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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2010
Upon close examination of Rousseau's accounts of human development, we find that Rousseau presents us with paradoxical chronologies in which the experience of supposed immediacy from which humans are said to originate always seems to be informed by, and even require, previous mediation. More specifically, reflection, comparison, and imagination are thought to exist only after the onset of perfectibility, but these mediating capacities are always already present in pity and self-love, as well as for the “independent” savage, calling into question the possibility that any human sentiment or condition could be immediately accessible and fundamentally imbuing human life with ambiguity, fluidity, and disorder. Consequently, morality and freedom for Rousseau require the negotiation, stabilization, or management of the unstable “things between” human beings and their experiences, the object world, and others, even as such management is best hidden from view and experienced as given and true.
1 I use the plural here because he tells different versions of this story throughout his oeuvre. Compare for example the Second Discourse with the Essay on the Origin of Languages, which depicts “northern” and “southern” development differently; for Rousseau climate and topography play a large role in early human history.
2 Starobinski, Jean, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23–24Google Scholar.
3 Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 271, 278, 281Google Scholar. Strauss seems to disagree with Rousseau, as he reads him, that this is a meaningful notion of “freedom” since it exists prior to reason (270).
4 Melzer, Arthur M., The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 21, 90–91Google Scholar; see also Strauss, Natural Right and History, 254–55, 263.
5 Cullen, Daniel E., Freedom in Rousseau's Political Philosophy (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 55Google Scholar.
6 Cassirer, Ernst, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 99Google Scholar.
7 Riley, Patrick, The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 241–50Google Scholar.
8 Horowitz, Asher, Rousseau, Nature, and History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 171Google Scholar.
9 However, I do not take for granted, as Horowitz does, that the “savage” lives in pure, unproblematic immediacy, or share his conclusion that for Rousseau history is characterized by repression and freedom by repression's elimination (ibid., 31–32, 52, 66–74, 128–34, 249–51).
10 Marks, Jonathan, Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 25–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also chap. 1 in general. My analysis differs from that of Marks, however, in that my reading of mediation ultimately demonstrates the untenability of the nature–history distinction as it is usually understood while Marks works within this dichotomy; he views “human nature” and “physical” or “external” nature (which he equates with history) as both partly at fault for humanity's corruption in Rousseau's accounts of human development (e.g., 37). Additionally, for Marks, whose aim is to settle the question of whether “nature” or “history” is to blame for said corruption (mine is not), Rousseau is more “moderate” than is usually thought in that he makes compromises, oscillates, or preserves a “middle way” between goods on both sides of the nature–history divide, for example by finding a mean between individualism and collectivism, stupidity and “fatal enlightenment,” or passivity and activity (chap. 2, esp. 85–86). In contrast, I read Rousseau as struggling more fundamentally (and often unsuccessfully) with disorder and fluidity; this is a subtle but, I maintain, important distinction.
11 Wingrove, Elizabeth, Rousseau's Republican Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 25, 27Google Scholar. Wingrove's focus is on Rousseau's sexual politics and the tension between coercion and consent.
12 Morgenstern, Mira, Rousseau and the Politics of Ambiguity: Self, Culture, and Society (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 60 n. 6Google Scholar. I also share with Morgenstern the claim that the faculty of imagination is inherently destabilizing (e.g., 72). However, in taking authenticity to be the key category for understanding Rousseau's ambiguity, her subsequent conclusion that Rousseau prescribes “authentic alienation” is both unnecessarily unwieldy and ultimately inaccurate, while her claim that inauthenticity and alienation develop with the acquisition of language and the onset of sociability leads her to invoke an origin free of mediation (59–63, 134–37, 138–57).
13 Grant, Ruth Weissbourd, Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 16, 25, 104, 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Her framing of Rousseau's problematic in terms of integrity rather than authenticity (e.g., 60–64) also has distinct advantages. At the same time, Grant takes for granted, as I do not, the “natural goodness of man” (95–97, 147–48, 156) and sees amour-propre itself as the most fundamental source of humanity's corruption, rather than the mediation necessarily at the root of amour-propre (e.g., 79, 153, 159–62).
14 I use the masculine to refer to the savage throughout, following Rousseau's own practice.
15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Second Discourse, in The First and Second Discourses, ed. Masters, Roger D., trans. Masters, Judith R. and Masters, Roger D. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964), 117Google Scholar. This work will hereafter be cited in the text as SD.
16 Morgenstern, Rousseau and the Politics of Ambiguity, 134–35.
17 Schaeffer, Denise, “The Utility of Ink: Rousseau and Robinson Crusoe,” The Review of Politics 64, no. 1 (2002): 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In order to do this, the tutor gives Emile a modified version of Robinson Crusoe. Not only does this book represent multiple layers of mediation, but as Schaeffer convincingly shows, Emile is to model himself on Defoe's character who is not a “natural man” but a “social man in nature” whose “self-consciousness makes him a witness to his own solitude” (137). Additionally, Schaeffer convincingly argues that not only is Emile completely dependent on the tutor throughout, but also that his self-sufficiency in fact requires an “other” in order to come into being (147).
18 Victor Gourevitch correctly argues that Rousseau's “pure” state of nature in Part I of the Second Discourse can only be conjectural insofar as it is impossible to derive humanity's later developments from its premises; the story is ultimately circular (Victor Gourevitch, “Rousseau's Pure State of Nature,” Interpretation 16, no. 1 [1988]: 53–59). (Wingrove also notes that the Discourse “conforms to a narrative circularity in which ends are always present at the beginnings, and the beginning reappears at the end.” Rousseau's Republican Romance, 17.) But while Gourevitch concludes that the pure state of nature functions to transmit Rousseau's “principles” of “natural goodness” and “perfectibility” (which, I agree, cannot be proven by reference to fact), I find instead that Rousseau points his readers toward the complex, layered, and difficult character of the human condition with which we must inevitably grapple.
19 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile; or, On Education, trans. Bloom, Allan (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 206Google Scholar. This work will hereafter be cited in the text as E.
20 Judith Shklar correctly notes, “primitive humans do not start with good, better and best and their opposites. The primitive hunter begins by measuring himself against his prey. It is then that such relative terms as strong, weak, large and small come to him” (Shklar, Judith, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory [London: Cambridge University Press, 1969], 48Google Scholar). But while she goes on to argue that these comparisons are not fundamentally moral because they do not lead to choices or actions related to human beings, the reading presented here shows the impossibility of reaching “down” or “back” to an unmediated state in which comparisons can be amoral and perfectibility is not implicated.
21 See also Marks, Jonathan, “The Divine Instinct? Rousseau and Conscience,” The Review of Politics 68, no. 4 (2006): 570CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 The impossibility of this chronology also calls into question the sharpness of the distinction between “nature” and “history.” On one hand, for example, Rousseau claims that there was an equilibrium in humanity's “original” state between desire and will (a claim this analysis questions). On the other hand, nature has given us “superfluous faculties” (E, 81)—faculties necessary to “enjoy our whole being” (E, 80) but which are also the source of human misery—so that “nature” is simultaneously the cause of disequilibrium. Once again, Rousseau invokes conceptually clear (though ultimately unreachable) opposites while directing our gaze toward the murkiness of what lies between.
23 Negotiating one's existence through language represents a particularly acute form of this problem. The development of language, which suffers from the same “you can't get here from there” problem that pervades his discussions of the other mediators (e.g., SD, 119–20, 126), multiplies the basic problem of living outside oneself as “signs” or “representations” take on independent meaning and force. The slippage between the “actual” thing being represented and the word used to represent it breaks our anchor to the “real” and leaves us only with the “apparent”; this is a problem in itself but also causes further mischief in that it makes miscommunication ever more likely. At the same time, it should be noted that Rousseau recognizes that speech has positive potential as well. As noted below, the tutor and the legislator actively employ rhetoric to achieve “virtuous” results, while in introducing Emile to society, the tutor gives him a book (Robinson Crusoe), an item representing complex forms of mediation and one that Rousseau claimed to categorically hate.
24 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Butterworth, Charles E. (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 68Google Scholar.
25 Much has been made of Rousseau's references to the “sentiment of existence” (SD, 117, 142; E, 42, 61, 270). For example, for Melzer it is “consciousness,” the “sense” or “intuitive knowledge” of our existence; it is the awareness of the “I” (Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man, 39). He then builds his argument for the natural unity of man on this “immediate” sentiment (e.g., 45 n. 31), the plausibility of which this analysis calls into doubt. (For arguments similar to Melzer's see also Cooper, Laurence D., Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life [University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999], 20–30Google Scholar; and Scott, John T., “The Theodicy of the Second Discourse: The ‘Pure State of Nature’ and Rousseau's Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 86, no. 3 [1992]: 705CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) It should be noted, moreover, that although Rousseau proclaims the savage man's soul to be “given over to the sole sentiment of his present existence,” he immediately declares the impossibility of the savage's bridging the great distance “from pure sensations to the simplest knowledge” (SD, 117–18).
26 Strong, Tracy makes a similar point; see Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 42Google Scholar. Strong goes on, however, to accept that pity does exist in the pure state of nature, though in an “ineffective” or latent form. As I will go on to argue, this reading renders such a distinction moot.
27 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, ed. and trans. Scott, John T. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 395Google Scholar.
28 Richard Boyd has astutely pointed out that pity is perhaps more likely to produce aversion and avoidance than aid for sufferers. “We may flock to the theaters to view the heady rush of human suffering, tragedy, and commiseration, but in our own lives, like Rousseau's animals, we avert our eyes and cross to the other side of the street” (Boyd, Richard, “Pity's Pathologies Portrayed: Rousseau and the Limits of Democratic Compassion,” Political Theory 32, no. 4 [2004]: 528CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Contrast Boyd's reading with Orwin, Clifford's more optimistic account in “Rousseau and the Discovery of Political Compassion,” in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Orwin, Clifford and Tarcov, Nathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 296–320Google Scholar. I share Boyd's skepticism of compassion's utility as a foundation of democratic morality.
29 Orwin also correctly notes that pity is an extension of amour-propre and usefully discusses its relative character (“Rousseau and the Discovery,” 303–7); see also E, 222.
30 Boyd, “Pity's Pathologies Portrayed,” 522.
31 Joseph Reisert argues that for Rousseau, “although the cultivation of reason is a necessary condition for the emergence of morality, it is not sufficient; reason perceives relationships, but it does not create them. Morality enters human affairs only after our developing reason interacts with our natural and organic sensitivity to produce the active and moral sensitivity lying at the root of amour-propre” (Reisert, Joseph R., Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003], 186Google Scholar). However, as I show here, reason, morality, and relationships emerge together with amour-propre in his development stories, troubling Reisert's conclusion that pity entirely precedes reason in Rousseau's work (ibid., 18).
32 Laurence Cooper astutely identifies the ambiguity of amour-propre and identifies ways it can be transformed into virtue. However, although he reasonably suggests that amour de soi and amour-propre could be present simultaneously, for Cooper Emile represents a “natural man in the state of society” because “in him amour-propre is allied with amour de soi and serves as its junior partner” (Cooper, Laurence, “Rousseau on Self-Love: What We've Learned, What We Might Have Learned,” The Review of Politics 60, no. 4 [1998]: 680CrossRefGoogle Scholar). However, if there is no “original natural man” or “inhabitant of the pure state of nature” who was “motivated by nothing but amour de soi” (ibid.), this conclusion becomes difficult to accept.
33 Jonathan Marks usefully traces this trajectory; see Marks, “The Divine Instinct?”
34 Cooper, “Rousseau on Self-Love,” 667–68.
35 Marks, “The Divine Instinct?” 570.
36 Cooper, for example, relying largely on the “Profession,” makes just this case (Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life, 91–96).
37 Cooper interprets conscience as the “love of order,” linking this “principle of the soul” to the natural goodness of man (ibid.). In contrast, I interpret the human condition for Rousseau as inherently disorderly and “order” as salutary but as imposed from without rather than derived from within.
38 Melzer, Arthur M., “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 2 (1996): 355–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I agree with Melzer's assessment that Rousseau probably found religion to be socially useful (whether or not Rousseau was a believer himself). My reading of the Vicar's “sincerity” differs from that of Melzer, however. Instead of concluding that basing salvation in sincerity would, for Rousseau, “heal the dividedness of the civilized soul” and “recreate something like our lost natural goodness or unity” (357), I conclude that belief experienced as sincere, even if learned and ultimately illusory, holds out for Rousseau respite from the essential ambiguity and instability of human life and in this way enables us to be our best selves.
39 I borrow the characterization from Melzer, “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment.” I add that the Vicar seems to function as his own tutor in arriving at conscience from self-love.
40 Interestingly, the Vicar comments that he seeks to know “only what is important for my conduct” (E, 308) while earlier he professes that “the good man orders himself in relation to the whole, and the wicked one orders the whole in relation to himself” (E, 292). It seems to me an open question as to which category the Vicar belongs to—or perhaps he belongs to both.
41 Frederick Neuhouser identifies two types of dependence in Rousseau's thought: dependence on things to fulfill our basic needs as physical beings, or economic dependence, and dependence resulting not from our biology but from needs arising from amour-propre, or psychological dependence (Neuhouser, Frederick, “Freedom, Dependence, and the General Will,” The Philosophical Review 102, no. 3 [1993]: 376–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
42 Ibid., 379.
43 Abizadeh, Arash, “Banishing the Particular: Rousseau on Rhetoric, Patrie, and the Passions,” Political Theory 29, no. 4 (2001): 572–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; emphasis in original.
44 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Social Contract, I.vii.8, in On the Social Contract, with Geneva Mansucript and Political Economy, ed. Masters, Roger D. and trans. Masters, Judith (New York: St. Martin's, 1978)Google Scholar. This work will hereafter be cited in the text as SC.
45 Wingrove refers to this basic dynamic as “consensual nonconsensuality” (Rousseau's Republican Romance) while Grant comments that Rousseau's account of political rule contains a “disturbing mix of paternalism and egalitarianism” (Hypocrisy and Integrity, 128). This analysis suggests that both of these characterizations are essentially correct.
46 For a discussion of the role of persuasion as a middle ground between coercion and rational argument in Rousseau's legislator, see Kelly, Christopher, “‘To Persuade without Convincing’: The Language of Rousseau's Legislator,” American Journal of Political Science 31, no. 2 (1987): 321–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
47 Grant, Hypocrisy and Integrity, 132.
48 However, the deaths of these characters, who seem too perfect to live, should also be read in light of Rousseau's fascinating and complex sexual politics, about which a vast literature has emerged. See, for example, Okin, Susan Moller, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Schwartz, Joel, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Weiss, Penny A., Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Wingrove, Rousseau's Republican Romance.
