Studies in Romance Languages

On The Individual and Society

Merle L. Perkins

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813182100
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In this study, Merle L. Perkins links individual freedom with national power in offering a close reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's major texts. He sees in Rousseau's thought an extreme tension and interdependence between the idiosyncrasy of nonconforming character and an almost obsessive concern with the external pressures operating on the state.

CHAPTER I

THE SOURCE OF VISION

THE STUDENT OF ROUSSEAU, whether considering his ideas on education, his novel, or some aspect o his moral, political, and economic theory, soon feels the need to return to the Confessions for more intimate knowledge of the man, his thought processes, his values, his strengths and weaknesses. The work is made up of two sections. The First Part, in six books, tells of the happy years of his youth and early manhood (1712-1741) spent near Lake Geneva or wandering in Switzerland, France, and Italy. Written while he was still on friendly terms with Hume at Wootton, Staffordshire, in 1765 and later with the Prince of Conti at Tryele-Château near Gisors in 1767, his memories are for him an escape and reveal also, he claims, the important experiences which helped determine his character. In the Second Part, Books VII to XII, he shows a very different side of his life, the increasing torment from 1741 to 1765 arising from the fears, doubts, and obsessions associated with his literary successes and his falling out with Grimm and Diderot. The period of composition (1769-1770) was one of isolation and terror for Rousseau, and these emotions control the focus of his memory. In an effort to communicate his views, Rousseau read passages of his manuscript in the salons which would receive him, but this outlet was soon closed by persons fearful that their reputations might suffer from such an unprecedented disclosure of his and their personal lives. The first part of the Confessions appeared in 1782, the second in 1789.

The body of criticism dealing with the Confessions has passed through several stages. In the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, a polemic flared over whether Rousseau was a good or a bad man.¹ Later, more attention was given to his accuracy. Critics sought to discredit his story or at least began to look at his statements with “the eye of the examining magistrate.”² More recently, the art of the Confessions has been made the issue, particularly with respect to verisimilitude. Underlying many of the studies in all three categories is the common-sense notion that Rousseau’s main object was to make the disclosures about his life convincing. He therefore aimed to communicate with the reader through a wealth of experiences everyone has shared.³ To be sure, evidence can be found to support this view. The scenes Rousseau gives of his early youth, of his efforts to find himself as a young man, of his loves, his friendships, and the conspiracy against him relate certainly in part to elements in every man’s life. Some of his temporal dimensions correspond to our own awareness of objective or psychological time. Devices he uses to uphold his veracity fit well within the verisimilar framework. He often seeks to increase his authority by the utility motive: “The great value of the lesson to be derived from so common and unfortunate an example as my own has made me decide to write it down” (1: 14). He moves toward the reader by supplying information about family background, environment, the quality of his character and emotions. He associates himself with behavior and values usually considered desirable — warmth of attitude toward father, aunt, friends, a sense of shame or pride because of certain acts, love of truth, hatred of injustice, of slander, of lying, of inhumanity of any sort. Rousseau is definitely by his intentions a member of the world of integrity and good faith that men usually claim to favor.

But to insist too much on the “shared experience” aspect of the Confessions means ignoring Rousseau’s own words. He makes it clear that the subject matter is his uniqueness, that any resemblance between his life and the reader’s exists at a superficial level only. From the first page on, the reader is bombarded by statements announcing and recalling that Rousseau is “autre,” different from other men: “I am not made like any of those I have seen” (1: 5). In the last book he is proud in his belief that the reader has been forced to see “throughout the course of my life thousands of inner emotions completely unlike their own” (1: 645). To make the point so persistently and then to offer the reader experiences known by all, to embrace the reader’s world, could have but one effect, a reaction of boredom and disappointment. The fact is that Rousseau’s claim to being different seems justified. He has opened up hidden channels of personality. The purpose of his repeated allusions to uniqueness has been no doubt to move the reader closer to the author, to make him ready for the new, the incredible: “Here is still another of these confessions which I am sure in advance will meet with the disbelief of those readers who are always determined to judge me by their own set of values” (1: 644). This anticipation can still be seen as part of the verisimilar technique, although it departs from the concept of universally known experience expressed in the definition already given. By announcing the improbable, then living up to expectations, the author has forestalled objections arising from the limitations of insight any reader must inevitably have with respect to the intimate experiences of an exceptional person.

But to insist too much on this diminished form of verisimilitude raises in turn serious difficulties. Knowledge that the author has been objective enough to recognize dissimilarity between himself and the reader can build very little confidence if objectivity in describing Rousseau’s uniqueness is itself open to question. The reader has been forewarned of surprise, his expectation has been satisfied, but then he is left wondering if the episode he has witnessed has not been interwoven with fictional threads. Many readers of Rousseau take this path, rather indefensibly if they are bothered by minor errors in fact, more excusably if they are reacting to his subjective control of the evidence. It is clearly part of Rousseau’s technique that he spurns any pretext of being impartial, of putting distance between himself as hero and himself as author. His motive for veracity, that his name will live in history, that he therefore wants a real being to exist with his name, is substantial but hardly reduces his involvement, for he is writing for posterity under pressure and with the aim of setting the record straight, of revealing himself “as he actually was and not as his unjust enemies strive without respite to paint him” (1: 277, 400).

If he points out that truthfulness has psychological rewards, is good therapy, that unburdening his conscience “to some extent has greatly contributed to my resolution to write my confessions” (1: 86), this kind of guarantee has more often than not been taken to indicate a mood of self-justification, of excusing guilt in the name of intention or the pressures of the moment. The presence of the author in all of the confession scenes — explaining, controlling the effect of a deed by self-accusation, regret, or mitigating humor — prevents for the most part the reader’s belief in Rousseau’s objectivity in matters which seriously involve the emotions. The entire weight of Rousseau’s argument is in fact in support of his need to be one with the hero. His memoirs deal mainly not with exterior facts but with an interior world of feeling which only he can know: “I cannot be mistaken about what I have felt, or about what my feelings have made me do; and that is principally the subject of my story” (1: 278). As he writes, his style must vibrate sympathetically with his emotional state at the time of the deed and at the time of its rediscovery: “My uneven and natural style, sometimes swift, sometimes wordy, now discreet, now mad, sometimes serious, sometimes cheerful, will itself become part of my story” (1: 1154, “Ebauches des Confessions”). Rather than remain aloof, the author is to immerse himself totally in the hero’s personal sentiments.

Rousseau is not for the most part using the framework of verisimilitude. He is never trying to make his world convincing at the expense of either uniqueness or subjectivity. His aim, on the contrary, is to identify intimate feelings in spite of society’s standardizing effect: “It is impossible for a man who is constantly abroad in society and continually putting on a front for others not to be taken in somewhat by his own acting, and if he had the time to study himself, it would be almost impossible for him truly to know himself” (1: 1121, “Mon portrait”). His purpose is to free himself from typical attitudes and sentiments. When he says the reader will find certain behavior incredible, he can because of his frankness mean it literally. His betrayal of Marion, his abandonment of Lemaitre, his fascination into impotence by Julietta’s deformed breast, his desire to be imprisoned on the Isle de Saint-Pierre are all beyond his own comprehension. The conspiracy against him, the “storm” which has engulfed him, is a mystery: “I do not know if this mystery, which remains one to me, will be cleared up later in my readers’ eyes” (1: 406). He wants the reader to take his side, not Grimm’s, but he cannot be sure of this result. He is filled with self-doubt, used to having listeners greet the reading of his memoirs with silence: “Madame d’Egmont was the only person who seemed moved. She trembled visibly, but quickly recovered, and remained silent, as did the rest of the company” (1: 656). Except for moments of happiness found in reveries, he is obsessed by the darkness which has enveloped his existence, by the need to prove to himself that his personality can survive the barrier of hostility and indifference which seems to deny the validity of his being.

To remedy these two circumstances — the author’s lack of objectivity and his inability to penetrate the significance of his uniqueness — the reader, according to Rousseau, must supply objectivity and establish meaning. The author is to tell everything and avoid the superficial consistency that characterizes the lives of great men, of portraits which impose so-called likenesses of the originals: “One grasps the outstanding features of a person, joins them by imagined insights, and provided the whole represents a face, what difference does it make if the face is a true likeness?” (1: 1149, “Ebauches”). He supplies information about the adverse opinion which upsets him, the relief he gains from confession, the importance of feeling in his scale of values. In the course of the book he also reveals frankly the limits of his memory, the gaps in his documentation, his ability to recall happy memories, his trouble in dredging up unhappy associations, and the laborious nature and method of his composition. He tells where and in what kind of mood he was while writing the first part and contrasts this setting and state with the less fortunate circumstances influencing his composition of the second part. With a kind of perverse pride in being a hostile witness to himself, he uses a revealing vocabulary to describe his most intimate deeds and thoughts: “this strange taste which persisted to the point of depravity and madness” (1: 16); “an absurd combination of boldness and stupidity” (1: 38); “the most extravagant behavior . . . the absurd pleasure I got from displaying myself” (1: 89); “my stupid blindness . . . the degree of my madness” (1: 100); his plans “the wildest, the most childish, the most foolish” (1: 101); “my head, tuned to the pitch of a strange instrument, was out of its proper key” (1: 129); “my awkward manner and clumsy phrases” (1: 519); “my imagination. . . busy creating phantoms” (1: 566).

In part these are self-excusing comments, but through them the reader gets closer to Rousseau’s mind, experiences him directly shuddering over the recall of certain events, senses the extent of his pain and joy. Intentionally, Rousseau has made himself the patient, the informant, and has made the reader the doctor, the judge: “I am an observer and not a moralist. I am the botanist describing a plant. It is up to the doctor to determine the use to be made of it” (1: 1121, “Mon portrait”). The reader is to listen to the data Rousseau offers, listen to the tale of an emotionally involved person, and then himself decide what the meaning is. Rousseau’s outburst at the close of Book XII that he has told the truth, that anyone who still believes him “a dishonorable man” is himself “a man deserving to be stifled,” only strengthens the impression given by earlier statements that the validity of the account lies less in the author’s control of the material in order to give a convincing explanation than in an outpouring of authentic detail which the reader must interpret: “If I made myself responsible for the result and said to him, ‘Such is my character,’ he might think, if not that I am deceiving him, at least that I am deceiving myself.”

Rousseau’s fear must be, not “that I may say too much or tell untruths, but that I may not tell everything and may leave the truth unsaid” (1: 175). He is well enough known so that the exterior facts can be verified, and “my book stands as witness against me if I lie” (1: 1121, “Mon portrait”). The author is to do no more than literally turn himself into a document for study, to become the “first basis for comparison in the study of men” (1: 3, 1120). The reader must judge the importance of the facts (“I must tell them all, and leave the matter of selection to him” [1: 175]). But the important facts, it must be remembered, are the nonverifiable sentiments which only Rousseau can know, the “succession of impressions and ideas” (1: 174). The reader, as cocreator, finds their sense: “It is up to him to assemble these elements and decide what being they form; the result must be his own work, and if he makes a mistake, the fault will be his own doing” (1: 175). The logic of Rousseau’s concept of the subservient author leads to this conclusion.

Rousseau’s approach to the reader is not one of verisimilitude in any of the usual senses. He expects his audience to judge him independently of any conventional code of what is probable or proper. The idea of experiences which everyone has shared is similarly not to the point. Recognizable descriptions of places or certain apt simulations of time may excite the audience’s desire for identification, but images are mainly important for Rousseau to the extent that they carry his personal feelings. The reader must be observant for what is new. If he is stirred by the belief that he has shared an experience, he may be reacting to a nonessential element outside Rousseau’s uniqueness. The reader may also be misled by a logic that the author may seem to have deliberately given to the sequence of his feelings. Again he is in error, for the significance of personal feelings is beyond the grasp of the individual having them. Rousseau writing about himself has purposefully avoided attributing to his feelings any meaning in terms of a whole: “When I write, I do not think of that whole, I concentrate only on saying what I know, and it is from this method that the whole is produced and its likeness to the original” (1: 1122, “Mon portrait”).

Since Rousseau’s representation of life is no more than unique feelings uncurbed by adherence to a code, by the need to find shared impressions, or by a logical meaning he has imposed, it follows that he alone decides when expression is in accord with inner feeling: “I make up my mind about style as about things. . . . I shall always have the one that comes naturally to me” (1: 1154, “Ebauches”). It seems certain, then, that verisimilitude in its first legitimate sense is style, the word itself, emanating from the writer’s dedication to his feelings, to capturing them accurately through his art, to finding the accent of truth, of sincerity, which may then sound in his words: “If the truth does not make itself evident by itself, it is necessary to conclude that it is not present” (1: 1123, “Mon portrait”). To these data the reader must make a contribution, his own analysis of Rousseau’s emotional state, then a synthesis which recreates the man of whom the author himself is unaware. The artist’s task is not to convince the reader of meaning. The reader is to convince himself by fashioning Rousseau’s feelings into significance. Verisimilitude, then, in addition to truthful style, has a second legitimate meaning, the author relinquishing to the reader all evaluation leading to definition of the author’s uniqueness.

If this doctrine seems mainly negative, it is far from empty. It gives appropriate emphasis to differences within individuals, the basic source for any investigation of human nature: “His inner mode of being . . . is known only to himself” (1: 1149, “Ebauches”). This priority given to the concept of uniqueness underlies also his notion that there was in his day no known human nature in any positive sense, only in the negative sense of the Second discours, man as amoral, innocent, free of pressures, his potential for character not defined: “Up until now no mortal has known anyone but himself, if indeed someone has really known himself, and that is not enough for judging his species or the place in it one holds from the point of view of morality” (1: 1158). Consistent with this turning to the unique and this awareness of man’s current opacity to man is the imposition of total responsibility on each individual reader. The reader, unique himself, must on his own find in Rousseau a sense meaningful in terms of his own interior vision: “I want to try to make it so . . . that each person can know himself and one other person and that other will be I” (1: 1158). The object of art is no longer the known and a convincing restatement of its significance in terms of resemblances between author and reader. On the contrary, differences are underlined. Through differences between informant and reader, the latter moves toward the unknown, possibly a new vision of mankind.

Rousseau’s uniqueness can perhaps best be introduced in terms of conflict at three different levels: within himself, between self and environment, and between destiny and art. Internal conflict appears in the areas of the affections and of conscience. His expansive emotionality is intense, but so curbed by self-inhibiting timidity that he is filled with the absurdity of his amorous ambitions. As a result, the air of comedy or of the grotesque attaches to the role of fool or victim that his hero in love must usually play: “that ridiculous and pleasurable state” in which on his knees he remains for precious moments before Mme Basile (1: 76); his waiting eight days for what are to become in his mind the incestuous favors of Mme de Warens, “dreading what I desired, to the point of sometimes seriously searching my brain for some honorable way of avoiding this promised happiness” (1: 194); in his passion for Mme d’Houdetot “the absurdity, finally, of being consumed at my age by the most extravagant of passions” (1: 441).

There is extreme inner discord, too, in his moral activities. His conscience, lucid in seeing right, makes him aspire to right, yet is housed in a machine so pitifully weak that he is repeatedly subjected to humiliating defeats. The lie against Marion, the abandonment of Lemaitre, of his children, near disloyalty to Saint-Lambert are only a few instances of his submission to pressures which thwart his intentions and scar the soul. If weakness for Rousseau is a means of self-justification, as so many have said, it brings little relief from guilt: “This cruel memory . . . so disturbs me that in my sleepless nights this poor girl comes to reproach me for my crime, as if it had been committed only yesterday” (1: 85-86). What is inconceivable, monstrous almost for him, is the incongruity of his purity of intention, his utter helplessness in carrying out certain acts, and the torment that pursues him in spite of his apparent freedom from responsibility.

Two other areas, one related to the nation, the other to personal philosophy, set him against himself and also against his times. In an age of civic callousness, he yearns to be part of a patrie, or at least of a pays, but he has a concept of the citizen so totally uncompromising in its defense of individual right that he renounces his own citizenship and is cast out by the two governments he had counted on most for shelter. After decrees by Paris and Geneva, his writings for no cause apparent to him seem to ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. The Source of Vision
• Chapter Two. Virtue as Science and Art
• Chapter Three. Nature and Necessity
• Chapter Four. The Enlightened Prince
• Chapter Five. A Nation’s Character: The Mechanics of Destruction
• Chapter Six. The Evolving Family
• Chapter Seven. Education: Matrix for Uniqueness and Legitimacy
• Chapter Eight. Sustaining the Individual Wills
• Chapter Nine. History and International Relations
• Chapter Ten. Legitimacy and National Power
• Chapter Eleven. Uniquely Evolving Self
• Selected Bibliography