of a “happy imagination” he finds consolation in a flux that appears as peace, as gentle movement, rather than strong movements that demand attention with an eye to action, or a total immobility reminiscent of death.81 (Here as in Julie and the Second Discourse, Rousseau conceives once more of a quiescent imagination as an amorphous, liminal serenity between life and death.) Yet Rousseau turns to a barbed consolation: his reveries require no person or fulfilled desire, but they do require “the help of surrounding objects.” This leaves him vulnerable to his contemporaries once more. Rousseau, whose doubts about the perfective faculty are expressed in his earlier writings, is now even more painfully sensitive to its imperatives— above all its desire to profit from penetrating the beautiful surfaces of inanimate nature that support and sustain his serenity. He rages at the stripping of the earth’s surface by mining, where in the name of (false) “imaginary” goods, the “real” goods of the surface are ignored (that Rousseau offers these goods as real will be extremely revealing, as shown below). Here, one senses that Rousseau is almost catching himself: these real goods are themselves quickly presented as an aid to the making of aesthetic images—or as Rousseau calls them, “sweet images of rural labor.” For Rousseau it is the apparent ugliness of what human perfectibility wreaks upon the flora of the earth—and those that express their nascent desire upon and through them—that repel him. He decries the effects of the changes around him: “foul vapors of the mines, the blackened blacksmiths, the hideous cyclopes are the spectacle that the apparatus of the mines substitutes at the heart of the earth for greenery and flowers, the blue sky, the amorous shepherds and the robust laborers on its surface.”82 He finds vivisection equally unpleasant, and once again his imagination calls upon what his writing suggests is a fragile, surface image of beauty.

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The images of dissection are powerful, and to drive them away he turns to “glorious flowers, dappled meadows, cool shade, streams, copses, greenery, [that] come to purify my imagination sullied by these hideous objects.”83 Here Rousseau’s reveries move toward irony: as Rousseau turns away more and more completely from the opinions of his age and his contemporaries, he becomes more sensitive rather than less to the perfective depredations of the Enlightenment. But Rousseau does not turn to nature simply for oscillating movement with the elements, which would be available to him even after nature’s transformation by industry. It is quite precisely the aesthetic rapture of nature that moves him, and its absence that repels him even as he seeks to exclude what is without himself, in favor of cannibalizing his own substance in imaginative self-dissolution. Yet how does beauty survive the abandonment of desire and the diminution of the self? And if it must remain, why can’t his imagination create beauty for itself, create its present perception from its own images and imaginatively transfigured memories, instead of depending on the diverse nature he encounters on his walks? Rousseau had long struggled with the scope and strength of imagination. He never settled entirely on the possibility of its excess receiving lasting order from the passions, or from illusion; he was never certain what concessions an exalted imagination needed to make to time, to circumstance, to the imaginations of others and the limits of embodied beings. The various answers to which Rousseau subscribed are often in tension with one another, all of them pointing to his uncertainty about whether one could set any limits to imagination’s apparent infinity. This is evident in his struggle between a self that aspires to subsist entirely in imaginative flux and a self that dissolves in imaginative flux; but it was formulated earlier, even in his various assertions about the legislator. At times he wants to follow Montesquieu and assert that the legislator must concede a great deal to the limits of culture, precedent, and physical surroundings.84 Yet in other passages, he can barely restrain himself from declaring the legislator a creator ex nihilo, a power for which Rousseau repeatedly shows a fascination. Amidst his reflections on the legislator’s need to consult circumstances, he writes in The Social Contract that the political genius as genius is distinguished from imitators like Peter the Great as one “who creates and makes everything from nothing.”85 In Julie, Saint-Preux tem-

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porizes only slightly on this point: “it is the distinctive feature of true genius to produce great effects by small means.”86 Even as he cherishes the moments where identity and selfhood give way, Rousseau is still trying to account for the paradoxes of his own notion of an infinite imagination, and its relation to his life, past and present. He describes his imaginative exaltation and his withdrawal from it this way: Forced to abstain from thinking for fear of thinking about my afflictions despite myself: forced to suppress the remains of a happy yet languishing imagination, that could ultimately be scared away by so many anxieties; forced to try to forget humankind, who overwhelm me with ignominy and outrages, for fear that indignation would embitter me against them at last; still I cannot concentrate myself entirely in myself despite what I would have for myself, because my expansive soul seeks to stretch out its sentiments and its existence to other beings, and I can no longer as I once did throw myself, head lowered, into this vast ocean of nature, because my weakened and slackened faculties no longer find objects sufficiently determined, sufficiently fixed, sufficiently in my reach for me to attach myself strongly to them—and I no longer feel sufficiently vigorous to swim in the chaos of my former ecstasies. My ideas are little more than sensations, and the ambit of my understanding does not surpass the objects that immediately surround me.87 Rousseau identifies swimming in nature not as an experience of order but as an ecstatic experience of “chaos.” This experience was the necessary experience of nature for his imagination; for it is only in this experience of nature that origin and movement from a given point within space and time are arbitrary—that is truly without laws, surrounding Rousseau’s exalted imagination with an infinite plasticity. Yet this chaos is only apparent chaos; it is the “ocean of nature” which contains “determined” and “fixed” objects to which his faculties must attach themselves while he is amidst his experience of chaos. It is through these faculties—one must think above all of imagination—that he could “reach” these objects if he is not only to write, but to think anything in the midst of his ecstasy. Imagination allows for his reach; but it does not appear to account for what is reached or for what is reaching. Hence “nature” must not only consist in objects beyond the faculties (i.e., imag-

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ination) to which one can attach one’s self, but in a certain mixture of solidity and mutability in the self that makes it possible to attach his faculties, including imagination, to them. Like other faculties, the sweep and force of imagination paradoxically relies on an ordered duration of identity manifest in memory and nature to move within and beyond itself. In this late return to themes that had long been a boundary for his own writing, Rousseau offers a forthright, if inevitably paradoxical, expression of his position. Chaos creates the ideal conditions for the free release of imaginative power because there are no laws that bind the imagination from without, but imagination exerting itself amidst infinite disorder and flux is a nullity. Even as Rousseau wants to live in endless imaginative movement, consoled by consuming his self, he cannot. Despite what he had imagined to be the true state of being—infinite imaginative flux without the illusions of contact with others, surrendering himself to a serene and absorbing present—he finds life without others and the desire for others impossible. His imagination languishes through its very lack of limit, but still his soul wants to extend its own feelings and existence to other beings, even if Rousseau can say nothing of wanting to receive something from them. Therefore Rousseau increasingly writes about his encounters with beings that cannot stretch themselves out to him: to landscapes, to plants, to the absent and the dead. But what is this desire to extend his sentiments and existence to other beings even as he writes of escaping the limits of beings? Rousseau confesses to fear and anger among others, and to the effects that the injustices visited upon him by others have on himself, but fear makes him recoil rather than extend himself. Fear and anger would not prompt him to write so precisely, one might also say so gratuitously, of so many landscapes and sights of nature, nor would it account for the fragile joy he often finds in them. As he acknowledges late in the Reveries, his imagination no longer provides such “food for his heart.”88 The patient observation of landscapes nourishes him as much or more than the food he seeks within, and discloses a dark beauty shot through Rousseau’s late writings, above all his final reveries, the most beautiful (and not coincidentally, in sustained passages about inanimate nature, the most sober) of his writings. He writes of beauty in flowing water and trees; his lyrical writing here recalls the beauty of the nightingale’s song that had never ceased to move him.89 With his illusions gone, imagination extends itself and dissipates its energies, but beauty shapes his prose and the memorable

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encounters he records. The desire to experience and express the beautiful remains even when the desiring imagination, the putative source and medium of desire, has ceased to give shape to its own flux. This beauty marks a return, at the very end of his writing, to the order of the allegorical fragment on revelation, in which the original philosopher wonders in the midst of a “beautiful summer night,”90 contemplating a profuse, gratuitous, and enchanting beauty. He seeks to grasp the ultimate source and order of this beauty through reason, and fails. It is only after his failure to securely ground, explain, and account for this beauty that the philosopher turns to imagination, and ultimately to the thoughts and dreams so “flattering to l’orgueil humain.”91 This aesthetic rapture returns with renewed intensity to Rousseau the solitary, and his desire for happiness turns to a beauty dependent on what exists in perceptible immediacy beyond Rousseau’s imagination—hence his sensitivity to the disruptions of the natural abundance he finds most beautiful. Rousseau’s final persistence in allowing beauty to order and inspire the mind leads to a richness of aesthetic insight that eluded Pascal’s account of imagination and the author of Julie. For Rousseau at his most penetrating, the aesthetic is not at all simply within imagination or made by imagination. Even when beauty is subsequently referred to the imaginary, a mere surface hiding terrifying and fathomless depths, in the end its appearance orders the imagination and his writing. In his final writing, Rousseau discloses to his reader a complex and historically consequential relation between imagination and beauty. From the spaces of imagination, the aesthetic orders both outside and inside—as an appearance beyond imagining that attracts and holds its attention amidst flux, and as a legitimate ordering principle of imagination when all order is putatively consumed by imagination. Drawn to the beauty around him and glimpsed as discontinuous moments in his memorial solitude, Rousseau desires less and less to go back to his previous response to beauty’s surface, and into the dreams and historical illusions of a demiurgic philosophical imagination.92 But he cannot accept that his faithfulness to the beauty before him might not shirk the depths of things but open them up. The constrictions he places on the beauty he encounters, voiding its place in a world of others and its capacity to persist through time and beyond the surface, indicate that he cannot, any more than the first philosopher, venture his self on the promise of beauty.93 As he indicated in his allegory of the first philosopher, this promise is the intimation of ultimate order beyond imagining,94

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of the fruitful reciprocity of desire, ultimately taken up and exceeded by the real. Of that order’s instantiation in the world with others, Rousseau consigns himself to a dismissive silence—even if, in his isolation and his suffering, its absence constantly disrupts the beauty of his reveries, and gives his final solitude the sharpness of a scream. Rousseau’s imagination—and all its revolutions—would soon be associated with the revolutionary history that proceeds from 1789, a history that would severely complicate the prospect of imagination as a comprehensive origin of order and value, above all in politics. A postrevolutionary moment would meet this original prospect with an analytically penetrating ambivalence, and with it a wavering between yearning and renunciation at the threshold of imaginary worlds. Yet after the revolution makes Rousseau a figure of intense ambivalence, several nineteenth-century writers marked by Rousseau take as a point of departure an assumption that hovers within Rousseau’s late writings. First, however, there is a move toward painful renunciation and anxiety about the powers of the imagination, even as they are admiringly acknowledged—with specific reference to Rousseau—with great force. But then, above all in Stendhal and Tocqueville, these writers assume an increasingly awkward and even hostile relationship between what, since Pascal and Malebranche, had been thought to be the eminently congruous powers of an exalted imagination and general opinion. The freedom of imagination and the constrictive limits of modern opinion soon appear as the figures of opposition within the self and its encounters with the world. Through writing, authors of the most varied kinds labor to reconcile these bifurcated forces on the terms of imagination, opinion, or the real, upon the imagined self—understood in various terms—or the uncertainty of the self’s encounter with others.

6 Rousseau and Restoration: Imagination and Memory

“Rousseau and Revolution” has recently enjoyed a scholarly revival. As a point of departure, it has a powerful allure; between Rousseau and the Revolution there are, as James Swenson has recently argued, real, if maddeningly elusive correspondences and affinities.1 Yet this traditional and wholly legitimate subject has sometimes occluded (though not entirely obscured) an equally important historical insight. Rousseau is as important as ever after the Revolution, and his thought an indispensable source in the political and psychological dilemmas of an extended modernity, as well as the critique of this modernity. Rousseau was identified as the author of an exalted and beguiling—if psychologically dangerous—imagination soon after his death. In nascent form, a notion of this kind appears in Madame de Stae¨l’s Letters on the Works and the Character of J.-J. Rousseau. While in general very admiring of Rousseau, de Stae¨l adds that she believes “the imagination was the first of his faculties, and that it absorbed all the others. He dreamed rather than existed, and the events of his life happened inside his head, rather than outside himself.”2 Similarly, Isabelle de Charrie`re’s In Praise of JeanJacques Rousseau of 1790 spoke of Rousseau as an author “faithful to his romanesque imagination.” Charrie`re says that what she “admires most” about Rousseau “are his dreams,” for “we are so tired of ourselves and all our realities, that we need ideal things to rejuvenate our sagging imaginations and our dull hearts.” For de Charrie`re, Rousseau was “frank in his pride” and had many failings. Nonetheless, his writings allow her to take flight, or “transport” herself to empyrean realms.3 After the Revolution, it is precisely Rousseau’s association with politics and opinion that will make him at once fascinating and repellent to many of his most gifted readers. For many of these nineteenth-century readers, Rousseau cannot be read apart from what they assumed were the dis159

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astrous political effects of his rhetoric. In Benjamin Constant’s essay on modern liberty, in the psychological reflections of Maine de Biran, and in the imaginary world created by Stendhal in The Red and the Black, there is a shared desire to understand and to limit Rousseau’s exalted imaginings. In taking inspired sustenance from Rousseau’s writing, each author relies on a kind of spontaneous attraction for which he needs no encouragement. For its limit, there appears a curiously Pascalian (it would not be precise to say Jansenist) refusal of the exalted imagination that does not always offer an opposing order of meaning, so much as a pained if not always fastidious refusal of imagination’s possible dominion. This is ultimately true in part even of Stendhal, in whose literary polysemy one can best glimpse the promise of a deep challenge to Rousseau. It is this challenge that deserves the greater part of one’s attention to a history of an exalted imagination between Rousseau and Tocqueville. Rousseau’s account of imagination manifests itself after the Revolution across authorial and disciplinary divisions. Writing in the immediate crisis and aftermath of the Terror, Joseph de Maistre attributed much of the Revolution to Rousseau’s power over the imaginations of others. Rousseau, more than Voltaire, was able through “eloquence” to “seduce the crowd upon which imagination has a firmer hold than reason.”4 Throughout his critique of Rousseau, however, de Maistre has frequent recourse to Rousseauvian vocabulary related to the imagination. For example, when he speaks of the need for religion and miracles to found a state, he acknowledges that “these are fables, it will be said . . . but the fables of all peoples, even modern peoples, cover many realities.”5 The vocabulary of “fables” that “cover” the real aside, de Maistre acknowledges an affinity between his own thought and Rousseau’s account of the religious origins of politics, only to suggest that Rousseau stumbled on this truth,6 rather than understanding the binding legal authority that must proceed from it. For de Maistre, Rousseau has a general tendency to encounter the first truths of politics, only to be led astray by his “pride,” and with it a desire for intellectual novelty and singularity.7 Rousseau’s account of imagination fascinated far longer than the immediate aftermath of the Terror, however, and well beyond politics. In his Essay on the Foundations of Psychology (uncompleted but compiled around 1812), the philosopher, psychologist, and moralist Maine de Biran presents an account of the self and its identity. To do so, he claims

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that he must work against longstanding precedent that has insisted on making a single faculty of the mind a sovereign faculty over all the others.8 These magnifications of a single faculty demonstrate, according to Biran, a consistent prejudice: “the history of psychology proves to us, by a multitude of examples, that the faculty of imagination, always predominant, even among philosophers, constantly leads them to exclude from the legitimate field of knowledge all that does not go back directly within its point of view and cannot bend to its laws.”9 Through a critique of Locke, Condillac, and others, Biran argues that all the faculties, including the terms and events associated with words like “imagine, remember, judge, reason, want,” depend on “a sense superior to all the others” that is “the power to freely initiate and complete an action or series of actions.” It is this “primitive fact” that makes the self aware of itself.10 It is for this notion of volitional movement as the source of perceptible selfhood that Biran is best known. This self then arrives at its identity through “personal recall” of itself, a memory that, as Philip Hallie observes, does not “constitute” the self but is the basis for the possibility of the self.11 However it manifests itself to itself, Biran is interested not only in the manifestation or perceptibility of the self, but in what he calls the “close alliance” between “psychology and morality.”12 Thus the Essai turns toward the rendering of an optional dynamic equilibrium of opposite faculties within the mind: sensibility, for example, is balanced by attention, or a lively memory by profound reflection. It is the imagination, however, that requires Biran’s special care. It, too, requires its counterweight, although unlike the other faculties, Biran must give the imagination extended, varied, and ambiguous thoughts on its proper antipode. At first, imagination is checked by the “severity of reason,” but Biran, stretching his thoughts on imagination well beyond the concise parallel phrases with which he dispatches other faculties, argues that in a situation of affluence and ease, the imagination also requires quantities of “attention, of reflection, of self-command” [d’empire sur soimeˆme]. Even these three additional terms are insufficient, however, for an imagination unchecked by the discipline of hardship and poverty; Biran claims that the imagination finds no effective balance amidst a “multitude of factitious needs.”13 Biran’s ideas about the imagination’s power amidst general comfort lead him to the importance of education as a means to achieve the proper balance of faculties. Here imagination responds to an assumed experience

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of stable leisure; in these circumstances, Biran argues that there must be an education not only of reason but of all faculties, including imagination itself. Given the strong interest in Kant among Biran and his circle,14 it is particularly interesting that the problem of imagination leads Biran not to Kant, but into a spirited tribute to Rousseau:14 Here, I could once more lean upon . . . the authority of a philosopher whose works, justly celebrated, have had the greatest number of readers and the fewest equitable or entirely impartial judges. J.-J. Rousseau, often carried beyond the limits of the truth by his imagination—always so beautiful, so elevated, but sometimes so impetuous—that was the source of his talents, of his misfortunes and his errors, appears to me to have had some views as correct as they are profound on diverse points of psychology in his immortal work on education.15 Biran’s textual rendering of Jean-Jacques and his beautiful imagination makes the rhythm of his prose accelerate as he describes Rousseau’s imaginative accomplishment. “How he subordinated even the exercise of the external senses to the activity of the mind! What wise precautions he employed to avoid the premature development of the imagination!” Everywhere, Biran claims, Rousseau understood that “sensible ideas” only gradually give way to “intellectual notions,” and this makes him a great pedagogue, or teacher of pedagogy.16 There is in Biran’s assessment a perceptible tension between some of Rousseau’s accomplishments—for example, his ability to constrict the imagination—even as Rousseau himself was both exalted and laid low by his exalted imagination. For Biran, reflection and attention are the true means to attain morality and happiness, rather than imagination, and after praising Rousseau, he proceeds to castigate Condillac and others for failing to understand this truth. Yet strangely, Biran concludes the Essai not with a vindication of the mental activities most conducive to the self’s well-being, but with a rueful acknowledgment of imagination as a preeminent faculty of successful communication to others. His own departure from imagination will thus limit the efficacy of his own writings. In the search for true understanding of his subject, the psychologist must sacrifice “glory” and with it the capacity “to occupy a great place in the mind of others.” He goes on to cite the observation that glory belongs “in the world that the imagination governs.” To understand the working of the mind, to travel into the self’s interior as a true observer away from the world of imagi-

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nation, Biran claims, is to speak to “a small number of men” who have the patience and intelligence for reason and conceptual understanding. At the end of the Essai, and with a certain melancholy, he accepts this sacrifice as his own.17 In his later writings, however, Biran’s interior journey takes him away from psychology strictly conceived, to extended reflections on ethics and metaphysics. Here Biran qualifies but does not repudiate his panegyric to Rousseau, not least as the author of the “immortal” Emile. As Biran investigates the conditions in which morality, psychology, and above all the imagination become related problems, however, his historical gaze extends beyond the eighteenth century. It is now Pascal who emerges from behind Rousseau as both the possible source of and solution to the very problem of imagination he encountered in Rousseau. For Biran, Pascal understood the need for a faculty capable of genuine restraint that was its own source of vivifying truth, one that brings human beings to give themselves and transcend the perception of “shadows,” in order to affirm a “moral conscience” that exceeds the relative and chimerical goods of “passion,” “taste,” and “sentiment.” For “who has better known it than Pascal? What man possessed to a higher degree this superior conscience of which we are speaking? And how much the Savoyard Vicar, in all his sublimity, is far from these conceptions, so elevated and so simply expressed?”18 In Pascalian fashion, Biran comes to accept the distinction between intellect and charity as two different orders of being.19 In the end, however, Biran perceives a uniquely modern crisis that appears in the transposition of Pascal’s Christian apologetic into modern accounts of the self. Biran does not address how this estrangement from the real is already present in Pascal: Pascal appears now as a thinker of sober Christianity, whose account of the self does not diminish its access to faith. But Biran senses the proximity of Pascal’s radical interiority to the very estrangement from the real he had long found in both the psychological and philosophical exaltation of imagination, above all in empiricist epistemology. Once Pascal’s account of love is understood within these peculiarly modern modes of thought (that are in truth abundantly evident in Pascal’s own account of imagination) the hope of an encounter with the real becomes an illusion. Thus Biran writes: Pascal said: “We cannot love that which is outside us.” This thought, as he understands it, is nothing but true and elevated, for he understands that God, the supreme good, is in us; but understood in the

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manner of us moderns, this maxim overturns all the foundations of true philosophy, for it amounts to saying that we only love, as we only sense [sentir], that which is in us, that is the distinctive modifications of our sensing being. And as the same philosophers only admit other realities as the objects of our sensations, in loving these objects, we really only love ourselves. As to the ideal that we love—it is in this system the work of our mind; in loving this ideal, we not only do not actually love that which is outside of us, but also we do not love and we do not grasp anything real.20 For Biran, Pascal introduces a Christian anthropology that can cooperate (it must be emphasized that for Biran, it does so against its own imperatives) with tendencies in modern thought that make the self the “true” origin of experience. With this change, however, the self cannot grasp “anything real”—including the self itself, a phantom that cannot be “grasped” any more than its others. “We really love only ourselves”—but in attachment and sense, this must be limited to “modifications to our sensing being,” receding even from the objects of sense. From this self, meanings and attachments become illusions. Following Biran, it appears that the account of the soul found in the Pense´es moves historically into a modern notion of self that can neither encounter nor love the real. Despite this absence, human beings do not cease to love, but continue to love in a perceptual world composed solely of imaginary loves. Biran’s ideas on the real, the imagination, and love appear to be very far from Tocqueville’s writing, with its careful and often (on the surface at least) rather clinical attention to diverse political, cultural, and social realities of the nineteenth century. Yet through Biran’s insight into a characteristic dilemma of modern notions of self and its encounters with others, the central aspiration of Tocqueville’s thought can be understood in its full depth. For Biran as for Tocqueville, to communicate to others with efficacy and to win “glory” one must live in a world that imagination “governs.” Furthermore, although Tocqueville believes himself to “grasp” a reality, it is a limited reality, the reality of history as providence, revealed in the general desires of human beings and their varying and unvarying tendencies of expression, or at most the rules of these desires’ development. Yet even these real tendencies are estranged from Tocqueville’s own deepest desire; Tocqueville does not believe that his self-declared great love belongs to the real. * * *

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Few writers can be said to have inhabited the paradoxes of imagination and opinion after the Revolution as fully as Benjamin Constant. He testifies with a sober persistence to a certain lack of reality in his experience. In stark words that seem to come directly from Biran’s account of modern thinking about the self, Constant wrote in a private letter to Prosper de Barante that “one realizes there is nothing real in the depths of souls.”21 In Constant’s published works, this loss of reality is not presented as an estrangement from some sort of meaning available in the real, but as an often fortunate diminution of imaginative power, which once had the supreme prerogative to compel real belief in its own illusions. Hence Constant writes in De l’usurpation that “the word illusion is not found in any ancient language, because the word is only created when the thing no longer exists.”22 From the end of illusions, Constant draws what for him is a happy but revealingly Rousseauvian consequence about the impossibility of a legislator in modern politics: “no more Lycurgus, no more Numa.”23 For Constant, there is an inverse proportion between imagination and true knowledge, including true knowledge of imagination: Constant precedes his account of the illusion’s emergence as a word, and its disappearance as a source of meaning, with the thought that moderns “have lost in imagination what we have won in knowledge.”24 What is left is sometimes unappealing to Constant: “Well, we have no energy now. We no longer know how to love, or believe, or will. Everyone doubts the truth of what he says, smiles at the passion he professes, and anticipates the waning of the emotions he feels.”25 In this epigonic world, an unreal passion threatens to become an unreal self, and Constant describes the movement of selfhood’s dissolution in the precise sequence outlined by Rousseau in the Reveries. For Constant, imagination is the apparent “true” source of self, consuming itself and then dissolving into a vastness beyond the self, beyond the category of “Man”: imagination, idle now and solitary, turns upon itself. He [Man] finds himself alone on an earth that may swallow him up . . . the voice of the living generations must soon be engulfed by the same eternal silence. What shall man do, without memory, without hope, without any link either to the past, by which he has been abandoned, or to a future, from which he is excluded?26 The eternal silence of a world without memory, denuded of imaginative power and its illusions is, for Constant, often if certainly not always a sad one. Imagination’s diminished power is thus of lasting concern to Con-

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stant, and with complete and admirable sobriety, he doubts that the shaping powers of illusion can or should be summoned in anything like an ordered and enduring fashion after their “true” source is known. Yet Constant is, of course, not always or even mostly given to elegies that one would find more easily in Burke. It is all the more important then that in his struggle with the dilemmas of a diminished imagination, Constant in no way simply rejects the “knowledge” responsible for his sense of loss, or the language that marks the presence and absence of vivifying illusion. He affirms the possibility of a distinctly modern freedom through a vocabulary that bears the unmistakable marks of Rousseau and other theorists of an exalted imagination, in which their ideas, values, and meanings are reconfigured rather than repudiated. In an address to the Athe´ne´e Royale in 1819, for example, Constant made his famous distinction between ancient and modern freedom in which he contrasts the modern search for “peaceful enjoyment of private independence” with the experience of the ancient citizen, whose participation in the life of the state demanded the sacrifice of his individual independence. Constant’s historical typology was frankly motivated by something beyond disinterested scholarly curiosity; he wanted to distinguish modern freedom from ancient freedom in order to avoid a return to terror, a terror that found among its leading theorists “J.-J. Rousseau” who “in transporting to our modern times an expanse of social power, of collective sovereignty that belonged to other ages . . . furnished . . . disastrous pretexts for a kind of tyranny.”27 It is easy to read this passage as part of a general historical continuum in nineteenth-century French liberalism. Constant sounds like many earlynineteenth-century liberals of the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Franc¸ois Guizot, for example, argued that by 1789, France had committed itself to several ideas, the first of which was derived from Rousseau: “no one is obliged to obey laws to which he has not consented.” This is “destructive of authority: it is anarchy.” For Guizot, Rousseau exerted himself in a futile effort to escape this necessary consequence of his political philosophy.28 For him, the Revolution also failed to escape this dilemma, except through despotism. For all they broadly share in their assessment of Rousseau, however, Constant’s treatment of the Revolution’s alleged “author” reveals something more profound and ambiguous than anything in Guizot’s critique. In the same lines where Constant identifies Rousseau as the origin of pretexts for terror, he also declares that Rousseau was “a sublime genius

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animated by the most pure love of liberty.” As with Biran’s enthusiastic reflections on Rousseau, Constant’s textual rendering of Jean-Jacques gives his language a dramatically different cadence. Later in the essay, he seizes another opportunity to speak about “the metaphysics of Rousseau, in the midst of which appeared all the sudden, like lightning, sublime truths and passages of an overwhelming eloquence.”29 Constant’s essay is not usually read for its exclamations on Rousseau, but for its bifurcated analysis of freedom in history; yet the two questions are very closely related for him. Of course, it is true that Constant’s essay is one of the most important French expositions of a defining aspiration of nineteenth-century political thought, distinct from those of Rousseau and the philosophes: the task of periodizing and historicizing human experience. Stimulated by the failure of the French Revolution to realize and universalize a regime of eudaemonic, liberating natural truth amidst the contradictions of its “natural” aspirations and the opposition they encountered, history offers the prospect of resolving these contradictions in their rational distribution along a temporal expanse. This aspiration in part accounts for the procession of political figures in France who write the history that preceded them, in hopes of laying bare its inner logic and understanding what could and should follow from it. This was a task to which not only Constant but Guizot, Lamartine, and Tocqueville (and even a more purely political actor like Thiers) would dedicate a considerable portion of their careers. Yet Constant is not content with placing Rousseau’s writings in the category of inspiring errors. He had already qualified Rousseau’s responsibility for terror by citing his sublimity, his genius, his pure love of liberty; but he feels the need to qualify his criticism still further. In the lines that follow, he says that he “will be circumspect in my refutation and respectful in my blame; I will certainly avoid joining the detractors of a great man.”30 Soon he will add that it is not really Rousseau who is responsible for Revolutionary “error,” but Mably.31 He turns away from Rousseau; here and elsewhere he acknowledges Montesquieu for his detached and accurate “observant mind,” but cannot rhapsodize about him as he does about Rousseau.32 Most significantly, when Constant takes the side of those who oppose Rousseau, he tells his readers that he feels a “distrust of myself” [je suis en de´fiance de moi-meˆme].33 It is a crucial, revealing phrase. In this passage, Constant sounds less like an exacting liberal thinker and politician, and more like Chateaubriand. Even in his late writings of the 1820s, Chateaubriand agonized

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over his realization that his own connection to Rousseau was so intense that, as a matter of desire if not action, he would perversely consent to sever himself from humankind for what Rousseau appeared to offer his readers. In his words, he would “prefer to condemn humankind as a whole rather than the citizen of Geneva. What an infatuation!”34 For Constant, by separating himself from Rousseau and joining the opposition to Rousseau, he confesses an inner breach of trust between the self that desires freedom, transcendence, and that recognizes sublimity, along with a kind of revelatory “lightning”—and the self that lives and acts in his historical moment, within a determining temporality estranged from this sublimity on prudential and eudaemonic grounds—that is, in order to preserve a possible liberty and a possible happiness, without exaltation. In the renunciation of the “sublime truths” attributed to Rousseau, there is a sacrifice, not only in history but within his self, estranged from what appear to be its most exalted possibilities. Constant’s political experience of division can be resolved—if with some regret35—by historicization. But the same divisions within the self are less easily periodized in this way and allow for a revised psychological understanding of human excellence in history, most evident in its change of “signs.” Constant acknowledges that his division between ancient and modern comes at the price of wholeness and a complete trust in one’s self and its deepest aesthetic desires, a price that, as befits an exalted imagining, becomes visible to him in writing: “one could not read the beautiful pages of antiquity, one could not retrace for one’s self the actions of great men, without feeling an undefinable emotion of a particular kind, of which one experiences nothing in that which is modern.”36 For Constant, however, this attraction in no way diminishes the very real and horrifying consequences of attempting to reproduce this beauty of ancient texts in modern life. Constant acknowledges a certain internal alienation and uncertainty that follows from his assent to a divided historical distribution of human possibilities, but he does not waver in his certainty that destruction and futility follow any modern refusal of this alienation. Constant’s reading of this division, however, endorses modernity by developing an interpretation of modernity ultimately derived from Rousseau. He urges, for example, his audience to support prudently the universal task of the perfective faculty. Perfectibility in Constant is explicitly encouraged as the necessary means to achieve eventually the “intellectual equality” of humankind.37

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For Constant, the freedom of the modern citizen is at a great distance from the unifying eudaemonic stasis of the proud imagination that appears in Rousseau. Instead, Constant embraces the necessity of contradicting Rousseau in order to realize the unique goods of modern liberty. Yet in accepting this modern liberty, he also accepts some of Rousseau’s vocabulary and his definition of modernity as a kind of individualizing “perfectibility” centered on acquisition and emerging intellectual equality, through which (much to Rousseau’s evident and repetitive dismay) philosophy is the beginning of public discussion rather than the unifying source of public instruction. Constant is still not satisfied; his admiration for Rousseau’s “sublime truths” will not permit him to be content with the very order he has just described. He follows Rousseau once more in believing that there is in this order the possibility of pervasive public apathy, and with it cultural exhaustion. More specifically, he shares the fear that modernity will entail a radical diminution of public vitality, or energy,38 and though he exhorts his audience to engage in public life, Constant does not seem entirely confident that commending some prudent measure of communal public vigor entirely answers his fear. But even as he asks for robust civic engagement in modern nations, Constant cannot go back to the unfortunate amalgamation of ancient and modern he has found in Rousseau. Instead, he seeks some indication that this modern order will not be simply commensurate with the human, and that modern freedom can sustain a more exalted conception of human being than prudent acquisition and private happiness proper allow. Thus in a sudden modulation of tone, Constant turns away from Rousseau and the perhaps insoluble difficulties Constant faces in “resolving” Rousseau’s dilemmas. No longer seeking the happiness of human beings, Constant finds in anxiety itself a promise and protector of human greatness—telling his audience of the “best part of our nature . . . this noble anxiety [noble inquie´tude] that pursues us and torments us.” It is this anxiety that makes us “expand our knowledge and develop our capacities” rather than rest in contentment built on the labor and achievements of others. It demands that moderns pursue an endlessly receding perfection in political freedom and intellectual equality.39 Here Constant evokes the great distance that the Revolution has imposed between his freedom and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, including those aspects of the Enlightenment most sympathetic to the freedom he extends and describes to his modern audience. The French

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Enlightenment in particular provides very little in the way of Pascalian encomia to anxiety as a sign of human “nobility.” After the Revolution, however, an increasingly powerful tendency in political thought no longer dreams a stable, uniquely modern eudaemonic order grounded in universal if mutable natural desires, but dreams of tempering the consequences of an actual modern order, if only by withholding one’s full inner consent to it. In this way, it reintroduces, very often via Rousseau’s philosophical terms and categories, the Pascalian notion of “the world” resisted by a noble anxiety that resists an easy contentment. That said, there is no transcendent order in Constant to resolve this “noble anxiety.” For Constant, moderns must simultaneously accept and resist the very comfort and general happiness available to them as moderns, and seek to develop themselves in the midst of abundance,40 driven by an elusive but ineradicable restlessness. This restlessness, however, moves within a larger stability. For along with other conditions favorable to modern liberty, it is crucial that for Constant, in modernity general or public opinion actually increases in power—even as elsewhere, he observes the declining power of imagination. As Biancamaria Fontana has observed, for Constant opinion is a stunningly effective check on the destructive vagaries of political despotism, that has worked nothing less than a kind of magic in the recent past. In Constant’s words, “in the second half of the eighteenth-century, the weight of public opinion restrained authority. Governments . . . were stopped by a mysterious power, present everywhere and yet invisible, which traced, as it were, around despotism a magic circle.”41 Yet with Constant’s characteristic ambivalence, this opinion is both an indispensable guarantor of liberty and a new form of subjugation. This is a primary theme of Constant’s Adolphe, in which, as Tzvetan Todorov has argued, opinion serves as a restrictive power that shapes reality—often at the cost of decisive action and enduring attachment.42 In explicit defiance of public opinion, Adolphe embarks upon an illicit affair, but the continuous power of opinion ultimately saps away his resolve, destroying not only his happiness but also the life of his lover. For Constant, the agonies and magic of modern opinion cannot be separated from one another. Memory could serve as a source of transcendence within this regime of opinion, but we have already observed that for Constant, the power of memory is declining or absent. In Adolphe, however, he does mention an evanescent alternative “magic” that is equal, if only briefly, to both opinion and memory. He observes that all affec-

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tions “have need of memory,” except love. Love alone can impersonate the trans-temporal, integrative power of memory: it “substitutes for long memories by a kind of magic . . . love creates, as if by enchantment, a past with which it surrounds us”—but not only a past—for “love is only a luminous point, and nonetheless it seems to seize all of time.” In the world of Adolphe, this impersonation of memory can transform lives, but it cannot last. If for a moment it seems transcendent, it is also true that “a few days ago it did not exist, and soon it will not exist.”43 Constant’s novel does not, however, consider the possibility of a love that does not impersonate but enters memory. For that possibility amidst the apparently pervasive power of a distinctively modern regime of opinion, we turn to Stendhal. The Red and the Black begins (Book I) with a curt epigraph from Danton: “the truth, the bitter truth.” It is important that the bitter truth comes from the mouth of revolutionary experience, at once among its leaders and its victims. Stendhal, in contrast to the bitter truth, promises his readers in the avertissement a kind of play or game “of the imagination.”44 The reader soon learns that the first, if certainly not the only, bitter truth within this game is the ubiquitous “tyranny of opinion” that encompasses its every move. More pessimistic than Constant, Stendhal’s commentary at the outset of the novel suggests that it is no longer a question of creating a new order of human community so much as resisting the present one. Stendhal explicitly suggests that this order encompasses not only France, but the modernizing West, including America.45 For Stendhal, after the exalted tumult of Revolution and amidst the release of acquisitive passions, opinion has ceased to be a “queen,” as it was for Pascal and Rousseau, and has become a despot.46 Hence whatever is subordinate to it must treat it as tyrants are treated, making it alternately the object of propitiation and of revolt. According to the narrator, the French provinces—and later in the novel, Paris itself, and even the nineteenth century as a whole—live under this incredibly “boring” oppression that leads to a sensation of being “asphyxiated.”47 The aristocratic Mathilde de la Mole appears to speak for Stendhal—and in fulfillment of Constant’s anxieties about modern liberty—when she remarks that in her century, “all energy is dead.”48 Amidst the rural beauty of Verrie`res, the small provincial town where the reader meets Julien Sorel, a false respectability rules. Its citizens grasp for small pecuniary advantages at the expense of others, ignoring the regal beauty

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of the countryside in their passion to exploit and profit from its bounty, and thus to assume a more enviable position in ambient public opinion. Yet the novel, as a game of the imagination, requires that this oppressive regime of opinion have some opposition or competition. (The exact nature of this antagonist is at the very heart of the book.) But it finds its initial foil in Julien, a boy given to constant reading in an uneducated and loveless family. Soon after he enters the novel, we learn that his constant reading has given Julien a new faith: the Confessions of Rousseau is “the sole book with whose aide his imagination configured the world.”49 Combined with the allure of Napoleon’s writings, Julien’s reading has the force of a religious revelation; Rousseau and Napoleon together “completed his Koran.”50 Julien believes that all other books tell lies.51 Not only in the text itself, but also in his summary of the novel, Stendhal gave particular emphasis to Julien’s extraordinary affinity for Rousseau.52 The meeting of Rousseau and Napoleon in this early passage is not a fortuitous one. In them Julien finds the highest expressions not of happiness, but of an emancipating power that rebels against the “despotism” of modern opinion, even if only to establish itself at the apex of opinion. Given his reading of Rousseau, there is only one faculty strong enough to advance under and to revolt against this regime: the proud imagination. To say that the narrator identifies Julien as proud would be to understate the case; Stendhal’s Julien is proud as Homer’s Hector has a shining helm.53 Only his future lover Mathilde de la Mole rivals him for references to a proud imagination, which unlike Julien’s does not find itself converted to something beyond itself at the end of the novel.54 Yet if pride is ubiquitous and dominating, of what importance is Julien’s imagination, whatever has configured it? Here Stendhal insists; along with his pride, Julien is regularly identified as “a man of imagination,”55 or more precisely a man of uncommon imagination,56 whose soul is given in intense moments to “wanderings in imaginary spaces.”57 Wherever imagination is invoked in The Red and the Black, it is closely associated with the exceptional, the daring, dramatically beautiful action and movement, exultant desire and danger—everything liberating that Julien’s native Verrie`res with its common opinions cannot be, and thus his native place “froze his imagination.”58 Julien seeks a stimulus in his worldly ambitions in politics (of which religion is merely an extension) and in his seductions, first of Madame de Reˆnal in Verrie`res and then of Mathilde de la Mole. The question remains: how do imagination and pride make their dis-

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tinctive presences manifest in the novel? In The Red and the Black, imagination is the more elusive of the two; in fact, it appears to be the most elusive aspect of a person’s way of being. Pride can know itself, if only abstractly, but imagination knows itself much more obscurely and tentatively. The characters often attribute pride to themselves and to others, whereas imagination’s very frequent appearances in the novel are generally limited to the narrator, who uses it as an explanatory word that goes beyond the character’s own understanding.59 If pride regularly surfaces as a spirit of superiority and domination in relation to all beings other than the self, the narrator describes the powers of imagination diversely. Imagination is often blurred together with the soul, and as it will be for Tocqueville, this transcending faculty seeks height and exaltation.60 When it is most powerful in Julien, imagination is “no longer on earth.”61 Imagination can offer acute and rapid perception of what lies concealed within the real—thus if the acquisitive bourgeois, M. de Reˆnal, was a “man of imagination” he would have learned of his wife’s affair with Julien much earlier than he did.62 However, imagination—in Rousseauvian fashion—is volatile and as the narrator says of Julien, is “always at extremes.”63 In emotional terms it is the negation of normal spatial and temporal limits, moving “a thousand leagues” in “an instant.”64 Within the “tyranny” of opinion, imagination seems particularly attracted to danger: Julien’s first thought in a minor conflict with a stranger is that he must fight him in a duel.65 Similarly, Julien impulsively risks everything on seductions that soon no longer matter to him. For Stendhal, against the power of mass opinion imagination is an intense and profuse medium of free possibility in all its depth and amplitude—but these very properties make Julien’s undisciplined, postrevolutionary imagination an indispensable and uncertain medium of pride. Thus Julien’s efforts to be a daring seducer of women or to carry out his imagined duties to others often lack constancy and certitude, and require obscurity, shade, or even darkness for him to find his courage. Despite his imagination’s imperious ascent toward manifold forms of grandeur, Julien is, according to the narrator, easily subject to timidity.66 Most significantly, this timidity and uncertainty surfaces when Julien exercises a kind of diligent, prudential course of action without stimulating his imagination with striking effects. This is most evident late in the novel, when Julien is engaged in a pretense of languorous indifference, appearing to scorn Mathilde, who had spurned him, in order to win her back. Julien’s restraint comes at great cost to his pride, and here Stendhal

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develops the potential separation of imagination and pride with some care. In the first half of the novel, Julien’s imagination served as a pliant and apparently infinite medium of extension for his pride; once he is forced to submit to prolonged uncertainty amidst a prosaic routine and intermittent disappointments, his imagination turns against his pride. Stendhal calls this condition “imagination renverse´e,” 67 which suggests in the manner of both Pascal and Rousseau the implicit stipulation that imagination “naturally” follows or cooperates with pride, and the possibility that it need not always do so. Although the narrator immediately describes “inverted imagination” as the sign of a “superior man,”68 its primary effect is wild instability. Inverted imagination inspires Julien to a rash action that briefly recaptures his place in Mathilde’s life, but ultimately it affects a severe diminution of his strength. Julien’s inverted imagination, no longer flattered by fantasy or fortified by opinion, fills him with doubts about the future. He abruptly reverses his judgment on all his past thoughts and actions, above all in relation to others. In a move to which pride simply would never consent, he now assumes that in conflicts with others throughout his life, he has been wrong and he has failed, and “now he had for an implacable enemy this powerful imagination, formerly constantly busy with painting for him a future of brilliant successes.”69 In some sense, of course, pride is not abandoned here, since Julien’s self remains the locus of all reflection, action, and meaning. His inverted imagination frustrates but does not diminish pride, just as the autobiographical Rousseau inverts fantasies of control into a proportionally exorbitant paranoia. For Julien, the demands of the proud imagination significantly take the form of an attack on memory. The theme reaches a crisis point in Julien’s struggle with imagination renverse´e, but throughout The Red and the Black, Julien resists and flatters the power of opinion through the exploitation and subjugation of memory. Stendhal carefully points out to the reader that imagination and memory do not have a relationship of equals in Julien’s life, but of master and slave. Julien quite literally founds his success in the world upon memory as an obedient resource for his imagination. Because he is able to memorize the entire New Testament and recite it at will (without any faith in the words he recites),70 he leaves his father’s life of physical labor and becomes a well-compensated tutor for the children of M. de Reˆnal, where he subsequently seduces Madame de Reˆnal. At this early point, the narrator assumes Julien’s contempt for

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memory, remarking that a capacity for remembering like Julien’s is “often united with foolishness.”71 This is not to say that memory is without value among Julien’s capacities—it is indispensable for his imaginative ascent in the world of opinion. It is simply incapable, however, of conferring meaning or ordering existence in a manner able to endure over time. This subjugation of memory as resource manifests itself not least in Julien’s efforts at impromptu seduction—for example, when he recites passages from Rousseau’s Julie from memory in an attempt to woo a cafe´ waitress.72 But memory’s service is by no means limited to these coltish lurches at romantic and social opportunity. Julien later thrives in the seminary through his powers of memorization, attracting powerful patrons even as he is hated by the seminarians. Only a brief misuse of his prodigious memory, in which he passionately recites pagan poets verbatim to his clerical examiners, briefly hinders his progress.73 The Marquis de la Mole later hires him as his secretary for his extraordinary memory and entrusts him on a secret political mission because of his capacity for extemporaneous memorization74 —even as in a triumph of imagination, he manages to seduce and then, after many reversals, to win the lasting passion of the Marquis’ daughter Mathilde de la Mole, until she is carrying his child and is eager to marry him. For most of the novel, when Julien’s memory is not an exploitable resource and becomes fraught with some authentic emotional power, memory has a pronounced tendency to take the form of intense pain, for which present desire serves as a cover or palliative. During Julien’s early encounters with Madame de Reˆnal, for example, he feels himself removed from “bitter memories; for the first time in his life, he saw no enemy.”75 Occasionally, happy memories of Madame de Reˆnal distract him from his “black ambition,” but only very briefly (and it is worth noting that here black is associated with the desires of imagination).76 Later, memories of Madame de Reˆnal will appear briefly with intense but fleeting power, but as soon as they appear, they are effaced by passion almost immediately, since “all true passion thinks [songer] only of itself.”77 His subsequent lover Mathilde will stoke his ambition and torture his memory. Her many rejections beget “cruel memories” of the moments when she sought or reciprocated his affections.78 In a broader historical sense, for Julien memory often appears as an obstacle to both understanding and satisfaction in the social and political

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world. At one point, Julien, thanks to Madame de Reˆnal, sees society as it is; she has removed the burden of historical memory.79 This is not to say that the pains of historical memory as such have been erased: he observes that the memory of Napoleon’s greatness prevents young Frenchmen from being happy.80 To any careful reader of Rousseau, the exalted imagination’s escape from and subjugation of memory is a familiar theme. Yet in Stendhal’s novel, this relation of imagination to memory does not find the stasis favored by Rousseau, in which imagination consumes memory in reverie, but results in an ultimate crisis of imagination and memory. Stendhal at this moment summons an alternative that had been cast to the margins in the configuration of a modern exalted imagination. For at the very point that Julien’s future is assured—when Mathilde has accepted him while carrying his child, and he is about to enter the most exclusive aristocratic company as a well-married gentleman—he allows memory to destroy the imminent prospect of fantasy commanding the real. This past takes the form of his love affair with Madame de Reˆnal, who has not forgotten him. Madame de Reˆnal’s return to piety has led her— at the behest of a vindictive priest solicitous of established opinion—to cooperate with Mathilde’s father in Julien’s disgrace, writing of her erstwhile lover that he was an unscrupulous fortune hunter.81 As a result, Julien is forbidden the hand of Mathilde and the fate of their expected child is uncertain. The sequence that follows is among the most famous scenes in all of nineteenth-century fiction: Julien rushes back to Verrie`res with his pistol and tries to kill his former mistress in church. Why does Julien shoot Madame de Reˆnal, and why do so at Mass? There is an easy answer. Madame de Reˆnal has thwarted Julien’s ambitions, and his impetuous, exalted imagination desires satisfaction, to abolish the limit it encounters from the past within a temple of provincial respectability. But this does not satisfy: Julien could well have beguiled Mathilde into accepting his attentions despite these revelations and, as he had done before, explained away his own behavior to her or even her father with some ingratiating or abrasive falsehood.82 With his education and knowledge of society, he could even have pursued another of his many fantasies of success, profligate in their incoherence and mutual exclusivity.83 But Julien’s exalted imagination no longer wants to surmount or subjugate memory—the past that constantly, “cruelly” impinges upon his diverse and incoherent dreams of a magnificent future—but rather to confront it directly and destroy it, in the form of a body whose very

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existence has thwarted him. This body, however, is actually two bodies: it is at once the body of the one person he loves, Madame de Reˆnal, and the body of Christ. This may sound rather stark at first reading; but for Stendhal as for Tocqueville, Christ and Christianity appear as the original—if not the only—imagination-destroying memory, the adversary of an exalted imagination. Stendhal emphatically underlines this point in The Red and the Black by having Julien fire his gun into the nave of the church during transubstantiation, when the priest elevates the Host84—and to shoot at the very moment of sacrifice: “this is my body, which will be given up for you.” This is only a few seconds away from the proclamation of the Gospel words to the congregation: “this is my blood . . . do this in memory of me.” It is at this moment—as the priest presides over sacrificial memory made flesh, as the injunction to act in memory approaches with the wine, as Madame de Reˆnal lowers her head in reverence—that she no longer becomes visible to Julien: she is “almost entirely hidden by the folds of her shawl.” Now as before, a half-obscurity, a move to darkness, allows Julien’s imagination to overcome its inhibitions and act upon its desires in the absence of a dialogic other, without a visible face able to look at and speak back to him. He fires his gun, “and missed; he fired a second shot, she fell.”85 Yet here something unaccountable happens. This obscurity that permits the imagination to act immediately turns on itself. The darkness that had heretofore allowed Julien to act within his imaginings was one in which another person was partially or totally hidden from him. But moments after Julien fires his gun, he himself is placed in shadow away from others—quite literally in the darkness of a prison cell, but more deeply still under the shadow of his possible death by execution, where he is in turn “the shadow of himself.”86 In this shadow of his imaginary self, in which the black night of imagination no longer encompasses the world without himself but simply his self, Julien’s imagination quickly ceases to be an exalted imagination, and his memory ceases to be an exploitable resource and a constant obstacle. Julien begins a turn toward a memory that participates in an encounter with transcendent meaning and value beyond imagination. Once he is truly aware of death, Julien’s ambitions abruptly disappear. With the end of his compulsive fantasies, Mathilde no longer stimulates his pride and his fantasies of the future; writing her bores him.87 He begs

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her to stay away from him and is irritated by her insistent visits and importunings. Mathilde, it is said, has an “exalted and courageous imagination,” but Julien now has the lucidity to recognize that in its pride, Mathilde’s elevated soul always requires the “idea of a public and of others,”88 in which, as the novel’s conclusion indicates, others appear as an audience for herself. Even her defiance and disdain of others is in fact a performance for them. (Thus he intimates that an exalted imagination’s contempt for opinion is only a symptom of imagination’s dependence upon it.) Julien, in contrast to Mathilde, now finds it difficult to acknowledge public opinion even to express his contempt for it, or to seek the approval of anyone whose influence on opinion could alter his fate. He acquires a thoroughgoing disgust with the possibility of justice and law in the world: the notion of a comprehensive law itself, which had occasionally inspired his political passions and impetuous rhetoric in the past, simply falls away. He concludes that there is no natural law, or as he puts it, “there is nothing natural but the strength of the lion, who is hungry and cold— in a word, need.” Julien rejects the principle of legitimacy or natural law as an abstraction; he reserves the word “just” for describing his own impending death.89 An important bifurcation is evident in this passage. Julien renounces the public, politics, and the world of anonymous others in opinion. The question of meaning and nature in a communal or political world is nonsensical to him. His rejection of all his previous ambitions and of any natural law embodies a kind of near-nihilism that no doubt made Stendhal attractive to Nietzsche; this is the part of Julien that said “each for himself in this desert of egoism called life.”90 But when Julien’s ambition and the idea of a public vanish, acknowledging the “desert” of life, Julien embarks on a decidedly anti-Nietzschean and anti-Rousseauvian course. He deserts this denuded space rather than offering a eudaemonic aesthetic that “peoples” or “covers” it (Rousseau) or an aesthetic of cruelty that “transvalues” or “overcomes” it (Nietzsche) with imaginative power. Julien also renounces the imaginative power necessary to sustain the illusions about himself and his future in the “desert of life” necessary to secure his acquittal. This very refusal, however, results in an encounter with a deep order of the soul that ultimately overcomes his fear of death and the nullity of an unimagined self. Memory returns triumphant, if only in a flash of time. Julien’s memory, no longer described as “cruel,” turns repeatedly to

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memories of Vergy or Verrie`res.91 He “never” thought of his success at Paris; he was “bored by it.”92 Julien thinks of Danton, but now he thinks not of Danton’s revolutionary exploits, but above all of Danton’s memory of his wife as he climbs the scaffold, accepting with this memory that he might have attained the greatness of Danton, but promptly accepting that for him this greatness will remain only a “perhaps.”93 There is in this a letting go of the self in the eyes of others, as well as a serene acceptance of the discrepancy between the longstanding desires of his imagination and the real. Julien is preparing for a transformation; he feels a new “passion” that he calls “remorse” for having (as he believes at this point) killed Madame de Reˆnal.94 This passion does not, as the narrator suggested earlier, “think only of itself”95 and its future. It is explicitly directed toward another in memory rather than in anticipation; thus Stendhal describes it as emerging from the “ashes” of his ambition,96 bleached white by the flames of sacrifice. Once Madame de Reˆnal visits him, wounded but alive, her love begins a more complete transformation. There is a confrontation between the memory of imaginative violence and the endurance of love in memory. Through it, Julien comes to the realization that “the person whose life I wanted to take will be the only one who will sincerely mourn my death.”97 Julien, no longer imitating Danton or Napoleon, experiences an extraordinary emotion. He no longer senses “the drunkenness of love” but “extreme gratitude,” for he “was coming to perceive, for the first time, the extent of the sacrifice that she had made for him.”98 Just as he failed to kill Madame de Reˆnal and is glad to have failed, so he has happily failed to close off the sacrificial economy of memory in his life. Of course, it should be said that the love between Julien and Madame de Reˆnal at the end of the novel is only made possible because of an earlier epoch of “pure” imagination. Imagination in The Red and the Black makes the attachment possible, and the connection between imagination and memory remains terminally ambiguous in Stendhal, as it is in the late Rousseau. Yet within this ambiguity, the emphasis of the relation is entirely different. Stendhal does not sanctify imaginings in his memory as fantastic possibility undefiled by the treason of the real (as Rousseau does in his autobiographical writings, or in Julie’s deathbed declaration that “this illusion [of loving her husband instead of Saint-Preux] was healthy for me”99), but as realized imagining sanctified by real sacrifice, and the reciprocal gratitude it inspires in the one who recognizes the sacrifice of

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the beloved. Julien’s seduction of Madame de Reˆnal owes its existence to a lively imagination and its pseudo-Napoleonic sense of a seductive “duty,” which compels the young Julien to overcome his boyish inhibitions toward an older woman. But the meaning of their love, unlike Rousseau’s loves, resoundingly affirms the limiting forms of temporality and alterity rather than fleeing from them. Stendhal took pains to describe Julien’s puerile psychology of seduction at the outset, making the contrast to the end of the novel still sharper. This contrast indicates a subtle reconciliation between memory and imagination. The origin of Julien and Madame de Reˆnal’s authentic earthly love cannot be separated from imagination as Stendhal understands it. Nor can it, as genuine love, be reduced to it; it relies upon the memory of imagination to transform it. Imagination does not appear in their love as a resource to be “used” by memory; imagination in a certain sense opens the way to a temporal reality that in turn opens the way for an authentically relational memory to confer value generously, even gratuitously, upon others. This inverts the relationship between memory and imagination that had heretofore prevailed in the novel. Now Julien “daydreams” about Madame de Reˆnal before she visits him, but dreams in the absence of reality do not satisfy him.100 When she returns to him, he is joyfully engaged with the present. In Stendhal’s reading, memory finds the deepest love in returning the violence of betrayal and denunciation with mutual kindness and forgiveness. It is the inverse proportion between the expansion of the proud imagination and the gratuitous, unjustified love it was given in return that places love outside of imagined time’s heedless movement and draws it from a source deeper than imagined desire. In this way, Julien slides out of Biran’s account of a self-dissolving spiral of inward sensation and encounters what is beyond his imagination, affirming and distinguishing the self from imagination. Julien sees this order of love and inhabits it, if only briefly, with Madame de Reˆnal. But of course he fired his pistol in the presence of two remembered bodies in the Church of Verrie`res. Yet Julien’s imaginative violence only reaches through to a genuine and deep erotic love. Unlike his reunion with Madame de Reˆnal, an order of memory that would both sustain and exceed the erotic is only tentatively within his grasp. The imagination turns to memory, but this power of memory still works largely—though not entirely—within the circumference of an eroticized imagination.

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As Julien begins to think passionately about God, he is not sure whether he requires the love of God or Madame de Reˆnal. Appropriately, he seeks the God of Fe´nelon or Voltaire—a God of traditional theology at least in definition, for he is “just, good, infinite”—who nonetheless transcends the pervasive hypocrisy of the priests around him and biblical tales of vengeance.101 Julien embarks on an ambivalent but sincere search for an infinite understood in memory, even as Julien’s reading continues to configure his imagination and gives a profound variability to his seeking, from the Gospels to Voltairean Deism (a Deism that, unlike Rousseau’s, is not rigorously indifferent to its own veracity). Within his spiritual wanderings, the question of the divine that guides them emerges only within the spaces of memory, in which Julien’s search for the divine uncertainly moves. Madame de Reˆnal at this point reveals that despite her former piety, she too lives under a similar limit: she confesses that she feels for Julien what should be reserved for God.102 Throughout the book, faith is configured in precisely this way—as the force of reserve that turns away from rather than integrating and ordering the whole of experience. This tendency is most evident within the novel through Julien’s sometime mentor, the “Jansenist” Father Pirard. Father Pirard is Julien’s least selfish paternal figure, especially in comparison to Julien’s actual father. He very often sees the world he inhabits without imagination distorting his perceptions. Thus he completely understands Julien’s enormous and largely imaginary pride, with all its attendant fragility, remarking to the Marquis de la Mole that Julien “will be of no use if one scares off his pride; then you will make him stupid.”103 Julien, in turn, is surprised and impressed by Pirard and other Jansenists, who actually live by the convictions they profess. Yet for all his insight and rectitude, Pirard is spiritually fastidious rather than generous. He both fears and avoids an engagement in the world of living beings. Thus Pirard feels “a sort of religious dread” [terreur religieuse] when he supports Julien, or in any way finds that he “was meddling so directly in the fate of another.”104 Pirard’s Jansenist faith seems removed from any kind of joy, and Stendhal’s narrator returns to this point repeatedly: “bilious, Jansenist, and believing in the duty of Christian charity, his life in the world was a battle.”105 Julien’s judgment on this question seems to echo the narrator’s. He considers turning to Pirard for advice as his moment of crisis between memory and imagination approaches. He is reluctant to do so because “his [Pirard’s] spirit has been shrunk by Jansenism.”106 In pas-

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sages like these, the possibility that the relationality of memory can authentically integrate and reconcile the finite and the infinite is presented as an impossibility. As the ultimate source or end of love remains ambiguous for Julien, it is at this moment—when he sees himself and another properly in an order of sacrificial love—that Julien is at last and at once happy and free. He is not precisely in a singular present, nor is he living in remembrance of past happiness as something removed from his present self. Rather, he sees the past properly through an act of memory that defines the past and the present as a unity whose truth is at once progressively and retrospectively revealed through gratitude. Thus he confesses to Madame de Reˆnal that “once . . . when I could have been so happy during our walks in the woods of Vergy, an ardent ambition carried my soul into imaginary countries . . . no, I would be dead without knowing happiness, if you had not come to see me in this prison.” With this happiness of memory—in which the power of imagination is merely a distraction—he goes to the scaffold. In the days before his death, his impending fate inspires the imaginations of the young women who have followed his story. But as he approaches death, he finds that “the sweetest moments that he had found once in the woods of Vergy came back to his mind in a crowd with an extreme energy.”107 Julien dies, having at least experienced the “energy” whose absence in the nineteenth century had been repeatedly announced by the narrator and the characters of the novel. But Mathilde knows nothing of a present and past that fulfill one another, even in a moment: she uses Julien’s death to impose a fantasy on his decapitated corpse (that Mathilde’s imagined world is a “dead” world, without dialogue or surprise, should be no surprise to readers of Rousseau) that exploits her cherished memory of the morbid love between Marguerite de Navarre and Boniface de la Mole during the tumult of the Wars of Religion. Mathilde kisses Julien’s severed head before Julien’s friend Fouque´, in a ghoulish reenactment of a historical legend before a spectator, in which memory is a copied performance rather than a gift of participatory gratitude.108 Unlike the Gospel injunction uttered before the raising of the transubstantiated Host— which insists on memory as the form of an active and cooperative futurity—Mathilde can only memorialize for a passive audience. Stendhal underlines the contrast between Mathilde and Madame de Reˆnal in these closing scenes: while Mathilde performs with her beloved’s corpse as a prop, Madame de Reˆnal dies three days later embracing her children.

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Madame de Reˆnal spends her love to her last moment, while Mathilde fails to escape her consuming “amour de teˆte.”109 One person’s future however, remains, unresolved by events: what of Julien’s child with Mathilde? His uncertain fate after Julien and Madame de Reˆnal have died indicates that the order of memory is, in the world of Stendhal, no longer a secure order of action in the world. Memory indeed returns as “extreme energy,” but it is an energy that cannot confidently generate its continuity in time—it can only emerge from behind imagination’s tyranny as death approaches across a desert of illusory common meanings. Julien’s pistol, fired before the command “do this in memory of me,” points to the conditions under which his child, if he lives, must live. Action formed by sacrificial love in memory is exactly what does not give form to lived time in The Red and the Black, even if an understanding of this love flourishes briefly, at the threshold of death. Julien gestures toward securing the fidelity of memory rather than the goods of imagination for his child, realizing that though once he sought every advantage for his offspring, the truly needful advantage is that in the future Madame de Reˆnal will love his son and Mathilde “will have forgotten him.”110 But Julien’s child will not benefit from the love Madame de Reˆnal extended to her own children, and given the reader’s information—that Madame de Reˆnal dies “three days” after Julien—her end appears to be an excessive gesture toward another sacrifice of love, but without redemption. In Stendhal, the understanding and value conferred by memory are at once the source of the most profound happiness and freedom. This psychology of memory, however, is written through a Pascalian revision that confirms the sovereignty of imagination in the world of others, and with it law, generative desire, and action. Under this sovereignty, the order of love is subject to an extreme skepticism about the promise of its engaging that sovereignty in the world on any terms other than capitulation and corruption. Here the Pascalian break between a fallen creation and a remote and removed hidden God finds itself written into the imaginary world of the novel. Yet Stendhal’s The Red and the Black is a novel—a “game of imagination”—that uncovers the nature of life in the world as a novel or as the play of imagination. This is why at its end both Madame de Reˆnal and Julien refer to the events that have shaped their lives together as a novel.111 Whatever death enables one to understand at the end of the novel of life, the deepest “bitter truth” of Danton’s epigraph is that under the powers

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of “imagination and opinion” the truths of memory are not or are no longer a living and continuous truth but a fugitive truth that appears in flashes of time. Tocqueville’s sensitivity to the play of “tyranny” and “liberation” in imagination and opinion is every bit as penetrating as Stendhal’s, if by no means identical in its focus or conclusions. He, too, will find in the French Revolution a tantalizing limit that has imposed on his century a radical finitude on an exalted and proud imagination. Yet on the question of memory as an energizing source of meaning within the real that can extend beyond a purely private and noncontinuous space, Tocqueville agrees entirely with Stendhal. For Tocqueville, the order of memory is often feeble and without energy. In his writing, the survival of freedom itself demands some mediation in the conflict between the exalted imagination and modern opinion—a conflict that ultimately demands a sacrifice of devotion to his own love in the name of justice and truth. In Biran, Constant, and Stendhal, the possibilities of imagination in Rousseau became an inescapable source of inspired fascination and of constant critique and revision. This anguished ambivalence toward an exalted imagination appeared not just in the writing of political thought and cultural criticism, but amidst philosophy and literature alike. Rousseau’s account of imagination thus attaches itself to the beginning of many modern inquires about the self and the world. Yet the possibilities of imagination do not remain in any simple sense Rousseau’s, even as they remain an indispensable point of departure. Thinking about the exalted imagination flies from happiness toward an emancipatory confrontation with a new regime of opinion, even as its theorists look to limit the “revolutionary” excesses of this confrontation with repeated gestures, both implicit and explicit, to the distinctive Jansenism of Pascal—gestures that are themselves modified by their transformation in Rousseau. In this way, Tocqueville’s thought is properly understood as part of a larger post-revolutionary attempt both to account for and to struggle with the limits of an exalted imagination.

7 The Gravity of Illusion: Alexis de Tocqueville

Tocqueville, often prone to prose of great nuance and ambivalence, addresses his reader with forthright certitude about what he loves. He says that he “adored freedom,” that to secure lasting freedom for his society was “the passion of my entire life.”1 Freedom, as Tocqueville understands it, is nothing less than a divine gift given to a few. If an inclination to love it is given to all human beings, “it is first in the hearts of a very small number” of persons.2 Though not identified with any specific historical origin, freedom is the true source of manifold human goods in history, not only “of political freedom, but of all the high and virile virtues”; not only of virtue, but of “all great passions.”3 For those few who possess it, it provides joy and a kind of spiritual justification that transcends reason. “Do not ask me to analyze this sublime yearning, one must experience it.” It enters “into the great hearts that God has prepared to receive it; it fills them, it sets them aflame. One must renounce any effort to make it comprehensible to souls that have never felt it.”4 Quite understandably, Tocqueville’s soaring rhetoric of freedom, coupled with his renunciation of analysis, has imposed severe difficulties on those who want to understand the central concept of his work. To compound the difficulty, freedom for Tocqueville appears in the most diverse regimes and epochs, with dizzyingly varied mores and founding institutions. Tocqueville found freedom in the city-states of Ancient Greece and in the Roman Republic that conquered them.5 In the absolutist monarchy of the French ancien re´gime, there is also freedom, “far more” freedom than his French contemporaries enjoy under the Second Empire.6 In the American wilderness, Tocqueville is moved nearly to awe by the now vanishing but once supremely courageous independence of Native American tribes,7 a freedom that for Tocqueville echoes certain features of life amid medieval European aristocrats.8 Yet Tocqueville also finds freedom 185

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in the clapboard towns of New England,9 inimical in historical and cultural terms to the survival of the free Native American tribes that European settlers of New England displaced and slaughtered. In volume II of Democracy in America, Tocqueville explicitly acknowledges that freedom for him cannot be confined to any single way of life or form of government: “freedom appears to me in different times and under different forms; it is not attached exclusively to one social state, and one encounters it in other places than democracies. Therefore, it cannot form the distinctive trait of democratic ages.”10 Tocqueville’s expansive and indeterminate freedom has inspired three distinct lines of interpretation. For many scholars, including some excellent readers of Tocqueville like Raymond Aron and Dominick LaCapra, the best way to resolve the problem is to concentrate on Tocqueville’s understanding of freedom in its modern, at least partially liberal, manifestations. In this way, for Aron Tocqueville’s “conception of liberty closely resembles Montesquieu’s” and thus includes the guarantee against arbitrary governments, of which the surest is “self-government.”11 Similarly, for LaCapra, Tocqueville’s freedom is defined against a despotism that entails “the absence of self-rule and the institutions, habits and sentiments that accompany it. It is invited by license and facilitated by public apathy. And it is related to a highly centralized political and administrative control of society by government.” 12 For other interpreters of Tocqueville, Tocqueville’s freedom borders on mysticism. Harvey Mitchell writes that Tocqueville sometimes evokes freedom as “a Platonic essence” and “came more and more to conceive of political freedom both as a concept existing in a timeless world and as an imperfect, historical entity.”13 Similarly, Andre´ Jardin wrote of Tocqueville’s freedom that “it was the cult of freedom that guided Tocqueville as writer and as man of action. For him the necessity for freedom was an article of faith drawn directly from the experience of life, and its grounds were beyond discussion. It was something more sacred than Benjamin Constant’s individualism and much closer to the Pauline freedom of the children of God.” Without freedom, Jardin contends that for Tocqueville human beings “would be merely a fallen creature.”14 Not all scholars have been willing to limit Tocqueville’s freedom to its most modern and formal governmental implications, or to accept Tocqueville’s declaration that the central aspiration of his thought defies analysis altogether. Jean-Claude Lamberti and Pierre Manent offer particularly rigorous readings that set Tocqueville’s freedom in a broad expanse of

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history. To accomplish this task, both rely on Tocqueville’s 1836 essay on “France before and after 1789.” Manent and Lamberti follow Tocqueville’s assertion in the essay that freedom takes two different historical forms. In aristocratic societies, freedom is a privilege that magnifies a sense of individual value and a “passionate taste for independence” accompanied by an energetic egoism. Democratic freedom proceeds on the assumption that all human beings are capable of making their own decisions and living independently of others to the extent they choose, except in those instances where the good of all requires coordinated action.15 Manent adds the indispensable insight that the intense self-assertion and sense of self-worth that accompany aristocratic freedom is based on the falsehood that a caste of men is intrinsically superior to other men based on their station,16 whereas democratic life merely assumes the truth of human beings endowed with a certain rationality that allows them to conduct themselves freely in accordance with basic laws and broad mores. Yet this is not quite all that we can understand of Tocqueville’s freedom, for both Manent and Lamberti affirm Tocqueville’s early division between aristocratic and democratic freedom. This distinction provides little basis for affirming that freedom transcends the regimes in which it instantiates itself and finds a common definition in the most varied regimes—thus justifying the shared use of the word in the most disparate historical contexts. Other than a very general freedom from individual despotism, there appears to be no unified meaning (certainly no positive meaning) for freedom in Tocqueville, and the experience of freedom in different regimes is defined preeminently by contrast. These objections made, there is something entirely proper in this interpretive restraint—to a point. Tocqueville’s freedom is protean and at times clearly draws on a language of transcendence that proceeds more easily by apophatic language than by assertion, even as his analysis of several free peoples indeed emphasizes the relatively tangible need for selfgovernment. But if one stops with what Tocqueville’s freedom is not, or what it is in a limited historical context, this freedom will lose its constituting medium of manifestation, as well as its force in the mind and in history. Here the configuration of language about imagination that Tocqueville encountered in his daily reading (with the adjustments made to it in the nineteenth-century) emerges as a language of utmost importance for Tocqueville to evoke and describe what he most loves. For example, if for Tocqueville Native Americans were free before their persecution at the hands of Europeans, for him the Native American has

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an “imagination completely filled with the alleged nobility of his origin. He lives and dies amidst these dreams of his pride.”17 This dreaming pride may lead to the destruction of Indians in North America,18 but it once entailed an inspiring abrogation of the most basic “natural” impulses that would limit it, including material necessities and the fear of death. The Native American “knew how to live without necessities, suffer without protest, and die while singing.”19 Even “the most famous ancient republics never had occasion to admire courage more firm, souls more proud, a more unyielding love of independence, than hid in the wild woods of the New World.”20 Similarly, at the end the ancien re´gime, in the final years of the Bourbons before the Revolution, people were “insanely proud” of “humanity.”21 They reserved a strange sort of humility—or as Tocqueville puts it in the same passage, contempt—for the limiting cultural and political forms of time and place that are usually the locus of collective pride. As Tocqueville describes them, the partisans of Enlightenment before the Revolution had “an unnatural contempt for the particular times in which they lived, and for the society of which they were a part.”22 At the time, every “imagination” was “seized and delighted” by the prospect of holding in his hands “not just the destiny of his country, but the very fate of humankind.”23 This allows for an extraordinary political unity from which greatness comes, at least at the Revolution’s beginning, when interest in Montesquieu began to fade, and “one no longer spoke of anyone but Rousseau.” Rousseau was thus, according to Tocqueville, the “pre´cepteur unique” of the early Revolution.24 Not coincidentally, it is at this moment of Rousseau’s preeminence that, imaginations enflamed, political unity and beauty are one. In his notes to a projected history of the French Revolution, Tocqueville remarks of 1789 that “I do not believe that at any moment in history, has anyone seen anywhere on earth, a similar number of men so sincerely, passionately in favor of the public good, so truly forgetful of their own interests, so absorbed in the contemplation of a great design.” The moment was beyond compare, not least for its aesthetic value: the “spectacle was short, but incomparably beautiful.”25 If Native Americans and the French of the ancien re´gime have proud imaginations, denatured from selfish considerations and capable of transcendent beauty, the origins of American freedom partake in a similar language. Even in colonial days, when Tocqueville describes an early American’s notion of freedom, the vocabulary of historical debts to Eu-

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rope in general and England in particular alters considerably with the thought that “true freedom” appears in America at a time when it was lost in Europe because “abandoned to the originality of its nature, the imagination of man improvised there a legislation without precedent.”26 Furthermore, the exalted imagination in democratic America finds its just glory at its supreme moment of origin, when the Constitution was being written, when power was constrained rather than concentrated. For “if ever America knew how to elevate itself to this high degree of glory, that the proud imagination of its residents constantly wants to show us, it was in this supreme moment, where the national power came in a fashion to abdicate its influence.”27 In these passages about early America, Tocqueville affirms his aversion to centralized power, even as in other passages, he offers a language of freedom that thrives even in the early modern centralized state par excellence (France), or in face-to-face tribal societies that could not easily be placed in any scheme demarcating centralized and decentralized power (and as we shall see, these are not the only regimes that realize their freedom through imagination). In Tocqueville’s description of modern American freedom, the proud imagination of its citizens can rightly glory in their origin. But in his description of American freedom, Tocqueville qualifies the relative power of the exalted imagination in America. As Tocqueville turns away from the Constitution, he makes an indignant, apparently tangential comparison between the American and French Revolutions: Who would dare to compare the American war to the wars of the French Revolution, and the efforts of the Americans to ours, when France was faced with attacks from all of Europe, without money, without credit, without allies, throwing a twentieth of its population before its enemies, stifling with one hand the fire that was devouring its entrails, and with the other holding up the torch around it?28 This passage is a crucial one for many reasons, not least for an early affirmation of the French Revolution’s inspirational power—a theme that would resonate in Tocqueville’s late writings as well. More importantly, however, it indicates a tension at the center of Tocqueville’s writing. If freedom is persistently associated with the proud imagination, Tocqueville is reluctant to identify the proud imagination of democratic America as a supreme or complete manifestation of this freedom. This tendency is open to misreading. For Tocqueville, America’s

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“glory” is real, and though reality is an equivocal term for Tocqueville, this real glory should not be gainsaid. America has limited the scope of political power “without it costing humanity a tear or a drop of blood.”29 Tocqueville never ceases to admire American life sincerely for its energy and for how this energy manifests itself among the citizenry as a whole: America has been able to distribute power widely so that all its people may taste independence and some kind of influence. This power is given form not through some comprehensive eudaemonic order of opinion, as in Rousseau, but by the willingness of individuals to take charge of their affairs, and above all to encounter elemental dangers and take risks. Americans find their own dignity within their very material and commercial obsessions. Tocqueville is especially impressed by the dangers American merchants and sailors are willing to endure for the sake of a shorter and more profitable journey. Upon the seas, Americans display what Tocqueville calls “a kind of heroism” in commerce. They are willing to risk death and ruin for profit, or as Tocqueville puts it, “what the French do for victory, they do for bargains.”30 The willingness of Americans to take “moderate” commercial passions to imaginative extremes inspires Tocqueville’s admiration of America. This allows American access to the “higher” dimensions of human existence in the midst of an egalitarian age: This universal movement that reigns in the United States, the frequent fluctuations of fortune, this unforeseen shifting of public and private wealth, all combine to maintain the soul in a sort of feverish agitation that admirably disposes it to all efforts, and maintains it so to speak above the common level of humanity. For an American, all of life goes on like a game of chance, a time of revolution, or a day of battle.31 As the references to “battle” and “revolution” indicate, for Tocqueville it is not instability alone that Tocqueville fears, but like Stendhal and in many ways Constant, an enervating and immutable stability. American life appears as a kind of regulated tumult. American democracy not only offers its citizens exhilarating, if fleeting, encounters with risk and danger (that appear as flashes rather than enduring states of being: a “game,” a “time,” a “day”)—though this is certainly necessary for their spiritual ascent above “the common level of humanity.” America also provides invigorating ventures of the self in civic association, in which individual voices can affect the laws and ventures of their communities, and the

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debate among associations and their members creates a people resistant to many forms of egalitarian conformity. Equality itself helps to “remedy the evil that it creates” by giving people a sense of their own importance and ability to make decisions for themselves. Thus he writes that “far from reproaching equality with the indocility it inspires, it is principally for this that I praise it . . . it is from this perspective that I am attached to it.”32 Why, then, must modern equality and democracy be in tension with the energies of the proud imagination, and thus with the vital dimension of human freedom? Tocqueville believes that a certain pride is ubiquitous in modern democracies and that a certain imagination is present in its art. But he distinguishes free pride and imagination as he understands them from their natural democratic counterparts. For example, Democracy in America includes an extended passage on pride that quickly becomes an exhortation to its readers to think of pride in relation not to others, but to the exaltation of one’s desires: I think therefore that the leaders of these new societies would be wrong to want the citizens to sleep in an excessively united and tranquil happiness, and that it is good that they are sometimes given difficult and perilous enterprises, so that they elevate ambition and open a theater for it. Moralists constantly complain that the favorite vice of our time is pride. This is true in a certain sense: there is no one, in effect, who does not believe himself to be worth more than his neighbor and who consents to obey his superior; but it is very false in another sense. For this same man, who can bear neither subordination nor equality, scorns himself nonetheless by believing himself made only to experience vulgar pleasures. He stops willingly in mediocre desires without daring to begin lofty undertakings; he scarcely imagines them. Thus far from believing that it is necessary to recommend humility to our contemporaries, I would like to make every attempt to give them a more expansive idea of themselves and of their species. Humility is not healthy for them; that which they most lack, in my opinion, is pride. I would willingly cede many small virtues for this vice.33 For Tocqueville, his contemporaries’ pride too often finds itself confined by others, in particular the opinions of contemporaries. For Tocqueville—as for Stendhal and Constant—opinion in modern societies is a

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force beyond the capacity of being shaped by any single center of authority, and it can easily enforce an oppressive mediocrity. Hence Tocqueville writes that in America, opinion is more effective than the Spanish Inquisition in suppressing freedom of thought. Tocqueville remarks that “I know of no country where there reigns, in general, less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.”34 In an age where “vulgar” pleasures and common opinions predominate, pride must seek an exalted “theater” for itself, to escape or ennoble prevailing opinion rather than be vindicated by it as it is. As with pride, for Tocqueville the imagination continues to exist among his contemporaries; but the imagination’s desire to take flight is increasingly thwarted in ages of equality. To represent the threat to imagination in his own time, Tocqueville repeatedly has recourse to images of a gravitational descent of imagination that refuses to recognize the proud desire for transcendence. For in democratic ages, the mind [esprit] takes a serious turn, calculating and positive; it willingly turns away from the ideal to direct itself towards some near and visible goal that appears to be the natural and necessary object of its desires. Equality thus does not destroy imagination; but it limits it and only allows it to fly while skimming the earth.35 As Rousseau, Charrie`re, and Stendhal turn to images of flight to capture the transcendent power of imagination, Tocqueville repeatedly turns to gravity as a powerful metaphor for envisioning the consequences of democracy and equality for the force of imagination. Significantly, this descent appears “natural” to those who experience it. In ages of equality, Tocqueville believes that the immediate object of desire appears inevitable, and that the possibility of transcendence is lost. In his discussion of poetry, for example, Tocqueville argues that in democracy “the imagination is not extinguished, but it devotes itself almost exclusively to conceiving the useful and representing the real . . . doubt draws back the imagination of poets to the earth and restricts them to the visible, real world.” In contrast to the leveling imagination of democratic centuries, in aristocratic ages, “the imagination feels at ease” and poets find much inspiration and a large audience for their visions.36 Tocqueville later introduces a discussion of self-interest properly understood with the contention that this doctrine can be understood as the product of imagination’s constriction: “to the extent that the imagination takes a less elevated flight [i.e., than in aristocratic ages], and each concentrates on himself, moralists are

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frightened at this idea of sacrifice and they no longer dare to offer it to the human spirit [esprit].”37 For Tocqueville, the economy of sacrifice that makes possible Pascal’s faith, or Julien’s turn to memory, becomes an increasingly remote prospect in an age of equality. According to Tocqueville, even when it is most active, the democratic imagination tends either to reproduce the prevailing fact of equality,38 or to inspire anxiety and covetousness rather than sacrifice and daring. For an American, “independent of the goods he possesses, imagines at each instant a thousand others that death will prevent him from enjoying, if he does not hurry.” This keeps “his soul in a sort of incessant trepidation.”39 Tocqueville contends that among democratic peoples, “ambition is ardent and steady, but will not be able to aim high with any regularity” for democratic peoples “constrain their soul to employ all their strength to do mediocre things.”40 Although Tocqueville explores with real subtlety and insight the artistic possibilities of democratic ages through their very tendency toward the general and the universal, he expresses no doubt that democratic regimes remain hostile to poetry as a way of life: for him, there is no life so antipoetic as the life of an American,41 or people less prone to dreaming than democratic citizens.42 For Tocqueville, the imagination of democratic citizens has no discipline to give it form; when it allows itself to fly, it turns to the bizarre. When democratic poetry dreams in the future, it may do so in such an overflow of lurid and incoherent imagery that he would prefer the real.43 For Tocqueville, the imagination’s descent is closely related to Americans’ tendency to exert imagination’s power in the hope of profit and other public needs: “it could be said that in the United States there is not an imagination that does not exhaust itself inventing means of increasing riches and of satisfying the needs of the public.”44 To be precise, in democracies, commerce “fills the imagination of the crowd; all energetic passions are directed towards it.”45 This may seem rather dour; in these pages, Tocqueville becomes a tragic witness of imagination’s decline rather than an advocate of democracy. It should be emphasized once more that for Tocqueville, American democracy is the best option available for Tocqueville’s imaginative freedom in an egalitarian age. America is the source of a uniquely modern form of freedom that allows the proud imagination access to self-assertion in associations large and small, and to energizing risk and danger. In Tocqueville’s writing, however, it is also true that modern freedom

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in general, including American freedom, is a sometimes disappointing and tepid instance of freedom in comparison to various historical alternatives. America’s achievement rests on its capacity to reassert imaginative energy in a modern egalitarian order that exists in tension with the transcendent pride of imagination. An imagination that submits to some general contentment in which it is raised without its own efforts—or to an order and origin it has not remade in its image—does not inspire Tocqueville. This would be an imagination without pride. A proud imagination is bound to reject a general happiness created by impersonal historical forces, especially those that rely on a limited conception of human possibility (e.g., the desire for security and material comfort). Given his yearning for the full freedom of the proud imagination as he understands it, Tocqueville feels a certain sadness about the inevitable and comprehensive expansion of democratic life, expressed in his published and unpublished writings. Privately, he remarked that “I have an intellectual taste for democratic institutions, but I am aristocratic by instinct; that is to say that I have contempt for and fear the crowd.”46 Tocqueville repeatedly suggests that the age of equality and democracy is imaginatively inferior to—and thus less free than—its historical predecessors. At the outset of his career, when political and literary ambitions sometimes gave his writing a more hopeful and expectant flush, he conceded that he perceived the political choices of the future to rest between “two now inevitable evils; that the question was not if one could secure aristocracy or democracy, but if one would have a functioning democracy without poetry and greatness, but with order and morality; or a disordered and depraved democratic society, abandoned to frenzied rages or weighed down under a yoke heavier than all those that have weighed on men since the fall of the Roman Empire.”47 Later in life, Tocqueville confided in another letter that although he would never despair of democracy under any circumstances, he had “always said it is more difficult to secure and maintain freedom in democratic societies like ours than in certain aristocratic societies that have preceded us.”48 At times, of course, Tocqueville presents aristocracy and democracy as equally propitious and pernicious historical phenomena for freedom. At the end of Democracy in America he comes close to Constant’s position on ancient and modern freedom by arguing that each regime produces or is produced by what seem to be “two distinct humanities” and that “each has its particular advantages and disadvantages, its distinctive goods and evils.”49 Yet although Tocqueville occasionally claims to believe in an ul-

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timate equality between the virtues of aristocracy and democracy, he never claims that democracy as a whole is superior to aristocracy as a whole, and he repeatedly asserts that aristocracy is superior to democracy (though he acknowledges that democracy is vastly more just than aristocracy). There can be little doubt that as an attachment of passion rather than prudential acceptance, Tocqueville preferred aristocratic to democratic humanity as a historical possibility. Hence for him, democracy must be, as he calls it, “un gouˆt de teˆte.” 50 Only this can account for his acknowledgment in the introduction to volume I of Democracy in America (1835) that he is filled with “religious dread” at the arrival of an egalitarian age,51 just as in the conclusion of volume II (1840) he regards the age to come as a “spectacle of . . . universal uniformity that saddens and chills me, and I am tempted to regret the society that is no more.”52 Tocqueville’s sympathy for aristocracy, however, produces several problems for interpreting his thought. If Tocqueville’s freedom is related to an exalted imagination, extending pride toward “great undertakings,” it is not clear that aristocracy belongs to the continuum of freedom evident in the ancien re´gime, or among American Indians, or in moderate form among American citizens. Furthermore, if imagination has enjoyed such great historical powers, and Tocqueville is a partisan of aristocracy (or for that matter, of revolutionary grandeur and beauty), why not engage his own and his readers’ imaginations in a vindication of aristocracy or of revolution? Even these difficulties, however, do not begin to account for all the dilemmas attending a reading of Tocqueville as a thinker of imagination. What are the meanings of terms like aristocracy in Tocqueville? And do a few references to freedom and a proud imagination allow for any more general understanding of Tocqueville’s thought? Richard Wolin has argued that Tocqueville creates a certain historical “mytheme” in order to create a position from which a certain critique of modernity can emerge.53 Although one can scruple about the term—I would use Tocqueville’s own language of imagination, and as we shall soon see, illusion—to make this argument, it is a valuable insight. Yet how does Tocqueville’s account of imagination function in his thought? Is it merely an illustrative dimension of his thinking, or does it have explanatory power? Many of these questions rest on a single and more basic question: What is an aristocracy? At times Tocqueville uses the term very loosely, applying it to virtually all premodern regimes not ruled by a despot, from ancient

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Rome to medieval feudalism to eighteenth-century Britain and France. Just as freedom appears in the most diverse contexts in Tocqueville’s writing, aristocracy offers itself across a formidable expanse of time, space, laws, morals, custom, and religion. To grasp the subtlety of Tocqueville’s thought on aristocracy, it must first be acknowledged that for all their differences, Tocqueville does admit a coherent starting point for thinking about aristocracies as such: aristocracies are not natural regimes. As he repeatedly observes, egalitarian regimes—through plebiscites or elections, articulated in demagoguery or reasoned argument—explicitly align themselves with the sovereignty of the people, and “the principle of the sovereignty of the people lies at the root of all government, whatever may be said to the contrary, and is hidden beneath the least independent institutions.”54 If the sovereignty of the people is the truth of government, aristocracy must be a regime of artifice, a conclusion Tocqueville does not hesitate to draw from his own thought. For “an aristocratic body composes itself of a certain number of citizens, who without being placed very far from the crowd, are yet raised permanently above them . . . it is impossible to imagine anything more contrary to nature and to the secret instincts of the human heart than a subjection of this kind . . . to last, an aristocracy must be founded on inequality in principle, legalized in advance . . . all things which are so strongly repugnant to natural equity, that they can only be obtained from men by constraint.”55 That is, for Tocqueville aristocracy is the regime at the outermost limit of imagining that to use Rousseau’s term, denatures human beings and makes them capable of a freedom that is not available to them through natural truth or natural political realities. The aristocratic regime can be republican or monarchical—this is not Tocqueville’s primary concern. Not despite but because of aristocracy’s capacity to denature its people in order to realize the aspirations of an exalted imagination, it is also a free regime. And as a regime that denatures more completely than any democracy can, aristocracy is the human regime most closely connected to greatness: “almost all the peoples who have acted formidably upon the world, those who have conceived, pursued and accomplished great designs, from the Romans to the English, were led by an aristocracy, and how can one be surprised by it?”56 Tocqueville’s account of aristocracy must be understood as a composite historical imagining about the political power of imagination against nature that serves as an exhilarating antipode to the natural truth of the

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sovereignty of the people. It creates, preserves, and enforces distinctions by necessity, and these permit an imaginative ascent. Tocqueville’s own presiding metaphor for democracy as a gravitational force acting on imagination suggests a primal truth that exerts powers beyond an exalted imagination’s control. In contrast to democracy, aristocracy is the regime not only of falsehood as Pierre Manent has incisively argued, but of an illusion. In this sense, the designation “aristocracy” allows Tocqueville to introduce the distinction between an order of energetic forms created by an exalted imagination and an order that can merely accommodate an exalted imagination on terms foreign to its own imperatives. According to Tocqueville, aristocratic regimes share certain characteristics across historical epochs that manifest themselves in art, in culture, in the small commerce of daily life, and in high politics. Aristocratic theater, for example, depicts human nature “above itself,” whereas democratic theater represents the real.57 Similarly, in contrast to the plainness of democratic manners, “the manners of aristocracy gave beautiful illusions about human nature, and although the tableau was often false, one experienced a noble pleasure in beholding it.”58 Aristocratic ages are prone to poetry, for the strict separation of classes and the relative ignorance of each class about the other creates a situation in which “the imagination can always, in representing them [i.e., these classes], add or subtract something from the real.”59 In matters well beyond poetry, the ruling class of an aristocracy is animated by a proud imagination that does not wish to be limited by safety and material comforts. An aristocracy “willingly imagines for itself glorious joys and sets magnificent goals for its desires.”60 The imagination of the aristocrat creates an analogous pride even in those who are excluded from power. Even servants in an aristocracy have “un fier orgueil” and selfrespect conducive to “great virtues and uncommon actions.”61 Through identification with their master, they “create an imaginary personality” that allows them to “glorify themselves in their [master’s] glory.”62 Aristocrats “feel a sort of proud disdain for the petty interests and material cares of life, and their thoughts have a natural grandeur revealed by their speech and manners.”63 For Tocqueville aristocracy creates a hierarchical ascent of imagination that defies the gravitational pull of truth: “when most conditions are very unequal and the inequality of conditions is permanent, the ideal of the superior grows in the imagination of men.”64 Such conditions and their consequences for imagination manifest themselves in aristocratic opinion. General opinion and the freedom of a proud

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imagination are compatible in Tocqueville’s account of aristocracy in a way that they can never be in his account of democracy. Thus “the principal opinions” of an aristocratic order favor an order of rank that allows the imagination to ascend through pride. Aristocratic mores include “pride in birth, respect for ancestors and descendants, scorn for the inferior, fear of contact, the taste for etiquette, traditions and antiquity.”65 One notes here that forms of memory—summarized as the “taste” for traditions and antiquity, appear here, as a form of “opinion,” and thus as enclosed and impelled by a kind of collective imagining, or illusion. Hence in Tocqueville’s thought, aristocrats live under the sway of various political and aesthetic illusions, supported by opinion, that favor the freedom of the proud imagination against the limitations of nature. Aristocracy is thus not an antipode to freedom as Tocqueville understands it, but one of its most powerful modes of fulfillment. Yet if aristocracies spanning centuries of history have created encompassing illusions under which greatness and beauty were at least able to flourish, Tocqueville meets a difficulty within his own thought. How is it that sovereignty of the people, a truth hidden from the foundation of the world, has surfaced in history and rendered aristocratic illusion a vestige of another age? Why can this age not return? If equality or its political manifestation in the sovereignty of the people exists in some sense throughout history, however well concealed, Tocqueville asserts in Democracy in America that its revelation depended on a specific historical event: “it was necessary that Jesus Christ come down to earth to make the members of the human race understand that they were naturally alike and equal.” Using the strong word “understand” [ pour faire comprendre] rather than “think” or “believe” is significant, especially since Tocqueville struggled over the precise wording and worthiness of the phrase before deciding to keep it in the manuscript.66 It seems that Tocqueville holds that equality was implicit in all political life before the Gospels, but the explicit understanding of this truth depends on them. The reference to the connection between the Gospels and equality is anything but random or obligatory. On this point, he is both indebted to, but perhaps still more forceful than Guizot67 and places this historical explanation into his distinct account of modern politics. Throughout his writing, Tocqueville repeatedly observes the teaching of Jesus on equality working its way over many centuries through the life of the Church and into the world, and implicitly appearing as the opponent of an exalted imagination and with it, the illusions required for a people to submit to

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orders of rank in history. In the introduction to Democracy in America, Tocqueville traces the first expressions of modern equality to the Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy of late medieval Europe, where men born in peasant huts found themselves in the midst of nobles and perhaps “seated above Kings.”68 During the Reformation, Protestant leaders tended toward the idea that one’s own reason could serve as a source of truth, and thus opened the possibility that no man was fit to tell another what to believe. This doctrine, first confined to matters of faith, soon spread to temporal questions and ideas.69 For Tocqueville, the Reformation also legitimates earthly existence with a new fervor that has the indirect consequence of unleashing human beings’ desire to improve their material condition.70 This in turn gives impetus to the making of a new world. Not only does equality emerge from Jesus and Christianity, but Tocqueville explicitly contends that modern political equality is the legitimate and providentially ordained “progeny” of Christian faith,71 even if this progeny differs in inclination from its parent.72 Even the Reformation, however, failed to accomplish a conscious acceptance of equality as the regnant principle of political, social, and cultural life. Equality revealed itself and its irresistible strength in the eighteenth century, through the movements of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. In France, lumie`res like the Physiocrats were particularly attached to an emergent egalitarian ethos, and they were most responsible for the presiding ideas of the Revolution that followed73 and for the mores of Tocqueville’s own age: “their passion for equality was so certain and their taste for freedom so uncertain that they had a deceptively contemporary air about them.”74 Tocqueville suggests that the Enlightenment popularized and won decisive victories for the ideas of Luther, Bacon, and Descartes—with all the vindications of individual conscience and material interest variously sought by their writings—a triumph attributable in turn to a complex transformation of political, economic, and social circumstances in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.75 After the American and French revolutions, the sovereignty of the people is no longer hidden or limited in scope, but manifest in modern life at almost every moment, above all in America. Hence “the people reign in the American political world like God in the universe. They are the cause and end of all things; everything stems from them and everything is absorbed in them.”76 Thus for Tocqueville as for Rousseau (though their historical accounts

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are very different), the Enlightenment is part of a process of unveiling that transforms history and human person. But unlike Rousseau, Tocqueville—in some ways as much as Nietzsche—asserts directly that Christianity and the egalitarian, reformist impulses of modern secularism are, at the deepest level, far from being antagonistic historical movements. Rather, the Enlightenment in some way completes the egalitarian movement begun in the Gospels by extending it to a comprehensive arrangement of social, cultural, and political life, in which equality itself emerges as a supreme good. Once the power of collectives, regardless of rank, is laid bare, illusions (and with them, arbitrary distinction) vanish. Where aristocracy offers illusions (in law, custom, opinion, mores, ceremony, and tradition) to conceal its opposition to nature, an egalitarian regime needs fewer and more modest illusions because it does not defy but expresses and even encourages nature. Tocqueville repeatedly suggests the irreversible convergence of nature and history under modern egalitarian regimes. For him it is an ongoing process of individuating homogeneity that he presents without any despair, but in somber tones. In the second volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville presents several carefully written and sometimes disturbing reflections on the “natural” outcomes of equality. Among them are these lines: What I have said of America applies to almost all the men of our time. Variety is disappearing from the breast of humankind; the same ways of acting, of thinking and of feeling are encountered in all the corners of the globe. This does not come only from the fact that all the peoples are more open to one another and copy each other more faithfully, but that in each country men are moving further and further away from the ideas and the particular sentiments of a caste, a profession, or a family, arriving simultaneously at that which is closest to the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same. In this way they become more similar, although without imitating one another. They are like travelers spread out in a great forest where all the paths lead to the same point. If everyone simultaneously perceives the central point and directs their steps in this direction, they all come together, without perceiving it and without knowing it, and finally they will be surprised to see themselves occupying the same place. All the peoples that take for the goal of their studies and emulation not an individual man, but Man himself, will finish by meeting each other in the same mores, like these travelers at the central point.77

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For Tocqueville, humanity in history is uncovering its nature, or the constitution proper to nature (which is not the same as becoming its nature). Human beings will be “surprised” at the final convergence in a single “constitution of man.” Thus Tocqueville does not appear to leave room for a metaphysical scheme that will reveal or justify this convergence as the final telos of human longing or hope. It is not an increasingly conscious project, as in Hegel.78 The unity of humankind will not come by the positive impetus of faith or philosophy with or through posited contraries, but by a process of stripping away all the particularities developed in history that leads to the “surprising” abrogation of all collective distinction. If the modern egalitarian regime constitutes an encounter with nature, Tocqueville does not offer any reason to believe that this converging humanity will “return” to some identifiably primitive manner of living or learning, beyond this ineffaceable human nature. In this way, the ultimate unity of humankind in Tocqueville bears an analogous resemblance to his account of democracy—for Tocqueville, a logical, though not necessary, political expression of equality—for unlike aristocracy, democracy is “founded upon an idea so simple and so natural, that always nonetheless supposes the existence of a civilized and learned society. At first one would believe it to be contemporary with the first ages of the world; upon a close look, one discovers easily that it could only come in the last age.”79 Tocqueville’s nature is a looming and pervasive reality in modern life; no longer will illusions distance human beings from an immediate encounter with the political truth about themselves. The mores of this age no longer require the “beautiful illusions” and “great undertakings” of aristocracy. The fundamental aristocratic ideal of honor, for example, will become superannuated in an egalitarian age because arbitrary (and illusory) differences and particularities are required to sustain it. As Tocqueville remarks toward the end of Democracy in America: Finally if it were permitted to suppose that all the races blended together80 and that all the peoples of the world that had come to this point had the same interests, the same needs, and could no longer distinguish one another by any characteristic trait, one would consider them in the same light; the general needs of humanity, that conscience reveals to each man, would be the common standard. Then, one would no longer encounter in the world anything but simple and general notions of good and of evil, to which would be attached, by a natural and necessary connection, ideas of praise and blame.

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In this way, to contain all my thought at last in a single formulation, it is the differences and the inequality among men that have created honor; it weakens to the extent that these differences fade [s’effacent], and it disappears with them.81 Passages like these offer little hope that a kind of exalted aristocratic illusion can maintain itself in an age of equality and natural truth. Yet if Tocqueville is generally less than enthusiastic about the consequences of equality as he understands them, he is by no means unreservedly negative about them. Tocqueville’s paradoxical cast of thought often allows for at least a partial enrichment even in the midst of what he generally perceives as loss. For example, it is the very proximity to a general human “nature” or “constitution” that allows democratic citizens to enjoy far closer and more intimate (or as Tocqueville repeatedly puts it, more “natural”82) relations within families, between spouses or between parents and children, relations that the artifice of aristocracy makes strained and conventional. Aristocratic regimes of opinion are strong, but it is on issues of marriage and love that these regimes become “tyrannical” for Tocqueville (although Tocqueville cannot help pointing out that American women have “judgment at the expense of imagination” and “illusion”).83 It is not that the decline of aristocracy is a pure loss for Tocqueville; aristocracy is both less just and more artificial than virtually any egalitarian order. But Tocqueville repeatedly indicates that an egalitarian order will offer real goods that are neither as great nor as beautiful as imaginary ones. Given Tocqueville’s preference—in no way unmitigated but nonetheless a preference—for aristocratic regimes of illusion, why not defend what remains of aristocracy after the French and American revolutions? Here Tocqueville’s thought reveals a fascinating and subtle pattern. Attempts to create a “modern” aristocratic, sovereign illusion of politics after the great modern revolutions, as in the antebellum American South and in Ireland, elicit Tocqueville’s contempt. Tocqueville’s sustained recourse to metaphors of convergence and gravitation while describing the historical consequences of modernity are not chosen idly. For Tocqueville, there is some irresistible truth to the prospect of equality (and with it, individualism and materialism) that once fully revealed and operative, cannot be repudiated without regimes of illusion becoming willful, corrupt, and despotic. Hence Tocqueville repeatedly announces his sympathy for aristocratic

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regimes through the very end of the French ancien re´gime. But in his own time, he interprets Ireland’s aristocracy and the slaveholding South as a kind of horrendous parody of past grandeur. He tells his readers of appalling poverty in Ireland, of pervasive destitution amidst a reactionary aristocracy distinct from the enlightened British aristocracy from which it derives its own dubious legitimacy. His readers will be able to see it themselves: “if you want to know what can be done by the spirit of conquest and religious hatred combined with the abuses of aristocracy, but without any of its advantages, go to Ireland.”84 Similarly, Tocqueville repeatedly argues that the slaveholders of the American South have created a kind of aristocracy.85 In his standard account of aristocracy as a regime of exalted imagination, he remarks that the Southerner, unlike the Northerner, finds “his imagination aims towards greater ends and less precisely defined ones. The American of the South loves grandeur, luxury, glory, noise, pleasure, idleness above all.” In sum, the Southerner has “the tastes, the prejudices, the weakness and the grandeur of all aristocracies.”86 In contrast to the South, “the equality of fortunes reigns in the North, and slavery no longer exists; man finds himself absorbed by the same material cares that the white scorns in the South . . . concentrated in the small details of life, his imagination fades [s’e´teint], his ideas are less numerous and more general, but they become more practical, more clear and more precise . . . he has a marvelous understanding of the art of making society contribute to the prosperity of each of its members, and to extract from individual egoism the happiness of all.”87 Yet Tocqueville finds no nostalgic lyricism to describe the American South. Its aristocracy is much worse than that of Ireland. For Tocqueville, the Southern aristocracy is driven by idleness and brutality. It must create and secure its rule upon a cruel and corrupt system of bondage, in which human beings are forced to command and to obey what they do not respect or believe. The illusion that sustains slavery (that blacks are not as human as whites) cannot last, since it is without support from both Christianity and the philosophies of individualist, material Enlightenment alike: “attacked by Christianity as unjust, by political economy as harmful; slavery, in the midst of democratic liberty and the enlightenment of our age, is not an institution that can endure.”88 According to Tocqueville, slaveholders sense this historical precariousness but lack the capacity to rectify their mistake or to enforce it comprehensively.89 They are left with the task of “spiritualizing despotism and

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violence,” forbidding anyone to teach slaves to read and write, and attempting to lower slaves to the level of “beasts.”90 The Southern aristocracy has nothing of noblesse oblige, and cannot even acknowledge that the people responsible for its leisured well-being are human. Their sovereign political illusion requires them to practice a tyranny so deep that Tocqueville foresees it may well be the cause of civil war. In sum, the “aristocracies” of modernity, after Revolution, do not believe in the illusory legitimacy of the order they lead, nor do those they oppress believe in it. This modern form of illusion must sustain itself by appalling oppression, supported by laws and mores but not by a deep inner conviction about its legitimacy. It produces neither beauty nor greatness, nor even decency. Failing to believe truly in their intrinsic superiority, these modern aristocrats love idleness rather than historic action, and for Tocqueville, the inevitable end of these regimes will not be heroic or inspiring. Nothing could be more different from the older aristocratic societies as Tocqueville saw them, in which lords are convinced of their superiority and inspired by it to do great deeds, and even their servants proudly imitate them.91 Tocqueville hints that modern Britain may be the last legitimate aristocratic regime,92 but even Britain is relentlessly moving in the direction of equality, along with the rest of Europe or “l’univers chre´tien.” 93 Once equality, and with it sovereignty of the people, is revealed in the life of a people, it cannot be subsumed under any aristocratic authority except through violent conquest, though even then the unnatural illusion will slowly give way to more egalitarian forms.94 But if this conquest does not derive its force from a sincere, if entirely illusory, conviction in one’s superiority, it only turns into a bestial despotism with far worse consequences for Tocqueville’s freedom than the gravitational limitations imposed on it by modern democracy. For Tocqueville, unlike Rousseau and his account of domesticated desire, the knowledge of illusion as illusion is neither a secure nor a happy nor a liberating space for the infinite desires of imagination. If aristocracy no longer promises the possibility of life within a denaturing illusion, what of revolution? Tocqueville could become a revolutionary of a sort. Even while decrying the Terror, he could yearn for the purity of the early or moderate revolution in the manner of Constant or Lamartine, for the days of what Tocqueville himself described as beauty and grandeur and the desire to sacrifice selfish interests. As in the case of aristocracy, however, Tocqueville concludes that

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modern revolutions tend to intensify and accelerate the descent of imagination rather than securing the exalted freedom of illusion. For Tocqueville, revolutions in particular ultimately debase rather than exalt pride. Thus the French Revolution, for all its beauty, lacked an order (as in American democracy) that would make its heroic tumult and danger sustainable. As Tocqueville remarks in his notes to La Re´volution, “today, since the dangers of revolutions have made us humble to the point of believing ourselves unworthy of the freedom that other nations enjoy, it is difficult to imagine the extent of our fathers’ pride.” In the eighteenth century, “the enlightened classes had nothing of this fearful and servile nature that revolutions had given them.” The revolution’s passion for equality had not yet become a material, prudent, and acquisitive passion, but it created an origin for such a world: “the desire for well-being, which was to end by mastering all other desires, was then only a secondary and ineffectual passion.” 95 Tocqueville’s thoughts on the proud imagination as freedom, the political importance of illusion, and the dangers of modern opinion are now made manifest at the center of his thought. They are an indispensable part of his effort to evoke the medium, experience, and possibility of freedom in human history, and to distinguish the unique difficulties of modern life for freedom as he understands it, connected to modernity as an uncovering of the natural or most basic constitution of humankind. While closely connected to Rousseau’s thought, his thought is by no means identical to Rousseau’s, (to take only the most obvious example, Tocqueville’s hierarchical regimes require the kind of elaborate artifice that Rousseau finds necessary for egalitarian regimes). Toqueville’s freedom as a form of limiting but energized imaginative forms, sustained by pride, is also different from the freedom defined by his contemporaries. Certainly, it is not the same as the freedom sketched out by Constant in his essay on modern freedom, or the freedom of nineteenth-century liberals like Franc¸ois Guizot and John Stuart Mill, who had little to say about the freedom of an exalted imagination. Guizot’s definition of freedom as “only the power to obey the truth he can recognize and to act accordingly” is entirely different in spirit from Tocqueville’s,96 as are his warnings against pride and the dangerous “movement of imagination” that often comes at the expense of sober, practical action.97 After reading Tocqueville, Mill worried about the fate of individual genius under modern egalitarianism, but his liberty is an

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individual “liberty of action” that may only be constrained in order “to prevent harm to others.”98 Tocqueville’s freedom is a subtle but pervasive concept in his thought, as are the ways in which this freedom is in tension with his notion of human truth. If equality homogenizes the world and makes the exalted illusions of aristocracy fall away in favor of practical, useful, and often material concerns that are in truth more “natural,” then how can Tocqueville himself yearn for something beyond them? What is it that defies the cumulative uncovering of “nature” in history, as he has defined the term in his work? Tocqueville would seem to have need of memory: memory of historical beauty, of greatness; memory as a relationality that places human beings in relation to exalted desires and high purposes that transcend individual interests; memory as a sense of continuity between past, present, and future, to which he and his posterity are connected by energizing affinities and analogy. Yet it is not memory that serves this purpose in Tocqueville’s thought. Tocqueville instead proposes a dualism in human nature of a particular kind, and is given to anthropological antinomies that ultimately rely on an opposition between nature and imagination. Tocqueville does not develop his thoughts on the dual condition of humanity with the same concision and clarity as Pascal, but his anthropology constantly relies on opposite possibilities in human existence coming from fundamental and opposing needs of the soul that cohere around transcendence and earthly limitation. Pascal once again appears as a resource in postrevolutionary thought as a means of understanding the limitations placed on transcendent desire, even as those transcendent desires refuse to disappear. These possibilities of human nature are in profound, reciprocal tension with one another, and the various opposing tendencies they create in history make human behavior a continuing paradox in decidedly Pascalian fashion. Democratic citizens are in constant, jarring agitation in pursuit of complete and unshakable happiness99 as public life grows, “the sphere of private relations narrows,” making people more isolated as a common life becomes more and more inclusive.100 Perhaps most importantly, the democratic imagination is weaker and unable to conceive the ideal outside itself, so democratic poets will turn inward and look into the soul itself to satisfy the need for the ideal and the infinite.101 This aesthetic transformation in history leads Tocqueville to write in distinctly Pascalian terms, even as the language reveals something quite different from Pascal:

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I have no need to search heaven and earth to discover a miraculous object full of contrasts, of greatness and of infinite pettiness, of profound obscurity and singular clarity, simultaneously capable of inspiring pity, admiration, contempt, and terror. I have only to consider myself: man emerges from nothing, traverses time and goes to disappear forever in the breast of God. He is only visible for a moment wandering on the limit of these two abysses where he loses himself.102 In Tocqueville, memory does not promise or disclose any emancipatory meaning between the “abysses,” he perceives, even as history and the configurations of meaning in the past constantly impose on the present. This must be understood with care. For Tocqueville, history, and thus the past, has enormous power to shape events, but this power is not to be confused with the prerogatives of memory, as Augustine, or alternately, as Stendhal would understand it. Memory by itself is too weak to uphold those aspirations that are not nurtured or even accommodated by an egalitarian order, in an age, where, as Tocqueville puts it, “the prestige of memories has vanished.”103 Even when memory is understood in Tocqueville simply as a repository for what is past, it often does not have even the modest, Santayanian educative prerogatives one would expect. In Tocqueville’s own memoirs, memory repeatedly appears as a confused, useless, or politically pernicious power.104 All this would be a thoroughly superficial reading of memory in Tocqueville were it not for a more subtle but far more profound weakness of memory. One thinks, for example, of the power of memory in aristocratic regimes, a power enclosed by the denaturing power of imagination through regnant illusions of rank and tradition. As aristocratic orders require the strength of memory (in their reverence for tradition and antiquity) even as these memories depend on illusory origins,105 so historical memory in Tocqueville repeatedly finds itself “exposed” (or rather, posited) as radically dependent on imagination as an origin of beauty, greatness, and freedom, even as imagination needs history to provide examples worthy of itself. Yet for Tocqueville, this historical memory is not a relational power disclosing true meaning, but rather a spectacle imperiled by the fidelity of memory to truth, which reveals a relational poverty concealed by imagination’s proud excess. Even amidst Tocqueville’s instances of “true” freedom, Tocqueville’s readers can observe throughout his writings a tendency to extol the tran-

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scendent freedom of past and present only to turn his readers’ glances down to earth, to demonstrate the illusory origin of what purports to be higher or more noble than the search for power, or pride, or above all, impersonal historical forces. Tocqueville cannot resist pointing to what he perceives to be the illusion behind his freedom, even when it is not his desire or in the interests of his imagined freedom to do so. Tocqueville’s love of the truth shows its power even within his yearning for illusion: the truth he believes himself to have seen transcends the desire for an imaginary transcendence. Hence Tocqueville marvels at the daring, risk-taking, and courage shown by Americans seeking profit; these are among the most enthusiastic passages about democratic life in both volumes of Democracy in America. As Tocqueville observes, however, this extraordinary agitation is ultimately based on the fantasy of a lasting happiness in total prosperity that Americans will never find.106 Faithful to their hope, they search relentlessly, but their desire for this happiness can never be satisfied. Yet they believe that it can be satisfied, and this is a necessary motive for their commercial “heroism.” Similarly, Tocqueville’s prose becomes poetic when he describes the unprecedented beauty and grandeur of 1789. Yet it is at least strange that this ode to a unique, transfigurative moment of “delighted” imaginations and “insane” pride was intended to accompany a famous argument that the Revolution did not change nearly as much as it was thought to have changed in the actual life of France and Frenchmen. In truth, according to Tocqueville, “all that the Revolution did would have been done, I don’t doubt, without it; it was only a violent and rapid process through which the political state adapted to the social state, facts to ideas, and laws to mores.”107 Just as American commercial heroism would presumably be chastened by the realization that the enduring happiness it seeks will never be found, so ardent revolutionary sacrifice would have lost a great deal of its imaginative energy had its advocates known that their hopes to begin a new relation between human beings’ transcendent hopes and lived reality were in truth prosaic accelerations of long-standing and inevitable historical tendencies. The sacrifice of their well-being and often their lives sped up what, in retrospect, Tocqueville confidently asserts would have happened anyway. But they did not know the poverty of their relation to the transcendent, nor their relation to their own past, and thus they created a “spectacle” that was “short, but incomparably beautiful.” Perhaps for Tocqueville freedom in politics is never far from illusion;

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but Tocqueville does not stop with freedom expressed in political action and ideas. In a stirring passage in Democracy in America, he writes at length about the “ardent and inexhaustible love of the truth,”108 a love that the exacting and decidedly unsentimental Pascal had spared nothing to praise as the “greatest of all Christian truths” and the “greatest of Christian virtues.”109 For Tocqueville, love of the truth is not quite so true, or the truths it finds are not those that truly motivate it. Amidst “a crowd of men” one can find a “selfish, mercenary and industrial taste for discoveries of the mind,” but this is not for Tocqueville a love of the truth. This true love belongs to a few who seek knowledge for its own sake, liberated from their own selfish needs or the demands of their contemporaries. It is “an ardent, proud and disinterested” love “that directs men to the abstract sources of truth to draw mother ideas from them.”110 Tocqueville names only one modern example of this love: Pascal. Pascal’s love of the truth was, according to Tocqueville, more proud than Pascal knew; Tocqueville knows what Pascal’s pride did not. This implication is amplified as Tocqueville turns to a discussion of Pascal: in these passages, God does not reveal himself to Pascal, but rather Pascal was able to “assemble . . . all the powers of his intellect to better discover the most hidden secrets of the Creator.” Furthermore, for Tocqueville Pascal’s achievement was probably dependent not on Pascal but on the regime in which he lived. Immediately after his reflections on Pascal, Tocqueville remarks that “the future will prove if these passions, so rare and fecund, will be born and develop as easily in the midst of democratic societies as in the midst of aristocracies. On my part, I admit that I have trouble believing it.” Tocqueville continues his argument, asserting that love of the truth instantiates itself more easily in an aristocratic order, where there is a “certain proud disdain for petty pleasures” and an exalted conception of humankind. From this aristocratic disdain, one arrives naturally at a “sublime and almost divine love for the truth.”111 It is not clear whether Pascal’s achievement as Tocqueville describes it would be possible had he known his position as Tocqueville remembers it: that is, that pride inspired his putative humility, and that his search for an infinite God was made possible by the welter of illusory ranks and distinctions that surrounded him in seventeenth-century Paris—that is, on the truth that his love of truth emerged from what Tocqueville describes as the presiding illusion of an aristocratic regime. *

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Yet in an age of equality, how can Tocqueville explain his own desire for transcendence and his desire to write for his contemporaries? Given that he himself is an aristocrat, and thus allegedly free of equality’s gravitational pull on the imagination, why does he express his hope that by writing he might educate others to control the excesses of equality and preserve freedom? Here there is a productive tension in Tocqueville’s thinking: if aristocracy exalts the superior in “the imaginations of men,” it is also true for Tocqueville—at least in certain passages—that human beings as such have this yearning. Thus the “nature” that democracy realizes is more properly described as a lower or fallen nature, against which a higher nature struggles. Tocqueville places a Pascalian anthropological dualism in his work to make the possibility of limiting equality’s failings possible. For Tocqueville to sustain a critique of a general human nature that is not simply annulled by this nature, there must be an internal tension within human nature to articulate the possibility of dissatisfaction with the rapid progress of the regime according to nature. Hence when Tocqueville writes of human beings between the two abysses of life and death, for example, he observes that humanity moves between two unfathomable abysses, in horizontal fashion. Yet the passage that describes this abyss also carries within it a vertical arrangement of these poles—“greatness” and “pettiness,” eliciting “admiration” and “contempt.” There is a yearning to ascend in Tocqueville’s writing revealed in the persistent metaphors of high and low, expansion and contraction, gravitation and flight. One particularly clear statement of this consistently vertical (and implicitly hierarchical) duality—once more subject to gravity—can be found in part II of Democracy in America, where in the midst of his reflections on leisure and intellectual cultivation in democratic societies, Tocqueville claims that “if it is true that the human spirit [esprit] leans on one side towards the restricted, the material and the useful, on the other, it rises naturally towards the infinite, the immaterial and the beautiful. The needs of the earth attach it to the earth, but when nothing holds it back, it stands on its own.”112 Tocqueville’s dual nature assumes that the higher, transcendent ennobling human experiences—that is, those that evoke standing, as opposed to a mere earthbound being—are defined against the gravitation of the passions and material needs. Tocqueville is not interested in the configuration of agitation and repose, but rather in a dualism in which the capacity for transcendence is ennobled as such.

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Although Tocqueville briefly evaluates the relative prospects for different forms of religious transcendence in ages of equality and recognizes the necessity of spiritual form itself,113 there is little room in Tocqueville for distinguishing false from true earthly beauty, or an illusory or empty infinite from an infinite suffused with spiritual energy, or an immaterial pride that conquers the soul from an immaterial love that leads it into or through the world. It is most significant that in Tocqueville’s discussion of religion in volume I of Democracy in America, he comes close to casting faith as a need of an imagination that is larger than the world, rather than a creation whose grandeur surpasses imagining. For him, “never will the short space of sixty years enclose the entire imagination of man; the incomplete joys of this world will never suffice for his heart.”114 Just as Tocqueville (and Stendhal’s Julien before the sacrificial end of The Red and the Black) adore the proud imagination less discriminately than Rousseau, so Tocqueville seeks a transcendent higher nature of almost any kind, capable of sacrifice, with an indifference to truth at once far more politically prudent but as spiritually radical as Rousseau’s. (One thinks, for example, of his remark that it is better for human beings to believe that they become pigs after death rather than to reject immortality.)115 This same tendency leads him to recommend any antimaterialist pride as such with some urgency, as a transcendent vice that he would gladly give to his contemporaries in exchange for many of their “small virtues.” To be sure, Tocqueville commends a more elevated estimate of human possibility to his readers, even as he calls attention to the limits this elevation will have in an age of equality and natural truth, and its illusory character in the ages preceding the triumph of equality. Tocqueville thus articulates a dualism within nature, and yet he accounts for why this dualism does not assert itself as a certain “equality” between the regime of natural truth and its alternatives in regimes more favorable to the illusions of an exalted imagination. For Tocqueville, it is not the case that the proud imagination is the equal of the regime that limits it, once the proud imagination and equality are, as it were, in the open as historical possibilities. What are the consequences of this inequality between the proud imagination and the regime of natural truth? There is in Tocqueville’s idea of transcendence a kind of vagueness that does not easily make itself felt in distinct action. Yet—and here he places himself in a painful dilemma— Tocqueville believes that it is precisely the task of all to uphold the higher

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possibilities of human existence through distinct actions. Tocqueville believes that the citizens of modernity “will arrive without effort at drawing out from this world all the goods that it can offer.” Yet “while man pleases himself in his honest and legitimate search for well-being, he will eventually lose the use of the most sublime faculties, and while wanting to improve everything around himself, he will in the end only degrade himself.” Therefore, Tocqueville thinks it necessary that the le´gislateurs116 of democracies and all the honest and enlightened men living in them, apply themselves without letting up to raise souls and keep raising them towards heaven. It is necessary that all those who are interested in the future of democratic societies unify themselves, and that all, in concert, make continual efforts to spread in the heart of these societies the taste for the infinite, the feeling for greatness and the love of immaterial pleasures.117 Yet this energetic defense of a vertical transcendence is precisely what Tocqueville cannot do, even in purely political terms, because his conception of transcendence is implicitly projective, and thus vague and illusory, while his conception of what is decidedly not transcendent is specific and determinative.118 Aristocratic grandeur, revolutionary fervor, and Pascalian love of the truth (not to mention the dreams of American acquisitiveness) do not, for Tocqueville, partake of the immaterial greatness and infinite in which its agents believe, but they do partake in illusions born of precise, contingent historical circumstances, circumstances that Tocqueville is compelled to point out to his readers. In this way, the uncovered truths of a general human nature appear to oppress the proud imagination, yet it appears that for Tocqueville their very power as truth makes it difficult to mount any comprehensive and successful—above all sincere and convinced—resistance to them, and make exhortations to transcendence of any kind rather weak and uncertain, prone to somber qualification and even repudiation at the moment they are written. What remains is the responsible task of tending to imagination by conceding the power of the real that opposes it, but in a way that suggests a duty without an energizing, hopeful faith in either the power of memory or imagination. Tocqueville’s advice to democratic le´gislateurs is thus decidedly cautious, even resigned in tone. In the conclusion of Democracy in America, he writes this as a kind of prescription for the le´gislateur:

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Fix social power in broad, but visible and intractable limits; give to individuals certain rights and guarantee them the uncontested enjoyment of these rights; preserve for the individual the little independence, strength, and originality left to him; raise him next to society and support him before it: this appears to me to be the primary goal of the legislator in the age we are entering.119 To put it mildly, this is hardly the best and most inspiring advice for unceasingly raising souls toward the immaterial and the infinite. There is little inspiration in preserving “the little independence, strength, and originality left” to modern citizens, or for that matter, in creating broad and fixed limits for social power. Yet if an immaterial transcendence that seeks the infinite is, for Tocqueville, a kind of preeminent imperative for anyone who wants to uphold modernity, what are the consequences of the incapacity to present a profoundly convincing or inspiring account of any form of transcendence? How does Tocqueville live with the impossibility of his most pressing task and with the diminution of the freedom he believes makes life worth living? Here there is an ominous disjunction between Tocqueville the prudent political thinker and a certain tendency in Tocqueville’s own writing. The difficult and painful situation in which Tocqueville finds himself creates a subtle but important turn in his account of modernity. Once Tocqueville understands the counterproductive futility of resistance to the modern order of nature and truth in his present, there comes a temptation to enjoy an experience of some place, or some event, in which the regime of truth and nature ceases to operate, if only in an instant, where imaginative possibility can order new situations that do not merely enact an order he already knows and has already seen. It gives rise to a palpably reluctant and qualified, but nonetheless real appreciation for dramatic and beautiful conflict, an aesthetic of destruction or violence against the order that confines an exalted imagination. It produces a temptation to pursue the anti-vocation of the spectator to violence. It is through this antivocation that Tocqueville’s intense desire for transcendent experience120 (which for him, whether in art, politics, or faith, must work through the imagination) and his inability to fully or sincerely uphold any particular form of transcendence converge. The tendency becomes markedly more intense in his later writings, above all in his writings after the Revolution of 1848, but it is visible throughout his writings as a desire for resolute action, indifferent to self-

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interest and, at times, to good and evil. In a letter from the early 1840s, he says of passions that “I love them when they are good, and I am not even sure that I detest them when they are bad. They come from strength, and strength, everywhere it appears, looks appealing in the midst of the universal weakness that surrounds us . . . we no longer know how to want, nor love, nor hate. Doubt and philanthropy make us incapable of all things, of great good and great evil alike.”121 Like Constant and Stendhal, Tocqueville suggests that the frantic activity of modern life can reveal a deeper lassitude, and thus that constant political engagement is required to prevent this frantic lassitude from becoming an inescapable cultural situation.122 Though Tocqueville’s formulations of the problem take on greater urgency in his later years, in his personal correspondence, a youthful Tocqueville wrote with revealing if massive overstatement that “the only quality I truly esteem in man [is] energy.”123 Yet if an exalted imagination must find itself humiliated by a universalizing regime of contentment, Tocqueville often expresses an attraction (especially in his personal memoirs and private correspondence) to moments when this new order is suspended or diminished. Most superficially, Tocqueville can toss off frequent asides in which history is compared to or becomes a work of art, justified by its ability to constitute an origin and provide an “image” of human greatness. In this way, “history, is like a painting gallery in which there are few originals and many copies.”124 He recommends danger to “open a theater” for high ambitions. Elsewhere he again compares history to a theater, and to times when one knows “before the curtain rises” that one is about to “see a new play.”125 For Tocqueville, the nineteenth century has added a “few hues into the colors” of an older historical picture, but he does not “see that we have put entirely new colors there.”126 In a passage from a private letter late in life, Tocqueville quietly acknowledges the discrepancy between his imagination and the lived reality around him: “the world, it is true, appears to me to march less and less towards the greatness I had imagined. But we are not responsible for its flaws and vices. And for people who must pass only a certain amount of time at the show, the play is sufficiently interesting.”127 More important, however, are the specific events that awaken his imaginative aesthetic sensibilities in more disturbing forms. During his account of the 1848 Revolution, Tocqueville reserves his critical sensibilities not for the recourse to violence—he never expressed any regret about the carnage of the June Days, which he believed was a “necessary crisis”128—

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but for the imitative vulgarity of events from the very beginning of the struggle. In reference to one event, Tocqueville claims that he was “never able to take the [Revolutionary] actors very seriously, and all of it appeared to me like a bad tragedy played by provincial actors.”129 France was not properly inspired to create anything new or beautiful, for “it was the time when all imaginations were smeared in the vulgar colors that Lamartine had just spread over his Girondins.”130 Nonetheless, Tocqueville generally enjoyed the debacle of 1848: he admitted that he “seemed . . . to breathe more freely than before the catastrophe” and felt “a certain relief, a sort of joy mixed with all the sadness and fears to which the Revolution was giving birth.”131 Tocqueville’s “relief” cannot be understood apart from his weariness with the “mediocrity and monotony” of parliamentary life, for the small but insistent and pervasive corruptions of the July Monarchy,132 for the suffocation of a political class, long confined by “languor, impotence, immobility and boredom.”133 Despite having so many relatives and friends in the middle of this tempest,” Tocqueville feels the full force of the Revolution’s “curiosity and interest,” even the “singularity and sometimes the greatness of the show that I have under my eyes.” He confesses that he was “so bored in the midst of the insipid monotony of the previous age that I should not complain too much about the stormy diversity of this one.”134 With this aestheticized vision of politics comes a sympathy for violence in an age that constricted the freedom of the proud imagination. Just as Tocqueville finds a certain enjoyment in the drama and the threat of imminent violence in 1848, he finds few reasons not to enjoy the violent drama of global European imperialism. Although he expresses some reservations about the most aggressive strategies of the French Army in North Africa, he urges France to contravene the rules of war to secure its hold over Algeria, proposing that French soldiers imprison Algerian women and children and burn their harvests.135 Similarly, Britain’s conquest of India is an “extraordinary” event, and he supports all of England’s efforts to preserve its mastery over the subcontinent, an imperial triumph that he claims, in what are by now very familiar terms, holds an “immense space in the imagination of humankind.”136 Revolution and Empire alike are for Tocqueville particularly robust if dangerous divertissements for an imagination that begins, especially in his account of revolution, to find its freedom in a spectacle of destruction. He occasionally finds himself tempted to write (though certainly not to act) as a passive spectator who finds a certain enjoyment in the disordering

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of the new order for its own sake. In several of these passages, Tocqueville appears to stand on the threshold of a late modern aesthetics of violence and the horrors that followed from it, enjoying a glance at the spectacle of the exalted imagination’s violent play, only to observe his own pleasure and resolutely turn himself against it. Thus even in the midst of the 1848 Revolution, he writes that although the “monotony” of petty politics had afflicted him, he recognizes that “to think this way, it is necessary to see human affairs solely as a show, and I see more than that in them.”137 It is extremely important that Tocqueville does see more than a show in history; he worked constantly to stabilize France after the fall of the July Monarchy, to impart a prudent stability for freedom in a moderate constitution. He refused to endorse the Bonapartist coup that further diminished the rule of law. Yet from his writings, it is clear that the constriction of the proud imagination leads him to live with a separation between any stable instantiation of freedom and his experience of freedom. In one of the most powerful passages in all of Tocqueville’s work, he reflects on the strange, unprecedented position that this separation imposes on him and on France in Democracy in America. Faith and freedom are at odds, and servility and rights alike are misnamed and misunderstood. As memory fails to furnish him with some historical analogy, he finds the very possibility of a relational or analogical order of meaning collapsing around him: I search through my memories in vain, I can find nothing that deserves to inspire more sorrow [douleur] and pity than that which happens before our eyes; it seems that in our days the natural connections that unite opinions to tastes and acts to beliefs have been broken; the sympathy that is perceptible in all times between the sentiments and ideas of men appears destroyed, and one would say that all the laws of moral analogy have been abolished.138 In Tocqueville’s account of modernity, the painful and unprecedented caesura between ideas and sentiments requires a decision, and Tocqueville responsibly chooses his ideas over his sentiments, or as he puts it elsewhere, his “instincts.” Given his assertion of a very awkward relation between freedom and truth, it is a responsible decision; but nowhere does Tocqueville’s writing suggest any understanding that it is his understanding of freedom itself that is responsible for abolishing the laws governing moral analogy. A freedom grounded in a proud imagination

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cannot participate in an analogical moral order, once it knows the “true” source of its freedom. It must be unstable, protest at limitation, move toward an infinite that it seeks to make its own, either in an act of revolutionary creativity or in a desire for the decline of the order that stifles it. Moral analogy submits imaginative identification to a relationality that exceeds imagination; once the power of analogy itself is referred entirely to imagination, a stable, limiting, and relational analogical order of meaning “imposed” upon it appears to be arbitrary and burdensome. The abolition of moral analogy still motivates a certain anguish in Tocqueville, and in the end of the book, this abolition at last makes full sense of the “religious dread” he expressed at the beginning of Democracy in America: When the world was filled with very great and very small men, very rich and very poor, very learned and very ignorant, I turned my glance away from the latter so I could fix it only upon the former, and these delighted my eyes; but I understand that this pleasure is born from my weakness: it is because I cannot see at the same time all that surrounds me that I am allowed to choose in this way and to set apart, among so many objects, those that it pleases me to contemplate. It is not the same with the all-powerful and eternal Being, whose eye necessarily encompasses all things, and who sees distinctly, though simultaneously, all of humankind and each man. It is natural to believe that what most satisfies the gaze of this creator and sustainer of men, is not the unique prosperity of some, but the greatest well-being of all: that which seems to me a decline is thus to his eyes an advance; what wounds me agrees with him. Equality is less elevated, perhaps; but it is more just, and its justice makes its grandeur and beauty. I try hard to go into [ pe´ne´trer] the point of view of God, and it is from there that I seek to consider and to judge human things.139 In this passage and in others, equality for Tocqueville is repeatedly connected to and associated with truth, with nature, with justice, and with the will of God. These are hardly trifling things. Yet his freedom, which Tocqueville calls God’s greatest gift to human beings, and with it a direct and unmediated sense of beauty, are profoundly connected to illusion, the more elevated realms of a higher human nature, the expanse of the imagination, and the transcendent energies of pride. Tocqueville repeatedly expresses the hope that lawgivers, legislators, and others can artfully

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diminish the pain of this separation and the contradictions that come with it, but they no longer have recourse to an encompassing illusion that can assume or posit their ultimate unity. Nor for Tocqueville is it responsible to take leave of others and the justice due them in order to exalt imagination with indifference to ultimate consequences. Most strikingly, this division appears above all as a theological contradiction: God’s greatest gift to men is increasingly diminished by the exertions of God’s will in history. It is a more stark formulation than anything in Constant, or Guizot, and it is written in theological rather than political language. It is also a perhaps ultimately revealing passage in which not only Tocqueville’s “dread” but also his decision to embrace democracy itself are finally understood as “religious” in nature, in Pascalian fashion. Tocqueville repeatedly confesses that his greatest love is freedom, but he does not assume that his deepest desire may reveal any contradiction between the historical order that suppresses it and the will of God, but rather that the will of God manifests itself in history140 against his desires, which he must negate in order to accept this order and obey the will of God. With this decision, the fundamental orientation of Tocqueville’s thought reveals its dependence on a secularized Pascalian Jansenism, in which desire exerts itself in God’s absence, and God’s presence demands the abnegation of desire rather than its true fulfillment. This divided sense of God’s will and God’s grace, and with it a profound inner division, makes Tocqueville’s relation to religion, above all Christianity and to some extent Judaism, strikingly difficult and ambiguous. Just as America is at once the exemplar of the proud imagination’s descent and the setting for the most dynamically stable form for the proud imagination in modern life, so Judaism and Christianity are at once necessary for the well-being of modern civilizations while being the ultimate source of their gravitational decline. Tocqueville sincerely admires American religiousness and urges Christians and Christianity to overcome the complicity of their faith with collapsing political and social hierarchies and align themselves with their natural ally, equality. Having an uncertain faith himself, at one point he describes the “free air” of Christianity as inspiring.141 Yet in a deeper spiritual sense, he clearly recognizes that the biblical God has had historical consequences distinctly unfavorable to freedom as he understands it. It is Christianity that both reveals and nurtures equality. Following logically from this premise, Tocqueville claims that the greatest

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Christian cannot be a citizen, nor can a nation of true Christians make a great nation.142 As we have seen, Tocqueville endows Pascal with distinctly un-Christian motives when Tocqueville explains the achievements and possibility of theological genius. Prophets and saints, not to mention Ancient Israel (as opposed to the city-states of Ancient Greece and Rome), are absent from Tocqueville’s account of free peoples. Amidst Tocqueville’s praise for the stimulating effects of danger, his single historical example of a people descending beneath themselves in time of danger (rather than elevating themselves) are the Jews of Ancient Israel at the destruction of the Temple.143 Tocqueville intellectually recognizes and greatly respects Christianity as a form of elevated freedom suited to the limitations of his age. In absolute terms, however, Judaism and above all Christianity are the ultimate source of the historical developments that dissatisfy and sadden him. In what he identifies as their true or ultimate form, they are inveterate enemies of pride. Tocqueville’s account of equality’s appearance in history (and the corresponding fate of illusion) also indicates that in their discriminating search for truth against the rank illusions of “the world,” they have, in the end, made imaginative activity and imaginative power conscious of itself and thus, from the perspective of imagination as freedom, corrupted imagination beyond imagining, a corruption that can never be taken back or reversed. Yet in Tocqueville and Rousseau alike, the need to expose the very illusions they seek to uphold is itself a concession to the power of this “religious” imperative toward truth, even as they celebrate human possibilities that according to their own thinking, require its absence. What can a historian of the modern imagination learn from Tocqueville? To some readers, there may understandably appear to be better theorists and expositors of imaginative power after the French Revolution: Nietzsche, perhaps Sorel, or Baudelaire. Yet none of these authors offers what Tocqueville does: for what makes Tocqueville’s writing so fascinating is that it is a kind of nodal point in which an astonishing number of postRousseauian experiences of imagination converge. Only a writer of exceptional insight and exceptional restraint could live with the contradictions expressed there without descending into incoherence. Tocqueville’s grounding political and theoretical decisions only make sense with reference to freedom as a form of transcendence connected to an exalted imagination that denatures, constricted by a true or natural regime (even if it is a nature that suppresses the “natural” desires of the

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human imagination). With this insight, it is possible to make sense of Tocqueville’s freedom in its full diversity, from antiquity to the Middle Ages to modernity, among tribes, republics, democracies, and aristocratic monarchies alike. It allows his readers to understand why he bestows stirring praise on aristocracies that existed before egalitarian revolutions and generally condemns them afterward; why he confesses an attraction to revolutions and to a nascent aesthetic of violence while wishing to avoid their “humbling” consequences; why he is a partisan of modern imperialism and of American commerce, and yet has a “religious dread” and “sadness” about the coming age of equality. It explains why he can turn to Christianity to give the imagination some higher, more liberating prospect than immediate material gain and the inevitability of democratic anomie, and yet he can also repeatedly suggest that Judaism and Christianity deprive the proud imagination of its innermost power. In sum, with a sequence of language about an exalted imagination, freedom, and truth, Tocqueville holds within himself an unprecedented range of the diagnostic and prescriptive alternatives for imaginative power in the nineteenth century, seeking Rousseau’s imaginary infinite within the limit of postrevolutionary disillusionment. These alternatives are held together by Tocqueville’s Pascalian capacity for what Tocqueville describes as a thoroughgoing self-denial in the presence of God’s will. This allows him to hold within himself the proud imagination developed in Pascal and Rousseau, while refusing this imagination its utmost desire to constitute an origin. It allows him to demonstrate the historical power of encompassing illusions, extol their power, and refuse to become their advocate. He remains a convinced, if judicious, defender of an order opposed to the proud imagination because he understands that the freedom he identifies with it can no longer sustain itself without limitations placed on it. Within this regime, the reduced possibilities for the proud imagination inspire diverse modern agendas drawn from the “spirit” of an exalted imagination in an age when this chimera must know itself, and thus submit to historical forces beyond itself if it is not to embark on a course of pure destruction of all limiting laws and forms (and in Tocqueville, the inevitable prudential turn after this destruction to the most natural and immediate desires for secure equality that humble the proud imagination). These tensions would have profound intellectual, political, and spiritual consequences after Tocqueville’s death. His wide understanding of these tensions allows his readers to survey the possibilities and limitations of imagination within modernity after him.

Conclusion

This book began with the claim that there was a profound and consequential history of imagination between the “knowledge of construction” turn of late medieval and early modern European thought, and the subsequent ascent of an exalted imagination in late modern experience. What can a reader learn from this history? First, a cumulative language articulating a novel and powerful account of an exalted imagination takes shape in the middle of the seventeenth century. Here new languages of the self, desire, and knowledge were both influenced and opposed by a language of the self ultimately derived from Augustine. It is at the meeting point of these tensions in early modern thought that a peculiar configuration of language places and displaces imagination in relation to truth, beauty, happiness, meaning, desire, value, opinion, pride, power, and selfhood. This language establishes imagination as the supreme faculty of the self and its experiences in the world— rather than, and often against, the place of memory. This language about imagination finds its inaugural crystallization in Pascal, even as it is subsequently modified or further developed in his posterity (by Malebranche, Montesquieu, and La Mettrie, among others). For all the historic movements and modifications that affect its course in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this language will both orient and inspire notions of imagination and imaginative power, above all in French philosophy, political theory, social thought, and literature for over two hundred years. Furthermore, it is clear that the trajectory of Rousseau’s body of writing can best be understood through a careful reading of the developing imperatives of a now infinite exalted imagination, imperatives derived from its seventeenth-century origins and Rousseau’s own expansive reading within and beyond the Enlightenment. These precedents led Rousseau to a distinctive reading and writing of imagination that propelled his work 221

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through its diverse genres and preoccupations—from politics to education, from a dream of philosophy in history to reveries that sustained and imperiled his writing, and the self that became consumable within it. Finally, it is only by understanding Rousseau’s account of imagination that one can fully understand the debt that some of the most important authors of post-revolutionary France owed to Rousseau well into the nineteenth century. This debt was arguably more influential and profound than any assumed by the Jacobins. Yet Jacobinism and Revolution impinge upon this debt at every moment, for the reception of Rousseau’s thought is itself transformed by the legacy of the Revolution, and Rousseau’s almost universally assumed connection to its violent incandescence—and the persistent uncertainty and self-consciousness that followed them. Only Rousseau read in the aftermath of Revolution demands that an exalted imagination find its highest end in a fragile, even fugitive freedom. This freedom finds itself cast in relief by a persistent tension rather than a general accord with enlightened happiness. This happiness, that finds its guarantor in modern regimes of opinion, is now assumed— through its earthly preoccupations with material acquisition and social comfort—to close upon the ascent of imagination. This argument raises other questions. Why does this history of an exalted imagination matter? What does it offer in relation to a more general modern fascination with imagination? One can only expect an incomplete treatment of this theme from a historian. Of great moment is the distinction between memory and imagination, understood as two alternative configurations of the self and its relation to the world. If imagination seeks to expand the self in the world, memory relates diversely to the world, accompanied by a constant increase of precision in understanding. Imagination exalts in possibility as such, toward which the real appears simultaneously as flux, as a tempting prospect of desire, and as a source of betrayal. Memory finds in the infinity of the real a medium of selection in which the possible is realized and exceeded. Imagination draws its energy from the illusion of a sovereign self, and its repose in the dissolution of this self, in which energy and form exist under the imperative of mutual attrition. Memory finds its energy in the love for both common and extraordinary realities beyond imagining, in which energy and the repose of form constantly give themselves to one another.1 There are of course other language “games” of imagination in the history of ideas; here one thinks, to make only a start, of Kant and Sartre,

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of Coleridge and Bachelard. Memory would also have its own alternative configurations of language, from Hegel, Ho¨lderlin, and Bergson, not to mention Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, and Margalit.2 We can “choose” other configurations of language. But to be able to choose is not necessarily to posit the equality of all choices—and with it, to assume that meaning and “content” are nothing more than arbitrary judgments of value, returning the reader of this book to familiar spaces. It is obvious to the inhabitants of a globalizing culture of imagination that imagination belongs to who we are, and not just to our being’s imperfection but to its promise. In dialogue with perception and in joyful play, it can enrich and deepen our experience of ourselves, of others, and our lives together. It is less obvious but no less true, however, that some aspects of the configuration of language at the center of this history subsist within our own notions of an exalted imagination, modern and postmodern, popular and theoretical. Their ensigns fly over several assumptions about order, value, and meaning in contemporary culture. For as the world refuses to be commensurate with our desires even as we remake it, for good and ill, according to our desires, human beings increasingly find asylum for their desires’ excess in an indeterminate but seemingly impregnable imaginative expanse. Within it, the self aesthetically (aesthetics remains the ambiguous inside-outside ordering principle of an exalted imagination) surveys, expands, and dissolves itself through the profuse limiting illusions that appear to precede, ground, and surround it. Thus the possibility of freely giving one’s self to any form for meaning and value as truth appears from within the asylum as at once arbitrary, naive, and constrictive. Security is a real and substantial good. But it is also good to acknowledge peacefully that an asylum of this kind will happily not encompass the last word upon the promise of beauty, not upon the mystery of the self. In the liberating uncertainty of the world, there is an abundance of life beyond the illusory infinite of an exalted imagination. The history of an exalted imagination allows us to remember all that exceeds our dreams.

Notes

Introduction 1. Famously, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991). In contrast to Anderson, the present book offers a history of imagination itself—a different task from Anderson’s. Nonetheless, readers will note that a concern at the center of Imagined Communities—the possibility of creating collective identities through writing and reading—is by no means lost on Pascal and Rousseau in particular. 2. Terry Eagleton writes: “One of our key words for the global reach of the mind is imagination, and perhaps no term in the literary-critical lexicon has been more unreservedly positive.” The entire passage is instructive; see Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), pp. 45–46. 3. Gilles Deleuze, Diffe´rence et re´pe´tition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), p. 284. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 4. Mary Warnock, Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 209. 5. John Sallis, Force of Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 191. In Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), Sallis offers—with a bow to Rousseau—some concise reflections on the imagination’s role as mediator between finitude and infinity, as a “discordant, disruptive, transgressive” force with promise for “the task of thinking at the end of metaphysics” (pp. 27–28). 6. Sallis, Force of Imagination, epigraph page, drawn from Blake’s “Milton.” 7. Wallace Stevens, “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas,” in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 231. In this part of the poem, Stevens introduces the “philosophic assassins” and presents the successful assassin as at once drawing out and imposing meaning in a shared world after killing his rivals: he plays “a chord 225

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

Notes to Pages 3–6 between the mass of men and himself . . . and sings, in the high imagination, triumphantly.” Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 444. Stevens’ essay, “A Collect of Philosophy” also asserts the primacy of imagination in art and philosophy. See p. 865: “The most significant deduction possible relates to the question of supremacy as between philosophy and poetry. If we say that philosophy is supreme, this means that . . . reason is supreme over the imagination. But is it? Does not philosophy carry us to a point at which there is nothing left except the imagination?” See Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 81–82. For example see Gaston Bachelard, La poe´tique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957). See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). ´ ditions de Minuit, 1967), See Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: E p. 445. Derrida’s late, ambiguous quasi-theological work took a somewhat different direction, though this might in turn be qualified by some of his last forays into political philosophy. For Derrida’s “theological turn,” see Jacques Derrida, Foi et Savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1996). See, for example, Paul Ricoeur’s “Imagination in Discourse and Action” in Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, ed. Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 120, where Ricoeur summarily refers to Pascal’s account of imagination with the phrase “the power of error and lies decried by Pascal.” See also Eva Brann’s very brief analysis of Pascal as an unreserved critic of imagination in The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), p. 691, and J. M. Cocking’s Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 265, where Cocking brusquely summarizes Pascal’s account of imagination by remarking that “Pascal’s mistrust of imagination is extreme.” For a more complete and stimulating reading of imagination in Pascal, see Ge´rard Bras and Jean-Pierre Cle´ro, Pascal: Figures de l’imagination (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Comple`tes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1959–1995); vol. 1, Les Confessions, p. 242. Henceforth this source will be designated by the initials “OC, Rousseau,” followed by volume number, manuscript title, and page number. OC, Rousseau, I, Les Confessions, p. 232. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., pp. 242–243. This list includes many authors, including Newton, Leibniz, Kepler, and

Notes to Pages 6–7

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20. 21.

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others as well as Pascal. See OC, Rousseau, II, “Le verger de Madame de Warens,” pp. 1124–1129. See OC Rousseau, I, p. XXII (introduction by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond). The source is cited in Harvey Mitchell, “Reclaiming the Self: The Pascal Rousseau Connection,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 54, no. 4 (October 1993), p. 637, first footnote. See Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). In the Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Mark Hulliung’s article, “The Revenge of Pascal,” broaches several affinities between Rousseau and Pascal. For his brief remarks about passion and desire (though not imagination), see pp. 67–69. There are two short articles that directly discuss the connection between Pascal and Rousseau in general terms: Harvey Mitchell’s “Reclaiming the Self” pp. 637–658, and John Plamenatz, “Pascal and Rousseau,” Political Studies 10, no. 3 (October 1962), pp. 248–263. Plamenatz’s article rightly observes that “Rousseau was perhaps the first to translate certain ideas familiar to the theologian into political terms,” but his contribution is marred by a sweeping psychology in which both Pascal and Rousseau are two instances of an introverted, self-occupied temperament; their own words are rarely cited. Mitchell’s article includes much more substantive work and traces, among other things, Pascal’s and Rousseau’s doubts about social orders based on self-interest, and correspondences between Rousseau’s late reflections on the importance of pre-rational knowledge and Pascal’s description of the intuitive mind. Their respective accounts of imagination are not especially important for Mitchell’s reading. In his outstanding Jean-Jacques, Maurice Cranston observes that Rousseau was fascinated by his Jansenist reading; his declared interest “may seem to confirm the judgment of those critics who see Rousseau as a successor of Pascal.” See Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 120. Yet Cranston does not explore the connection or cite scholars who have done so. In Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 356, the author remarks that “Rousseau on the philosophes sometimes awakens echoes of Pascal on Descartes.” Taylor briefly elaborates on the point but only to connect it to Rousseau’s quasi-Augustinian doctrine about “two basic orientations of the will” and the ways in which Rousseau “transposes” Pascal’s ideas about the contradictions and elusiveness of the self into Deism (pp. 356–357). In Anthropologie et politique: Les Principes du syste`me du Rousseau (Paris: Jean Vrin, 1983), Victor Goldschmidt traces an affinity between Pascal’s and Rousseau’s conclusions about the need for the law to be simply obeyed, rather than being an object of reasoned debate (see pp. 84, 530, and 572). For the difficulty of making a direct connection between Constant and Tocqueville, see George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant,

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24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

Notes to Page 7 Tocqueville and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 3–5. For a more recent treatment of the topic, see Robert T. Gannett Jr., Tocqueville Unveiled: The Historian and His Sources for The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 32–33. According to Gannett, Tocqueville particularly admired Constant’s observation that the Directory’s tendency to flout its own laws was a challenge to the well-being of society itself. Oeuvres Comple`tes of Alexis de Tocqueville, J. P. Mayer, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–), vol. XIII, I, p. 148. Tocqueville to Louis de Kergorlay, November 10, 1836. Henceforth this source will be cited as “OC, Tocqueville (Mayer).” Letter cited in Jean-Claude Lamberti, Tocqueville and the Two Democracies, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 5. See OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. XIV, pp. 283 and 387. Cited in Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), note 7 to introduction, pp. 573–574. In the same letter, Tocqueville mentions Montesquieu as the third author whose writings he read each day. The affinities between Tocqueville and Montesquieu were not lost on Tocqueville’s contemporaries or recent scholarship. Raymond Aron has offered insightful comment on the similarities between Tocqueville’s and Montesquieu’s concepts of liberty. See Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Vol. I: Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (New York: Doubleday, 1968). The renowned Tocqueville scholar Andre´ Jardin could refer to Montesquieu, without fear of controversy, as Tocqueville’s “master.” See Andre´ Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), trans. Lydia Davis and Robert Hemenway, p. 341. With few exceptions like Peter Lawler’s book on Tocqueville, the ways in which Tocqueville’s thought works with and against Pascal and Rousseau have been discussed quite broadly. Even in Lawler’s book, Pascal and Rousseau are generally cited in short excerpts with reference to Tocqueville’s response to the possibility of a final stasis in history, and various accounts of imagination are not Lawler’s primary interest. Pierre Manent’s outstanding Tocqueville et la nature de la de´mocratie identifies some of the manifestations of Pascal’s and Rousseau’s influence on Tocqueville but does not extensively discuss or analyze Tocqueville’s relations to these authors. See Peter A. Lawler, The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993), and Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la de´mocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1993). See James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). See John Sallis, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000). See Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage,

Notes to Pages 7–9

30. 31. 32.

33.

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MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), p. 691. For Pascal, for example, see especially pp. 294 and 300. John Llewelyn, The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas (New York: Routledge, 2000). See Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, eds., Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, pp. 120 and 158. See, for example, Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (II, 418– 419), where the author asserts that “the problem of determining certainly and universally what action will promote the happiness of a rational being is completely insoluble. Therefore, regarding such action no imperative that in the strictest sense could command what is to be done to make one happy is possible, inasmuch as happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.” See Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), p. 28. This passage on imagination’s eudaemonic power is particularly near to—if by no means identical to—Pascal’s and Rousseau’s conceptions of imagination. Elsewhere Kant’s philosophy of imagination is much more rigorously epistemological than either Pascal’s or Rousseau’s. Even here, however, there is a kind of ambiguity: hence, although imagination has a crucial place in the productive mediation or association of appearances in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant informs his readers late in the work (A 570, B 598) that what emerges from the imagination cannot be understood philosophically: “the products of the imagination are of an entirely different nature; no one can explain or give an intelligible concept of them; each is a kind of monogram, a mere set of particular qualities, determined by no assignable rule, and forming rather a blurred sketch drawn from diverse experiences rather than a determinate image.” Translation from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan and Co., 1929; reissued 1965), p. 487, italics in original text. Others have attempted to magnify the importance of imagination in Kant. Martin Heidegger, for example, argued that in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, Kant denied the implicit power of imagination granted it in the first. According to Makkreel, this is an exaggeration; for more on this topic, see Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 20–25. Descartes’ thought about imagination will receive attention in Chapter 1. For now, it is worth a preliminary citation of Dennis Sepper’s observation that although imagination remains important to Descartes throughout his writings, imagination was “at the heart of his earliest philosophizing . . . the canonical Descartes (as we might call it), is a direct outgrowth of a shift that was intended to circumvent and displace the problematics of imagination.” See Dennis Sepper, Descartes’ Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 5. Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres Comple`tes de Pascal, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1954), Pense´es, p. 1116 (fragment 104,

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34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

Notes to Pages 9–12 Brunschwig fragment 82). Henceforth, this source will be designated by the abbreviation “OC, Pascal,” followed by the manuscript title and page number. Citations from the Pense´es will also include the 1954 Ple´iade fragment number and the Brunschwig fragment number, cited with a “B” followed by the number. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 305. Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres, ed. Andre´ Jardin (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1992), De la De´mocratie en Ame´rique, vol. II of the series. Henceforth this source will be designated by the abbreviation “OC, Tocqueville,” followed by volume number, manuscript title, and page number. For Tocqueville’s definition of “moeurs,” see footnote on p. 354. For association, see p. 213. See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination. Augustine’s powerful presence in seventeenth-century anthropology and soteriology is well known; see Jean Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), and Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. IV, Reformation of Church and Dogma, 1300– 1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). The problem of interpreting Augustine in early modern theology is the subject of a superb analysis by Henri de Lubac in Augustinianism and Modern Theology, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1969), originally published in 1965. Memory in this book will, unless otherwise noted, refer to memory in its Augustinian sense. Memory is itself an important word in contemporary intellectual conversation, though in a different form. Memory now very often comes with close affinities to ideas of trauma and recovery, and with them crises and affirmations of identity. In Kerwin Lee Klein’s insightful article “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations, 69 (Winter 2000), pp. 127–150, the author adds to these contemporary tendencies an association between memory and ethnic identity, as well as religion broadly conceived. Augustine’s notion of memory—and its appropriation by Stendhal, among others—is distinct from this contemporary understanding, though this book may offer some help in understanding how the emphases and silences in memory’s recent reemergence are connected to a general modern diminution of memory. How, then, is one precisely to distinguish Rousseau from some of his philosophical antecedents who were more than willing to call transcendent faith the product of imagination (i.e., Spinoza or Hobbes)? In Hobbes, for example, religion is the act in which “men stand in awe of their own imaginations” and “from the innumerable variety of Fancy, men have created in the world innumerable sorts of Gods.” Yet for Hobbes, imagination encompasses faith by reducing it to a discrete, self-seeking human passion or passions, represented with compounded sense impressions. See Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (London: Penguin Books, 1968), I.11, p. 168; see also I.2, pp. 89–93. Thus in the passage following the one quoted here

Notes to Pages 12–19

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41. 42. 43.

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on p. 168, Hobbes says “and this fear of things invisible, is the natural Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion.” Furthermore, for Hobbes, the imagination is by definition finite, not only in the Pascalian sense of not being able to conceive infinity, but in its dependence on the direct representation or combination of actual sense impressions, fixed dimensions of space, and so on, to create images (see p. 99). For Rousseau, this reductive move can be provisionally useful but has only a secondary importance. As we shall see, for Rousseau, it is the infinite of imagined desire itself (not any particular passion or passions) that motivates faith. In Rousseau, both the scope and imperative of the imagination itself are infinite. Furthermore, for Rousseau one can be aware of this infinity as the medium for faith and continue to experience a life-transforming (illusory) transcendence through it. This is an experience for which Hobbes and many other theorists of imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show no interest. Hence Rousseau’s infinite imagination engulfs a divine infinite rather than simply reducing it to the finite, that is, placing the divine within the confines of an empiricist epistemology or a nascent psychology of discrete passions. The theme of imagination in Rousseau has inspired centuries of interpretation that extends from Madame de Stae¨l and Isabelle de Charrie`re through the present (there will be more on these authors at the beginning of Chapter 6). I have found the following scholarship on Rousseau and imagination especially helpful. First, Henri Gouhier’s Les Me´ditations Me´taphysiques de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Jean Vrin, 1984), in which Gouhier argues that for Rousseau, imagination replaces rational contemplation as the highest state of being (see, for example, pp. 182–184). Second, Pierre Burgelin’s La philosophie de l’existence de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Jean Vrin, 1973), in which imagination is a force of expansion throughout Rousseau’s thought. Finally, Christopher Kelly’s excellent Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The Confessions as Political Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), which is especially valuable for its account of the ways in which Rousseau struggles with imagination and its constraint. See Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, pp. 298, 203, and 289. Ibid., p. 327. For more on imagination and judgment, see Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 65–67.

Pascal 1. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1116 (104, B 82). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 19–22

4. For more on Bruno, memory, and imagination, see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), esp. pp. 298–299. 5. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, pp. 1118–1119 (104, B 82). 6. Ibid., p. 1116 (104, B 82). 7. Ibid., pp. 1184–1185 (370, B 425). 8. In Queen of the World: Opinion in the Public Life of France from the Renaissance to the Revolution (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), J. A. W. Gunn asserts that the association of imagination and opinion is “conventional,” though he provides no citations to this effect (see p. 70). This may be perfectly true; but as the reactions of Pascal’s Jansenist editors indicate, the Pense´es’ specific account of imagination’s and opinion’s power had the power to shock and disturb. 9. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1152 (243, B 311). Here again, opinion is the “queen of the world” (this time in French rather than Italian). Pascal defines the relation between force and opinion in varied and complex terms. Opinion legitimates force, but it is also shaped by force. But when Pascal defines tyranny as “the desire for domination, universal and outside of its order” (244, B 332), he brings tyranny, in his own terms, into the ambit of imagination. Even his examples of tyrannical assertions—for example, “I am strong, there I must be loved”—rely upon transpositions of attachment and value that are clearly placed within the imagination elsewhere in his writings. 10. Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 306–345. 11. See Nicholas Hammond, Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condition in Pascal’s Pense´es (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 12. OC, Pascal, Les Provinciales, fragment of the 19th Letter, p. 904; Pense´es, p. 1338 (823, B 945). 13. D’Alembert and Condorcet intimated that Pascal was at heart an unbeliever who did not have the courage of his unbelief. For more on this background, see David Finch, La Critique Philosophique de Pascal au XVIIIe Sie`cle (Philadelphia: Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1940), p. 52. For a recent and more comprehensive treatment of the same subject, see Arnoux Straudo, La Fortune de Pascal en France au dix-huitie`me sie`cle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 351, 1997). For Cousin’s interpretation of Pascal, see George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 168–180. 14. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1221 (475, B 275). Port-Royal edition, p. 266. 15. Ibid., p. 1220 (470, B 252). 16. Ibid., p. 1221 (474, B 274). See also the Pense´es de M. Pascal sur la religion at autres sujets (Paris: Guillaune Desprez, 1678). Henceforth cited as the Port-Royal edition. See pages 319–320.

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17. Thomas’ account of imagination is clear on imagination’s limitations. First, it is dependent on sense impressions: “imagination has to do with bodily and singular things only . . . imagination is a movement caused by actual sensation.” See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II: Creation, trans. James F. Anderson (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1975), Chapter 67:3, p. 203. Italics in original text. While Thomas does allow that imagination and memory belong to the same part of the soul, they are not identical. It is imagination that permits the entry of sense impressions into the memory, and it is only there that they are given to what Frances Yates calls “the abstract intellect.” See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 71. On the power of imagination over reason, Thomas agrees with Augustine that fantasies can trouble the soul but that reason can and should master them. See Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on the Virtues, trans. John A. Oesterle (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1984), Question LIX, p. 91. Augustine’s references to imagination and memory will be discussed later in the chapter. 18. See Pierre Force, Le probe`me herme´neutique chez Pascal (Paris: Jean Vrin, 1989), p. 112. 19. See OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1090 (9, B 185); and Les Provinciales, p. 893, 18th Letter, on the relation between violence and truth. For Pascal’s account of faiths other than Christianity, see Pense´es, p. 1192 (394, B 591, 395, B 590); pp. 1199–1200 (413, B 601); p. 1231 (498, B 610). The quote from Augustine means “compel them to come in.” 20. For a few examples of this tension—that is, on whether divine order and charity can or should be visible in the world to others, including to those who are themselves to varying degrees imperfectly ordered by them—a very incomplete list would include Ex. 34:29–35, Eccl. 12:1–8, Wis. 13:3–10, Matt. 5:14–16, Matt. 6:3–6, Matt. 5:16–18, Matt. 7:16–20, Mark 8:11, Luke 6:44, Luke 11:33–36, Luke 8:10, Luke 17:20–22, Luke 24:15–31, Rom. 1:20, 1 Cor. 13:12, 2 Cor. 4:16–18, Heb. 11:1. In Pascal, as Marion observes, in the order of charity, “metaphysics suffers its last destitution: far from seeing without being seen, it is seen without seeing and without seeing that it is seen” (Marion, p. 345). In this way, charity is and in some sense should not be visible to those outside it. (Here in the intellectual, but also clearly in the carnal order—see OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1341 (829, B 793). Pascal thus leans toward a certain resolution of a biblical paradox, that allows Pascal to conclude that “it is right that so pure a God should disclose himself only to those whose hearts are purified.” Quoted from Marion, p. 352; see OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1278 (600, B 737). 21. Hobbes, Leviathan, I.6, pp. 118–120. 22. Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 131. This connection to judgment can be seen in Gassendi’s Institutio Logica of 1658, for example, in I: Canon 12, where Gassendi remarks in his section on “simple imagination” that love

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23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

Notes to Pages 23–25 or hate felt by persons transforms their perception of beauty and ugliness, good or evil in others according to their affection for them. See Pierre Gassendi’s Institutio Logica, Latin with English translation, trans. Howard Jones (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1981), pp. 13 and 94. Spinoza, Ethics II/150. Translation from A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 161. Notations of passages within Spinoza’s writings follow Curley’s marginal notations. Hobbes, Leviathan, I.11, p. 168 and I.2, pp. 89–93. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, III/30, trans. Curley, p. 17. Hobbes, Leviathan, I.6, pp. 118–120. Ibid., I.12, p. 177. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, III/58–59; Ethics II/81–82, trans. Curley, pp. 113. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 88. Italics in original text. Gassendi, Institutio Logica, I, Canons 1–3, pp. 4–5, 84–85. Antony McKenna, De Pascal a` Voltaire: Le Roˆle des Pense´es de Pascal dans l’histoire des ide´es entre 1670 et 1734 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1990), pp. 24–29. See Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, Latin text ed. James Hankins, English trans. Michael Allen (Cambridge, MA: I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2001–2002). See, for example, vol. 1, pp. 154–155, on the imagination’s and “phantasy’s” capacity to integrate sense impressions. Spinoza, Ethics, II/106. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, p. 131. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, III 29/30, trans. Curley, pp. 15–17. Ibid., III/5, p. 7. See Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1994), pp. 58, 77. Spinoza, Ethics, II/233; II/249, trans. Curley, p. 216. For a useful summary of Spinoza’s politics, see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 262–264. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1162 (289, B 304; 290, B 306). The Trois discours sur la Condition des Grands sketches something more substantive, though even here Pascal refuses to legitimate the political “realm” of “concupiscence” or conceive of its goods as real if subordinate goods, though worldly desires can be satisfied with greater or lesser degrees of temporal justice. This refusal distinguishes Pascal’s political thought from Augustinian and Thomist precedents. For more on Pascal’s political thought and its differences with Augustine, see Erich Auerbach’s outstanding essay “On the Political Theory of Pascal,” throughout and especially p. 34, in Blaise Pascal: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989). For more on Gassendi’s ethics, see Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, especially Chapter 3. Hobbes, Leviathan, I.8, p. 139.

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43. Hobbes, Leviathan, I.15, p. 211. 44. Ibid., I.2, p. 93. 45. Quote from Antoine Arnauld, cited in Antony McKenna, De Pascal a` Voltaire: Le roˆle des Pense´es de Pascal dans l’histoire des ide´es entre 1670 and 1734 vol. I, p. 120. Quoted from Louis Lafuma, Pense´es, (Paris: Luxembourg, 1951) vol. III, p. 160. Arnauld calls attention to the danger of Pascal’s thought and attributes it to a lingering impression from his reading of Montaigne. Nicole shared Arnauld’s reservations about Pascal’s suggestion that all law—and wordly attachments governed by them—are ultimately based on caprice, illusion, and chance: see E. D. James, Pierre Nicole, Jansenist and Humanist (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), pp. 112–113, 159–160. There are also some marked departures in Nicole’s Essais on these same questions, especially on the spiritual legitimacy of political power and worldly vocations in general. See Pierre Nicole, Essais de Morale, ed. Laurent Thirouin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), pp. 206, 242, 253, 261. As Michael Moriarty suggests, however, some of Nicole’s essays do show an interest in the relation between imagination and pride; see Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 190. After Pascal’s death, Nicole had an ambivalent fascination with Pascal’s reflections on imagination. Nicole wrote a two-volume work entitled Les Imaginaires, ou lettres sur l’he´re´sie imaginaire (Lie`ge: Adolphe Beyers, 1667), which is full of references to the threat that imagination (and specifically its aspiration to infinity) poses to the Church (e.g., p. 225, Letter 7). 46. See Dale Van Kley’s The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France: 1757–1765 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975); the author observes that Pascal’s politics were not necessarily Jansenist. “Pascal’s profound pessimism toward the temporal order naturally led him to an attitude of complete abnegation in the face of all temporal powers and principalities . . . yet the extreme otherworldliness that characterized Pascal and to a lesser extent Barcos, Singlin, and Ange´lique Arnauld was by no means true of all Jansenists.” He notes Pascal’s willingness to attack the Jesuits in 1656, and concludes that “his companions in arms in this affair, Pierre Nicole and Antoine Arnauld, refused to share their more illustrious colleague’s totally pessimistic and docile attitude toward the temporal order.” See p. 18. 47. See Pascal, Port-Royal edition, editors’ preface (no page numbers are given for the preface in the original edition). The editors claim to present “the most clear and complete thoughts.” Their subsequent example of editorial control excludes fragments that are “obscure, short, and very incomplete.” Yet their edits obviously include softening some of the more uncompromising expressions of imaginative power, especially in relation to politics and wisdom, even as their reluctance to do so allows these same thoughts to enter into the text in terse, muted, or indirect forms. 48. Port-Royal edition, pp. 186–188. For the law (in particular, laws pertaining to property) as “fantasy,” see Port-Royal edition, pp. 193–194. 49. See Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La logique ou l’art de penser (Paris:

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50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Notes to Pages 28–30 Gallimard, 1992) originally published 1662. See I.3, p. 44; II. 16, p. 157; III.13, p. 207. Ibid., I.10, pp. 74–75. For more on Pascal’s intense engagement with Augustine, see Philippe Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995—originally published in 1970), pp. 15–17. The argument presented here draws on the central ideas and themes of the Confessions. For a more general treatment of Pascal’s theological reading, see Jan Miel, Pascal and Theology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969). For a summary of these references, see Sellier, Pascal et Saint Augustin, pp. 634–635. Pascal read both Montaigne and Descartes with care, as his abundant citations of Montaigne and his debates about Cartesian themes attest. For more about when Pascal came to know their work, see Henry Phillips, “The Inheritance of Montaigne and Descartes” in The Cambridge Companion to Pascal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 23–24, 30–32. Phillips observes that in France alone, from 1600 to 1662, publishers issued “some twenty editions” of Montaigne’s Essais (p. 24). Descartes was of course at the center of philosophical debate during Pascal’s productive life; his Jansenist associates Arnauld and Nicole were among Descartes’ admirers. Rene´ Descartes, Oeuvres Comple`tes, ed. by Andre´ Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1953). Me´ditations, p. 319. Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres Comple`tes, Essais, ed. by Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1962), pp. 95– 105. See Dennis Sepper, Descartes’ Imagination, p. 5. OC, Descartes, Discours de la me´thode, pp. 150–153. See OC, Descartes, Les passions de l’aˆme, pp. 794–795. OC, Descartes, Me´ditations, p. 272. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., pp. 294–317. Pascal was famously dubious of Descartes’ religious sincerity. For more on Descartes’ notion of the self and its relation to notions of sacred order, see James Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), for example, pp. 97–98: “The revolution in theism which Descartes had instigated lies precisely here: the world has become godless. Descartes does not draw the corollary from his metaphysics, but succeeding ages will draw it very clearly.” For “Descartes had not failed to assert that this universe depends upon God. It depends upon God not merely for its existence and its continuance, as traditional metaphysics argued, but even for the truth of its mathematical axioms. 1 and 2 would not be 3 unless God had freely chosen this equation. You cannot get much more dependent than that! But the world does not assert or witness the existence of God. Just as the human person became a hazardous unity between the machine that is the body and the thinking thing

Notes to Pages 30–36

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

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that is the ego, so the unity of the sciences became a fragile concatenation of a metaphysics that inquires into thinking and a physics that examines the mathematical possibilities of extension.” OC, Descartes, Discours de la me´thode, p. 127. Ibid. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., p. 129. Italics added. Ibid., pp. 137–138. See, for example, ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 141. For the hint of overcoming mortality, see the reference to overcoming the “affaiblissement de la vieillesse” in OC, Descartes, Discours de la me´thode, p. 169. OC, Descartes, Discours de la me´thode, p. 143. Ibid., p. 168. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, pp. 95–105. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 1065. Ibid., p. 1074. Ibid., p. 1087. From “la balance de Critolau¨s.” Ibid. Ibid., p. 1068. Ibid., p. 1073. Ibid., p. 1077. See Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). The constant exhortations to fear death as a means to live a Christian life in sermons and other writings is analyzed by Bernard Groethuysen in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth Century France, trans. Mary Ilford (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968—originally published in 1927). The analysis of death as a figure in early modern religious texts (Chapter 6) is particularly valuable. For a summary of references to Book X of the Confessions in Pascal’s writings, see Sellier, Pascal at Saint Augustin, pp. 634–635. As James O’Donnell observes in Augustine, Confessions, vol. III: Commentary on Books 8–13 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), for Augustine, memory, intellect, and will are made analogous to the trinity. Memory “corresponds to the first person of the trinity” (pp. 174–175). Saint Augustine, Confessions, vol. II, Books IX–XIII, Latin text and trans. William Watts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1912), X: XVII, pp. 120–121. Unless otherwise noted, translations from Augustine’s Confessions are from Watts (I have modernized Watts’

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88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

Notes to Pages 36–37 pronouns). Augustine’s memory, the self it integrates and how it relates to itself and to creation—above all its relation to ultimate knowledge—cannot be assimilated to Platonic or Neoplatonic models of the self’s relation to ultimate knowledge. Augustine’s memory bears the image of a divine infinite, through which the self partakes in an infinite relational dialogue with a living transcendence and creation rather than beholding a transcendent form or unity in its impassive grandeur. This is not entirely reconcilable with Platonic notions of noetic enlightenment and its recall (see, for example Symposium 210e–212b; Republic 516a–519b). As O’Donnell observes in his commentary on the Confessions (vol. III, p. 177), Augustinian memory includes ideas as well as images, in contrast to the account of memory in both Aristotle and Plotinus. Augustine’s thought on memory, the self, and its relation to what transcends it is also distinct in several ways from Neoplatonism. As David B. Hart has argued in his excellent book, “the One” does not respond to the self that seeks it, not does it order human cognition and its relation to matter. See David B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 191: “the One is of necessity the eternal oblivion of the here below; it is not mindful of us, and shows itself to us only in the fragmentations of its light, shattered in the prism of Nous, dimly reflected by Psyche in the darkness of matter. So the bounty of being is pervaded by a tragic truth: the diffusiveness of the good is sustained only by the absolute inexpressiveness of its ultimate priniciple.” For Hart on Augustine’s memory, see p. 287. For another helpful account of Augustine on memory, see Garry Wills, Saint Augustine’s Memory (New York: Penguin 2002), pp. 3–26. Confessions, II, X: VI, pp. 88–89. Confessions, II, X: IV, pp. 82–83. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), p. 315. Originally published in 1966. Confessions, II, X: VIII, pp. 98–99. For example: see ibid., X: XXXV, p. 176. See also Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp. 309–323. Ibid., X: VIII, pp. 98–99. For other statements of memory’s expansiveness, see pp. 96 and 118. Ibid., X: XVII, pp. 120–121. Ibid., X: VIII, pp. 98–99. Ibid., X: XXXIV, pp. 170–171. See Augustine’s earlier extended quotation of verses by Ambrose that explicitly praises God as the creator of this light. Ibid., IX: XII, pp. 62–63. See City of God, 11. 26. For more on the Augustinian self and the Cartesian cogito, see Gareth Matthews, “Augustine and Descartes on Minds and Bodies,” in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 222–232.

Notes to Pages 38–41

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99. Confessions, II, X: IX, pp. 100–101. 100. Ibid., X: X1, pp. 106–107. 101. For example, at the beginning of Book VII in the Confessions, Augustine labors to free himself from what separates him from God, including “omnia phantasmata mea,” above all the notion that God was a body taking up space. But if imagination can be an obstacle to faith and reason, nonetheless for Augustine both faith and reason are clearly superior to imagination, and so Augustine reasons his way through his imaginings with the help of divine illumination, allowing him to dismiss his phantasms as false. See Augustine, Confessions, vol. 1, VII: I–II, pp. 332–341. A similar point is made in Contra Epistolam Manichaei, Chapter 2, note 2, where a rare “devout mind” is able to discipline the “fleshly imagination.” One should note, however, that imagination in Augustine is, in Pascalian terms, a faculty of the “carnal order” capable of being overcome by divine illumination directly and through the power of reason, argument and reflection. Citation quoted from Henri de Lubac, The Discovery of God, trans. Alexander Dru, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), p. 42. Originally published as Sur les chemins de Dieu (Paris: Aubier 1956). In keeping with imagination’s relation to the senses in Augustine, Eva Brann observes that in his writings imagination appears to have some licit function as an agent of integration between sensation and “intuitive mind” (See Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination, p. 53), though obviously for Augustine memory is the agent of a more complete integration of sensation, knowledge, desire, and truth than imagination. 102. Augustine, Confessions, X: XIV, pp. 110–111 and X: XXI, pp. 132–133. 103. Ibid., X: XL, pp. 194–197. 104. Ibid., X: XX, pp. 130–131. 105. Ibid., X: XXIII, pp. 138–139. 106. Ibid., X: XXIV, pp. 140–143. 107. Ibid., X: XXV, pp. 144–145. 108. For Pascal on imagination’s relationship to time, see OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1120 (107, 195 bis). 109. For example, Pascal’s assertion that an “instinct” remains of our original nature that reminds us that happiness cannot be found in diversion but in rest. See OC, Pascal, Pense´es, pp. 1141–1142 (205, B 139). 110. Augustine, Confessions, II, X: XXXVI, pp. 184–185. 111. See ibid., pp. 182–185. 112. Ibid., X: XXXIV, pp. 172–173. 113. See ibid., X: XXX, pp. 150–155. 114. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1105 (84, B 72). Port-Royal edition, p. 169, my italics. It might be said that this assertion in no way precludes the imagination’s own infinitude; the infinite imagination might only fail to fathom itself. But in Pascalian terms, this is itself a sign of finitude. The imagination’s failure to conceive or possess itself in its own infinity makes it less

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115.

116.

117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

Notes to Pages 41–43 than God, and as a dimension of possibility with aspirations to infinite spiritual power (as a “superbe puissance” ) this is a sign of its finitude and incapacity. See Hobbes, Leviathan, I.3, p. 99. Before Rousseau, Locke believed that it is possible to conceive infinite progression without limit, but not “the idea of a space infinite” as a “positive” conception. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin, 1997), II.17, pp. 199–210. The promises at the end of Wager (of true friendship, faithfulness, honesty) are an exception. See OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1216 (451, B 233). These promises, too, can be successfully imitated by imagination; it is also true that Pascal’s apology can hardly be said to dwell on these possibilities. Pascal identifies amour de soi as a simple self-love that exists before the Fall and does not seek to tyrannize other selves. This turns to amour-propre after the Fall, and leaves human beings constantly seeking to fill an infinite void. Following one’s selfish desire for eternal existence through the acceptance of the Wager, Pascal suggests that those who are truly converted as a result become honest, good friends, and sincerely humble: thus relentless, insatiable amour-propre returns to proportional, limited amour de soi. This is among the most positive assessments of faith’s fruitfulness in the world in the Pense´es. See OC, Pascal, Lettre de Pascal a` Monsieur et Madame Pe´rier, September 24, 1651, p. 496. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, pp. 1141–1142 (205, B 139). Port-Royal edition, pp. 205–206. Hobbes, Leviathan, I.2 p. 89. Spinoza, Ethics, II/107, trans. Curley, pp. 130–131. See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, pp. 374–375. OC, Descartes, Les passions de l’aˆme, pp. 715–716; 730. Descartes, Meditations, pp. 315–316. I was referred to this passage by Louis E. Loeb’s article “The Cartesian Circle” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 207. Ibid., Discours de la me´thode, p. 164. Ibid., Les passions de l’aˆme, p. 758, art. 136. OC, Montaigne, p. 34. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid. Ermanno Bencivenga, The Discipline of Subjectivity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 19, 24–26. OC, Montiagne, p. 633. Similarly, Montaigne’s reveries and dreams sometimes prompt him to place them in his memory; but his reveries and dreams refuse to submit to this constraint. See “On some verses in Virgil,” pp. 854– 855. This passage was called to my attention by a citation in Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 197.

Notes to Pages 43–51

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131. Augustine, Confessions, II, X: VIII, pp. 98–101. 132. Quotes and translation from Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works, trans. and ed. Mark Musa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 17. Blumenberg reads Petrarch’s Ascent as uncomplicated Augustinianism; see Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 341. 133. Arnauld d’Andilly, translation of Augustine’s Confessions (Paris: Jean Camusat et Pierre le Petit, 1649), p. 370. 134. Ibid., pp. 120–121. 135. Ibid., p. 383. 136. Nicholas D. Paige, Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 51–53. Paige notes that Augustine’s “inner man” includes an emphasis on “human sin and desire . . . hidden within” absent from Paul’s “allegorical” rendering of the inner man–outer man distinction. 137. D’Andilly, translation of Augustine’s Confessions, p. 363. English: Augustine, Confessions, vol. II, pp. 86–89. See also Paige’s comparison of these passages, p. 54. 138. Edouard Morot-Sir, La raison et la graˆce selon Pascal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), pp. 217–219. 139. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1115 (97, B 369). 140. Augustine, Confessions, II, X: XXVI, pp. 116–121. 141. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1115 (98, B 370; 100, B 372). 142. Ibid., pp. 1120–1121 (113, B 123); pp. 1132–133 (176, B 140). 143. Ibid., p. 1132 (168, B 172). Port-Royal edition, p. 183. 144. Ibid., pp. 1141–1142 (205, B 139). Port-Royal edition, pp. 205–206. Translation, with modifications to match the Port-Royal edition: Blaise Pascal. Pense´es and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 46. 145. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1140 in marginal notes; the Port-Royal edition expands on Pascal’s anecdote on pp. 206–207. 146. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, pp. 1139–1140 (205, B 139). Port-Royal edition, p. 203. Trans. Levi, p. 45. 147. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1143 (205, B 139). Port-Royal edition, pp. 207–208. 148. Port-Royal edition, pp. 210–212. Pascal’s original manuscript does not include “deceives us,” but the rest of the phrase is identical to Pascal’s own text. See OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1147 (217, B 171). 149. OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1144 (206, B 142). Port-Royal edition, p. 202. 150. Ibid., p. 1132 (170, B 110). Port-Royal edition, p. 323.

Chapter 2: The Imagination of Reason 1. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Discours pre´liminaire de L’Encyclope´die, annotated by Michel Malherbe (Paris: Jean Vrin, 2000), p. 111. 2. For Turgot’s belief that imagination gives way to reason in history, see Mark

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

Notes to Pages 51–54 Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 164. D’Alembert, Me´langes, IV, pp. 318–319. Quote and translation in Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 234. Helve´tius, De L’Esprit (Paris: Fayard, 1988), pp. 428–441; see pp. 428–429 for his remark about the imagination’s former prominence. De L’Esprit was originally published in 1758. Voltaire, “Imagination” in L’Encyclope´die, vol. VIII (Neufchaˆtel: Samuel Faulche, 1765; reprinted Frankfurt: Verlag, 1966), pp. 560–564. Voltaire to d’Alembert, July 8, 1765, in Voltaire’s Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva: Institut et Muse´e Voltaire, 1960), vol. 58, p. 253, Letter 11937. A fragment of this quote led me to the full citation; the fragment can be found in Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 97. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 234. Originally published in 1764. Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, in Oeuvres Comple`tes, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1949), vol. 1, p. 218, Letter 59. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, pp. 56–58. Ibid., pp. 94–95. Ibid., p. 62. See Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 156–184. See Voltaire, Microme´gas (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), pp. 62–66. Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, in Oeuvres Comple`tes, ed. Andre´ Billy (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1951), p. 462. Elsewhere in his work, Diderot posits an imagination often limited to certain kinds of aesthetic appreciation. As Servanne Woodward observes, for Diderot, the imagination is premised on the idea of a unified self exploring an imagined object, rather than the imagination as an origin or force that unites and dissolves the self. See Servanne Woodward, Diderot’s and Rousseau’s Contribution to Aesthetics (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 82: “Diderot’s conception of the beautiful object is one with which he may in imagination carry on a monologue, an object which offers itself to his penetrating glance and permits him to produce his interpretive, subjective thoughts.” As Robert Morin argues in his Diderot et l’imagination, for Diderot imagination not only assumes a self that exceeds imagination, but assumes that imagination does not impose itself upon the real; imagination imitates nature rather than being the faculty that violates or exceeds nature, or creates a new nature. See Robert Morin, Diderot et l’imagination (Paris: Annales Litte´raires de l’universite´ de Besancon, 1987), esp. pp. 177–213. See Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 178, including footnote 44. See Franc¸ois Bernier, Abre´ge´ de la Philosophie de Gassendi (Paris: Fayard, 1992), vol. VI, p. 133.

Notes to Pages 55–57

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18. See, for example, OC, Pascal, Pense´es, p. 1146 (208, B 11), where Pascal presents representations of romantic love in the theater as a kind of “violence” in which the pleasures and “sacrifices” of romantic love are made most powerful, and that incites human “amour-propre” to imitate what it sees on stage. 19. Rousseau did not especially care for Bayle, but had read him (see OC, Rousseau, II, Remarques sur les lettres sur les anglais et les franc¸ais de Muralt, p. 1318). See Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique in Bayle: Political Writings, ed. Sally Jenkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 337–338. For example: “Were chastity about avoiding any stimulation of the imagination one would need to avoid going to temples where impurity is censured, or where one may read about forthcoming marriages.” Originally published in 1696. 20. Malebranche, Oeuvres de Malebranche, directed by Henri Gouhier, ed. Genevie`ve Rodis-Lewis, 3rd ed. (Paris: Jean Vrin, 1991), De la recherche de la ve´rite´, bk. II, pt. III, ch. II, p. 337. Originally published in 1674–1675; revised editions through the final edition of 1712. 21. Ibid., p. 338. 22. See Diana Schaub, Erotic Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). 23. OC, Montesquieu, I, Lettres persanes, p. 139, Letter 7. Italics added. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., pp. 252–253, Letter 80. 26. Abbe´ de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Paris: Galile´e, 1973), p. 147. 27. Ibid., p. 148. 28. Ibid. pp. 149–150. 29. Ibid., p. 149. For more on Condillac’s account of imagination as a faculty that within rational limits, can help lead to knowledge, see Re´my G. Saisselin, The Rule of Reason and the Ruses of the Heart (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970), pp. 104–105. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 146. For the more general comment on imagination as a more formidable power in women than in men, see Mary Terrall, “Metaphysics, Mathematics, and the Gendering of Science in Eighteenth-Century France,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. W. Clark, J. Golinski, and S. Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 258–260. 32. Encylope´die, p. 123; vol. X, p. 327. 33. See Charles L. Griswold Jr., Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 17 and accompanying note, and Raphael’s and Macfie’s introduction to Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1976), pp. 10–11; Smith read the Second Discourse prior to the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The latter was originally published in 1759. 34. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1976), p. 200.

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Notes to Pages 57–59

35. See Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 122, 137. 36. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 621. 37. Ibid. 38. Hume was threatened by the possibility that imagination was simply a dominant faculty, and thus that secure knowledge was impossible. See Gerhard Streminger’s excellent article “Hume’s Theory of Imagination” in Hume Studies 6, no. 2 (November 1980), especially pp. 102–108. 39. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 200. Some would argue that this is Rousseau’s position; I would only do so in a very qualified sense, and only if the “passions” are mediated through imagination. See Chapter 3. 40. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 500. 41. Thus Griswold has observed that in both Smith and Hume, imagination has considerable, if not unlimited, importance, as that which helps to construct an understanding of the real that as “part of a connected narrative or account within which it has meaning and value, is formed by the imagination—but not formed out of thin air . . . the imagination works on givens, including complex “systems” previously shaped by the imagination.” See Griswold, pp. 339–340. 42. For more on these distinctions see the careful reflections of Streminger, “Hume’s Theory of Imagination,” pp. 91–118, esp. pp. 91–99. 43. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 272. 44. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1988), p. 192. Italics in original text. 45. Ibid., p. 193. 46. It could be argued that the security discussed here is nothing more than the desire for Cartesian certitude, and that this drives the entire history of the modern imagination. I would not quarrel with this judgment as an important motivating force in this history. But (speaking of the language of imagination examined here) certitude does not require that the imagination be associated with pride, or that Rousseau’s eudaemonic equilibrium take its distinctive imaginative forms, or that democracy exist in tension with the imaginative freedom of Tocqueville. To simply postulate the imagination as a receptacle for uncertainty would in no way produce this history, even as it is one of the crucial forces that gives it its continuing power in modern culture. 47. See Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 263–271. 48. See Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, p. 114. According to Griswold, in Smith “the imagination has replaced what an earlier tradition (extending as far as Descartes, though with a change of meaning) would have referred to as the soul.” 49. The Ple´iade notes to Rousseau suggest that a reference to materialism in the

Notes to Pages 59–64

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

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First Discourse is a reference to either D’Holbach or La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine. See OC, Rousseau, III, pp. 1254–1255. To my knowledge, it is widely assumed but not certain that Rousseau read the book. Given his social circles in the period of his early writings, he would certainly have been familiar with its contents. The word “bibulous” might appear harsh, but even La Mettrie’s appreciative scholarly defender, Adam Vartanian, conceded in La Mettrie’s L’Homme-Machine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), that La Mettrie’s writing can be “overly assertive,” characterized by a “vehement tone and blunt style” (p. 17) associated with “sensual exuberance” (p. 31). See La Mettrie, L’Homme-Machine (Paris: Denoe¨l, 1981), p. 167, where the soul and imagination have the same functions, and p. 172, where imagination appears as a dynamic principle and the soul as a kind of repository for the products of its energy. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., pp. 213–215. See Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). The use of this term will be justified in Chapter 3, by drawing upon Rousseau’s own understanding of revolution. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 232. OC, Rousseau, II, Le verger de Madame de Warens, p. 1128. See, for example, the concise definition of imagination in Malebranche, De la recherche de la ve´rite´, ed. Genevie`ve Rodis-Lewis (Paris: Jean Vrin, 1991), Vol. 1, II.I.I., pp. 192–193. Ibid., II.I.4, p. 228. Ibid., II.I.III, pp. 225–226. Ibid., II.III.III, p. 341. Ibid., II.III.IV, pp. 354–355. For more on this theme, see Denis Moreau, Malebranche (Paris: Jean Vrin, 2004), pp. 57–58. Malebranche, De la recherche de la ve´rite´ II.III.I, p. 321. Ibid., II.III.I, p. 329. Ibid., II.III.III, p. 341. Ibid., II, III, V, p. 369. Ibid. II, III, II, p. 340. ´ claircissement, p. 897. I encountered this quote and translation Ibid., I, IX E in Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought, p. 198. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 232.

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Notes to Pages 64–70

74. Bernard Lamy, Entretiens sur les Sciences (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), pp. 86–87, 91, 256–264. Originally published c. 1680. 75. Lamy, Entretiens, p. 28. 76. Ibid., p. 132. 77. Ibid., pp. 132–133. 78. Ibid., pp. 58–59. 79. Ibid., p. 110. 80. Lamy, L’Art de parler, p. 256. 81. Lamy, Entretiens, pp. 65–68. 82. Ibid., p. 96. 83. Ibid. 84. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 9. 85. Ibid., Lettres a` Malesherbes, p. 1134. 86. Ibid., Confessions, pp. 8–9. 87. See among others, OC, Rousseau, III, Discours sur l’origine de l’ine´galite´, p. 180; OC, IV, Emile, p. 250. 88. See Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, vol. I, trans. John Dryden (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 52. 89. Ibid., p. 73. 90. Ibid., p. 75. 91. Ibid., p. 64. 92. Ibid., p. 71. 93. Ibid., pp. 64–66. 94. See, OC, Rousseau, III, Fragments politiques, p. 512. 95. For examples, see Plutarch, pp. 54, 60. 96. Ibid., p. 78. 97. This will be discussed in Chapter 5. 98. See OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, pp. 381–384. 99. Niccolo` Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), I.11, p. 34. 100. Ibid., p. 35. 101. Ibid., pp. 34–35. 102. See ibid., pp. 876. See also Thomas Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 278. 103. OC, Montesquieu, II, De L’Esprit des Lois, p. 480. 104. Ibid., pp. 882–883. 105. Ibid., p. 571. 106. Ibid., p. 786. 107. Ibid., p. 865.

Chapter 3: Rousseau and the Revolution of Enlightenment 1. See Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 88–89.

Notes to Pages 70–77 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

247

OC, Rousseau, II, Pre´face de Narcisse, p. 964. OC, Rousseau, III, Pre´face d’une second lettre a` Bordes, pp. 105–106. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 759. Ibid., p. 345 note. Ibid., p. 550. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 573. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, pp. 241–242. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 388. Ibid., p. 199. Rousseau to Dom Deschamps, September 12, 1761. Correspondance Comple`te de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. R. A. Leigh (Geneva: Institut et Muse´e Voltaire, 1965–1995), 52 vols., vol. IX, pp. 120–121. Hereafter noted as “CC” followed by volume and page number. This citation is quoted and translated in Jean Starobinski, Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 233. OC, Rousseau, III, Pre´face d’une seconde lettre a` Bordes, p. 106. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 388. OC, Rousseau, III, Discours sur l’origine de l’ine´galite´ (hereafter cited as “Ine´galite´”), p. 163. OC, Rousseau, III, Ine´galite´, p. 133. OC, Rousseau, V, Lettre a` d’Alembert, p. 6. The context at first appears to give a favorable reading of the public’s capacity for reading, in contrast to the philosophers’ capacity, but this is reversed by the end of the paragraph. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 802. Ibid., p. 541. OC, Rouseau, IV, notes et variantes a` Emile, p. 1421 (note to p. 440). See Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One’s Life to the Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 143–148. Pierre Burgelin, La philosophie de l’existence, pp. 556–565. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1046. See also OC, II, Julie, p. 509 note, and OC IV, Lettres Morales, pp. 1092–1099. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 303. Ibid., pp. 1017–1018. As will be shown below, Rousseau’s views on spiritual questions are also at times equivocal (which is not the same as saying they are skeptical). Rousseau often justifies the immortality of the soul on the basis of its psychological and political power, and as will be shown below, places reservations around any supernatural claim’s status as truth. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1062; OC, IV, Fragments de botanique, p. 1249. Similar images of covering can be found elsewhere in Rousseau; for example, OC, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 816. See OC, Rousseau, IV, editor’s notes to the Morceau alle´gorique, pp. 1766– 1767. OC, Rousseau, IV, Morceau alle´gorique, pp. 1044–1045. Ibid., p. 1047.

248 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Notes to Pages 77–81

Ibid., p. 1046–1047. Ibid. Italics in original. Ibid. Ibid., p. 1048. Ibid. Ibid., p. 1047. Ibid. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, pp. 656–657. OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 383. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 415 note. OC, Rousseau, IV, Morceau alle´gorique, p. 1049. Ibid., p. 1050. Ibid., p. 1053. Ibid., p. 1054. See Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, pp. 68–70. Starobinski’s book is an outstanding contribution to any subsequent interpretation of Rousseau. I would, however, add a reservation about Starobinski’s reading of the Morceau alle´gorique. It is not quite true that in the fragment, “anyone of us is capable of equaling Christ’s exploit.” In this allegorical fragment and in many other writings, Rousseau distinguishes between a large group of human beings who are led (through fables tyrannical or just) and those few capable of uncovering truths about humankind in their unveiled ‘nudity,’ and as a possible additional task, creating the fabulistic forms that give shape to the imaginations and thus to the happiness of others. 44. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, pp. 304–305. 45. As with the relation between Pascal and Rousseau, Rousseau’s infinite imagination is not simply reproduced elsewhere. But after Rousseau, thinking increasingly takes leave of the finite imagination of Hobbes and Pascal, and posits an infinite imagination with a central role in limiting the self and allowing the self to transcend limits. See, for example, Fichte’s remark that “this interplay of the self, in and with itself, whereby it posits itself at once as finite and infinite—an interplay that consists, as it were, in self-conflict and is self-reproducing, in that the self endeavors to unite the irreconcilable, now attempting to receive the infinite in the form of the finite, now, baffled, positing it again outside the latter, and in that very moment seeking once more to entertain it under the form of finitude—this is the power of imagination.” See J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. and ed. P. Heath and J. Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 193. Quoted in Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 211–212. For Kierkegaard, the imagination appears in his dialectical subjectivity as the “infinitizing reflection,” with finite application as the “faculty instar omnium” that allows the self to represent itself to itself. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 60–61.

Notes to Pages 82–86

249

46. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 250. 47. Ibid., p. 249. 48. Ibid., p. 242. In Rousseau and Nature (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999), Laurence Cooper has argued that existence, not happiness, is Rousseau’s supreme end. As a way of thinking about the complexity of Rousseau’s writing and its impulse toward its later emphases on moments of self-consuming or self-abnegating perception, this is extremely helpful and important. But in Rousseau’s writing, these moments of pure perception of existence are repeatedly described as affording the most secure and enchanting happiness. This pure perception is not always the orienting point of Rousseau’s diverse eudaemonic writings. As will be shown below, in other writings Rousseau approves of other forms of happiness that do not allow for the perception of existence, but of illusion. 49. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1058. 50. OC, Rousseau, III, Ine´galite´, pp. 132–133. 51. Ibid., p. 192. 52. Ibid., p. 133. 53. Ibid., pp. 144, 158. 54. Ibid., p. 154. 55. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, pp. 505–506. 56. OC, Rousseau, III, Ine´galite´, pp. 126, 154. 57. These include the mother’s instinct to protect her children from danger, a horse reluctant to tread on a living creature (that poses certain risks for the horse), an animal looking on a corpse of its own species, and cattle being led into a slaughter-house. See ibid., p. 154. 58. Ibid., pp. 154–155. 59. I will further define Rousseau’s use of the term “fable” later in the chapter. 60. OC, Rousseau, III, Pre´face d’une seconde lettre a` Bordes, pp. 105–106. 61. OC, Rousseau, II, Pre´face de Narcisse, pp. 968–969. 62. OC, Rousseau, III, Ine´galite´, p. 142. 63. Ibid. Translation from “Orinoko . . . children” from The First and Second Discourses, trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), p. 149. 64. OC, Rousseau, III, Pre´face d’une seconde lettre a` Bordes, pp. 105–106. 65. In Judith Shklar’s excellent Men and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), the author identifies perfectibility with creative imagination (pp. 54–55). I prefer distinguishing perfectibility from imagination as the desire to realize desire, since imaginative creativity for Rousseau can take place without realizing desire beyond imagination. (This becomes an important theme in the autobiographical writings.) To be fair, however, the difference is a slippery one in Rousseau, including in the autobiographical texts. In Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques, for example, Rousseau describes imagination in general in terms similar to (though much more vague than) those he had used for perfectibility in the Second Discourse (see OC, Rousseau, I, Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques, pp. 815–816).

250 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

Notes to Pages 87–92 OC, Descartes, Discours de la me´thode, p. 168. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 384. Ibid., p. 817. Italics in original text. Ibid., p. 384. Ibid., p. 288. Here Rousseau uses the example of a child, remarking that Hobbes is wrong to call men a “robust child,” since a strong child would be good. Of course, here Rousseau might seem to be arguing that human beings should be able to realize their desires in the world; but given imagination’s infinity, this is not the case. It is significant that Rousseau’s example of someone who can “do everything,” and thus is not wicked, is not a powerful human but God. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 391. OC, Rousseau, II, Pygmalion, p. 1230. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 656. Ibid., pp. 743 and 758. See also OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, p. 15. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 743. OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, pp. 383–384. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 743. OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, p. 693. This passage will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4. On the importance of vanity in general for political life, see OC, Rousseau, III, Conside´rations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, pp. 1005–1007; ibid., Constitution pour la Corse, p. 937. OC, Rousseau, V, Lettre a` d’Alembert, pp. 123–124. Ibid. Ibid., p. 81. In this way, Rousseau writes in Emile that “the sole habit that the child should be allowed to take up is not to contract any.” OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 282. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 384. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., pp. 382–388. Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., pp. 287, 320; OC, I, Reˆveries, p. 1078. OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, pp. 383–384. Related notions will appear in Julie and Book IV of Emile. These will be discussed in Chapter 4. This will be discussed in the reading of Julie; it is also present in OC, Rousseau, IV, Lettres Morales, p. 1107. OC, Rousseau, IV, Morceau alle´gorique, p. 1048. In a recent article, Marco Di Palma has argued that the Lettres Morales articulate an ethics distinct from those of nature and the citizen. See Marco Di Palma, “The Ethics of Lettres Morales and Rousseau’s Philosophical Project,” Modern Philology 100, no. 2 (November 2002), pp. 227–257. Yet the advice of the Lettres Morales has a fourfold structure characteristic of

Notes to Pages 92–94

93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101.

251

Rousseau’s illusions. It offers a transcendent authority that offers an intense self-satisfaction to those who obey it (in this case “conscience,” a “divine instinct”—OC, Rousseau, IV, Lettres Morales, p. 1111). But it is not truly transcendent in itself: conscience is “weak and fearful” (1112), and it requires three supports: beauty, habit, and self-satisfaction based on being a witness to one’s own goodness. Rousseau’s morality is in no way solipsistic: it reaches its apogee only when it spreads happiness to others not through a patronizing sympathy expressed only through the disbursement of money, but through demonstrations of respect for others (p. 1117). Hence what makes this a moral illusion as opposed to simply moral teaching (that could certainly also draw on beauty and habit) is a turn toward the thinly veiled and emphatic validation of amour-propre. Rousseau’s exalted rhetoric of transcendent moral or spiritual authority is here, as is so often the case elsewhere, subsequently revealed to be effective only when supported by the self’s very egotistical desires, which are understood as those that exalt the self in relation to other selves. These powers are most manifest in the repeated and emphatic promises of the immediate and comparative self-satisfaction this morality will offer those who follow it. One thinks, for example, of the spectacle of immediate and rapturous admiration that greets Rousseau’s moral agent upon the occasion of their moral actions, performed by those he or she has treated morally (see p. 1118). One hardly has to be a rigorous Kantian to wonder whether the imperatives of amour-propre are merely “covered” here rather than being transformed by a genuine ethical alterity. It is true, as Di Palma rightly remarks, that Rousseau’s morality “naturally flatters one’s self-conceit by an idea of superiority, [but] he does so in order to draw in readers highly sensitive to, and in need of, such flattery” (Di Palma, p. 256). It must be said, however, that among those with need of this flattery are Rousseau himself and various exemplary figures of morality throughout his work. As Robert Derathe´ observes, according to Rousseau, in a “state that remains healthy” the “divergences of opinion” are not a source of deep division and often cancel each other out, clarifying the General Will. See Robert Derathe´, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, 2nd ed (Paris: Jean Vrin, 1995), p. 235. OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 464. See, OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, pp. 24–25; and OC, V, Lettre a` d’Alembert, p. 107. OC, Rousseau, III, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 6. See OC, Rousseau, III, Pre´face de Narcisse, pp. 968–969. This summarizes various passages in which Rousseau defines his task as a writer. See OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 416; OC, IV, Emile, p. 242; OC, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 829; OC, I, Reˆveries, pp. 1029–1038. CC, vol. 3, Rousseau to Voltaire, September 7, 1755, Letter 319, p. 165. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 274. OC, Rousseau, III, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 15.

252 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

Notes to Pages 94–97 OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 523. Ibid., p. 651. Ibid., p. 633. Italics in original. OC, Rousseau, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, pp. 861–862. OC, Rousseau, II, Pre´face de Narcisse, p. 970. Ibid., p. 971. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 633. OC, Rousseau, II, Pre´face de Narcisse, p. 968. OC, Rousseau, III, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 28. CC, vol. 10, Rousseau to Tscharner, April 29, 1762, Letter 1761, pp. 225– 226. OC, Rousseau, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, pp. 890–891. See Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), and Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). To be fair to Neiman’s argument, she observes that Rousseau’s “natural education” in Emile requires “constant intervention,” but she argues (rightly, to my mind) that “his texts make available the more hopeful line that readers like Kant and Cassirer drew” (see p. 57). I would not, however, attribute the presence of these two readings in Rousseau’s texts to their authors’ “moods,” as Neiman does (p. 56). Rather, the texts, including Emile, invite readers to draw different conclusions, all of which work outside the dominant anthropology revealed in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, at different degrees of depth and clarity. In this sense, this argument comes closer to the arguments of Starobinski, Burgelin, and Arthur Melzer’s Natural Goodness of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) which emphasize the artifice, concealment, and illusion present in Rousseau’s writing, and reflect, as noted above, what Rousseau concluded were his “sad” and “distressing” conclusions about human beings and their happiness. I would add to this latter view two crucial questions explored in these pages: why Rousseau so often calls attention to the presence of concealment, manipulation, and illusion in his texts, and how readers themselves are offered the possibility that the idea of illusion can function as an eudaemonic illusion in itself (to be discussed in Chapter 4). OC, Rousseau, III, Ine´galite´, p. 116. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 288. Ibid., p. 345 note. Ibid., pp. 289–290. Ibid., p. 663. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile et Sophie, pp. 881–924. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 453. OC, Rousseau, IV, fragments for Emile, fragment 18, p. 876. See also OC, III, fragments under the heading Des Moeurs, fragment I, p. 554. See CC, vol. 37, Rousseau to Franquie`res, January 15, 1769, Letter 6529, p. 13.

Notes to Pages 97–100

253

123. For Rousseau’s praise of and qualifications about Genevan freedom, see OC, Rousseau, III, Lettres ´ecrites de la Montagne, p. 881. 124. See OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, pp. 424–425. The full analysis and interpretation of the General Will is beyond the scope of this book. For more information on the General Will as a presiding concept of political life in Rousseau drawn from Pascal, Malebranche, and others, see Patrick Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). I would also refer the reader to an extremely interesting and helpful recent article. On the nature of the General Will, see Gopal Sreenivasan, “What Is the General Will?” The Philosophical Review 109, no. 4 (October 2000), pp. 545–581. To Sreenivasan’s analysis, I would add only that for Rousseau, there would be an important distinction to be made between a people arriving at the General Will by being “well-informed” (i.e., “seeing things” properly, not seeing others) and “sufficiently informed.” (The latter can easily mean a certain amount of information drawn from a theoretically unlimited quantity of information available to citizens.) For citations, see p. 573. For Rousseau, it is most important that the citizen and citizenry believe that he or they have “obeyed” (p. 580) himself or themselves—and in a sense he has, or they have. But Rousseau repeatedly emphasizes that selves, both individual and collective, should be given shape—a shape constituted by limits on information and debate—rather than left to shape themselves as autonomous, rational agents that adjudicate interests without reference to a wide range of shared assumptions, meanings, and values that are not subject to adjudication. (When they are, for Rousseau this is an indication of political impasse or decline—see OC, Rousseau, II, Pre´face de Narcisse, pp. 968–971). 125. OC, Rousseau, III, Conside´rations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, p. 1019. 126. OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, p. 463. Monsieur and Madame are abbreviated in the original text. 127. OC, Rousseau, V, Dictionnaire de musique, p. 954. As with the question of the General Will, it is beyond the purpose of this book to address Rousseau’s musical writings in detail. For further information on the connections between Rousseau’s ideas about music and his thought as a whole, see John T. Scott’s stimulating and helpful article, “Rousseau and the Melodious Language of Freedom” in The Journal of Politics 59, no. 3 (August 1997), pp. 803–829, especially the analogy between Rousseau’s politics and music on p. 823. 128. OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 380. 129. OC, Rousseau, II, Pre´face de Narcisse, p. 970. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid., p. 971. 132. Rousseau uses both terms to describe the legislator. See OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, pp. 382–383. 133. Ibid., p. 384. 134. Ibid., p. 383.

254

Notes to Pages 100–103

135. Ibid., p. 381. 136. Ibid. 137. Socrates and Jesus appear as instructors to humankind in general in the Morceau alle´gorique (cited above). Jesus is an ambiguous case, both because the “Son of Man” in the allegorical fragment is not the Jesus of the Gospels and because Christianity as such (not just its doctrinal development) is so harshly criticized for dividing authority and law in Contrat social. Moses is presented as a legislator in OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 384. Lycurgus is identified as a legislator in OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 250, in Contrat social, p. 382, and in Conside´rations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, p. 956. (Moses and Numa are listed as legislators on the same page). For Mohammed as a creator of political order, see Contrat social, pp. 462–463. Machiavelli is invoked repeatedly for understanding and teaching the true structure or laws of political life (and thus serves as a legislator for philosophers of politics) in Contrat social: see pp. 372, 409, and 384, where a quote from Machiavelli is the closing note to the chapter on the legislator. 138. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 250. 139. Ibid., p. 249. 140. See OC, Rousseau, V, Essai sur l’origine des langues, pp. 410–411. This general unity is sustained elsewhere: see Dictionnaire de musique, p. 915, where Rousseau claims that “ancient musicians were poets, philosophers and orators of the first order.” 141. OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 382. 142. Ibid., p. 394. 143. In Rousseau, the phrase appears in OC, V, Lettre a` d’Alembert, p. 67. 144. OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 394. 145. Ibid. 146. Ibid., p. 367. 147. This will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4. 148. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 362. 149. Ibid., p. 326. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid. 152. Ibid., p. 661. 153. Ibid., p. 651. 154. Ibid., p. 362. 155. OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, p. 472. 156. See OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, p. 467; OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 381. 157. OC, Rousseau, III, Lettres ´ecrites de la Montagne, p. 896. 158. See, for example, OC, Rousseau, III, Constitution pour la Corse, p. 925. Corsica should have a large number of agricultural laborers, and Rousseau encourages his readers to make “this state happy in its commonness [me´diocrite´].” It should be done in such a way that in a state free of official

Notes to Pages 103–107

159.

160.

161. 162. 163.

164.

165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174.

175. 176. 177.

178.

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corruption, and that is “furnishing all the needs of life,” there will be real contentment, which “will not let any of them even imagine a better or more noble” life, for “seeing nothing above ” themselves they will be content. OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 381. A “prince” can be a citizen for the simple reason that for Rousseau a republic is not a given form of government, but “all states governed by laws, whatever their form of administration might be” (p. 379). For great leaders working within the “machine” invented by the legislator, see OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 381, where the great leader is only “the worker who puts it together and makes it work.” See Tracy Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary (London: Sage, 1994), p. 161. OC, I, Reˆveries, p. 1032. OC, Rousseau, I, Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 699. In Julie, Julie recommends reading and interpreting books by one’s internal dispositions after reading them, and in a note at the bottom of the page Rousseau agrees, “si le lecteur approuve cette re`gle,” that is, if the reader’s passions are pleased by reading this exhortation (OC, II, Julie, p. 261). This is precisely the advice that Rousseau gives to Sophie d’Houdetot in Lettres Morales (though the advice was never sent). See OC, IV, Lettres Morales pp. 1083, 1088, 1109. For the desire to burn the book, see OC, Rousseau II, Julie, pp. 5 and 26; for Julie as a model for and indicator of a moral heart, without historical qualifications, see OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 547. OC, Rousseau, III, Pre´face d’une seconde lettre a` Bordes, p. 106; OC, Rousseau, I, “Ebauches des Confessions,” p. 1152. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, pp. 1026–1027. Ibid., p. 1029. Ibid., p. 1038. Ibid., p. 1026. OC, Rousseau, III, Ine´galite´, p. 132. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1026. OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, pp. 655 and 657. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 645. For groups of people and revolution, see OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 385. In individuals, Rousseau’s revolution is often associated with erotic passion and sometimes with its consummation. See OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, pp. 800–801. OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, p. 364. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 416. For example, see Robert Wokler, “Rousseau and His Critics on the Fanciful Liberties We Have Lost” in Rousseau and Liberty, ed. Robert Wokler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 209–210. See Strong, Politics of the Ordinary, p. 161.

256

Notes to Pages 108–109

179. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 241. Rousseau makes a nearly identical statement in OC, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 728. 180. See OC, Rousseau, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 829. 181. See OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, pp. 351 and 394. In the Histoire du gouvernement de Gene`ve, he claims that the time for law-giving is past, for “the name of the le´gislateur is nothing more than an abstract word more appropriate to represent the one who gives force to the laws rather than the one who composes them. There is no longer any other legislator than strength nor other laws than the interests of the most powerful” (OC, V, Histoire du gouvernement de Gene`ve, p. 499). Again, however, a legislator could not announce himself as one; the question then turns to whether in other contexts Rousseau conceived of his writing as having a legislative function. The evidence suggests that he did. 182. OC, Rousseau, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 829. 183. Ibid. 184. See for example, Ibid., p. 815. 185. OC, Rousseau, III, Fragments politiques, p. 500, fragment 26. 186. Rousseau’s move away from this role will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. 187. See OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, pp. 384–385, 397. 188. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 415 note. 189. OC, Rousseau, IV, Morceau alle´gorique, p. 1054. 190. OC, Rousseau, III, Conside´rations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, p. 960. 191. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, pp. 249–250. 192. This is not to say that Rousseau does not take a special interest in Geneva, as Arthur Melzer rightly observes. But Melzer goes too far by demarcating a major work like the Second Discourse as a work addressed “primarily” to Geneva, even if that was certainly an audience of great concern to Rousseau. See Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 272. First, Rousseau took evident pride in all his writings being read all over Europe (OC, Rousseau, I, “Ebauches des Confessions,” p. 1151; Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 829). Second, as noted above, Rousseau explicitly asserts that while writing the Second Discourse, he “will suppose himself” not before Geneva but before “the Lyceum of Athens” and “humankind” (OC, III, Ine´galite´, p. 133). I would prefer this very strong internal textual evidence to a subsequent letter written to a periodical (Melzer’s evidence), especially since the letter to the Mercure de France does not give unequivocal support to the “Genevan” argument. In the letter, Rousseau confines his remark about the irrelevance of the text to non-Genevan readers to those among them who might (or might not) find nothing “useful” or “amusing” in the Discourse (see OC, III, p. 1387). In a more general sense (beyond Melzer’s argument about certain political texts), Rousseau acknowledges his desire for central political writings to be read by a general posterity, including The First Discourse and Emile (OC, III, Discours

Notes to Pages 110–115

193. 194.

195. 196.

257

sur les sciences et les arts, p. 3; OC, I, Reˆveries, p. 1018); and as Melzer remarks (p. 277), Julie is written in response to his “times” and its “corrupt peoples” (note the plural). See OC, II, Julie, p. 5. OC, Rousseau, III, Lettres ´ecrites de la Montagne, p. 881. Rousseau expressed utmost confidence that his writing and the story of his life would outlive him. See OC, Rousseau, I, “Ebauches des Confessions,” p. 1153. This will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 5. Ibid., p. 1152. OC, Rousseau, II, Pre´face de Narcisse, p. 968.

Chapter 4: Illusion’s Reflection 1. OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, p. 632 note. Throughout this chapter, this source will be identified as “Julie” followed by the relevant page number. 2. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 228, 232, 251; for more on Julie’s popularity, see p. 242. “At least seventy editions were published before 1800—probably more than for any other novel in the previous history of publishing.” 3. Julie, pp. 5, 26. 4. Ibid., p. 15. 5. Ibid., p. 17. 6. Ibid., pp. 22–23. 7. Ibid., pp. 24–25. 8. OC, Rousseau, V, Lettre a` d’Alembert, p. 107. 9. Julie, p. 27. 10. Ibid., p. 277. 11. Ibid., pp. 25–26. 12. Ibid., pp. 136–137. 13. Ibid., p. 144. 14. Ibid., p. 217. 15. Ibid., pp. 225–226. 16. Ibid., p. 557. 17. Ibid., p. 687. 18. In the play, the protagonist, Vale`re, has seen his own portrait after it has been altered to resemble a woman, but he fails to recognize that it is a picture of himself. He is ready to jilt his beloved, Ange´lique, in order to pursue the subject of the portrait. At the end, he pledges to marry Ange´lique before discovering the identity of the portrait’s subject. In The Politics of the Ordinary, Tracy Strong argues that the play is an affirmation of the recognition of another, since the protagonist agrees to marry his beloved rather than continue to seek out a feminized version of himself. I do think this recognition of another is at work in the play, but I would not go so far as to say it expresses a deep, self-constituting mutuality, where “self-knowledge is con-

258

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

Notes to Pages 115–118 sequent to and does not precede the recognition of another” (p. 49). First, Vale`re’s willingness to accept Ange´lique at the play’s end is clearly based in large part on the fact that Ange´lique did not seem at all put out about losing him to the subject of the painting, a disappointment he expresses repeatedly (she, of course, knew the portrait was of Vale`re). Even when he declares that he desires to feel nothing but hatred for her, she responds with total indifference (OC, Rousseau, II, Narcisse, p. 1013). To desire Ange´lique again is in part a response to the fact that her emotional distance has made her seem superior and thus more desirable. Second, though it is true that Vale`re chooses Ange´lique before knowing the subject of the portrait, and that is important, it is also true that even after the couple is reunited, Ange´lique has to order the removal of the obfuscating parure, before Vale`re can recognize his mistake (pp. 1015–1016). That is, she instructs his perception as a “guide”—but only after Vale`re has given his full and voluntary assent to their union, rather than being compelled by constraint to do so. In this modestly charming comedy, Rousseau’s interest in assigning ranks of perception and self-command (in which the superior person both refuses all coercion of others, while quietly manipulating the desires of others) is happily muted—but not absent. Julie, p. 394. For example, see ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 526. See Mira Morgenstern, “Women, Power and the Politics of Everyday Life,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2002), pp. 113–143. Claire’s importance in Julie is discussed on pp. 125–128 and 135–138. In general, Morgenstern’s reading of Claire and Clarens is powerful and persuasive; as noted below, I disagree with her on the nature of the ultimate limitations placed on Claire’s autonomy and happiness, above all with reference to memory. Julie, pp. 320–321. Ibid., pp. 187, 489. Ibid., pp. 432–433. Ibid., pp. 320–321. Ibid., see pp. 179, 206, 405. In the final reference, Claire claims that her now dead husband and Julie had shared her heart, but Julie filled in the place left by her husband’s death almost immediately. Ibid., p. 409. Ibid., p. 640. Ibid., pp. 321–322, 404, 538. See OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, p. 385; OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, pp. 800–801. In these texts, revolutions are variously able to return peoples (in Contrat social) and persons (in Emile) to youthful plasticity and vigor. Julie, p. 364. Julie, p. 349.

Notes to Pages 119–125 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

259

Ibid., p. 354. Ibid., p. 355. Ibid., pp. 356–357. Ibid., p. 363. See Julie’s prayer in Julie, pp. 356–357. Ibid., p. 365. Julie, p. 589. For Rousseau’s criticism of Christianity, see OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, pp. 464–469; for his assessment of Christianity’s decline in Europe, see OC, Rousseau, III, Lettres ´ecrites de la Montagne, p. 802. Julie p. 488. Ibid., p. 472. See Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), esp. Chapter 5. Julie, p. 467. Ibid., p. 449. Ibid., p. 446. Ibid., p. 453. Ibid., pp. 510–511. Ibid. Ibid. See ibid., pp. 520–521, and the excellent book by Christie McDonald Vance, The Extravagant Shepherd (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1973), vol. CV, p. 159. In the conclusion of a letter to Bomston recounting this incident, SaintPreux claims that the “memory” of Bomston’s virtue and restraint helped him to restrain himself with Julie (see p. 428). Bomston’s restraint is the subject of raised eyebrows elsewhere in the novel, including those of the “editor” Rousseau, as cited above. Even if this assertion were true, however, the larger context, previously defined by Wolmar, points to a manipulation of imagination that supplants memory rather than drawing upon it as a source of truth or moral authority. Julie, pp. 511–512. Ibid., p. 424. Ibid., p. 425. This translation closely follows the Stewart and Vache´ translation (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), p. 350. Julie, p. 487. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, pp. 406–407. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1018. See Jean-Pierre Dubost, “Libertinage and Rationality: From the ‘Will to Knowledge’ to Libertine Textuality” in Yale French Studies, no. 94 (1998), p. 63. Julie, p. 129. Ibid., p. 289.

260 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

Notes to Pages 125–128 Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., pp. 77–78. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., pp. 288–289. Ibid., p. 693. Ibid., p. 343. Ibid., p. 344. Ibid., p. 345. Ibid., pp. 345–346. Even when the letters speak of the reality of beauty or love, Rousseau’s editorial notes often turn the reader to imagination. See ibid., p. 341, p. 693 note. Conscience might be thought to be an unwaveringly real and true guide in Rousseau. But Julie claims early in the novel that she is certain that her feelings for Saint-Preux have changed, because her conscience tells her so (p. 364), yet on this point her conscience will prove to be wrong, and it is illusion that has protected her from her feelings (p. 741). Ibid., p. 590 note. See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), pp. 288–289. OC, Rousseau, III, Lettres ´ecrites de la Montagne, p. 705. OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat Social, p. 464. Ibid., p. 467. Ibid., p. 379. Ibid., p. 467. For an interesting alternative reading of these passages, see Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, p. 264. Rosenblatt argues that these remarks are intended to inspire resistance; Rousseau is “deliberately baiting people to oppose his statements about Christianity.” This may well be a desired effect of this writing. That said, his criticisms of Christianity are also grounded in his deepest assumptions about political unity, a unity incompatible with the Christian distinction between the sacred and the secular orders. This may well be a meliorable reality for Rousseau, but in his thought, it is still a pernicious one. Julie, pp. 694–695, 698. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 599. Ibid., p. 607. Julie, p. 359. Julie, p. 698. See CC, vol. 37, Rousseau to Franquie`res, January 15, 1769, Letter 6529, p. 13. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, pp. 618–619. Julie, p. 699. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 654. “One takes hold of the passions only by the passions; it is by their empire that one must fight their tyranny.” OC, Rousseau, V, Essai sur l’origine des langues, p. 401 note.

Notes to Pages 128–137

261

90. OC, Rousseau, III, Ine´galite´, p. 211. See also OC, Rousseau, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 846. 91. OC, Rousseau, V, Essai sur l’origine des langues, p. 401. 92. OC, Rousseau, IV, Emile, p. 421. 93. See ibid., pp. 632–635 note. Furthermore, the Savoyard Vicar believes in good instincts and natural pity (see pp. 596–597), while in his own authorial voice, Rousseau gives a much more qualified assessment of natural pity (see p. 358—on self-interest—and pp. 504 and 507 on the motives for pity). 94. Julie, pp. 694–695. 95. See Julie, p. 696; OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, pp. 228–229. 96. Julie, p. 696. 97. Ibid., p. 695. 98. Ibid., pp. 695–697. 99. Ibid., p. 697. 100. Ibid., p. 556. 101. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 219, note 36. 102. Julie, p. 693. 103. Ibid., p. 693 note. 104. OC, Rousseau, V, Essai sur l’origine des langues, p. 416. 105. Julie, p. 689. 106. Ibid., pp. 719, 740–741. 107. Ine´galite´, pp. 143–144. 108. For example, Julie has a last supper, at which she consumes bread, fish, and wine; her servant Fauchon’s prodigal husband returns (see pp. 730–731, 721–723). In the end Julie speaks with a “supernatural fire” and dies. After her death, the townspeople imagine that she has risen from the dead (p. 736). 109. Ibid., p. 692. 110. Ibid., p. 741. 111. See ibid., pp. 694 note and 740. 112. Ibid., p. 740. 113. Though Saint-Preux is described as easily led and manipulated, he is also described as a childlike character moving towards extremes in his imagination (see, for example, Julie’s assessment in ibid., pp. 686–687). The terms of this description are very similar to the ones Rousseau will use to describe himself in his autobiographical writings.

Chapter 5: The Consuming Infinite 1. 2. 3. 4.

OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. See OC, Rousseau, V, Lettre a` d’Alembert, pp. 61–67. OC, Rousseau, I, “Ebauches des Confessions,” pp. 1152–1153.

262 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Notes to Pages 138–143 Ibid., p. 1149. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 5. “Interiorly and Under the Skin.” OC, Rousseau, I, “Ebauches des Confessions,” p. 1153. Ibid., p. 1154. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, pp. 8–9. Ibid., p. 12. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1012. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 226. My italics. See Ann Hartle, “Augustine and Rousseau: Narrative and Self-Knowledge in the Two Confessions” in Gareth Matthews ed. The Augustinian Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 263–285. OC, Rousseau, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 858. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 10. See, for example, ibid, Confessions, pp. 98–103, where Rousseau’s imagination leads him to abandon a promising position in favor of traveling with a friend, intending to enrich themselves with an amusing contraption (a Heron fountain). This and other examples can be found in Ann Hartle’s excellent comparison of Augustine’s Confessions and Rousseau’s Confessions, based on the distinction between imagination and memory. See Hartle, “Augustine and Rousseau” in The Augustinian Tradition, pp. 263–285. Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The Confessions as Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 12. Ibid., p. 17. See Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life, p. 88. See Kelly, p. 144. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 115. Ibid., pp. 202–203. Ibid., p. 162. Ibid., p. 351. Ibid., p. 573. Ibid., p. 386. Ibid., p. 388. OC, Rousseau, III, Ine´galite´, p. 133. OC, Rousseau, III, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 3. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 351. Ibid., p. 386. OC, Rousseau, I, Lettres a` Malesherbes, pp. 1135–1136. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 416. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 320. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 321–322. Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., p. 321. Ibid. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 144–147

263

40. Ibid., pp. 75–76. Rousseau passionately kisses Madame Basile’s hand, but their desire remains unfulfilled. Rousseau observes that “it is perhaps because of this that the image of this lovable woman has rested engraved at the bottom of my heart with such charming features.” 41. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, pp. 321–322. Roughly, “leave the ladies, and study mathematics.” 42. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 601. 43. Ibid., pp. 585, 107–108. 44. Ibid., pp. 331–332. Derrida famously elaborates on this theme (De la Grammatologie, pp. 203–226). Perhaps the most interesting manifestation of this supplement, with all its desire and fear, is not Rousseau’s sexuality but his relation to God. Its religious manifestation will be taken up below. 45. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 320. Rousseau claims that Nature “has put in my miserable head the poison of this ineffable happiness, the appetite for which she has put in my heart.” Heart, here as elsewhere, is not clearly distinguished in Rousseau’s writing from imagination. 46. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 135, where Rousseau rhapsodizes about the “earth in its greatest parure,” immediately after describing the joys of women’s “parure” and clothing on the preceding page. See also p. 189, where Rousseau acknowledges to readers that “I fear nothing so much in the world as a pretty woman undressed; I dread her a hundred times less pare´e.” On one occasion, Rousseau takes pride in showing natural man “nud”; but here the clothing had “disfigured” humankind by weakness and “petty lies” (p. 388), whereas he believes that his own philosophical exaltation was “great” and “beautiful” (p. 416). 47. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 440. 48. Ibid., p. 414. 49. Ibid., p. 601. 50. See, for example, an interesting passage in Dennis Sepper’s Descartes’s Imagination, pp. 154–155: “Lachterman considers, in particular, the use of diagrams in ancient and early modern mathematics within the context of an ontological dilemma posed by imageability. He interprets Aristotle, in comparison to Neoplatonists, as more sharply separating the knowledge of mathematics from imagination, in that the process of abstraction makes the image transparent to intellection so that the latter can know unchangeable, universal essences.” Then: “simply stated, radically modern thinking about imagination takes its bearing from the phenomenon of productive arts, including especially those arts adept at fashioning internal mental images and then embodying these elsewhere, by design. Descartes in particular, is one of these radically modern thinkers, and his mathematics is a paradigm of the modern approach.” 51. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 656. 52. OC, Rousseau, I, “Ebauches des Confessions,” p. 1153. See also Lettres a` Malesherbes, p. 1145. 53. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, pp. 1090–1092.

264

Notes to Pages 147–150

54. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 641. See also Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 817. 55. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1077. 56. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 3; “Ebauches des Confessions,” p. 1154. 57. OC, Rousseau I, Lettres a` Malesherbes, pp. 1139–1140. It is important to note that not all the passages in the Lettres are so committed to solitude. Again, this argument addresses a tendency in Rousseau’s writing that culminates in the Reˆveries, though even there, as noted above, it is not without qualification. The turn to solitude becomes progressively more radical and pervasive, however, from the early 1760s forward. 58. OC, Rousseau, I, Lettres a` Malesherbes, p. 1140. 59. In Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, Rousseau will repeatedly claim that once the imagination satisfies itself, complete happiness is possible; it alone is “solidly happy” (p. 814). Rousseau will vacillate on the extent to which the proud imagination is sufficiently stable to create its own happiness, but the temptation to assert this control against the real is itself revealing. See OC, Rousseau, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, pp. 814, 857–858. 60. OC, Rousseau, I, Lettres a` Malesherbes, p. 1141. 61. OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, pp. 590–591. For a different reading of this passage emphasizing the desire for immediate contact with the divine, see Starobinski, Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, p. 117. Given the dynamics of this larger pattern throughout Rousseau’s writing, in contrast to Starobinski, I am much more inclined to interpret Julie’s “regret” at her inability to enjoy such direct contact as an exact expression of the “lively and attractive sadness” mentioned by Rousseau in the Lettres a` Malesherbes, especially as Saint-Preux continues to describe in what ways Bomston can “imagine” Julie’s faith, and the tender melancholy she feels in response to her husband’s incredulity (pp. 591–592). 62. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, pp. 1015–1023. 63. OC, Rousseau, I, Lettres a` Malesherbes, p. 1141. 64. Ibid., pp. 1141–1142. 65. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1048. 66. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 641. See also Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 817. 67. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1005. In Eli Friedlander’s J. J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 23–24, the author describes this accident as “the ordinary experienced as a revelation” that “provides a truth opening to meaning, making it possible for the self to be beside itself.” Thus it is not “an inner private space of fantasy.” It is quite right and important to note that this is not an “inner” or “private” space. But although Friedlander’s reading of the Reˆveries is very intelligent and stimulating, this is a strange account of the ordinary, not least because what is other than Rousseau is not encountered as other in its ordinary (and revelatory) difference, but as the borderless expansion of his

Notes to Pages 151–154

68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

265

own existence released from the limit of identity, of being an I. It thus seems to Rousseau that everything he can perceive is “filled with his insubstantial existence.” Friedlander suggests something very helpful about the I and otherness on p. 110. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 226. For a different reading based on this passage and the conclusion of the Confessions in general, see Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life, pp. 231–238. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1073. As noted in text, the same process occurs in the following walk, where Rousseau begins with a genre of “adorable memory” only to turn quickly to his misfortunes. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1074. By the next page, he is writing of his unhappiness. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, pp. 1002 and 1004. Ibid., p. 1075. Ibid., p. 1002. Friedlander speaks of Rousseau letting go of intention in passages like these. In Friedlander’s words, it is “tempting” to think of Rousseau as “evading the moral sphere” and giving way to pure perception, but “rather than a fit to the actual sensuous given, one might speak here of the actualization of meaning that leaves no hidden excess” (see p. 94). This is hard to sustain; Rousseau’s reading of all human others around him as “automatons” indicates a very real excess, as does his comparisons of his own impassivity to God’s. Friedlander suggests that Rousseau sees himself as an object as well as his contemporaries, and thus the reference to automatons can become part of a general move beyond intention (pp. 93–94). But Rousseau’s loss of identity and worldly intention in pure perception is a move toward an ecstatic imagined infinity and expansion rather than the inanimate; the states are similar in that they both lack a capacity for autonomous action, but that does not make them identical. That said, here there is a decline in excess related to the infinite imagination’s consuming of the self, and thus a lack of imaginative intention, which Rousseau often experiences with regret and melancholy. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, pp. 1056–1057. Ibid., p. 1078. This will be discussed in some detail in Chapter 6. See his assertions in the Reˆveries that he is “proscrit par un accord unanime” (p. 995), and that he is subject to the “constantly active and palpable animosity of the whole present generation” (p. 1023). OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, p. 416. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 999. See also p. 1047, where he seeks a state of pure existence where one feels “sufficient to one’s self like God.” OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, pp. 1047–1048. Ibid., p. 1067. Ibid., p. 1068.

266 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93.

94.

Notes to Pages 154–159 See, for example, OC, Rousseau, III, Contrat social, pp. 384–385, 393. Ibid., p. 386. OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, p. 455. OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1066. Ibid., p. 1075. OC, Rousseau, I, Confessions, pp. 135, 159, 403, 426. See also Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 807. See also the Ple´iade notes, pp. 1348–1349, note 4. OC, Rousseau, IV, Morceau alle´gorique, p. 1044. Ibid., p. 1048. See OC, Rousseau, I, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, p. 824. Significantly, Rousseau observes of Jean-Jacques that he is an “idolator” of beauty. In this passage, Rousseau tells the Frenchman that “virtue” is the supreme beauty; this returns the reader to Rousseau’s notion of virtue as a property of active, self-sufficient “strong souls” (also p. 824), among which Rousseau believes he can no longer count himself. But as he observes in these pages, his imagination allows him a self-sufficiency that functions like virtue and is itself beautiful (see pp. 814, 857–858). Of course, the end of the Reˆveries includes a beautiful memory of Rousseau’s love for Madame de Warens. Once again, however, it is an imaginatively transfigured memory, and characteristically rendered without rapport between persons or true otherness, but rather as a “cover” that conceals what is now unpleasant and valued as a means to enjoy possession in an effortless equilibrium of desire and desired. Rousseau remarks that “I convinced Maman [Warens] to live in the country. An isolated house on the slope of a valley was our refuge, and it is here that in the space of four or five years I enjoyed a century of life and of pure and full happiness that covers with its charms all that is horrifying in my present fate. I had need of a woman friend according to my heart, and I had her; I had desired to live in the country, I had obtained it; I could not suffer subjugation, and I was perfectly free, and better than free, for subjugated only by my affections, I only did what I wanted to do.” See OC, Rousseau, I, Reˆveries, p. 1099. Ibid., pp. 1044–1048. The argument here owes a clear debt to Hans Urs von Balthasar. Recent work on aesthetics has drawn upon his thought as well. See, for example, Denis Donoghue, Speaking of Beauty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

Chapter 6: Rousseau and Restoration: Imagination and Memory 1. See especially James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), and Nathalie Barbara Robisco, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la re´volution franc¸aise (Paris: Champion, 1998), which includes a section on assessments of Rousseau after the Revolution. See also the short concluding references to Rousseau in Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment

Notes to Pages 159–163

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

267

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 714–720. The emphasis shifts toward more forceful limiting, as well as an acknowledgment of Rousseau’s influence on the Revolution in Patrice Higonnet’s Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), for example, pp. 71–72, 319–320. On this question, Roger Chartier argues that there is a way in which far from making the Revolution, the Revolution “made” Rousseau’s texts. See Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 89. The argument that follows will qualify this thesis, suggesting that in post-revolutionary France, Rousseau and Revolution were in a kind of dialogue between a transformed Rousseauvian anthropology of imagination and the “world” of others that, in an act of sacrifice, ultimately demands the renunciation of this anthropology’s full expression. Madame de Stae¨l, Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caracte`re de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1788). Letter 6, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Me´moire de la critique, ed. Raymond Trousson (Paris: Presses de l’Universite´ de Paris-Sorbonne, 2000), p. 551. Isabelle de Charrie`re, Eloge de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1790), in ibid., pp. 576, 578–579, 583, 581, 586. Italics in original text. Joseph de Maistre, De la souverainete´ du peuple (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), p. 171. Ibid., p. 111. See Robisco, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 329. For more information on de Maistre and myths of origin, see Owen Bradley, A Modern Maistre (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). De Maistre, De la souverainete´ du peuple, p. 118. Maine de Biran, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, in Maine de Biran: Oeuvres Choisies, introduced by Henri Gouhier (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1942), p. 122. Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., pp. 120–121. See Philip Hallie, Maine de Biran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 79–83. Maine de Biran, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, p. 135. Ibid. For more background on Biran and Kant, see ibid., pp. 22–23, 67–68, 210– 228. For more on Biran’s intellectual circle, see Jan Goldstein, The PostRevolutionary Self. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., pp. 148–149. Fondements de la morale et de la religion, in Gouhier, ed. Maine de Biran: Oeuvres Choisies, pp. 265–266.

268

Notes to Pages 163–170

19. Nouveaux Essais d’Anthropologie, in Gouhier, ed., Maine de Biran: Oeuvres Choisies, pp. 304–305. 20. Vie de l’Esprit in Nouveaux Essais d’Anthropologie, in Gouhier, ed., in Maine de Biran: Oeuvres Choisies, pp. 306–307. 21. From “Lettres de Benjamin Constant a` Prosper de Barante,” ed. Baron de Barante, Revue des Deux Mondes 34 (1906), pp. 241–272, 528–567, and p. 534 (letter of August 8, 1810), as cited in Lionel Gossman, “Sweet Water and Bitter: Benjamin Constant and the Legacy of Enlightenment.” Delivered as the George R. Havens Memorial Lecture, Ohio State University, May 2004; available from www.princeton.edu/⬃lgossman/constant.pdf; Internet. Gossman’s essay is superb and entirely faithful to Constant’s passionately ambivalent reading of Enlightenment. ´ crits Politiques, ed. Marcel Gauchet 22. Benjamin Constant, De l’usurpation, in E (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 210. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Benjamin Constant, Adolphe, ed. Gustave Rudler (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1919), pp. xii–xiii. Quoted and trans. Gossman, “Sweet Water and Bitter,” p. 40. 26. Benjamin Constant, De la Religion conside´re´e dans sa source, ses formes et ses de´veloppements, preface and notes by Pierre Deguise (Lausanne, 1971), pp. 65–66. Quoted and trans. Gossman, “Sweet Water and Bitter,” p. 23. 27. Benjamin Constant, “De la liberte´ des anciens compare´e a` celle des modernes,” ´ crits Politiques, p. 604. in Benjamin Constant, E 28. Franc¸ois Guizot, Histoire Parlementaire de France (Paris: Michel Le´vy Fre`res, 1863), vol. 1, pp. XVIII–XIX. 29. Benjamin Constant, “De la liberte´ des anciens compare´e a` celle des modernes,” pp. 604, 607. 30. Ibid., p. 604. 31. Ibid., p. 605. 32. Ibid., p. 606. 33. Ibid., p. 604. 34. See Franc¸ois Rene´ de Chateaubriand, Essai sur les re´volutions (Paris: Lib. Ladvocat, 1826), note to 1826 edition, pp. 268–269. Quoted in Robisco, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, p. 359. 35. See Constant, p. 603. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., p. 617. 38. See ibid., p. 603. 39. Ibid., p. 617. 40. Ibid., pp. 616–617. 41. See Biancamaria Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-Revolutionary Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 83. Includes quote from Ben-

Notes to Pages 170–172

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

269

jamin Constant, taken from Fragments d’un ouvrage abandonne´ sur la possibilite´ d’une constitution re´publicaine dans un grand pays, Bibliothe`que Nationale, Paris, Mss. N.a.f., 14363, ff. 128–129 (Fontana’s translation). See Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 98–100. The broader point about the possibility of opinion giving constrictive shape to reality is also made by Todorov, though in slightly different terms. Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1995), p. 120. See Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), title page for Book I and “avertissement.” Originally published in 1830. See Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 22, for reference to America, and footnote 25 for his more general critique. See OC, Rousseau, V, Lettre a` d’Alembert, p. 67, and OC, Pascal, Pense´es, pp. 1118–1119 (104, B 82). Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, pp. 20–22. References to the more general problem of opinion and its oppressive qualities occur throughout the novel, including the many sardonic epigraphs on modernity by Barnave and others; Mathilde’s almost obsessive boredom despite—and properly speaking because of—her exalted rank in common opinion (see the reference to “moral asphyxia” at the de la Mole’s on p. 258); and the remark by Altamira that “there are no more true passions in the nineteenth-century” (p. 296). See also the narrator’s comment that Mathilde’s ability to scorn her own immediate self-interest makes her status as a fictional character in the nineteenth century especially clear (p. 357), and the concluding note on the novel’s final page referring to the “reign of opinion” that goes where it has no business, including “la vie prive´e” (p. 499 note). Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 314. Ibid., p. 35. For more on the theme of historicity in Stendhal (with connections to Rousseau and Revolution), see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 454–492. Originally published in 1946. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 35. Ibid., p. 35. See Stendhal, Project d’Article sur Le Rouge et le Noir, in Le Rouge et le Noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1922), p. 566, where he speaks about Julien’s interest in Rousseau’s Confessions, and “l’immense influence de ce livre sur son caracte`re.” For references to Julien’s pride (among many others), see ibid., pp. 46, 53, 69, 93, 126 (where Julien’s pride briefly gives way and reasserts itself on the same page), 222, 226–227, 243, 278, 282, 285, 294, 300 (here and elsewhere Julien recognizes his own pride, including on p. 307). For Mathilde’s pride, see among others, ibid., pp. 284, 294, 330, 359 (where she confesses “mon orgueil atroce”), 414, 462, and 464. Ibid., p. 183.

270 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

Notes to Pages 172–177 Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 39. Even when the characters use the term “imagination” to account for their own or others’ behavior, they can easily misunderstand its power and its place in their situation. Hence Mathilde breaks with Julien on the grounds that her attraction to him is attributable to her “mad imagination” (ibid., p. 365); but she loves him again, then fails to love him, trapped in what Stendhal calls an “amour de teˆte” that never has a true encounter with Julien beyond her imagination. Her repudiation of Julien and her “mad imagination” suggest a triumph over imagination at the very moment her imagination is asserting its power by veering in rapid fashion toward extremes, in one of many reversals on the question she believes herself to have “settled” by separating herself from her imaginings. See for example, ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., p. 172. See for examples, ibid., pp. 40 and 69. Ibid., p. 358. Ibid. Ibid., p. 390. Ibid., pp. 33–41. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., pp. 369–375. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., pp. 368, 411. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., pp. 443–444. For an example of the latter, see ibid., p. 423. As a politically ambitious young man, Julien at various points is an advocate or servant of monarchism, Indulgent (i.e., Danton-led) Jacobinism and Bonapartism, without coming to terms with their contradictions. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 445. Ibid. Ibid., p. 452. Ibid., p. 447.

Notes to Pages 178–182 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108.

271

Ibid., p. 463. Ibid., p. 474. Ibid., p. 324. Ibid., p. 464. Peter Brooks argues that the abrupt transformation here (what he calls the “collapse” of the novel) represents Stendhal’s own tendency to see “the figure of the narrator as father” who “threatens domination, threatens to offer an authorized version. He too must be guillotined.” Yet this diminishes the subtlety and care with which Stendhal patterns imagination and memory in this conclusion—which at fifty pages is not abrupt—a conclusion that “authorizes” a life heretofore lived prospectively in imagination. Legitimacy is indeed the theme of these concluding chapters, but understood in spiritual and interpersonal in addition to political and familial terms. In interpersonal and spiritual terms, the possibility of legitimacy is affirmed rather than repudiated. See Peter Brooks, “Fathers and Sons in Le Rouge et le Noir,” in Stendhal: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1989), p. 175. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 464. Ibid., p. 479. Ibid., p. 464. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 464. Ibid., p. 481. Ibid., p. 484. OC, Rousseau, II, Julie, p. 740. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 481. Ibid., p. 483, 449, 477, 491. Ibid., p. 483. Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. 430. Julien does visit Pirard, who is able to calm him briefly. But when Julien reenters the world beyond the priest’s lodgings, he is quickly overwhelmed by the imperatives of his imagination once more. Ibid., p. 497. Lisa G. Algazi rightly argues that Mathilde is in some ways a more masculine figure than Madame de Reˆnal, and argues that Julien rejects Mathilde because of her failure to be traditionally “feminine.” But the vocabulary Stendhal uses to describe Mathilde—above all her proud imagination—is vocabulary used to describe only Julien, not men in general. More convincing is the assertion that Julien adapts Madame de Reˆnal’s order of experience while Mathilde remains trapped in her imagination. In doing so, Stendhal’s narrative does not suggest that, by opening himself to Madame de Reˆnal’s order of experience, Julien is now “feminine” (for example, the references to Julien’s appearance as a “jeune fille” occur at the beginning of the novel rather

272

Notes to Pages 183–188

than at its end—see pp. 39 and 42). See Lisa Algazi, Maternal Subjectivity in the Works of Stendhal (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), esp. pp. 138–151. 109. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, p. 356. 110. Ibid., p. 466. 111. See ibid., pp. 439, 482.

Chapter 7: The Gravity of Illusion 1. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. XII, Souvenirs, pp. 178, 86. 2. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. II, L’Ancien Re´gime et la Re´volution, p. 345. Hereafter this source will be noted as “L’Ancien Re´gime,” followed by page number(s). 3. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. II, part II, La Re´volution, p. 345. 4. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. II, part I, L’Ancien Re´gime, p. 217. 5. OC, Tocqueville, II, De la de´mocratie en Ame´rique, p. 574. Hereafter this source will be cited as “De´mocratie,” followed by the relevant page number(s). 6. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. II, part I, L’Ancien Re´gime, p. 176. 7. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 26. 8. Ibid., p. 381. 9. Ibid., pp. 67–75. 10. Ibid., p. 608. 11. Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 245. 12. Dominick LaCapra, History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault and French Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 108. 13. Harvey Mitchell, “Tocqueville’s Mirage or Reality? Political Freedom from Old Regime to Revolution,” The Journal of Modern History, 60, no. 1 (March 1988), p. 53. 14. Andre´ Jardin, Tocqueville, trans. L. Davis (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), p. 385. 15. Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la de´mocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1993), pp. 36–37. Jean-Claude Lamberti, Tocqueville et les deux de´mocraties (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), p. 79. 16. Manent, Tocqueville, p. 37. 17. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 371. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 27. 20. Ibid., p. 26. 21. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. II, part II, notes for La Re´volution, p. 34, 131. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 132.

Notes to Pages 188–195 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

273

Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., pp. 133–134. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 46. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 469. Ibid., p. 471. Ibid., p. 807. Ibid., p. 765. Ibid., pp. 292–295. Ibid., p. 723. Ibid., p. 584. Ibid., p. 635. Ibid., p. 695. Ibid., p. 649. Ibid., p. 761. Ibid., p. 587. Ibid., p. 723. Ibid., p. 591. Ibid., p. 619. Ibid., p. 669. A quote from Tocqueville’s family papers, quoted in Lamberti, Tocqueville et les deux democraties, p. 74. From Alexis de Tocqueville, Correspondance et Oeuvres Posthumes d’Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Marie de Tocqueville (Paris: Michel Le´vy Fre`res, 1866), vol. V, Tocqueville to Stoffels, February 21, 1835, p. 426. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. IX, Tocqueville to Gobineau, January 24, 1857, p. 280. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 852. Full quote in Lamberti, Tocqueville et les deux de´mocraties, p. 74, from an unpublished fragment in the Tocqueville family archive. The first segment can also be found in Irena Grudzinska Gross, The Scar of Revolution: Custine, Tocqueville and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 149. Cited from J. P. Mayer, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Essay in Political Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 28–29. With his resigned assessments of democracy, Tocqueville can occasionally sound like a French Jacob Burckhardt (or at least Burckhardt after the mid-1840s), conscious of the gathering obsolescence of his caste and its animating ideas. According to Lionel Gossman, however, for Burckhardt, this attitude expressed itself in irony and detachment; he describes it as a kind of waiting until some inevitable “restoration.” At least for himself, Tocqueville considered this response an indulgence, and Tocqueville at no point expresses his hope for a restoration of aristocratic Europe in cultural

274

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

Notes to Pages 195–199 and social life. For more on Burckhardt and democracy, see Lionel Gossman, “Basle, Bachofen and the Critique of Modernity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtland Institutes, 47 (1984), pp. 136–185, especially pp. 152–153. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 7. Ibid., p. 851. See Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 99. As Wolin acknowledges, the term mytheme is taken from Le´vi-Strauss. Wolin suggests here that in Tocqueville, memory intrudes on the present. But his example—the idea of aristocratic manners—is for Tocqueville a work of imagination: these manners gave “beautiful illusions about human nature.” See OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 735. Illusion, as will be shown below, is the governing form of aristocratic regimes as such in Tocqueville. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. XII, Souvenirs, p. 242. See also OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie p. 60. In John Koritansky’s Alexis de Tocqueville and the New Science of Politics (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1986), the author argues that Rousseau and Tocqueville share the assumption that equality is the regnant principle in modern politics (see pp. 4, 87). This is true, although it is important to note that for Tocqueville there is a kind of truth of human nature in this equality itself. Rousseau is much more equivocal on this point and suggests that various kinds of equality require various kinds of “denaturing.” OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 465. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. 594. Ibid., 735. Ibid., p. 585. Ibid., p. 555. Ibid., p. 691. Ibid., p. 693. Ibid., p. 732. Ibid., p. 707. Ibid., p. 691. See ibid., p. 526, and accompanying note on p. 1093. See Laurent Theis, “Guizot et le proble`me religeux” in Marina Valensise, ed., Franc¸ois Guizot et la culture politique de son temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 258. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 4. Ibid., pp. 514–515. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. XIII, part I, Tocqueville to Kergorlay, August 5, 1836, p. 388. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 13. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. IX, Tocqueville to Gobineau, October 22, 1843, p. 68.

Notes to Pages 199–204

275

73. See Tocqueville to Corcelle, December 31, 1853. Quoted in Harvey Mitchell, “Tocqueville Mirage or Reality? Political Freedom from Old Regime to Revolution,” The Journal of Modern History 60, no. 1 (March 1988), p. 49. 74. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. II, part I, L’Ancien Re´gime, p. 214. 75. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, pp. 516–517. 76. Ibid., p. 63. 77. Ibid., p. 744. For more on Tocqueville’s response to a convergence of historical variation and possibility, see Peter Lawler’s stimulating The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993). 78. The connection between Tocqueville and Hegel is tenuous. Hegel is not a part of Tocqueville’s learning or points of reference, and one reference that does exist is dismissive. Tocqueville wrote to a friend regarding “the Hegelian school” that “the political consequences of this doctrine [i.e., the Hegelian school] are to establish that everything that happens is acceptable and legitimate, that a government merits obedience for the sole reason that it has come into existence.” See Tocqueville to Corcelle, July 22, 1854. Quoted in Catherine Zuckert, “Political Sociology Versus Speculative Philosophy,” in Interpreting Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, ed. Ken Masugi (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), p. 123. Even though the Hegelian school cannot be simply identified with Hegel’s philosophy, Tocqueville’s writings give eloquent testimony to their extremely different ideas of freedom, human excellence, and the prospect of historical progress. 79. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 236. 80. It might be suggested that Tocqueville here expresses some fear of miscegenation and that he is in the grip of nineteenth-century racism. This is not the case: Tocqueville’s entire correspondence with the renowned racist Gobineau rejects Gobineau’s attempts to make racism an account of history and politics. 81. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 758. 82. See, for example, ibid., pp. 709, 711. 83. Ibid., pp. 721, 714, 712. 84. OC, Tocqueville, I, Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande de 1835, p. 518. Trans. George Lawrence and K. P. Mayer in Journeys to England and Ireland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 122. 85. See OC, II, De´mocratie, for example, pp. 397, 405. 86. Ibid., p. 437. 87. Ibid., pp. 436–437. 88. Ibid., p. 421. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., pp. 419–420. 91. Ibid., pp. 691–694. 92. Ibid., p. 268. 93. Ibid., p. 6. 94. Ibid., p. 465.

276

Notes to Pages 205–212

95. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. II, part II, notes for La Re´volution, pp. 131– 132. Italics added. 96. See Franc¸ois Guizot, Origines du Gouvernement Repre´sentatif, vol. I, p. 250. Quoted in Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe, foreword to “On Sovereignty” by Pierre Rosanvallon (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 311. 97. See Franc¸ois Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 71. 98. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 68. Originally published 1859. 99. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 649. 100. Ibid., p. 730. 101. Ibid., pp. 588–589. 102. Ibid. 103. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. I, p. 247. Quoted and trans. in Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, p. 219. 104. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. XII, Souvenirs, pp. 29, 30, 32, 34, and 59. 105. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 691–693. 106. Ibid., p. 649. 107. See “Etat Social et Politique de la France” in OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. II, part I, L’Ancien Re´gime, pp. 65–66. This was a longstanding conviction of Tocqueville’s; according to Franc¸ois Furet, Tocqueville argued for the continuity of the Revolution with the ancien re´gime as early as 1836. See Franc¸ois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 133. 108. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 554. 109. OC, Pascal, Les Provinciales, fragment of the 19th Letter, p. 904; Pense´es, p. 1338 (823, B 945). 110. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 554. 111. Ibid., pp. 554–555. 112. Ibid., p. 549. 113. Ibid., pp. 533–534, 536. 114. Ibid., p. 343. 115. Ibid., p. 658. 116. The term is more ambiguous in Tocqueville than in Rousseau. For Tocqueville the le´gislateur can be a lawgiver or a legislator in a more quotidian sense. Even when he raises the prospect of lawgiving, Tocqueville’s language has none of the vertiginous grandiosity one finds in Rousseau’s writing on the same concept. 117. OC, II, Tocqueville, De´mocratie, p. 657. 118. Given Tocqueville’s own emphases, I further discuss political and intellectual forms of transcendence or extraordinary achievement below. As for religion, in a manner appropriate for a close reader of Pascal, Tocqueville can alternate in quick succession between placing religion in the “heart” and the “imagination.” See OC, II, Tocqueville, De´mocratie, p. 343.

Notes to Pages 213–218

277

119. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 848. “Before it” follows the Mansfield and Winthrop translation, p. 672. 120. Tocqueville certainly knew the desire for transcendence as such: As he wrote in a private letter soon after the smashing success of the first volume of Democracy in America, it was “unreasonable . . . to desire something other than human destiny,” but this was “the all-powerful and involuntary impulse of my soul.” See OC Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. XIII, part II, Tocqueville to Kergorlay, March 21, 1838, p. 28. 121. OC, Tocqueville, (Mayer), vol. XI, Tocqueville to J. Ampe`re, August 10, 1841, p. 152. Italics added. 122. In Constant, see De la liberte´ des anciens compare´e a` celle des modernes, p. 603, where the author’s admiration for the “energy and dignity” available in the “beautiful pages of antiquity” leads to a certain “regret” with reference to the missing powers or virtues of modern peoples. See also p. 617. 123. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. VIII, part I, Tocqueville to Beaumont, October 25, 1829, p. 92. 124. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. II, part I, L’Ancien Re´gime, p. 133. Trans. Stuart Gilbert in The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1955), p. 65. 125. OC, Tocqueville, vol. II, part II, notes for La Re´volution, p. 291. 126. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. IX, Tocqueville to Gobineau, September 5, 1843, p. 46. Italics in original text. 127. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. XVIII, Tocqueville to the Comte de Circourt, November 8, 1855, p. 283. 128. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. XII, Souvenirs, p. 178. 129. Ibid., p. 75. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid., p. 102. 132. Ibid., pp. 102–103, 58. 133. Ibid., p. 35. 134. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. XIII, part II, Tocqueville to Mme. Louis de Kergorlay, May 1848, p. 220. 135. OC, Tocqueville, I, Travail sur l’Alge´rie, pp. 704–705. 136. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. VI, Tocqueville to Lady Theresa Lewis, October 18, 1857, p. 275. On this point, at least, Tocqueville and Mill agreed; imperialism was a means for a kind of archaic exaltation within the leveling, rationalizing forms of modern life. See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 13. 137. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. XIII, part II, Tocqueville to Mme. Louis de Kergorlay, May 1848, p. 220. 138. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, pp. 12–13. 139. Ibid., pp. 852–853. 140. As the quote from the conclusion of Democracy in America suggests, Tocqueville believed that to know the will of a Providential God in history, one

278

Notes to Pages 218–223

must interpret historical “tendencies” in the silence of God. As he put it at the beginning of the book, it was “not necessary that God himself speak for us to discover the certain signs of his will; it suffices to examine what is the habitual progress of nature and the ongoing tendencies of events; I know, without the Creator raising his voice, that the stars in space follow the routes that his finger has traced.” See OC, II, Tocqueville, De´mocratie, p. 7. 141. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. IX, Tocqueville to Gobineau, October 2, 1843, p. 57. 142. OC, Tocqueville (Mayer), vol. II, part I, L’Ancien Re´gime, p. 75. 143. OC, Tocqueville, II, De´mocratie, p. 225.

Conclusion 1. The broaching of “giving” and “gift” turns to the question of the gift’s possibility, as raised by Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida. For two especially interesting reflections on this question, see Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 74–118; and David B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, pp. 260– 273. 2. See Avishai Margalit’s insightful book, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Index

Active imagination, 52 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, 22, 51, 52, 57 America: imagination of democratic, 183, 189; freedom in, 188–189, 193–194; Tocqueville’s admiration of, 189, 190, 191, 202; Tocqueville’s critique of, 189, 191–193, 203–204; self’s ventures in, 190; God and, 199; commercial heroism of, 208 American Revolution, 189, 202 American South, 203–204 Ancien re´gime, 61, 185, 188, 195, 203 The Ancien Re´gime and the French Revolution (Tocqueville), 208, 272n2, 277n124 Ancient Greece, 185, 219 Anderson, Benedict, 225n1 Andilly, Arnauld d’, 44, 241n133, 241n137 Animals, 33, 38, 85–86 Anthropology: Augustinian, 5, 36–40; Tocqueville’s dualistic, 13, 206, 210; Pascalian, 17–22, 44–48; Rousseauvian, 80–89 Antiquity, 72, 73, 93 Anxiety: intellectual, 77; noble, 169, 170. See also Noble inquie´tude Aristocracy: illusions of, 195–108, 200, 202; Tocqueville on, 195–197, 198, 202– 203; imagined joys of, 197; theater of, 197; opinion of, 197–198; illusions of, 200, 202; slaveholder’s, 203; Britain’s modern, 204 Aristotle, 28, 67, 237n87, 263n50 Arnauld, Antoine, 26, 27n45, 28, 235n45 Aron, Raymond, 186, 228n26

Atheism, 131, 236–237n61 Auerbach, Erich, 234n40 Augustine, 5, 11, 22, 28, 36–40, 45, 135– 138, 230n7, 237n87, 239n101, 262n15; memory and, 36–40, 43, 135, 230n38 Aurelius, Marcus, 131 Bachelard, Gaston, 3, 223, 226n10 Bacon, Francis, 21, 25, 199 Balthasar, Hans Urs Von, 266n94 Barante, Prosper de, 165 Beauty, 10, 20, 36, 37, 40, 52, 56–59, 63, 76–77, 89–90, 105, 130–131, 142–145, 153–154, 156–158, 162, 168, 188, 197– 198, 208, 217, 223, 266n93, 266n94; philosophizing and, 76–77; political unity and, 90–91, 188; mediating influence of, 91; as illusion of passion, 125; inanimate nature and, 147, 148 Bencivenga, Ermanno, 42, 240n129 Bernier, Franc¸ois, 54 Bible, 48, 111. See also Christ, Jesus; Gospels; Last Judgment; New Testament Biran, Maine de, 5, 12, 160–162, 164; Rousseau and, 162–163; Pascal and, 163 Blake, William, 3 Blumenberg, Hans, 36, 37, 238n92 Bonapartism, 216, 270n83 Brann, Eva, 7, 226n13, 228n29 Bruno, Giordano, 19, 232n4 Buckley, James, 236n61 Buddha, 67, 246n103 Burckhardt, Jacob, 273–274n50 Burgelin, Pierre, 74, 231n40

279

280

Index

Cassirer, Ernst, 95, 252n113 Catonic virtue, 137 Charrie`re, Isabelle de, 159, 192 Chartier, Roger, 267n1 Chateaubriand, Franc¸ois Rene´ de, 167, 168n34 Chimeras. See Fables Christianity, 21, 22, 23, 39, 79, 119, 127, 163, 164, 177, 181, 199, 200, 203, 209, 218, 219, 233n20, 260n79 Citizenship: political forms of, 92; revolution and, 106, 118 Coercion, use of, 23, 121, 203–204 Cogito, 29–30, 238n98 Common life, 124 Communities: imagined, 2; mores imposed by small, 93; ordered, 139, 140 ´ tienne Bonnot de, 5, 56, 57, Condillac, E 106, 161 Confessions (Augustine), 11, 28–29, 36– 40, 43–44, 62, 237n87, 239n101, 262n15 Confessions (Rousseau), 12, 71, 73, 99, 135– 147 Considerations on the Government of Poland (Rousseau), 250n79, 253n125, 254m137, 256n190 Constant, Benjamin, 5, 6, 12, 160, 165– 171, 191, 194, 205, 218; liberty and, 160; Rousseau critiqued by, 166; perfectibility and, 168; political division experienced by, 168; dissatisfaction of, 169; individualism of, 186 Cooper, Laurence, 81n45, 249n48 Cousin, Victor, 22 Cranston, Maurice, 227n22 Danger, imagination and, 173 Darnton, Robert, 111, 179, 183, 257n2 Death, 34, 47, 132, 153, 156, 177, 182– 183, 190 Decline, political process of, 94, 212–213, 217 Deism, 124, 129, 181 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 225n3 Delumeau, Jean, 35, 237n84 De Man, Paul, 130, 261n101 Democracy, 187, 189, 206; imagination and, 189, 193; equality and, 192, 193; artistic possibilities of, 193 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 7, 9,

186, 191, 194, 195, 198, 199, 200, 201, 208, 210 Derathe´, Robert, 250n93, 263n44 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 144n44, 226n12 Descartes, Rene´, 8, 29–32, 42, 87, 131, 199 Desire(s): sexual, 52, 55–56, 66, 139, 142– 144; imagination and, 80–82, 86, 87, 88; happiness v., 82; Enlightenment and, 87; Julie’s presentation of simple, 113–114; distancing from, 117; selfcontrol of, 119; thwarting of, 120; illusion and, 125; realization of, 126; desire for, 130; excess, 130; enthusiastic, 145; beauty and, 154; as palliative, 175 Despotism, 78, 86, 93, 95, 170–171, 192, 203–204 Le Devin du village (Rousseau), 115 Diderot, Denis, 53–54, 242n15 Di Palma, Marco, 250n92 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Rousseau), 72, 74, 82–88, 93, 95, 128, 141 Discourse on the Sciences and Art (Rousseau), 59, 72, 93–94, 141, 244n9 Divertissement, functions of, 114 Dreams, 34, 40–51, 78–79 Dubost, Jean-Pierre, 124, 259n60 Eagleton, Terry, 225n2 “Ebauches des Confessions” (Rousseau), 136– 137 Egotism: reason and, 94; happiness and, 203 Emile (Rousseau), 70, 72–73, 74, 78, 80, 81–82, 84, 101 Engell, James, 7, 228n27 Enlightenment (18th century), 27, 50–60, 68, 93–95, 104, 199–200 Equality: natural, 25; perfect, 80; appearance of, 101–103; humankind’s, 168; intellectual, 169; help given by, 191; modern, 191; democracy and, 192, 193; Tocqueville on, 194–195, 198, 200, 202; natural, 200; age of, 210 Essay on the Origin of Languages (Rousseau), 128, 132 Fables, 30, 31, 68, 79, 83, 106, 130–131, 151, 160 Faith, 22–23, 39–40, 128, 129–130, 180– 181, 211

Index Fichte, J.G., 81, 248n45 Ficino, Marsilio, 24, 234n32 First Discourse. See Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts Flux, 4, 9, 45, 75–76, 88–89, 89, 126, 137–140, 145 Fontana, Biancamaria, 170, 268n41 Force, Pierre, 22, 233n18 Forgetting. See Memory France: Enlightenment of, 51–57, 169– 170; liberalism of, 166; ancien re´gime of, 188, 208. See also Ancien re´gime; French Revolution “France before and after 1789” (Tocqueville), 187 Freedom: human, 5; Tocqueville on, 8, 13, 185, 186, 187, 195, 196, 207–208, 216–217; domination and, 56; Rousseau on, 75; rational, 96; appearance of, 102; happiness and, 107; imagination and, 158, 194; modern, 166; Antiquity and, 166–168, 185, 219; Constant’s position on, 166–171, 194, 205; revolution and, 169; democratic, 187; America’s notion of, 188–189, 193–194; transcendent, 208; God and, 217 French Revolution, 5, 188, 189, 199, 202, 208 Friedlander, Eli, 264n67, 265n74 Funkenstein, Amos, 11, 14, 15, 226n11 Furet, Franc¸ois, 276n107 Gannett, Robert, 6–7 Gassendi, Pierre, 21, 23, 24, 25, 54, 233n22, 234n41, 242n17 General Will (concept), 6, 97, 98, 253n124 Genesis, 15 Genevan Constitution, 95 God: imagination and, 3, 9, 22, 52, 127– 131, 149, 153, 211, 217–218; memory and, 38, 180–183, 209; “inner man” as loving, 44; Rousseau on, 77, 88, 126– 129, 135, 149, 153; freedom and, 185, 217; Tocqueville on, 185, 199, 217–218; will of, 217 Goldstein, Jan, 60–61 Good: imagination and, 81; reason, evil and, 95 Gospels, 132, 181, 198 Gossman, Lionel, 268n21, 273n50

281

Great Britain, modern aristocracy of, 204 Greece. See Ancient Greece Groethuysen, Bernard, 35, 237n84 Gross, Irena Grudzinska, 273n50 Guizot, Franc¸ois, 205, 218, 268n28, 274N67 Gunn, J.A.W., 232n8 Habits, 61–62, 92 Hammond, Nicholas, 21, 232n11 Happiness, 5, 20, 33–35, 38, 39, 40, 45– 49, 71, 77, 80–83, 93, 107, 115–117, 122, 131–132, 153, 162, 169, 180, 203, 208 Harmony, 132, 138 Hart, David, 237n87, 278n1 Hartle, Ann, 138, 262n12 Hegel, G.W.F., 201, 275n78 Heidegger, Martin, 229n32 Higonnet, Patrice, 267n1 Hobbes, Thomas, 14, 21, 23, 24, 25, 41, 234n29 Honor, collective imagination and, 136 Houdetot, Sophie d’, 92, 145 Hume, David, 3, 57–58, 59, 244n38 Illusion(s): legislator’s, 66–67, 106–110, 133–134; love as, 89, 92, 112–113, 125, 145; Rousseau and, 89–93, 106– 110, 124–134, 137, 142–143; illusion understood as illusion, 111–134; truth and, 132; pride and, 142; healthiness of, 179; Tocqueville and, 195–198, 202, 207–209 Imagination: honor and collective, 1–2, 136; writing and, 4, 48, 58, 59, 62–64, 106–108, 137, 162, 168; power of, 5; defined, 8–9; pride and, 10, 19, 40, 63, 78, 80, 152–153, 172–173, 188–189, 191–192; infinite, 12, 41, 83, 87, 126, 130, 134, 144, 146, 147, 152, 240n115, 248n45; deceptive power of, 17, 18, 122; grand droit of, 18; values assigned by, 18; law and, 28; mind and, 31; animals and, 33; eudaemonic problem of, 33, 45–49, 80–82; active, 52; passive, 52; women and, 54–55, 56, 202, 243n31; sexuality of, 54–57, 112– 114, 125, 142–145, 271–272n108; habits and, 61–62; memory and, 116, 121, 122, 151, 179–183, 207–209;

282

Index

Imagination (continued ) revolutions and, 118, 188; American, 189, 193; democratic, 189, 193; descent of, 193 Imagination renverse´e (Stendhal), 152, 174, 265n77 Imperialism, 215 Infinite/infinity: imagination, 12, 41, 81, 83, 87, 126, 130, 134, 144, 146, 147, 152, 239–240n114, 248n45 Inner man, 44 Ireland, American South v., 203 Jacobinism, 270n83 Jansenism/Jansenists, 5, 6, 26, 28, 41, 44, 160, 181, 218 Jardin, Andre´, 186, 272n14 Jesus (Christ), 44, 78–79, 100, 132, 177, 198, 199, 254n137 Journeys to England and Ireland (Tocqueville), 203, 275n84 Judaism, 22, 218, 219 Julie (Rousseau), 12, 74, 89, 101, 111– 134; summary of, 112 June Days crisis (1848), 214, 277n128 Justice, 20–21, 51, 103–104, 135–136, 217 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 4, 15, 81, 95, 97, 229n32, 267n14 Kelly, Christopher, 73, 139, 231n40, 262n16 Kelly, George Armstrong, 227n23, 232n13 Kierkegaard, Søren, 81, 248n45 Klein, Kerwin, 230n38 Lacan, Jacques, 3 LaCapra, Dominick, 186, 272n12 Lamberti, Jean-Claude, 186, 187, 195 La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de, 5, 59, 60, 64, 245n50 Lamy, Bernard, 50, 61, 63–65, 97 La Re´volution (Tocqueville), 205 Last Judgment, 135 Law, 28, 60, 70, 94, 100–102, 123, 178, 189, 212 Legislator: Plutarch’s Lycurgus and, 65–66; Machiavelli’s notion of, 66–68; Montesquieu’s notion of, 67–68, 109– 110; as fantasy, 107; Rousseau’s role as, 109; The Social Contract and, 115;

illusions of, 133; Constant and, 165; Tocqueville and, 212, 276n116 Les Provinciales (Pascal), 232n12, 233n19, 276n109 Letters Written from the Mountain (Rousseau), 127 Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater (Rousseau), 72, 85, 90, 92, 113, 136 Lettres a` Malesherbes (Rousseau), 147–150, 148n58 Lettres Morales (Rousseau), 92, 247n22, 250n90, 255n163 Liberalism, 166, 205–206, 227n23 Llewelyn, John, 7 Locke, John, 240n115 Love: of truth, 21, 209, 219; happiness and, 40, 92, 112–118, 121–122, 132–133, 142–146, 179–183, 202; memory, 40, 171, 179–183; self-, 40–41, 52–54, 78, 92, 94, 116–117, 163–164, 203, 240n117, 250–251n92; Voltaire’s reflections on, 52–53, 125; fraternal, 77; illusory, 89, 92, 112–113, 112–118, 125, 132–133, 145; soul exhausted by, 114; unhappiness and, 114; novels, 124; Biran’s ideas on, 163–164; of liberty, 167 Lubac, Henri de, 230n37, 239n101 Lull, Ramon, 42 Luther, Martin, 199 Lycurgus, 66, 82, 100–101, 165, 248n85 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 3, 226n9 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 66–67, 99–100 Maistre, Joseph de, 160 Malebranche, Nicholas, 5, 50, 55, 61, 62, 63, 68, 106, 158 Man: inner, 44; natural, 83, 151 Manent, Pierre, 186, 187, 197, 272n15 Margalit, Avishai, 223, 278n2 Marion, Jean-Luc, 21, 278n1 McKenna, Anthony, 24, 235n45 Mehta, Uday Singh, 277n136 Melzer, Arthur, 252n113, 256n192 Memory: Augustine and, 36–40, 43, 135, 230n38, 237–238n87; transcendence and, 36–40, 170; self and, 37–38, 222; God and, 38; mind and, 38; happiness and, 40, 122; love and, 40, 171; Spinoza and, 41–42; subordination and reduction of, 41–45, 62, 78, 122, 136, 141–142, 150–152, 165, 174–175, 206–

Index 209; distinctions of, 42; Montaigne and, 42; knowledge and, 45; physiology of, 62; stabilizing influence of, 91; imagination and, 116, 121, 122, 151, 180; reverence for, 118; attack on, 121– 122; truth and, 133; lapses of, 136; absence of, 150; affection and, 171; Stendhal on, 174–175, 180; cruel, 175, 178–179; obstacles of, 175–176; crisis of, 176; Tocqueville’s need for, 206–209; historical, 207 Mill, John Stuart, 205, 276n98 Mind(s): imagination and, 31; memory and, 38 Mitchell, Harvey, 186, 227n21 Mohammed, 100 Montaigne, Michel de, 11, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 63; memory and, 42; reveries of, 240n130 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 5, 52, 55, 66, 67–68, 68, 186, 188, 246n103; legislator as viewed by, 67– 68, 109–110 Morality, 1, 8, 32, 46, 58, 60, 94–97, 123– 124, 142, 162, 201–203, 216–217, 229n32, 250–251n92 Morceau alle´gorique sur la re´ve´lation (Rousseau), 76–80, 90, 109, 149, 247n26, 248n39, 250n91, 254n137, 256n189, 266n90 Mores, 9, 56, 82, 92, 93, 101, 119 Morgenstern, Mira, 116, 258n22 Morot-Sir, Edouard, 44–45 Moses, 100, 102 Napoleon, 172, 176, 179, 180 Narcisse (Rousseau), 71, 72, 85, 94, 99, 140, 247n2, 249n61, 251n97, 253n124, 257n18 Native Americans, 185, 187, 188 Nature: misunderstanding Rousseau on, 8; qualities of, 20, 34, 36, 38, 82–88, 155– 156, 201, 210; fable and, 31; knowledge and, 32, 68, 86, 99, 153–154; manipulating, 32, 62–63, 93, 153–154; masters of, 32; variability of, 44; imagination in, 58, 83, 155–156; justice/ morals and, 58; law of, 60; Second Discourse’ reflections on, 82–88; beauty of inanimate, 147, 148, 156–157; Tocqueville’s dual, 201, 210

283

Neiman, Susan, 95, 252n113 Neoplatonism, 24, 36, 237n87 New Testament, 132, 174 Nicole, Pierre, 27–28, 230n38, 235n45 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 99, 178, 200, 219 Noble inquie´tude, 169 O’Donnell, James, 237n86 Paige, Nicholas, 44, 241n136 Pangle, Thomas, 67 Parables, 79 Pascal, Blaise, 4, 5, 6, 10, 81, 276n109; psychology of, 5; and Rousseau, 6, 10– 11, 48–49, 69, 80–81, 97, 114–117; imagination viewed by, 9, 17–49; self as viewed by, 17; science and, 18; love of truth in, 21, 209; political thoughts of, 27; ideas appropriated in nineteenthcentury, 163–164, 169–170, 181–184, 206–207, 209–210, 218–220; world notion of, 170 Pascal’s Wager, 22 Passion(s): power of, 25–26, 63, 114–115, 128, 205, 214; imagination’s transfiguration of, 116; diversion of, 118; illusion of, 122; beauty and, 125; passions checking other, 128 Pense´es (Pascal), 6, 10, 22, 54, 231n1, 232n9; exalted imagination of, 17–21, 26, 39–41; Port-Royal edition of, 27, 28; soul in, 164 Perfectibility, 85–90, 93, 128–129, 153– 154; virtue and, 88; denatured, 88–89; Constant and, 168 Peter the Great, 154 Petrarch, 43 Pity, natural, 84–85, 261n93 Plato, 42, 64, 67, 72 Plutarch, 65, 66, 68, 99 Pride, 10, 19, 40, 63, 78, 80, 142, 152– 153, 172–174, 188–189, 191–192, 197, 205, 208–209, 219 Prophecy, 23, 24–25 Pygmalion (Rousseau), 89 Reason: limits of, 8, 17–19, 50, 64–65, 67, 97, 98, 106, 185; imagination of, 50–69; Rousseau on, 93, 94, 106; egotism and, 94; good, evil and, 95; enlightened, 96; limits of, 96

284

Index

Reformation, 199 The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rousseau), 12, 74, 76, 91, 105, 149, 151–158 Revolution: Copernican, 4; citizenship and, 106, 118; textual, 106; Rousseau’s use of, 106–107, 124, 132, 135; imagination and, 118; internal, 119; political, 119; Constant and, 166–167; freedom and, 169; Tocqueville and, 188– 189, 204–205, 208, 214–216. See also American Revolution; French Revolution; Revolution of 1848 Revolution of 1848, 213, 214, 215, 216 Ricoeur, Paul, 226n13 Riley, Patrick, 6, 227n20, 227n21, 253n124 Robisco, Nathalie, 266–267n1, 267n6 Roman Republic, 82, 97, 98, 185, 194 Romanticism, 3, 4, 81 Rosenblatt, Helena, 60, 260n79 Rothschild, Emma, 57 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 5, 6, 12, 57, 59, 66, 159, 160, 162–163, 166–168, 172, 188, 196, passim; nature and, 8, 84– 85; function of imagination defined by, 9, 81, 82; contradictions of, 70–75, 83, 154–156; Revolution of Enlightenment and, 70–110; autobiographical writings of, 73–74, 105, 111, 135–158, 261n113; freedom and, 75; God as seen by, 77, 126–131, 135, 149; memory and, 78, 122, 136, 141–142, 150–152; infinite imagination of, 80–82, 142, 146, 147, 149, 248n45; natural man fables of, 83; perfectibility and, 85–90; illusion and, 89–94, 100, 106–142; reason and, 93, 94, 95–98, 106; writing and, 106–110, 146, 147; legislator role of, 109; revolution of, 124, 132; Christianity criticized by, 126–127, 260N79; writing and, 146, 147; Biran’s reflections on, 162–163, 167; Constant’s critique of, 166 Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques (Rousseau), 12, 74, 95, 104, 108, 146 Sallis, John, 3, 7, 221n6, 225n1, 225n5, 228n28 Sarasohn, Lisa, 23, 233n22 Schaub, Diana, 55, 243n22

Scholastic theology, 31 Schwartz, Joel, 120 Science, 2, 14–15, 18, 32–33, 35, 54, 56, 99, 153–54, 236–237n61, 243n31, 244n46 Scotland, 57 Scott, John T., 253n127 Second Discourse. See Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Sellier, Philippe, 236n51, 237n85 Senses, 26, 29, 149, 162 Sepper, Dennis, 29, 229n32, 263n50 Shklar, Judith, 242n6, 249n65 Slavery, 127, 203–204 Smith, Adam, 57–59, 243n33, 243n34, 244n42, 244n48 The Social Contract (Rousseau), 66, 71, 73, 74, 78, 92, 98, 101, 115, 121, 127, 154 Socrates, 79, 94, 100, 254n137 Son of Man, 79–80, 254n137 Souvenirs (Tocqueville), 207, 213–216, 272n1, 274n54, 276n104, 277n128 Spanish Inquisition, 192 Sparta, 66, 82, 90 Spinoza, Baruch, 21–25, 25, 234n23; prophecy and, 23, 24–25; memory and, 41–42 Stae¨l, Germaine de, 159 Starobinski, Jean, 79, 248n43, 264n61 Stendhal, 5, 12, 152, 158, 160, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 179, 180, 183, 191, 211, 265n77, 269n47 Stevens, Wallace, 3, 225n7, 226n8 Stoicism, 35, 130–131 Strength, virtue and, 88 Strong, Tracy, 103, 107, 257n18 Swenson, James, 159 Terrall, Mary, 243n31 Thomas Aquinas, 22, 233n17 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5, 6–7, 7, 158, 185– 220; Pascal and, 7, 206–207, 209–211, 218; Rousseau and, 7, 188, 190, 192, 196, 199–200, 205, 211, 219–220; freedom and, 8, 13, 185, 186, 187, 195, 196, 207–208, 216–217; imagination and, 9, 188–189, 192–193, 196–198, 202–204, 205, 214–216, 219–220; anthropology of, 13, 206, 210; Jesus, Christianity and, 177, 198–199, 218–

Index 220; liberty and, 186; Native Americans and, 187–188; revolution and, 188–189, 204–205, 208, 214–216; admiration of America by, 189, 190, 191, 202; critique of America by, 189, 191–193, 203–204; pride and, 191–192; gravity metaphor of, 192; equality and, 194– 195, 198, 200, 202; aristocracy and, 195–197, 198, 202–203; illusion and, 196–198, 202–204, 208–209; dual nature of, 201, 210; Hegel and, 201, 275n78; humankind and, 206; memory needs of, 206–207; transcendence and, 211, 213, 277n120; legislator of, 212, 276n116; dread of, 218 Todorov, Tzvetan, 170, 269n42 Transcendence, 2–3, 13, 14, 22, 36–40, 58– 59, 76–80, 116, 147–150, 157, 167, 170, 173, 185, 208–209, 211, 213, 277n120 Transparency, notion of, 123–124 Travail sur l’Alge´rie (Tocqueville), 215, 277n135 Truth(s): imagination and, 17–22, 30–31, 56, 75, 77–80, 105–106, 131–132, 134; love of, 21, 209, 219; memory and, 36– 40, 78, 133, 178–184, 207–209; humankind and, 64; happiness and, 71; sublime, 77; irrelevance of historical

285

truth in Rousseau, 78; beauty and, 89; illusion and, 103–107, 132, 208–209; eudaemonic, 105; divine, 141, 169; natural, 196 Van Kley, Dale, 27, 235n46 Vico, Giambattista, 3, 14 Violence: peace v., 36; imaginative, 180; spiritualizing despotism and, 203–204 Virtues, 21, 86, 88, 123, 137, 209 Voltaire, 51, 52, 53, 93, 125, 131, 181, 242n13 Warnock, Mary, 2–3, 7, 225n4 Wills, Garry, 238n87 Wolin, Sheldon S., 195, 274n53 Women: power of, 20; imagination and, 54–55, 56, 243n31; sexual desire and, 55; Sparta and, 66; Rousseau and intimacy with, 142–145; Tocqueville on American, 202 Writing, 4, 48, 58, 62–64, 69, 106–108, 137, 146, 147, 162, 168, 172 Xenophon, 64, 65 Yates, Frances, 233n17 Zuckert, Catherine, 201n78, 275n78