Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity

Mark Hulliung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351492577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume seeks to capture Jean-Jacques Rousseau's astonishing contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas of modernity. For the contributors to this book Rousseau is present as well as past, because he was so modern and yet so ambivalent about modernity, a position with which we are quite familiar. Highlighted in this volume is the contention that Rousseau set the stage for many discussions of the good and bad of modernity.Previous efforts to deal with Rousseau and modernity have suffered from myopia. In the nineteenth century the Romantics claimed Rousseau as one of their own, pulling him out of his historical context, ignoring his full scale immersion in the debates of the French Enlightenment. In the twentieth century commentators have read into Rousseau the ahistorical and present-minded Cold War theme of "Rousseau the totalitarian."In this volume Rousseau is treated as a person of his age but also as someone who speaks to us today. The topics covered range from feminism, music, science, and political theory, to updating the classics, and to the search for and limitations to the quest for self-knowledge. Few if any figures can compete with Rousseau when it comes to forcing us to face up to the price we pay for "progress."

Part One

Before and After Vincennes

1

Rousseau’s Chemical
Apprenticeship¹

Christopher Kelly

The temptation to divide Rousseau’s life into a “before” and “after” is irresistible. There are, in fact, numerous candidates for the turning point: his decision to run away from Geneva when he was fifteen, his decision to pursue fame and fortune in Paris when he was thirty, or his flight from France and subsequent persecution after the publication of Emile when he was fifty. Each of these is dramatic enough and Rousseau makes much of each of them; but, for most students of his thought, the authentic turning point is the famous “illumination” on the road to Vincennes in 1749. Rousseau’s most complete description of this moment, in the second of the “Letters to Malesherbes” written in 1762, is particularly vivid in its account of a rupture from the past. Rousseau compares the illumination to a “sudden inspiration” accompanied by “a thousand lights,” “inexpressible perturbation,” “dizziness similar to drunkenness,” and “violent palpitation.”²

This illumination represents a crisis in Rousseau’s life that was intensely personal. The insights contained in it also led to a crisis in modern thought and life under Rousseau’s withering scrutiny. Rousseau’s consequent decision to write works based on the insights acquired so suddenly turned him from a little known secretary into a famous writer almost overnight. In little more than a decade, Rousseau published the First and Second Discourses, The Village Soothsayer, Julie, Emile, and the Social Contract—to mention only his most notable works. Among authors, only Voltaire, whose string of successes had begun decades earlier, rivaled his fame. Given the suddenness and durability of this change in Rousseau’s life, it hardly seems an exaggeration for him to describe it by saying, “I saw another universe and became another man.”³

Rousseau’s own emphasis on this moment and the prominence of the writings that came from it have led to a fairly uniform view of his career, even among scholars who evaluate his work in different ways. It is customary to refer to the writings that were published in the years immediately following the illumination as early writings—as if he had written nothing before.⁴ Thus the First and Second Discourses are considered early writings, and the Social Contract and Emile are regarded as late. This framework has its uses, but it can be misleading. Rousseau wrote all of these works over a quite short period of time—little more than a decade. He often worked on several at a time, some of which he published right away and others of which he took time to finish. Why is a work published in 1755 an early work and one begun earlier but published a few years later a late work? Rousseau always insisted that these writings formed a unified whole. Furthermore, calling the Discourses early works neglects the fact that Rousseau was thirty-eight when he published the first of these.

This does not mean, of course, that little attention is paid to Rousseau’s life before the illumination. Indeed, there are few major thinkers whose childhood experiences and feelings have been subject to as much scholarly attention. The unprecedented candor of the account of these experiences and feelings given in the Confessions has been a strong stimulus for psychologically oriented accounts of Rousseau’s life. Those who direct their attention to Rousseau’s life before the illumination tend to diminish the profundity of his mature thought by seeing it as the ultimate expression of deep-seated conflicts rooted in childhood experience; whereas those who attempt to demonstrate the depth of his thought avoid considering what he did before the illumination. In short, the division of Rousseau’s life into two halves encourages a view that the first half was one of intense feeling and variety of experiences accompanied by little thought and that the second was one of deep thought that either did or didn’t free itself from youthful feelings.

Rousseau’s apparent authorization of this characterization of the division in his life is hardly absolute, however. His more nuanced view of the matter becomes clearer when one looks at things he wrote near the period of the illumination. For example, in the “Final Reply,” written in 1752 in response to one of the many attacks on the First Discourse, Rousseau complains about the superficiality of those writers who hastened to oppose him saying, “Before explaining myself, I meditated on my subject at length and deeply, and I tried to consider all aspects of it.”⁵ A few years later, in reviewing the controversies in which he had been involved, he elaborates on this, saying, “I wondered how anyone could write with so little discretion and no reflection about matters that I had meditated about almost my whole life without having been able to clarify them adequately, and I was always surprised not to find in my adversaries’ writings a single objection that I had not seen and rejected in advance as unworthy of attention.”⁶ In describing the period before the Discourse, he says, “I was active because I was foolish; to the extent that I was undeceived I changed tastes, attachment, projects, and in all these changes I always wasted my effort and my time because I was always looking for what did not exist.”⁷ He does not, however, say that he had not had a single thought in his head; he indicates confusion, not total ignorance. Looking at the illumination as a beginning point—which it surely was in some sense—obscures the fact that it was also a conclusion: a period of confusion came to a close and was replaced with clarity. In these passages Rousseau indicates that he had long struggled prior to the illumination with precisely the issues that he addressed in the Discourse and subsequent writings. This evidence does not contradict the later accounts, but it does indicate that the result of the illumination was not the sudden awareness of these important issues, but rather the sudden solution to questions that had plagued Rousseau for a long time. The purpose of this essay is to call attention to one set of these issues centering on a sustained encounter with modern natural science. Rousseau’s mature critique of modernity was preceded by a sustained absorption with one of modernity’s proudest claims: its aspiration to scientific knowledge.

I

Since the publication of the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Rousseau has been regarded as a critic of the sciences. Even in the case of the one science with which he is closely associated, namely botany, his best-known discussions sharply distinguish this science from other natural sciences such as physics and chemistry.⁸ In particular, his praise of the pleasant activity of botanizing outdoors is contrasted to the “tedious and costly experiments” necessary for chemistry, experiments that require spending “money and time in the midst of charcoal, crucibles, furnaces, retorts, smoke and suffocating fumes, always at the risk of life and often at the expense of health.”⁹ It is not often noticed that this and other attacks on chemistry show that Rousseau was well acquainted with the activity he is criticizing. Indeed, earlier in his life he engaged in an extensive period of study of chemistry and had considerable experience with crucibles, furnaces, retorts, and all that their operations entailed.

Until the recent publication of two separate scholarly editions of the Institutions chimiques, little attention had been paid to Rousseau’s writings on chemistry.¹⁰ Indeed, the Institutions was not included in the standard Pléiade edition of Rousseau’s works, even though the final volume included other scientific works written around the same time or even earlier. The editors apparently regarded the Institutions as a work of mere compilation, which, if it had been completed, might have appeared as the work of Rousseau’s employer rather than his own.¹¹ Rousseau entrusted this work, over 1,200 pages in manuscript and accompanied by numerous shorter essays, to one of his literary executors, Pierre Moultou, in 1778, and it was handed down through Moultou’s family. The manuscript was discovered by scholars toward the end of the nineteenth century and was published successively between 1919 and 1921. Even this publication stimulated little interest. The new editions of the Institutions allow the status of this work to be reevaluated.

Book VII of the Confessions discusses the circumstances leading to the composition of the Institutions. Rousseau had been exposed to chemistry in the 1730s when he lived with Mme. de Warens. She combined botany and chemistry with the production of herbal remedies, but Rousseau claims that he did not develop a taste for these studies at that time. The one episode he does recount of performing an experiment involved an attempt to make sympathetic ink, which blew up in his face and blinded him for more than six weeks.¹² Book VII begins with Rousseau’s arrival in Paris in the middle of 1742 filled with hopes for success based on his system of musical notation and a draft of his play Narcisse. When neither of these was warmly received, he was left with the resource of some letters of recommendation, one of which was to the Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel. The Jesuit urged Rousseau to turn away from scholars and academies, saying, “One does nothing in Paris except by means of women. They are like the curves of which wise men are the asymptotes; they ceaselessly approach them but they never touch them.”¹³ Castel obtained entry for Rousseau into a few households, including that of Louise-Marie-Madeleine Dupin, the wife of the tax farmer Claude Dupin, whose son by an earlier marriage, Charles-Louis Dupin de Francueil, was several years younger than Rousseau. Rousseau formed a friendship with Francueil on the basis of their mutual love of music, and, in the spring of 1743, they took a course in chemistry with Guillaume-François Rouelle, the leading French chemist of his day and later a teacher of Lavoisier among others.¹⁴ Some months later Rousseau left Paris to take the position as secretary to the French ambassador to Venice. After a tempestuous stay in Venice, during which he used his knowledge of chemistry to perform magic tricks (apparently using sympathetic ink),¹⁵ he returned to Paris in the autumn of 1744 and eventually responded to Francueil’s offer of employment as one of his and his stepmother’s secretaries. Rousseau entered their employ because he was desperate for a steady, if small, income. His correspondence indicates that he had maintained an interest in chemistry.

Rousseau explains Francueil’s desire for a secretary by saying, “M. de Francueil was studying natural history and chemistry at that time and was making a collection. I believe that he aspired to the Academy of Sciences: for that purpose he wanted to write a book, and he judged that I could be useful to him in this labor.”¹⁶ Accordingly, the two friends resumed their studies with Rouelle and took several of his courses. At the Château of Che...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Modernity
• Part One Before and After Vincennes
• Part Two Citoyens and Citoyennes
• Part Three Sound and Music
• Part Four Ancients and Moderns
• Part Five The Modern Predicament
• About the Authors
• Index