I [0(82~72 JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU ‘Transparency and Obstruction JEAN STAROBINSKI Translated by Arthur Goldhammer With an Introduction by Robert J. MorrisseyJean Sraxoninsx: is professor emeritus at the University of Geneva. His book Montaigne in Motion is also published by the University of Chicago Press. ARtHur GotoHasoen, who has translated more than thirty-five books, including Montaigne in Motion, is presently translating Starobinski's selected essays. Rowen J. MORRISEY is associate professor of French at the University of Chicago. Originally published as Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et Vobstacle, © 1971 Editions Gallimard. ‘The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 ‘The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1988 by The University of Chicago Alll rights reserved. Published 1988 Printed in the United States of America 97 96 95 94 93 9291 9089 88 54821 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, transparency and obstruction. ‘Translation of: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et Tobstacle. Bibliography: p. Includes index 1. Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 1712-1778, 1. Title, B2137.S713 1988 "848.509 87-19050 ISBN 0-226-77126-1 ISBN 0.226-77128-8 (pbk.)Contents Translator’s Note Preface Introduction Jean Starobinski and Otherness by Robert J. Morrissey TRANSPARENCY AND OBSTRUCTION The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts “Appearances Condemned Me” Divided Time and the Myth of Transparency Historical Knowledge and Poetic Vision The God Glaucus A Theodicy That Exculpates God and Man Critique of Society The Primordial Innocence Work, Reflection, Pride Synthesis through Revolution Synthesis through Education Solitude “Let Us Settle My Opinions Once and For All” But Is Unity Natural? Inner Conflict Magic The Veiled Statue Christ Galatea Theory of Unveiling xi 1 14 15 20 22 25 26 29 30 33 45 47 53 58 65 68 70 73vi 10 La nouvelle Héloise Music and Transparency Elegiac Feeling ‘The Feast Equality Economy Apotheosis The Death of Julie Misunderstandings The Return “Unable to Utter a Single Word” ‘The Power of Signs Amorous Communication Exhibitionism The Tutor The Problems of Autobiography How to Describe Oneself? To Tell All Guilty Reflection Obstacles Silence Inaction Friendships among the Plants Imprisoned for Life Achieved Intentions The Two Tribunals ‘The Transparency of Crystal Judgments “Alone on Earth” Essays on Rousseau Rousseau and the Search for Origins The Discourse on Inequality Rousseau and the Origin of Languages Rousseau and Buffon Fiction and Boundaries Contents 81 88 90 92 97 104 lll 113 122 126 136 139 167 170 177 180 186 188 201 218 224 230 234 239 240 251 254 261 266 271 271 281 304 323, 333Contents Reverie and Transmutation On Rousseau’s Illness Notes. Index 352 365 379 409@ Translator’s Note For the convenience of the reader without French in locating pas- sages from Rousseau’s work in context, I have included page ref- erences (in parentheses) to the following English translations: Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1953). Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1984). Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (New York: Pen- guin, 1979). Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1968). My translations of Rousseau sometimes follow these very closely, sometimes not. Translations from other works of Rousseau are my own. I want to express my thanks to my wife, Dr. Stephanie Engel, her colleague, Dr. Humphrey Morris, and Jean Starobinski for help in translating medical and psychiatric terminology, and deep grat- itude to Jean Starobinski for his invaluable comments on the entire manuscript. —Arthur Goldhammer© Preface This book is not a biography, although in overall outline it tries to follow the chronological development of Rousseau’s attitudes and ideas, Neither is it a systematic exposition of the philosophy of the citizen of Geneva, although crucial aspects of that philosophy do come in for detailed examination. Rightly or wrongly, Rousseau was unwilling to separate his thought from his person, his theories from his personal destiny. We must take him as he offers himself to us, in this fusion, and confusion, of existence and idea. This leads us to analyze Jean-Jacqués’s lit- erary creation as if it represented a kind of imaginary action and to analyze his behavior as if it constituted a lived fiction. Adventurer, dreamer, philosopher, antiphilosopher, political theorist, musician, and victim of persecution: Jean-Jacques was all of these. As diverse as his work is, it can, I think, be read and comprehended as a unified whole: it is rich enough to suggest themes and motifs useful for grasping both the variety of its ten- dencies and the unity of its intentions. By attending naively to the work and refraining from hasty condemnation or absolution, we can hope to discover the images, obsessions, and nostalgic desires that more or less constantly governed Jean-Jacques’s conduct and work. I have limited myself as much as I could to observing and de- scribing the structure of Rousseau’s world. Rather than impose external patterns and values, I have chosen to read the texts in such a way as to reveal their internal coherence or incoherence and to highlight the symbols and ideas that structured Rousseau’s thought. Yet this study is something more than a “close textual analysis.” For it is obvious that one cannot interpret Rousseau’s work without taking into account the world that its author opposed. If intimate personal experience enjoys a special place in that work, it acquires that place as the result of Rousseau’s conflict with a society he xixii PREFACE deemed unacceptable. Indeed, as we shall sce, the proper place of the inner life is defined solely by the failure to establish any sat- isfactory relationship with external reality. Rousseau desired com- munication and transparency of the heart. But after pursuing this avenue and meeting with disappointment, he chose the opposite course, accepting—indeed provoking—obstructions, which enabled him to withdraw, certain of his innocence, into passive resignation. Note This translation is based on the 1971 French edition published by Gallimard, which includes numerous detailed changes to the orig- inal 1957 edition. These emendations do not affect the overall structure of the work, however. Citations in this edition are to the critical edition of Rousseau’s works: Oeuvres completes, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pléiade). The seven essays collected at the end of this volume were pub- lished in various places between 1962 and 1970. Two other essays on Rousseau are not reprinted here: “Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le peril de la réflexion” appears in Oeil vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1961; 2d ed. 1968), and “Liinterpréte et son cercle” appears in La relation critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). —Jean Starobinski@ Introduction Jean Starobinski and Otherness Robert J. Morrissey Ata time in contemporary French criticism when many are her- alding a rediscovery of the individual and a return to history, the case of Jean Starobinski takes on special significance. Throughout his career he has remained steadfastly committed to an examination of the problems of subject and subjectivity and has constantly re- minded us of the importance of the diachronic perspective. And yet in discussions of a theoretical nature he is often seen as a kind of brilliant eclectic who does not have, or want, a method. To a large extent this is true, and it would be of little use to try to “contain” him by constructing a methodology around him. On the other hand it is important to understand the basic tenets of his approach to the text and to explore some of the epistemological questions they raise. For this, his work on Rousseau is crucial. Over his long and distinguished career, Jean Starobinski has consistently returned to the Genevan philosopher as to his first love and greatest obsession. Rousseau is for him both a complex individual and a profoundly emblematic figure. In this respect, Starobinski’s ap- proach brings together two very different critical tendencies, two very different visions of Rousseau. One vision of Jean-Jacques Rousseau makes him a product of his times. His thought marks an important transitional moment on both a political and a metaphysical level. Politically speaking, he is situated at the beginning of the twilight of an ancien régime ever more threatened by the rise of enlightened individualism and the growing incompatibility of aristocracy and absolutism. From a metaphysical point of view, his thought is the result of a series of decentering epistemological revolutions that had profoundly al- tered man’s view of himself and his position in the universe: the Copernican revolution had removed man from the center of the universe, and empiricism had displaced the “center” or essence of man toward the peripheries, from the Cartesian cogito to Lockean sensation. xiiixiv Intropuction Certainly, whether or not one considers him to be determined by the Zeitgeist, by the structures in place, or, in a poststructuralist view, by the transpersonal interplay of “differences,” Rousseau must be seen as a pivotal figure in history. Rousseau was a philosopher who led what was to become the Romantic charge against the En- lightenment. In the moments preceding the awakening of modern class consciousness, he defined himself as a commoner and asserted the value of his story and the worth of the individual against a society of privilege. Asa moralist, he tried to reconcile the universal necessity of the laws of reason and history with a vision of man as essentially free and capable of making his own destiny. An outsider by class, by nationality, and by temperament, he gained universal recognition by decrying the scandalous victimization of those ex- cluded. He expressed in words before the fact the violence, aspi- rations, and contradictions acted out in the Revolution of 1789. Perhaps more than any other, he formulated the terms and the tone of revolutionary discourse in France. But the time of revolution was not at hand. In the ideology of the ancien régime, the words and ideas of Rousseau were literally out of place. He was forced to carve out that place for himself, and in so doing he created a space that was to be occupied by revolu- tionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike. It was not only that his words were too radical, they were too passionate. Indeed, Rousseau introduced the language of passion into the discourse of political theory: “Love of truth has become dear to me, I feel, because I have had to pay for it. Perhaps, at first, it was merely a system; now itis my ruling passion. Itis the noblest one that can enter the heart of man.”! And the most dangerous, one is tempted to add. But Rousseau believed he had been paying from very early on, and this strange mixture of logic and a passionate, personal identification with an absolute, transcendent truth can already be found in his earliest writings. It is here in Rousseau’s passion that Jean Staro- binski begins his now-celebrated Transparency and Obstruction— not in a critical analysis of Rousseau’s political philosophy as manifested in the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts but in a discussion of the trembling, personal anger that betrays itself in Rousseau’s denun- Gation of a scandalous absence of human communication. Refusing any fascination with “purified” ideas thai might exist independent of the text, Starobinski seeks to identify a fundamental intention that is acted out in and through the text. In the preceding lines my emphasis has shifted from a view of Rousseau as a product of his times to one of him as a creator ofJean Starobinski and Otherness - his own space, or, to put it another way, from a passive, determined Rousseau to an active, responsible Rousseau. The latter constitutes the second vision of Rousseau, to which I will return later. But Starobinski begins by situating what proves to be the dominant theme of seeming and being or appearance and reality in the historically determined context of a literary and philosophical topos. In his view, just as ideas are not to be abstracted from the text, the text is not to be abstracted from history. Rather than concentrating on the text as a formal entity as did the American New Critics, Starobinski, whose approach is indirectly influenced by the thought of the German philosophers Dilthey and Heidegger, conceives of it primarily as an expression of meaning and insists on the impor- tance of its roots in history. For him, there is no true understanding of meaning outside of time and space. From this perspective, Rous- seau is very much the product of his age, and the themes he develops are those of his era. Because for Starobinski, a work “is defined by what surrounds it [and] has no meaning except in relation to its context,” meaning is relative in its essence, and understanding is, on a very fundamental level, an understanding of relations.? He does not try therefore to measure Rousseau’s ideas against a set of absolutes that transcend his time. Instead, he comprehends Rous- seau within the functioning parameters of his era. The truthfulness or falseness of Rousseau, his “legitimacy,” is to be judged in terms of the questions he poses, and those questions are anchored in a particular sociohistorical situation. This is not to say, however, that these questions and Rousseau’s manner of response are without importance to us, but rather that we must remain aware of the distance that separates him from us. ‘This stance has important methodological consequences. We are forced to ask, on the one hand, what constitutes the proper context for understanding and, on the other hand, what is the nature of the relation that one can or should have with the literary work. To a certain extent, there can be no satisfactory response to the first question. It implies that the context itself becomes an object of study which then functions as a necessary condition for under- standing the work. But how, then, is one to define that object? Starobinski clearly recognizes this problem: “Here is the snag: the context is so vast, the critical relations so numerous, that [the critic] succumbs to a secret despair; he will never bring together the elements of this whole. ... What is worse, from the moment he decides to situate a work in its historical perspective, only an arbitrary decision can limit the inquiry.”* On a theoretical level, the desirexvi InTRODUCTION to attain a full, unified understanding of the total context is un- realizable. Criticism is condemned to a constant state of becoming; it is always in search of a “final unity,” a total, and for that reason unattainable, knowledge.‘ Yet this ideal remains there as an epis- temological imperative that gives a unifying intention to the critical enterprise. From this point of view, Starobinski’s work self-con- sciously defines itself in terms of its limitations, its impossibilities, or to put it more strongly, its own inescapable failure. In fact his work serves as a practical critique of this search for total contextual knowledge. Such a concern with context threatens to engulf the text, and the work loses its privileged position as the primary object of study to become nothing more than “one of the innumerable manifestations of an era, of a culture, or of a ‘world vision.’ ” Seen in this light, the triumph of contextualization only represents a form of failure, for “in pretending to give us the world in which the work is afloat, it makes us lose sight of the work itself and its meaning,” But Starobinski refuses to lose sight of the work as an expression of the individual. From this point of view, the reason for studying the work’s surroundings, or the various milieux in which it is formed, is primarily differential in nature. Thus the study “Rousseau and Buffon” aims at differentiating the “philosophical anthropology” of Buffon from that of Rousseau. There are, of course, similarities to be examined. But more significant is the dissimilarity between the two, the way in which Rousseau transforms notions found in Buffon and how the great naturalist serves as a justifying authority in Rousseau. Rousseau is to be studied in context precisely because he is different from that which surrounds him both in time and in space—not immeasurably different, but irreducibly so. Starobin- ski’s aim, then, is to try to measure that difference. For this reason, the unfulfillable requirement of a unifying total knowledge is meth- odologically important: the more complete the contextual knowl- edge, the better the understanding of the work’s specificity. Without it, the critic is condemned to a passive observation of diversity and thereby succumbs to fragmentation.* We are now better able to grasp Starobinski’s relation to Geistes- geschichte: apprebending the meaning of, an author's work implies understanding the culture in which it was produced as a cohesive whole. Yet total understanding of another time and place implies seeing all, total transparency, omniscience in sum, and in this sense one can say that theological aspirations inform Starobinski’s ap- proach. However, the recognized impossibility of their fulfillmentJean Starobinski and Otherness xvii puts the critic into a position of “existential” responsibility. Because a complete understanding of the ultimate whole is impossible, the critic must define lesser totalities as relevant objects necessary for the understanding of the work. “It is an arbitrary decision that delimits the boundaries of a whole, and consequently the relations governing the elements of the system thus defined.”” With the critic’s choice goes the critic’s responsibility. But what kinds of systems are relevant? In principle at least, all aspects of the historical moment, be they sociological, biographical, or linguistic, constitute valid fields of inquiry for better understand- ing the literary work. What is more, there is a wide variety of methodological tools for examining these objects. Here, Starobinski becomes an apologist of method, or rather of methods, arguing that the critic should choose those methods most appropriate for given objects of study. But he makes an important distinction be- tween method and interpretation, Methods are impersonal ana- lytical tools that do not engage the responsibility of the person employing them. “Interpretive discourses presuppose methods and make use of them, but they do not themselves have any method- ological guarantees. They come into play outside of those areas where methods are able to make use of techniques of verification.” For Starobinski, then, we would do better to speak of a Freudian style of interpretation, for instance, than of a psychoanalytic method. In the human sciences, to subordinate oneself to “a” method is to refuse to assume one’s responsibility—and one’s freedom. Thus Starobinski gives a restrictive definition of method, assigning to it a more technical role. Yet methods are essential, and foremost among them is that method without which historical and literary interpretation is im- possible—philology.® This is so precisely because the system of lan- guage is the matter out of which the work is constituted. The value of words, their meaning in a text, can only be understood in terms of the usage of the times, the contemporary system of language and the rhetoric of the day.'° It is around this point that one un- derstands the importance of Leo Spitzer for Starobinski."' Starobinski not only applauds Spitzer’s general commitment to philological methods, he values above all the German scholar’s use of the notion of écart, or deviation from a linguistic norm, in his elaboration of a theory and practice of stylistic analysis. Here the term norm has a descriptive rather than a prescriptive function. It refers to the general usage or the “average” language (langue moy- enne), with the same connotations that average or norm would havexviii INTRODUCTION in disciplines making use of statistical analyses. But in Spitzerian stylistics, the norm is defined through philological methods: ac- quiring a knowledge of the use and meaning of words, studying semantic fields, understanding the synchronic workings of words, expressions, and topoi in the system of the language at a given time. This effort to obtain a view of the language as a functioning whole has very clear affinities with structuralist theories (although, as Starobinski points out, on this level Spitzer is less interested in seeing language as a system of differences than as a network of convergences) and leads Starobinski to describe him as “a philol- ogist enamoured of totality.” We can immediately see what Staro- binski finds attractive in Spitzer’s approach: it satisfies the epistemological requirement of a unifying vision and it situates the literary work in a social context—the general usage. But while it shares with Geistesgeschichte the notion of a totalizing comprehen- sion, it represents an attempt to go beyond the latter’s romantic, idealizing tendency to view cultural phenomena simply as mani- festations of a hypostasized “spirit of the times” or Zeitgeist. For both Spitzer and Starobinski, the point of primary interest remains the écart, the deviation, the textual difference.'* Thus Starobinski discovers in Spitzer’s notion of style a description of that which i “neither the purely particular, nor the universal, but a particular that is undergoing universalization and a universal that escapes to reveal an individual liberty.”!® However, Starobinski extends the notion of écart well beyond purely linguistic or stylistic concerns in order to make of it a general interpretive concept functioning on two fundamental levels: that of production and that of interpretation. From the point of view of production or writing as an existential act, the écart is a diver- gence implying the revolt of the individual against the norm, the refusal to be determined by the structures in place. Here writing is, in its very essence, an “oppositional act” in that, on the one hand, it expresses the adhesion to and acceptance of the norm and de- termining structures inherent in language and, on the other, it reveals at the same time an intention of refusal or revolt, be it con- scious or not."* This conflict between common practices and par- ticular experiences is what makes writing both a gesture of self- liberation and an attempt to reconcile oneself with the world through the literary work.!® The work represents an act in that it is a working through of the author’s relation to the world. Given this understanding, the notion of écart acquires an addi- tional importance for interpretation. ‘To one degree or another,Jean Starobinski and Otherness xix Starobinski interprets all information exterior to the work in light of this notion. This is the case when, in the opening line of the preface to Transparency and Obstruction, he affirms that his study is not a biography, but that it nevertheless follows Rousseau's chron- ological development. In point of fact, Starobinski often comes back to events in Rousseau’s life or discussions of this correspondence. In so doing he does not hesitate to make use of his training as a medical doctor and a psychiatrist.'° But the goal is not so much to tell us about Jean-Jacques’s life as to point out the écart, the dis crepancies between what Rousseau says about his life and what the existing evidence would lead us to conclude. A work is revealing not only in its resemblance to the inner ex- perience, but also by reason of its difference. If there are enough documents to permit us to construct a probable image of the empirical personality of the author, it becomes possible to measure yet another écart: that by which the work goes beyond and trans- forms the primitive givens of experience. In considering differ- entially the work and the psychological life, it is no longer the principle of emanation or reflection that is at work, but the prin- ciple of creative invention and desire, of successful metamorpho- sis. It is necessary to know the man and his empirical existence in order to know what the work is opposing or its coefficient of negativity.” In his considerations of all that surrounds the work, be it bio- graphical, historical, or philological, Starobinski is less interested in knowing the context as a thing-in-itself than in knowing it as a differential entity-in-relation, allowing him to circumscribe the lim- its of the work, to distinguish it from what it is not: it is not identical with its times; its language is not consubstantial with the language of the moment; and itis not a faithful image of the author’s interior experience. And yet the work certainly partakes of all these things. But while these extratextual totalities help to delimit the work, they are in the end only hypothetical constructions, valuable yet only more or less plausible conceptual models, and to them he prefers the material presence of the text precisely because it has an identity that resists assimilation, because it is not the creation of the critical mind. It is not just that the text is an object, however; it is an object that calls to us; it needs a reader to “realize” itsel{—to mean som thing it must mean something fo—and thus by its very nature it beckons to us.'* After being “looked at” it must be “looked into,” and hence it is not surprising to find that the metaphor of thexx InTRoDUCTION critical “gaze” informs Starobinski’s approach to the text. Seeing is an activity of the senses and not of the mind, more a sensitivity than an intellectual construction. Sensible seeing implies a trained receptivity to the text, that is, a “sense” of the historical and of the distance separating us from the object of our gaze. To train the gaze is to concentrate it on a specific object, to “look into” it, to explore and understand it. Phenomenological philosophers from Husser] to Merleau-Ponty have made of the gaze the privileged vehicle of the individual’s relation to the world. Our consciousness of the world passes through the corporeal intermediary of the senses. As Merleau-Ponty ex- plains, meaning depends quite literally on how we sce things: “Vis- ual content is picked up, utilized, and although it is sublimated on the level of thought by a symbolic power that goes beyond that content, it is nevertheless on the basis of vision that this power can constitute itself. .. . Vision is the foundation upon which the sym- bolic function is built, not because vision is the cause, but rather because it is that gift of nature that the Mind [Esprit] would use beyond all expectations.”"? The way we are in the world and our consciousness of ourselves are based on the experience of “seeing,” which thus becomes synonymous with “being aware.”® This ex- periential reality, which is the only reality we live immediately (as opposed to a scientific “reality” which is abstract and grasped in- tellectually rather than experientially), is thus fundamentally sub- jective in nature. The objects that surround us function less “as they are” than “as they mean,” and objects only mean for someone.*! Whence the positing of the primacy of the subject as well as the use of the term intentional to describe that world-constituting or meaning-giving role of consciousness. To see implies seeing meaningfully. It is in this context that Starobinski defines the gaze as an “in- tentional relation to others and the surrounding world” and thus “less as the faculty that receives images than that which establishes a relation.”** The task of the critical gaze trained on a text is “to decipher the words in order to gain access to the intuition of their full meaning: this perception no longer has anything to do with a visual act other than in a metaphorical sense.”** And so it is that the gaze, for Starobinski, becomes a metaphor for understanding: “seeing” the meaning of a text. Such’a position raises two kinds of objections. Georges Poulet, among others, suspects that behind Starobinski’s intellectualization of the critical gaze lies a tendancy toward “angelism” which diminishes the role of the perceiving body.”*Jean Starobinski and Otherness xxi While this is true to some extent, one can counter that this “an- gelism” is a necessary consequence both of the textual nature of the objects and of the basic hypothesis of a unity of consciousness. Starobinski is specifically trying to understand how the body is written into the text. He certainly assumes that the body is appre- hended immediately as part of the perceiving I, but he is essentially dealing with how this view of the body is textually thematized. Thus in discussing “Rousseau’s illness,” on the one hand, he is not con- cerned with the pure experience (Erlebnis) of the body but with the textually mediated one, and, on the other, he is looking less to “see” what the disease was than what it meant for Rousseau, that is, how he experienced it or how it functioned in his “vision” of himself and the surrounding world. We now have two instances of gaze: Starobinski trying to “see” Rousseau’s “vision.” This convergence is not accidental, for it is Rousseau’s gaze that fascinates Starobinski. His desire to under- stand Rousseau, to see into him as it were, parallels Rousseau’s desire to see into the hearts of others. On one important occasion the Genevan philosopher expressed, by way of his character Wol- mar in La Nouvelle Héloise, a wish to be a pure, disembodied gaze. “If I could change my nature and become a living eye, I would do so willingly, ... while not concerned about being seen, I need to see [my fellow men].”* And later, in the Réveries, Jean-Jacques muses about what it would have been like to have owned the magic ring of Gugés, ancient king of Lydia, which gave its owner the power to render himself invisible at will.?* In Rousseau the impor- tance of seeing without being seen is that it would give him inde- pendence from his fellowmen—he would be free from their judgmental and condemning gaze while at the same time being able to see them as they really are. In entitling his two-volume collection of critical essays The Living Eye, Starobinski underscores the profound analogy between this desire of Rousseau and the critic's desire to “look into” an author. But what Starobinski sees when he looks at Rousseau’s manner of seeing or making sense of the world around him becomes, as we shall find, the matter of a second and potentially more damaging objection to his own critical approach, that of impressionism. As he focuses on Rousseau, he sees the subjective limitations of Jean-Jacque’s gaze. {The] solicitation of meaning is spontaneously, from its inception, an act of interpretation: it implies that a general meaning has been attached to the world, against which particular meanings will take shape. In other words the gaze that looks out upon the worldxxii InTRODUCTION clicits signs destined for it alone, which disclose its world. .. Rousseau, however, refuses to admit that meaning depends on him, that itis, in large part, his own creation, He wants it to inhere entirely in the object perceived. He does not recognize his own question in the world’s answer. He therefore deprives himself of the part of freedom that each of our perceptions contains. Having chosen one of several possible meanings offered by the external object, he blames the object itself for his choice and sees a pe- remptory and unequivocal intention in the sign. This leads him to impute a decisive will to things, when in fact the decision is contained in his own gaze.” In Starobinski’s view, Jean-Jacques does not see the world, he sees only himself, and in so doing he loses the freedom to see. What Rousseau is looking for, and what he never will find, is a state of universal Sameness—whence his desire for transparency, unity, freedom, and a moral and ontological absolute. But since Sameness can only be defined in terms of self, freedom for Rousseau is above all freedom from Otherness. The only escape is either to make one’s own Sameness function as a transcendent absolute, thus elim- inating all obstructions by making the world a transparent extension of the self, or to refuse any encounter with the Other by declaring all that is different to be an insurmountable obstacle and with drawing in alienation from the world. In the first case, liberty is total and power absolute; without constraint, the “I see” becomes the “I can.” But for Rousseau the moral philosopher, freedom and power imply responsibility, Because I am free to do as I wish, | am responsible for what I do. In the end, however, Rousseau refuses to assume this responsibility for his actions, In the second case, surrounded by obstacles and constraints, I am no longer free to act, but I no longer must bear the responsibility for my actions. In this case, freedom becomes a freedom from responsibility and, par- adoxically, subjugation becomes a precondition for freedom. At this point, “his freedom is not freedom to act but freedom for self- presence; it is but a mere feeling.”** Both these attitudes are to be repeated over and over again in various permutations in the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries: the self as absolute and the indi- vidual as alienated victim. Many of these ‘permutations are already implied in the work of Rousseau: self as collectivity; self as uniquely original; refuge in dreams and reveries as more “real” than the objective world; love or its sublimation as a remedy to alienation; reason as a solution; the renewal of history or submission to it.Jean Starobinski and Otherness soi ‘The underlying problematic that Starobinski discovers in Rous- seau, then, is Otherness, the very same. problematic that is at the heart of phenomenology. It is this convergence of object of study and critical approach that I shall explore in some detail. Without falling into too much word play, we can affirm that Rousseau is constantly returning to descriptions of a state of indifference both on an ethical and on an existential level. In fact the two levels are intimately connected. On the ethical level, he seeks an ataraxic indifference not unlike that of stoic wisdom. On the existential level, he evokes moments of universal Sameness. We find the latter in the General Will of the Social Contract, in the féte at Clarens, and in the Golden Age of humanity before the advent of history. On the moral as well as the existential level, the result is the same: the problem of Otherness disappears. There are thus two interdepen- dent modes of overcoming difference: unity and autonomy. The wisdom of the ancients afforded individual independence in the same way that Clarens affords economic independence.*® By def- inition, unity, whether collective or mystically transcendent, effaces difference. On both levels what is achieved is a freedom defined essentially as freedom from difference or otherness. And so it is that transparency reveals itself as nothing more than a way of always seeing oneself—only the definition of the self varies from individual to collective—while the veil or obstacle end up becoming a pretext for refusing to look beyond oneself. Time after time, in very dif- ferent areas of Rousseau’s work, Starobinski comes to the same conclusion. In art: Rousseau/Pygmalion “is unwilling to allow the work of art to be other than himself.”®° In Rousseau's defense of the struggle against religious intolerance: “Removal of the veil abol- ishes the subjectivity of error, But in the end we must confront a new subjectivity, certain that it knows the truth. Maleficent sub- jectivity has given way to felicitous subjectivity. But we remain within the confines of consciousness, even when we think we are encountering objects.”"' In matters of the heart Rousseau’s use of the same word, supplement, to describe both his lifelong com- panion, Thérése, and his onanistic practices “shows us what Rous- seau saw in Thérése: someone he could easily identify with his own flesh, and who never raised the problem of the other.”** In this context Rousseau’s final “return to self” is nothing more than another means of avoiding the same problem. “Neither in pure sensation, nor in imagination does consciousness confront an object distinct from itself."xxiv InTRopuCTION Not only is it impossible to have any true intersubjective relation, but there are no avenues for reformulating the problem of sub- jectivity and “alienation.” Looking into an era where transcendent values are straining under the attack of the Enlightenment and where the modern notion of class has not yet been discovered as a justification for action, Starobinski is able to trace in Rousseau the collapse of universals into a subjectivity that refuses alterity. At this historical juncture, a set of problems that can no longer be “resolved” on the theological front and cannot yet be transferred to the political front becomes the problems of the individual. In making them basic elements of self-definition, Rousseau tests the limits of subjectivity and invests the notion of freedom with a new sense of urgency that integrates both metaphysical uneasiness and social and political apprehensions. Unable to escape subjectivity, Rousseau attempts to find the true self, to overcome the “self-forgetfulness” that has made us other than ourselves. In his preoccupation with originary moments—as in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and in the Essay on the Origin of Languages—Rousseau is seeking to establish meaning out- side of history and to delve beneath the layers of “forgetfulness” in history to find the essence of natural man. While Starobinski refuses meaning outside of history, Rousseau does represent for him an originary figure who defines in an exemplary manner the problematic of modern consciousness as it manifests itself in lit- erature. And nowhere is this more apparent than in Rousseau’s relation to language. This new language has nothing in common with classical “dis- course.” .. . No longer does the literary work call forth the assent of the reader to a truth that stands as a “third person” between the writer and his audience; the writer singles himself out through his work and calls forth assent to the truth of his personal ex- perience. Rousseau discovered these problems: he truly invented a new attitude, which became that of modern literature (beyond the sen- timental romanticism for which he has been blamed). He was the first to experience the dangerous compact between ego and lan- guage, the “new alliance” in which man makes himself the word. For Starobinski, Rousseau’s genius and great significance lie in his lifelong struggle with the problem of the individual; Rousseau’s great failure is in not confronting the Other, in avoiding an en- counter without which one can understand neither the world nor one’s place in it: in losing the Other, Rousseau loses himself, On the one hand, he refuses to recognize that language, by definition,Jean Starobinski and Otherness xxv is convention, hence inhabited by Otherness, and that writing is a way of being-for-others; on the other hand, in having recourse to writing, he is making of the immediacy of his intimate life a means to justify himself in the eyes of others and thus he loses his own authenticity. “Jean-Jacques loses both the purity of immediate sen- timent and the possibility of concrete communication with others. This double loss defines him asa writer.”** In this sense, Starobinski’s criticism has a moral thrust and centers on Rousseau’s refusal to assume his freedom by accepting responsibility for the meanings he chooses to see and the mediation that he chooses to employ. Rous- seau’s failure is thus situated on the level of an existential “bad faith” in a Sartrian sense. At the same time Rousseau represents a particularly important challenge for Starobinski in that, by bringing his critical gaze to bear on him, he not only undertakes to reveal the philosopher's blind spot but, above all, undertakes not to allow himself to be blinded in like manner.** Yet what is to guarantee that his own gaze will not be as deformed as Rousseau’s, that it is not his own gaze that decides what it will see in Jean-Jacques? Starobinski turns to Rousseau with a profound sense that he is returning to the origins of our own—and his own—particular form of desire as moderns to understand our world, and in so doing he places these origins squarely in history and not in any necessary, universal, and ahis- torical fundaments. Yet to a great extent, he accepts the values espoused by Rousseau. Unity and freedom are, as we have seen, Starobinski’s fundamental critical ideals. And Starobinski seeks to preserve and extend what could be called the Enlightenment’s op- timism with the forces of reason and “light.” Further, he accepts the subject/object distinction as essential. In this he differs from such thinkers as Foucault and Derrida, who specifically repudiate the subject/object framework of modern humanism. Finally, Sta- robinski sees a profound similarity between artist and critic, be- tween the creative gaze and the critical gaze, for both are trying “to lead the mind beyond the visual realm into that of meaning.”*” From this point of view, we can say that Starobinski’s approach contains in itself a remedy to Rousseau’s failure: Rousseau is an Other, and to understand him, to “see” him correctly, is to have a “good” or “proper” relation with that Other; at stake then is the possibility of knowing. But the critic’s approach also contains evi- dence of having learned from the philosopher's failure. In this sense the object of study is instructing the gaze that is interpreting it. There is a circular relation between the two that Starobinski ex-xxvi INTRODUCTION plicitly recognizes and places in the German tradition of the her- meneutical circle: “the explicated object . .. is not only an illustration and an application of a preexistent methodology, it brings to the methodological principles the possibility of being transformed as they are exercised, so that in the end the interpreted object con- stitutes a new element of the interpreting discourse.” This circular relation with Rousseau, who has remained the dominant pole in Starobinski's career, profoundly marks his critical approach and allows us to clarify certain aspects of it: What is the proper relation with a work? And what am I relating to, is it the work or the writer? What does Starobinski mean when he talks about Jean-Jacques Rousseau? His relation with Rousseau also allows us to understand better what distinguishes his approach from that of the phenom- enological critic, Georges Poulet, who, along with Marcel Raymond, has had the strongest formative influence on Starobinski. Both Starobinski and Poulet believe in a first intuitive and em- pathetic reading. This is the first contact with the work as Other. But this work is the expression of a subjectivity and provides a privileged access to the interiority of the Other. That which I, the reader, experience empathetically in my own ego while reading leads to an alter-ation of my being. I am “seized by the Other,” by an alter-ego. “When I am absorbed in my reading, a second ‘I’ takes me over and experiences for me.”*° Seen in this light, reading is a passive, alienating “act” in which I experience the Other as a subject for the world, that is, I experience his world apperception. This alienation has two faces in that it is at once an estrangement—I am made other—and a suspension of the alienness of the Other—the other is in me. But the presence of the Other exists for me only in the form of his textual actuality. The subject that I attain in my reading is not the author in a biographical or historical sense. “The subject pre- siding in the work can only be in the work.”*° ‘Thus the interiority of the Other is in the work itself and is never situated outside of it. To look outside of the work, or behind it, to a psychological ex- perience or a psychological causality is to miss the point by placing meaning outside of the work rather than in it, For this reason, Starobinski keeps his distance from psychoanalytic approaches. Further, to attempt to go beyond the work to some pure or “real” experience (Erlebnis) of the author, as did Spitzer in his early work, is to lose oneself in a purely conjectural area that is, in the end, inaccessible to us. Both Starobinski and Poulet attempt to “attain the author as he made himself through his work and not as he wasJean Starobinski and Otherness xxvii before it," and each successive work represents another stage in the constant process of becoming. The critic’s goal, then, is a complicity or an identification with the author-in-the-work or the creative consciousness manifested in the work. Poulet designates this creative consciousness the cogito, which functions as the structuring core of every work. Poulet aims at coinciding with this subjectivity and this means apprehending what could be described as an author’s intransitive, preconceptual consciousness, that consciousness which precedes any consciousness of something. Because Poulet aims at identifying totally with the creative consciousness, criticism for him is “the mimetic redoubling of a cognitive act”; the critic partakes of the creative consciousness, and criticism functions as an extension of it.*? Criticism can only clarify and explicate from inside, the difference between critic and author having been eliminated. Criticism is then essentially tauto- logical, a clarifying repetition. In this sense Poulet emphasizes the passivity of the critical encounter in which the critic’s alienation or alter-ation by the Other takes precedence over any active or con- stitutive appropriation. One might even go so far as to say that Poulet, because he is looking for total complicity, is a prisoner, albeit a willing one, of his author.* Starobinski does not share Poulet’s view of an author’s intransitive consciousness. Like Husserl and Sartre, he believes that conscious- ness is, by definition, transitive or intentional; there is no con- sciousness that is not consciousness of something. For Starobinski existence is ontologically both relative and relational; there is no Self without the Other. Thus the empathetic reading, although a crucial moment, constitutes only one moment in the critical process. He believes that it is neither possible nor desirable to establish a complete identity of consciousness between reader and author-in- the-work. The critical relation, as he defines it, is very much based on the notion of difference. The critic differs irreducibly from the author in time—his work is différé in that it comes after the work being studied—and in consciousness—the author-in-the-work is a different being with whom it is impossible to be one. The author- in-the-work is on some level always the Other for Starobinski, and thus his approach, while recognizing the crucial importance of the passive moment, emphasizes the moment of active appropriation. Not to distance oneself from the object of study is to fall into the trap of Sameness that plagued Rousseau. “It is not adequate to define interpretation as a language circle that closes back in on itself and that establishes an order of sameness by absorbing every-xxviii INTRODUCTION thing it touches into its coherent universality. It is in this way that Rousseau ran the risk of interpretive delirium; it is in this same way that most of us run the risk of what might be called delirium intelligentiae, the dogmatism of hypothetico-deductive reasoning.” For Starobinski, criticism must consist of both an empathetic alter- ation of the interpretive I and an encounter with the Other qua Other. The danger of limiting oneself to the first moment lies in the solipsistic, “absolute I” syndrome in which all difference is ab- sorbed into my sphere of sameness and where one ends up with a sort of immanent transcendence not unlike the kind one experi- enced in the workings of the imagination where the I envisions itself as Other without ever really confronting an external object. Thus it is not only through identification but also through con- frontation that I attain a true or transcendent transcendence. On this level, the critical I can not only see the object of study as other but also sees “itself” as the Other of the text. Such a stance has significant practical and theoretical conse- quences. Most important, it recognizes the constitutive function of the textual Other: the text constitutes me as its Other, that is, as reader. It is precisely the legitimacy of the constitutive capacity of the Other that Rousseau refuses to recognize. In reading, I become aware “of a gaze that is directed at me: this gaze is not the reflection of my own questioning. It is a different, radically other conscious- ness that seeks me out and summons me to answer it.”** This second level presupposes the empathetic identification, for only to the extent that I can identify with the Other and see myself from his or her point of view can I envision myself as the text’s Other. It is in this sense that the creative consciousness that 1 have appre- hended constitutes me as reader. This means that the critical I is no longer a simple extension of the creative I and that the relation between the two is based on difference. As the text’s Other, I con- serve my independence, and I maintain my right to question, to comment, and to judge. But this objectifying self-apperception takes place through the text. Having moved from the level of subjectivity to that of intersubjectivity, I now acquire an identity in relation to the Other and, with that identity, the freedom of inquiry—not an absolute freedom to be sure, but one defined in relation. And with this relation comes a sense of responsibility, which to a great extent involves respecting the difference between self and other. “While I can never attain the author outside of his work, I have the right and the duty to question the author in his work by asking who is speaking. And immediately I must ask who is the destinataire—real,Jean Starobinski and Otherness xxix imaginary, collective, unique, or absent—to which these words are addressed: to whom or before whom are they spoken.”* It is in this context that Starobinski sees the critical relation not only as an acquiescence to the work but also as. an encounter or aconfrontation with it. We have seen that in theory at least the criticism of Starobinski answers some of the problems posed in Rousseau, but these answers are fashioned in a praxis and have practical implications. The mix- ture of acquiescence and confrontation has two important conse- quences: it allows for a more comprehensive analysis in that it leads the critic to contemplate the literary work from both a writerly and a readerly point of view, and it gives to Starobinski’s work the character of a conversation. Looking at the text from a writerly point of view yields what might be called a thematic structure of the author-in-the-text’s consciousness. Looking at the text from a readerly point of view leads to an examination of the work's se- ductive power. On this level Starobinski concentrates on the more “objective” characteristics of the text—composition, phonetics, syn- tax—and on the formal, internal relations of the text, with an eye to understanding the effects on the reader. But in reality he finds that the seduction is in the meaning as much as in the textual strategies. “Form is not the external covering of content; it is not a seductive appearance behind which a more precious reality is hiding. . .. A structural approach helps us overcome a sterile op- position: it allows us to see both meaning in its incarnation and the ‘spiritual’ function of the ‘objective’ elements.”*” Such an attempt to integrate formal and “objective” concerns is pursued with re- markable success in Starobinski’s analysis of the “dinner in Tur- ino.”** However, although the study of the “objective” aspects of Rousseau is not entirely neglected in Transparency and Obstruction, the book is on the whole much more oriented toward analyzing the basic consciousness-structuring schemata by which Rousseau apprehended himself and the world around him. A simple glance at the text indicates the conversational character of Starobinski’s work. Rousseau speaks often in Starobinski’s text. Acquiescence and confrontation produce a particular type of dia- logical discourse in which the critic’s statements must find multiple resonances in the work being analyzed. In this, as well as in its regressive movement to an originary moment and in its desire to reveal a latent content, Starobinski’s approach has much in common with a psychoanalytic model. However, the origin to which Staro- binski goes back is not a repressed one, but a moment of awareness,wx INTRODUCTION a prise de conscience in which the individual takes stock and examines his place in the world. Starobinski is more concerned with the fundamental structure of awareness than with the hidden causes of that structure. The latency he seeks to reveal is the intentionality of the author rather than his or her conscious intentions. Further, Starobinski’s study of Rousseau has an important “progressive aspect, for while the consciousness of the author has a number of | basic constants, it is also in a constant state of becoming. For this © reason, Starobinski’s analysis mixes, and not without some confu- | sion at times, the logical and the chronological. In this context | Starobinski speaks of certain “fundamental existential choices” that - Rousseau makes and that serve to reveal his relation to the world. (To understand what Starobinski means here by choices, we might | think of the choices an actor makes in playing a role in improvisa- | tional theater where the basic character traits are given, which the | actor must then act out, and thus give meaning to, as he will.) Fundamentally then, the phenomenological critic is looking for a latent meaning contained in the work and nota hidden cause. “Even | if we must admit with Freud that the symbol is hiding or disguising © an underlying desire, it is also the very thing that points to and reveals that desire. And it is hard to understand why it is necessary to cut through the symbol (as though it were an interposed screen) in order to have access to a region situated below or beyond the literary work. Let us recognize that the symbol has the right to its own life."*1 The work is not a reflection of the author’s relation to the world, it és that relation. Rather than attempting to look behind appeal ances for a deeper reality, Starobinski accepts appearances as that by which reality manifests itself. In fact, one can say that all of Starobinski’s work is aimed at exploring the depth and richness of appearances. In this sense, literary criticism becomes an application, a practical working through of an existential position that has its roots in moral philosophy. The most challenging task of the het meneutical enterprise is to understand and respect its own limits. In his critical endeavors, the set of problems that Starobinski examines remains fundamentally the same: the problem of sub- jectivity and self-knowledge; the temptation of a hidden reality 2™ the rejection of appearances; and the status of the literary work an act of revolt or transgression (which is nothing if not a decla- ration of difference). Indeed, it is the discovery of these problems in an author that constitutes for him the call to respond critical If, on the one hand, Rousseau represents the modern problemapean Starobinski and Otherness xxxi and the modern failure in this area, Montaigne represents a’ pro- totypical example of that same problematic and a model resolution. In Montaigne in Motion, he discovers in the sixteenth-century humanist a dialectical relation based’ on a ternary movement that begins with a rejection of the vain appearances and masks of the everyday world and a retreat from that world in the name of liberty and autonomy. But Montaigne’s return to self and his attempt to find « more fundamental truth in the works of moral philosophy only lead to fragmentation, contradiction, and alienation. Thus, in a movement of synthesis, Montaigne comes back to the world of appearances which he had rejected before and accepts joyfully others’ and his own limits. Yet there is something paradoxical in looking to the premodern Montaigne to respond to the challenges of modernism and post- modernism. After all, the differences, the very otherness of Mon- taigne, would seem to make his solution inapplicable, even if Montaigne did formulate certain fundamental aspects of subjec- tivity. Above all, what separates Montaigne from modernism is the fact that expression was not yet seen as essentially subjective. But it is here that the role of the critic becomes important. The critical gaze discerns this solution in Montaigne by mediating between a modern conception of language and an attempt at self-expression bound to a tradition of an “objective” language. It is precisely this relation that Starobinski has devoted himself to exploring as a re- ciprocity that is informed by tradition and history, but is never reduced to a relation of identity. In the disciplines of history and literary criticism, attempts have been made to repudiate the prob- lem of the self and the other by going beyond it either through the abstract reasoning of logically rigorous theory or through the positing of the abolition of the subject. In Starobinski’s eyes, the former misses the specificity of the object, the latter is profoundly counterintuitive, and both represent an abdication of the individ- ual’s responsibility. Starobinski remains committed to this respon- sibility in his use of the critical gaze to understand the literary experience. a In the context of a discussion on Otherness, the problem of trans- lation becomes particularly interesting. Arthur Goldhammer has given us an excellent, highly readable translation of Jean Starobin- ski’s work. He has managed to transport much of the subtlety and elegance of Starobinski’s prose into English. Goldhammer's ap- proach to translation is not “literalist;” rather he attempts to rethinkInTRODUCTION the text. The result is a text that is “at home” in English and readers who are “at home” in the text. If we were to place this effort in the context of our discussion of Starobinski’s work, we would view Goldhammer as having chosen to assimilate the Other to the Same, reducing Starobinski’s difference from us and, in a sense, denying his identity. Yet this strategy can be defended on the grounds that a more literal technique would only lead to awkward English prose and that awkwardness is only a fool’s substitute for alterity. For example, Starobinski achieves subtlety and precision by his use of ternary syntactic structures. When translated literally into English, these structures tend to look bombastic. While Starobinski’s use of them in French is not stylistically neutral, it certainly cannot be considered overblown. In translating them, one is forced to choose between accepted norms of stylistic felicity and the added precision afforded by nuancing and reinforcing repetitions. Goldhammer responds to this challenge by translating the thought and restruc- turing the sentence. Goldhammer has thus made clarifying choices that are certainly justifiable and that have been carried through with remarkable consistency. Among these choices, those concerning a set of vocab- ulary that draws upon a tradition of phenomenology have the great- est impact on the meaning of the text and should be noted by the reader. Starobinski’s book is structured around the opposition be- tween what has been translated as appearance and reality. In French the opposition is between two substantivized infinitives: étre mean- ing “to be” and paraitre “to appear.” While “appearance” renders fairly comprehensively the meaning of paraiire (although seeming would often also be appropriate), the more usual translation of étre, in the phenomenological tradition, is by the substantivized parti- ciple: being. But this phenomenological terminology is less familiar to English readers. Pairing being and appearances or being and appearing would not have constituted a clearly and immediately recognizable oppo- sition for most readers and, indeed, on some level might have been misleading. Moreover, pairing being and appearance would have been awkward stylistically and difficult to use with the same consistency as reality and appearance, either because it pairs a participle and a noun or because the participial form of to appear is not commonly accepted as a substantive. Because this opposition is separated from its phenomenological resonances, Goldhammer, in order to render it more intelligible in the context of the comb incident, for example,Jean Starobinski and Otherness xxxiii places the concept of appearances under the sign of false appearances. Thus a sentence such as “Rousseau découvre le paraitre en victime du paraitre” (literally: “Rousseau discovers.appearance as a victim of appearance”) becomes “Rousseau discovers the falsity of appear- ances as a victim of that falsity.”®* Because Rousseau becomes con- vinced that there is a “reality” behind appearances, it is no word play to say here that, in spite of appearances, this is not a mistranslation, especially given the way in which Goldhammer develops the vocab- ulary as the book proceeds. But something is definitely lost in the translation. The same can be said for the word conscience, which is sometimes translated as mind rather than as consciousness or aware- ness. But these “losses” are to a great extent unavoidable. What is more important is the fact that Goldhammer is consistent in his choices. For English-speaking readers, the appearance/reality couple is a well-recognized opposition that has its roots in the Platonic tradi- tion, but that also opens out into the Kantian opposition between “an appearance” and “a thing-in-itself.” The opposition is between the sensory data of the physical world and either some other level of existence, as in the case of Plato—where the opposition is on- tological—or the possibility of knowing, as in the case of Kant— where the opposition is epistemological. The opposition étre/parattre has a function similar in the French language to that of appearance/ reality in English. But it is semantically richer—and has the added force of rhyme. For one thing, in the Thomist tradition Being is used to refer to God. He is the Being who transcends any opposition between existence (the fact that a thing is) and essence (what it is); he is pure, undivided Being. Certainly in speaking of Rousseau, Starobinski often uses the term Being to refer to a transcendent absolute. But there is also the rich phenomenological terminology that attempts to place being on a phenomenal or experiential level. A whole family of terms has developed around being: being-in- itself, being-for-itself, being-for-others, being there. In this tradi- tion, things have many distinct ways of being. Reality is always a perceived reality, and thus reality as subjective experience is con- sciousness. In this context, the opposition between being and ap- pearing is not a valid one, or rather it is overcome. This is the tradition that informs Starobinski’s approach to literature and that is always present in his analyses. One might say that the étre/paraitre distinction can do more “work” in French than the reality/appear- ance opposition in English.xxxiv InTRopucTION Because of the consistency of his choices, Goldhammer enables the readers to understand better the profoundly binary nature of Starobinski’s thought, which is structured around a basic set of oppositions. I hope that by making readers aware of some of these choices, I will enable them to perceive the benefit of the eminently readable prose as well as some of the resonances of Starobinski’s difference. Soe he Jean Starobinski was born on November 17, 1920, in Geneva, Switzerland. He received his Licence és lettres from the University of Geneva during the Second World War in 1942. At that time he began teaching literature as the assistant of Marcel Raymond. Partly because of the uncertainties of the times and partly because of natural affinities, he began studying medicine while continuing to teach literature. He completed his medical studies in 1949 and began a series of residencies, including one in psychiatry. “I wanted to bring together literary history, medical history, and problems raised by contemporary psychiatry. The common denominator could only be philosophical, or to be more exact, anthropological in the broadest sense of the word.”5+ George Poulet, who was teaching at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1950s, encouraged Staro- binski to come to Baltimore, where he taught literature and con- tinued his work in medicine. There Starobinski met Leo Spitzer, whose work he had known before coming to the United States. Starobinski taught at Johns Hopkins from 1958 to 1956, and when he left he had completed a draft of his doctoral thesis, “Transpar- ency and Obstruction,” which was published in 1957. Upon his return to Switzerland, he taught at the Universities of Geneva and Basel. In 1958, he was awarded the Chair of History of Ideas at the University of Geneva. In 1961 he was named Professor of Literature at the University of Geneva, but he continued his teach- ing in the history of ideas, above all at the medical school, where he taught the history of medicine. Starobinski retired in 1985 and is currently preparing a work on Diderot. Notes 1. “Ebauches des Confessions,” in Ewores complates (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), I: 1164. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 2. “Eile se définit par ce qui l'avoisinc, elle n'a de sens que par rapport 4 ensemble de son contexte.” Jean Starobinski, Oeil vivant (Paris: Galli- mard, 1961), 26.Jean Starobinski and Otherness xxv In regard to the influence of Dilthey and Heidegger, Starobinski, in.a personal communication, emphasized that this influence was not direct and believes it might have come through the work of Eric Weil (Logique de la philosophie), a student of Ernst Cassirer and an interpreter of Hegel's thought. 3. Ibid., 26-27, “Or voici l’écueil: le contexte est si vaste, les relations si nombreuses, que le regard est saisi d’un secret désespoir; jamais il ne rassemblera tous les éléments de cette totalité. Au surplus, das 'instant od Yon soblige a situer une o¢uvre dans ses coordonnées historiques, seule une décision arbitraire nous autorise a limiter 'enquéte.” 4. Jean Starobinski, Oeil vivant I: La relation critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 11. 5. Starobinski, Oeil vivant, 27. “Le triomphe du regard surplombant n'est - qwune forme de ’échec: il nous fait perdre Poeuvre et ses significations, en prétendant nous donner le monde dans lequel baigne l'ocuvre.” 6. Starobinski, Relation critique, 11-12. 7. Mbid., 73. 8, Jean Starobinski, “Entretien avec Jacques Bonnet,” in Jacques Bonnet, ed., Cahiers pour un temps: Jean Starobinski (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985), 10. This volume also contains several very helpful essays on Sta- robinski as well as some more recent articles by him. 9. Starobinski’s terminology on the question of method varies somewhat according to the polemical weight that the term carries at a given moment. In La relation critique, published in 1970, he distinguishes between technical means and the methodological reflection that should accompany any critical undertaking. In the interview with Jacques Bonnet, which took place in Geneva in 1984, Starobinski responds in the following manner to the question: “Is there a Starobinskian method?” “If you had asked me this question at the time of methodological tyrannies, I would have been tempted to prove to you that there could be no such thing as method (in the scientific sense of the word) in the areas of literary criticism and history. But, now that methods have lost some of their drawing power and, on the contrary, a certain arbitrariness (to each his own fiction) seems fashionable, Iam tempted to plead the case for method” (Cahiers pour un temps, 9). Clearly Starobinski takes a mischievous pleasure in evoking the least “fashionable” of all “methods”: philology. 10. It goes without saying that Starobinski believes that in order to understand the language and rhetoric of a given time, it is important to know their historical antecedents, that is, how they differ from what pre- ceded them. 11. Jean Starobinski, Etudes de style (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Starobinski also included this piece in La relation critique. 12. I do not mean to imply that Starobinski does not engage in broad studies of cultural history, witness The Invention of Liberty (Geneva: Skira, 1964) and 1789: The Emblems of Reason (Paris: Flammarion, 1973). Ratherxxxvi INTRODUCTION 1 am examining how he interprets the relation between an author and his sociohistoric moment. 18. Starobinski, Relation critique, 56 14. On the notion of the “oppositional act,” see Michel de Certeau, Linvention du quotidien (Paris: Union Général d’Editions, coll. 10/18, 1980), 7. 15. Starobinski, Relation critique, 56. 16. Starobinski is careful to point out that while he received training in psychiatry, he was not trained as a psychoanalyst and has not undergone psychoanalysis himself. 17. Starobinski, Relation critique, 63. 18. Ibid., 16. 19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Galli- mard, 1947), 147. “Les contenus visuels sont repris, utilisés, sublimés au niveau de la pensée par une puissance symbolique qui les dépasse, mais Cest sur la base de la vision que cette puissance peut se constituer. ... La fonction symbolique repose sur la vision comme sur un sol, non que la vision en soit la cause, mais parce qu’elle est ce don de la nature que Esprit devait utiliser au-dela de tout espoir.” 20. Husser!’s definition is helpful here: “Immediate seeing {is] not merely sensuous, experiential seeing, but seeing in the universal sense as an originally presentive consciousness of any kind whatever.” Ideas I, §19, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 36. 21. For an excellent treatment of this question see Erazim Kohak, Idea and Experience: Edmund Husserl’s Project of Phenomenology in “Ideas 1” (Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 22. Starobinski, Oeil vivant, 13. 23. Ibid., 24. 24. Georges Poulet, “Jean Starobinski,” in La conscience critique (Paris Corti, 1971), 233-61; see also J. Hillis Miller, “The Geneva School.” in John K. Simon, ed., Modern French Criticism from Proust and Valéry to Struc- turalism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 277-310. 25. Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), II: 491. 26. Ihid., I: 1057-58. 27. Jean Starobinski La transparence et Vobstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 187—88: in trans., 000-00. 28. Ibid., 291; in trans., 000. 29. [bid., 135~36; in trans., 000-00. 30. /bid., 90; in trans., 000. 31. Ibid.,99; in wans., 000. Rousseau is discussing the Allegorical Piece on the Revelation. 32. Starobinski, La transparence et Vobstacle, 214~15; in trans., 000. 33. Ibid., 263; in trans., 000 34. Ibid., 239; in trans., 000-00. 35. Ibid., 208; in trans., 000. 36. In Blindness and Insight, Paul de Man criticizes the critical attitude which is “diagnostic and looks on Rousseau as if he were the one askingJean Starobinski and Otherness xxxvii for assistance rather than offering his counsel. ... One hears this tone of voice even in so sympathetic and penetrating a critic as Jean Starobinski” (Blindness and Insight [New York: Oxford, 1971; 2d ed., Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press}), p. 112 37. Starobinski, Oeil vivant, 24. 38. Starobinski, Relation critique, 162 and 165. 39. Poulet, Conscience critique, 283. 40. Ibid., 284. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes how a literary work functions as subjectivity: “A novel, a poem, a painting, apiece of musicare individuals, that is, beings where one cannot distinguish the manner of expressing from what is expressed, where the meaning is only accessible through direct contact, and which send forth their meaning without leaving their place in time and place. ... When it is successful, the expressive act [Vopération expressive] is not limited to leaving the reader and the writer himself with a memory aid, rather it makes meaning exist asa thing in very heart of the text, it makes it live in an organism of words,” (pp. 177, 213). This list of “privileged” objects could be extended to include memoires and other documents. In fact the criterion of literarity remains unclear in phenomenological criticism. Clearly literary works are consid- ered as having a special value. There is what Starobinski calls the fait littéraire which refers to something that might best be described as the “literary specificity” of a work. However it must be remembered that this notion does not describe an absolute, but is itself anchored in time and space. Much of the raison d’étre of the privileged status that phenome- nology accords the modern work of art is due to the fact that society and individuals invest it with special, transcendent significance. This explains why Poulet as he goes back in time returns to other, more personal or private documents that often have the character of philosophical meditations. 41, Starobinski, Relation critique, 61 42. Poulet, Conscience critique, 307. 48. The best introduction in English to the so-called Geneva School of Criticism remains Sarah Lawall, Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Struc- tures of Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). Other works of interest include: J. Hillis Miller, “The Geneva School: The Grit- icism of Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, and Jean Starobinski,” in Simon, Modern French Grit- icism, 277-310; (Robert Magliola], Phenomenology and Literature: An Intro- duction (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1977); Philipe Catrard, “Hybrid Hermeneutics: The Metacriticism of Jean Starobinski?” L, no. 2 (Fall 1984): 241-63. 44, Starobinski, Relation critique, 165. “Le cercle d'une parole qui se referme sur son origine, qui fait régner Fordre du méme, qui absorbe dans son universalité cohérente tout ce qu'elle touche: cela ne suffit pas & définir Vinterprétation. Crest 14 qu’apparaissait pour Rousseau le risque du délire; cest la que surgit, pour la plupart d’entre nous, le risque du dog- matisme, de la pensée hypothético-déductive, ce délire de Vintelligence.”xxxviii INTRODUCTION 45. Starobinski, Oeil vivant, 27. Of particular relevance for this question of the constitutive role of the Other is Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sarte, and Buber (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984), 84-95. 46. Starobinski, Relation critique, 23-24. 47. Ibid,, 18. 48. [bid., 98-154. 49, Starobinski, La transparence et U'obstacle, 204. 50. See Kohak, Idea and Experience, 25 51. Starobinski, Relation critique, 282. 52. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Gold- hammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Montaigne en mouve- ment (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). 58. Starobinski, La transparence et Vobsiacle, 20; in trans., 00. 54. Starobinski, Cahiers pour un temps, 15.@@ Transparency and Obstruction1 The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts ‘The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts begins pompously with a eulogy of culture. Noble sentences give an abbreviated history of the progress of enlightenment. But a sudden reversal brings us face to face with the disparity between appearance and reality [étre]: “The sciences, letters, and the arts ... wrap garlands of flowers around the iron chains they [ie., men] wear.” A nice rhetorical effect: a wave of the magic wand inverts the values, and the brilliant image that Rousseau had created for us becomes a false decor— too good to be true: “How sweet it would be to live among us, if the outward countenance were always the image of the heart's dispositions.”® Behind this false surface lurks a void, from which stem all our woes. For it is through the gap between the “outer countenance” and the “dispositions of the heart” that evil comes into the world. The benefits of enlightenment are counterbalanced, indeed prac- tically annihilated, by the vices introduced into the world by de- ceptive appearances. In a burst of eloquence Rousseau describes the triumphal rise of the arts and sciences; then, in a second burst of eloquence, we are abruptly jerked about and shown the full extent of the “corruption of morals.” The human mind triumphs, but man has lost his way. The contrast is violent, for what is at issue is not merely the abstract notion of reality versus appearance but the destiny of men, caught between the innocence they have re- nounced and the perdition that is certain to follow: appearance and evil are one and the same. ‘That appearances are deceiving was hardly a novel theme in 1748. In the theater and the church, in novels and in newspapers, sham, convention, hypocrisy, and masks were denounced in a variety of ways. In the vocabulary of polemic and satire no words occurred more often than unveil and unmask. Tartuffe was read and reread. The deceiver, the “vile flatterer,” the scoundrel in disguise were the 34 Cuaprer ONE common currency of comedy and tragedy. Every well-wrought plot required the unmasking of a deceiver. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau would be remembered for the lines: Le masque tombe, Phomme reste Et le héros s’évanouit.> [The masks falls, the man remains And the hero vanishes.] The theme was sufficiently commonplace, vulgarized, and au- tomatic that anyone could work variations on it without strenuous intellectual effort. The antithesis between appearance and reality belonged to common parlance: the idea had become a cliché. Yet when Rousseau encountered the blinding truth on the road to Vincennes, and as he “turned and returned” the sentences of his essay, * the cliché came back to life: it blazed up and glowed white hot. Suffused with pathos, the antithesis of appearance and reality gives the Discourse its dramatic tension. What had been merely a well-worn figure of rhetoric now expresses a pain, a rending of the soul. Despite the bombast of the discourse, a true feeling of division is established and maintained. The clash between appear- ance and reality is echoed in a series of other conflicts: between good and evil (and between the righteous and the wicked), between nature and society, between man and his gods, even between man and himself. Finally, history itself is divided into a before and an after: before there were fatherlands and citizens, now there are none. Once again, Rome provides the example: the virtuous re- public, beguiled by glittering appearances, is doomed by luxury and conquest. “Fools, what have you done?”> Although the target of this diatribe is the prestige enjoyed by public opinion, and although it deplores the betrayal of Rome into the hands of the rhetoricians, all the rules of rhetoric are observed. Nothing is left out of this competition essay, written to be judged by Academicians: apostrophe, prosopopoeia, gradation—all are here. Everything, down to the epigraph, reveals the influence of literary tradition: Decipimur specie recti.© The main theme is pre- sented to us under the aegis of a Roman epigram. The citation is apt, moreover. In thrall to the illusion of goodness, captives of appearance, we allow ouselves—it says—to be seduced by a false image of justice. Our error is of a moral rather than an episte- mological order. To be mistaken in this regard is to do wrong in the belief that one is doing right. Unwittingly and against our willThe Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts 5 we are embroiled in evil. Illusion does not merely cloud our un- derstanding; it veils the truth, distorts all our actions, and perverts our lives. This rhetoric serves as the vehicle for an embittered philosophy, a philosophy haunted by the idea that human communication is impossible. In the first Discourse Rousseau already voices the com- plaint that he will repeat indefatigably during the years of perse- cution to come: that souls are invisible, that friendship is impossible, that trust can never endure, and that there is no sure sign by which we can judge the dispositions of the heart: One no longer dares to appear as one is. And under this perpetual constraint, the men who make up the herd that is called society, given identical circumstances, will all do the same things unless more powerful motives dissuade them. Hence one never really knows with whom one is dealing: to know one’s friend, one must await a great occasion, or in other words, until it is too late, since it is for such an occasion that it was essential that we know him. What train of vices will not accompany such uncertainty? No more sincere friendships; no more genuine esteem; no more well founded trust. Suspicion, umbrage, fear, coldness, reserve, hatred, and treason will hide beneath the uniform and perfidious veil of politeness, beneath that much-praised urbanity that we owe to the enlightenment of our century.” ‘That appearance and reality are two different things and that a “veil” covers our true feelings—this is the initial scandal that Rous- seau encounters, this is the unacceptable datum for which he will seek the explanation and cause, this is the misfortune from which he longs for deliverance. The theme is a fertile one. It opens the way to inexhaustible developments. By Rousseau’s own admission, the scandal of deceit was the driving force behind all his theorizing. Many years after the first Discourse, when he looks back on his work in order to interpret it, in order to write the “history of his ideas,” he will say: As soon as I was in a position to observe men, I watched them act and I listened to them speak; then, having noticed that their actions did not resemble their words, I sought the reason for this disparity, and I discovered that reality and appearance were for them two things as different as acting and speaking, this second difference being the cause of the first.* This declaration is noteworthy, but it raises certain questions. “As soon as I was in a position to observe men”: Rousseau here claims6 Cuaprer ONE the role of observer. He adopts the attitude of the naturalist phi- losopher, who transforms observations into concepts and proceeds inductively to establish reasons, first causes, for what he sees. But in stating that he admires objective analysis, isn’t Rousseau in fact “rationalizing” far more confused emotions and far more subjective feelings? Isn't he adopting the tone of abstract learning more or less deliberately as‘compensation for, and in order to conceal, cer- tain quite personal disappointments and failures? Rousseau himself authorizes us to ask these questions. Well before modern psychol- ogy drew our attention to the emotional sources and unconscious underpinnings of thought, Rousseau, in his Confessions, asked us to seek the origins of his own theories in his emotional experience, and in his Réveries went further still, asking us to consider even his dream life: “My entire life has merely been one long reverie.”® Was it a sustained act of critical attention that revealed to Rous- seau the disparity between appearance and reality? Was it calm comparison that inspired his thinking? There is reason to think not, Aware that the theme of false appearances was a commonplace of the period, we may doubt that it was the real starting point, the original inspiration, of Rousseau’s philosophy. Assuming that it is in any way possible to comprehend the sources and origins of Rousseau’s thinking, shouldn’t we look to a deeper level of his psychology? Shouldn’t we seek a primary emotion, a more intimate motivation? If we do, the theme of false appearances will crop up again, this time not as rhetorical cliché or methodological principle but as part of Rousseau’s inner drama. “Appearances Condemned Me” Let us turn to book 1 of the Confessions. “I have displayed myself as I was” (that is, as he thinks or wishes he was). He is not con- cerned to trace the history of his ideas. Rather, he lets his mind fill with emotional memories: his existence seems to him to consist of a sequence not of thoughts but of feelings, a “train of secret emo- tions.” If the theme of false appearances were merely an intel- lectual superstructure, it would hardly have a place in the Confessions. But in fact it occupies quite a large place. Significantly, Jean-Jacques's self-consciousness begins with his en- counter with “literature”: 1 do not know what I did until I was five or six. I do not know how I learned to read. I only remember my first books and their‘The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts 7 effect on me; it is from my earliest reading that I date the unbroken consciousness of my own existence. My mother had possessed some novels. .'* ‘The discovery of the self coincides with the discovery of the imag- inary: the two discoveries are in fact the same. From the beginning, self-awareness is intimately associated with the possibility of becom- ing someone else (“I became the character whose life I was read- ing”).'* Although Rousseau sees danger in this method of education, which awakens sentiment before reason and yields knowledge of imaginary things before knowledge of what is real, he does not hold here that appearances are an evil influence. The sentimental illusion fostered by his reading involves a risk, to be sure, but in this case a risk that brings with it a significant advantage: Jean-Jacques is brought up as someone who is different. “These confused emotions, which I experienced one after another, did not warp my powers of reasoning, for as yet I had none. But they shaped my mind in a peculiar way.”"* His belief that he is unique stems from the fascinating fan- tasies fostered by the novelistic illusion. This is the first biographical fact offered as confirmation of the statement made in the opening paragraph of the Confessions: “Iam not made like anyone I have ever met.” Jean-Jacques desires this difference but also deplores it: it is both a misfortune and a reason to be proud. Emotions inspired by fiction, exaltation produced by imagination, made him different from other people. His condemnation of these literary emotions and ex- alted mental states is consequently ambiguous: the novels read in his youth are a vestige of his lost mother. Next we come to another childhood memory in which Jean- ‘Jacques states that his discovery of false appearances caused a sud- den disruption in his life. He began not by observing the disparity between appearance and reality but by enduring it. He describes his first experience of the evil in appearances. This “traumatic” discovery has crucial importance in his life: “From that moment I never again enjoyed pure happiness.”"® This catastrophe (or “fall”) destroys Jean-Jacques’s pure childhood pleasure. From this mo- ment on, injustice exists in the world, and evil is present or possible. ‘The memory is important as an archetype: the discovery of false accusation. Jean-Jacques appears to be guilty although in fact he is not. He appears to lie when in fact he is sincere. Those who punish him are acting unjustly, although they speak the language of justice. In this case, moreover, physical punishment does not8 CHarTER OnE yield the erotic side effects of the spanking administered by Mile Lambercier; Jean-Jacques discovers not physical pleasure but lone- liness and separation: ‘One day I was studying my lessons alone in the room next to the kitchen, where the servant had left Mlle Lambercier’s combs to dry on the stove top. When she returned for them, she discovered that the teeth of one were broken all along one side. Who was to be blamed for this? No one but me had been in the room. I was questioned and denied having touched the comb. M. and Mile Lambercier jointly lectured, pressed, and threatened me, but I steadfastly maintained my denial. They were convinced otherwise, however, and so sure of themselves that they swept aside all my protests, even though this was the first time that I had been sus- pected of an outright lie. They took the matter seriously, as it deserved. The mischief, the lie, and my stubborn refusal to con- fess all seemed worthy of punishment. .. Nearly fifty years have passed since this occurrence, and I have no fear of being punished for the offense. But I declare before heaven that I was not guilty. ... 1 lacked the reasoning power to see how much appearances were against me or to see the thing as others did. I stuck to my own view, and all I felt was the cruelty of an appalling punishment for a crime I had not committed.” Rousseau is here cast in the role of the accused. (In the first Discourse he plays the role of accuser, but from the moment he meets with contradiction he resumes the role of the accused.) The experience described in this passage involves not an abstract, no- tional comparison of reality with appearance but a disturbing con- trast between real innocence and apparent guilt. “Imagine the revolution in [the child’s] ideas, the violent change of his feelings, the confusion in his heart and brain.”'* Even as the child is somehow gaining obscure knowledge of the ontological rift between ap- pearance and reality, he is also subjected to the unbearable mystery of injustice. He learns that inner certainty of innocence is powerless against apparent proofs of guilt. He discovers that minds are sep- arate from one another and that we cannot communicate the im- mediate evidence of inward conviction. From that moment paradise is lost, for paradise was the state of transparent communication between mind and mind, the conviction that total, reliable com- munication is possible. In that moment the very aspect of the world changes and darkens. The terms that Rousseau uses to describe the consequences of the broken-comb incident are strangely like‘The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts 9 the words he uses in the first Discourse to describe the “train of vices” that develop once people “no longer dare to appear as they really are.” In both texts Rousseau speaks of a loss of confidence and then refers to the drawing of a veil: We stayed on at Bossey for several months, There we lived as we are told the first man lived in Eden, but we no longer enjoyed it. The situation was the same in appearance but utterly different in reality. No longer were we pupils bound by ties of respect, inti- macy, and confidence to our teachers. We no longer looked upon them as gods who read our hearts. We were less ashamed when we misbehaved, and more afraid of being blamed. We began to be secretive, to rebel, and to lic. All the vices of our age began to corrupt our innocence and to give an ugly turn to our amuse- ments. Even the country lost the sweet and simple charms that touch the heart. It seemed dark and empty, as if it had been covered by a veil that hid its beauties."” Souls cease to connect, and take pleasure in hiding from one another. Everything is confused, and the punished child discovers that uncertainty in our knowledge of others that he will later (in the first Discourse) deplore: “One no longer knew with whom one was dealing.” For Jean-Jacques the catastrophe is especially disas- trous because it separates him from “precisely those people whom he most cherished and respected.”*° This break constitutes an orig- inal sin, an accusation all the more cruel because it involves a crime of which Jean-Jacques was not guilty. It is worth noting that no one in the story of the comb bears the responsibility for introducing evil and separation into the world. An unfortunate combination of circumstances is to blame, a simple misunderstanding; nothing else. Nowhere does Rousseau say that the Lamberciers are wicked and unjust. He describes them, in fact, as “gentle,” “highly reasonable,” and “justly severe.” Only they are wrong. They have been deceived by the appearance of justice (to borrow the phrase in the epigraph of the first Discourse); the injustice is impersonal and inevitable. “Appearances” are against Rousseau. Their “conviction was too strong.” Nowhere is there a guilty party. There is only an accusation and an apparently guilty party thrust forward as if by chance and automatically offered up for punish- ment. The individuals involved are all innocent, but their relations are corrupted by false appearances and injustice. The evil of false appearances and the separation of consciousness from consciousness put an end to the blissful unity of childhood.10 Cuaprer ONE Henceforth unity is something that must be recovered or redis- covered. Individuals, separated one from another, must achieve reconciliation. The mind, driven from paradise, must embark on a lengthy journey before returning to its original felicitous state. It must seek another happiness, of a totally different kind yet one in which its original condition will be totally restored. The revelation that appearances are deceiving is experienced as an injury. Rousseau discovers the falsity of appearances as a victim of that falsity. He perceives the limits of his subjectivity when that subjectivity becomes an object of calumny. He is misperceived by others: the self suffers for its appearance as from a miscarriage of justice, inflicted by people by whom it wished to be loved. Hence the “phenomenal” structure of the world is called into question only indirectly. Here, the discovery of false appearances is by no means the result of reflection upon the illusory nature of perceived reality. Jean-Jacques is not a philosophical “subject” who analyzes the spectacle of the external world and casts doubt upon its reality on the grounds that it is a mere tissue of appearances created by the deceptive agency of the senses. He discovers that other people do not share his truth, his innocence, and his good faith; it is only afterward that the landscape darkens as if shrouded by a veil. Before the self senses its distance from the world, it experiences its distance from others. The evil in appearances strikes first at the existence of the ego and only secondarily at the shape of the world. “It is in man’s heart that the spectacle of nature lives.”*'When man’s heart loses its transparency, nature turns dark and tangled. The image of the world is shaped by the way in which mind relates to mind; any alteration in that relationship distorts appearances. By the time the episode at Bossey is over, the heart's transparency is gone, and so is the luminosity of nature. Gone, too, is the almost divine ability to “read in hearts.” A veil is drawn over the landscape, and the lamp of the world dies out. The “veil” has fallen between Rousseau and himself. He can no longer see his original nature, his innocence. And, to be sure, Jean- Jacques begins to misbehave (“we were less ashamed of misbehaving . ++ we began to be secretive”),”* but he is not responsible for the introduction of evil into the world, and he begins to conceal himself only because the truth has first concealed itself. His story had begun differently. His childhood had at first been one of complete con- fidence and total transparency. His memory is still capable of taking him back to that time, of restoring him to the limpidity of a brighter world. But he cannot alter the fact that that world is lost andThe Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts an everything has turned dark: “We do not see the souls of others, because they hide, nor of ourselves, because our intellect has no mirror.” We must live in opacity.?* Divided Time and the Myth of Transparency This moment of crisis—in which the “veil” of separation is lowered and the world turns dark, in which minds become opaque to one another and mistrust makes friendship forever impossible—is part of a larger story: it marks the beginning of a disturbance in Jean- Jacques’s happy childhood, the beginning of a new era, another age in the development of consciousness. This new age is charac- terized by a crucial discovery: for the first time consciousness has a past. But this discovery, if it brings new wealth, also reveals an essential impoverishment, a lack. The temporal dimension that opens up behind the present moment is perceptible only because it is fleeing into inaccessibility. The mind turns back to an earlier world and sees that world, which once belonged to it, as lost forever. As the child’s happiness slips away, the mind recognizes the bound- less value of this now-forbidden joy. There is nothing left to do but create the poetic myth of a bygone era. In the past, before the veil fell between the world and ourselves, there were “gods who read in our hearts,” and nothing denatured the transparency and clarity of our souls. We lived at one with the truth. In both individual biography and the history of humanity, this time is situated close to birth, in the vicinity of the origin. Rousseau is one of the first writers (perhaps one should say poets) to cast the Platonic myth of exile and return in a form pertaining not to some heavenly home- land but to the condition of childhood. In evoking the time of transparency the first Discourse uses im- agery strikingly similar to that found in the story from the Confes- sions. As in the Bossey episode Rousseau refers to the presence of the “gods.” In this time divine witnesses live among men and read in their hearts. This is a world in which one consciousness recog- nizes another at a glance: ‘These are beautiful shores, decorated by no other hand than nature’s, to which the eye is constantly drawn and which the heart cannot leave without regret. When man was innocent and vir- tuous, he liked to have the gods as witnesses to his actions and lived in common huts. But now that he has grown wicked, he finds spectators inconvenient.*12 Cuaprer ONE Until art fashioned our manners and taught passion to speak an affected language, our ways were rustic but natural. Differences in behavior revealed differences in character at a glance. Human nature was not fundamentally better; but men found security in the ease with which they could see into one another's hearts.® Prior to any theory or hypothesis concerning the state of nature, Rousseau gives his intuitive (or imagined) description of that state, which resembles his own childhood up to the time when he is falsely accused. In the state of nature man lived happily in peace. Ap- pearance and reality were in perfect equilibrium. Men showed themselves and were seen by others as they really were. External appearances were not obstacles but faithful mirrors, wherein mind met mind in perfect harmony. Here, of course, nostalgia for a “prior life” detaches us from the “contemporary” world without causing us to lose contact with either nature or our fellow man. In this previous state of happiness we are surrounded by the same nature, the same vegetation, that sur- rounds us today. We see the forest, which men have mutilated, but of which large tracts still remain. To explain the fall of man no demon tempter or tempted Eve—no supernatural intervention— is required; human causes will suffice. Man, being perfectible, has always tried to supplement nature's gifts with inventions of his own. Man’s pride and the ever-increasing burden of human artifice that is its consequence have accelerated the fall into corruption: such is the history of mankind. Horrified, we gaze upon a world of masks and mortal illusions, and there is no reason for the observer (or accuser) to believe that he alone has escaped the universal affliction. Hence the drama of the fall does not precede man’s earthly existence. Rousseau takes the religious myth and sets it in historical time, which he divides into two ages: a changeless age of innocence, during which pristine nature reigns in peace, and an age of his- torical change, of culpable activity, of negation of nature by man. But if the fall is man’s own doing, a mere accident of human history, it follows that man is not by nature condemned to live in a vicious climate of mistrust and opacity. For the flaws in man’s condition are the work of man himself, or of society. Hence there is no reason why we cannot remake or unmake history in order to regain the transparency we have lost. There is no supernatural taboo. Man's essence is not compromised but only his historical situation. “Perhaps you would like to go back?”7 The question is left unanswered, but clearly there is no flaming sword that prevents our entering the lost paradise. For some people (on distant shores),‘The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts 13 who have not yet abandoned that paradise, perhaps it is not too late to “stop.” But even if, for purely human reasons, the evil is irreversible, even if we must concede that a “vicious people never returns to virtue,” history sets us the challenge of resisting and thwarting the progress of evil. If we cannot “ make good those who are good no longer,” the least we can do is “preserve those who by good fortune still are.”2° Because the introduction of evil into the world is a fact of history, the struggle against evil is a struggle that must be waged by man in history. Rousseau has no doubt that some form of action is possible and that by our own free will we can devote ourselves to lifting the veil from the face of truth. But he has several different ideas about the nature of such action and of such a decision to serve the truth, ideas that he expresses at different times (or even simultaneously) in his work: at times he sees it as a matter of personal moral reform (vitam impendere vero), at times as a matter of individual education (Emile), and at times as a matter of forming a political community (in Political Economy and the Social Contract). Beyond this, there is a fundamental uncertainty in Jean-Jacques’s desires: sometimes his wishes are directed toward the past, sometimes to the most im- mediate present, the refuge of the self-sufficient mind, and other times—more rarely—to transcendence in the future. At first he harbors “Arcadian” dreams of a return to the primeval forest. Later he argues in favor of a conservative solution, a stable compromise in which the soul and society maintain what remains pure and original in each of them, Still later he sketches “the idea of man- kind’s future happiness” and constructs his atemporal ideal of the virtuous city. in Institutions politiques. It is difficult to reconcile in a fully satisfactory manner so many dissimilar designs. One common feature is worth noting, however: the unity of intention, which is to preserve or restore a compromised state of wransparency. In Rousseau’s impassioned appeal to his contemporaries there may be nothing more than an invitation to cultivate the ethics of good will and clear conscience, or one may read his work as an invitation to transform society through political action. This ambiguity is em- barrassing. What is unambiguous, however, is that Rousseau first calls upon us to will a restoration of transparency, both for ourselves and in our lives. This desire is unmistakable, as powerful as it is simple. Ambiguity begins when this simple desire must confront concrete tasks and difficult situations. From desire for transparency to possession of transparency the transition is not direct; there is no immediate access to the desired state. The man who sets out to14 Cuaprer ONE free himself from false appearances must sooner or later face the question of means (diverse and contradictory as these are) and the question of action, which may bring either success or failure and which threatens to plunge him back into the world of falsity and opacity from which he had sought to free himself. Historical Knowledge and Poetic Vision How far are we, though, from the lost transparency? How many layers of veil must be penetrate? How far do we have to go to regain what we have lost? In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Rousseau interposes “multitudes of centuries.” The distance is vast, and the light of our primitive happiness seems almost to vanish in the mists of the ages. What can we know of a time so long ago? Reason cannot refrain from voicing its doubts: Was the time of transparency indeed real, or is it merely a fiction of our own invention, necessary for un- dertaking a speculative reconstruction of human history from its inception? In a passage in the second Discourse in which Rousseau is clearly surveying his whole philosophy, he goes so far as to suggest that the state of nature “perhaps did not exist.” It is a mere spec- ulation, the starting point of a “hypothetical history,” a principle from which certain conclusions can be deduced in an attempt to establish a chain of cause and effect, to construct a genetic expla- nation of the world as it appears to us. This procedure is no dif- ferent from that used by nearly all scientists and philosophers in this period, when people believed that proof required tracing all phenomena back to their simple and necessary sources: scholars therefore took upon themselves the role of historians of the earth, of life, of the faculties of the soul, and of societies, whose origins they attempted to trace. In bestowing upon speculation the name observation, they hoped to be dispensed from the need to provide further proof. In fact, the more Rousseau developed his “historical” fiction, the more it shed its hypothetical character: intellectual prudence gave way to ever-increasing confidence, to a rapture of the spirit. The description of the primordial state, of what was scarcely more than an animal existence, turned into an enchanted evocation of a “place in which to live.” The idea of a “healthy,” nomadic existence, with its sensory equilibrium and proper self-sufficiency, aroused such feelings of nostalgia that it produced an elegy. For Rousseau, the image was too powerful, too profoundly satisfying, not to have‘The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts 15 corresponded to the letter of historical truth. A certainty took shape within him—a certainty poetic in essence but mistaken as to its own true nature. It sought to speak the:language of history and called to witness the most earnest erudition. Conviction overcame all doubt: the origins of mankind were incontrovertibly thus and so, Rousseau declared, and primitive man must have been exactly as he believed. Rovsseau justifies his nostalgia by making up an objective history of an Age of Transparency. His certitude is that of memory. Cer- titude of this kind is fortified by contact, and Rousseau’s disciples viewed him not as the author of a hypothetical history but as a seer (Seher, as Hélderlin called him) possessed of memory of very ancient times, of a past finer than the present. In an unfinished ode entitled “Rousseau,” Hélderlin wrote: auch dir, auch dir Erfreuet die ferne Sonne dein Haupt, Und Strahlen aus der schénern Zeit. Es Haben die Boten dein Herz gefunden. [For thee too, for thee too ‘The distant sun illuminates thy head With rays from a finer time. The messengers Found thy heart.] Holderlin here casts Rousseau in the role of “interpreter,” one touched by the light of a future age or a vanished past. The God Glaucus Has the primal transparency really disappeared? Or has it been preserved in the transparency of memory and thereby saved? Has it deserted us entirely, or does it still loom nearby? Rousseau cannot choose between contradictory answers. At some point the myth gives rise to two distinct versions. In one of these, the human soul has degenerated; it has been deformed, totally transformed, and has forever lost its primal nobility. In the other, however, what has occurred is not a deformation but a kind of eclipse: man’s primitive nature persists, but hidden, veiled, shrouded in artifice—yet intact. What we have, then, is an optimistic and a pessimistic version of the myth of origin: Rousseau believes sometimes in one, sometimes in the other, sometimes in both simultaneously. He tells us that man has irrevocably destroyed his natural identity, but he also says that man’s original soul is indestructible and hence that it survives un- changed beneath the mask of artifice.16 Carrer ONE Rousseau uses the Platonic myth of the statue of Glaucus for his own ends: Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, the seas, and the storms had so disfigured that it resembled less a god than a wild beast, the human soul modified in society by a thousand ever-recurring causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and errors, by mutations taking place in the constitution of the body, and by the constant impact of the passions, has, in a manner of speaking, changed in appearance to the point of becoming almost unrecognizable. But here, the words “in a manner of speaking” and “almost” keep hope alive. There is something enigmatic about the image of Glaucus as Rousseau uses it, Has Glaucus’s face been eaten away by time? Has it lost forever the form it possessed when it first left the hands of the sculptor? Or has it merely been encrusted with salt and algae, beneath which the divine physiognomy preserves its original shape, with no loss of substance? Or again, is the original face a mere fiction, an ideal against which the current state of mankind can be measured? Itis no light enterprise to separate what is original from what is artificial in man’s present nature and to obtain sure knowledge of a state that no longer exists, that may never have existed, and that probably never will exist, yet about which we must have sound ideas if we are to judge our present state satisfactorily." To remain as one was or to submit to change: the alternatives are equivalent, in Rousseau’s mind, to the theological alternatives of salvation and perdition. Rousseau does not believe in hell, but he does believe that change is evil, whereas to remain true to oneself holds out at least a promise of salvation. Historical time, which as Rousseau sees it is not incompatible with organic devel- opment, must bear a burden of guilt. Historical change obscures the past; it brings not progress but distortion. Rousseau sees change as corruption.** As time goes by, man becomes disfigured and depraved. Not simply his appearance but his very essence becomes unrecognizable. This drastic (and, if you |, Calvinist) version of the myth of origin occurs at several points in Rousseau’s work. Underneath, we detect a very real anguish, aggravated by Rous- seau’s sense of irreparable decline. He several times states that evil is irredeemable, that once a’ certain threshold has been crossed the soul is lost and must resign itself to its loss. A “smothered nature” never returns, he says, “and one loses both what one has‘phe Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts 7 destroyed and what one has made.”* “Miserable! what have we become? How is it that we ceased to be what we were?”** ‘The distortion, it seems, is such that nothing remains of the original form. Rousseau himself felt attacked and threatened: ‘The most vile tastes and base mischief drove out all memory of agreeable amusements. Despite the most upright education I must have had a true penchant for degeneracy, for it came on me rapidly and without the slightest effort: never did a Caesar become so quickly a Laridon.* This passage follows closely on the Bossey episode. With it I want to cite a text from the end of Rousseau’s life, which is particularly significant, I think, because it dates from a period in which Rous- seau is steadfast in his assertion that he has always been true to himself: Perhaps, without realizing it, 1 changed more than I should have. What nature could withstand a situation like mine without deteriorating?”®* Rousseau hastens to answer this question in the negative. Indeed, at a moment when everything has changed for him and he thinks he is living in a dream, he struggles against the anguish of inner change with all his might and fights to maintain his identity. Some- thing has changed, but his soul has remained the same. He places the responsibility for change outside himself. It is others who have undergone the most surprising metamorphosis and who, them- selves unrecognizable, have distorted his image and works. Rous- seau himself remains what he has always been. His feelings have changed only because the external realities are no longer the same: But things changed utterly . . . as soon as my misfortunes began. Since then I have lived among a new generation, quite unlike the first, and my own feelings for others have suffered from the changes I have observed in theirs. The people whom I have seen in these very different generations have as it were adapted them- selves to each.” I, the very same man who I was then and am still today.” Beneath the mask that others, outside himself, have imposed on him, Jean-Jacques remains Jean-Jacques. At the height of his obses- sion with persecution, he reminds himself of the optimistic version of the myth of origin: nothing has been lost; time has altered nothing essential, but only the surface of things; evil originates outside the self and remains external to it. Beneath the disfiguring incrustation Glaucus's features remain unchanged. Jean-Jacques38 Cxaprer ONE then applies to himself (and to himself alone) an idea that he had previously applied to man in general. He distinguishes between a lost nature and a hidden nature, the latter being a nature that may be masked but can never be destroyed. Too powerful and perhaps too godlike to admit of transformation or eradication, this hidden nature eludes whatever we may do to profane it and takes refuge in the depths of our being, covered by extraneous shrouds. It is forgotten but not really lost, and when memory finally yields up vestiges of some remote past, we can snatch away the veils and recover the hidden nature that has remained present and alive within our bosom. “The afflictions of the soul ... temporary, ex- ternal alterations to an immortal and uncomplicated essence, grad- ually disappear, leaving the soul in its original form, which nothing can change.”*! When Rousseau confidently invokes a “nature that nothing can destroy,” he becomes the poet of enduring essences, at last un- veiled. He discovers the primal transparency close at hand, indeed within himself. “Natural man; whom he had sought in the depths of time, turns up in the depths of the self, with all his “original features” intact. A man who can delve into himself can rediscover the resplendent face of the god, free of the “rust” that had con- cealed it: Where can the painter of and apologist for a nature today so disfigured and reviled have found his model, if not in his own heart? He has described nature as he felt it. Prejudices to which he was not subject, artificial passions of which he was not the victim, did not blind him as they have blinded so many others to original features forgotten or unrecognized by nearly all. So new and so true, the rightness of those features was confirmed by the evidence of the heart, but they never would have reemerged had not the historian of nature begun by scraping away the rust that hid them. Only a retiring and solitary life, a lively taste for reverie and contemplation, and a habit of introspection, of calmly passionate seeking after what the multitude cannot see, could reveal those original features to him. In a word, a man had to paint himself in order to show us primitive man in this way.*® Self-knowledge, then, is the same as reminiscence. But it is not memory that reveals man’s “original features” to Rousseau, even though those features belong to an earlier age. Rousseau did not have to travel back somehow to the beginning of time in order to enter the state of nature and become its historian. He had only to describe himself, to know himself intimately, to get close to his own‘The Discourse om the Sciences and the Arts 19 true nature through a process that was at once active and passive: exploring his inner nature and abandoning himself to reverie. In- ward exploration yields knowledge of the same reality, it reveals the same absolute norms, as does exploration of the most remote past: What was first in historical time is also deepest in Jean-Jacques’s experience. Historical distance is reduced to mere interior di tance—a distance soon traversed by a man who knows how to aban- don himself to his emotions. From that moment, nature (like the divine presence for Augustine)" ceases to be what is most remote from us in the past and becomes what is most central to our very existence. No longer transcendent, the norm is now immanent in the self. If we are just sincere—just ourselves—natural man ceases to be a remote archetype: he becomes identical with us. Previously, transparency was possible because man existed naively under the gaze of the gods; now transparency is an inward condition, a matter of one’s relation to oneself. Jean-Jacques describes himself as he really is. An image results, which (Rousseau assures us) is a true image of the history of the species as a whole: the vanished past is resurrected and revealed to be the eternal present of nature. Hu- man beings regain the certainty that they are all alike (“every man bears the entire form of the human condition,” said Montaigne). Because Jean-Jacques was able to abandon himself to his reveries, men will in turn recognize one another. Behind their false truths they will rediscover a forgotten present, a form that remained intact beneath the veils. Delivered from oblivion, they rediscover their true selves. It is possible, therefore, to grasp man’s original nature without knowing his real origins and without engaging in speculative his- torical reconstruction. Rousseau explains this clearly in the second Discourse, in which he readily concedes that he can say nothing about man’s “true origins” and yet reserves the right to speculate as to the “nature of things”: ‘The kind of research that one can do on this subject should not be expected to reveal historical truth; it amounts to no more than speculative, conditional reasoning, more apt to illuminate the na- ture of things than to demonstrate their true origins. Is it possible to grasp the nature of man independent of human history? Rousseau is not sure, He can neither relinquish the notion that there is an essential human nature nor do without the idea of historical change, which enables him to explain plausibly why man- kind was denatured as it moved away from its blissful origins. Rous-= Carter ONE, seau does not wish to give up the possibility of criticizing society for perverting human nature, but at the same time he wants to claim that man’s original goodness remains unaltered. The two claims may appear contradictory, and Rousseau has been criticized for subscribing to both. To the extent that society is the work of man, it must be admitted that man is guilty and bears responsibility for the evil done to mankind. But to the extent that man has remained a child of nature, his innocence is indestructible. How does one reconcile the assertion that “man is naturally good” with the assertion that “everything degenerates at the hands of man?” A Theodicy That Exculpates Man and God As Ernst Cassirer has demonstrated, Rousseau’s assumptions yield a solution to the problem of theodi¢y without requiring that the blame for evil be laid at the door of either God or man, It [is not] necessary to assume that man is wicked by nature when one [can] demonstrate the origins and progress of his wickedness. These reflections led me into new investigations of the human spirit considered in its civil estate, wherein I discovered that en- lightenment and vice always developed in equal proportions, not in individuals but in peoples; a distinction that I have always been careful to make, and that none who attacked me have been able to conceive. Evil is produced by history and society without altering the es- sence of the individual. The flaw in society is not a flaw in man’s essential nature but in the relations that exist among men. Provided that a distinction is made between the essence of man and relations among men, between sociability and human nature, it is possible to state that the persistence of man’s original nature is the central truth, to which the existence of evil, of change over time, is merely peripheral. Hence evil can be identified with man’s passion for what is external to himself: prestige, appearances, possession of material wealth. Evil is external, and it is the passion for the external: if man succumbs entirely to the seduction of alien goods, he falls entirely under the dominion of evil. But he always has the option of securing his salvation by turning inward. Rousseau, unlike most previous moralists, is not content merely to criticize external things: he incriminates the external in his very definition of evil. This condemnation is merely the counterpart of an exculpation that claims, once and for all, to save man’s inner essence. Relegated t0‘phe Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts 2 the periphery of being, to the realm of interpersonal relations, evil ceases to enjoy the same ontological status as man’s “natural good- ness.” Evil is veil and obfuscation, it is mask, itis intimately bound up with fiction, and it would not exist if man had not the dangerous freedom to deny, by means of artifice, what is given by nature. Things degenerate at the hands of man, not in his heart, His hands do work, change nature, make history, shape the outside world, ‘and ultimately produce differences between historical epochs, con- flict between nations, and inequality between “individuals.” In the space of a single page, Rousseau protests against the “false philosophy” that claims that “men are everywhere the same” yet mnaintains that the vices of the contemporary world “are vices not of man but of man ill governed.”*” A significant contradiction. Rousseau affirms both the permanence of an essential innocence and the fact of historical change, which means alteration, moral corruption, and political degeneration and gives rise to conflict and injustice.** In later theories of progress we find a similar hypothesis, in- tended to reconcile the postulate of an enduring human nature with the idea of collective change. “Man remains the same, but mankind constantly progresses,” said Goethe. The pessimism of the second Discourse was challenged, and many people found Goethe’s more optimistic view easier to accept. Philosophically, however, the problem is the same. On either view, one must reconcile the stability of human nature with the mobility of history. One must explain why man (qua individual) enjoys the privilege of remaining “the same,” while mankind (qua collectivity) is subject to change. Rousseau needs history, however, only in order to explain evil. It is the idea of evil that gives his system its historical dimension. His- torical change is the means by which mankind acquires guilt. Man is not vicious by nature; he becomes vicious. ‘To restore goodness is therefore to rebel against history and, in particular, against the pres- ent historical situation. If Rousseau’s philosophy is revolutionary, it is revolutionary in the name of an eternal human nature rather than of historical progress. (In order to sce Rousseau’s work as a decisive factor in eighteenth-century political developments, that work must be interpreted.) Aware of the need to confront the world and “men as they are,” Rousseau’s social thought is, as we shall discover, aimed primarily at establishing or reestablishing the sovereignty of the im- mediate, that is, the primacy of a value upon which duration has no claim.2 Critique of Society Among the writers of his day, Rousseau belongs with those who challenged monarchical values and social structures. Opposition to the status quo creates a resemblance and an air of fraternity among these diverse writers, each of whom may in some sense be consid- ered a contributor to or precursor of the Revolution. Hence it has been possible to effect a posthumous reconciliation between Rous- seau and Voltaire, resulting in their common apotheosis or, better still, in their promotion to the status of a Janus-faced deity, a tutelary dyad: in popular engravings the two are immortalized together— two geniuses, lamps in hand, spreading enlightenment and glowing with Luciferian brilliance. Rousseau sought to attack the root of evil. He leveled a finger of accusation at society, at the social order from top to bottom. He did not scatter his critical volleys, attacking one at a time the mul- tiple manifestations of evil, but aimed rather at their common cause. This choice freed him from the need to attack particular abuses, particular usurpations of power, and particular cases of fraud. (He was in any case too egocentric to accept the role of a righter of wrongs. Voltaire made himself the champion of justice in the Calas affair and a dozen similar cases. Rousseau was totally preoccupied with one affair: his own.) Rousseau traces the history of his thoughts as follows: he observed a disparity between men’s words and their actions; he explained this in terms of yet another disparity, between appearance aod reality; he then identified the root cause. J found it in our social order, which, being contrary in every way to indestructible nature, tyrannizes that nature and obliges it to insist constantly on its rights. I pursued this contradiction to draw out its consequences and saw that it alone explained all the vices of men and all the ills of society.' 22critique of Society 23 In this passage, which vigorously sums up the argument of the two Discourses, Rousseau gives the clearest definition of the object and scope of his social criticism: his protest is directed against society insofar as society is contrary to nature. Society, which negates pature (or the natural order), has not, eradicated nature. Society and nature remain, rather, in permanent conflict, and it is this conflict that gives rise to all man’s ills and vices. Rousseau’s critique thus begins a “negation of the negation.” He accuses civilization, which is characterized by its negativity with respect to nature. The established culture denies nature: this is the dramatic claim put forward in the two Discourses and Emile. Civilization’s “deceptive lights” do not illuminate man’s world but veil the transparency of nature, separate men from one another, give rise to special interests, destroy all possibility of mutual confidence, and substitute for true communication between souls a factitious commerce, devoid of sincerity. The result is a society in which individuals isolate them- selves in selfishness and take refuge behind false appearances. A striking paradox: what might have seemed a world in which eco- nomic ties among men were closer than ever becomes a world of opacity, falsity, and hypocrisy: 1 protest that philosophy is loosening the social bonds formed by mutual esteem and benevolence, and I protest that the sciences, the arts, and all the other objects of commerce are tightening social bonds through personal interest. Indeed, one of these bonds cannot be tightened without loosening the other by an equal amount. Hence there is no contradiction in what I say? Significantly, Rousseau here contrasts two types of social relation, antithetical in the same way as transparency and opacity. Esteem and benevolence constitute a social bond in which men relate to one another immediately: nothing comes between one mind and another, and each individual is fully and spontaneously open to the other, By contrast, the bonds created by private interest have lost this characteristic immediacy. No longer is there a direct connection of mind to mind: the relationship now involves the mediation of things. The resulting perversion stems not merely from the fact that things come between minds but also from the fact that men no longer identify their interest with their personal existence but instead with mediating objects, which they believe to be indispensable to their happiness. Social man no longer seeks his being within himself but outside, among things; his means become his end. Mankind as a whole becomes a thing, or the slave of things. Rous-4 Carter Two seau’s critique denounces this alienation and proposes instead a return to immediacy, Civilized society, by constantly increasing the distance between itself and nature, obscures the immediate relation of one mind to another: loss of the primordial transparency goes hand in hand with alienation in the world of material things. Rousseau’s analysis in this regard prefigures the analyses of Hegel and Marx; all rely on an account of human history. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality isin fact a history of civilization as progress in the negation of nature, a progress that corresponds to a loss of innocence. The history of technology is set forth in close parallel with the moral history of mankind. Unlike nineteenth-century philosophers, how- ever, and in contrast to his more positivistically inclined contem- poraries, Rousseau is seeking not to establish anthropological knowledge but to justify his moral judgment of history. It is as a moralist that he writes the history of morality. This accounts for the ambiguities in his argument. The stages through which man- kind has passed and the condition in which it now lives must first be established as facts. Then they must be accepted: mankind has undergone inevitable transformations that brought it ineluctably to its present condition—so much is beyond doubt. But the factual truth of the matter tells us nothing about what is right. The his- torical facts justify nothing. History has no moral legitimacy, and Rousseau does not hesitate to condemn, in the name of eternal values, the historical mechanism whose necessity he has proven and whose effects he has extended to the moral functions themselves. Having traced the progress of culture, defined as negation of nature, Rousseau refuses to accept that progress: he negates the negation by virtue of a moral judgment that claims to be based on an ethical absolute. Rousseau’s indignation (as a “natural” man) against society (a historical creation) is the emotional expression of this conflict. Rousseau raises his voice to say No! to antinature. The present situation, with its contrasts of wealth and poverty, is his- torically logical but morally unacceptable. Rousseau understands the society of his day but rejects it in outrage. His philosophy cannot end with indignation, however. Merely understanding an opaque world is not enough to restore its lost transparency. For Rousseau, comprehension does not lead simply to intellectual commitment to “fact” but directly to moral opposition on behalf of what is “right.” He protests against Grotius that his “method of reasoning is always to offer fact as proof of right.”* Rousseau judges and condemns, on behalf of what is right, the facts whose historical necessity heritique of Society 25 has demonstrated. In order to realize his ideal of transparency, however, he requires a world in which fact and right coincide. He seeks this world, now before history, in “ancient times” prior to corrupting progress, now beyond history, in an abstract future in which a more perfect order will have supplanted the disorder of the present. The Primordial Innocence Prior to the development of the arts and of reason, the human fact was not yet sufficiently developed to enter into conflict with a still (narticulated right: primitive man is “good” because he is not yet active enough to do wrong. The moralist’s judgment in conferring goodness is retrospective. Natural man, for his part, lives “naively” in an amoral or premoral world. His limited intelligence does not distinguish beween good and evil. Hence what is is not truly in harmony with what is right: the conflict between fact and value has simply not yet erupted into the open. Man’s horizons in the state of nature are limited, and he lives in an equilibrium that does not yet bring him into conflict with either the world or himself. He does not work (which would involve him in conflict with nature), nor does he reflect (which would involve him in conflict with himself and his peers): His desires do not go beyond his physical needs. . . . His imagi- nation paints no images. His heart yearns for nothing. His modest needs are so close at hand, and he is so far from the degree of knowledge necessary to acquire greater knowledge, thathe cannot possibly exhibit either prudence or curiosity. . . . His soul, which nothing disturbs, dwells only in the sensation of its present existence.* In this state of perfect self-sufficiency, man does not need to transform the world in order to satisfy his needs. Here we have an “animal” and “sensationalist” version of the Stoic ideal of autarchy. Man does not look outside himself, nor does he look beyond the present moment. In a word, he lives in the immediate. If each sen- sation is new, the apparent discontinuity is merely a way of expe- riencing the continuity of the immediate. Nothing comes between man’s “limited desires” and their object. Language is scarcely nec- essary. Sensation has direct access to the world, to such a degree that man scarcely distinguishes between himself and his environ- ment. He sees things clearly, and the possibility of error does not yet disturb his vision. The senses, as yet unaided, uncontaminated26 Cuarrer Two by judgment and reflection, are not subject to distortion. Just as Rousseau retrospectively ascribes goodness to man’s premoral con- dition, he retrospectively ascribes truth to his prereflective expe- rience, which he assumes to have been purely passive. ‘The state of nature presumably exists prior to any distinction between truth and falsehood, and Rousseau accords to man in the state of nature the privilege of immediate possession of the truth. As he himself ad- mits, this state is akin to that of childhood, and even now it is possible for a child a live in a state of nature so long as adults do not “corrupt” him prematurely. Emile is “wholly engaged in his current existence, but enjoying a fullness of life that seems to want to extend beyond him. ... His still pure senses are free from illusion.”> Rousseau’s discussion of “sensual truth” is similar to that of Con- dillac, for whom error begins at the moment we begin to judge sense data: “There is neither error, nor obscurity, nor confusion in what goes on inside us, nor in the relations that we establish between it and the outside. . .. If error enters in, it does so only insofar as we presume to judge.” Sensation is always correct, but it does not know that it is correct.” Work, Reflection, Pride But just as the child, in growing up, leaves the world of sensation to enter first the “moral world” and then the social world, so, too, does primitive man abandon the paradise of pure sensibility. In this process, gradual but irreversible, Rousseau holds that the strug- gle to overcome natural obstacles plays a role of the utmost im- portance. Psychological changes commence when man begins to use tools. Chronologically, work and the use of instruments precede the development of judgment and reflection: Such was the condition of nascent man; such was the life of an animal limited at first to mere sensation and scarcely profiting from the gifts bestowed on him by nature, let alone dreaming of wresting anything from her. ... Natural weapons—branches of trees and stones—were soon found to be at hand. Man learned to overcome the obstacles of nature, to fight when necessary against other animals, to struggle for his subsistence even against other men, or to compensate himself for what he was forced to yield to the stronger? Fresh obstacles obliged men to fashion new implements, less “natural” than branches and rocks. The distance between man at!Critique of Society 27 nature—a distance created by the artifice to which man resorted in order to dominate his environment—was thus increased: Barren years, long hard winters, scorching summers consuming everything demanded new industry from men, Along seacoasts and river banks they invented fishing lines and hooks and became fishermen and fish eaters. In the forests they made bows and arrows. Man’s effort to struggle actively with the world resulted in psy- chological changes. The faculty of comparison made him capable of rudimentary reflection: he began to perceive the differences between things. He discovered, for instance, that he was different from the animals and indeed superior to them, and therein arose a first vice: pride. This repeated comparison of various creatures to himself and to one another must naturally have given rise to the perception of certain relationships. These relationships . . . eventually resulted in some sort of reflection, ‘The new discoveries that followed from this development in- creased man’s superiority over the other animals by making him conscious of it. . .. Thus man’s first scrutiny of himself yielded the first stirring of pride.” Rousseau proceeds to describe a long series of “moments” in man’s pursuit of perfection. Natural obstacles were overcome by work; work led to reflection; reflection produced “the first sensation of pride.” With the beginning of reflection, the time of “natural man” comes. to an end and the time of “mankind” begins. The fall is nothing other than the introduction of pride. The equilibrium of the sen- tient being is destroyed. Man is no longer innocently and sponta- neously at one with himself. If nature “intended us to be healthy, I would almost venture to say that the state of reflection is unnat- ural, and that man who meditates is a depraved animal.”"' The active division between self and other begins now. Selfishness perverts innocent love of self [amour de soi as opposed to amour-propre], vice is born, and society takes shape. And as reason progresses, property and inequality arise, and what is mine is ever more sharply distin- guished from what is yours. The gap between appearance and reality marks the triumph of the “factitious,” the ever-growing dis- parity not only between ourselves and the outside world but be- tween ourselves and our own inner nature,28 Cuarrer Two Each man began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself.” For his own advantage he had to make himself appear other than as he really was. Appearance and reality became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose insolent osten- tation, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their train." Man is alienated in his appearances. Rousseau describes (false) appearances as both an effect and cause of economic changes. In- deed, he sees a profound connection between the moral problem and the economic problem. Social man, whose existence is not autonomous but relative, constantly invents new desires, which he cannot satisfy on his own, He needs wealth and prestige. He wants to possess objects and dominate minds. He is truly himself, he believes, only when he enjoys the “consideration” and respect of others on account of his wealth and appearances. An abstract notion from which all sorts of concrete woes derive, appearance explains not only the inner division of civilized man but also his subjugation to limitless desires. The condition of civilized man stands at the opposite extreme from the happiness of primitive man, given over to the immediate. For the man of appearance there are no ends but only means, and he himself is reduced to the status of a means. None of his desires can be gratified immediately, for gratification involves the imaginary and factitious: the opinion of others and the labor of others are indispensable. Since men no longer seek to satisfy their “true needs” but only the needs created by vanity, they are never at one with themselves but always estranged—one an- other's slaves. Rousseau’s language in denouncing the alienation of social man clearly prefigures the language of Kant and Hegel, even though it remains in many respects that of a Stoic moralist." In a passage that seems to anticipate modern philosophies of history we find all the themes of ancient philosophy: Once free and independent, now man bas become through a host of new needs subjugated, as it were, to all of nature and above all to his fellow men, whose slave he becomes in a sense, even as he becomes their master. If rich, he needs their services; if poor, he needs their help; and mediocrity does not put him in a position to do without them. Hence he must constantly seek to interest others in his fate, to make'them see profit, real or apparent, in working for his benefit: which makes him false and cunning in his dealings with some, imperious and harsh in his dealings with others."*Critique of Society 29 Despotism then becomes the extreme form of the now universal servitude, in which man is slave both to his fellow man and to his own needs. Humbled by tyranny, men once again find themselves living in equality, but this time an equality of oppression and non- existence: “Here all individuals regain their equality, because they are nothing.”"® We have come full circle: starting from the equality of presocial independence, we end with the servile equality of des- potic society. Man has completed the process of social development, but the cost of intellectual and technical progress has been moral degradation. He has become inauthentic, and the conflict between himself and nature has grown steadily worse. Synthesis through Revolution Is there any way out of this situation: Or is transcendence impos- sible? In interpreting the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Engels emphasizes the conclusion of Rousseau’s text.!” Enslaved men, op- pressed by a brutal despot, resort to violence to free themselves and overthrow the tyrant: ‘The despot is master only as long as he remains the strongest. . Once the people are ready to throw him out, he has no ar- gument against violence. The uprising that ends with the sultan being throttled or dethroned is no less legitimate an act than the sultan’s previous exercise of the power of life and death over his subjects. Force alone kept him in power, and force alone can overthrow him. This is the natural order of things."* In other words, there is a “natural order” in the very historical process that has estranged man from his “natural condition.” In- ,, Engels says, is finally transformed into equality: not the of primitive, prelinguistic man, but the higher equality of the social contract. The oppressors are oppressed. Prior terms in the series are at once preserved and transcended. Men realize the negation of the negation. This Hegelian-Marxist interpretation as- sumes that the Social Contract can be read as a sequel to, indeed as a denouement of, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Such an interpretation of Rousseau’s meaning is certainly ap- pealing. But it makes sense only if one reads the two works as parts of a continuous argument. One objection to this interpretation is that, according to the second Discourse, the revolution that culmi- nates the historical process will not bring about decisive change. It will merely end change in what is essentially an evil state of affairs. This changelessness is diametrically opposed, however, to the30 Cuaprer Two changeless innocence of the state of nature. The revolution against despotism does not establish a new form of justice. Having lost the equality of natural independence, man achieves equality in servi- tude. Rousseau does not invoke hope, and he does not tell us how equality might be won in civil liberty (a question deferred until the Social Contract). He simply looks forward to “short and frequent revolutions,” that is, to enduring anarchy. At the nadir of his moral decline, man is unable to avoid chaos and violence. History ends, but it ends chaotically: against this evil there is no recourse." The Social Contract, moreover, contains no discussion of present or future historical conditions. The hypothetical contract is situated at the beginning of social life, just as man emerges from the state of nature. There is no question of destroying an imperfect society in order to establish freedom and equality. Rousseau thereby side- steps the practical problem of how to effect the transition from the present society to the perfectly just one. (He will consider this problem more seriously when the time comes to advise the Poles.) In one fell swoop, with no transition, he moves from the state of nature to the decision that establishes the primacy of the general will and the law of reason. This decision is inaugural in character, not revolutionary. Although he clearly states the problem of the lawgiver, Rousseau does not locate his legal speculation at any spe- cific stage of actual history. He is not explicit about what sort of action might bring about the changes he describes. The social pact is not an evolutionary development that follows naturally from the second Discourse; it belongs, rather, to another dimension, a purely normative dimension, outside historical time. We begin ex nihilo, without asking what conditions must be met in order for the po- litical ideal to be realized. With this new and more reasonable start, history begins not with the possessive assertion—“This is mine!”— but with the transfer of the common will into the hands of the collectivity. Such a hypothetical society is not subject to the inevitable historical misfortune that condemned actual humanity to fall into an irrevocable state of corruption. It is, rather, an ideal model against which corrupt society can be judged.2° Synthesis through Education Engels's interpretation links the Social Contract to the second Dis- course via the idea of revolution (the “negation of the negation”) Kant and more recently Cassirer also consider Rousseau’s theo- retical thought as a coherent whole. They find the same iCritique of Society 31 the same ternary rhythm, as Engels did. But the synthesis of op- posing terms is for them effected not by revolution but by education. The final moment is the same: the reconciliation of nature and culture in a society that returns to nature and transcends the in- justices of civilization. Essentially, the difference between the two interpretations concerns the transition between the second Discourse and the Social Contract. Since Rousseau does not make this transition explicit, the exegete must reconstruct it using such clues as he can find in the texts, none of which is decisive. A certain arbitrariness of interpretation is inevitable, since one is forced to carry Rous- seau’s thinking beyond what he himself explicitly affirmed. Engels chooses to focus on the last two or three pages of the second Dis- course, in which Rousseau describes the restoration of equality and the revolt of the slaves. Kant and Cassirer prefer to interpolate ssages from Emile and Rousseau’s other pedagogical writings, in order to establish a necessary connection between the argument of the second Discourse and the positive construction in the Social Con- tract. Revolution or education: this is the crux of the difference between the “Marxist” interpretation of Rousseau and the “idealist” interpretation. Both agree, however, on the need for a global inter- pretation of Rousseau’s theoretical contribution. Kant was one of the first to maintain that Rousseau’s thought is constructed according to a rational plan: those who accuse Rous- seau of contradicting himself, says Kant, fail to understand him. In Kant’s view, Rousseau not only denounced the conflict between nature and culture but sought to resolve it.2" Rousseau attempted to define the conditions under which the possibility of cultural progress might exist, progress “that would enable mankind to de- velop its dispositions [Andagen] qua moral species [sittlicke Gattung] without violating its determination [zu shrer Bestimmung gehdrig), in such a way as to surmount the conflict that opposes mankind to itself qua natural species [natiirliche Gattung].” Nature is restored when art and culture attain their highest perfection: “Consummate art becomes nature anew.” What Kant means by art is the juridical institution, the free and reasonable order in conformity with which man decides voluntarily to live. The supreme function of education and law, both built upon freedom, is to allow nature to flourish within culture. Then (adds Cassirer)** men recover the immediacy they had enjoyed previously in the state of nature.* What they discover now, however, is not merely the primitive immediacy of sensation and feeling but the immediacy of the autonomous will and reasonable intellect.32 Cnaprer Two Furthermore, Rousseau himself suggested the possibility of such a synthesis at the end of the first Discourse: if men, and above all princes, want to overcome alienation, then, indeed, it can be over- come and a true community reestablished. The essence of evil lies not in knowledge or art (or technology) but in social disintegration, Under current conditions it is simply the case that the arts and sciences favor and indeed accelerate such disintegration. But there is no reason why the arts and sciences cannot be made to serve better ends. Thus Rousseau’s point is not to banish the arts and sciences forever but to restore the social totality by emphasizing the imperative need for virtue, which alone is capable of creating the necessary cohesion: Only then can we hope to see what can be accomplished by virtue, science, and authority, animated by a noble emulation and working in concert for the happiness of the human race. But as long as power shall remain on one side and reason and wisdom on an- other, philosophers will rarely think great thoughts, princes will rarely perform noble deeds, and nations will continue to be base, corrupt, and miserable.** What Rousseau deplores is the fact that political power and cul- ture may choose divergent goals. For he is ready to absolve culture, provided that it takes its place as part of a harmonious totality instead of encouraging men to seck private pleasures and advan- tages. He does not dream of abolishing science. He counsels, rather, that science be preserved but that the current conflict between “power” and “reason” be eliminated. To that end Rousseau calls upon princes and academies (here, out of politeness no doubt, the Academy of Dijon). Behind the flattering formulas, however, we see clearly the wish for a return to unity, for a restoration of con- fidence, and for a reestablishment of communication. None of what men have thought and invented would then need to be rejected; everything could be incorporated into the felicity of a life reconciled with itself.3 Solitude If the interpretations are contradictory, the reason is that Rousseau merely sketches a possible synthesis in which lost unity might be restored. This possibility looms dimly on the horizon as the point at which several distinct strands ought to converge. Rousseau con- ceived of the origins of inequality in historical terms, but he did not concern himself with the “eschatological” problems of the end of inequality in human history.' Fhe “social contract” is a postulate with no definite place in history: it posits the need for civil liberty that would arise if all men agreed to alienate their natural inde- pendence. Had Rousseau been rigorous in his philosophical in- vestigation, he would have asked himself under what conditions a synthesis that would be of benefit to all society could be achieved. But then he could not have stopped with mere dreams of liberty's coming; he would have been obliged to formulate concrete means for winning man’s freedom. Had he patiently examined the his- torical conditions necessary for the restoration of unity, however, Rousseau would have had to forget about himself. And a Rousseau capable of putting aside his own personality would no longer be Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He is in too much of a hurry to secure for himself the happiness that history cannot promise right now. Rec- onciliation as he sees it lies in either the remote past or the distant future, but for Rousseau the question is whether he can obtain it for himself, during his own lifetime. It is as though Jean-Jacques’s impatience placed the problem squarely within the bounds of his own life, requiring him to discover an immediate solution. After formulating his thoughts about the world and its history, Rousseau retreats to the realm of subjectivity, as if forced to turn inward by the very urgency of the questions previously raised in historical and social terms. The world was not yet ready to solve these prob- lems, and Jean-Jacques had no desire to put himself aside in order to enter the world of action. If there was something to be done, it involved not the outside world but the self. 3334 Cuaprer THREE Having raised certain problems in a historical context, Rousseau went on to live those problems in the context of his own life. His work, which began asa philosophy of history, ended as an existential “experience.” It is a forerunner of the work of both Hegel and his antagonist Kierkegaard. Here we have two aspects of modern thought: the progress of reason in history and the tragic quest for individual salvation. The author of the second Discourse asks himself, What shall 1 do with my life? No one, it seems, is waiting for him to write a new literary work to resolve the antitheses so vehemently set forth in the works that have gone before. What is required of him, he thinks, is that his life become an example, that his principles be made visible in the way he lives. Itis up to him, first of all, to demonstrate the meaning of nature and of the primitive unity that is threatened by civilization. His decision involves himself alone; mankind, whose evolution he has so brilliantly analyzed, need make no commitment. At this point it is reasonable to ask whether Rousseau’s historical theory is not a mere construct whose real purpose is to justify a personal choice. Is he really choosing to live according to his prin- ciples? Or has he perhaps forged his principles and historical the- ories merely to excuse and justify his personal peculiarities—his timidity, awkwardness, and moods—and his choice to live with the ill-bred Thérése? The conflict that Jean-Jacques denounces in his- tory has all the earmarks of a personal conflict. This ambiguity must be taken into account and not dismissed for the convenience of the interpretation. Rousseau is alone. The characters he meets are all masked. “All put their reality in their appearance.” He meditates in solitude on man’s collective fate. Yet his meditation is not disinterested, since it will allow him to blame history and society for the defects in his personal life. He will prove that he is right to be so unusual and to live alone. His concern is not so much to demonstrate the truth of his system as to justify his attitude. Little by little, personal apol- ogy takes the place of speculative thought. When he first attacks society’s vices, he has no one at his side and wants no ally. The more general his protest, the more solitary he becomes. (Others might put it this way: he wants to be alone, and this desire forces him to make his protest more general.) His cti- tique, whose target is the root of evil, has in his view nothing iP common with the philosophes' critique of oppressive institutions. In- deed, as Rousseau sees it, the philosophical critique is merely on Hii.Solitude 35 more expression of the evil in society, Far from being inimical to society, the philosophical critique is merely society's most elaborate, most poisonous product. It actively contributes to making things worse. “Philosophers” are no exception to the general rule of vanity and corruption, and, what is more, they profit from the wickedness of a world bent on self-destruction. Their influence increases the distance between individual minds and further advances the dis- integration of society, (Later, Rousseau adopts a paranoid form of the same idea. He imagines that the philosophes and the authorities are in league against him: Choiseul [minister of foreign affairs under Louis XV—Trans.] and the Encyclopedists are accomplices jn evil. They do not fight but assist one another.) ‘The philosophes are still part of the world they criticize. Rousseau accuses them indiscriminately of working to preserve defective in- stitutions while destroying the true bonds that hold society together. Parasites on a society in disintegration, they heap ridicule upon the very ideas that ought to bind men together within a more just social order. “They smile disdainfully at the old words fatherland and religion.”® But their mockery stems from nothing other than a““rage to distinguish themselves,” to achieve social success in a society that has ceased to be a fatherland and makes fun of its own religion. In the salons, where false appearances and opinions reign trium- phant, one can say anything, but no one believes anything that is said: the protests of the philosophes are nothing more than gossip, inauthentic commentaries on an inauthentic world. To avoid becoming the worst of these commentators, Rousseau sets himself apart and seeks to stand out as an exception. Although he has attacked the arbitrariness of existing institutions, the injus- tice of absolute power, and the absurdity of certain customs and abuses, nothing has yet set him definitively apart from the Ency- clopedists, and nothing in his philosophy yet requires solitude as its necessary complement: he might have been solitary merely by virtue of temperament, illness, or narcissism, and his solitude, as a mere biographical detail, would have held but little interest for us. No profound link would exist between Rousseau’s solitude and his thought. But Rousseau’s rebellion, directed as it was against the very es- sence of contemporary society, was so sweeping that it made sense only as the rebellion of a man who had excluded himself from that society. The only way to guarantee the seriousness of his challenge to the status quo was to take a stance—alone and against all others— somewhere outside hypocritical society. Evil and society being one36 Cuaprer THREE and the same, fraud and hypocrisy would exist wherever human society was found. It was therefore necessary to flee society at all costs and to become a belle ame, or beautiful soul. The vehemence and absoluteness of Rousseau’s critique forced him into solitude. (Others might put it this way: wanting to be alone, he took for his excuse the radical evil that perverts communal life.) If he wished to be taken seriously, he would have to be much more than an opposition writer. His criticism would truly count only when his entire life had become an exemplary contradiction. A man who becomes a writer to denounce the social fraud places himself in a paradoxical situation. By choosing to become an author and, even more, to begin his career by winning an academic prize, Rousseau entered the social circuit of opinion, success, and fashion. From the first he was therefore subject to suspicion of duplicity, contaminated by the very disease he was attacking. As his solitude became increasingly absolute, Rousseau became more and more convinced that his literary debut had been a curse: “From that moment I was lost.”* The only possible redemption was to make a public statement of his separation: withdrawal became necessary, and a permanent disengagement would serve as Rousseau’s justi- fication. I am speaking fo you, he would henceforth say, but not as one of you. I belong to another world, to another fatherland. You have forgotten what a fatherland is, but I, am a citizen of Geneva. No, Iam not even a citizen of Geneva, for the Genevans are no longer what they once were. Your Voltaire has come and corrupted them. I am simply: the citizen.* Once he becomes a man of letters, the accuser can never fully excuse his compromise with evil, which perpetuates itself within him as long as he continues to write. Even his excuse, so long as it remains public, is yet another link to public opinion and does not eradicate his mistake. Ultimately the only solution is to keep silent, to reduce oneself to a nullity for others. But Rousseau cannot keep silent; he can only write that he wishes he were a nullity. Rousseau’s problem, then, is to close the gap that is constantly reappearing between his life and his principles. All his conduct must somehow counter the artifice of the corrupt world that he is attacking but that still claims too much of him. He must make sure that his protest is not mistaken for mere literature. In words too fine he proclaims a dangerous truth, which condemns vain elo- quence and declares that virtue lies in silent wisdom.solitude 37 ‘The proposition that society is the opposite of nature leads im- mediately to the statement: J am opposed to society. It is the “I” that takes upon itself the responsibility to reject a society that is the ne- ation of nature. The negation of the negation thus becomes, in essence, a lived attitude (rather than a moment in a historical process or a project of historical action). Society is collectively the negation of na- ture; Jean-Jacques would make himself, as a solitary individual, the negation of society. Once again we are forced to turn from the his- torical theories of Rousseau to the individual Jean-Jacques, from speculation on human evolution to life's inner problems. The tran- sition from one category to another, from objective knowledge to subjective experience, makes no logical sense, And yet nothing could be more logical, given the logic of a morality aimed at establishing the identity of words and actions. Jean-Jacques will establish his per- sonal salvation upon the collective perdition that he denounces. Many commentators have stressed the “modern” or “romantic” tone of Rousseau’s individualism. It would be easy, too, to trace its ancient, and especially Stoic, sources. To live in harmony with one- self and with nature is a precept that Rousseau might have found in Seneca or Montaigne. He merely adapts, with a singular infusion of passion, a very old commonplace of moral philosophy: “With all the strength of my soul I sought to break the shackles of opinion and to do with courage what seemed to me good, without giving the slightest thought to the judgment of men.”¢ Rousseau does not want to be taken for a speechifier or sophist: he wants his actions to conform to his words, and he wants to live out his truth without allowing himself to be influenced by the judg- ment of others. His solitude is therefore justified: he will live alone in order to prove that he is right and everyone else wrong. Now he can give a reasonable explanation for his solitude, which is based on universal values. But his decision does not bring Rousseau the inner contentment, or ataraxia, promised by the ancient sages. In fact, it is all but impossible for Rousseau to live out his thoughts without extreme tension and continual misunderstandings in his relations with others. His resolve to live virtuously amounts to a deliberate decision to seek unhappiness. How is it possible to live in accordance with universal truth but in opposition to all other men? Isn’t there a radical contradiction between the withdrawal into solitude and the appeal to the universal? Can I still claim justification on the basis of universal truth if I decide not to “give the slightest thought to the judgment of men?”38 Carrer THREE Rousseau can neither forgive this hypocritical world nor abandon it entirely. He takes his distance but returns in the role of accuser. He renounces the world without “dying to the world.” From that moment he becomes the prisoner of a role that obliges him to show the public that he is a man of virtue. He maintains this final tie, which enables him to say that he has broken all ties with the opinions of others. The effort to regain possession of himself and of his freedom is intended to give visibility to Jean-Jacques (and to the truth that he has chosen for himself). Hence the choice of solitude is never fully realized: caught by his exhibitionism, Rousseau re- mains trapped in society's snares. He knows this himself, suffers from the knowledge, and is constantly punishing himself for it. But in order to prove his theories, he must put them to the test in his own life, and for this he requires witnesses: Rousseau will be forced to publicize his way of life as he once publicized his ideas. His personal reform, which is intended to free himself from en- slavement to public opinion, can succeed fully only if he is capable of shaping that same opinion: “My resolution caused a stir.” His enemies, moreover, will say that he constructed his system only to highlight the uniqueness of his personality. Let us accommodate ourselves to this dual focus: Rousseau lived his life in accordance with the requirements of his theories, while, conversely, he adapted his system to the requirements of his “sen- sibility,” that is, to his need for emotional gratification. In his “sin- gular posture” there is an element of pride and a wish to be noticed, and his critics did not fail to assail him on these grounds. But Rousseau is the first to admit the justice of the cri m; the most stringent and ironic criticism comes from Rousseau himself. It is he who teaches us to be suspicious of him. What appears to be a heroic sacrifice to virtue is sometimes mere emotional sophistry: the accusation occurs in the Confessions.* Rousseau is the first t0 raise the question of bad faith. It is true that he indicts only his reason, from which he dissociates himself. In using arguments based on “cold reason,” he tells us, he has pleaded causes whose ultimate goal was not rational truth but the satisfaction of some obscure “vital interest” or pathological “libido.”- In Rousseau’s impassioned discourse, in his reasoned fulmina- tions against reason, there is a quality of intoxication that interferes with the straightforward exercise of reason. But we must also rec” ognize that there is a desire to bring the darker realms of experience into the light of a truly sovereign reason. Rousseau’s confusion ofsolitude 39 thos and logos can be interpreted in two ways: where pathos seems ty pervert logos, we must also recognize the effort (never fully successful) of a mind attempting to free itself from pathos in order to attain the serenity of logos—“in the calm of the passions.”® The very movement by which Rousseau wrests himself free from passion is itself a surge of passion: he is too constantly oppressed by feelings of inner turmoil not to want to attain the clarity of reason. But the reason to which he lays claim is not that of the reasoners, not that which brings intellectual certainty: he wants to clarify his ideas only in order to provide better justification for his existence. A life whose singularity cannot be justified is condemned to the ultimate un- reason: insignificance. The important thing is to escape from this condition of meaninglessness. On the other hand, Jean-Jacques is unwilling to take a position in the camp of reason already occupied by others. He wants not to sacrifice his solitude but to save it, and it is to rational truth—at once intimate, universal, and unknown to other men—that he ascribes the power to sanctify.!? Not enough attention has been paid to the curious mixture of pride and irony in Rousseau’s account of his “personal reform.” He proudly affirms the greatness of his enterprise, only to mock it immediately as a fraud. It is an extraordinary act of courage, but also a feverish act of “foolish pride.” Rousseau thus warrants a dual interpretation of his “reform.” On the one hand, the solitary chal- lenge that he hurls at society can be interpreted as the ideology of a timid man, a sick man who hopes to make the best of his malad- justment, so much so, in fact, that he makes it his proudest. pos- session. Does he not wish to live among other people? Well, then, at least let his estrangement and awkwardness stand for a passionate conversion to virtue! Since he feels ill at ease in the salons, let him attract their attention by slamming the door on his way out! “You have lived a great deal in the opinion of others,” Mirabeau would write to him."! On the other hand, however, the point was to trans- form a literary career into a heroic destiny: to free life from the vicissitudes of literature, to bring actual behavior into accord with a virtuous ideal first learned from books, and finally, fortified by the conquest of truth, to set forth, in writing, a philosophy para- doxically based on the rejection of literature. “The work that I was doing could only be done in absolute retirement.”!? For the first time, the problem of an “existential” transcendence of literature arose outside the confines of traditional religious spirituality: the renunciation of the world’s vanities and the conversion to “another40 Cuaprer THREE moral world”!* took Rousseau not toward the Church but toward the forest and the life of the vagabond. Those who take refuge in the Church can maintain their silence, however (since the Church speaks in their name, and in justification of their silence, through its saints and doctors), whereas Rousseau, whose only justification is within himself, can never be silent. He must forever rise to speak because he can never finish explaining the true meaning of his solitude. This, he knows, is open to inter- pretation as the solitude of the wicked or prideful man. “Only the wicked man is alone,” declares Diderot.'* Rousseau, who believed himself to be the target of this attack, would spend the rest of his life answering it, for he never could stand ambiguity. The struggle would not have been so tragic for Rousseau had the only question been to stand out from the crowd and make manifest his difference from others. His task, however, is not simply to play the role of the other (in the guise of an Armenian), but also to demonstrate to a wicked society that which is radically different from evil; in other words, he must make men see the good that they have failed to recognize. The tragic tension in Rousseau comes not just from separation and rupture in themselves but from the need to make his solitude coincide at all times with essential goodness and truth, not only as he recognizes goodness and truth within his heart of hearts but also as goodness and truth may be recognized by others. What we see, then, is not merely the irrational claim of amind attempting to establish itself through opposition; Rousseau’s subjectivity lays claim to certain privileges, not only to be fully recognized by others (which is already a great deal for the son of a Genevan artisan astray among the marshals and farmers-general of France), not only to force the world to watch the spectacle of an uncompromising personality, but to win acceptance as the le- gitimate interpreter of a truth that others have allowed to fall into oblivion. Rousseau wants to give his solitary ruminations meaning as both. protest and prophecy. By setting himself in opposition to others, Rousseau is not seeking merely to impose his own unique personality; he is making a heroic effort to live in accordance with universal values: freedom, virtue, truth, and nature. Rousseau settles in solitude so that he may speak legitimately in the name of the universal. When he leaves the big city and breaks off relations with his “so-called friends,” is he seeking refuge in “mystery” or in the “spiritual depths” of subjective existence? Not at all: we must be careful not to ascribe to Rousseau a romanticis™ of which he is no more than an early precursor. Subjective intuitionsolitude “a for Rousseau has none of the intellectual character that it had for pescartes and Malebranche, yet it does, as with those two writers, dlaim to reveal a universal truth that is neither irrational nor su- prarational in nature. Turning inward is a sure way of achieving greater clarity of thought and immediately perceptible proof, as Opposed to the meaninglessness that reigns in society. Rousseau’s uncertainty as to the value of reason makes sense once one rec- ognizes that reason seems dangerous to him only to the extent that it claims to reach the truth in nonimmediate fashion, that is, through a “chain” of arguments. When Rousseau attacks reason, his target is primarily discursive reason. Whenever he can rely on intuitive reason, immediate illumination, he becomes, once more, a ration- alist. The crucial choice is not between reason and feeling but between immediacy and mediation. Rousseau opts for the imme- diate, not the irrational. Immediate certainty may be associated with either emotion, sensation, or reason. As long as immediacy obtains, Rousseau sees no hierarchy between the “sensible imme- diate” and the “rational immediate.” On the contrary, reason and feeling turn out to be perfectly compatible. Rousseau’s hostility is limited to la raison raisonnante (what Kant would later call the “un- derstanding” [der Verstand]), which inspires “the senseless judg- ments of men.”'* This instrumental reason imprisons men in the confused subjectivity of opinion and illusion. Rousseau denounces it as absurd; as seen by a more profound reason, the false clarities of common reasoning prove senseless. Rousseau made himself a stranger to men in order to protest against the alienation that makes men strangers to one another— a paradox for which he is still criticized. His decision to wed the cause of absent truth led him to claim the fate of the exile. The same choice that makes him the defender of lost (or unrecognized) transparency also makes him a vagabond. An exile and a vagabond, then, but only in relation to the world of alienation, and only in order to make that world ashamed of itself. In reality Rousseau claims to have “fixed” his ideas, “settled his inner life for the rest of his days.” He has pitched his tent in the camp of truth. so that he can live the life of a homeless person, of a man who flees from asylum to asylum, from retreat to retreat, on the periphery of a society that has placed a veil over man’s original nature and dis- torted all communication between men. Because he dreams of total transparency and immediate communication, he must cut any ties that might bind him to a troubled world over which pass worrisome shadows, masked faces, and opaque stares.42 Cnaprer Tuer The veil that had fallen over nature, the opacity that entered the scene at Bossey, will disappear once Rousseau has conquered sol- itude. His lost happiness will be restored, but only in part, for although the brilliance of the natural landscape returns, Rousseau must pay the price: a definitive break with his fellow men. Rous- seau’s solitude represents a return to transparency, but only on condition that he stand apart from society. ‘The vapors of self-love and the tumult of the world cast a pall in my mind over the bloom of the groves and disturbed the peace of my retreat. Though I fied into the depths of the woods, an importunate crowd followed me everywhere and veiled all of na- ture. Only after I freed myself from the social passions and their mournful train did I rediscover nature in all her charm.” Once society was forgotten and all memory of and concern for the opinion of others were banished, the landscape once again took on the character of a primordial and primary side in Jean-Jacques’s eyes. Its charm reappeared; its true magic made itself felt. Now Rousseau is able to encounter nataure in an immediate fashion, with no foreign object to intervene—no unseasonable reminder of human labor, no stigma of history or civilization: I then went at a more tranquil pace in search of some wild or deserted place in the forest, where there would lurk no mark of the hand of man to proclaim servitude and domination, some asylum that I might think I was the first to have reached, and where no unwelcome visitor would come between nature and me.!* In the midst of nature, immediately available to the senses once again and rescued from the curse of opacity, Rousseau again as- sumes the role of prophet. He proclaims the hidden truth: In the depths of the forest I sought and found the image of the beginning of time, whose history I proudly traced; I swept aside the petty lies of men, I dared to unveil their naked nature and to follow the progress of time and the things that disfigured it.” But for one who simply wishes to get back to nature, Rousseau takes too much pleasure telling us that he has left behind the vain pleasures of the world. His forgetfulness is not complete, and his detachment is not total. He may not miss the world, but he re- members it in order to condemn it. Even as he flees into the forest to take refuge among the fundamental truths of nature, he does not lose sight of the factitious world he has rejected, and he hasSolitude 43 not forgotten the “petty lies” he hates. He enjoys the immediate Jeasures of nature only as he fulminates against the world of jnstrumental and mediated relations. He has not fled far enough to forget the errors of others, and if “social passions” no longer possess him, he is still the antagonist of corrupt society. Paradoxical as it may seem, he remains, in the depths of his isolation, linked to society through his antisocial rebellion and passion: hostility is a bond. The only way for Jean-Jacques to avoid the opacity that threatens him from without is to make himself transparent, to experience transparency from within, while making sure that he remains visible to others, imprisoned though they be in an opaque world. Only then does the act whereby universal truth is proclaimed merge with the act whereby the ego displays itself in a single revelation. If truth is to reveal itself, it must be lived by a “witness.” (Kierkegaard will later write: “An existential relationship to the ideal is never visible, for an existence of this kind is one lived by the witness to truth.”)?° The witness’s life is double: his relationship is not only the truth but also with the society before which he stands as witness. He must constantly explain himself. What gives him the right to set himself up as witness? And if society is false appearance, why maintain a dubious attachment to it? The witness, then, must prove that he has the right to throw down the gauntlet to society.*! He must be certain that his rela- tionship to truth is essential, that is, that his personal existence is somehow identical with the essence of truth. When he speaks, his ego must first assert itself, then vanish in the transparency of the impersonal, so as to reveal the eternal values that stand behind the individual witness: liberty and virtue. Rousseau will have nothing to do with the precarious or conjectural aspects of subjective ex- perience. He hastens to establish an absolute, for it is only with the aid of the absolute that he can quell his anxiety, his fear that he is somehow culpable. Virtuous words, purifying renunciations, and painful rejections are not enough. It is not enough that he has sold his watch, given up his sword and fine linen, and fled the cities Further proof is needed, and further sacrifice. He must endure many more dreadful misfortunes, persecutions, and “tempests.” The “witness to truth” will never achieve final certainty as to what kind of man he is or what kind of truth he claims to bring mankind; he will never be done proving himself. Rousseau, in fact, will anx- iously court misfortune, because misfortune is for him a kind of consecration. The witness to truth looks forward to martyrdom as44 Chapter Turee ultimate proof of his mission: “I hope that some day people will judge what kind of man I was by what I was able to endure. ... No, there is nothing so great, I think, nothing so beautiful, as to suffer for the truth. I envy the glory of the martyrs." Kierkegaard, who was also tempted by the idea of martyrdom, expressed himself in strikingly similar terms: “After all, there is but one thing to do in order to serve the truth: suffer for it.”®° The critique of society thus turns into an epiphany of private consciousness, Not because individual life is somehow more valu- able than communal life: society is not wicked because social man lives communally but because the motives that impel men to join together in society inevitably cloud the primordial transparency of presocial existence. Rousseau’s hostility is directed against social hypocrisy and the tyranny of opinion, not against society as such. He does not seek solitude for itself (at least he denies that he does): solitude is necessary because it opens the way to reason, to freedom, and to nature. If it were possible for a society to be created in conditions of transparency, if all minds could agree to be open to one another and to abdicate any ulterior or “private” motives—as the Social Contract hypothesizes—then there would be no reason to prefer the individual to society. On the contrary, in a social orga- nization that encouraged communication between minds, in a har- mony based upon the “general will;” nothing would be more pernicious than for an individual to withdraw into himself and rely on his own private will. By placing self-interest first he would threaten the harmony of the larger society. The blame would then lie with the resisting individual and not with the collective law. Traditional criticism sees a mysterious hiatus between the Social Contract and the rest of Rousseau’s work, because he fails in the former to sanc- tion the claim of personal happiness, which elsewhere is so impor- tant to him. But in fact Rousseau is, in a profound way, faithful to the principle of transparency. If transparency is embodied in the general will, then society must take precedence over the happiness of the individual. If it can be achieved only in solitary life, then solitary life must take precedence over society. Rousseau’s hesit: tions and “vacillations” merely involve the time, place, and condi- tions under which transparency can be restored. He abandons hope in Parisian society and takes refuge in the Hermitage. Has he made a definitive choice in favor of-individual existence? No, because he immediately begins dreaming of his Political Institutions. A solitary transparency remains a fragmentary transparency, when what Rousseau wants is total ‘transparency.Solitude 45 Let me add here one further remark concerning not Jean- acques’s intentions but the (for him) unpredictable consequences of his philosophy and way of life. We saw earlier that as Rousseau began to focus almost exclusively on the demands of his private sensibility, his main preoccupations ceased to be history and phi- Josophy. It must be conceded, however, that this withdrawal into individuality did not diminish Rousseau’s historical influence but in fact increased it. Rousseau changed history (and not merely fiterature) not only through his political theories and views about history but, to a considerable extent, because of the myth that grew up around his peculiar way of life. He was no doubt sincere in his withdrawal from the world and his wish to make himself a nullity in the eyes of others, but his manner of turning his back on the world transformed the world he spurned. Toward the end of his life he ceased to care about the world’s fate except to worry about how he would be remembered. Would he finally be rehabilitated? Would generations to come recognize his innocence? The only thing that seemed to matter to the author of the Dialogues and Réveries was not that humanity some day reform its laws but that it change its attitude toward Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Soon even the hope that posterity would do him justice was to fade, and Rousseau would direct his final appeal exclusively to his conscience and his God. But his disinterest in history only made his effect on it more profound. “Let Us Settle My Opinions Once and For All” In making himself the herald of truth, Jean-Jacques hoped to bind himself to his work and thus force himself to stabilize his own personality?" In explaining Jean-Jacques’s enthusiasm for a literary career, the account in the Confessions looks not so much to intellec- tual conviction as to a heartfelt need. This need is multiform: what Jean-Jacques seeks is of course the truth, but also the rapture of heroic exertion and the glory that goes along with it. The essential need, however, seems to be to establish an identity capable of meet- ing any challenge. Assuming the role of defender of virtue, Rous- seau is forced to unify his personality by drawing upon the unity of virtue itself. The need for unification figures in the enthusiasm for the truth as well as in the proud claim that he, Rousseau, possesses it, Because Rousseau wants to settle [ fixer] his life, he chooses to base his existence on what is most immutable: Truth and Nature. And to make sure that he will keep faith with himself,46 Cuaprer THREE he proclaims his resolve for all to hear; he takes the whole world to witness. Yes, this man is sincerely seeking the truth. And yes, his soul is swollen with pride. No other way is open to him that will allow him to find his identity and become, at last, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen and man of nature. Hence the passion for truth is not “disinterested.” It does not cul- minate in knowledge of the world. Rather, it inaugurates, in Jean- Jacques’s life, a period of firmness of will and unshakable conviction. It is a way of putting an end to the instability from which he has suffered for so long. For thirty-eight years he has lived as a vaga- bond. Now the time has come to put an end to this life of wandering, with its half lies and partial failures of courage. With varying degrees of success Rousseau has played at being many different people: tu- tor, musician, steward, diplomat. He has allowed himself to be taken in by dubious masters. He has subjected himself to too many influ- ences. Now, at last, he can once again be what he really is: a “citizen” and a foreigner, but one whose cause is identified with the cause of Virtue. He can “be himself,’ a simple man of the people who lives by his work, and he can force the world (that is, high society: the nobility and the haute bourgeoisie) to attend to the extraordinary spectacle of a man who earns his bread by working and who, shock- ingly enough, chooses to live as an artisan at the very moment when success holds out the hope of subsidized comfort. He will make the idle rich ashamed by refusing their gifts and stubbornly insisting on earning his living at “a penny a line.” By protesting against the falseness of society Rousseau seeks to acquire a lasting identity for himself. It soon becomes apparent, however, that he lacks confidence in his strength to accomplish this task. He casts about for outside help. How often had he “drifted”?* in the past, failing to live up to his noblest resolutions? How many times had he been forced to swerve from his path? This time, however, he invokes the universal: he appeals to the highest values and calls. all mankind to witness. Thus he places himself in safe keeping. Should he wish to abandon his enterprise, others will not permit it. Rather than rely solely on his own will, he trusts in transcendent powers, which will not forgive the slightest failing. He will be forced to toe the straight and narrow, for Virtue will not have it any other way, and men will laugh at his first misstep. Burning all his bridges is a great help. The very vehemence of his protest and exaggeration of his virtue leave him absolutely un- fettered, except for his ties to the absolute; from now on no com- promise is possible. He has so thoroughly cut himself off fromsolitude 41 society that incorruptible Truth is his only refuge. The misfortunes that he suffers (or provokes) turn out to be advantageous, in that they bolster his identity and establish his role as that of the honest man wrongfully persecuted. Jean-Jacques in this way forces him- self—more by resignation than by will—to live for one cause and one cause only: this unique cause will become the foundation of his inner unity. To compensate for his weakness he seeks the aid of an outside force, which obliges him to resign himself, frequently with obvious pleasure, to the slings and arrows of an inexorable destiny. He makes his own the commandment of Saint Augustine, to look within. But in order to carry through this conversion to the self and fully enjoy his self-containment, Rousseau must have his decision imposed on him by a hostile outside force. Illness some- times plays this role early on. Later, it is fate that Rousseau accuses, or the malevolence of “those gentlemen.” No longer does he have to choose his own place, and no longer need he hesitate to choose: others have chosen for him, and all that he must do now is show himself equal to his destiny. He will show others that he is capable of living up to his own ideal. They may exclude him and cut him out, but the worst they can do is oblige him to take up commerce with himself. From this he can only profit. Persecution is a means to salvation. Rousseau repeats this to himself constantly, not merely because he finds it consoling but also, perhaps, because it reveals his secret purpose: to turn the hostility of others to his own ad- vantage. “Persecution has ennobled my soul. Love of truth has become dear to me, I feel, because I have had to pay for it. Perhaps, at first, it was merely a system; now it is my ruling passion.”** Persecution makes the abstract ideal of truth a value by which Rousseau actually lives. Jean-Jacques’s “sadistic superego” enforces unflagging courage. Target of a consistently dangerous enemy, he must, in turn, be consistent in his defiance. It f Rousseau looked forward to persecution as a goad to conscientious resolve. A man who foolishly succumbs to the most contradictory temptations and the most diverse enthusiasms chooses to accept the burden of fate and voluntary seclusion in the hope that, by resigning himself to irremediable misfortune, he may acquire the center of gravity that he lacks. But Is Unity Natural? Later, however, Rousseau will criticize the “ardent enthusiasn” with which he dedicated himself to achieving unity, for, by so doing, had he not done violence to his spontaneous nature? In his enthusiasm48 Cuaprer THREE for abstract and general truth, had he not been unfaithful to his own inner truth, compounded of weakness, fickleness, and insta- bility? Having publicly chosen Nature as his vocation, had he not chosen a path that conflicted with his inner nature? Even as he sought to bring unity into his life, he again fell prey to inner conflict and paradox. Epictetus (whom Rousseau studied) counsels that we should act in life as though were acting on the stage.?” We do not choose ‘our roles, however; we must make the best of whatever role we are given. According to Stoic morality, man must will himself, but will himself as Fate or God would have him. The wise man brings imagination to his role, which complements his humble acceptance. Without inventing the role, he strives simply to be equal to it, to be a good actor in a commedia del l'arte whose plot and outcome he is not free to change. His performance is a matter of style, nothing more. He can play his part with grace, with grandeur, even with freedom, but he cannot choose or modify it. Stoic virtue is therefore a kind of virtuosity. Striking the right balance between submitting to the inevitable and “looking good” in the part we have been given requires abundant talent. How do we know when we have it right? Overplay the part, and sage constancy becomes mere ostentation. Too little pride, and resignation becomes cowardice. At the time of his “personal reform” Rousseau no doubt believed that he had struck the right balance. He did not blink at the fact that he was playing a part, but he was at last convinced that now he was playing his true role, assuming his true character. Jean-Jacques’s reform begins (does it not?) with what is most external, most visible. “I began my reform with my dress. I put aside gold ornament and white stockings, I chose a round wig, I lay down my sword, I sold my watch.” The initial gesture is the most ostentatious: Rousseau theatrically rejects those aspects of civilized life that make life re- semble the stage. But this histrionic gesture reflects his desire to be true to himself: “To be consistent with myself, I must not blush, no matter where I may be, because I am dressed in keeping with the estate I have chosen.” When writing the Conféssions, however, Rousseau says that a kind of intoxication was responsible for his reform. He lacked the sta- bility that comes from assured wisdom and the virtuosity that per- mits appearance and reality to coincide. The initial impulse came from without. In their conversation at Vincennes, Diderot played the role of the serpent; tempting Rousseau to taste the forbiddensolitude 49 fruit. The account in the Confessions exhibits a strange ambivalence gs to the circumstances surrounding the beginning of Rousseau’s career as a writer. Everything seems to stem from an inner illu- mination and metamorphosis (“As I read [the subject submitted to competition by the Dijon Academy],,1 saw another universe and I became another man”). Elsewhere, however, Rousseau blames outside influences and ill-intentioned suggestions that he was weak enough to follow. (Diderot, he says, “exhorted me to develop my ideas and compete for the prize. I did so, and from that moment ] was lost. All the rest of my life and my misfortunes were the inevitable consequence of that misguided moment.”)* Hence there are two ways of looking at the event. On the one hand Rousseau felt as though he had been visited by a “truly heavenly fire.”>? The text of the Confessions is warmed by the memory. The light of truth illuminates everything. Yet the same facts, reconsidered and relived at Wootton or Monquin, abruptly reveal their darker face, their aspect of doom, At the moment Rousseau abandoned himself to the “enthusiasm of truth, freedom, and virtue,” the shadowy part of his life began without his being aware of it; an evil fate took hold of him. The Confessions present both interpretations of the past side by side. Within the space of a few lines the same events are described on the one hand as acts of sovereign inspiration and on the other hand as links in a chain, stages in an implacable destiny. Whether Rousseau acted because of a heavenly visitation or un- der the influence of malevolent friends, some sort of alienation is blamed for his decision: an alien force (persecutory or inspirational) compelled him to betray his true self. Victim of wickedness or inspired enthusiast of the Good: in either case, he is no longer himself. This, at any rate, is the way the years of effervescence, of feverish activity, appear in retrospect. The ambiguity is surprising. The Confessions tell of Jean-Jacques's heroic efforts to free himself from the alienation of opinion and the judgment of others, but the apologetic account of his “personal reform” suggests that here too alienation was something to which Rousseau was subjected. Intoxication, folly, heavenly fire, evil fate: he was forced to abandon his true identity by the very enthusiasm that he felt for the decision to reassert it. A boundless extravagance impelled him toward a literary career despite himself. The search for unity took Jean-Jacques away from his true “nature.” ‘That nature desired repose, idleness, a carefree existence, and free in- dulgence of contradictory desires. Rousseau was not made for any other kind of life. The passion for truth plunged him into a fright-5° Cuaprer THREE, fully strange world. Into what desert had he wandered? What kind of man had he become, estranged from himself and cut off from others? In looking back on these febrile years, the Rousseau of the Confessions seems no longer to understand; he does not know what judgment to make. He admires his courage, feels ironic pity for his illusions, and is frightened that he became another person. This was a period of intimacy with the sacred, but it was also a time of abject infidelity and shameful error. In Le persifleur (a project for a periodical, and written before the “reform”), Rousseau described himself as restless, fickle, inconsis- tent, and incapable of settling on a stable identity: ‘When Boileau said of men in general that they change from black to white, he was painting my portrait in two words. The individual portrait would have been more accurate had he included all the other colors of the spectrum, with all their intermediate hues. Nothing is more unlike me than myself, hence it is pointless to try to define me except as a person of singular variety. Fickleness isso much a part of me that it frequently influences my sentiments. Sometimes I am a harsh, fierce misanthrope, while other times 1 wax ecstatic over the charms of society and the delights of love. Sometimes I am austere and devout, and for the sake of my soul I do everything in my power to make those holy dispositions last. But before long I turn into a free-thinking libertine, and since I am then much more concerned with my senses than with my reason, I generally abstain at such times from writing. . ..In short, a Proteus, a chameleon, or a woman is less changeable than I. The curious should consequently abandon hope of recognizing me by my character. For they will always find me in some peculiar state, which will be mine only for the length of a moment. Nor is there hope, even, of recognizing me by my habit of making changes, for these have no fixed period: sometimes they take place from one moment to the next; other times I remain in a fixed state for months on end. This very irregularity is the substance of my constitution. An unpredictable man who prides himself on being an enigma for others, Rousseau is pleased to be inscrutable (even though he will later complain that no one knew himi). He is a man of constant changes, of utter irregularity. Immediately, however, Rousseau con tradicts what he has just stated: in the next paragraph he admits to the existence of an inner rhythm, a more regular and constant pulse. It is not altogether true:that there is no “fixed period” to his changes. He recognizes the constancy of a cyclic law, and beyondsolitude inose cycles he evokes, in a bantering tone, the permanent presence ff a more or less concealed “folly”: Withal, in examining myself, I have not failed to discern certain dominant dispositions and almost periodic recurrences, which would be difficult to identify for all but the most attentive ob- servers, which is to say, for all but myself. By the same token, the vicissitudes and irregularities of the atmosphere do not prevent sailors and country folk from noting certain annual occurrences and phenomena to which they have ascribed rules for predicting, approximately, what the weather will be in certain seasons. I am subject, for example, to two main moods, which change fairly regularly every seven days and which I call my weekly humors: in one I find myself wisely mad, in the other madly wise, but in such a way that, since in either case folly predominates over wis- dom, it is most visibly predominant in the week during which I call myself wise, for then the substance of any subject that I treat, no matter how reasonable in itelf, is almost entirely absorbed by the vain and extravagant things with which I am always careful to surround it. My mad humor, for its part, is much wiser, for even though it always draws the text with which it deals from its own depths, it puts so much art, order, and force into its reasoning and demonstrations that folly thus disguised scarcely differs at all from wisdom.** Behind all the variations of Le persifleur, then, there is a hidden constant, which Rousseau calls his folly. He singles out the principle of discontinuity and change so as to ascribe to it, in jest, continuity. Of course Rousseau is here turning cartwheels before the reader. Influenced proximately by Diderot and more remotely by Mon- taigne, he speaks with a nonchalant tone that he cannot keep up for long. But in the Dialogues (that is, twenty years later), we find a self-portrait not entirely dissimilar from the one in Le persifleur. Rousseau again insists on his fickleness, on the insignificant reasons for his changes of humor: His ideas are scarcely persistent enough to make any real plans. But inflamed by lengthy contemplation of an object, he will some- times make sudden and vigorous resolutions in his rooms, only to forget or abandon them by the time he reaches the street. All the strength of his will is used up in the resolve; none is left for the execution. His whole character is determined by a primary inconsistency. The same contrast that is found in the elements of his constitution recurs in his inclinations, mores, and conduct. He is active, ardent, hardworking, and indefatigable; he is indolent, lazy, lacking in vigor. He is proud, audacious, reckless; he is fear-52 Cuarrer THREE, ful, timid, embarrassed. He is cold, disdainful, standoffish to the point of asperity; he is mild, gracious, easy to the point of weak- ness, and does not know how to avoid doing or suffering what pleases him least. In a word, he passes from one extreme to the other with incredible rapidity, and without noticing the change or remembering what he was the moment before. Here again, the cause of the variability is said to be constant: a permanent quality that Rousseau calls sensibility, or passion. His extreme fickleness is consequently absorbed in “an unvarying, sim- ple, and routine life.”** All the irregularities of behavior are due to an “ardent nature,” which leaves mark on the most diverse actions. Jean-Jacques consistently maintains that he possesses an underlying unity, which expresses itself in the spontaneity of change. Sympathy is required to detect this unity of character, just as it is necessary to see his work as the realization of a unified project. To make palpable this permanence in the face of change Rousseau repeats, at the beginning of the second Dialogue, a metaphor that he used earlier, in Le persifleur, namely, the regularity of atmospheric change:*” 1 followed him in his steadiest form of existence as well as in his minor ups and downs, no less inevitable, or perhaps useful in the calm of private life, than are slight variations in the air and wind in the calm of the most beautiful days: Thus does Rousseau describe himself in Le persifleur and the Dialogues, that is, in the days before he dizzily abandons himself to the fever of writing and then again, later, as he seeks to escape the “sad destiny” to which his decision to become a writer had exposed him. Once, long ago, he had wandered freely, a vagabond awaiting some great occasion to settle his personality, to show himself in public, and to establish his glory. But after “six years” of “heavenly fire,” six years in which glory compelled him to inhabit strange houses (the palaces of princes of the blood and marshals of France and the cottages of farmers-general), Jean-Jacques once agai? chooses the roving life of the vagabond. But now he is no longeF expectant, no longer an adventurer in search of success, but a tramp on the run, He flees the course of the glory he has won. He seeks to put that glory behind him. At first, perhaps, his flight from glorY was not entirely sincere. Possibly he rejoiced to hear the tumult growing behind him as he hastened toward new asylums. But eve?” tually the tumult catches up with him. Insults rain upon his home like hailstones. Glory cannot be a home; it condemns Jean-Jacque’solitude 53 olive without one. Now he seeks, in vain, an island where he might find oblivion, where he might gratify his true nature by quietly ;ving in to contradictory impulses. If only he could once more be an innocent wanderer. If only he could roam the world as he did in his youth, without purpose. If only he could escape the curse and be allowed to live in peace, to indulge his weakness and his Jaziness. Settled in the rue Platriére, he attempts to reestablish his carefree existence (though obsessed by the thought of persecution and slander). He describes himself at that time in much the same terms as he used earlier, in Le persifleur: changeable, sensitive, at eace with himself, obedient to a hidden drummer, just as the ality of the air on a fair day changes in accordance with hidden rules. This is doubtless an attempt to placate fate: Rousseau pro- aims his happiness and inner peace in order to give them reality and to bolster his courage in the face of danger. Later, when he comes to paint the portrait of his youth, he depicts it as a time of sensuous reverie and innocent amazement, because he needs to have a past that can serve as refuge. But abundant testimony proves that his youth was in fact one of worry and anguish—to a far greater degree than the Confessions are willing to recognize. Rousseau dis- torts the reality because he wants to make a myth of his life: the unfettered daydreams of youth were interrupted, he tells us, by an alien course. He allowed his happiness to be snatched away. But now he has regained his true identity. The muddied waters have cleared, but fewer reflections shimmer in the now transparent pool. Transparency is emptier, colder than what went before. Inner Conflict Extreme variability does not imply inner conflict. The protean Rousseau of Le persifleur and the infinitely variable Jean-Jacques of the Dialogues endure a variety of experiences, but they remain true to themselves throughout, if only long enough to sense the advent of a new identity. Change is experienced as the imposition of a new law by an outside authority. The self is not in control of its meta- morphoses. It changes as the heavens change (and sometimes be- cause the heavens change), It looks on, without rebelling. Hence it can claim to be at peace with itself: “The uniformity of this life and the sweetness that he finds in it show that his soul is at peace.”*° Variety is reduced to uniformity and peace: the paradox is more apparent than real. Even the most contradictory impulses can be indulged without inner conflict if experienced one after another54 Cuarrer THREE and with the mind’s full consent. They are contradictory only to an outside observer who insists upon perfect consistency. A com- pliant spirit that does not oppose the changes to which it is subject remains in perfect harmony with itself: no matter how dissimilar its successive phases may be, the consciousness at the center remains the same. In order to be aware of any contradiction, the mind must assume the standpoint of the intransigent judge who, from outside, insists upon unity and coherence. Nothing prevents the self from challenging the authority of an outside observer to whose law it does not wish to submit. If its behavior were tenable, it could avoid conflict indefinitely. It would not be at odds with itself or with the outside judgment that it rejects. It would live within contradiction without suffering from it. It would be able to support variability without conflict. Personal reform comes at the moment when Rousseau becomes aware of the incoherent character of his life and makes an attempt to dominate that incoherence. He suddenly sees his changeability as an inconsistency that must be eliminated. It becomes unbearable to him that no invariable principles govern his conduct, his speech, or his feelings. He scrutinizes himself with the eye of an uncom- promising judge. He calls upon all men to scrutinize him in turn and promises to stabilize his identity, to settle his ideas once and for all. He thus sets himself a novel goal. He rigidly adopts a posture of virtue. At that moment conflict begins, and it will grow worse. For Jean-Jacques has not somehow managed to root out his mutable and inconstant “nature.” He has set himself the duty of taming it, but it is still there. From now on he is going to have to fight, he is going to have to acquire the strength without which no virtuous soul can exist. He must show that he has changed radically, that he is no longer the frivolous and feeble character he once was. Impul- siveness and inner peace are no longer compatible: change of any kind is now a weakness, and vacillation grounds for remorse. The imperative of the moment is no longer justified on its face; the only legitimate demands are those that make sense in the context of some long-term program. Unless an impulse is an integral part of a virtuous plan, to give in to it is culpable weakness. The mind thus recognizes within itself a danger of discord. A new depth opens up within, born of conflict and danger. (But this is merely to de~ scribe the birth of the spirit, which comes into being when con” sciousness, in the name of some higher goal, repudiates its naive identification with the sequence of moments that hitherto defined its content.)Fr solitude 55 Hence from the moment Rousseau sets himself in opposition to false appearances in the world, inner conflict becomes inevitable. ‘The virtue in whose name he sets out to do battle with a perverse and masked society is a cruel master. It makes him aware of an jnner division, a lack of unity within his own mind. He will be obliged to acknowledge that to give in to a momentary impulse is easy compared to the constant effort. required by virtue. (Rousseau is quick to confess that he is incapable of such effort: Jean-Jacques js not virtuous. He is the slave of his senses. He lives a life of jnnocent spontaneity and lacks the strength to combat his own nature.) The personal reform whereby he had hoped to achieve inner unity in fact reveals to him how difficult such unity is. He had hoped to put an end to a life of roving and uncertainty. He had hoped to settle his ideas and behavior. But a decision that was supposed to banish error from his life inaugurates a period of trial that puts the truth in doubt. An act that should have yielded a final conclusion turns out to be inconclusive. Its very violence generates new tensions, new disorientation. The will to achieve unity exposes an inner weakness that threatens to destroy the possibility of unity. Rousseau, who had hoped to achieve a stability firmly based on the noblest values, gradually comes to understand that, by his decision, he has made himself vulnerable and courted danger. The recourse to justification based on absolutes brings him not security but the risk of failure. The danger is twofold. First, as we have seen, Rousseau can display his opposition to false appearances in the world only by borrowing the world’s corrupt arms: that is, the language of lit- erature. And second, the strict values on which he hopes to base his existence are threatened internally by instability, weakness, and the temptation to seek immediate gratification. The scattering of energies that had been part of Rousseau’s nature now becomes an enemy that he must, but cannot, overcome. In writing the ninth book of the Confessions, Rousseau disavows the years of exaltation during which he had sought to become “witness to the truth”: Were one to search for the state of the world most contrary to my nature, this is what one would find. Were one to recall those brief moments in my life when I became another person and ceased to be myself, it would again be in this time I am speaking of. But it lasted not six days or six weeks but nearly six years, and might endure still but for the peculiar circumstances that put an56 Cuaprer Taree end to it and restored me to my natural condition, above which Thad sought to raise myself.” As Jean-Jacques realizes, his personal reform was but another of the sudden changes to which he was prone. But its purpose was to put an end to all change. Hence it created a powerful internal contradiction, Rousseau had declared war on the ubiquity of hypocrisy and sought to set a straight course for his life and work, but this course of necessity deviated from the sinuous, ever- changing path dictated by his true “nature.” That nature lacked continuity; but now, to that lack of continuity, he had added the further and more serious sin of seeking to rise above it. Rather than live life as a series of separate moments, he sought something more and found instead anxiety and dissatisfaction. He continued to be subject to inner variability, to unpredictable changes of mood, but now these became the source of an essential inner division. Rousseau can neither repudiate the changing data of immediate experience nor integrate them into the unity required by his moral system. (He attempted to do so, as we shall see, in his projected Morale sensitive, but success was impossible, for reasons whose dis- cussion I wish to defer.) Having chosen to defend the abstract ideas of nature and virtue, and having sought an “existential” realization of his ideal, Rousseau found himself in conflict with his empirical nature. His natural weaknesses and caprices of mood testified against the sincerity of his indictment of the world of apperances and, too, against the solidity of his personal example. The contradictory diversity of his spontaneous life was something from which he could not escape. ‘That diversity persisted within him as a hostile threat, despite his insistence upon an unattainable unity. His very existence was threat- ened, his very life in jeopardy: antithetical demands undermined each other’s foundations. The quest for unity imperiled the spon- taneity of immediate experience, while spontaneity, compromised though it was, remained powerful enough to thwart the “antinat- ural” quest for unity, which was made to seem foolish. Tranquillity was impossible. Inevitably, the resulting tension produced a number of consequences. In the end, Rousseatt decides to accept his fickle nature and abandon himself to the realm of the sensible, to im- mediate sensation, but his enjoyment of the senses can no longet be innocent: it has to justify itself, explain itself. Hence RousseaU must write, must accept the mediation of language and literature- And although he writes only to denounce his mistake, the inevitablesolitude 57 ,esult is to compound his error. The return to nature is possible Gw only at a price: the effort required will be as extravagant as the earlier attempt to rise above nature: Seeking to tame the ‘Mapredictable vacillations of his mood, Jean-Jacques sets in motion sill greater oscillations, of such amplitude, in fact, that they soon exceed the limits of the tolerable. The “revolution” that returns im to his point of departure fails to bring him stability, much as nis previous efforts have failed. Rousseau is left vulnerable to major mood swings, unable to recapture the relative calm (that is, the becillations of lesser amplitude) he had enjoyed before his literary vocation led him astray: If the revolution had restored me to my previous condition and ended there, all would have been well. Unfortunately, however, it went further and quickly carried me to the other extreme. From then on my vibrating soul kept swinging past the position of rest, in which its oscillations, constantly renewed, never allowed it to settle. The question then arises whether the notion of “nature” still makes sense. This oscillatory motion precludes the possibility that the soul will ever come to rest, that it will ever return to its natural state. Is there, then, such a thing as a natural state? At best it is an imaginary position, midway between two extremes. There, how- ever, movement does not cease. The “natural” self is nothing more than a fleeting image, glimpsed in passing and blurred by motion. My self is merely something that I lack, something that constantly eludes my grasp. I am always someone else, someone without a stable identity. Perhaps what is needed is a radical semantic change: suppose we use the word nature (or essence or truth) to refer to the very motion that makes stable identity impossible. Such a move gives the oscillation a validity that it appeared at first to lack. The “self” is not the unattainable position of rest but the anxiety that makes tranquillity impossible. My truth reveals itself by wresting me from the grip of what I had mistaken for a fundamental fact (which disappears the moment it is scrutinized), the “nature” wherein Thad thought my “true self” was located. Now all my actions, all my errors, all my fictions, and all my lies herald my nature: I am authentically this, namely, the failure to achieve an equilibrium to which I am constantly drawn yet from which I am just as constantly repelled. (“All movement lays us bare,” said Montaigne.) There is no folly or madness that cannot be subsumed in the totality of the self, a totality all of whose aspects are equally open to question,