On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life: Reflections on Rousseau's Rêveries in Two Books 9780226074177

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On the Happiness of  the Philosophic Life

On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life Reflections on Rousseau’s Rêveries in Two Book s

Heinrich Meier

Translated by Robert Berman

The University of  Chicago Press  C h i c a g o & L o n d o n

h e i n r i c h m e i e r is director of  the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation in Munich, professor of  philosophy at the University of Munich, and permanent visiting professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. r o b e r t b e r m a n is professor of philosophy at Xavier University of  Louisiana. The University of  Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of  Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of  Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of  America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­07403-­0 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­07417-­7 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226074177.001.0001 Library of  Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Meier, Heinrich, 1953– author. | Berman, Robert, translator. Title: On the happiness of the philosophic life : reflections on Rousseau’s Rêveries in two books / Heinrich Meier ; translated by Robert Berman. Other titles: Über das GlÜck des philosophischen Lebens. English Description: Chicago : The University of  Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015041318| ISBN 9780226074030 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226074177 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Rousseau,  Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. | Rousseau,  Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard. | Rousseau,  Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778—Criticism and interpretation. | Philosophy in literature. | Solitude in literature. Classification: LCC PQ2040.R53 M45613 2016 | DDC 848/.509—dc23 LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2015041318 Originally published as Über das Glück des philosophischen Lebens: Reflexionen zu Rousseaus “Rêveries” in zwei Büchern by Heinrich Meier, © Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, München 2011 The translation of  this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—­Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of  the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association). ♾ This paper meets the requirements of  ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of  Paper).

Ich sah rückwärts, ich sah hinaus, ich sah nie so viel und so gute Dinge auf  einmal . . . Wie sollte ich nicht meinem ganzen Leben dankbar sein? F r i e d r i c h N i e t z s c h e , Ecce homo

Contents

Preface  ix Preface to the American Edition xi Note on Citations xiii Translator’s Note and Acknowledgments xv First Book I. The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers II. Faith III. Nature IV. Beisichselbstsein V. Politics VI. Love VII. Self-­Knowledge

3 46 73 98 135 178 195

Second Book Rousseau and the Profession of  Faith of  the Savoyard Vicar Name Index  341

223

Preface

The present writing is the result of  a friendship that grew over thirty-­five years and of a conversation that deepened in phases, occasionally interrupted, but never broken off. It could not have been written without the studies in the founding of  political philosophy that have preoccupied me since the middle of  the 1980s. And it could never have come to be without the thorough engagement with the Discours sur l’inégalité whose yield is contained in my 1984 critical edition. At that time I considered Rousseau’s early masterpiece as his most philosophic writing, since it was not clear to me that the Rêveries have the philosophic life itself  for their theme and that the Rêveries are not part of  Rousseau’s œuvre in the demanding sense of  the term. My error was supported by the philosophically most discerning sources, and it corresponded to the author’s intention that the reader seek access to his philosophy by engaging seriously with his œuvre. The writing consists of two books, which are designed to illuminate one another reciprocally. The first undertakes to think the philosophic life with constant regard to Rousseau’s least understood book. The second gives a continuous interpretation of  Rousseau’s most controversial book, which tries to lay the ground for a successful nonphilosophic life, i.e., attempts to conceive its foundations. The Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard, to which Rousseau emphatically refers the reader of  the Rêveries, stands in my confrontation with the Rêveries for the œuvre whose significance for the philosophic life is a prominent object of  Rousseau’s self-­reflection. In the second book I am particularly interested in the distinction between Natural Religion and Natural

x  Preface

Theology. It is suited to serve as a supplement to the distinction between political theology and political philosophy. The interpretation of  the Rêveries and of  the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard presented here was worked out in a series of seminars that I gave at Ludwig-­Maximilians-­Universität in Munich starting in 2001, at Boston College in 2003, and in the Committee on Social Thought of  the University of  Chicago in 2008 and 2010. Parts of the first and second chapters were tested in public lectures in Boston, Freiburg in Breisgau, Kyoto, Beijing, Chicago, London, and Berlin. The writing on Rousseau’s last book will be followed by a twin writing on Nietzsche’s last book. Ecce homo: Wie man wird, was man ist has in common with Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire not only that it is the least understood book of  its author. The two books converge with one another in that both treat the philosophic life. H. M. Munich, October 15, 2010

Preface to the American Edition

The American edition gives me the opportunity to supplement the preface to the German first publication with comments that one reader or another might find useful. In the third chapter of  my book Political Philosophy and the Challenge of  Revealed Religion, which appeared in German in 2013 and which will be available in English translation from the University of  Chicago Press in 2016, I presented a thorough confrontation with Rousseau’s Du contrat social. The chapter joins in a certain way with Chapter V of  the First Book of  On the Happiness of  the Philosophic Life and has an analysis of  Rousseau’s Religion civile follow the treatment of  the Savoyard Vicar’s Religion naturelle in the Second Book. The interpretation of  Du contrat social shows that Rousseau’s treatise cannot be adequately understood as long as it is not understood as a response to the challenge of  theocracy in the most demanding sense and as a critique of all political manifestations derived from it. The second chapter of the book from 2013, “The Renewal of  Philosophy and the Challenge of  Revealed Religion: On the Intention of Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli,” takes up the distinction between Natural Religion and Natural Theology that I have introduced in the present writing, and explains the significance of  Natural Theology for the argument of political philosophy and for the self-­knowledge of  the philosopher. That Kant was “set straight” not so much by Rousseau as by the Savoyard Vicar belongs among the unspoken theses of the Second Book, which will not have escaped attentive readers. I want to add that the belief in historical progress toward the establishment of  the “rule of the good principle” or of a

xii  Preface to the American Edition

“kingdom of  God on earth,” which is aired in Religion Within the Boundaries of  Mere Reason, neither traces back to the influence of the Vicar nor finds any support in Rousseau’s thought. The twin writing on Nietzsche’s last book that was announced in the preface from 2010 remains pending. For its preparation an additional book proved to be required, which I worked out in four seminars I taught at Ludwig-­ Maximilians-­Universität in Munich and in the Committee on Social Thought of  the University of Chicago from the summer of 2013 to the spring of 2015. The title of the book is: What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? Munich,  June 2015 H.M.

Note on Citations

The Rêveries are cited following Rousseau’s orthography and punctuation as they appear in the edition of  Marcel Raymond in volume I of  the Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1959, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). Deserving constant attention is the first and even to this day still unsurpassed critical edition of  John S. Spink (Paris: Didier, 1948, Société des textes français modernes), which Raymond follows for the most part in the Œuvres complètes, whose variants he nevertheless reprints only to a lesser extent. In addition, important editions warranting mention are the substantial edition of  Henri Roddier (Paris: Garnier, 1960),which presents the text carefully, but with modern orthography, and the facsimile of  the manuscript published by Marc Eigeldinger and Frédéric-­S. Eigeldinger (Geneva: Slatkine, 1978). The widely disseminated “Edition critique” (Geneva: Droz, 1948), which Marcel Raymond published in the same year in which Spink’s edition appeared, is highly unreliable. Although it does not hold up when compared with the thorough editions of  Spink and Roddier or with Raymond’s later edition, it has been reproduced in “Textes littéraires français” again and again in numerous printings. Deviating from the other Rousseau citations, which specify the pages from the Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1959–­95), or in the case of the Discours sur l’inégalité the pages of  the critical edition (Paderborn, 1984, 6 th edition, 2008), the citations for the Rêveries refer to the paragraphs of the cited Promenade, followed by the page in volume I of the Œuvres complètes: I, 1 (995) refers to the Première promenade, first paragraph, p. 995 in the Œuvres complètes, volume I. The editions of  Marcel Raymond (in the Œuvres complètes) and of  John S. Spink deviate from Rousseau’s division, in one and in two cases, respectively.

xiv  Note on Citations

Following Spink, Raymond divides the Neuvième promenade into 23 instead of 24 paragraphs. Contrary to the manuscript, he does not indent on p. 1095 (Spink p. 199) a paragraph that begins with the words “Une de mes promenades favorites.” Furthermore, Spink divides the Dixième promenade, which consists in a single paragraph, into two paragraphs ( p. 208). Henri Roddier maintains Rousseau’s division, whereas Raymond’s 1948 edition in the “Textes littéraires français” deviates so markedly that a detailed correction would go too far. The division of the book into paragraphs is as follows: Première promenade 15, Deuxième promenade 25, Troisième promenade 25, Quatrième promenade 42, Cinquième promenade 17, Sixième promenade 21, Septième promenade 30, Huitième promenade 23, Neuvième promenade 24, Dixième promenade 1. The abbreviation P and the term “Footnote” refer, respectively, to pages and footnotes in this writing. The abbreviations p and n are for references to pages and notes, respectively, in other publications. “Note” designates Rousseau’s own notes or footnotes.

Translator’s Note and Acknowledgments

Translating is an act of mediation traversing the distance between home and destination languages alien to one another. The translator who wants to convey to readers the author’s intended meaning aims, asymptotically, to close that distance by furnishing a perfectly transparent medium. He wants to get out of the way, to avoid preempting, distorting, or substituting his own meaning for the author’s. The literal translation he seeks to provide should be experienced as if the language foreign to the author were his native tongue. Where the destination language already has a functionally perfect match for the word or phrase in the home language, the literalist goal is easily achieved. Where no such terminological equivalent stands immediately at the ready in the more difficult cases, more or less complex constructions are needed to supply the missing simple equation. Faced with a genuinely hard case—­one where no construction can avoid the serious risk of preempting or distorting the author’s intended meaning—­ the translator can choose simply to leave the term untranslated. This is the decision that has been made here for Beisichselbstsein (and the related expressions bei sich and bei sich selbst), a term the author originally coined in an earlier work, and the contrasting word, Außersichsein. Beisichselbstsein supplies the title of chapter IV of the First Book, where the term also makes its most concentrated appearance. Although the author explains his usage in the course of his discussion of the matter, associating it with a set of ideas expressed in language familiar to readers of English, none of these terms—­at one with oneself, wholeness, self-­sufficiency, fundamental independence,

xvi  Translator’s Note and Acknowledgments

and the like—­is alone sufficient to serve as an English-­language equivalent for the unique German term. It seems best, therefore, to let the reader come to appreciate the author’s meaning from his treatment of Beisichselbstsein in context. Handling the German Sammlung illustrates another problem of  translation. In one of its uses, Sammlung has a perfect match in English—­a “collection,” such as an anthology or an assemblage of antiques. But in addition, the term Sammlung can be used to express the sense conveyed by the English colloquial phrase “cool, calm, and collected,” or by the advice given to someone not already in that state to “collect yourself,” meaning to pull yourself together. When the author uses Sammlung intending this second sense, the translation uses the English “collectedness” or “being collected.” It is well-­known that English, unlike German, does not as rule capitalize common nouns. However, in this translation, in all but a few exceptional cases the terms “Natural Religion” and “Natural Theology” are deliberately capitalized in order to call the reader’s attention to the central importance of the specific concepts the author intends these terms to express. In those few instances in which the author means to express other concepts using the same terms, the terms are left in lowercase. Footnote 58 in the Second Book provides the rationale for this decision. The English translations of Rousseau’s French rely in the main on the translation of Émile by Allan Bloom (in Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 13, Dartmouth College Press, 2010), the translation of the Rêveries by Charles Butterworth (in Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 8, Dartmouth College Press, 2000), and the translation of  Du contrat social by Victor Gourevitch in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, UK, 1997). On occasion, however, when conveying the author’s own German translations of Rousseau, the English translation here may deviate from Bloom’s, Butterworth’s, or Gourevitch’s renderings and instead reflect the author’s renderings. The punctuation has also been corrected to conform to the French original. I want to express my gratitude to Heinrich Meier for his active collaboration throughout this entire translation project. He has given generously and unflaggingly of his time and energy, responding to my questions, clarifying his intentions, offering valuable guidance at every step along the way. I would like to thank Hannes Kerber, who read with meticulous care several drafts of the translation and provided many helpful suggestions. Ronna Burger read through the manuscript with her keen eye for matters of substance as well as

Translator’s Note and Acknowledgments   xvii

language, and it was a pleasure to be able to discuss the work with her. I am indebted to Susan Tarcov for her demonstrated expertise in copy editing and for her sage counsel on numerous matters as they arose. Finally, I am pleased to acknowledge John Tryneski, whose ongoing encouragement and unstinting support of this project I have greatly appreciated from start to finish.

Chapter 1

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers

Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire always seemed to me to be the most beautiful and the most daring of  Rousseau’s books. Their beauty and their daring are intimately connected with one another, without being equally conspicuous, or precisely because they are not. The charm of the poetry, the lightness of the style, the interweaving of urgency and reticence, the shift from deeply touching passages to seemingly casual remarks, the interplay of motion and rest, the power of the language and the art of silence, which give the book its own tone, its unmistakable face, its special character, have earned it readers in large numbers, even from the most remote regions and across time. The literary rank of the Rêveries is beyond question. Their splendor outshines whatever is in question in them and pushes it into the background. “I am thus now alone on earth, no longer having any brother, any neighbor, any friend, any society but myself.” Thus reads the thought-­provoking start of the book. Do we hear the voice of a man who, with an opening that is unforgettable, wants to draw attention to the wretchedness of his fate? Or does a philosopher speak who with the first sentence identifies the starting point of an enterprise that distinguishes itself from everything he has begun up to that point, if not in society then nevertheless for society? Does the author from the very beginning pursue the intention of moving his readers to think for themselves? Or does he ask straight out for their pity? In other words: this work, whose alpha and omega is solitude, to whom is it directed and to what end was it written? The Rêveries have in common with all of Rousseau’s other books that the path to their understanding leads through an understanding of  their rhetoric.

4  Chapter One

And they are distinguished from all the others in that they have remained Rousseau’s least understood book. What Rousseau said in a famous passage from the Confessions about the Discours sur l’inégalité nearly twenty years after its publication could be asserted with almost as much right about the Rêveries two hundred twenty years after their posthumous publication: We are dealing with a book that  “in all of Europe found only very few readers who understood it, and none among them who wanted to talk about it.”1 If, in a no less famous sentence from the Confessions, Rousseau characterized the Discours sur l’inégalité as that writing in which his principles “are made manifest with the greatest boldness, not to say audacity,”2 then it must be added to this judgment, regarding the work Rousseau died writing, that the audacity of the Discours is surpassed only by that of the Rêveries. For in the Rêveries not only does Rousseau reaffirm at the end of his life the philosophical principles he expounded in the Discours “for a very small number of readers,”3 but in contrast to a quarter-­century earlier, he makes the philosopher himself the central object and has the contours of  his existence stand out with astonishing sharpness, not to say shocking clarity. Yet just as the true boldness of the Discours is not evident, the daring of the Rêveries does not spring immediately into view. The inverse relation that exists in both cases between the philosophic audacity and the general understanding of the work has its basis in the special art of writing Rousseau employs and thus in the intention that is determinative for it. That his most daring books are at the same time those most difficult to gain access to, that the different manner of addressing unequal addressees who are given different things to understand plays an outstanding role in them, and that the prohibitive potential of a deliberately employed rhetoric comes into effect thereby to a high degree, cannot be surprising; on the contrary, it is to be expected from an author who from the beginning of  his public effectiveness never tires of  warning of the corrupting influence of the sciences and the arts on the virtue of the citizens and on the well-­ordered political community, who like no other in the century of the Enlightenment opposes the opinion that it is necessary, possible, or even indeed desirable to make philosophy popular, who 1. Les Confessions VIII, in Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 5 vols. (Paris, 1959–­95), I, p. 389 (hereafter OCP). 2. Les Confessions IX, p. 407. 3. Rousseau to Jean  Jallabert, March 3, 1755, Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, Edition critique, ed. R. A. Leigh, 52 vols. (Geneva–­Banbury–­Oxford, 1965–­98), III, p. 115 (hereafter CC ).

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  5

agrees with political philosophers before and after him that by its nature philosophy is threatening to society, that the truth is dangerous, and that the distinction between philosophers and nonphilosophers is insuperable because men are by nature unequal. All the important determinations that demand our attention if we want to understand Rousseau’s rhetoric adequately—­its prohibitive function and its pedagogical eros, the distinction between addressees, the author’s intention, and the philosopher’s self-­understanding—­are already brought together and expressed emblematically in the frontispiece that Rousseau chose in 1750 for the first edition of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts. The etching for the prize essay, whose “paradoxes” made Rousseau famous overnight throughout Europe, shows, in the picture’s upper left half, Prometheus descending from a cloud with a torch in his right hand; in the middle of the picture a human figure can be seen on a stone pedestal, his face turned toward Prometheus: a naked youth in a receptive posture, on whose shoulder Prometheus encouragingly lays his left hand; from the other side, lower than both of the other figures, a satyr approaches impetuously with an arm extended upward. The caption under the illustration, “Satyre, tu ne le connois pas. Voy. note pag. 31,” refers the reader to a Note Rousseau added to the first sentence of the second part of the Discours: “It was an ancient tradition, passed from Egypt to Greece, that a god who was hostile to the tranquillity of men was the inventor of the sciences.” The Note to this reads: “The allegory in the fable of  Prometheus is easily seen; and it does not seem that the Greeks who riveted him to Mount Kaukasos thought any more favorably of  him than did the Egyptians of their god Theuth. ‘The satyr,’ an ancient fable relates, ‘wanted to kiss and embrace fire the first time he saw it; but Prometheus cried out to him: Satyr, you will mourn the beard on your chin, for fire burns when one touches it.’ This is the subject of the frontispiece.”4 What does it have to do with the “ancienne tradition” that Rousseau recalls at the outset of the second part? At first glance it is appealed to as a witness for the prosecution against the sciences and philosophy, just as the clarifying Note seems to bring the authority of the Greeks to bear against Prometheus. But a God who is hostile to the 4. Discours sur les sciences et les arts, OCP III, p. 17 and n. Why the editors of OCP did not find the frontispiece, to which Rousseau explicitly refers in the text, worthy of reproduction is their secret. That in the case of the Discours sur l’inégalité they proceed in precisely the same way does not improve their negligence. Here the reader does find Rousseau’s remark faithfully reproduced: Voyez le frontispice (OCP III, p. 221), which refers to the last discours dans le Discours and assigns this latter a particularly prominent position in the rhetorical structure of the work. Nevertheless, the reader cannot follow Rousseau’s invitation and view the frontispiece, since the editors have not reproduced it in their edition.

6  Chapter One

tranquillity of men need not be an enemy of men. What if, on closer inspection, he turned out to be a friend? And what should we think of the power of judgment, of the opinion of the Greeks who chained Prometheus to Mount Kaukasos? How does what we hear in the first part of the Note look in light of the second part, which shows us Prometheus as a benefactor? Attentive readers will be able to consider these and similar questions and to answer them for themselves. Moreover, some may be familiar with the “ancienne fable” to which Rousseau refers in the Note, or may look up the precise wording in Plutarch in order to ascertain that the quotation from Amyot’s translation of the Moralia, completed with the aid of the source, confirms the result that an intelligent reading of Rousseau’s text suggests: After Prometheus has warned about fire, he continues: “for it burns when one touches it, but it gives light and warmth and is an instrument that serves all crafts, assuming that one knows how to use it properly.”5 The unintelligent reader, to whom an unidentified voice calls in the frontispiece: “Satyr, you are not familiar with it, you do not know it, you do not understand it,” not only is unfamiliar with the dangers of  “fire” but also does not know anything of its beneficial and gladsome possibilities. Who approaches us in the figure of the satyr? Whom does the youth represent, for whom the torchbearer intended the fire? And who or what is the divine being that towers above both and that turns toward both, to each in a different way? According to Rousseau’s own interpretation of the allegory, which he offers to a critic in 1752 on the last page of his last public response in the long controversy surrounding the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, the torch of Prometheus symbolizes the torch of the sciences, which is made to inspire the great geniuses; the satyr who runs to embrace the fire represents the common men who, seduced by the splendor of literature and the sciences, give themselves over immoderately to study; but the god who warns the hommes vulgaires of the danger—­and who, nota bene, holds the torch in his hands for the grands génies—­is none other than Rousseau himself.6 Rousseau’s 5. “Le Satyre voulut baiser et embrasser le feu la premiere fois qu’il le vid: mais Prometheus lui cria, Bouquin tu pleureras la barbe de ton menton, car il brusle quand on y touche: mais il baille lumiere et chaleur, et est un instrument servant à tout artifice, pourveu qu’on en sache bien user.” Les œuvres morales de Plutarque, translatées de Grec en François, revues et corrigées en plusieurs passages par le Translateur [Amyot] (Geneva: Iacob Stoer, 1621), I, p. 342 [Moralia 86 E–­F]. 6. “J’aurois cru faire injure aux Lecteurs, et les traiter comme des enfans, de leur interpréter une allégorie si claire; de leur dire que le flambeau de Prométhée est celui des Sciences fait pour animer les grands génies; que le Satyre, qui voyant le feu pour la première fois, court à lui, et

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  7

interpretation of the frontispiece makes it clear beyond all doubt that he does not adopt the judgment of “the Greeks” and “the Egyptians” about the God and that he by no means speaks as an “homme vulgaire” about the sciences and philosophy, even if at the end of the Discours he expressly counts himself among the “vulgar men”7—­immediately after he has declared philosophy to be the privilege of the few who feel the strength to walk in the footsteps of the “great geniuses,” alone and without any assistance, who think themselves capable of emulating a Bacon, Descartes, or Newton in order to get beyond them. The youth whom the frontispiece shows in the center of the picture and whom Rousseau does not refer to by name in his interpretation represents the “small number” of  future, potential philosophers, those readers of  the Discours for whom the allegory does not need to be authoritatively interpreted, because they know how to think and to interpret for themselves, because they, relying on themselves, “know how to understand.”8 The key role that falls to the frontispiece of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts for the proper understanding of  Rousseau’s rhetoric is underscored by the genealogical connection that the pertinent passage in the Discours draws between the Gods of science and of writing, between Prometheus and Theuth and, by means of them, between Rousseau and Plato. The reference to Theuth refers the “lecteur attentif ” to the Phaedrus, thus to the Platonic dialogue that, like no other, confronts the question of which rhetoric philosophy needs veut l’embrasser, représente les hommes vulgaires, qui séduits par l’éclat des Lettres, se livrent indiscrétement à l’étude; que le Prométhée qui crie et les avertit du danger, est le Citoyen de Geneve. Cette allégorie est juste, belle, j’ose la croire sublime.” Lettre à Lecat, OCP III, p. 102. 7. “Pour nous, hommes vulgaires, à qui le Ciel n’a point départi de si grands talens et qu’il ne destine pas à tant de gloire, restons dans nôtre obscurité. Ne courons point après une réputation qui nous échaperoit, et qui, dans l’état présent des choses ne nous rendroit jamais ce qu’elle nous auroit coûté, quand nous aurions tous les titres pour l’obtenir. A quoi bon chercher nôtre bonheur dans l’opinion d’autrui si nous pouvons le trouver en nous-­mêmes? Laissons à d’autres le soin d’instruire les Peuples de leurs devoirs, et bornons-­nous à bien remplir les nôtres, nous n’avons pas besoin d’en savoir davantage.” Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 30. 8. Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 29. “Ce n’est que successivement et toujours pour peu de Lecteurs, que j’ai développé mes idées. Ce n’est point moi que j’ai ménagé, mais la vérité, afin de la faire passer plus sûrement et de la rendre utile. Souvent je me suis donné beaucoup de peine pour tâcher de renfermer dans une Phrase, dans une ligne, dans un mot jetté comme au hasard, le résultat d’une longue suitte de réflexions. Souvent la pluspart de mes Lecteurs auront du trouver mes discours mal liés et presque entierement décousus, faute d’appercevoir le tronc dont je ne leur montrois que les rameaux. Mais c’en étoit assez pour ceux qui savent entendre, et je n’ai jamais voulu parler aux autres.” Préface d’une seconde lettre à Bordes, OCP III, p. 106.

8  Chapter One

and which it is capable of. Socrates introduces the legend of  Theuth as the bringer of geometry, astronomy, and other sciences, but especially as the in­ ventor of writing, in the context of the criticism that he makes in his speech about writing in philosophy.9 Just as Plato saw himself as in a position to fix in writing the objections he has Socrates raise in the Phaedrus against speeches fixed in writing—­that they are available everywhere and accessible to everyone, both to those who know how to understand them and to those for whom they are not suited; that they are not capable of distinguishing between those to whom they should and those to whom they should not speak; that they are not able to protect themselves and help themselves with reasons, but rather remain dependent on the assistance of their author—­just as Plato was in a position to raise these and other objections to written speeches in order to take account of those objections in precisely that dialogue in which they are raised and to accord with the Socratic requirements of philosophical speech in the medium of writing,10 likewise Rousseau sees himself as in a position in the Premier Discours and the works that follow it to do justice to the arguments that the Discours raises against the sciences and philosophy and by means of the art of careful writing to satisfy the Socratic standard of philosophical speech, which knows to whom it should and to whom it should not speak.11 In the case of the Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, Rousseau’s art sees to it that the philosophic audacity of the book is integrated in an extremely elaborate rhetoric. More than in any other of Rousseau’s writings, rhetorical elements determine its face. The distinction between the “judges” of and the “listeners” to the discourse is to be mentioned here, as are the diverse “discours dans le Discours,” the discourses that Rousseau brings into play in the course of the argumentation and that help his 9. Plato, Phaedrus 274c5–­275b3. 10. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus 276e4–­277a4. 11. Jacques Derrida’s investigation in De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967) of what Rousseau has to say about language, about speech, and about writing ignores the question of whom Rousseau’s discourse is directed to, and at no point does he mention the distinction that Rousseau himself makes with a view toward the readers of his writings. What results from this omission is not only the typical distortion of Rousseau’s attitude toward the Egyptian bringer of writing, the God Theuth—­“que Rousseau incrimine dans le Discours sur le sciences et les arts” (p. 441; cf. p. 413)—­but above all the radical misunderstanding of the philosophic significance proper to the Cinquième promenade (pp. 353–­55). That in Derrida’s presentation the philosopher retreats behind the moralist or the doctrinaire thinker and often vanishes altogether (cf. pp. 248, 326, 355, 367, 401, 416) is at one with a persistent lack of understanding of Rousseau’s rhetoric (cf. pp. 270, 273, 357, 359).

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  9

discourse become a masterfully conducted polyphony and give it a modulated resonance. In no other book of  Rousseau’s do the interlocking of and the shift to and fro between the level of philosophic analysis and the level of polemical presentation play a similar role. None possesses a politico-­philosophic topography comparable in significance to that of the Discours sur l’inégalité, which was written in France, dated from Savoyard Chambéry and published in Amsterdam, formally dedicated to the Republic of  Geneva, but “presented” in the “Lyceum of Athens” to philosophers and from there brought to the ears of the “human race.” None has such a complex outer form, such a multifaceted structure, whereby all the individual parts out of which the Discours is composed are tightly woven into the rhetoric of the writing as a whole and therein receive their respective, special function: beginning with the frontispiece Rousseau chose for the book, via the title, the motto, the dedication, the preface, the notice on the Notes, the question of the Academy of Dijon, which precedes the “real” discourse, via the exordium, the first part and second part, down to the nineteen quite peculiarly numbered Notes, which make up not less than a third of the entire text. The writing in which Rousseau discloses the principles of his philosophy with the greatest boldness during his lifetime is simultaneously his most rhetorical writing.12 But what are we to expect in the case of the Rêveries, if even the boldness of the Discours sur l’inégalité is surpassed by the daring of the Rêveries? What protection and what assistance was Rousseau able to give his last book? Was it possible to outdo the rhetoric of  his most rhetorical publication? The Rêveries do not seem to have any complex outer form. At least they lack a multifaceted structure. No frontispiece and no motto, no dedication, no preface, and no Notes. Nothing but ten “walks” and a laconic title. Nor do they have a significant politico-­philosophic topography. The places that show up in the Rêveries take on significance solely because Rousseau frequents them and associates them with his life. Finally, the distinction between “judges” and “listeners,” which is of such importance in the rhetoric of the Discours, does not come into play in the Rêveries, since Rousseau, if we take him at his word, speaks to no one, turns toward no one, and writes for no one—­except to, toward, and for himself. In the Rêveries Rousseau does not exceed the rhetoric of the Discours sur l’inégalité by increasing its complexity, by achieving a refinement 12. In the “Einführender Essay über die Rhetorik und die Intention des Werkes” as well as in the commentary to my critical edition of the Discours sur l’inégalité (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1984; 6th ed. 2008), I have presented an in-­depth investigation of Rousseau’s art of writing and a detailed analysis of the rhetoric of the Discours.

10  Chapter One

of the coordination or an increase in the tension among all the structure’s components, for instance, through the introduction of further stylistic elements, additional discursive figures, or new levels of argumentation. Instead, he does an about-­face. He takes the path of simplification and reduction. He chooses the rhetoric of an absolute sincerity that does not seem concerned with any addressee and of an immediate transparency that appears not to be motivated by any intention regarding others. The principle of the rhetoric that Rousseau employs in the Rêveries reads: The author and his reader are one. It is the principle of a rhetoric that pretends to get by without any rhetoric, to renounce all rhetoric, to be beyond all rhetoric. If the efficacy inherent in the rhetoric of the renunciation of all rhetoric needed historical evidence, then the reception of the Rêveries over more than two centuries has supplied it. Rousseau would not have been the political philosopher he was if he had not recognized this efficacy in good time and known how to assess it properly so as to take advantage of it when an extraordinary rhetoric was necessary for an extraordinary undertaking. And the master of  indirect communication, of roundabout confirmation, of cryptic corroboration, as he proved himself to be in all of his preceding publications, does not fail to provide clues in the Rêveries that he wrote his last work mindful of the exacting requirements that arise from his original philosophic insight into the insuperable tension between philosophy and politics for a public treatment of philosophic subjects, requirements that hold all the more for the treatment of the philosophic life itself. Among the clues that indicate to the careful reader that he is on the right track are several unmistakable references back to the writing with which Rousseau began his literary career and in which, as we have seen, he determined the basic rhetorical constellation for everything to follow, the writing in which he concisely expressed his self-­understanding as an author, as well as the relationship to the different readers of his œuvre. A special role is accorded thereby to a small treatise by Plutarch, whom Rousseau singles out like no other author in the Rêveries and whom he enlists for his own purposes.13 Rousseau brings it into play at the outset of the Quatrième promenade: the subject of this “walk,” by far the longest and at the same time the one that comes closest in structure and in execution to being a philosophic treatise in 13. “Dans le petit nombre de Livres que je lis quelquefois encore, Plutarque est celui qui m’attache et me profite le plus. Ce fut la prémiére lecture de mon enfance, ce sera la derniére de ma vieillesse; c’est presque le seul auteur que je n’ai jamais lu sans en tirer quelque fruit.” IV, 1, OCP I, p. 1024; cf. III, 1 (1011), III, 25 (1023), IV, 42 (1039), IX, 21 (1095).

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  11

the usual sense, is the lie. The question of the truth that the author owes his readers takes up a great deal of space. The reference to Plutarch’s writing How One Can Profit by One’s Enemies seems to be wholly occasional: a more or less accidental reading of Rousseau’s that induces him, when he happens upon an unsolicited communication, to scrutinize more closely what importance the lie has had in his life and whether he justly chose the maxim Vitam impendere vero as the motto of his public persona.14 However, there is actually a closer, far more relevant connection to the theme of the Quatrième promenade. For that treatise, which Rousseau claims to have read only “the day before yesterday,” is the very text from which Rousseau took the subject for the frontispiece of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts more than a quarter century earlier. Just as in the Discours he did not name the source of the “ancienne fable” that he quoted verbatim, likewise now he does not repeat the warning that the God gives to the satyr. The reader who follows Rousseau’s clue will encounter the warning in the second paragraph of Plutarch/Amyot’s Comment on pourra tirer utilité de ses ennemis. There can be no doubt that the Promeneur Solitaire of the Rêveries is no less aware than the Prometheus of the Discours of what he carries with him and what he wants to transmit. The rhetoric of the renunciation of all rhetoric is the most striking element in the rhetorical preparation of the Rêveries. Its prohibitive effect unfolds, however, only in its interplay with two other devices. In the presentation of his life, Rousseau oscillates between the description of an Everyman’s existence—­replete with experiences and feelings, joys and sufferings of a generally hu­man kind, which invite the reader to share in the suffering and joy, to sympathize and to recognize himself—­and the insistence on an exceptional existence that in its singularity cannot be achieved by anyone else and whose eccentricity surpasses everything. The Everyman’s existence permits the identification with the author, who in no way differs essentially from his reader; the exceptional existence creates a distance that appears unbridgeable and points to a peculiarity that is as emphatically stressed as in its substantial expression it is left in the dark for the ordinary reader. Whereas the Everyman-­pole is combined with the first device, with the rhetoric of unhindered transparency or the renunciation of rhetoric, the exception-­pole is intimately connected with the third device: Rousseau neither gives a direct view nor shows the integral shape of the activity that sustains his life and founds his eccentricity. He discloses it 14. “Pour mettre à profit les leçons du bon Plutarque je résolus d’employer à m’examiner sur le mensonge la promenade du lendemain.” IV, 1 (1024).

12  Chapter One

only in the medium of estrangement and fragmentation, spectrally refracted and laid out in parts; and it remains the reader’s task to fit them together into a whole and to integrate them into one movement. The Rêveries show the fire of philosophy in the mirror of  the water, in the reflections of the unlimited, needing more precise determination, of  the inconspicuous, needing careful inspection, and of the surface, needing an in-­depth interpretation.— Following a thread through Rousseau’s texture, I want to outline how such an interpretation can start, and by way of anticipation illustrate to what my reflections refer. I begin at the beginning, more precisely, with what precedes the opening of the book cited at the outset: I begin with the title. It combines all three types of titles that Rousseau has employed for books to that point: First, the naming of the subject, a literary figure or a topic ( Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, Du contrat social, Émile ou de l’éducation); second, the genre (Discours, Essai, Lettre, Dictionnaire); and, third, an activity (Discours, Les Confessions, Dialogues). Rêveries designate a private activity that, unlike confessions, discours, or dialogues, does not immediately refer to a counterpart, an auditorium, an addressee, but is intrinsically self-­sufficient. Nevertheless, rêveries are, when set down in writing, accessible to a reader and, once printed, are in principle accessible to anyone who can read. As a book, they might establish a genre of their own or be accorded the rank of a genre of their own, just as Montaigne’s Essais—­which Rousseau expressly uses by way of contrast in the Première promenade15—­established a new genre. Finally, in its linking of the activity of rêveries with the subject, the Promeneur Solitaire, the title Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire designates the subject of the book. The activity to which the title gives prominence invites the reader to make comparisons with other outstanding works that raised an activity of the author to their title, thus with the Meditationes of  Descartes or the Pensées of  Pascal. Both concepts, méditations and pensées, which the title absorbs and conceals in the open rêveries that is kept vague, are present in the book in important passages, and the return to the subject who considers himself as the ultimate, unsurpassable court of appeal of the philosophic enterprise of self-­assurance and of the disclosure of the world, a movement that for many is bound up with the name of Descartes, is part of the activity at the root of the Rêveries, just as much as the confrontation with religion, which Pascal’s notes have as their subject, makes up part of the book. In contrast to Descartes’s Meditationes or Pascal’s Pensées, Rousseau’s title does not specify the topic, the themes that the rêveries take up, and in contrast to Montaigne’s Essais, Rousseau uses the definite article and speaks 15. I, 14 (1001).

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  13

of Les rêveries. The designation of the activity is continued in the identification du Promeneur Solitaire. We are dealing with the rêveries of not just any, but of the solitary walker. The title points to the tension between an activity that is not very specific, is left unclear, and requires interpretation, and a subject who is highly specific, solitary, and singular, the tension that pervades the rhetoric of the entire book. The rêveries in the title, which Rousseau writes in lowercase, come to be determinate rêveries through the capitalized Promeneur Solitaire. They lose the approximate, vague, harmless character suggested by the word only when they are understood to be his rêveries, issuing from and leading to him. Conversely, the identity of the Promeneur Solitaire will not be disclosed to the reader, so long as he does not know how to understand the activity in which this identity is articulated and through which it acquires shape. Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire is the only title of  Rousseau’s that simultaneously designates the result or presentation of an activity and the underlying activity of the author himself, an activity that is not exhausted by the result to which it leads, that retains its actuality on this side of and beyond the presentation in the book. The definite article indicates that the rêveries presented to us, that precisely the promenades Rousseau wrote and to which he gave an order, have to be thought through, regarded as a whole, and conceived in their development and interconnection, if the activity is to be grasped that distinguishes the Promeneur Solitaire.16 The activity goes beyond the merely individual. It belongs to a type. It permits in its individual execution a particular universal to become visible. The title promises us not Les rêveries de Jean-­Jacques Rousseau but rather Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire.17 16. Rousseau does not use the term “Promeneur Solitaire” in any of the ten Promenades. He reserves it for the title of the whole. 17. The title, clearly legible, that Rousseau placed at the front of the clean copy of the manuscript has been reproduced erroneously in the entire scholarly literature. That Rousseau’s use of small and capital letters, which deviates from what is usual, has not been noticed goes back in the first place to the inattentiveness of the editors of  his book, who—­following the literary executors, Moultou and Du Peyrou—­never reproduced the title in its authentic form. Mostly, the use of capital letters for all of the five words makes the distinctions Rousseau intended indiscernible: ed. Paul Moultou and Pierre-­Alexandre Du Peyrou, Collection complète des œuvres de J. J. Rousseau (Geneva, 1782), vol. X in-­4, vol. XX in-­8; ed. John S. Spink, Edition critique publiée d’après les manuscrits autographes, Société des Textes français modernes (Paris: Didier, 1948); ed. Marcel Raymond, Edition critique, Textes littéraires français (Geneva: Droz, 1948), and Œuvres complètes, vol. I, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1959); ed. Marie-­Madeleine Castex, Lettres françaises (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1978); ed. Marc Eigeldinger and Frédéric-­S. Eigeldinger, Fac-­similé du manuscrit original (Geneva: Slatkine, 1978). Or the reproduction

14  Chapter One

Why Rousseau chooses the word rêverie is obvious, after what has been said thus far: Rousseau uses it both to point to and to divert attention away from the activity central to the philosophic life. Using the word rêverie leaves indeterminate what in fact constitutes this life. We can divide the answer into two answers: (1) Rousseau takes pains to give the impression of harmlessness, to sketch the picture of an “innocent” life.18 (2) Rousseau leaves it to the reader who is capable of doing so to arrive at clarity about the activity to which the enig­ matic title refers precisely by means of that activity. Already in the Dialogues, Rousseau sought to the best of his abilities to create the impression of harmlessness. What danger could arise from an author who does not like to write— ­even though within the span of a few years, as we are reminded in the very same book, he wrote thousands of pages? Or from a thinker who had to force himself to think—­even if, as we are also told, he learned to think profoundly, indeed as profoundly as anyone has ever thought?19 What would one have to fear from an innocently persecuted man who seeks to escape from the misfortune of his life in the world of his imagination? What would one have to fear from a solitary dreamer who has long concerned himself almost exclusively with music and botany? Or who, once he overcomes his natural indolence in order to seek to investigate a substantive question and to concentrate on a theoretical problem, as he did earlier and now finds himself occasionally willing to do, when asked to compose a writing such as Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, allows himself to be led by nothing but “by the idea of the future happiness of reads Les Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire: ed. S. de Sacy, Folio (Paris, Gallimard, 1972); likewise in the introductions, explications, etc., in John S. Spink (1948), Marcel Raymond (1959), Marie-­ Madeleine Castex (1978). Or Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire: ed. Henri Roddier, Classiques (Paris: Garnier, 1960). Or Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire: ed. Michel Launay in Rousseau Œuvres complètes, vol. I, L’Integral (Paris: Seuil, 1967); ed. Bernard Gagnebin (Paris: Le livre de poche, 1972); ed. Érik Leborque (Paris: Flammarion, 1997). Or the title is abbreviated from the beginning to Rêveries du promeneur solitaire: ed. Michèle Crogiez (Paris: Le livre de poche, 2001). Still, since 1948 every interested reader could have informed himself of the authentic form of the title, because John S. Spink transcribed it correctly in a passage in his introduction (p. xlvii) and provided an image of it in Rousseau’s handwriting, without nevertheless paying attention to the peculiarities of Rousseau’s manner of writing or taking it into consideration for the edition itself. The same holds for the 1978 fascimile edition by Marc Eigeldinger and Frédéric S. Eigeldinger. 18. II, 6 (1004); VII, 1 (1061); VII, 30 (1073). Cf. I, 15 (1001); II, 25 (1010); III, 19 (1019); III, 22 (1022); VI, 12 (1056). 19. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques. Dialogues II, OCP I, pp. 829 and 791; cf. pp. 816, 820, 839, 864–­65, 874, and III, p. 936.

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  15

the human race and by the honor of contributing to it”?20 The Rêveries already adopt this rhetorical strategy in their title. They continue to paint the picture presented in the Dialogues of a thinker for whom thinking is above all an effort and a burden and, to crown the overall impression, provide it—­not coincidentally in the Cinquième promenade—­with the slogan “precious far niente.” Let us consider the use Rousseau makes of rêverie in the text. The word appears for the first time in the first sentence of the thirteenth paragraph of the Première promenade: “Ces feuilles ne seront proprement qu’un informe journal de mes rêveries.” Here the word has the same openness it has in the book’s title. The doubling of the activity and the result of the activity, which is abandoned in favor of the result in the second and final use in the Première promenade, is also preserved. Yet already in the next sentence Rousseau makes a more precise determination: he calls himself, the subject and the author of the rêveries that “these pages” contain, “un solitaire qui réflechit.” Réflechir takes the place of rêver and thereby elucidates, sharpens, determines rêveries. Time and again Rousseau makes use of the tool of elucidation, sharpening, and determination by replacement or by silent transition to a more sharply contoured concept following the example of this passage. All further uses of rêverie to designate an activity are reserved for Promenades II, V, and VII. The most informative use regarding our question as to why Rousseau highlights the word in the title is found in the first paragraph of the Deuxième promenade. Together with the three subsequent paragraphs, it forms the introduction to the sole promenade that can be regarded in the narrower sense as a presentation of a walk and at the same time as a concise and significant second introduction to the Rêveries as a whole. Rousseau announces that in order to carry out his proj­ ect, to describe “l’état habituel” of his soul “in the strangest position in which a mortal could ever find himself,” he will keep a “faithful record”—­in the form of the book that we have before us—­“of my solitary walks and of the reveries that fill them when I leave my head entirely free and let my ideas follow their bent without resistance and without constraint.” Rêveries designate the activity that arises spontaneously in and for Rousseau as soon as his head is entirely free and he can follow his inclination. The activity takes hold of him and fills his solitary walks, when he is able to pursue his ideas without hindrance and without restriction: insofar as he is subject to no law, owes obedience to no one, is bound by no duty and is committed to no particular task, neither asks for the judgment of others nor seeks to gain their esteem, nor worries about his effect on the public and on posterity. Rêverie is at first negatively determined: 20. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 829, see p. 836.

16  Chapter One

It is the activity that is free of every external constraint and from every practical purpose.21 The positive determination is given in the sentence that immediately follows, once again by way of replacement: “These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day during which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, and during which I can truly claim to be what nature willed.” Rousseau is fully himself when, in his solitude, obstructed by nothing and no one, he can unfold the activity that suits him. He is for himself and bei sich when he meditates. Solitude and meditation permit him to be “what nature willed.” At the point at which Rousseau links solitude and méditation to one another, nature makes its first appearance in the book. The project of describing the “état habituel” of his soul “in the strangest position in which a mortal could ever find himself,” the scientific observation and recording of the “modifications” of his soul that Rousseau, as he declared in the Première promenade, wanted to carry out, following the example of the physicists who investigate the daily changes in the condition of the air by applying the barometer to his soul,22 this enterprise leads a few sentences later to the question of  how, when, and where Rousseau can be “what nature willed.” The “faithful record” of  which Rousseau speaks in the introduction will, above all, set down what Rousseau is and what he remains, regardless of what the adverse situation might be in which he is placed. The “singular” conspiracy, the “singular” persecution, the “singular” fate serve in the end to show that the Promeneur Solitaire is capable of being wholly bei sich even under the most unfavorable conditions. Let us return once more to the concept rêverie. As noted, it appears as the designation of an activity only in Promenades II, V, and VII. By means of replacement and delimitation, rêverie is more precisely determined as réflexion, méditation, and contemplation and is characterized as essentially free from social constraint or from any purpose that remains external to it. Rêverie serves 21. Cf. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, pp. 841, 845, 849, 865. 22. “Une situation si singuliére mérite assurement d’être examinée et décrite, et c’est à cet examen que je consacre mes derniers loisirs. Pour le faire avec succés il y faudroit proceder avec ordre et methode: mais je suis incapable de ce travail et même il m’écarteroit de mon but qui est de me rendre compte des modifications de mon ame et de leurs successions. Je ferai sur moi-­même à quelque égard les operations que font les physiciens sur l’air pour en connoitre l’état journalier. J’appliquerai le baromettre à mon ame, et ces operations bien dirigées et longtems repetées me pourroient fournir des resultats aussi surs que les leurs. Mais je n’étens pas jusques-­là mon entreprise. Je me contenterai de tenir le registre des opérations sans chercher à les reduire en systême.” I, 14 (1000–­1001).

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  17

Rousseau as a signpost to the philosophic activity of the Promeneur Solitaire and as its abbreviation. Outside the Deuxième, the Cinquième, and the Septième promenades, which, when read together in the context established by their cross-­references, develop an argument concerning the autarky and the happiness of the philosophic life, the word “rêverie” in fact occurs in the book only four times (out of a total of twenty-­four). I have already discussed the title and the two uses of the term in the Première promenade. The fourth and final use altogether is found at the end of the Huitième promenade. There Rousseau reaffirms what he discussed at the outset of the Deuxième promenade: that regardless of what happens to him, he is capable of coming back to himself and again becoming “what nature willed.” He now declares expressly that his “most constant state” is, despite his fate, the state in which he enjoys a happiness for which he feels himself constituted, “un bonheur pour lequel je me sens constitué.” Then he adds: “I have described this state in one of my rêveries.” Rousseau refers the reader back to the Cinquième promenade, the heart and the peak of the book. In its concluding use, rêverie becomes synonymous with promenade.23 This is in accord with a note that Rousseau wrote during his work on the Rêveries on the back of one of the playing cards he carried with him on his walks: “To fulfill the title of this collection properly, I would have had to begin sixty years ago: for my entire life has hardly been anything but a long rêverie, which was divided into chapters by my daily promenades.”24 Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire do not give us the chapters into which Rousseau’s life can be divided. Instead, the ten Rêveries of which “the collection” consists allow us to glance at the paths that the Promeneur Solitaire has taken, and takes always anew, pursuing the activity he calls rêverie. These are the paths on which he realizes his nature. The Rêveries are the concealing unconcealing of the philosophic life in which Rousseau finds his destiny. The ten Promenades give us the chapters in which this life can be articulated. The title Rousseau chose for the most daring of his books corresponds in every way to the subject matter treated in it. It does not announce any exhortation to philosophy. It is suited to lower expectations. It induces one to take what follows lightly or to underestimate it. Especially since in the philosophic writings he published during his lifetime, Rousseau had always used the term 23. VIII, 23 (1084). 24. “Pour bien remplir le titre de ce recueil je l’aurois du commencer il y a soixante ans: car ma vie entiére n’a guére été qu’une longue réverie divisée en chapitres par mes promenades de chaque jour.” Ebauches des Rêveries 1, OCP I, p. 1165.

18  Chapter One

rêveries in a pejorative or ironically defensive sense.25 In short, the title fits seamlessly into the political-­philosophic conception that determines Rousseau’s œuvre as a whole and joins it together, making it into a whole. But at the same time it indicates that this book stands on its own. We should expect neither a speech of the citizen of Geneva nor a treatise of the teacher of mankind. In a strict sense the Rêveries no longer belong to Rousseau’s œuvre.— With this we are apparently brought back to the principle of the rhetoric of the Rêveries, that the author and the reader are one. As we have seen, in the preparation Rousseau made for his most enigmatic work this principle is accorded a prominent significance. There is no question of the “rhetorical character” of the assurance “I write my Rêveries solely for myself ”26 in a book whose author never loses sight of its possible readers, repeatedly includes them in the first-­person plural in the course of the action,27 and on occasion addresses them almost openly.28 Nevertheless, the assurance offers a hint of the exceptional position of the Rêveries, which deserves attention. For Rousseau’s statement asserts a distinction not only in comparison with the works of other authors, but also in regard to his own œuvre. It explic­ itly sets the Rêveries apart from Montaignes’s Essais, which fully in oppo­ sition to the Rêveries are written “only for others.” In the immediate context, however, the assertion serves above all to differentiate the Rêveries from the Confessions and the Dialogues, which likewise were written for others, namely, 25. In the Discours sur les sciences et les arts Rousseau writes: “Les écrits impies des Leucippes et des Diagoras sont péris avec eux. On n’avoit point encore inventé l’art d’éterniser les extravagances de l’esprit humain. Mais, grace aux caractéres Typographiques et à l’usage que nous en faisons, les dangereuses reveries des Hobbes et des Spinosas resteront à jamais” (pp. 27–­28). In Émile the term appears twice. In the preface Rousseau anticipates a possible objection to his book: “On croira moins lire un Traité d’éducation, que les rêveries d’un visionnaire sur l’éducation” (OCP IV, p. 242; for corroboration of this, Lettres écrites de la montagne III, 75, OCP III, p. 748, and Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, OCP IV, p. 1003). And in the “transcription” of the Profession de foi, “nos ridicules rêveries” are mentioned in reference to God (p. 560). In addition, attention should be paid to the use of the term in the conclusion of the Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, which brings us chronologically into the vicinity of the Dialogues (Rousseau submitted the Considérations to Count Wielhorski in June 1771): “je mets fin à ce long fatras en faisant à Monsieur le Comte Wielhorski mes excuses de l’en avoir occupé si longtems. Quoique je pense autrement que les autres hommes, je ne me flate pas d’être plus sage qu’eux, ni qu’il trouve dans mes rêveries rien qui puisse être reellement utile à sa patrie” (OCP III, p. 1041). 26. I, 14 (1001). 27. I, 12 (999); II, 25 (1010); III, 13 (1016); III, 18 (1019); IV, 7 (1026). 28. II, 13 (1006); V, 6 (1042). Cf. I, 13 (1000); I, 14 (1000); IV, 5 (1026).

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  19

for “other generations.”29 As misleading as this differentiation in the Première promenade appears at first glance—­the Rêveries are ultimately also written for a future reader, a reader akin to the author but not identical to him—­upon closer consideration it proves to be just as helpful. It directs our attention to the question of the tasks Rousseau takes on in the Confessions, the Dialogues, and the Rêveries, respectively: what distinguishes them, what differentiates them, and what in particular determines them. The usual summary of the three works under the heading “autobiographical texts” points in the opposite direction. It conceals precisely what is particular, levels the differences, and suggests the idea that we are dealing with something like an autobiography in three parts or ventured three times. But the opinion that it is one and the same project in several attempts, which would be explained by an obsession or which would document the failure of the autobiographical undertaking itself,30 misses what is most important. The Confessions make the claim that they portray for the first time “a man in the whole truth of nature”: Jean-­Jacques Rousseau. The appeal to the reader, with which the author prefaces the manuscript, already leaves no doubt that the task of the Confessions reaches far beyond the portrait of a life. He underscores “in the name of the whole human species” the importance the work will have in the future “for the study of men,” for which properly speaking it “can serve as the first piece of comparison.” The preliminary remark announces an anthropological treatise, although of a surprising character. It will be just as “unique” as “useful.”31 The title discloses the thrust of the enterprise, which, as the first sentence of the first book asserts, is without precedent. With his confessions, Rousseau is responding to Augustine’s Confessiones. He enters into a competition with the theologian, the only name he will utter in the Rêveries in the same breath with the God of revelation.32 The anthropological treatise sets Rousseau’s doctrine of natural goodness in opposition to the Church Father’s doc­trine of original sin. In fact, the extensive work is in no small part an interpreta­ tion of the maxim of bonté naturelle and an illustration of its meaning, which Rousseau contrasted in the Discours sur l’inégalité with the commandment 29. I, 15 (1001). 30. From the extensive literature on Rousseau’s “autobiographical texts,” one of the few books on the Dialogues might be mentioned here: James F. Jones Jr., Rousseau’s Dialogues: An Interpretive Essay (Geneva, 1991). Regarding the “failure of autobiography,” cf. pp. 178–­91. 31. Les Confessions, p. 3; cf. X, p. 516. 32. II, 25 (1010). In the Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont published in 1763, Rousseau singled out the “Rhéteur Augustin” as the genuine author of the doctrine of original sin, “cette doctrine du péché originel, sujette à des difficultés si terribles” (pp. 937–­38).

20  Chapter One

of  the Sermon on the Mount, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”: “Do your good with the least possible harm to others.”33 All this would suffice to make Les Confessions into a cornerstone of the architectonic of Rousseau’s œuvre. Yet there is something else that concerns the turn to autobiography in the narrower sense. This turn fulfills two specific functions, one philosophic, the other political, which are of significance for the œuvre. The biographical anchoring of the teaching serves, on the one hand, as the reflexive counterpart to its historical derivation, i.e., the emphatic exposition of his own life is the expression of  Rousseau’s repudiation of a  justification based on a philosophy of history. Not the assertion of a privileged historical moment in which the philosopher thinks and speaks, but rather the appeal to the natural capabilities that distinguish him and to the particular constitution he preserved, contains the answer to the question concerning the justifying reason: The recourse to nature, not the access to history or history’s interplay, opens the path to the truth. On the other hand, the enterprise of portraying Jean-­Jacques Rousseau “in the whole truth of nature” serves a political purpose. Part of Rousseau’s project is to present the author of the œuvre as the witness to the truth for posterity. Rousseau was convinced, on the basis of the history of Christianity, of the distinctive significance that must be attached to the witness to the truth for the authentication and for the ultimate success of a teaching. According to Rousseau’s analysis, what proves to be decisive for the historical effect of a doctrine is not so much its truth, but rather above all the character and justice of its representatives. For the truth of a doctrine can be evaluated only by “wise men who are educated and know how to reason,” thus only by the very few. By contrast, the “proof ” that is found in the conduct of life, the example of those who vouch for the truth with their lives, reaches and makes an impression on “good and upright people, who see the truth everywhere they see justice,”34 and whoever wants to win over public opinion in the long run must dispose it favorably to his teaching. The political intention Rousseau pursues with the turn to autobiography is not one with the intention of the author to speak to future readers through his writings. Just as from the beginning Rousseau carefully distinguishes the addressees to whom he speaks in his books, so from the beginning he makes it 33. Discours sur l’inégalité, Première partie, ed. Meier, p. 150. Rousseau uses the concept bonté naturelle there for the first time (cf. nn. 187 and 188). Consider Les Confessions II, p. 56 and VII, p. 277. 34. Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764) III, 5 and 6, p. 728. Cf. Observations sur la réponse qui a été faite a son Discours (Réponse au roi de Pologne) (1751), 5 and 6, pp. 45–­46.

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  21

understood that the addressees to whom he wants to speak most comprehensively are going to be found in the future rather than in the present. Whoever has the intention of reaching the few “who know how to understand,” and therefore, as Rousseau writes in the preface to the Premier Discours, “wants to live beyond his century,”35 must gain distance from the present. He must keep himself far from its fashions, disengage from its assumptions, and free himself from its prejudices. In short: Whoever would like to speak to the philosophers of the future must do what a philosopher must do in any event. He will have to subject to a thorough criticism the opinions, primarily the most powerful opinions, that he encounters in his family, his class, his fatherland, in contemporary society. He will thus have to make himself known as the stepson of his time that he is. The philosopher who, beyond his death, wants to establish a standard “for us, vulgar men,” who wants to show the paths for very diverse natures, must undertake still other endeavors. He will strive to replace harmful with beneficial opinions and to provide the basis for or strengthen salutary beliefs of public utility. Consequently, Rousseau resorts to the means that his personal example and autobiographical underpinning offer for his political project. The project thereby takes on concrete shape as the echo amplifies and the enmity that Rousseau reaps with his doctrinal edifice becomes stron­ ger, and in the awareness of the increasing attention paid by the public and the greater possibilities of its effectiveness, Rousseau develops and extends the doctrinal edifice, pushing it to new heights and deepening it. The motto Vitam impendere vero, which he subjects to a late examination in the Quatrième promenade, Rousseau first claims for himself not accidentally in that writing in which he declares that it is no longer his concern “to speak to the small number, but to the public, nor to make others think, but to explain my thinking clearly.”36 The Lettre à d’Alembert from 1758, although addressed to an individual, is the first writing Rousseau explicitly addresses 35. “Aussi mon parti est-­il pris; je ne me soucie de plaire ni aux Beaux-­Esprits, ni aux Gens à la mode. Il y aura dans tous les tems des hommes faits pour être subjugués par les opinions de leur siécle, de leur Pays, de leur Société: Tel fait aujourd’hui l’Esprit fort et le Philosophe, qui, par la même raison n’eût été qu’un fanatique du tems de la Ligue. Il ne faut point écrire pour de tels Lecteurs, quand on veut vivre au-­delà de son siécle.” Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 3. 36. “Prémiérement, il ne s’agit plus ici d’un vain babil de Philosophie; mais d’une vérité de pratique importante à tout un peuple. Il ne s’agit plus de parler au petit nombre mais au public, ni de faire penser les autres mais d’expliquer nettement ma pensée. Il a donc fallu changer de stile: Pour me faire mieux entendre à tout le monde, j’ai dit moins de choses en plus de mots, et voulant être clair et simple, je me suis trouvé lâche et diffus.” Lettre à d’Alembert, Préface 7, OCP V, p. 6.

22  Chapter One

to the great number, to the people, to the many. It is the first book that he publishes after completing the conspicuous “reform” spoken about in the Troisième promenade and as he twice suggests in the Lettre—­at the beginning and at the end—­he writes it in the expectation that it will be his parting words to the public.37 Faced with death, Rousseau confesses that he has dedicated his life to truth.38 As his legacy, which should sharpen his image for posterity, he composes a book that, in order to protect his fatherland from political danger, opposes one of the most prominent spokesmen of the French Enlightenment and one of the most well-­known proponents of the science of his time. “J.-­J. Rous­­seau Citoyen de Genève” replies to “Monsieur d’Alembert de l’Académie française, de l’Académie Royale des Sciences de Paris, de celle de Prusse, de la Société Royale de Londres, de l’Académie Royale des Belles-­ Lettres de Suède, et de l’Institut de Bologne” in order to warn the citizens of Geneva urgently against the construction of a theater for which his acquain­ tance of many years from the Paris days pleaded in an article about Geneva he published in 1757 in the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie. Rousseau, who belonged to the circle participating in the large-­scale enterprise directed by Diderot and d’Alembert and himself contributed articles to the Encyclopédie, the most important machine de guerre of the philosophes, uses 282 pages to explain why d’Alembert’s recommendation that Geneva be receptive to the opening of a theater was about “the most dangerous advice one could give us.”39 Rousseau seizes the opportunity to speak as “one of us.” Stated more precisely, in his capacity as a member of the Geneva sovereign he takes a stand on a concrete proposal that in his judgment is of great import for morals, for public opinion, and thus for the political order of the republic. He demonstrates for Everyman that he does not allow his political action to be determined by his own interest, neither private considerations nor personal preferences, but that he is guided by the “primary affections” of man, which belong to mankind and to the fatherland, and that above all he satisfies the “primary duties of man,” which he formulates with two concepts: justice et vérité.40 37. The last sentence of the Préface reads: “Lecteur, si vous recevez ce dernier ouvrage avec indulgence, vous accueillirez mon ombre; car pour moi, je ne suis plus.” The Lettre itself concludes with the words: “C’est le dernier vœu par lequel je finis mes Ecrits; c’est celui par lequel finira ma vie.” Lettre à d’Alembert, pp. 7 and 125. 38. Lettre à d’Alembert, p. 120n. 39. Lettre à d’Alembert, Préface 4, p. 5. 40. “Justice et vérité; voila les prémiers devoirs de l’homme. Humanité, patrie, voila ses prémiéres affections. Toutes les fois que des ménagemens particuliers lui font changer cet ordre, il est coupable.” Lettre à d’Alembert, Préface 1, p. 3.

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  23

The Lettre à d’Alembert is the first book in which Rousseau appears on the scene emphatically as witness to the truth.41 The truth for which he stands is the truth of his teaching of the duties and rights of the citizen. In broader perspective, it is the teaching of the well-­ordered political community, of the dignity of the political, and of the fulfillment that can be achieved in political existence. Rousseau becomes the witness to this teaching not by setting out for Geneva in order to lead there the political life, which is based on and defined by the teaching of the citoyen. From the seclusion of his hermitage he as an author offers the fatherland and mankind an example of the good citizen. He is a partisan for the whole. He dispenses advice in a debate that concerns the weal and woe of the republic. The writing shows that the author is up to the task. It provides evidence that he knows how to consider the historical circumstances, economic presuppositions, and moral aspects of the matter at issue with circumspection, which is required for an appropriate political counsel. It illustrates that Rousseau has both the ability to do precise analysis of the situation and a clear idea of the principles by which his home city is able to orient itself. And, in addition, it makes him known as a theater critic of consequence, who knows by heart the plays of a Racine, Molière, or Voltaire, and who will perform brilliantly when arguing with critics in Paris or elsewhere about their dramatic works. In fact, Rousseau begins a dialogue with d’Alembert about tragedy and comedy, both ancient and modern. The penetrating interpretation 41. The motto Vitam impendere vero, which Rousseau publicizes in his first book about Geneva, can be read in capital letters on the title page of Lettres écrites de la montagne, his second and last book about Geneva. In the second paragraph of the Avertissement, Rousseau makes it clear that, as previously with the Lettre à d’Alembert, he is addressing as broad a public as conceivable: “Rien de moins important pour le public, j’en conviens, que la matiere de ces Lettres. La Constitution d’une petite République, le sort d’un petit particulier, l’exposé de quelques injustices, la réfutation de quelques sophismes; tout cela n’a rien en soi d’assez considérable pour mériter beaucoup de Lecteurs: Mais si mes sujets sont petits mes objets sont grands, et dignes de l’attention de tout honnête homme. Laissons Genève à sa place, et Rousseau dans sa dépression; mais la Religion, mais la liberté, la justice! voila, qui que vous soyez, ce qui n’est pas au dessous de vous.” And the third paragraph comes to speak about the truth and the question concerning what discourse might be fitting with which to speak of it: “Réduit au triste emploi de me défendre moi-­même, j’ai du me borner à raisonner; m’échauffer eut été m’avilir. J’aurai donc trouvé grace en ce point devant ceux qui s’imaginent qu’il est essenciel à la vérité d’être dite froidement; opinion que pourtant j’ai peine à comprendre. Lorsqu’une vive persuasion nous anime, le moyen d’employer un langage glacé? Quand Archimede tout transporté couroit nud dans les rues de Syracuse, en avoit-­il moins trouvé la vérité parce qu’il se passionnoit pour elle? Tout au contraire, celui qui la sent ne peut s’abstenir de l’adorer; celui qui demeure froid ne l’a pas vue.” Lettres écrites de la montagne, pp. 685–­86.

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of the Misanthrope that the Lettre à d’Alembert presents alone sufficed to demonstrate Rousseau’s knowledge and valuation of the theater. Rousseau opposes the construction of a theater in Geneva, not because he thinks little of the theater, but rather because he knows how to make political judgments and that means how to make distinctions. What is good for Rousseau is not necessarily good for Geneva. This is completely at odds with the universalism of the mathematician to whom the Lettre is addressed. He universalizes what is conducive to him to what is right for Everyman. To the enlightener’s zeal of spreading philosophy throughout Geneva and everywhere,42 Rousseau 42. D’Alembert makes known the thrust of his article about Geneva through its structure. Of the 43 paragraphs composing the text, the 23rd, by far the longest, is devoted to the project of building a theater in Geneva. It follows immediately the most blatant flattery of Rousseau’s native city in the center of the article (“Il n’y a peut-­être point de ville où il y ait plus de mariages heureux; Geneve est sur ce point à deux cents ans de nos mœurs,” 22) and praises Geneva as “le séjour de la Philosophie et de la liberté,” a distinction that is prepared for in the 4th paragraph and strengthened in the 36th. From the last 13 paragraphs, which form the most extensive part of the article, the reader can gather what d’Alembert has in mind with his proposal. He treats most pointedly “la Religion de Geneve” (31). At the outset d’Alembert says: “c’est la partie de cet article qui interesse peut-­être le plus les Philosophes” (31, my emphasis), and in the end identifies himself as a “Philosophe” (43), the only two uses of the term in the article. The theater would be an appropriate instrument to strengthen the influence of the “Philosophes,” and staging the plays of a Voltaire could contribute to overcoming and historically superseding the only remaining distinction that, as d’Alembert emphasizes, still separates “le Christianisme de Geneve” from a “pur Déisme” (39). The only two authors d’Alembert mentions by name and quotes verbatim are Tacitus and Voltaire. A quotation from Tacitus’s Germania concludes the part about the government (14), whereas Voltaire comes to speak in the part about religion (36). It is reserved for him to adduce the fact that his Essai sur l’histoire universelle, despite its containing a criticism of Calvin (“que Calvin avoit une ame atroce”), could be published in Geneva “avec l’approbation publique” as evidence of the progress of human reason (“Ce n’est pas, dit M. de Voltaire, un petit exemple du progrès de la raison humaine”). “Geneva” is for d’Alembert what “Germania” was for Tacitus. But he avails himself of the comparative criticism and contrasting praise no longer with a view toward a particular political community, but rather with the intention of serving the progress of mankind and of advancing the assertion of universal claims. The decisive difference between the historians Tacitus and Voltaire is based upon the historical power of Christianity. It is the presupposition and starting point for d’Alembert’s political project. Rousseau expresses in a subtle way that he has understood the devices of  which d’Alembert avails himself. He uses the first part of the Lettre à d’Alembert for a political defense of the Genevan pastors and a complex philosophic statement about Christianity in order thereafter, in the 11th paragraph, to engage with d’Alembert’s proposal: “Je n’exposerai point ici mes conjectures sur les motifs qui vous ont pu porter à nous proposer un établissement si contraire à nos maximes. Quelles que soient vos raisons, il ne s’agit pour moi que des nôtres, et tout ce que

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  25

opposes in the preface the double appeal to the zeal of the patriot. And at its center stands the sentence: “J’écrivois pour ma patrie.”43 With the Lettre à d’Alembert Rousseau casts himself in the role of the patriot of Geneva, but the drama he brings to the stage, the didactic plays of political action animated by the spirit of the republic, is a drama for the world. The witness whose example ought to support the teaching of the good citizen speaks to mankind, to whom this teaching is directed before, in, and after the Lettre: in 1750 in the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, in 1755 in the Discours sur l’inégalité as well as in the Économie politique, then in 1762 in Du contrat social, 1764 in the Lettres écrites de la montagne, in the posthumously published Projet de constitution pour la Corse from 1765, and finally in the Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne from 1771. Geneva, Corsica, Poland are cases, concretizations, representatives of a principled conception that Rousseau illustrates with the Lettre and that he pursues in his œuvre up to the very end, in order to unfold it more richly and to think it through anew. Still, he is already at work at the time of the Lettre à d’Alembert on extending his teaching. In the Nouvelle Héloïse and Émile, which appeared in 1761 and 1762, respectively, Rousseau complements the political existence of the citoyen, who realizes his happiness as part of the moi commun in the unity of the republic, with the possibility of the successful existence of lovers who, in the best case, find an encompassing unity and a kind of self-­sufficiency. And he designs, once again for “les hommes vulgaires,” the option of a moral existence that seeks je me perméttrai de dire à votre égard, c’est que vous serez surement le premier Philosophe* qui jamais ait excité un peuple libre, une petite ville, et un Etat pauvre, à se charger d’un spectacle public.” Rousseau adds a footnote that must remain obscure for any reader who does not know how to read d’Alembert’s article as Rousseau knew how to read it: “*De deux célebres Historiens, tous deux Philosophes, tous deux chers à M. d’Alembert, le moderne seroit de son avis, peut-­être; mais Tacite qu’il aime, qu’il médite, qu’il daigne traduire, le grave Tacite qu’il cite si volontiers, et qu’à l’obscurité près il imite si bien quelquefois, en eut-­il été de même?” (Lettre à d’Alembert, p. 14, corrected following the first edition, my emphasis). This is a beautiful example illustrating that philosophers who master the art of careful writing are used to writing as they read. D’Alembert replied in 1759 in his Lettre à M. Rousseau, Citoyen de Geneve. Although the text was more than twice as long as the article about Geneva, d’Alembert again divided it into 43 paragraphs. But after Rousseau’s criticism, the weighting of the main issue is exactly the reverse: The most extensive part by far treats the theater, its significance for the Enlightenment, for philosophers, and for the progress of mankind (paragraphs 5–­36), whereas now for the confrontation over religion in Geneva, for which “la plupart de nos Lecteurs” (42) have scarcely any interest, only a single paragraph is used: the penultimate and by far the longest of the reply . . . 43. Lettre à d’Alembert, Préface 6, p. 6. D’Alembert’s “zéle” appears in paragraph 2, Rousseau’s “zéle” in paragraphs 5 and 6 of the 11 paragraphs that make up the preface.

26  Chapter One

to cultivate its inner unity in the midst of a depraved society, in a society for which the concepts patrie and citoyen no longer have any meaning.44 To this extension of his teaching, which indicates different possibilities for different natures in different circumstances and different historical conditions, there corresponds the turn to autobiography in the Confessions, which originated in the years 1764–­70. The witness to the truth now has to stand for something more and other than the teaching of the good political community. The example of political action, which the citizen of Geneva offered with the Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, does not suffice to support the multifactored, comprehensive teaching of the 1760s and the claim bound up with it. It is not sufficient to promote the effect of the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard, which Rousseau included in the fourth book of Émile and which he highlights in the Troisième promenade as a work for posterity, “which may one day make a revolution among men, if good sense and good faith are ever reborn among them.”45 In order to confirm equally the widely diverging conceptions of the citizen and of the lovers and to gain the authority that the doctrine of moral existence required for its authentication, Rousseau had to begin more deeply and show himself in a fuller, brighter light. He endeavors to do precisely this with the portrait he draws of himself in the Confessions, supported by his awareness of being le meilleur des hommes, when seen as whole.46 But the picture of the witness to the truth will be definitively fixed only in the Dialogues, which present the author before the future reader as l’homme de la nature éclairé par la raison.47 The Dialogues bring Rousseau’s œuvre to a conclusion—­and thus in the real sense prepare the Rêveries.— Like no other book of Rousseau’s, the Dialogues: Rousseau juge de Jean-­ Jacques have the effect of the œuvre in view. They contain the most far-­ reaching investigation of the question of the ideal reader. And nowhere else does Rousseau treat with comparable urgency what can make access difficult for the addressees of his work and what can deprive them of gaining from his teaching. Whereas the rhetoric of the Rêveries postulates that the author and the reader are one, the Dialogues, which immediately precede the Rêveries, split Jean-­Jacques Rousseau in two. Rousseau the reader debates about Jean-­ Jacques the author, whom he at first knows only from his writings, with an interlocutor named “le François,” who under the influence of public opinion 44. Cf. Émile I, pp. 249–­50 and 266. 45. III, 17 (1018). 46. Les Confessions X, p. 517. 47. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 864.

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  27

has long refused to read the writings of Jean-­Jacques. Finally, Rousseau succeeds in winning over “the Frenchman,” who embodies in the Dialogues the moral man and nonerotic reader, to a well-­intended reading and a favorable evaluation of Jean-­Jacques. At no point, however, does Rousseau’s opponent become the judge, either of Jean-­Jacques or of  Rousseau. As the title succinctly expresses, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau is his own judge. He recognizes no judge over himself, whoever it may be. Translated into the hermeneutic constellation of the Dialogues and stated about the three dialogues as a whole that Rousseau carries on with the Frenchman: Only Rousseau the reader, who knows how to understand the writings of  Jean-­Jacques and recognizes himself in them, is able and authorized to judge  Jean-­Jacques the author, who wrote them for a kindred nature. By contrast, the Frenchman illustrates, on the one hand, the obstacle that public opinion about author and work presents to the future reception, if the intelligent reader is not able—­in conjunction with the author himself  48—­to have an advantageous influence on it. On the other hand, he brings conspicuously to the fore, by means of a contrasting comparison with his interlocutor, what characterizes the ideal reader and necessarily distinguishes him from the ordinary reader. The dialogues begin in the middle of the action. They have a prehistory, of which we are informed only by its result. Both the report the Frenchman gives Rousseau about the monster Jean-­Jacques and the judgment about Jean-­Jacques that Rousseau reaches precede the dialogues whose witness we become. The judge of  Jean-­Jacques could take everything essential from his writings. His judgment is confirmed by the later encounter with the author; it is based upon the careful study of the œuvre. It goes back to a reading not diverted by any nasty gossip about the author, not marred by any allegation about the work. For Rousseau only recently arrived in France and was just now informed by the Frenchman about the shamefulness of  Jean-­Jacques, about the judgment of the authorities, about what the “Messieurs” say. He found himself in the privileged position of a stranger, whom nothing would prejudice in his concentration on the œuvre and the intention of the author. He had not had to work his way through the thicket of a complicated history of reception and had 48. What holds for the reader of the œuvre and for the author of the Dialogues is true within the Dialogues for Rousseau the reader and Jean-­Jacques the author, whom Rousseau visited in Paris at exactly the time when, as Rousseau reports in the second dialogue, he was working on the Dialogues and thus was writing down what Rousseau communicates to the Frenchman about the visit with Jean-­Jacques and his writing down of the text (Rousseau juge de Jean-­ Jacques II, p. 836).

28  Chapter One

not, on the path to an adequate understanding, needed to account to himself for the directives and prejudices of the most diverse parties, the impressive list of whom, stretching from the Enlighteners via politicians to theologians, is not close to exhausted with the mention of  “doctors” and “women,” and in the light of the historical experience in each case can be continued, adapted, actualized. But the course of action leaves no doubt that “Rousseau’s” judgment is in no way tied to a privileged position of immediacy. In fact, one of the lessons the Dialogues have to offer is that the reader for whom “Jean-­Jacques” writes knows how to escape from influence by a third party, how to overcome historical resistances, how to liberate himself from unfavorable conditions of understanding, or that the ideal reader is in principle possible at all times. If Rousseau had been instructed earlier that the œuvre of  Jean-­Jacques was the work of a monster, he would no more have been kept from reading Jean-­ Jacques’s writings than, instructed by the Frenchman, he is kept from seeking out the monster between the first and second dialogues, in order to see with his own eyes for whom the verdict of the “Messieurs” holds in truth. In contrast with the Frenchman, who lets others dictate to him and has to let others dictate to him what is most important, Rousseau relies solely on what he himself sees and reads. To see with his own eyes and to read carefully are for him two sides of the same coin. In the conception of the Dialogues, whose determining verb is “voir” and whose last words are “les yeux,” the two activities belong together to such an extent that in Rousseau’s case, in the eyes of the author and in view of the readers, they can nearly stand in for one another.49 The principle of the unity of author and work, to which both interlocutors are committed, but of  which they make use in different ways, forms the basis for the course of the action. Rousseau bases his knowledge of the author on his knowledge of the work. He knows that the monster, as the Frenchman depicts Jean-­Jacques, cannot be the author of the writings he has read. From this he infers that Jean-­Jacques is either not the author or not the monster public opinion would have him appear to be. Rousseau defers judgment about Jean-­Jacques 49. The verb “voir” appears five hundred times in the Dialogues. Its frequency surpasses—­ after “faire” and “pouvoir”—­that of all the other verbs by far. The final use refers to Jean-­Jacques, about whom Rousseau says at the end of the book, anticipating the end of the author: “Ajoûtons y de plus la douceur de voir encore deux cœurs honnêtes et vrais s’ouvrir au sien. Temperons ainsi l’horreur de cette solitude où l’on le force de vivre au milieu du genre humain. Enfin sans faire en sa faveur d’inutiles efforts qui pourroient causer de grands desordres et dont le sucçés même ne le toucheroit plus, ménageons-­lui cette consolation pour sa derniére heure que des mains amies lui ferment les yeux.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, p. 976.

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until he has seen him. For the Frenchman the judgment at the beginning of the dialogue is beyond question. He abides by what he has heard about the œuvre and about Jean-­Jacques. Since he has neither read the writings nor seen Jean-­Jacques, he harbors no doubt about the unity of author and work. For him the unity is based on hearsay, on ignorance, on belief. Consequently, the dialogue has the task of defending the principle of the unity of author and work in such a way that Jean-­Jacques is identified as the author and that the Frenchman’s judgment about Jean-­Jacques is refuted. The importance the Dialogues attribute to the task of correcting the judgment about the person of the author becomes evident from the action. The crimes with which the “Messieurs” charge Jean-­Jacques prevent the Frenchman from engaging with any of his writings. At the end of the first dialogue, the Frenchman declares himself ready to want to read Jean-­Jacques, while Rousseau takes a close look at Jean-­ Jacques. Yet there is still a need for the second and by far longest dialogue, in which Rousseau gives a report about his visit with Jean-­Jacques and shows his character and way of life in another light, so that the Frenchman, secluded in the countryside, finally begins a more than merely cursory reading, the gain from which he expands in the third dialogue. The person Jean-­Jacques moves to the center of the action to the degree that opinion about the person turns out to be a hurdle or help for the œuvre. The Dialogues are the attempt to invalidate the judgment established by “all the judges of  Jean-­Jacques” and supersede it with Rousseau’s judgment.50 If the Dialogues appoint Rousseau as the only legitimate judge of the work as well as of the person of  Jean-­Jacques, they assign to the reader of the book the double task of measuring his own reading against “Rousseau” and becoming the judge of “the Frenchman.” They invite and challenge him to self-­knowledge. From the outset Rousseau has made an effort to moderate the Frenchman’s moral indignation and rein in his enmity toward Jean-­Jacques.51 To unsettle his prejudiced opinion, he tries, using a bold exposition, to get the Frenchman to understand that Jean-­Jacques could appear to him as a monster because the strange and singular Jean-­Jacques belongs to a world to which the Frenchman has no access. Rousseau projects the image of “an ideal world, similar to ours yet altogether different,” and populates it with beings he later calls, playing on 50. Cf. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 761 and III, p. 938. 51. Immediately following the opening of the dialogue, in which he seems to share completely the Frenchman’s indignation, Rousseau already warns: “Soyons justes, même avec les méchans.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 667.

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Plato’s Phaedrus, “mes êtres surlunaires.”52 The inhabitants of the world into which Rousseau grants a glimpse are different from the men with whom the Frenchman is familiar from his world, both as regards their capabilities and passions and as regards the interests that unite them and the purposes they consider as decisive. Their souls are filled with enthusiasm above all by the contemplation of nature, to which they are devoted in every way. Their action is determined by the principle of amour de soi. Mindful of their fundamental independence, they do not harbor any intention of acquiring wealth, of gaining recognition by the many, or of ruling. Instead of striving for a higher rank or a prominent position in the social order, they focus “all the powers of their soul” on achieving the “état celeste,” which is “the sole object of all their wishes.” The superlunary beings are favored by nature. It keeps them in the state proper to them, so that “their soul maintains forever its original character,” or it en­ ables them, by virtue of their own insight, to seek out that state, to return to it, or to create it in the first place. To sum up, the inhabitants of the “monde idéal” are kept “by nature and by reason” from losing themselves in the conventions of society and orientating their life toward opinion, according to the judgment of an authority. Rather, they lead and enjoy this life so “that they do each day what appears good for themselves and right for others, without regard for the valuations of men and the caprices of opinion.” The Frenchman interrupts Rousseau’s description of the “monde idéal” only once, in order to announce his lack of understanding. What, he interjects, could the “êtres fantastiques” Rousseau depicts have in common with the “monster” that “we were just talking about”? The world to which the author of the incriminated writings belongs remains so inaccessible to the Frenchman that to him it seems it can neither make him think nor awaken his curiosity. He literally does not know how to pose a question about it. This also holds for the concluding part of the description, in which Rousseau states the reason for the Frenchman’s lack of understanding: The special imprint “in the expression of their feelings and their ideas,” which unites and distinguishes the inhabitants of the “monde idéal,” must escape the notice of one who, like the Frenchman, has no conception of the “maniére d’être” under discussion in Rousseau’s allegory, while that way of being cannot escape the notice of those who “know it and are themselves affected by it.” Rousseau goes so far in this highly remarkable passage as to speak of a “signe caracteristique” “by which the initiates recognize one another.” Initiates are the “inhabitants of the ideal world,” not 52. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, pp. 668–­73, 686; cf. II, pp. 815, 829, 840, 849, 851, 854, 864.

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because they would have been introduced to a secret teaching. The sign of recognition has nothing to do with doctrinal content, with a formula to be taught, or with a slogan that has to be learned. For “it cannot be counterfeit and can never act except at the level of its source.” It manifests itself most unmistakably “in the entire conduct of life.” Likewise, it can be read off the writings of the superlunary beings, since what the sign refers to finds its expression in both, in life as in the work. “Initiés” are thus the “inhabitants of the enchanted world” on the basis of their “maniére d’être.” It grants them access to a world in which they encounter beings who, as “singularly constituted” as they themselves are, have something in common with them, which reaches more deeply than everything that human power can produce or human opinion can alter. The Frenchman responds to the report with the suspicion that Rousseau could be one of the inhabitants of the described world. Playing a role in the Frenchman’s response might be the fact that when Rousseau concerned himself in the final section of his speech with those inhabitants’ writings, he asserted their public utility. And it will not be reckoned of little significance that Rousseau calls the world so alien to the Frenchman “ideal” and in addition speaks of an “enchanted world.” But what the “author of Émile and Héloïse,” whom Rousseau recognizes “without the slightest doubt” to be one of the inhabitants, has to do with this world is a puzzle to the Frenchman now as it was before.53 When measured against the Frenchman’s lack of understanding, the allegory of the “monde idéal” appears to be a failure. In accord with this, Rousseau immediately gives the conversation a new turn and brings into play the assumption that the author and Jean-­Jacques are not the same person, so that he can concentrate first on the author and his writings. When measured against what the allegory shows the reader of the dialogue and gives him to understand, however, it is the opposite of a failure. In the Frenchman’s lack of understanding, the allegory makes his limits visible, for which the allegory offers elucidation and classification. With an object of the greatest importance, it demonstrates how the action should be read in light of the speeches and how the speeches are modified, concretized, commented on through the action. By an example that is more than an example, the reader learns at the beginning what he has to direct his attention to all the way to the end of the book if he wants to live up to the task the author has thought out for him, namely, of proving to be a friend or judge of “Rousseau,” of “the Frenchman,” and of  himself. The description of the “monde idéal” sets the tone for the Dialogues and opens, in reverse direction, a wide-­ranging perspective on the œuvre. Nowhere 53. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 673.

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has Rousseau treated the problem of the philosopher among nonphilosophers so vividly and delicately. Nowhere has he expressed more strikingly that the philosophic author and the philosophic reader are not bound and separated by history, but operate within a single space. And nowhere has he more emphatically spoken of what brings them together and causes them to recognize each another. Yet, just as in the title of the Rêveries Rousseau will abstain from referring to the activity that is characteristic of the Promeneur Solitaire, except for pointing to it enigmatically, “Rousseau” refrains from translating the characteristic sign of the “inhabitants” of his allegorical world into a concept or referring to it by an ordinary name. Those for whom the allegory is meant do not need the translation, and the others would be left with—­a name.54 Instead, he shows the power of the “characteristic sign” in his own case, decisive for the Dialogues, namely, his encounter with the œuvre of Jean-­Jacques. In a “digression” of the first dialogue,55 Rousseau reports how fundamentally his reading of Jean-­Jacques’s writings changed his life. The report is linked even in the details of its formulation to the description of the “monde idéal,” without thereby losing sight of the opinion, the belief, the ability of the Frenchman to comprehend. The key term of the “digression” is seul. Rousseau was alone—­“I found myself alone in the midst of the multitude, as much because of my ideas as because of my feelings”—­until he found himself in the writings of  Jean-­Jacques. “I recognized in his writings the man I found in myself, and meditating on them taught me to find within myself the enjoyment and happiness that all others seek so far from themselves.” Rousseau, who finds himself in the writings of  Jean-­Jacques, is no longer alone, since he recognizes in Jean-­ Jacques a kindred nature. In his confrontation with Jean-­Jacques, he experiences the liberating and gladsome force that grows from the “interest in the truth” and at the same time gives it wings, an interest that animates him as well. From this point forward he harbors the hope of leading a life in “commerce” with the author, filled by friendship and contemplation.56 If, on the contrary, the Frenchman were correct and were per impossibile to take the author of the 54. In advance of the eleven paragraphs in which he presents his allegory, Rousseau places a short paragraph: “Je m’expliquerai: mais ce sera prendre le soin le plus inutile ou le plus superflu: car tout ce que je vous dirai ne sauroit être entendu que par ceux à qui l’on n’a pas besoin de le dire.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 668. 55. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, pp. 727–­31. 56. “je me livrois à l’espoir de retrouver en lui tout ce que j’avois perdu, de gouter encor les douceurs d’une amitié sincere, et de me nourrir encore avec lui de ces grandes et ravissantes contemplations qui font la meilleure jouissance de cette vie et la seule consolation solide qu’on trouve dans l’adversité.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 729.

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writings away from Rousseau, Rousseau would again be alone. “Rousseau” would then find himself in the position Rousseau evokes in the first sentence of the Rêveries. He would be “alone on earth.”57 Let us return from the world of the superlunary beings and their love objects,58 which will still be of concern to us in another context, back to the realm of the Frenchman, in which there is no place for philosophic eros. The Frenchman hates Jean-­Jacques, because he hates evil. He approves of the conspiracy—­he is also an “initiate”—­the “Messieurs” have set in motion against the monster in order to protect mankind, as one has to protect it against a wild animal.59 He is most of all amazed by the persecutors’ clemency;60 the persecution certainly comports with his moral attitude. Morality must be enforced, the wicked must be fought against, and he who stands outside of society may not hope for mercy. “Does he who is in no way human deserve to be treated as a man?”61 The labeling of the philosopher as a monster, freighted as it is with moral indignation, unleashes a dangerous explosive force.62 The urgency and 57. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 729. 58. Cf. Plato, Symposium 177d7–­8; Theages 128b2–­4; Phaedrus 257a6–­b6. 59. “Oui, Monsieur, on veut qu’il vive, et même agréablement, autant qu’il est possible à un méchant sans mal faire: on voudroit qu’il ne manquât à son bonheur, que les moyens de troubler celui des autres. Mais c’est un Ours qu’il faut enchaîner de peur qu’il ne dévore les passans.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 716. 60. “Je hais J. J., nos Messieurs l’aiment, ils veulent le conserver à tout prix.” In the third dialogue, the Frenchman in retrospect confesses: “je ne doutois pas un moment que J. J. ne fut un détestable hypocrite et un monstre qui n’eut jamais dû naitre.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, pp. 721–­22; III, p. 928. 61. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 732. 62. The first sentence of the speech of July 1, 1762, in which the Syndic of the theological faculty of the Sorbonne called upon the theologians to prepare a detailed Censure of Émile assimilates Rousseau to the “godless men or rather to the monsters” promised by the apocalypse of the last age. The accuser designates Rousseau as the author of a “monstrous philosophy” and accuses him of being out “to become famous,” by “making his name immortal through great crimes and destroying our temples as another Herostratus and turning them into dust.” He sets the faculty colleagues the task: “que vous fassiez connoître, non-­seulement à cette Capitale, mais à l’Univers entier, que cet Auteur n’est qu’un Philosophe en délire.” And he goes yet a step further and calls Rousseau’s teachings “diabolic”: “Pourquoi, en effet, n’appellerions-­nous pas diabolique ce que dans son livre cet Auteur sacrilége vomit d’une bouche impie contre Dieu, contre la Loi naturelle, contre la possibilité, la nécessité, les caractères de la Révélation, contre les moyens infaillibles de la connoître, contre les Miracles et les Prophéties, contre la Doctrine révelée et l’intolérantisme que la vraie Religion professe. Blasphêmes horribles, que nul homme ne peut entendre sans indignation, si Dieu ne l’a livré à cet aveuglement d’esprit et à ce sens dépravé qui font prendre le mal pour le bien et le bien pour le mal, l’erreur pour la vérité et la

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the primary aim of the political education the Frenchman needs are thus obvious. After the failure of the attempt by means of the allegory of the “monde idéal” to achieve a modicum of respect from the interlocutor for a being who belongs to “another” world, or at least caution in judgment about a way of life the “ordinary man” does not know, Rousseau begins anew. He treats the case on a general human level and argues almost completely ad hominem. He starts from the Frenchman’s beliefs, has recourse to justice and equity, to rectitude and sincerity, appeals to virtue and conscience, accord with oneself and the prospect for glory.63 The education of the Frenchman is accomplished in several steps. First, he must learn to respect the basic rules of legality and not to disparage them, certain of the moral superiority of one’s own cause, as “judicial formalities.” This is true especially for the claim to a judicial hearing, which is accorded to every criminal defendant and without which no one may be convicted of a crime.64 He learns in addition that it is more difficult than he wanted to believe “to see a man exactly as he is when one has a fixed opinion about him in advance, whether it be good or bad.” The obstacle to arriving at a correct understanding and consequently an appropriate judgment in such a case leads Rousseau back to “the natural game of amour-­propre”: “one sees what one believes and not what one sees.”65 Whereas the author instructs the reader in passing, as it were, regarding one of the natural difficulties of philosophizing,66 Rousseau confronts the Frenchman in this crucial phase of the dialogue with the anthropological determination that will undermine and finally destroy confidence in the judgment of the “judges of Jean-­Jacques.” Rousseau unsettles the belief of the Frenchman that the “Messieurs” were guided by unselfish motives. He directs the Frenchman’s gaze to amour-­propre, which lies concealed behind their care for the common good and their supposed goodwill toward Jean-­Jacques. He explains to him that the crimes of the “monster” are not the vérité pour l’erreur, les ténébres pour la lumiere et la lumiere pour les ténébres.” Censure de la Faculté de Théologie de Paris, Contre le Livre qui a pour titre, Émile ou de l’Éducation (Paris: P. Al. Le Prieur, 1762), pp. 4, 6, 9, 11, 12. The speech of the Syndic comprises pages 4–­14, the Censure is printed on pages 15–­351. 63. Cf. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, pp. 696, 721, 751, 756, 759, 762 and especially III, pp. 973–­74. 64. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, pp. 731–­40, 743. 65. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, pp. 741, 742. 66. “On cherche toujours à se justifier ses propres sentimens; c’est encore une disposition très naturelle. On s’efforce à trouver haïssable ce qu’on hait, et s’il est vrai que l’homme prévenu voit ce qu’il croit, il l’est bien plus encore que l’homme passionné voit ce qu’il desire.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 742.

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result of  “the most extravagant amour-­propre,” which the public attributes to the philosopher, but rather it is conversely the “singularity” of the philosopher that arouses the “amour-­propre of the public” against him.67 Amour-­propre, which fundamentally determines the existence of sociable man, asserts its influence all the way up to the demand for the highest justice and for the universally binding force of obligation. The peripety of the dialogue is reached when the Frenchman has to concede how strongly amour-­propre has shaped his own attitude toward Jean-­Jacques. In response to Rousseau’s question of what he might feel if he were to imagine for a moment the possibility that Jean-­Jacques might in the end be recognized everywhere as innocent and he were compelled to bestow respect on the one finally vindicated and had to reproach himself for the harsh judgments he let fall on Jean-­Jacques, the Frenchman replies: “I would then hate him even more, perhaps, for my wrongs than I hate him now for his crimes: I would never forgive him my injustice toward him.”68 Rousseau prepares the admission by attending persistently to the Frenchman’s amour-­propre and making optimal use of it. In the same way he brings about the ultimate separation from the persecutors. Can the Frenchman be indifferent to whether Rousseau applauds him or denies him every kind of “admiration,” as long as he offers a hand in the persecution of  Jean-­Jacques? His rectitude is tested. His sincerity is put into question. Is it compatible with his conscience that injustice is done to an innocent and he participates in it? Does he not have duties toward himself ? Does his opinion have less weight than the opinion of the “Messieurs”? Or must he fail to provide an answer to Rousseau’s question concerning his own opinion?69 The Frenchman wants to be respected by Rousseau as an “honnête homme.” He would like not to have to reproach himself for anything. He wants to be at peace with himself. He tries to satisfy the claims that his belief and his morality impose upon him. He is of good will and within the bounds of his possibilities open to arguments—­the best case that can be assumed with

67. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, pp. 755, 757, 768; cf. II, p. 886. 68. The Frenchman adds: “Je me reproche cette disposition, j’en rougis; mais je la sens dans mon cœur malgré moi.” Rousseau replies: “Homme véridique et franc, je n’en veux pas davantage, et je prends acte de cet aveu pour vous le rappeller en tems et lieu; il me suffit pour le moment de vous y laisser réfléchir. Au reste consolez-­vous de cette disposition qui n’est qu’un developement des plus naturels de l’amour-­propre. Elle vous est commune avec tous les juges de J. J. avec cette difference que vous serez le seul peut-­être qui ait le courage et la franchise de l’avouer.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 761. 69. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, pp. 751, 756, 759, 771.

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an “ordinary man” or “vulgar soul.”70 By the end of the first dialogue Rousseau has encouraged the Frenchman’s emancipation from his informants and uncertainty about their judgment to such an extent71 that the interlocutor for the first time shows his readiness to read the writings of Jean-­Jacques. He explicitly approves Rousseau’s project of seeking out Jean-­Jacques in order to form his own judgment about the one ostracized. But nothing can motivate the Frenchman himself to make such a move. Neither striving for knowledge and clarity nor the prospect of gaining a friend, which motivate Rousseau, will do it, nor even the expectation of undertaking “noble research,” as Rousseau commends the project to him.72 To see with his own eyes means so little to him that he literally does not know what seeing and knowing mean. Seeing and hearing amount to the same thing for him.73 An investigation or a report of an investigation, this makes no real difference to him.74 Therefore, his opinion remains, however much he might insist on it following his encounter with Rousseau, essentially the opinion of others. The same holds for his reading. Not only does he begin to read Jean-­Jacques’s writings seriously only after what he hears from Rousseau about his visit with Jean-­Jacques has decisively changed his attitude toward the person of the author, but Rousseau also—­sit venia verbo—­gives him the eyes with which he will read the œuvre. The second dialogue serves this purpose of preparing the Frenchman for his reading. It contains Rousseau’s apology for Jean-­Jacques before tout le monde. 70. Cf. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 672; II, p. 829. 71. “Écoutez: je n’aime pas J. J. mais je hais encor plus l’injustice, encor plus la trahison. Vous m’avez dit des choses qui me frappent et auxquelles je veux refléchir.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, pp. 771–­72. 72. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 762. 73. To Rousseau’s question why he would never seek out Jean-­Jacques to make up his own mind about him, the Frenchman answers: “Oh moi, je n’avois pas besoin de le voir pour le connoitre. Je le connois par ses œuvres; c’en est assez et meme trop.” Since the Frenchman admittedly never read the writings of Jean-­Jacques, the “œuvres” he claims to know are Jean-­ Jacques’s deeds, which he knows about exclusively through hearsay. After the Frenchman has asked Rousseau at the beginning of the second dialogue to let him hear the judgment Rousseau has reached with his investigation of the way of life of Jean-­Jacques, he says: “Voyons donc.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 771 and II, p. 772. 74. Rousseau expresses the difference clearly enough: “Ce que j’ai vu est meilleur à voir qu’à dire. Ce que j’ai vu me suffit, à moi qui l’ai vu, pour determiner mon jugement, mais non pas à vous pour déterminer le votre sur mon rapport; car il a besoin d’être vu pour être cru, et après la façon dont vous m’aviez prévenu je ne l’aurois pas cru moi-­même sur le rapport d’autrui.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, p. 797. Unlike Rousseau, the Frenchman will believe what he himself has not seen.

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With the long, circumspectively presented apology, Rousseau repeats the attempt he previously undertook with the brief allegory of the world of the philosophers, which demanded too much of his immediate addressee. Like the description of the “monde idéal,” the defense of  Jean-­Jacques rests on the “singularity,” the disturbing peculiarity of the being who, by reason of the superiority of his nature and the independence of  his life, is branded as a “monster.” The defense aims to transform the Frenchman’s indignation into awe and vanquish his hostility through the honor that he is able to earn as a benefactor and champion of a good cause. Rousseau stresses right at the outset of his report about Jean-­Jacques: “this man is like none other I know; he requires a separate analysis, made uniquely for him.”75 The analysis itself concentrates on Jean-­Jacques’s way of  being or of life. For on the one hand, the judgment about the “true character of a man” must be based on the exact observation of his way of life,76 and on the other, all the accusations brought against Jean-­Jacques in the end have his way of life in view. Rousseau traces the central accusation of misanthropy all the way back to the criticism that Diderot, “le philosophe Diderot,” leveled against his friend’s solitary existence at the moment of separation, after Rousseau’s “great revolution” and “reform,” Jean-­Jacques’s retreat into solitude. Four times in the most compact space Rousseau mentions Diderot’s name, and four times he prefixes the epithet “philosophe.”77 Diderot’s sentence from Le Fils naturel, which concentrated his criticism of  Jean-­ Jacques and carried it to the public as a poison arrow, Il n’y a que le méchant qui soit seul, Rousseau answers with the maxim: Quiconque se suffit à lui-­même ne veut nuire à qui que ce soit.78 This answer reaches far beyond the purposes of the apology and directs our attention again to the foundational questions 75. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 774. 76. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 784. Rousseau speaks repeatedly of  “sa constante maniére d’être” (pp. 784, 795), alternatively of “cette constante maniére d’être” (p. 792) or of “sa maniére de vivre” (pp. 791, 793). 77. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, pp. 789–­90. Still later, Rousseau mentions Diderot three times and in these cases refers to him, respectively, as “le philosophe Diderot,” “l’illustre Diderot,” and “le philosophe Diderot” (II, p. 843). 78. (“Only the wicked is alone.” “Whoever suffices to himself does not want to harm anyone at all.”) “Cette maxime est moins éclattante et moins arrogante, mais plus sensée et plus juste que celle du philosophe Diderot, et préférable au moins en ce qu’elle ne tend à outrager personne.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 790. Rousseau had opened his defense against the charge of misanthropy with the argument: “Non, Monsieur, le vrai misantrope, si un être aussi contradictoire pouvoit exister, ne fuiroit point dans la solitude; quel mal peut et veut faire aux hommes celui qui vit seul? Celui qui les hait veut leur nuire, et pour leur nuire il ne faut pas les fuir. Les

38  Chapter One

of the philosophic life, which Rousseau had treated allegorically. Precisely for this reason Rousseau cannot leave matters there. Instead, he draws upon two main arguments to justify Jean-­Jacques’s solitary way of life: Only in collecting himself in his reclusiveness could the œuvre come into being that Jean-­ Jacques worked on for the sake of public utility and with which he proved to be of the greatest service to mankind. But the solitude in which he has now lived for many years was forced upon him by his persecutors. In other words: Rousseau parries the accusation of misanthropy by asserting  Jean-­Jacques’s philanthropy, rightly understood.79 The apology traverses, it should be added, almost the complete catalogue of accusations, prejudices, and reservations that the philosopher encounters—­from his amorality to his partisanship, from his striving for domination to his enmity toward religion, from his poverty of feeling to his love of himself. As we have seen, Rousseau stakes everything on convincing the Frenchman of Jean-­Jacques’s harmlessness. He is a person persecuted who hardly presents a danger, cut off as he is from all substantive commerce, who spends his solitary life at the periphery of society and whose interest seems to be only in music and botany. A walker who prefers rêverie to réflexion and only too gladly gives himself over to his natural indolence does not need to cause the Frenchman any unease. Finally, no proof could be more striking than the enmity Jean-­Jacques drew down upon himself from the side of the philosophes. For, as Rousseau emphasizes, for the sect of the philosophes, whom  Jean-­Jacques repeatedly opposed publicly, and from whom he distances himself once again in his private conversation with Rousseau,80 the striving for méchans ne sont point dans les deserts, ils sont dans le monde” (II, p. 788). Consider Émile II, pp. 340–­41 Note and IV, p. 493. 79. Rousseau grants Jean-­Jacques himself the opportunity to speak: “Je quitterai volontiers, m’a-­t-­il dit, la societé des végétaux pour celle des hommes, au prémier espoir d’en retrouver.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 794. After the apology has progressed further, the Frenchman hears the following from Rousseau: “Du reste, quoique cette inclination pour la vie retirée et solitaire n’ait certainement rien de méchant et de misantrope, elle est neanmoins si singuliére que je ne l’ai jamais trouvée à ce point qu’en lui seul, et qu’il en falloit absolument démêler la cause précise, ou renoncer à bien connoitre l’homme dans lequel je la remarquois” (II, p. 812). 80. “je ne suis ni philosophe, ni austére . . .” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, 838. ( Jean-­ Jacques implicitly responds to an attack by d’Alembert, who placed at the front of his reply to the Lettre à d’Alembert a motto from La Fontaine’s fable Le Philosophe scythe, which compared Rousseau to the “philosophe austere” of the fable. La Fontaine says about him: “Celui-­ci retranche de l’âme / Désirs et passions, le bon et le mauvais, / Jusqu’aux plus innocens souhaits. / Contre de tells gens, quant à moi je réclame. / Ils ôtent à nos cœurs le principal ressort: / Ils

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  39

domination, enmity toward religion, and partisanship are in fact characteristic.81 Their impatience with the author Jean-­Jacques makes his œuvre appear in a more moderate and favorable light. It is no minor feat of Rousseau’s to make Jean-­Jacques’s enemies sworn witnesses for his defense. A kind of anthropological discourse takes up a substantial amount of space in the apology of the second dialogue. It deploys the fundamental determinations that Jean-­Jacques’s œuvre makes available in order to investigate and distinguish the homme de la nature and the homme de l’homme for the “separate analysis, made uniquely for him” that Jean-­Jacques requires. Rousseau applies to Jean-­Jacques the entire conceptual arsenal of amour de soi and amour-­ propre, bonté and vertu, sensibilité, imagination, and so on in order to show that he is an homme de la nature and with this to elucidate at the same time the homme de la nature of the œuvre using the individual example of the author. Rousseau inserts a thought experiment into the analysis with which he tries to show that Jean-­Jacques, independent of the events that befell him during his life, had to become who he is. He challenges the Frenchman to set aside for the moment all the details he has reported to him of Jean-­Jacques’s development and current circumstances and to investigate with Rousseau what naturally emerges and follows from the “temperament” of Jean-­Jacques. The thought experiment is suited to make vivid, if not to the Frenchman, nevertheless to the reader how, concerning what is most important, he can disengage himself from Rousseau’s report and thus go beyond mere hearsay.82 For the thought experiment demonstrates that an être fictif with Jean-­Jacques’s nature will out of inner necessity arrive at the way of life that characterizes Jean-­Jacques. Thus, Rousseau places the defense of solitary existence on another foundation. The discourse about Jean-­Jacques’s nature, however, is not limited to defense. It serves above all the authentication of the author as the witness to the truth. Jean-­Jacques suffices for himself. He follows the first movements of font cesser de vivre avant que l’on soit mort.” La Fontaine, Œuvres complètes I, ed. Jean-­Pierre Collinet [Paris, 1991], p. 493. See the—­tellingly inexact—­interpretation that the Frenchman later gives of d’Alembert’s motto, without mentioning the “philosophe austère,” III, p. 941.) Consider I, p. 669; II, pp. 789, 861. 81. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, pp. 886–­96; cf. I, p. 695 and III, pp. 970–­72. 82. “Pour mieux sentir cette necessité écartons un moment tous les faits, ne supposons connu que le temperament que je vous ai décrit, et voyons ce qui devroit naturellement en resulter dans un être fictif dont nous n’aurions aucune autre idée.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 820. The consideration of the “être fictif,” which comprises eleven paragraphs (II, pp. 820–­ 25), deserves detailed comparison with the description of the “monde idéal” (I, pp. 668–­73).

40  Chapter One

nature. Social depravity does not touch his core. “He is what nature made him: education has changed him very little.”83 The author recognizes in himself the standard he asserts in his teaching. He presents the greatest approximation to the man of nature that is possible under conditions of sociability. Put into a formula: l’homme de la nature éclairé par la raison. As soon as the “man of nature” directs himself as the witness to the truth to mankind, he robs himself of the protection that a life in obscurity guaranteed him. As soon as he mounts the stage as an author, he exposes himself to the risk of the political. From the perspective of peace and security, with respect to a simple life, measured against the man of nature’s undisturbed, immediate Beisichselbstsein, the witness to the truth, therefore, appears as Jean-­Jacques’s deviation from himself. Rousseau speaks of the “célébrité fatale” Jean-­Jacques achieved when, following his “ame expansive,” he embarked upon the literary path, and of the “unfortunate question of the Academy” that offered him the opportunity.84 On the other hand, the public role that quickly grew to be his let him overcome his natural indolence.85 Only the political and philosophical task, which challenged him with everything that was at his disposal, developed his particular capabilities: “he submitted his head to the fatigue of reflection, he learned to meditate profoundly.” And the same books that brought the persecutors onto the scene made and make it possible for the superlunary beings before and after him to recognize “him with joy as one of their own.”86 The third dialogue shows how the Frenchman reads the books of Jean-­ Jacques and what the effect of Rousseau’s apology has had on him. The monster belongs to the past. The author of the once detested writings now appears to the Frenchman as a philanthropist. He perceives the patriot from a distance, but he takes no further interest in him, as little as he does in the political theorist in the narrower sense. The Frenchman is no citoyen.87 Nevertheless, he believes he knows that Jean-­Jacques is the one man in the world who has the “truest respect for the laws” and feels the “greatest aversion to revolutions.”88 The Frenchman’s real discovery is the moralist, what actually interests him 83. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 799. 84. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, pp. 827, 828. 85. “J. J. est indolent, paresseux comme tous les contemplatifs.” “La vie contemplative dégoute de l’action.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, pp. 845, 822. 86. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 829; cf. II, p. 856 and I, p. 670. 87. The term “citoyen” is used in the Dialogues only twice, in a conventional and in a historical sense, first by the Frenchman (I, p. 710), subsequently by the author in a footnote to the text (I, p. 717n.), each time in the plural. Consider Pp. 25–26 with Footnote 44. 88. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, p. 935.

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  41

are virtue and goodness, which he finds embodied in the person and œuvre of the author or which he connects with both. As he tells Rousseau in hindsight, already with his first reading the books made a favorable, not at all questionable impression on him. He came to the conclusion that they contained “a doctrine as healthy as it was simple, which without Epicureanism and cant was directed only to the happiness of the human race.”89 Convinced of the dishonest intentions of the “Messieurs” who had so vehemently warned him against Jean-­Jacques’s writings, and apprehensive that he could rely on no one, that he could no longer have respect for anyone, that he must “come upon only wicked ones everywhere,” he sensed the wish growing within himself that at least Jean-­Jacques might not be wicked. When he begins after the second dialogue to read the writings anew, he secretly harbors the hope that they will give him back his belief in virtue and the good in man. This is exactly what transpires. In the end the Frenchman is convinced that he has found a truthful human being. And for him the person of the author stands in for the œuvre. Even if “his system” were to be false, this would alter nothing in the truthfulness of the writings of Jean-­Jacques. They are, therefore, protected against all “mimicry” by others. The character of Jean-­Jacques’s feeling and thinking is unmistakable. “Nothing is so contrary to the philosophic spirit of this century, into which his false imitators always fall back.” His sincerity and uprightness, the pluck with which he pursues his aim of correcting “us,” of protecting “us” from error, vice, and misery, distinguish Jean-­Jacques from his enemies and win over the Frenchman for him.90 Jean-­Jacques has become the witness to the truth for the Frenchman. Yet he has become so with an accent other than the one Rousseau had presented. According to the Frenchman’s understanding, the teaching Jean-­Jacques addresses to his readers arises immediately from the feeling and heart of the author. What he knows to say about nature is drawn from his inner truth,91 and this truth again stands or falls with the probity and rectitude of Jean-­Jacques or with the credibility the Frenchman can grant him. Therefore, the hardships Jean-­Jacques has taken upon himself, the torments he has suffered, are of the greatest importance for the Frenchman; the attacks to which 89. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, p. 930. 90. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, pp. 934, 935. 91. “D’où le peintre et l’apologiste de la nature aujourdui si défigurée et si calomniée peut-­il avoir tiré son modéle, si ce n’est de son propre cœur? Il l’a décrite comme il se sentoit lui-­ même . . . En un mot, il falloit qu’un homme se fut peint lui-­même pour nous montrer ainsi l’homme primitif et si l’Auteur n’eut été tout aussi singulier que ses livres, jamais il ne les eut écrits.” Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques III, p. 936.

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the author sees himself exposed by hedonists, atheists, and immoralists are regarded by the Frenchman as just so many proofs for the justice of his cause. Concerning his persecution and his passion, in the eyes of the Frenchman Jean-­Jacques does not need to shy away from any historical comparison: “His destiny is perhaps a unique example of all possible humiliations and of an almost invincible patience to endure them.” Nothing, so it seems, is able to authenticate the truth more effectively than martyrdom.92 The political education of the Frenchman bears fruit. Out of his initial hatred for Jean-­Jacques has come respect. The onetime persecutor even affirms at the conclusion that he wants to help so that the rich stock of unpublished manuscripts of the persecuted can be saved and the integrity of the œuvre can be secured for posterity. And if, unlike Rousseau, the homme ordinaire will never love Jean-­Jacques, Rousseau still achieves everything he can, given the nature of the interlocutor: the Frenchman learns to honor the author and the work.93 There are two general lessons to add: For one, the moderation of the pride in one’s own knowledge, especially where one is advertising his presumed knowledge at the expense of another; for another, the demand “to respect natural right in everything and always” and to distance oneself from moral claims that violate this right. The first of the two “great lessons” Rousseau formulates “for the public” takes up the most important insight the Frenchman attains in the Dialogues. At the end of the revaluation of his attitude toward Jean-­Jacques, he draws the consequence for himself from the experience of his error and his wrongdoing: “the memory of the illusion from which I am emerging leaves me with a great preventative against proud confidence in my own understand­ ing and against the sufficiency of false knowledge.”94 The taming of his pride, the lesson of modesty and caution the honnête homme receives, makes a potential ally of the philosopher out of the sworn enemy of the monster. In fact, the Frenchman changes sides. Not only does he no longer lend an ear to the allegations the “Messieurs” make against Jean-­Jacques, but in Rousseau’s presence he also accuses the persecutors on the basis of his knowledge and exposes their conspiracy. In doing so he overshoots the mark when he denounces the 92. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, p. 937. Cf. Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, p. 1002: “C’est le Décret contre ma personne, c’est mon Livre brûlé par le bourreau, que je transmets à la postérité pour pieces justificatives. Mes sentimens sont moins bien établis par mes Ecrits que par mes malheurs.” 93. “Je ne l’aimerai peut-­être jamais, parce que cela ne dépend pas de moi: mais je l’honore parce que je veux être juste, que je le crois innocent, et que je le vois opprimé.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, p. 937; cf. pp. 974–­75. 94. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, p. 973 (Rousseau) and p. 937 (le François).

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  43

philosophes as the worst enemies of Jean-­Jacques and awakens the impression that they were the sole or main persecutors and the accusation of monstrosity was their prerogative.95 In a footnote the author of the Dialogues reminds the attentive reader of the enmity he faced from the priests and theologians.96 That the Frenchman fixates on the persecution by the philosophes is due not only to the zeal of the renegade, a mixture of bad conscience, disappointment, and indignation about the abuse of his gullibility by the “Messieurs.” The philosophes’ enmity belongs as an indispensable contrast as well to the picture of Jean-­Jacques he depicts for himself. The enmity is an essential part of his new belief. For the picture he tries to match up with or adapt to the author and the œuvre remains in the most important respect based upon belief. The Frenchman firmly rejects Rousseau’s suggestion that he might visit Jean-­Jacques in order to gain his own knowledge—­“since you have neither seen nor studied him by yourself . . . that, according to me, is the only certain means to know him.”97 What he has read by Jean-­Jacques, heard from Rousseau, and learned from the “Messieurs” of their conspiracy is enough for him to offer an unequivocal confession: “As for myself, I want to make my straightforward confession to you at this point. I believe that J.-­J. is innocent and virtuous, and this belief is such, deep in my soul, that it has no need for any other confirmation.”98 The Frenchman either failed to hear or has long forgotten what Rousseau stated on the record in a way that was as provocative as it was precise in the first sentence of his report about Jean-­Jacques and what he later explicitly repeats: “according to me he is not a virtuous man.”99 The Frenchman is able to respect and 95. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, pp. 942–­46, 956–­69. “Si d’Alembert ou Diderot s’avisoient d’affirmer aujourdui qu’il a deux têtes, en le voyant passer demain dans la rue tout le monde lui verroit deux têtes très distinctement, et chacun seroit très surpris de n’avoir pas apperçu plustot cette monstruosité” (p. 961). See Footnote 62. 96. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau says in his own name about the priests of the Oratorian Order: “Dangereux ennemis s’il en fut jamais, non seulement à cause du corps qu’ils composent et des colléges qu’ils gouvernent; mais parce qu’ils savent encor mieux que les philosophes cacher leur animosité cruelle sous un air beat et doucereux.” Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 906n. 97. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, pp. 937–­39. The Frenchman answers: “Vous voyez que je suis plus avancé que vous dans votre propre recherche, puisqu’il vous reste à cet égard des scrupules que je n’ai plus. Non, Monsieur, je n’ai pas même besoin de voir J. J. pour savoir à quoi m’en tenir sur son compte” (III, p. 942). 98. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, p. 945; cf. III, p. 968. 99. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 773; cf. II, p. 823. “C’est un homme sans malice plustôt que bon, une ame saine mais foible, qui adore la vertu sans la pratiquer, qui aime ardemment le bien et qui n’en fait guéres” (II, p. 774); cf. I, p. 670; II, p. 755. “J. J. n’est assurement pas

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honor Jean-­Jacques only if he takes him to be virtuous. The honnête homme will not become an ally of the philosopher if he cannot believe in virtue.— The Dialogues form the keystone in Rousseau’s œuvre, and precisely thereby, like no other of his writings, they prepare the Rêveries. The thesis I stated in advance of my consideration of the book of Rousseau’s to which least attention is given leads us back to the Rêveries, which I never lost sight of for a moment during the lengthy path through Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques. The Dialogues are the first book mentioned in the Rêveries. Their grand theme —­the philosopher among nonphilosophers or the question concerning the rhetoric needed by philosophy—­links the Dialogues most intimately with the Discours sur les sciences et les arts. The two writings in which Rousseau’s œuvre finds its prelude and its conclusion, respectively, refer not accidentally, each in its respective way and reciprocally complementing one another, to Plato’s Phaedrus. Conversely, silent references to the Dialogues in the Rêveries play no less important a role than the unmistakable references back to the Discours. This is already true, as we saw, and is of considerable significance for the famous opening words, “I am thus now alone on earth.” The Rêveries presuppose the œuvre, but they do not continue it. Rousseau’s public effectiveness as a teacher of mankind is designated and delimited by the large arc he draws in the Dialogues to the Premier Discours. It begins with the em­ blematic figure of the divine bringer of light, who throws down the gauntlet to the century of lumières, and ends with the historically informed figure of the witness to the truth, who has antagonized the philosophes and the prêtres. The foundational constellation, which the frontispiece of the Discours presented in a tri-­figured image, the constellation that remains determinative for the rhetoric of the entire œuvre and to which the Rêveries especially will do justice, receives in the Dialogues its late development and final elucidation. With the thorough investigation of the diverse addressees to whom Rousseau’s writings are directed or who for better or worse will come into contact with them, the work turns back upon itself. The analysis of the “Frenchman” puts Rousseau’s political philosophy in perspective and illuminates the œuvre in toto. Its light reaches all the way to the first prize essay in which Rousseau lent the “hommes vulgaires” his voice and encouraged them emphatically to maintain their distance from the fire that he carries with him. The œuvre comes to a close by turning back to the beginning and begins to circle within itself. Rousseau seals the intertwining of beginning and end that makes the œuvre into a whole with un bel homme” (II, p. 777). Consider II, pp. 818, 851, 859, and 864 as well as Pp. 19–­20 with Footnote 33.

The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers  45

the motto he chooses for the Dialogues. It is the same motto he chose for the Premier Discours, the only one he uses twice, and the last that he will give to a book: Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis.100 With the Rêveries something new, something of its own, something other begins. That the Rêveries could be a kind of “continuation” of or “appendix” to the Confessions belongs to the errors or misdirections of the Première promenade.101 That is, if the reader understands the Confessions as an autobiographical undertaking, which would continue to be written and, as it were, updated in the Rêveries. The most remarkable episodes and the most important subjects of the Rêveries, such as the sojourn on St. Peter’s Island, the “reform” in the middle of life, or the years of Les Charmettes, were treated previously in the Confessions and mostly in greater detail. In a speech that Rousseau the reader reproduces verbatim for the Frenchman in the second dialogue, Jean-­ Jacques the author explains that after the Dialogues102 he will not write another book. What he had to say to the public is said, what had to be done for posterity has been done.103 L’œuvre est fini. Rousseau has fulfilled his task. In the introduction that he places in the front of the Dialogues, he reports in moving words of the travails and of their overcoming that the completion of the work demanded of him. The apology for his own life before the forum of the world was a burden. Both introductions to the Rêveries are completely different. They stress the joy of Beisichselbstsein.104 Rousseau’s service to the public at large lies behind him. The conclusion of the œuvre opens up a new freedom. What can now come is “un bienfait purement gratuit.” Les rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire are not meant for any altar. Rousseau writes them for himself. They are a gift for himself and for those like him. 100. “Here I am the barbarian, because I am not understood by anyone.” The motto is taken from Ovid’s Tristia, book V, 10th elegy, verse 37. Consider the political criticism Rousseau levels in the text of the Premier Discours against Ovid, whom he classifies as one of the “Auteurs obscénes, dont les noms seuls allarment la pudeur” (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, pp. 1 and 10), and compare Pp. 6–­7 as well as 23–24. Rousseau placed mottos at the front of all his books, as long as they were not “commissioned works” such as the writings on Corsica and Poland. With the exception of the Rêveries. 101. I, 12 (999); 13 (1000); 15 (1001); cf. II, 4 (1003). 102. See Footnote 48. 103. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 840. 104. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques. Du sujet et de la forme de cet ecrit, p. 664. (Rousseau worked on the Dialogues from 1772 until 1776. He spent almost five years on what he describes retrospectively as “une occupation si douloureuse.”) I, 11 (999); 12 (999); 14 (1001); 15 (1001); II, 1–­4 (1002–­3).

Chapter 2

Faith

The Rêveries have as their subject the philosophic life as a whole. They think through its beginning and its end. Multivariously broken and artfully distorted, they treat its basis, its goal, and its sustaining middle. The individual promenades show the philosophic life in motion. They follow its paths and its turns. From the confrontation with faith to self-­knowledge as well as in the countervailing interplay of self-­knowledge and Beisichselbstsein. The Rêveries make vivid how philosophizing has its footing in life and proves its transfor­ mative power. How it is sparked by a fruit of reading, or turns an attack from without to its own good. How an unexpected event brings about experiences that deserve exact analysis and provide occasion for far-­reaching reflections. How the engagement with a classical text flows into the thorough investigation of a general problem. How the observation of a routine action as a member of society entails a determination as fundamental as conceivable of the place of the observer on the periphery of society, or how a short detour can unexpectedly lead onto the path of self-­knowledge. Self-­knowledge is the question that preoccupies Rousseau from the first step of the first promenade onward. The Promeneur Solitaire pursues it on all his walks, examining himself, taking heed of the enemy, correcting himself, beginning anew, turning toward nature, returning to himself, reaching out further, collecting himself, digging deeper. In their structure as well as in their content the Rêveries reflect the inexhaustibility and interminability of self-­knowledge. All the great themes broached in them are in a precise sense variations on the one theme of self-­knowledge: God and nature, morality and politics, love and happiness, goodness and virtue, truth and death. Self-­knowledge is the theme of  the Rêveries, because and

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insofar as it is the theme of the philosophic life. It makes the Rêveries a book that is mediated to the highest degree, a book traversing mediations and demanding mediations from the reader. A philosophic life does not begin at birth, but it ends definitively with the death of the individual who leads a philosophic life. Its beginning is, therefore, in question to a higher degree and in a different sense than its end. The beginning of the philosophic life is itself an object of philosophic reflection and of possible philosophic controversy. In any case it has a prehistory. It needs preparation, and it demands reassurance. Death breaks off the philosophic life, somewhere and sometime in its course. Provided death is not self-­chosen, it puts an end to the philosophic life by falling upon it from the outside. In their form the Rêveries take into account the peculiarities of the beginning and the end. They begin not with the beginning but in an afterward, which is abruptly evoked by the opening sentence: “Me voici donc seul.” And they end according to the model of the actual end. They do not have an ending authenticated by the author as finis operis. They stop, without being exhausted. They fall silent, without having said everything that would have to be said. Their end does not follow an inner necessity. It is determined by death. Death, not the author, ends the rêveries of the Promeneur Solitaire. By allowing his “collection” to break off, 1 the author gives the Rêveries their perfect ending. At the beginning of the Septième promenade Rousseau announces the end of the book. The seventh Rêverie, which in the guise of “botany” has as its theme the philosophic contemplation of nature or theoria in the narrower sense—­ the only Rêverie, incidentally, that refers to a philosopher as a philosopher by his name and cites him as an example—­would have been quite suitable for a number of reasons to give the book an appropriate ending. In the final sentence Rousseau recalls his youth. He reiterates the “innocent” character of his pleasures and reaffirms his ability to be happy in the midst of “the saddest lot ever to have befallen a mortal.” The last two words read: “un mortel.”2 Rousseau produced a clean copy of the first seven Rêveries, as he had done with his manuscripts so many times before in his life as an author, in order to 1. See Chapter I, P. 17, Footnote 24. On the same playing card on which Rousseau recorded the note quoted in Footnote 24, the following entry about the Rêveries is to be found: “Je sens déja mon imagination se glacer, touttes mes facultés s’affoiblir. Je m’attends à voir mes reveries devenir plus froides de jour en jour jusqu’à ce que l’ennui de les écrire m’en ôte le courage; ainsi mon livre si je le continue doit naturellement finir quand j’approcherai de la fin de ma vie.” Ebauches des Rêveries 1, p. 1165 (my emphasis). Reading the Dixième promenade suffices to convince oneself that the end of the Rêveries is not to be accounted for by the “ennui de les écrire.” 2. VII, 30 (1073).

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prepare them for typesetting and printing. But then he starts anew. He writes the Huitième promenade. After the preceding promenade directed attention to the world in its natural articulation, the eighth turns the view back to the Promeneur Solitaire, whose erotic nature puts him in danger, in engaging with the world, of  losing sight of himself in the “expansion of his soul.” Rousseau once again makes his life the object of reflection, examination, and introspection. He drives the analysis forward even more decisively and further than in the previous seven promenades. With the example of the distinction between amour de soi and amour-­propre he demonstrates that even about a theme he has treated repeatedly in his œuvre he knows something new to say, put more sharply and presented more provocatively than anywhere else. With the deepening that Rousseau achieves in it, with the final use of rêverie, and in referring the reader back to the center of the book, the Huitième promenade rounds out the Rêveries into a whole. It would have been an excellent ending. Yet Rousseau continues. He writes the Neuvième promenade, which carries out an expansion, and in a kind of parallel to the Septième elaborates the paramount importance of seeing, of seeing with one’s own eyes in contrast not only to hearsay, but also to picturing by the imagination, now by means of contemplation directed to the world of men. Finally, he writes the Dixième promenade. It is devoted to love, and traces Rousseau’s way of life back to a formative initial constellation in order to think its entire development out of one root, in its internal consistency. The tenth walk thus marks the outermost counterpole to the first, in which Rousseau initially presented himself as a plaything of  the “directeurs” of his fate.3 The tenth promenade comprises a single paragraph. It is precisely dated. And it is the only one explicitly situated in the present. It begins with the word “aujourdui.” The Rêveries end today. Either the seventh or the eighth Rêverie would have given the book a convincing ending. The lack of an authorial end, however, their breaking off, completes the Rêveries as a masterpiece of mimesis. The beginning of the philosophic life has its place in the Troisième promenade. It is preceded by an introduction as extensive as it is multilayered, in the course of which philosophic questions of the greatest importance appear on the horizon: What is God? Or: Wherein lies the destiny of one’s own nature? It is preceded in particular by the double introduction of the book in the form of the first or actual introduction, which is given by the Première promenade as a whole, and its abridged repetition in the introduction to the Deuxième promenade. In it Rousseau corrects an error of  the first introduction, which itself is 3. I, 3 (996); cf. I, 5 (996) and I, 9 (998).

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rich in corrections of errors and insights gained from them. The beginning of the philosophic life is not to be equated with the beginning of philosophizing. And philosophizing begins in error. To the mimetic preparation by the first and second promenades corresponds in the third a concise autobiographical sketch of the prehistory of the beginning that is of concern to us. The sketch is arranged in the text in such a way that the attentive reader is led unobtrusively to the philosophic question bound up with the beginning. For Rousseau emphasizes that “dans tous les tems” he sought to understand the nature and destiny of his being. He asserts that he conducted this investigation with more interest and care than he was able to find in any other man. And he makes it as clear as one possibly can that he undertook his investigation for himself, for the sake of knowledge of truth, that all his philosophizing was ultimately directed toward his own good: “As for me, when I desired to learn, it was in order to know for myself and not in order to teach; I have always believed that before instructing others, it was necessary to begin by knowing enough for oneself, and of all the studies I have tried to undertake during my life in the midst of men, there is hardly any I would not just as well have undertaken alone on a desert island to which I might have been confined for the rest of my days.” It goes without saying that Rousseau provides for the necessary embedding, that he does not fail to furnish a strong contrast as the cushioning that this statement requires.4 Yet let us return to our question. It gains all the more weight through the continuity that Rousseau claims for his philosophizing. How is the beginning of the philosophic life to be thought? How might a discontinuity be conceived in a development that, according to everything Rousseau discloses in the Rêveries, is subject to an inner necessity and is in complete harmony with his nature? As the breakthrough of a latent tendency of this nature? As a groundbreaking insight that makes the most important points of reference within which that development takes place suddenly appear in a different light? As the becoming aware of the distinct character of a life that follows philosophic eros, and that comes to itself only in the awareness of its being different? The autobiographical sketch that Rousseau inserts has its starting point in the morals and the piety with which Rousseau was raised, in order to draw a line via his religious education and the readings of  his youth, which made him, as we are assured, “devout almost in the manner of  Fénelon,” straight to his philosophic activity, to “meditation in seclusion, the study of  nature, the contemplation of the universe.” No rejection of precious beliefs, no break with deep-­rooted prejudices, no crisis, no 4. III, 5 (1012–­13).

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periagoge. But then Rousseau comes to speak of a “great revolution,” which he dates in his fortieth year: It was born of a long-­held resolve and based upon the firm will to subject all opinions to a severe examination. Now, in the middle of his life, Rousseau sets to work on a “great review,” from which he exempts nothing, which is a matter of life and death. Its central object is faith: the duties and expectations of morality, the commandments and hopes of religion. To obtain clarity about how he ought to live, and how he wants to find himself at his death, Rousseau chooses “for a certain time” a way of life that is completely at the service of  his enterprise. The way of life that Rousseau adopts in order, along the path of long and undisturbed meditation, to find an answer to the question what the right life is turns out to be the way of life that he recognizes as good for himself and that he therefore wants to maintain for the rest of his days.5 The entanglement of question and answer underlying the philosophic way of life can hardly be conceived more succinctly. And where would one find the transition from the question of what is right to the answer of the good life presented with a lighter touch? Almost incidentally, Rousseau gives expression to a formative experience he has in common with the other inhabitants of the “monde idéal,” so laconically that it redounds to the honor of  Xenophon, and in a manner as though he were speaking only of what Everyman can see: of the solitary character of  his life, which, of course, he ultimately connects with nothing less than his happiness.6 At first glance the determination 5. III, 6–­10 (1013–­15). 6. “C’est de cette époque que je puis dater mon entier renoncement au monde et ce gout vif pour la solitude qui ne m’a plus quitté depuis ce tems-­là. L’ouvrage que j’entreprenois ne pouvoit s’executer que dans une retraite absolue; il demandoit de longues et paisibles méditations que le tumulte de la societé ne souffre pas. Cela me força de prendre pour un tems une autre maniére de vivre dont ensuite je me trouvai si bien que ne l’ayant interrompue depuis lors que par force et pour peu d’instans, je l’ai reprise de tout mon cœur et m’y suis borné sans peine aussitot que je l’ai pu, et quand ensuite les hommes m’ont reduit à vivre seul, j’ai trouvé qu’en me sequestrant pour me rendre misérable, ils avoient plus fait pour mon bonheur que je n’avois su faire moi-­même.” III, 10 (1015). Various commentators have applied the second sentence of the paragraph reproduced here in its entirety to the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard. What speaks against such a limited reading is not only the explicit statement about the Profession de foi in the 17 th paragraph of the Troisième promenade (“Le résultat de mes pénibles recherches fut tel à peu près que je l’ai consigné depuis dans la profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard”). The overhasty identification with the writing later drawn upon for comparative purposes fails to appreciate the existential as well as comprehensive character of the enterprise treated in the 10th paragraph. The paragraphs immediately preceding and following leave no doubt on this point: “j’entrepris de soumettre mon intérieur à un examen sevére qui le réglat pour le reste de ma vie tel que je voulois le trouver à ma mort” III, 8 (1015). “tout m’obligeoit à cette grande revue dont

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of Rousseau’s manière de vivre in the only place in which the phrase occurs in the Rêveries7 does not seem to go beyond what can be said from a distance about the Promeneur Solitaire, who likewise appears only once8—­in the title of  the book—­and of  whom no outsider can know what moves and fulfills him on his solitary paths. In speaking of the “grande revue” and the “grande révolution” Rousseau points emphatically to the deep break that is tantamount to the beginning of the philosophic life. Two aspects in Rousseau’s presentation of the caesura deserve special mention. On the one hand, the “great review” requires the deployment of all powers and abilities, not least courage and persistence in questioning. Rousseau does not shrink from declaring that when he sought to get to the bottom of things and ceased to take his bearings by what “prudence commune” teaches, he displayed courage for the first time in his life. To express the situation after having divested himself of what had been handed down to him and what he had believed, he employs a variant of the image of the seafarer who sets out onto the open sea, not knowing whether he will ever set foot on firm ground again. Whoever found himself in such a situation, whoever had to invest and to activate everything he had in order to meet a challenge on which his “total lot” depended, will have a clear awareness of the beginning, and remember the reasons that passed the examination.9 On the other hand, the “great revolution” affects all spheres of life. Long-­standing friendships and habits of social intercourse, the choice of occupation, the decision for or against a place of residence—­nothing is in principle exempt from it or remains beyond its reach. It might manifest itself even in the change of externals, in the reform of one’s public image, or the reorganization of one’s daily routine. The will to a justified life is joined by the will to a consistent life. Both the unreserved character of questioning and the striving for consistency are for Rousseau bound up with the beginning of the philosophic life. je sentois depuis longtems le besoin. Je l’entrepris donc et je ne négligeai rien de ce qui dépendoit de moi pour bien executer cette entreprise” III, 9 (1015). “Je me livrai au travail que j’avois entrepris avec un zéle proportionné, et à l’importance de la chose et au besoin que je sentois en avoir” III, 11 (1015). “J’éxécutai ce projet lentement et à diverses reprises, mais avec tout l’effort et toute l’attention dont j’étois capable. Je sentois vivement que le repos du reste de mes jours et mon sort total en dependoient” III, 14 (1016). 7. Consider V, 11 (1045). 8. Consider V, 2 (1040). 9. III, 14–­15 (1016–­17). Cf. Heinrich Meier, Warum Politische Philosophie? (Stuttgart–­ Weimar, 2000), pp. 27–­28 [Leo Strauss and the Theologico-­Political Problem (Cambridge, UK, 2006), p. 104].

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In the Troisième promenade Rousseau does not compete with earlier autobiographical testimonials of the widely visible upheaval that took place in his living conditions between the publication of the prize question of the Academy of  Dijon in the Mercure de France and his move to the Hermitage.10 For him it is not a matter of duplicating or correcting the details of the change that he described in the Confessions as “ma réforme”: from the alteration of  his “finery,” taking off his sword, and selling his watch, through quitting the service with the tax collectors Dupin and Francueil in 1751 or 1752,11 all the way to the departure in April 1756 from Paris and the society to which he had belonged or with which he had been associated for more than a decade. The determinations of place and time recede completely into the background. Rousseau does not speak as a historian of himself. The “40th year of life,” which he first brought into play in the Lettres à Malesherbes in 1762, now obeys a different principle as well. It is not a historical but a symbolic date. It serves, “from youth onward,” to demarcate the “epoch” in which the decisive clarification must take place, independent of external events that may or may not occur, based upon an objective necessity that can be recognized at any time and is therefore not subject to individual discretion.12 The “40th year of life” compresses the “epoch” as it were into a single point and becomes the sign of the concentration in the insight, on the basis of  which everything is different from what it has been up until then. The “40th year of life” stands for the discrete, determinate, and conscious beginning that the “grande revue” inaugurates. The mention of the “great revolution” and the “great review” leaves far behind what Rousseau said prior to the Rêveries when characterizing his “reform.” According to the account in the Confessions, the reform essentially concerned Rousseau’s resolve for “independence and poverty,” a resolve borne by the will to live a self-­sufficient life.13 In contrast, the “grande revue” of the Troisième promenade concerns the question whether the self-­sufficient life is the right life or, more precisely, the question whether the Promeneur Solitaire is permitted to lead the life that accords with his nature. The decisive clarification demands the 10. Lettres à Malesherbes II, OCP I, pp. 1135–­36; Les Confessions VIII, pp. 356, 361–­64 and IX, pp. 416–­18. 11. Les Confessions VIII, pp. 362–­63; cf. CC II, pp. 145–­46 nn. c and d, and pp. 195–­96 n. a. 12. Compare René Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia I in princ. (Œuvres, ed. Charles Adam et Paul Tannery [Paris, 1983], VII, pp. 17–­18.) 13. Les Confessions VIII, pp. 362 and 356. How far the Troisième promenade goes beyond the account of the Confessions is already shown by the comparison of the “grande révolution” with the two “révolutions” mentioned in Book IX (pp. 417–­18). The “grande revue” is without counterpart in the Confessions.

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confrontation with the most important objections that can be raised against the self-­sufficient life of the philosopher. And the most powerful objections share in common that they claim, for themselves and for their answer as to what the right life is, to be authoritative, obligatory, compelling. Therefore, the clarification moves within a horizon delimited by convention and necessary transgression on the one hand, and by prohibition and possible violation on the other. Following one’s inclination, or letting oneself be guided by “pure curiosity,” is not sufficient for a justified life. Confronted with the prospect that a step he has taken could later be “imputed as a crime” to him for which he has not given a timely account, the Promeneur Solitaire ascertains whether he has good reasons to proceed further along the path of philosophizing he has taken, to follow it to the end.14 If philosophizing begins in error, the philosophic life begins with the insight that the question whether the philosophic life rests upon an error cannot be suspended. For this error would fall prey to the verdict of common prudence, which would speak not of error but of guilt or of sin. To preserve for itself the freedom to err and to doubt, the freedom to suspend judgment, the freedom to act or not act, philosophy must offer proof of its right and necessity. The possibility of crime is bound to a law, the pronouncement of sin is bound to a commandment, and both are bound to the demand for an obedience that is obligatory. The duty of obedience compels the life of free questioning and inquiring to question unreservedly, to inquire into itself, and simultaneously to examine the tribunal before which it has to defend itself. It is urged to bring itself into accord with itself. It cannot afford not to be radical. The objection that puts philosophy into question contributes essentially to its attaining its specific shape and to its achieving the consciousness of its distinctive character. But the consciousness of its distinctive character is constitutive for the philosophic life. It joins the will to a justified life with the will to a self-­consistent life in the knowledge of the demanding alternative and of its own urgency. The opinion that the philosophic life has no discrete beginning is, therefore, as mistaken as the opinion that it rests upon a decisionistic act. If the former were true, it would not be the determinate and conscious way of life at issue for us. And if the latter were the case, our way of life would be in conflict with itself, since it would appear to be unable to recover its beginning through questioning and to satisfy itself with reasons. The philosophic life can be neither thought nor led without consciousness of its distinctive character. A political community that promises to give 14. III, 5 (1012–­13); III, 15 (1017).

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philosophy completely free rein, and a religion that does not staunchly op­ pose philosophy or that, within limits, approves of it in order to make use of it, might thus make philosophizing easier while making it more difficult to lead a philosophic life. The absence of visible barriers and prohibitory signs does not advance awareness of the obstacles and resistances that stand in the way of philosophy in every community. This counts all the more for the falling silent of all serious objections to philosophy as such, or for the ease of failing to hear those objections that are grounded in the nature of philosophy. None of this proves advantageous for the collectedness of philosophizing, for philosophy’s turning its attention back to itself, or for the formation of the inner unity of the philosophic life. What appears as an easing in general proves to be an impediment in particular and for the particular. If we distinguish between the concepts of philosophizing and of the philosophic life, in order to avoid the confusion of philosophy with an activity that can remain disparate, partial, or sporadic, and that does not in itself constitute a distinct way of  life, it readily follows from this distinction that even where philosophy is not conceived as a distinct way of life, philosophic problems can be handled in a competent manner. In short, that someone does not lead a philosophic life need not keep him from philosophizing with profit and instructively for us. And conversely: that someone “philosophizes much more learnedly” does not mean that with regard to what is most important he would have an advantage over us or could accomplish for us what we would have to accomplish for ourselves.15 The “severe examination” with which Rousseau links the great caesura cannot be delegated to anyone.16 It is the genuine principium of the philosophic life, which is based upon radical questioning and does not content itself with any answer that owes its authentication to an authority. The severe examination to which traditional opinions and one’s own dispositions are subjected in order to achieve clarity about what can last for the rest of one’s life and ought to be its standard is suited to bring about that collectedness without which the life of the philosopher does not become one. Significantly enough, it is solely with regard to the undertaking of the decisive clarification that in the Rêveries Rousseau attributes courage to himself.17 Courage, or the cardinal virtue of  bravery, is required for the unreserved questioning that determines the philosophic life from the ground up, for a questioning that 15. III, 5 (1012). 16. III, 8 (1015); cf. III, 6 last sentence (1014), and III, 13 (1016). 17. III, 15 (1017), consider IV, 41 (1039). In the Rêveries Rousseau uses the term only in these two places.

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bears the heavy weight of the “total lot” or “eternal lot.”18 This questioning deserves to be called unreserved insofar as it does not defer to any convention or to any authority, and consequently does not find support in either. To embark upon such questioning in all seriousness, not only is courage needed. The undertaking must be supported by the confidence that one can live up to it. Trust in one’s own capabilities is needed. Trust in the capacity to carry out the examination adequately, to get to the bottom of the matter, to make oneself independent of the judgment of other judges. Trust in the ability to be judge oneself. If this trust is not to be blind faith, and courage not mere foolhardiness, it must be nourished by experiences of thinking and understanding, it must grow out of the practice of questioning and inquiring. It is strengthened by overcoming prejudices, liberation from illusions, by the exercise of  probity. It draws in particular upon the insight as to what the difference is between believing something and knowing it. In this sense as well the philosophic life has a prehistory it cannot do without, and for this reason also philosophizing precedes the beginning of the philosophic life. Rousseau treats the beginning of the philosophic life in the promenade that makes the theme of  his faith obvious for Everyman. The Troisième is the only promenade in which Rousseau speaks of “my faith” and “my belief,” and also the only one in which he calls to mind the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard.19 In addition, the retrospective glance at the prehistory of the beginning provides him with the opportunity to mention his Christian origin and thus to bring into play Christianity, which is never spoken of by name in any other place in the book.20 In fact, the Troisième promenade does not have Rousseau’s faith in a general sense as its theme. Rather, it has to do tacitly with his stance toward Christianity, thus with the matters in dispute that like no others earned him enmity and persecution. The question in the context of which Rousseau discusses the beginning of the philosophic life is the question of faith in revelation. Faith in revelation asserts, and it ensures that it will cause the parting of the ways. If the decisive clarification demands the confrontation with the weightiest objections, faith in revelation moves to the center of attention. In it philosophy encounters its deepest denial. It opposes to the unreservedness of questioning the duty to act. Against the self-­sufficiency of the philosopher, it asserts 18. III, 14 (1016); III, 15 (1017). 19. Once in III, 18 (1018); III, 23 (1022); and III, 17 (1018), respectively. 20. III, 6 (1013). The word “chretien” occurs only here, the word “christianisme” occurs nowhere in the Rêveries.

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the boundedness to God’s commandment. It negates the philosophic life in its raison d’être. The philosophic life is utterly incompatible with the life of obedience of faith, and the consciousness of its distinctive character cannot be sharpened by any alternative in a more abiding manner. The rejection of the demand for obedience is implied in the beginning of the philosophic life. The confrontation is not, however, exhausted in the rejection and does not end with the beginning. It is part of the philosophic life, which, as we have seen, can become a justified life only if it is able to recover its beginning and to confirm it along the path of questioning and thinking. To prove its right and its truth, philosophy must seek out the most powerful objection to philosophy, subject it to a thorough examination, and invalidate it with reasons. But there is no more powerful objection conceivable than the objection that appeals to faith in the all-­powerful God and to his commandment or law. The confrontation with faith in revelation is, therefore, not a one-­time act. On the contrary, there is much indication that the examination proceeds “slowly and at various times,”21 and that the critique goes through ever new resumptions, as we can observe with Rousseau from the Discours sur l’inégalité through the Lettre à d’Alembert and the Contrat social to Émile, and from the apologetic writings of the years 1763 and 1764, the Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont and the Lettres écrites de la montagne, to the Confessions. Even the late occupation with the objections and statements of  his critics, which the replies to the archbishop of Paris and the pastors of Geneva made necessary, induced Rousseau to elaborate his position further—­for instance, concerning the Christian doctrines of original sin and of grace or biblical miracles, which are closely bound up with belief in omnipotence.22 Thus, beyond defending against theological attacks, doing so will have advanced his knowledge of the subject matter itself. As did the crisis of the beginning. In the Troisième promenade Rousseau does not present his critique of  faith in revelation. Instead, he keeps it in the background and diverts attention from it as best he can. To divert attention, he avails himself of the means he exper­ imented with in the Dialogues: He directs sharp attacks against the philosophes and their atheism. Stated more precisely, he attacks the public use the philosophes make of atheism. If in the Dialogues, Rousseau the reader, in the sole passage in which he used the term athéisme, accused the philosophes of 21. III, 14 (1016). 22. Cf. Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, pp. 937–­40 and 945–­46; Lettres écrites de la montagne I, 58, pp. 702–­3; I, 69, p. 705; II, 1, p. 711; II, 14, p. 715; III, 3, p. 727; III, 95, p. 754; V, 122n., p. 798; and for the critique of miracles, III as a whole, pp. 727–­54.

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“infatuation with atheism” and of  “ephemeral fanaticism,” which he discerned in their enthusiasm,23 now in the Rêveries, Rousseau the author, in the sole passage in which he uses the term “atheism,” levels the accusation against the philosophes that they are “ardent missionaries of atheism and very imperious dogmatists.” In what they teach and want others to believe or not to believe, the philosophes let themselves be guided by their passions and interests. Their doctrine obeys the spirit of partisanship and is an expression of hypocrisy. “Their philosophy is for others.” Philosophy does not determine their lives but serves them for purposes of propaganda.24 Dogmatism and fanaticism, missionary zeal and imperiousness—­everything that Rousseau associates with the atheism of the philosophes is incompatible with the philosophic life and has its root in a lack of self-­knowledge. The lack of self-­knowledge goes hand in hand with a lack of freedom of mind and of thorough thinking, a lack Rousseau points out to the philosophes over and over in his œuvre, starting with the preface to the Discours sur les sciences et les arts and more recently affirmed in the third dialogue of Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques: far from freeing themselves from the opinions of their time, the philosophes remain subservient to their century. They swim in the stream of its fashions and on the waves of their popularizations. This holds true in particular for the atheism they propagate.25 The dissociation from the philosophes played an important role when, in the Dialogues, the concern was to defend the “monster” against the charge of atheism and in the end to encourage the Frenchman in his opinion that Jean-­ Jacques, like himself, stands on the side of faith.26 In the Troisième promenade 23. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, p. 971. 24. III, 11 (1016); III, 13 (1016), cf. III, 5 (1012); III, 17 (1018); III, 22 (1022). 25. Cf. Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 3; Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques III, p. 971. 26. The Frenchman twice speaks of “atheism”: In the first dialogue he accuses “Jean-­ Jacques” of being the author of “leçons d’Atheïsme” (p. 690). In the third dialogue—­after “Rousseau” has instructed him about the character of  “Jean-­Jacques” and he has made himself more familiar with the latter’s œuvre, especially with Émile—­he judges of the “philosophers”: “Or cette doctrine de materialisme et d’Atheïsme prêchée et propagée avec toute l’ardeur des plus zélés missionnaires n’a pas seulement pour objet de faire dominer les chefs sur leurs proselytes, mais dans les mistéres secrets où ils les employent de n’en craindre aucune indiscretion durant leur vie ni aucune repentance à leur mort. Leurs trames après le sucçés meurent avec leurs complices auxquels ils n’ont rien tant appris qu’à ne pas craindre dans l’autre vie ce Poul-­ Serrho des Persans objecté par J. J. à ceux qui disent que la Religion ne fait aucun bien. Le dogme de l’ordre moral rétabli dans l’autre vie a fait jadis reparer bien des torts dans celle-­ci, et les imposteurs ont eu dans les derniers momens de leurs complices un danger à courir qui souvent leur servit de frein. Mais notre philosophie en délivrant ses prédicateurs de cette crainte et leurs disciples de cette obligation a détruit pour jamais tout retour au repentir” (p. 968).

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Rousseau seems to go even further and to offer a kind of profession, which should make it easier for the reader, represented by the Frenchman in the Dialogues, to assimilate what Rousseau calls “my faith” to his own faith. Negatively, dissociating himself from the philosophes, he assures: “I never adopted their desolate doctrine.”27 Positively, making a profession, he holds that “the principles I had adopted after such a long and reflective meditation” are the support he needs “to endure the miseries of my life. In any other system I would live without resource and die without hope. I would be the unhappiest of creatures. Let us hold, then, to this one, which alone suffices to render me happy in spite of fortune and men.”28 The message for Everyman apparently is: Rousseau’s happiness depends upon his faith, and his faith is essentially hope. Hope for “compensation” for the misery, the suffering, and the injustice in “this life.” Hope for recompense, reward, justice in view of a life that “is only a state of trials.” It might be disturbing to the believing reader, however, that Rousseau speaks of the “certainty” of future compensation, that, in other words, he recognizes his portion with the certainty of  him who knows what is owed to him, who himself judges who he is and how he will be situated—­“the certainty of this compensation was the principal fruit I had drawn from my previous meditations.”29 Is Rousseau’s certainty compatible with the obedience of faith? Or conversely, if it is faith, are the certainty of faith and the hope of faith in truth one?30 Rousseau invites such and similar questions precisely by leaving the contents of his “faith” sufficiently undetermined and so giving readers the possibility to insert their own articles into his alleged profession of faith. Let us assume hypothetically a well-­meaning Christian reading, which might draw upon statements from the autobiographical sketch of the prehistory of the great caesura,31 and sees itself encouraged by familiar-­sounding formulations, such as Rousseau’s mention of the “author of things” or when he drags in “heaven.”32 Let us thus suppose for a moment that Rousseau’s faith 27. III, 11 (1016). 28. III, 18 (1018–­19). 29. III, 20 (1019–­20). 30. Consider “mon espérance” in the sentence immediately following “la certitude de ce dedomagement.” III, 21 (1020), and cf. before III, 18 (1019), and after III, 24 (1023). 31. “je me fis catholique, mais je demeurai toujours chretien” “me rendirent dévot presque à la maniére de Fenelon” Both statements refer to Rousseau’s jeunesse. III, 6 (1013). 32. The formulation “l’auteur des choses” is ascribed to Rousseau’s youth, to the epoch before the caesura. III, 6 (1014). “Le Ciel” is invoked in a rhetorical question following the passage quoted above (Footnote 28): “Cette deliberation et la conclusion que j’en tirai ne semblent-­elles

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could be brought together with the Christian profession; what would fol­ low from the Troisième promenade for this profession? It would be believed for the sake of hope and consolation. It would have its strongest spokesmen in the fear of despair and in the desire for a just order. Its deepest cause would be the insufficiency of one’s own life. “The prejudices of childhood and the secret wishes of the heart” would have led up to it. And its vanishing point would be found in life after death. “It is difficult to keep oneself from believing what one so ardently desires, and who can doubt that their interest in admitting or rejecting the judgments of the next life determines the faith of most men, and it does so according to their hope or fear.”33 If we find ourselves tempted to counter this picture, which condenses what is essential into a concise outline, with questions and doubts, Rousseau has already gotten there long before us. No less than a dozen times in rapid succession he emphasizes the “insoluble objections,” “insurmountable difficulties,” and “discouraging doubts” to which the opinions he puts forward as “ma foi” are exposed. Rousseau could scarcely have pointed more emphatically to his objections—­without referring to a single one by name. The exposition of  faith is dominated by the obstinacy of the objection.34 Irrespective of the conspicuous objections and doubts it raises, and despite all the warning signs Rousseau has posted, the Troisième promenade has been understood by the vast majority of readers as a testimony of faith. Rousseau could count on a widespread readiness to follow him in the view that faith will defy every objection, however striking, and silence even the most piercing doubt, if it alone promises to provide support and if a life without faith would be tantamount to a life without happiness. Moreover, Rousseau actively encourages the readiness to believe in his faith. He avails himself of two devices above all. On the one hand, he suggests that he at least agrees with the article that he makes serve as the leitmotif of  his discussion of  faith: with the hope for life after death. On the other, he introduces into his Rêverie a veritable “profession of faith,” one that he published fifteen years before. pas avoir été dictées par le Ciel même pour me préparer à la destinée qui m’attendoit et me mettre en état de la soutenir?” III, 19 (1019), my emphasis. 33. III, 15 (1017), my emphasis. III, 18–­24 (1019–­23). 34. Rousseau uses the term “objection” eight times in the Troisième promenade: four times before and four times after mentioning the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard: III, 14 (1017); III, 16 (1018), three times; III, 18 (1018), two times; III, 21 (1020); III, 23 (1022). Outside of the Troisième promenade the term occurs nowhere in the Rêveries.

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As far as life after death is concerned, the truth is that nowhere does Rousseau make such a profession. Even statements that seem to be pertinent prove, upon more careful examination, to be ambiguous. To give an example, when Rousseau writes that early on it became clear to him that he should not seek the “veritable goal” of his life “in this world,” the bulk of readers will take it as evidence of Rousseau’s turning to a future world, for his orientation to a world beyond. The reader envisioned by the Dialogues, in contrast, takes into consideration a deliberate reference to the “monde idéal” and its inhabitants. If several paragraphs further the reader comes upon the adjective “immor­ tal,” which most interpreters expect and will quite readily read into the text before, it occurs to the reader envisioned by the Dialogues that Rousseau is speaking of his “immortal nature” and not of his “immortal soul.” He wonders what might be meant by Rousseau’s immortal nature. And the word the author later inserted into the Troisième promenade makes this reader aware that nowhere in the Rêveries is there any mention at all of “immortality.”35 Nevertheless, the leitmotif-­like presence of the question of a life after death gives rise to the impression that Rousseau shares the hope of  his believing readers. He nourishes this hope especially with a passage in the last paragraph of the Troisième promenade, which reminds one of Socrates’s final speech before his execution in Plato’s Phaedo. No one need be astonished by this, in view of the fact that in the Contrat social Rousseau had made “the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked” the sixth, seventh, and eighth articles of faith, respectively, of the ten dogmas making up the Religion civile.36 Still, the leitmotif-­like presence of the hope for a life after death has the consequence that, as the sole more or less intelligible content of faith in the Troisième promenade, it attracts to itself, as it were, the full brunt of the objections Rousseau confesses he has never been able to resolve. The famous statement, already cited, from the seventeenth paragraph of the Troisième promenade proved to be highly effective: “The result of my painstaking investigations was approximately that which I have since set down in the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” Is this not the word that clarifies and solves the matter? Can a book that the author wrote “solely for himself ” contain anything other than a sincere profession? Does Rousseau thus admit 35. III, 5 (1013); III, 18 (1018). Aside from its use in III, 18, the term “immortelle” can be found in only one other place in the Rêveries. There Rousseau speaks of the “ardent, immortal hatred” of the “corps collectifs,” which will persecute him beyond his death and beyond the death of his enemies during his lifetime: I, 10 (998). 36. Du contrat social IV, 8, 33, OCP III, p. 468.

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at the end of  his life that he believed what he had the Vicar say? The prevailing opinion, which takes Rousseau’s statement as a profession, underestimates the task of bringing to light first of all what Rousseau “set down” in the Profession de foi. Furthermore, it underestimates the difficulty concealed in the qualification “à peu près.” Rousseau’s reference back to the Profession de foi imposes its painstaking examination on the reader who wants to gain clarity for himself. For what Rousseau set down in that work is in no way identical with what he has the Vicar say. Besides the Vicar’s speeches, which are in need of a thorough interpretation, the action in which they are embedded demands our keen attention, to say nothing of the observations and comments with which Rousseau accompanies the Vicar’s educational enterprise. The examination of the Profession de foi is an undertaking in its own right.37 Here I have to limit myself to the “à peu près.” Rousseau is quite daring in declaring that the result of his investigations corresponds “approximately” to what he later set down in the Profession of Faith. For it was the Profession de foi that in 1762 earned him the arrest warrant in Paris and forced him for years to flee from one country to another. The Profession de foi was the real scandalon for the Christian churches as well as for the secular authorities of  France and Switzerland. Rousseau’s “à peu près,” which indicates a certain distance, an unspoken difference in regard to a writing that made the Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy infuriated with him for a decade and a half, leaves open whether the “result” to which he came turned out to be less or more heterodox. That the qualification allows for interpretations in both directions is not surprising in light of the explosiveness of the subject. Again, an example may illustrate this. The Vicar professes belief in a life after death, but he does not profess belief in the immortality of the soul. In his religious-­moral instruction, he tries to convince the proselyte that the soul will persist long enough so that a just recompense for the deeds and omissions “in this world” can take place. Did Rousseau refuse to agree with the Vicar concerning the denial of the immortality of the soul? Did he support the Vicar’s teaching of a continued life after death for reasons of morality? Did Rousseau quit following the Vicar in proposing to elevate a postulate of justice to a truth of faith that he would have to advocate? The Troisième promenade repeatedly indicates that Rousseau’s “result” did not deviate from the Profession de foi in the direction of a diminished but rather at any event in the direction of a sharpened heterodoxy.38 The presumed proximity to a profession that in his time was condemned as heterodoxy, that falls short, however, 37. See the Second Book, which completes my reflections on the Rêveries. 38. Consider above all III, 14 (1017); III, 15 (1017); III, 16 (1018).

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of  Rousseau’s actual heterodoxy, thus was able to lessen the offensiveness and allay the suspicion to which Rousseau knowingly exposed himself in the Rêveries. And Rousseau had reason to expect that the “revolution” the Profession de foi would “one day” bring on, or to which it would contribute its share, would cause his deviation to appear to future generations in a more mild light: Whatever errors he could be charged with in matters of faith, they would be errors of bonne foi. The question as to the truth regarding Rousseau’s “faith” or “belief ” leads far beyond the Troisième promenade. The book as a whole provides the answer. But in the Troisième promenade the question is posed most sharply. Most sharply, not only most obviously or most emphatically, since the walk that is with good reason the most convoluted gathers together the points of view by which the answer is to be assessed: Does Rousseau’s happiness depend upon an alien will, or upon the intervention of the Wholly Other? Does only the hope for a future compensation make his present misery bearable? Is his existence expectant of an event that always lies ahead of it and remains external to it? Or is Rousseau’s life self-­sufficient? The Troisième promenade puts the reader in a position to arrive at a reasoned judgment about the issue that the walk pushes so much into the foreground—­so much so that simply no one can fail to see or to hear it. The center of faith in revelation remains omitted in the Troisième promenade as if it were an empty space. God is not mentioned in it. The same holds for the Quatrième promenade, which is closely connected with the Troisième. The two walks have a special position in the Rêveries. They form a pair: the fourth promenade is the continuation of the third. Rousseau brackets these two promenades together with the only epigraph he uses in the book: “I continue to learn while growing old.” He places this saying of Solon at the head of the third Rêverie, begins the Troisième with Solon, and contradicts him at its end explicitly with regard to faith, in order to grant just as explicitly at the end of the Quatrième that Solon is correct in regard to self-­knowledge. The sequence of the two walks confirms the progress in learning that the epigraph claims, and that the Troisième denied in one important respect. The external bracket is reinforced by an additional brace. While Rousseau opened up the Troisième with an unidentified quotation from Plutarch’s Lives, at the outset of the Quatrième he recurs to a tractate from Plutarch’s Moralia whose title he reproduces in full, and by means of which he makes vivid that in old age he neither ceases to learn something new nor stands in danger of falling behind the level of reflection he had reached at the time of his boldest writings. But before naming the treatise, How One Can Profit by One’s Enemies, with

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which he has been familiar for more than a quarter of a century,39 he makes a remarkable statement: “Of the small number of  books I still occasionally read,” runs the opening of the Quatrième promenade, “Plutarch is the one who grips and profits me the most.” In the first sentence that follows upon the Troisième promenade Rousseau makes a confession. Plutarch, not the Holy Scripture, grips him and profits him the most.40 The insight Rousseau gains from reading a philosophic author forms, as it were, the inner hinge of the two Rêveries, to whose pairing the reader is subtly referred: The third walk has faith for its theme, the fourth the lie. Upon closer consideration it turns out that the third deals with the beginning of the philosophic life and the fourth with the question of  justice. The fourth relates to the third as its commentary or supplement. Whereas Dieu does not occur in either the Troisième or the Quatrième promenade, Rousseau employs the term in four places before and after the pair of promenades. Stated more precisely, he uses Dieu five times altogether, in one passage in the first, second, fifth, and sixth walks, respectively. If we look up the four places in the four walks symmetrically flanking the two promenades in which the term is omitted, and follow the paths that link them with one another, the eccentric topography of the Rêveries exposes the view of the center of  Rousseau’s critique of faith in revelation. God is mentioned for the first time in a self-­characterization of  Rousseau, and already the first mention of God confronts us with the question that the four passages viewed together lead one to consider: What is a God? The question confronts us at the turning point of an enterprise of self-­knowledge that is advanced with an exceptional urgency, portrayed by the Première promenade as a drama in time, from the delirium of Außersichsein to the recovery of the tranquillity of soul. The individual steps of the enterprise will concern us later. For now, the following may suffice: Rousseau’s reflection takes as its point of departure the situation in which he finds himself after years of theologico-­ political persecution. He sees that the indignation with which he reacted to his condemnation as a monster only provided the means to those “masters of my destiny” whom he opposed. He realizes that he had to become the plaything of his persecutors when he oriented his intentions and actions toward theirs. He knows that his enemies will maintain their power over him as long as he remains affectively attached to them. To liberate himself from dependence upon the will of the enemies, whose power he can neither break nor escape, Rousseau attempts to distance himself from his persecutors’ actions and intentions 39. See Chapter I, Pp. 6 and 10–11. 40. III, 1 (1011); III, 25 (1023); IV, 1 (1024); IV, 42 (1039).

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en bloc, by deindividualizing them and agglomerating them together as a “destiny,” to which he can submit himself  “without rebelling against necessity any longer.”41 Whether this attempt to resign himself to the inevitable leads to enduring tranquillity of soul depends, however, on whether the relatedness to an alien will, so fatal for the tranquillity of soul, will in fact disintegrate when the opponent is subsumed under an unalterable destiny; it depends, in other words, on whether Rousseau can succeed in incorporating his adversaries into “ma destinée,” in such a way that they go under in it. Rousseau is aware that at any rate his “résignation” does not suffice as a basis for his “tranquillité” as long as he has not become master of his hope and his fear. Hope and fear are the main doors of entry for the alien will; imagination, worry about posterity, orientation toward the future are as many sources for Außersichsein in the present. Only when Rousseau has convinced himself that persecution will outlast his death, that his enemies’ hatred is “immortal,” does he leave all hoping and fearing behind.42 Rousseau attains the new tranquillity of soul from the thought of immortality. But he attains it not from the hope for the immortality of his soul, rather from the expectation of the immortality of his enemies, who, beyond the grave, will fight him collectively by means of institutions and organizations. Under the rubric “corps collectifs” of the enemies, he invokes neither les philosophes nor les politiques. Instead, he emphasizes “the Oratorians, Church people, and half-­monks.” The Oratorian Order represents the hard core of the enmity that assails the Promeneur Solitaire and his œuvre.43 Rousseau knows how to make the work of the enemies subservient to him. He achieves tranquillity of soul by recognizing the good in the evil: “I have nothing more to hope for or to fear in this world; and I am now, tranquil at the bottom of the abyss, a poor, unfortunate mortal, but imperturbable, like God himself.”44 In the abyss of human fearlessness and hopelessness, Rousseau reaches the ground of divine ataraxia. It allows a mortal in an important respect to be “like God himself.” The equanimous, the unmoved, the serene God spoken of in the Première promenade is not the zealous God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is also not the Christian God of anger and compassion, 41. I, 3 (996) and I, 4 (996). 42. “Les particuliers meurent, mais les corps collectifs ne meurent point. Les mêmes passions s’y perpetuent, et leur haine ardente, immortelle comme le Démon qui l’inspire, a toujours la même activité” I, 10 (998). OCP reads “en meurent point.” I follow the manuscript. 43. I, 10 (999). Cf. Chapter I, Footnote 96, and Footnote 35 above on the “immortal nature” Rousseau speaks about in the Troisième promenade. 44. I, 11 (999).

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who commands love of thy neighbor. Immediately following the peripety that marks the mention of God, Rousseau declares, resuming the beginning of the walk while modifying it, that he no longer has any neighbor in this world, neither fellow men nor brothers.45 He perceives himself on earth as if on an alien planet, having fallen from the heavenly body he inhabited.46 Rousseau belongs to the “monde idéal” and to the “êtres surlunaires” described in the Dialogues, the only book he has mentioned up to this point. The same holds true for the God of ataraxia, who is a God of the philosophers. The God of faith in revelation makes his appearance at the end of the Deuxième promenade. In the last paragraph before the pair of promenades that omits God in order to present the presuppositions of faith in revelation, Rousseau comes to speak of a God who, unlike the God of the tranquillity of soul, is so far from considering the fate of men with equanimity that instead he himself directs, effects, controls it. Rousseau introduces the God of providence in the context of a new attempt to disengage entirely from his affective relatedness to his enemies and to achieve a state in which he cannot be shaken by anything that might happen to him in the future. For the Deuxième promenade proved that distancing the actions and intentions of the persecutors into a compact, inescapable destiny did not suffice to gain the necessity that compels resignation and frees one for serenity. Rousseau’s hoping and fearing were not extinguished. They were aroused in regard to the œuvre, above all the parts as yet unpublished, but also in the face of particular actions of the persecutors. Fate assumes shape in the particular. It encounters in concrete deed, in individual expression, in particular behavior. And precisely in doing so, it provokes intervention and rebellion. The arrangement that Rousseau now puts to the test responds to this difficulty. It replaces a blind fate by a fate that sees, from which no piece can be broken off, from which nothing can be exempt. Instead of making the intentions of the persecutors vanish in an opaque conglomeration, Rousseau imagines that they are all governed by a single, divine intention. To overcome dependence on the wills of men, he brings into play the will of God, 45. “Tout ce qui m’est extérieur m’est étranger desormais. Je n’ai plus en ce monde ni prochain, ni semblables, ni fréres.” And four sentences later: “Seul pour le reste de ma vie, puisque je ne trouve qu’en moi la consolation, l’espérance et la paix je ne dois ni ne veux plus m’occuper que de moi” I, 12 (999). The beginning read as follows: “Me voici donc seul sur la terre, n’ayant plus de frere, de prochain, d’ami, de societé que moi-­même” I, 1 (995). The “repetition” replaces “the friend” by “the fellow men,” thus arriving at the following sequence with Christian connotation: “ni prochain, ni semblables, ni fréres.” 46. “Je suis sur la terre comme dans une planette étrangére où je serois tombé de celle que j’habitois” I, 12 (999).

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which uses the wills of men as its instruments, thus bestowing upon them an irresistibility that without this interpretation they would not have. The recourse to “the eternal decrees” puts Rousseau in the position “to consider” henceforth, “as one of those secrets of heaven impenetrable to human reason,” “the same work” that until then he “looked upon as only a fruit of the wickedness of men.”47 According to his own testimony, not only does this idea help him to resign himself—­as one resigns oneself to a higher power against which one cannot accomplish anything—­but it also brings him tranquillity and consoles him at the same time. On closer inspection, the idea helps him to resign himself, because it consoles him and in this respect it brings him tranquillity. 48 Yet what is consoling about the thought that the intentions of one’s enemies obey providence? And does not he who takes refuge in the claim of unfathomability, which destroys all security, have reason to be unsettled to the highest degree? Why does the will of God not fill Rousseau with fear and trembling? The answers are implied in the dialectical syllogism with which Rousseau has the other attempt of the Deuxième promenade culminate: “God is just; he wills that I suffer; and he knows that I am innocent. That is the motive for my confidence, my heart and my reason cry out to me that it will not deceive me.”49 That God is just takes up an important motive of faith in revelation; and the opinion that the will of God governs the world has found its most powerful proponent in faith in revelation. But the use that Rousseau makes of the two, of opinion and motive, in his thought experiment means nothing less than an attack on the center of faith in revelation, on the sovereignty of  God. The will of God is bound to justice and subjected to knowledge. God knows that Rousseau is innocent, for Rousseau knows that he is innocent. The two meet in the knowledge that binds both and thus unfolds its necessity. Rousseau does not need to wait for judgment or hope for grace. The order harmed by the will of God ultimately must be restored by the will of God. Rousseau’s conclusion denies the unfathomability and therewith the absoluteness of the divine will. In what dispute he is taking a stand, Rousseau makes sufficiently clear, by prefacing the first part of his conclusion, Dieu est juste, with the sole mention in the Rêveries of la volonté de Dieu, linking it up with an unconcealed criticism of Augustine, the Church Father held in equally high esteem by both 47. II, 24 (1010). 48. “Cette idée, loin de m’être cruelle et déchirante me console, me tranquillise, et m’aide à me résigner” II, 25 (1010). 49. II, 25 (1010).

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Protestants and Catholics: “I do not go as far as Saint Augustine, who would have consoled himself to be damned if such had been the will of  God.” To seek one’s consolation in the will of God, provided one’s damnation would have its sole basis in the will of God, means to posit the will of God absolutely. It means, moreover, to want to respond to the absoluteness of the divine will with absolute obedience. Absolute obedience to God demands, as faith in revelation teaches, to love God with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul, and with all one’s might. It demands subjecting one’s own will unconditionally to the will of God for the sake of God. He who gains his consolation from having his damnation based upon the will of God is stating that he would want to be damned by the will of God rather than to be without the will of God. He believes he has found in the will of God the ultimate support, the sustaining ground, the all-­decisive security for himself. The attitude that Rousseau ascribes to Augustine exposes to sudden view the faith that confesses of  itself: I’ve put my cause in God’s hands. Rousseau contrasts with this the attitude that would correspond to his experiment with the divine decree. His resignation stemmed from a source that would indeed be “less disinterested” than that of Augustine, “but no less pure.” It would be less disinterested, since it would be determined by the vital interest in its own good. But it would be no less pure, since love of oneself is nothing impure, and since the will that pursues undaunted the love of oneself, and in which the love of oneself expresses itself without distortion, is not inferior in purity to the will that denies love of oneself and that nevertheless cannot avoid it. Finally, it can count as more pure as regards speech about God, since it highlights justice and knowledge and does not let the necessary distinctions sink into unfathomability. Rousseau thus explicitly claims for his source, compared with that of Augustine, that it is “to my mind more worthy of the perfect being that I adore.”50 The perfect being Rousseau elevates to the standard stands between the God of faith in revelation and the God of the syllogism. It connects and separates the second and third mentions of Dieu in the Rêveries. Faith in revelation accepts perfection in its speech about God, but it denies the necessity inherent in it. Just as it affirms justice or wisdom while at the same time denying it, by making it withdraw into the incomprehensibility of the divine will.51 50. II, 25 (1010). 51. Cf. Paul, Romans 9: 11–­23, and Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum I, 2, no. 16 (Logik des Schreckens. Die Gnadenlehre von 397, ed. Kurt Flasch [Mainz, 1990], pp. 198–­ 204). See Heinrich Meier, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts. Vier Kapitel zur Unterscheidung Politischer

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The God of the philosophers returns in the Cinquième promenade. The fourth use of Dieu, the first after the interruption by the pair of promenades about faith and the lie, has attracted considerably more attention than the four uses before and after. This might be due less to its offensiveness—­in which the other passages hardly fall short of it—­than to the context in which Rousseau once again refers comparatively to God. For there Rousseau speaks of the “sufficient, perfect, and full happiness” that he attained in his “rêveries solitaires.” He describes this happiness as the state of an enduring, fulfilled, timeless present, in which the soul finds a sufficiently solid foundation, which supports it wholly and on which it can collect its whole being. And he cites episodes from the time of his sojourn on St. Peter’s Island, which make it light up from afar. “What does one enjoy in such a situation?” Rousseau asks. “Nothing external to oneself, nothing except oneself and one’s own existence; as long as this state lasts, one is sufficient unto oneself, like God.” As high as Rousseau reaches when, in order to outline his happiness, he invokes the self-­sufficiency of  God, so deeply he digs when, in order to lay bare its root, in the next sentence he goes back to the determination of the sentiment de l’existence that is com­mon to God and animal. The self-­sufficiency of God repeats the self-­ sufficiency of the savage, which Rousseau traced more than two decades earlier “in the picture of the veritable state of nature” in order to gain clarity about the foundations of his existence, in the same sense in which Rousseau’s description of  happiness in the sentiment de l’existence is linked to the “state of animality” without for a moment losing sight of the differences between the existence of Rousseau and that of the savage: It confirms the fundamental character of the determination by transferring it to the level of the highest reflexivity—­or by suggesting this transposition to the one who wants to comprehend the whole range of self-­sufficiency and the sentiment of existence.52 With the statement about self-­sufficiency in the Cinquième promenade Rousseau confirms at the end of his life the theological implications that were inherent from the outset in his conception and analysis of the “homme naturel” and that he took into consideration. This is especially true for the central anthropological distinction between amour de soi and amour-­propre, which is closely bound up with the determinations of self-­sufficiency and the sentiment of existence: for the Theologie und Politischer Philosophie (Stuttgart–­Weimar, 1994), pp. 143–­45 [The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction of Political Theology and Political Philosophy, expanded edition (Chicago–­London, 2011), pp. 90–­92]. 52. V, 14 and 15 (1046–­47); Discours sur l’inégalité, Première partie, pp. 110, 160; cf. pp. 104–­ 6; Seconde partie, p. 268, Note XII, p. 362.

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differentiation between love of oneself, which without diversion aims at one’s own good, and self-­love, which draws its force from the comparison with others and makes itself dependent on their behavior and judgment, belief and feeling. In the same Note to the Discours sur l’inégalité in which Rousseau introduces the distinction and opposes the “natural sentiment” of amour de soi-­même to the sentiment of amour-­propre, which is “only a relative sentiment, artificial, and has arisen in society,” his famous assertion “that in our primitive state, in the veritable state of nature, self-­love does not exist” is followed by the telling reasoning: “For since each particular man regards himself as the sole spectator to observe him, as the sole being in the universe to take an interest in him, as the sole judge of his own merit, it is not possible that a sentiment having its source in comparisons he is not capable of making could spring up in his soul.” The theological explosiveness of  Rousseau’s explanation is obvious, and it is not difficult to discern it as well in his tracing back of resentment to dependence on or opposition to an alien will.53 The description of the happiness of self-­sufficiency in the Cinquième promenade leaves no doubt that over the course of the experiment with the will of God in the last two paragraphs of the Deuxième promenade, Rousseau by no means forgot the insights of his earlier analysis. Rousseau speaks pointedly enough of the “compensations” godlike self-­sufficiency granted him for “all the human felicities” he was denied. As little as Rousseau subjects himself to the volonté de Dieu, as little as he takes refuge in the unfathomability of God’s will, just as little is his happiness tied to “compensations” that would be reserved for a life after death. In the Huitième promenade Rousseau will go so far as to declare, referring back to the Cinquième, the happiness indicated there to be his “most constant state.”54 The Cinquième promenade contains the center of gravity around which the Rêveries revolve. How can the speech about God go beyond the fifth walk with­ out falling back behind it? In the fourth place in which he mentions Dieu, Rousseau places himself once more within the ambit of faith in revelation. But he does so playfully, ironically, in the subjunctive: “If I had been invisible and all-­powerful like God,” Rousseau writes in the Sixième promenade, “I would have been benevolent and good like him.” In the walk that, besides the fourth and the eighth, is most closely concerned with politics and expresses itself about politics most clearly of all, Rousseau takes up the attribute that distinguishes the God of faith in revelation above every other God, and which must ultimately, as Rousseau knows, explode every doctrine of the attributes. It is 53. Discours sur l’inégalité, Note XV, pp. 368–­72; cf. commentary ad locum. 54. V, 15 and 16 (1047); VIII, 23 (1084); cf. II, 24 and 25 (1010), and III, 20 (1020).

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precisely for this reason that he attempts to delimit omnipotence by relating it to attributes that would be in accord with a divine being. Goodness would result from a power that does not allow resentment to arise; for strength and freedom produce excellence, whereas feelings of revenge and reaction arise from weakness and slavery, which have never brought forth “anything but wicked ones.” Benevolence in turn would be a source of joy for him who can see in it the radiance of his power without himself being seen; for his invisibility would protect him from being affected by alien wills, and it would make the “sight of public felicity” a delight to the eyes and to the heart. Goodness and benevolence are, rightly understood, an expression of the fullness that he who rests in himself carries within himself. An all-­powerful and invisible Rousseau would have satisfied the justice without which “public felicity” cannot be thought. But he would not have persecuted the wicked with hatred and condemned them; rather he would have pitied them precisely on account of their wickedness, since he would have let himself be determined by “the certain knowledge of the evil that they inflict upon themselves by wanting to inflict it on others.” Neither the invisibility that the magic power of the ring of  Gyges is said to bestow, nor the omnipotence that is attributed to God, seems to attain the necessity without which there is no knowledge. “Perhaps” in moments of cheerfulness Rousseau would have embarked on “the childishness” of “occasionally performing prodigies,” and thus of disrupting the order of nature. But even then he would only have followed his nature. If  he had disinterestedly intervened in the play of the world, following upon “a few acts of strict justice” would come a thousand actions that would have brought clemency and equity to bear. And if  he had placed himself in the service of  “providence,” he would at any rate “have performed wiser and more useful miracles” than those reported by saints and believers appealing to the omnipotence of God. Goodness, benevolence, justice, knowledge, clemency, usefulness, and wisdom are attributes by which an “all-­powerful” being would have to be measured. For they are attributes that would belong to Rousseau, provided that he were tout-­ puissant comme Dieu.55 Rousseau knows that he cannot be all-­powerful. And he knows that knowledge is possible only if not everything is possible. His speech about God is based upon this knowledge. In the first and third of the four places in the Rêveries in which Rousseau speaks about God, he refers to determinations he knows to be possible. In both cases, the statement that establishes the 55. VI, 18 (1057–­58). After all we have observed and remarked thus far, need it be mentioned that tout-­puissant occurs in the Rêveries only in this passage and only this one time?

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comparison with God, comme Dieu, is in the indicative, unlike in the Sixième promenade. The determinations of imperturbability or tranquillity of soul and self-­sufficiency are inferred from the reality of natural beings. They are part of Rousseau’s Natural Theology.56 Natural Theology also forms the background for Rousseau’s treatment of the God of faith in revelation in the second and fourth places. In the fourth place it provides the perspectives for the encounter with omnipotence, for its hypothetical delimitation as well as for the judgment of the main issue.57 In the second place, it designates with Être parfait the standard that underlies the entire discussion and to a certain degree is common to both sides. For faith appropriates the standard in its speech about God, although in doing so it enters the eminent domain of philosophy. Natural or Philosophic Theology thinks and articulates perfection. It answers the question what a God is by means of criteria that the philosopher, by dint of his reason and by virtue of his own experience, gains from the contemplation of a perfect being. The end of the Deuxième promenade, in the only passage in which God is mentioned twice, arrives at the confrontation of direct comparison.58 Starting from unfathomability, Rousseau takes up, in the central use of Dieu, central determinations of the theology of revelation with the justice, the will, and the knowledge of God, in order to bring them, as we have seen, into an order that denies the unfathomability of God in the all-­decisive respect. I have only to add what in the further course of the Rêveries becomes of the middle term of  Rousseau’s syllogism. For in the Huitième promenade Rousseau subjects his experiment with the will of God from the Deuxième to a radical revision. There the intentions of men are no longer supposed to be traced back to the intention of God, which directed the wills of individuals and made them irresistible for Rousseau. Instead, Rousseau now makes the attempt to transport himself to a world in which he would not have to deal with any alien intention, and would not be affected by anyone’s will. To free himself from dependence on the intentionality of other beings, and to silence his amour-­propre, Rousseau experiments with the return to the state of the homme na­turel, which he described in the Note to the Discours sur l’inégalité on the distinction between amour de soi and amour-­propre as a state of purely natural events.59 Even this approach, even this undertaking as a kind of homme naturel redivivus, under conditions of sociability, to abstract from every in56. I, 11 (939), and V, 15 (1047). 57. VI, 18 (1057). 58. II, 25 (1010). 59. VIII, 12–­14 (1077–­79); Discours sur l’inégalité, Note XV, pp. 370–­72.

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tention and to regard his contemporaries as “mechanical beings,” or to keep them at a distance as “differently moved masses,” is not Rousseau’s last word. The last word will be the homme de la nature éclairé par la raison,60 whose knowledge of himself and of others, whose thinking and whose insight put him in the position to account for his own nature without distortion and without suppression. But what remains, what Rousseau urgently calls to mind with his last attempt, and from which he will not retreat, is the tranquil view of a world that is governed neither by intention nor by will, but that has its sufficiency in being the play of chance and necessity.

60. Cf. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 864.

Chapter 3

Nature

The Promeneur Solitaire knows himself to be wholly bei sich when, bound by no law and owing obedience to no one, he engages in the activity proper to him. The confrontation to which the Troisième promenade refers using the cipher of the “great review” precedes this knowledge, and the discovery of nature is in turn the basis for that confrontation. For the unreserved examination of opinion and faith, of commandment and convention, will first become possible by the insight into the peculiar obligatory character inherent in what is known and by the experience of the liberating force that can grow out of necessity—­an insight and experience intimately linked with the observation of and research into nature. In the autobiographical sketch of the Troisième, the “grande revue” with good reason follows the “étude de la nature.”1 Yet, following the break designated by the “great review” and the “great revolution,” the study of nature has another character and nature itself acquires a new status. It becomes the standard support for the self-­understanding and orientation of the philosophic life, which is based upon the clarification of the decisive confrontation. We are now better prepared to consider more closely the first appearance of nature in the Rêveries, to which the Promeneur Solitaire’s Beisichselbstsein has led us: With this first appearance of nature we arrive once again at the opening of the Deuxième promenade, at the place where Rousseau names solitude and méditation in a single breath and lets us know that it is solely the time of solitude and meditation during which he is wholly bei sich and about which 1. III, 9 (1015) and III, 6 (1014).

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he can truly say that he is “what nature willed.”2 How is this constellation to be understood? And what does Rousseau’s explicit talk of “être ce que la nature a voulu” tell us? I would like to highlight three moments that will concern us further: (1) In meditation, which comes into its own in solitude, Rousseau actualizes a particular capacity of  his nature. Without its actualization he would not be who he is, and his life would not be what it can be in the best case. This ability distinguishes him so greatly that he can stand for a type in the book’s title. In the immediately preceding paragraph, at the end of the Première promenade, Rousseau characterized the written rêveries as the fruit of his “méditations solitaires” and added that their source can be extinguished only with his soul.3 (2) The unfolding of the activity that is extinguished only with the death of  his soul makes it possible for Rousseau to be in harmony with his own nature. He is not only wholly himself when he meditates in solitude. His meditation—­on nature in general, on human nature in particular, on the nature of the “Promeneur Solitaire,” on his individual nature—­has a far-­ reaching, formative effect. It prompts him to adopt the “habitude de rentrer en moi-­même.” Rousseau owes his insight into the possibilities of his autarky and of his happiness to the Beisichselbstsein proper to meditation and to the turning toward himself proper to conscious life as a whole: “thus I learned through my own experience that the source of true happiness is within us and that it is not within the power of men to make anyone truly miserable who knows how to will to be happy.” To clarify this, Rousseau draws on—­we are still in the introduction to the Deuxième promenade—­the “inner delights” that “les ames aimantes et douces” find in contemplation. (3) When Rousseau is fully himself and realizes his particular nature, he accords with nature in general. In the concentration proper to solitude and meditation, which opens up for him a free reaching out to the world and a loving turn toward what is outside him, in the conscious particularity of his existence, he stands in harmony with nature in its universality. Nature does not “will” that he lose himself  in his devotion to what is other, greater, higher. He is not supposed to merge into a human community or blend with the all-­encompassing whole. Harmony with nature requires not that Rousseau deny himself in the face of nature or that he dissolve himself in it, but that he encounter it in his nature. To unpack what Rousseau has packed into the introduction to the Deuxième promenade, one walk is not sufficient. What is thought here gives shape to 2. II, 1 (1002). For the following see the first three paragraphs of the introduction of the Deuxième promenade (1002–­3). 3. I, 15 (1001).

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the entire book and finds clarification in everything that follows. Let us begin where Rousseau does: with the contemplation of and meditation on nonhuman nature. The Solitary Walker is surrounded by nature. For him, earth and heaven, water and air, stones and stars, plants and animals are omnipresent. Among the possible objects of a closer examination he chooses plants. They merit his particular attention. They interest him right down to the most insignificant details. The pleasure he finds in studying them he speaks about in three walks, ever increasing and each case taking in a more extensive space. Immediately following the opening of the Deuxième we learn first of all that during his walk of October 24, 1776—­the only one of which the Rêveries provide a report—­Rousseau joyfully discovered three species that are seldom found in the vicinity of Paris, namely, Picris hieracioides, Bupleurum falcatum, as well as Cerastium aquaticum, and that the last-­named plant in the end found a place in his herbarium, despite a fateful accident caused by a large dog when it set upon him. Rousseau adds that he investigated many other plants en détail whose aspect and determination, although already familiar to him, did not for that reason give him any less pleasure.4 The Cinquième brings us back to fall 1765, when Rousseau was in his “first botanical fever,” and shows us the joy in knowing with which he wandered around St. Peter’s Island, pursuing botany with magnifying glass in hand and Linnaeus’s Systema naturae under his arm. The Cinquième depicts the “raptures” and “ecstasies” to which each new observation moved him, which let him better comprehend the structure and organization of the plants. And it does not neglect to mention how much the differentiation and classification of the species under generic classifications “charmed” him, to say nothing of other still more exciting sights and insights.5 Finally, the Septième is devoted entirely to botany. It connects past and present. It traces the development of Rousseau’s love for the study of plants and discusses the reasons that attract him to botany. However, with the discussion of these reasons, it becomes the natural place for reflection on the study of nature in general. The Septième is the only promenade after and in addition to the Troisième in which Rousseau speaks of l’étude de la nature.6 This indicates its level of importance. Indeed, its significance does not fall short of that of the Troisième, 4. II, 5 and 6 (1003−4). 5. V, 7 and 8 (1042−44). 6. III, 6 (1014); VII, 23 (1069). Cf. VII, 21 (1068). In the twelfth paragraph of the Septième, in an extremely important passage, Rousseau first spoke likewise of the “étude de la nature,” only to correct it subsequently with “observation de la nature.” (These variants are made available by

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to which it is related in more than one respect. Just as the third walk had for its object the confrontation with faith, so the seventh walk has for its object the contemplation of nature.7 The two walks are, therefore, tightly connected by their subjects. In their approach, however, they reveal a conspicuous difference. The Troisième stood under the sign of the examen sévère on whose starting point for Rousseau “le repos du reste de mes jours et mon sort total” depended. Its undertaking demanded the deployment of all natural abilities and virtues over which he had command, not least courage. In the Septième the ease of amusement stands in the foreground. A relaxed cheerfulness hovers over it. Rousseau lets the promenade fade away in anecdotal recollections of the time he first engaged in botany, which makes him laugh, and he begins it with laughter about himself. He has to laugh when he thinks about the “enthusiasm” bordering on “madness” with which he is ready to submit to his newly enflamed amusement and completely give himself over to the study of plants. Rousseau laughs more in the Septième than in any other promenade before or after.8 His laughter says nothing against the seriousness of  the object that Rousseau treats in the Septième promenade, but it says quite a lot about the manner of its treatment. And it says something about the attitude, the distance, and the equanimity that he gains in relation to the world and to himself in the course of his consideration of nature. The two anecdotes that show us a laughing Rousseau toward the end of the walk have a serious background. They take place near Môtiers, in the vicinity of  Grenoble, a couple of months before or a few years after his sojourn on St. Peter’s Island, at a time when Rousseau found asylum from persecution in Prussian Neuenburg and was tolerated in France only under a false name. The last anecdote has for its subject a “poisonous fruit” that the botanizing Rousseau eats, following his natural curiosity, without being warned by his companion, a lawyer from the region, although “tout le monde” in Grenoble believe they know and although later Rousseau hears from “tout le monde” that the fruit is dangerous, even in the smallest dose. Asked by Rousseau why he did not warn him, the companion replies deferentially that he did not dare take the liberty. Rousseau reacts with neither indignation nor annoyance to the behavior of the lawyer, who “made it John S. Spink p. 131, but they are missing from the apparatus of the OCP.) Thus, there remains exactly one use in the Troisième and in the Septième, respectively. 7. In the Septième “nature” appears twenty times, in promenades II, III, IV, V, VI, IX altogether seventeen times. 8. Rousseau laughs four times, twice about himself and twice about others: VII, 1, 26, 28 (1061, 1071, 1072−73).

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into a law” unto himself to serve as Rousseau’s bodyguard during his sojourn in Grenoble, and if possible never to be even a step away from Rousseau. He laughs about so much “humility” and never recalls without renewed laughter the “unusual discretion” of the honest man who, under no circumstances, wanted to offend against what convention seemed to him to demand. Rousseau suffers no harm to body or soul from eating of the forbidden fruit. He feels some “inquietude,” but awakens the next day in “perfect health.”9 The first anecdote brings to mind the consequences that the public confrontation with faith in revelation had for Rousseau, and thus the confrontation itself. It depicts a solitary excursion that Rousseau took in the nearly impassable heights of the Jura Mountains, where he came upon Dentaria heptaphyllos,10 Cyclamen, Nidus avis, Laserpitium, and other plants with which he spent a long time. Finally, sitting on a pillow of Lycopodium and moss, he imagined himself in a refuge “unknown to the whole universe,” in which “persecutors could not unearth” him. “A flash of pride soon inserted itself into this reverie.” He saw himself as the “first mortal” in such an uninhabited place, “almost as another Columbus,” until a familiar-­sounding noise made him aware that no more than a thicket and twenty steps separated him from a stocking mill. In the factory, he said to himself, there were perhaps not even two men who were not a party to the plot against him instigated by Pastor Montmollin of Môtiers, a plot that was supposed to culminate on September 6, 1765, with the “stoning” of the house in which Rousseau was living.11 Rousseau banished the gloomy idea, freed himself from the power of his pious persecutors, and in the end laughed about “both my puerile vanity and the comic manner in which I had been punished for it.”12 Much in the Septième promenade is not as it seems, and only a little is as it is made out to be. The first impression proves deceptive. In the details, seen as a whole, literally. Already the opening, which indicates the impending end of the Rêveries, turns out to be misleading: “The collection of my long dreams is scarcely begun, and I already feel it is near its end. Another amusement takes its place, absorbs me, and even deprives me of the time to dream.” The 9. VII, 28 (1072−73). 10. Or Dentaria polyphylla, which, according to Albert Jansen, “of all the forest plants of the coniferous regions arouses the greatest interest” ( Jean-­Jacques Rousseau als Botaniker [Berlin, 1885], p. 86). 11. See V, 4 (1041). Frédéric S. Eigeldinger gives an exhaustive account of the event and its prehistory in his “Des pierres dans mon jardin.” Les années neuchâteloises de J. J. Rousseau et la crise de 1765 (Paris–­Geneva, 1992), especially pp. 351–­53. 12. VII, 25−26 (1070−71).

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other occupation, which seems to compete in Rousseau with the amusement of thinking and writing the Rêveries, is so far from suppressing his meditation and taking over from his writing that it is instead subordinate to precisely these activities. Rousseau immediately turns his bent for botany into the object of reflection. Why he finds so attractive a “vain study”—­which for him remains “without profit, without progress” and sends him back again late in his life to the school desk of his youth, with the difficulties of old age, especially “without aptitude, without memory”—­the task of explaining to himself such a “bizarrerie” is a question of self-­knowledge.13 Botany, which seemed to lead away from the Rêveries, not only is readily incorporated into Rousseau’s project of advancing his self-­knowledge but will become an integral component of the enterprise of the Rêveries as a whole, of whose end the first sentence spoke. The walk that is devoted to it widens—­although botanizing leaves Rousseau no time for dreaming—­into one of the longest Rêveries of all. But after the Septième, nothing more is said about botany. The two amusements, which were opposed to one another at the opening, are not of equal rank. Botany presents no alternative to the enterprise of the Rêveries. It belongs to this enterprise as one moment belongs to the overarching movement or stands in the same relation to it as species does to genus. Rousseau treats the observation of nature in corpore vili. Botany, which becomes thematic in the Septième as the question of self-­knowledge, suffices as fittingly for the conception of the Rêveries, namely, having philosophic activity discerned in an alien and fragmented form, as it accords with Rousseau’s rhetoric of having the philosophic life appear as a harmless oddity. Botany allows Rousseau to speak of the study of nature as if he were speaking of nothing other than an innocent amusement. The precautions that the treatment of the subject demands are not exhausted by the choice of the appropriate example and by preparing readers for the discussion of an amusement, a folie, a fantaisie, or a bizarrerie that Rousseau is still willing to allow himself as his “only preoccupation”—­all characterizations of the supposed subject of the promenade drawn from its introduction. In the same introduction, there is talk of the “wise project” of the sixty-­five-­year-­old “learning by heart the entire Regnum vegetabile,” which Johann Andreas Murray had placed at the front of his edition of Linnaeus’s Systema vegetabilium in 1774, and thus “becoming acquainted with all the known plants on earth.” This project is the repetition, 13. “Or c’est une bizarrerie que je voudrois m’expliquer; il me semble que, bien eclaircie, elle pourroit jetter quelque nouveau jour sur cette connoissance de moimême à l’acquisition de laquelle j’ai consacré mes derniers loisirs” VII, 4 (1061).

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driven to the comical, of  Rousseau’s undertaking, mentioned in the Cinquième promenade, of describing “all the plants” on St. Peter’s Island “without omitting a single one,” and of applying the rest of his days to composing the Flora petrinsularis.14 The wisdom of the project is laughable. We can imagine Rousseau laughing again when, shortly thereafter, he puts the following sentences to paper: “I have sometimes thought rather deeply, but rarely with pleasure, almost always against my liking, and as though by force: reverie relaxes and amuses me; reflection tires and saddens me; thinking always was a painful and charmless occupation for me.” The rhetorical gesture is familiar to us from the Dialogues, and the attentive reader would scarcely need the hints with which the author follows up in the same promenade in order to be convinced that Rousseau would sooner have to be kept from thinking than forced to think.15 The Rêveries by themselves, promenade by promenade, would testify to Rousseau’s pleasure in thinking and writing, even if  he had neglected to speak explicitly of plaisir and amusement in order to characterize his activity and attitude.16 But what does deserve attention is the circumstance that precisely in the Septième Rousseau has recourse to the gesture experimented with in the Dialogues of presenting thinking as if it were a burden, and that only in this walk, solely in the cited passage from the introduction, does he oppose rêverie to réflexion, a distinction he immediately follows with the distinction between rêverie and méditation: “Sometimes my reveries end in meditation, but more often my meditations end in reverie; and during these wanderings, my soul rambles and glides through the universe on the wings of imagination, in ecstasies which surpass every other enjoyment.”17 In the Septième, rêverie is determined as it were as a species of its own and separated off from the genus rêverie, which in addition to rêverie in the now specified sense of an ecstatic gliding and rambling on the wings of imagination encompasses réflexion, méditation, and contemplation, and also includes sentiment and pensée.18 This operation invites one to equate the narrower and broader senses of the term “rêverie,” not to distinguish “genus” and “species,” and in the end to leave “rêveries,” which figures as an enigmatic term in the title of the book, to mean 14. VII, 2 (1061) and V, 7 (1043). 15. “J’errois nonchalemment dans les bois et dans les montagnes, n’osant penser de peur d’attiser mes douleurs” VII, 10 (1063). “Forcé de m’abstenir de penser, de peur de penser à mes malheurs malgré moi . . .” VII, 17 (1066), my emphasis. 16. Cf. I, 15 (1001) and VII, 1 (1060). 17. VII, 5 (1061−62). The paragraph is composed of the two sentences that are reproduced completely in the text. Consider V, 16 (1048) and V, 7 (1044). 18. Cf. I, 13 (1000).

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the “wanderings” of Rousseau’s imagination. The distinction between rêverie and méditation in the fifth paragraph of the Septième is designed to sow confusion, since the required distinction in the use of the term “rêverie” remains unstated. Rousseau had prepared this deliberate confusion when, in the first sentence of the Septième, he spoke of the “recueil de mes longs rêves” instead of  “recueil de mes longues rêveries,” the “collection of my long dreams” instead of the “collection of my long reveries.” The substitution of rêves in place of rêveries is without parallel in the Rêveries.19 It makes one attentive in a subtle way to the necessity of the distinction between “genus” and “species,” which the fifth paragraph passes over in silence. The demotion of the Rêveries to “dreams” in the opening, which sets the tone for the promenade in its complete inauthenticity, corresponds incidentally to the diminishment of the theme of the Septième, which gains expression in the crescendo of the four characterizations, amusement,  folie, fantaisie, bizarrerie, in the first four paragraphs. For the seventh Rêverie, the protection of the enigmatic term, not further determined, evidently seemed to Rousseau not to suffice. The precautions Rousseau takes with the framework, the introduction, and the concluding anecdotes have multiple supports and amplifications in the corpus of the promenade. These include all sorts of anthropomorphic, edifying figures of speech borrowed from the realm of fable that Rousseau intersperses,20 but most prominently from Everyman’s perspective that he seems to adopt when he speaks about knowledge and science in general21 and about individual sciences in particular, such as chemistry or zoology, including anatomy.22 Whoever reads the reservations Rousseau brings forward against chemistry23 will not easily arrive at the thought that the author who 19. “Rêve” appears in the plural only here, and it appears only once in the singular, namely, in the Première promenade (I, 2, p. 995), where it conveys the meaning of a bad dream. The use of the verb “rêver” in the second sentence of the opening of the Septième promenade provides additional stress on the substitution of “rêve” for “rêverie” in the previous sentence. Consider for this Chapter I, P. 15. 20. Cf. inter alia VII, 16 (1066); VII, 18 in fine (1067); VII, 22 in fine (1069). 21. Cf. VII, 22 in princ. (1068) with the text variants. See III, 1 as well as III, 3−5 (1010−13). 22. “Quel appareil affreux qu’un amphitheatre anatomique, des cadavres puans, de baveuses et livides chairs, du sang, des intestins dégoutans, des squeletes affreux, des vapeurs pestilentielles! Ce n’est pas là, sur ma parole, que J. J. ira chercher ses amusemens” VII, 20 (1068). 23. “il faut faire des expériences pénibles et couteuses, travailler dans des laboratoires, dépenser beaucoup d’argent et de tems parmi le charbon, les creusets, les fourneaux, les cornues, dans la fumée et les vapeurs étouffantes, toujours au risque de sa vie et souvent aux dé­ pends de sa santé. De tout ce triste et fatigant travail resulte pour l’ordinaire beaucoup moins

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expresses them could have occupied himself in any detail with chemistry and kept among his papers an extensive manuscript with the title Institutions chimiques that proves his expertise as a chemist.24 The solitary walker might lack the “instruments” and “machines” he would need in order to devote himself to astronomy; on the other hand, the “connoisssances preliminaires,” which he cites as the first requirement, he in no way lacks, for astronomy likewise belonged among the sciences of which Rousseau early on acquired knowledge.25 Not to mention his intensive preoccupation with what in his century was called the “natural history” of the animate world. Rousseau encourages the impression that he speaks as one layman to another. An amateur, who knows how to explain his weakness for botany in a way that Everyman can follow. Yet what in the guise of “botany” he observes and notes, communicates as reasons, and gives us to see and consider reminds us that in the walker of the seventh Rêverie we have before us the author of the Discours sur l’inégalité. He is familiar with the explosive force that can be released by the study of nature. He knows that it is essential to nature as a term of distinction: Nature in contrast to convention, without which a political community can have no basis; nature in contrast to authority, without which no political community can be maintained; nature as the designation of that which is by necessity, in contrast to that which men and Gods say about it and devise with it, or in contrast to that which is only insofar as they say something about it and devise something with it. Accordingly, Rousseau proceeds with circumspection when he introduces nature as a term of distinction into the promenade. For this purpose he chooses a paragraph that opposes the cooptation of  botany by pharmacology, and by medicine by means of pharmacology, and he defends the study of plants for the sake of knowledge against its practical aim. Medicine, constantly interested in drugs and remedies, takes possession of plants and transforms them de savoir que d’orgueil, et où est le plus mediocre chymiste qui ne croye pas avoir pénétré toutes les grandes operations de la nature pour avoir trouvé par hazard peut-­être quelques petites combinaisons de l’art?” VII, 19 (1067). 24. Rousseau had written the book around 1747 and two months before his death entrusted the manuscript to Paul Moultou. Maurice Gautier edited it for the first time in the Annales Jean-­Jacques Rousseau 12 (Geneva, 1918−19): 1−164 and 13 (1920−21): 1−178. The Institutions chimiques are not contained in the OCP. In the meantime Bruno Bernardi and Bernadette Bensaude-­Vincent have made them available as a book (Paris, 1999) and in addition edited a collection of essays on the theme, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau et la chimie (Corpus. Revue de philosophie 36 [Paris, 1999]). 25. VII, 23 (1069). Cf. Cours de geographie and Réponse au mémoire anonyme, intitulé, “Si le monde que nous habitons est une sphére etc.” OCP V, pp. 535−52.

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into medicinal herbs, so “that we see in them what we do not see in them at all, namely, the pretended virtue that it pleases just anybody to attribute to them.” The will to have knowledge serve practical purposes has an impact on knowledge in turn. Plants are no longer observed as plants and investigated as such, but rather are reduced to specific properties that promise to be useful. Concomitantly, botany is dismissed as “useless study” if it is not linked to the study of those properties, “that is to say, if one does not abandon the observation of nature, which does not lie at all and which says nothing of all that to us, in order to submit solely to the authority of men, who are liars.” With a light touch, Rousseau links the distinction between nature and authority to the question of truth. He who wants to know the truth is referred to the observation of nature, which does not lie, since nature does not pursue any intentions. He must see with his own eyes and rely on himself. By contrast, whoever relies on hearsay must abandon the study of nature. He subordinates himself to rule by another, with the risk that his will or judgment will cause him in the end to see things that are not there to be seen. The contrast between nature, which does not lie, and the authority of men, who are liars, has for its model a famous passage in the Discours sur l’inégalité. In the last paragraph of the exordium, Rousseau addresses his audience and, speaking directly to man, no matter what country he may come from and whatever his opinions might be, announces: “Here is your history, as I believed to read it, not in the books of your fellow men, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies.” This is one of the most daring sentences in the rhetoric of the Discours, in light of the fact that the last books to which Rousseau had referred most recently were “the writings of Moses,” to which, Rousseau pointedly adds, “any Christian philosopher owes credence.”26 The “writings of  Moses” are not mentioned in the Septième promenade. Instead Rousseau continues the sentence that opposes nature to the authority of men: “men, who are liars and who assure us of many things one must believe upon their word, fondée elle-­même le plus souvent sur l’autorité d’autrui.” The word we are supposed to rely on is itself most often founded on the authority of others or of another. The authority we are called upon to believe in refers us to another, older, higher authority. This is an ample amount of explosive for a paragraph that is venting about the misconstrual of plants 26. Discours sur l’inégalité, Exorde, pp. 74 and 70. The two statements are separated from one another by a single paragraph, at the end of which Rousseau explains that he will imagine himself giving his speech in the Lyceum of Athens and having a Plato and a Xenocrates for judges and the human race as his audience.

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as medicinal herbs and the conflation of a “garden of rare trees and plants” with an “apothecary’s garden.” A paragraph, however, whose prominent position is marked by two antipodes appearing at its beginning and end and in no other place in the Rêveries: The second sentence praises the philosopher Theophrastus as the “only botanist of antiquity.” The penultimate sentence, in an ironic reversal, raises Adam to the status of the “first apothecary.” “For it is not easy to imagine a garden better stocked with plants than the Garden of Eden.”27 What we think we know about the Garden of Eden rests on the “writings of Moses,” and how little Rousseau bowed to their authority, how far he was from agreeing to render the obedience any “Christian philosopher” owes to those writings, he had shown in the Discours sur l’inégalité, which presents a position as radically opposed as conceivable to the tradition that originates with the “writings of Moses.” Adam is as little mentioned in the Discours as Moses in the Rêveries, but Adam is as present in the former as Moses is in the latter. Both texts speak about the tree of knowledge of good and evil, without referring to it by name. The Discours interprets the prohibition against eating from the tree of knowledge, with which the revealed religions agree, as “the intention of giving from the beginning a morality to human actions, which they would not have acquired for a long time.”28 The Rêveries again evoke with the “Garden of  Eden” the most famous of all plants to which “virtues” or “properties” are ascribed, which one does not see in nature. The tree that separates obedience from disobedience connects botany with philosophy. It has proven to be one of the two plants that have become most significant for philosophy.29 In a digression, brief and emphatically incidental, Rousseau takes up once more the distinction between nature and authority. While initially the distinction concerned his good in relation to his knowledge, to access to the truth, it now concerns rule over his body in regard to his health. Rousseau reports that while he has “never had great trust in medicine,” in the past he nevertheless so trusted doctors, whom he “esteemed” and “loved,” that he let them “govern” 27. VII, 12 (1063−64), my emphasis. 28. Discours sur l’inégalité, Note IX, p. 320; see the commentary ad locum. Cf. Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, pp. 939–­40n., where in his interpretation of the prohibition against eating from the tree of  knowledge Rousseau develops an ad hominem argument, which he maintains against his adversary; further pp. 945–­46. 29. The other plant, Homer’s Moly, stands for the discovery of nature. Odysseus discerns the physis of the Moly with Hermes’s help, a knowledge that immunizes him against Circe’s arts. Odyssey X, 302−6. Cf. Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey (Lanham, MD, 1997), pp. 80−90.

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his “carcass with full authority.” With “fifteen years’ experience” at his own expense, he would now be better instructed. Only since he returned to live “under the sole laws of nature” did he regain his “original health” through these very laws. His confidence in physicians was misplaced. Rousseau became “living proof of the futility of their art.” Through suffering he was forced to become aware that it was not good for him to expose himself to the rule of others, although he granted them full authority merely over his body, for nowhere is it said that Rousseau would have conceded to another, whoever it might be, authority over his soul.30 The “laws of nature” point in the opposite direction. The return to these laws corresponds not only to the turn away from authority but also, with this turning away, to the turn toward himself. The movements of rentrer sous les seules loix de la nature and rentrer en soi-­même have for Rousseau one meaning, even if they are not one and the same. The study of nature, which can claim the Promeneur Solitaire’s undivided attention, is not tied to the needs of the body. It is not determined by material interests. It is not in service to society. “Medicine” and “pharmacy” furnish Rousseau the foil in order to make clear what he has in view with his praise of “botany.” They represent a science for which interest in rule and utility is constitutive. They illustrate an attitude that makes men “seek profit or remedies everywhere, and that would cause men to regard the whole of nature with indifference,” or “would cause” them not to regard it “if they were doing well.” In contrast to the practical access of medicine and pharmacy, botany embodies the essentially theoretical orientation of philosophic study. Botany represents the contemplation of nature in itself and for its own sake. It stands for the “delights allowed by a pure and disinterested contemplation.”31 Its reputation as “useless study” is precisely what made botany fitting to present the theoretical attitude in an individual science, as only astronomy might otherwise be suited to do. What links botany and astronomy is the large power of attraction that dwells in the objects with which they are concerned, owing to their beauty and variety. “Plants seem to have been sown profusely on the earth, like the 30. VII, 15 (1065). Rousseau speaks of the doctors’ hatred he drew upon himself, because he regained his original health only by the laws of nature: “Quand les medicins n’auroient point contre moi d’autres griefs, qui pourroit s’étonner de leur haine?” With this he offers a late account of the “ardent, immortal hatred” of the “collective bodies” that, he assumed in the Première promenade (I, 10), would persecute him even after his death. The enmity of the doctors as well as of the churchmen, of whom he spoke there, has its deepest basis in the distinction between authority and nature, which is made prominent only in the Septième promenade. 31. VII, 15 (1065).

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stars in the sky, to invite man to the study of nature by the attraction of  pleasure and curiosity.” Plants and stars are the natural objects of delight to the eyes and of the desire to know, without which theoria is inconceivable.32 Yet the stars are so far away from the observer that “very long ladders are needed to get to them and bring them within our reach,” while plants are naturally to be found within it. “They are born under our feet and in our hands, so to speak.” Botany can do without machines, needs only a few simple instruments, and is not necessarily dependent upon a division of labor. It is distinguished among the other empirical disciplines, including astronomy, by its high degree of autarky.33 To the external autarky, which is a decisive point of view in Rousseau’s discussion, corresponds the requirement of inner self-­sufficiency. It is contained in the third determination of the triad plaisir, curiosité, plein calme des passions, with which Rousseau characterizes the étude de la nature. For only if the passions are brought to complete calm will that “charm” be able to be felt that is proper to contemplation and that certainly “alone suffices to make life happy and sweet.” Rousseau explicates the silence of the passions, which theory demands, in light of the social affects, which distract from the subject matter and interfere with knowledge where they do not corrupt it: the vanity of wanting to learn only in order to instruct others; the striving for reputation, for which knowing matters less than showing that one knows; the worry about being admired “on the world stage” for one’s discoveries and insights.34 No less depressing, diminishing, and distorting, however, is the effect on the observer who mingles his own into the study of nature on the basis of hopes, fears, and wishes from which he was not be able to free himself. The “delights of pure and disinterested contemplation” can be had only at the price of the rejection of the anthropocentric prejudices and teleological consolations that Rousseau opposed in his œuvre more openly than any of his predecessors. The praise of theory in the Septième promenade has behind it a sober view of man in the cosmos, which found its starkest expression in the statement in the Discours sur l’inégalité that man would have remained “eternally” in his original, animal condition, without “the contingent combination of several alien causes, which also might never have arisen.”35 This conception of nature, which breaks with 32. Consider Genesis 3: 6. 33. “La botanique est l’étude d’un oisif et paresseux solitaire: une pointe et une loupe sont tout l’appareil dont il a besoin pour les [sc. plantes] observer” VII, 23 (1069). 34. VII, 23 (1069). See Chapter II, P. 49. 35. Discours sur l’inégalité, Première partie, p. 166.

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the provisions of teleological doctrines, is not expressed in the Septième—­it is barely hinted at36—­but is brought to mind by the determinations of the contemplation of nature for a reader who has thought through Rousseau’s “boldest” writing, so that we can say, relying on the word of a poet who felt close to Rousseau without following him in the radicality of his thinking: For the one who thinks, a wink was enough.

The “inner delights” of contemplation are not accessible to Everyman. The distinction introduced at the beginning of the Deuxième promenade, which correlated these delights with a particular type, that of “loving and sweet souls,” is taken up and made more precise in the Septième, which answers the question, to whom the study of nature alone can be sufficient “to make life happy and sweet.” Contemplation becomes the happiness of a soul that finds its true pleasure in seeing, conceiving, and learning, that cannot be deterred by any obstacle from following its curiosity, that in the contemplation of nature is determined by no passion or purpose other than the eros of  knowledge, of a loving soul that turns its full attention to the object of contemplation and seeks to do justice to it in its reality.37 Stated the other way around: Whoever “wants to study nature only to find continuously new reasons to love it” and thus to study it still further will, without expecting it, become a “botanist”; the cheerful objects surrounding him, which “laugh” at him, attract him, he sees them, observes them, compares them, eventually learns to classify, distinguish, and arrange them . . . 38 The determination of the study of nature by eros is the most fundamental reason that Rousseau can treat it in the guise of an amusement: plaisir, curiosité, and calme des passions can be explicated in both, since they derive from a single root. Despite this, botany for Rousseau is no “mere” amusement. The discussion of the individual sciences, which could come into question for the Promeneur Solitaire as an amusement but not as a métier, draws a clear limit to every dilettantish pursuit that is unable to do justice to the object domain of investigation owing to lack of sufficient expertise or 36. Cf. inter alia: “Le régne mineral n’a rien en soi d’aimable et d’attrayant; ses richesses enfermées dans le sein de la terre semblent avoir été éloignées des regards des hommes pour ne pas tenter leur cupidité” VII, 18 (1066). “Les plantes semblent avoir été semées avec profusion sur la terre comme les étoiles dans le ciel pour inviter l’homme par l’attrait du plaisir et de la curiosité à l’étude de la nature” VII, 23 (1069), my emphasis. Consider Chapter II in fine. 37. The courage that the âme aimante et douce must have is mentioned only in the Troisième promenade. See Chapter II, Pp. 54–55. 38. VII, 21 (1068).

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because of inadequate equipment or failure to satisfy other presuppositions.39 Rousseau’s botanical writings, which apart from the never-­written Flora petrinsularis are not mentioned in the Rêveries, show incidentally not only the rich results that botany, characterized with exaggeration as “the study of an idle and lazy solitary person,” yielded for him. They also leave no doubt that his amusement accorded with the nature of the subject matter.40 To want to study nature in order through its study always to find new reasons to love it designates an attitude diametrically opposed to the enterprise of modern science, namely, to conduct research into nature in order to conquer it. The “complete calm of the passions,” which Rousseau demands for the sake of theory, targets not least those passions that empower dominion by means of a knowledge they wrest from nature by its “constriction” and “vexation,” by methodically exercised coercion, a knowledge nature would not give up “of its own freedom.” The defense of botany against its subordination to pharmacy and medicine consists ultimately in a single objection to the orientation of all science and knowledge toward the goal for which Francis Bacon coined the phrase “reliefe of Mans estate.”41 Rousseau profiles this opposition to modernity’s 39. VII, 18−20 (1066−68). “Il est aisé,  je l’avoue d’aller ramassant du sable et des pierres, d’en remplir ses poches et son cabinet et de se donner avec cela les airs d’un naturaliste: mais ceux qui s’attachent et se bornent à ces sortes de collections sont pour l’ordinaire de riches ignorans qui ne cherchent à cela que le plaisir de l’étalage. Pour profiter dans l’étude des mineraux, il faut être chymiste et physicien; il faut faire des expériences pénibles et couteuses, travailler dans des laboratoires . . .” VII, 19 (1067). 40. Lettres sur la botanique; Fragmens pour un dictionnaire des termes d’usage en botanique; Fragments de Botanique, OCP IV, pp. 1151−97, 1201−47, 1249−56. Additional material is contained in the editions of Lettres inédites de Jean-­Jacques Rousseau à Mmes Boy de La Tour et Delessert comprenant les Lettres sur la botanique by Philippe Godet and Maurice Boy de La Tour (Paris and Geneva, 1911) and Lettres sur la botanique par Jean-­Jacques Rousseau by Bernard Gagnebin (Paris, 1962). 41. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Oxford Francis Bacon IV, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford, 2000), p. 32. Instauratio magna, Oxford Francis Bacon XI, ed. Graham Rees with Maria Wakely (Oxford, 2004), pp. 28 and 38 (“conficimus Historiam non solum Naturae liberae ac solutae . . . sed multo magis Naturae constrictae et vexatae; nempe, cum per Artem et ministerium humanum de statu suo detruditur, atque premitur et fingitur . . . quandoquidem Natura rerum magis se prodit per vexationis Artis, quam in libertate propria”); Novum organum 1, CXXIX, Oxford Francis Bacon XI, p. 194. (The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath [London, 1857–­74), III, p. 294; IV, pp. 24, 29, 114.) In Bacon’s New Atlantis the representative of the “House of Salomon,” the order for the advancement of science and technical progress, explains: “The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of

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project of the progressive, all-­encompassing domination of nature by the praise of  Theophrastus, who, unlike the moderns, saw in plants no mere supplier of drugs and remedies: “one can regard this philosopher as the only botanist of antiquity, which is also why he is almost unknown among us.”42 The student of Plato and Aristotle carried out thorough investigations in each of the three areas of research into nature—­mineralogy, zoology, and botany—­that Rousseau explicitly treats in the Septième. Not only was he the author of numerous writings about the most diverse objects, from logic to the natural sciences to ethics, among them the Historia plantarum, relevant for the Rêveries,43 and the much-­read Characteres ethici. Following Aristotle’s death, he also for almost four decades led the Lyceum of Athens, which Rousseau in 1755 determined as the venue for his speech about the natural history of man and the development of society. Only Theophrastus is designated in the Rêveries as a philosopher. That Rousseau reserves this designation for a botanist who is “almost unknown among us” underlines the importance assigned to botany in the argument of the book. That he applies it in the Septième44 refers us back once more to the Troisième promenade, the only walk in which philosophers were mentioned. There Rousseau spoke emphatically of the “philosophes modernes,” or alternatively of “nos philosophes,” and distinguished these from the ancient philosophers. But he did not explicate the distinction. Here Theophrastus comes into play.

Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible” ( paragraph 20, my emphasis). In the central paragraph of the New Atlantis, the “Father of Salomon’s House” cites as the achievement of the order possession of the scientific-­technical means “to make divers new plants” ( paragraph 30). Immediately prior to this, he makes clear what purpose is served by the triumph the scientists achieve by art over the nature of plants: “And many of them we so order, as they become of medicinal use” ( paragraph 29). For the preoccupation of the “House of Salomon” with medicine and especially with human life extension, see paragraphs 21, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35 (The Works of Francis Bacon III, pp. 157–­60). Cf. Pp. 81–82 and 83–84. 42. VII, 12 (1063). For Theophrastus, see Diogenes Laertius V 36−50. 43. Suzanne Amigues has produced a critical edition with French translation and commentary in the Collection Budé: Théophraste, Recherches sur les plantes, 5 vols. (Paris, 1988–­2006). 44. In his botanical writings Rousseau mentions Theophrastus only once—­without calling him a philosopher: “L’histoire de cette opération [sc. la caprification] a été détaillée en premier lieu par Théophraste, le premier, le plus savant ou, pour mieux dire, l’unique et vrai Botaniste de l’antiquité, et après lui par Pline chez les anciens. Chez les modernes par Jean Bauhin, puis par Tournefort sur les lieux mêmes, après lui par Pontedera, et par tous les compilateurs de Botanique et d’Histoire naturelle qui n’ont fait que transcrire la relation de Tournefort.” Fragmens pour un dictionnaire des termes d’usage en botanique, Caprification, p. 1215.

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The modern philosophers, whom Rousseau characterizes in the Troisième as “ardent missionaries of atheism and very imperious dogmatists,” are not philosophers of the rank of a Machiavelli or Hobbes, of a Spinoza or Locke, but are instead the French philosophes, whom he knew with his own eyes. “I was living then among modern philosophers who hardly resembled the ancient ones.” Rousseau speaks of the circle around the Encyclopédie, with whom he had close contact in Paris, of Diderot, presumably of d’Alembert, certainly of Helvétius, and of Holbach’s “coterie.”45 We have seen what role Rousseau assigns to the philosophes in his rhetoric. Why he introduces them in the promenade about faith needs no further explanation.46 Things are different with the question concerning the assumptions and presuppositions that turned the philosophes—­evidently not only in contrast to the ancient philosophers—­into ardent missionaries of atheism and into dogmatists with a pronounced will to rule. Whoever labors with missionary zeal for the victory of atheism not only assumes that a society of atheists would be a better society, but also presupposes that a society without belief in a God who cares about the life of men and watches over their action, is viable.47 But that assumption and this presupposition rest on belief and hope. On the belief in the possibility of a fundamental alteration of man and on the hope of achieving that planned transformation by way of enlightenment. A hope and a belief nourished in turn by the expectations set free by the process of the progressive mastery of nature by means of science and technology. What the philosophes wrote on their banner was to lead this process, which they conceived as a philanthropic enterprise of grand design, to a religious, moral, political victory. In doing so they appealed emphatically to the modern philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, above all to Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, who had inaugurated the enterprise, without necessarily sharing for that reason the intention of the philosophes, not to mention agreeing with their belief and hope.48 Bacon was the figurehead of the flagship of the philosophes. Diderot praised him in 1750 in the prospectus for the Encyclopédie as an “extraordinary genius,” and d’Alembert in the Discours préliminaire a year later saw himself “tempted to consider him as 45. III, 11 (1015−16). Cf. Les Confessions VIII, p. 369 and X, p. 491. 46. See Chapter I, Pp. 38–39, 43 and Chapter II, Pp. 56−57. 47. Theophrastus denied this presupposition in De pietate. See Jacob Bernays, Theophrastos’ Schrift über Frömmigkeit. Ein Beitrag zur Religionsgeschichte (Berlin, 1866), pp. 37 and 56. Since the work has come down to us only in fragments, Rousseau probably had no knowledge of it. Nevertheless, he did know the writings of  Theophrastus’s teachers. 48. Cf. Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 29.

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the greatest, most universal, and most eloquent of philosophers.”49 He compared the significance of Bacon’s writings with that which the writings of  Hippocrates achieved for medicine. Yet d’Alembert complained that Bacon was “perhaps too fearful” and “still restrained by chains he could not or dared not break.”50 The reserve that Bacon maintained, the philosophes no longer imposed upon themselves. Diderot, who was most familiar with the techniques to which the art of careful writing has recourse, and about whose application under conditions of censorship he had written discerningly in La Promenade du sceptique,51 understood the distinction between an exoteric and an esoteric presentation, which speaks to diverse addressees and of which Bacon as well as the modern philosophers availed themselves, to be a provisional 49. “A la tête de ces illustres personnages doit être placé l’immortel Chancelier d’Angleterre, François Bacon, dont les Ouvrages si justement estimés, et plus estimés pourtant qu’ils ne sont connus, méritent encore plus notre lecture que nos éloges. A considérer les vûes saines et étendues de ce grand homme, la multitude d’objets sur lesquels son esprit s’est porté, la hardiesse de son style qui réunit partout les plus sublimes images avec la précision la plus rigoureuse, on seroit tenté de le regarder comme le plus grand, le plus universel, et le plus éloquent des Philosophes. Bacon, né dans le sein de la nuit la plus profonde, sentit que la Philosophie n’étoit pas encore, quoique bien des gens sans doute se flatassent d’y exceller.” Jean d’Alembert: Discours préliminaire des éditeurs (1751), Encyclopédie I, p. xxiv; in the edition of Martine Groult (Paris, 1999), pp. 120−21. A year before, Rousseau had called the “Chancelier d’Angleterre” “le plus grand, peut-­être, des Philosophes” (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 29). It is rather unlikely that Rousseau later maintained this judgment. After 1751 he never again mentions Bacon by name in any of his publications. Cf. Discours sur la vertu du héros (1751), OCP II, p. 1273. 50. Discours préliminaire des éditeurs, pp. xxiv and xxv, ed. Martine Groult, pp. 121 and 122. 51. La Promenade du sceptique, ou Les Allées, Discours préliminaire, in Denis Diderot, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1975–­), II, pp. 78−84; hereafter OC. The manuscript, which was written between 1747 and 1749, was seized by the police and was published for the first time in 1830. Cf. Diderot’s article, Encyclopédie, OC VII, p. 258. Diderot’s position regarding the exoteric-­ esoteric mode of writing was in agreement with that of John Toland, who in 1720 had presented a treatise of his own with the title Clidophorus on the exoteric-­esoteric distinction and with whose writings the philosophes were very well acquainted. The full title of the treatise, which appeared as the second piece in Toland’s Tetradymus (London, 1720), pp. 61–­100, runs as follows: Clidophorus, or, Of the Exoteric and Esoteric Philosophy; that is, Of the External and Internal Doctrine of the Ancients: The one open and public, accommodated to popular prejudices and the Religions establish’d by Law; the other private and secret, wherin, to the few capable and discrete, was taught the real Truth stript of all disguises. See pp. 65–­66, 67, 69, 75, 77, 81, 88–­89, 94, and consider pp. 95–­96. Toland had already called attention to the exoteric-­esoteric distinction in his Letters to Serena (London, 1704), pp. 56–­57, 114–­16, which found a lively echo both in En­ gland and on the Continent, and it was brought out by Holbach in a French translation in 1768.

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distinction. For him it was a ruse, which he deployed with virtuosity in order to win a war that would render the distinction superfluous. He believed that the distinction between philosopher and nonphilosopher is not founded in distinct natures and that consequently it can be historically superseded, overcome politically, morally, religiously. To accelerate the historical process, in his Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature of 1753 he supplied the slogan: “Let us hasten to make philosophy popular.”52 Rousseau immediately contradicted his friend.53 The contradiction was as far-­reaching as possible, for it concerned the belief that underlay the project of the philosophes and the hope that inspired them. At no point did Rousseau endorse the view that the distinction between philosophers and nonphilosophers should or could be eliminated. Since his prize essay of 1750 he had illuminated the drawbacks of the “restoration of the sciences and arts” and highlighted the repercussions that scientific, technological, economic progress would have on the morals of the citizens. Like no one before, he showed both in principled investigations and in concrete case studies the tension between the well-­ordered political community and the process of universalization, the convergence of opinions, lifestyles, and laws that the philosophes actively pursued. That in his capacity as citizen of Geneva he elevated virtue, freedom, and the distinctiveness of the fatherland as his cause, and in the quarrel over Geneva opposed d’Alembert and Voltaire for all to see, caused the more profound underlying conflict to erupt politically and made it paradigmatically visible. Yet Rousseau contradicted the demand for a “popular” philosophy not only in a political respect but also in a philosophical respect. He saw in the attempted popularization of philosophy its achieved denaturalization: The transformation of a private activity into a public service; the shift from the joy of  knowledge to the utility of  knowing and from the openness of questioning to the establishment of a doctrine; the usurpation of the love for truth by the will to change the world; the perversion of enlightenment into propaganda, of skepticism into belief, of wonder into partisanship. What he saw was the transformation, shift, usurpation, and perversion that he could observe in the philosophes themselves, that he could perceive in the demeanor 52. “Hâtons-­nous de rendre la philosophie populaire. Si nous voulons que les philosophes marchent en avant; approchons le peuple du point où en sont les philosophes. Diront-­ils qu’il est des ouvrages qu’on ne mettra jamais à la portée du commun des esprits? S’ils le disent, ils montreront seulement qu’ils ignorent ce que peuvent la bonne méthode et la longue habitude.” Pensées sur l’interpretation de la nature XL, OC IX, p. 69. 53. Discours sur l’inégalité, Note X, pp. 340–­42. See the introductory essay, pp. lvi–­lvii.

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of the “parti philosophiste” during the years between the Discours and the Rêveries.54 If philosophy has become fashionable, the philosopher will take care to keep his distance from the frivolous talk of philosophy. He avoids using the term whenever possible or he sharpens his use of it and makes it seem so foreign that its untimeliness leaps to the eye, or he opposes the prejudice for philosophy by awakening a prejudice against it that can lead to reasoned judgment and genuine understanding. And if the philosopher has become synonymous with the partisan of the movement that intellectually sets the tone of the age, the philosopher will subject the political partisan, who is regarded as a philosopher and calls himself philosopher, to criticism and will try to prevent their conflation. He might then speak of  “loving and sweet souls” or of “solitary contemplatives” in order to indicate the characteristic difference from the philosophers currently in fashion, and, without explanation, he might introduce a figure all his own, whose contours it is incumbent upon the reader’s reflection to determine more specifically: the case of the Promeneur Solitaire. Rousseau does not fail to provide the necessary hints. The term “philosophe” is used four times in the Rêveries, three times in the Troisième and once in the Septième promenade.55 In the Troisième it always appears in the plural. Here Rousseau speaks of the faction of the philosophes, who determine the usage of the language of the time.56 But in the same sentence in which he introduces the “philosophes modernes” into the debate and immediately identifies them more precisely as the contemporary philosophes, he maintains that there were and thus can be philosophers of a different profile. In the Septième, he gives them a face, with Theophrastus, the philosopher in the singular, as their representative. The two Rêveries in which philosophers are mentioned57 are the 54. Émile IV, p. 632 Note. 55. III, 11 (1015); III, 16 (1017); III, 23 (1022); VII, 12 (1063). 56. Cf. III, 13 (1016): “Peut-­on chercher de la bonne-­foi dans des chefs de parti? Leur philosophie est pour les autres; il m’en faudroit une pour moi.” 57. Along with the uses of “philosophes,” three of the four uses of “philosopher” and of “philosophie” are reserved for the Troisième: “philosopher” III, 5 (1012); “philosophie” III, 5 (1012) and III, 13 (1016). Just as “philosophe” outside of the Troisième appears only once in VII, 12, so the use of “philosophie” outside of the Troisième is found only in IV, 6 (1026): “Je me souviens d’avoir lu dans un Livre de Philosophie que mentir c’est cacher une vérité que l’on doit manifester.” The book to which Rousseau refers without giving the title or author is De l’esprit. Its author is a prominent philosophe, Claude-­Adrien Helvétius, and its appearance in 1758 was cause for scandal. In the paragraph that follows Rousseau writes: “Laissons donc ces autorités qui se contredisent, et cherchons par mes propres principes à résoudre pour moi ces questions.”

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only ones in which Rousseau mentions “the study of nature.” As we have seen, the question of the study of nature—­the question of the understanding of the study itself, on the one hand, the understanding of nature, of the nature of the philosopher, and of human nature, on the other—­is of central significance for Rousseau’s criticism of the philosophes. To what extent the criticism also concerns other “modern philosophers,” to what degree it refers for example to philosophers whom the philosophes claim for their project, the set of concepts of the Troisième leaves open.58 There is no doubt, on the contrary, about the fundamental criticism the Septième levels against modern science, its self-­ understanding, the goals it sets, the expectations it connects with the conquest of nature, including human nature. In his praise of botany and in the determinations of the étude de la nature Rousseau expresses once more at the end of his life his skepticism about the blessings of “making ourselves the masters and possessors of nature” and his adherence to the primacy of theoretical reason. In both respects the Rêveries agree completely with the Discours sur l’inégalité. With the writing in which Rousseau investigated most penetratingly the dialectic of the domination of nature,59 and which embodies like none other in his œuvre the primacy of theory.60 The most concentrated description of the nature of the philosopher that precedes the Rêveries, the allegory of the “monde idéal” at the beginning of the book with which Rousseau brought his œuvre to its conclusion, throws additional light on the “loving and sweet souls” and their contemplation. “Rousseau” the reader says in the allegory that the “inhabitants of the ideal world,” The passage stands in close connection with the Septième. See VII, 12 (1064) and VII, 15 (1065). The cited paragraphs from the Quatrième and the Septième contain all four uses of  “autorité” in the Rêveries: IV, 7; VII, 12 (twice); VII, 15. 58. The overlapping talk of “philosophes modernes” (III, 13), “nos philosophes” (III, 16), “tous les philosophes” (III, 23) has a further advantage for Rousseau, to which I refer in Chap­ ter II, Pp. 56–57. 59. Cf. Discours sur l’inégalité, Seconde partie, pp. 176, 194−96, 200−202, 206, 218−22, 266, and Note IX, pp. 298−306, 318. 60. It might be helpful to reread a paragraph from the central Note of the Discours, which contains Rousseau’s response to Diderot’s challenge to make philosophy popular: “Shall we never see reborn the happy times when peoples did not pretend to philosophize, but a Plato, a Thales, and a Pythagoras, seized with an ardent desire to know, undertook the greatest voyages solely in order to inform themselves, and went far off to shake the yoke of national prejudices, to get to know men by their conformities and their differences, and to acquire that universal knowledge that is not exclusively of one century or of one country but of all times and of all places, and thus is, so to speak, the common science of the wise?” Discours sur l’inégalité, Note X, p. 342, my emphasis. See Rêveries III, 5 (1013) and VII, 12 (1063−64); VII, 15 (1065); VII, 23 (1069).

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favored by nature, “to which they are more attached,” preserve the “original character” of their souls, since they follow their love of themselves without being entangled in sociable men’s relationships of rule and of dependence: “The primitive passions, which all tend directly toward our happiness, focus us only on objects that relate to it, and having only the love of oneself as a principle, are all loving and gentle in their essence.” What enables the inhabitants of the “monde idéal” to avoid for the most part “that host of passions and prejudices that human society engenders,” to which “the many” remain subject, is the exclusivity of their goal. For the “heavenly state to which they aspire constitutes their first need.” The “état celeste” is for the “êtres surlunaires” not only the sole object of all their wishes, but also a real need. A need—­in this lies the advantage of their nature and the true sense in which they are favored by nature—­that “makes them ceaselessly concentrate and direct all the powers of their souls to attain it”; “and it is this that causes their extreme disgust for ev­ erything else.” In what the “heavenly state” consists for those capable by nature of the necessary concentration and effort Rousseau does not say. Yet already in the first paragraph of the description “immediate enjoyments” are mentioned, to which contemplation of nature in the “monde idéal” gives access: “All nature is so beautiful there that its contemplation, enflaming souls with love for such a touching tableau, inspires in them the desire to contribute to this beautiful system and the fear of troubling its harmony; and from this comes an exquisite sensitivity which gives those endowed with it immediate enjoyments unknown to hearts that the same contemplations have not aroused.”61 The need of theory is supported by the eros of the philosopher.62 It is not the expression of his will to conquer nature. Therefore, the joys of contemplation are “immediate enjoyments,” joys that belong intrinsically to contemplation, and they come without further setting of goals or justification to the one receptive to them. They are not tied to social use, neither dependent upon the opinion of others nor gained from the expectation of future glory. The love 61. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, “le monde idéal” 3, p. 669; 4, p. 669; 5, p. 670; 1, p. 668. See Chapter I, Pp. 29−33. 62. It goes without saying that the philosopher is never mentioned in the allegory. Only le sage (“le monde idéal” 4, p. 669) serves as the figure of reference in the “real world,” to whom Rousseau already recurred repeatedly earlier in order to prevent the conflation with “philosophe” in the contemporary sense. In fact, le monde idéal can be conceived, abbreviated but not misleadingly so, as the space that is filled by that science commune des sages that Rousseau introduced in the Discours sur l’inégalité and had opposed to the “bel adage de morale, si rebatu par la tourbe Philosophesque, que les hommes sont par tout les mêmes.” (Note X, pp. 340−42, my emphasis).

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for the observation of nature, for the observation of the details of the structure in which nature becomes comprehensible, of the order in which nature is articulated, of the spectacle nature provides for one who takes an interest in its objects, who lets its forms, colors, and sounds affect him, this love accords with the love of oneself. Both discourage highfalutin plans to change the world by the transformation of nature. Both impose moderation on the philosopher. He will be especially adequate to his desire to “contribute” something “to this beautiful system” by his conceiving it as a “system” and as “beautiful.” The contribution most his own is that he has the whole in view, that he sees things and beings within the horizon of the whole, that he investigates and orders them as parts, that he knows himself as a part and reflects on his relation to the whole or that he poses the question of the whole. But if he wants to keep the question of the whole in view, he may not lose himself. To conceive the “beautiful system,” he must devote himself to it in detail and again return to himself. To be able to observe nature, he may not blend into it. Observation requires both proximity and distance. Praise for the observation of nature necessarily includes criticism of the loss of self and loss of distance. This criticism, which in its core is the criticism of imagination, becomes visible in Rousseau in the wake of the hyperbolic praise of his “ecstasies on the wings of imagination,” which in the Septième promenade he ascribes to rêverie in the narrower meaning elucidated there. The ecstasies of rêverie, in which the soul is carried by the imagination in order to ramble and glide through the universe, surpass, so we learn, “every other enjoyment.” In the following paragraph, however, Rousseau tells us that for him the enjoyment of that rêverie belongs to the past. It falls into the first fifty years of his life. Thereafter Rousseau could “only very rarely recapture those dear ecstasies.” In light of the suffering and troubles that “an unfortunate celebrity” brought him, i.e., above all under the burden of persecution, “an instinct that is natural to me and makes me flee from every depressing idea” commanded his imagination to be silent. Only now, we further learn, only after the imagination was silenced, did he direct his attention to the objects that surrounded him. And with a stylization that redresses the imbalance of the distortion with which the discussion began, Rousseau adds that this new attention made the fifty-­year-­old “consider in detail for the first time the spectacle of nature, which until then I had hardly contemplated except in a mass and in its entirety.”63 Rousseau does not stop with the diachronic treatment of the matter. He interrupts the narrative, which presents the necessary distinctions 63. VII, 5−7 (1062). Cf. Pp. 80−82 with Footnotes 24 and 25.

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in the drama of his life story, in order to insert two paragraphs that designate another, fundamental level of the presentation. The first paragraph speaks of the spectacle that the earth, clothed by plants and enlivened by animals, offers “to man,” “the only spectacle in the world of which his eyes and his heart never weary.” The second comes straight to the matter. It speaks explicitly and exclusively about a “contemplateur” who devotes himself to “extases” that the spectacle of nature calls forth from him: “A sweet and deep reverie takes possession of his senses then, and through a delightful intoxication he loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful system with which he feels himself identified. Then, all particular objects elude him; he sees and feels nothing except in the whole. Some particular circumstance must focus his ideas and circumscribe his imagination for him to be able to observe the parts of this universe he was straining to embrace.”64 Whoever wants to observe the world must resist the temptation to want to embrace it. Whoever does not see a part because all individual objects elude him sees nothing in the whole. Whoever loses himself in the immensity of the “beautiful system” is able to know neither himself nor the “beautiful system.” The étude de la nature demands méditation, réflexion, and a contemplation that does not sink into the intoxication of that rêverie which is swept away by imagination, determined by imagination, which essentially is imagination. We now see a further reason why rêverie is specified in the Septième promenade, why precisely in the Rêverie about botany the reader is asked to distinguish the key concept of the book in accord with “genus” and “species.” The study of nature tolerates no observer who “throws himself headfirst into the vast ocean of nature,” and Rousseau would not be “what nature willed” if he were to perish in that ocean before his time.65 The distinction Rousseau introduces in presumably the last of the at this stage seven promenades is necessary; the conception of the book without the criticism of the imagination is unthinkable. With all that botany evidently requires, it was for this critique the medium of choice: the schooling of exact perception, the devotion to objects rooted in the earth, the investigation of details decisive for their appropriate classification in the “beautiful system,” the right relationship between proximity and distance to the beloved object. When Rousseau decides to continue the Rêveries, he also continues with the critique of imagination. In the ninth walk, which like none of the others highlights the joy of seeing, Rousseau goes so far as to explain in almost as many words that an event he imagines, the expected 64. VII, 9 (1062−63). 65. VII, 17 (1066); II, 1 (1002) and VIII, 23 (1084).

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behavior of other men, their joy over an act of beneficence, their satisfaction he can picture, would offer him, even if he were certain of his notion, only half as much enjoyment as the sensory perception of the event, as seeing with his own eyes.66 The confrontation of the seventh walk is expanded in the triad of promenades VII, VIII, and IX, with the Septième treating the contemplation of nature, the Neuvième the contemplation of men, and Rousseau’s turn back to himself in the Huitième taking the central position between the two of them. The ninth brings a considerable application, the eighth a significant deepening, yet the core of the matter, which is pursued further in them from two sides, is already present in the seventh promenade. It concerns the erotic nature of the Promeneur Solitaire or, as Rousseau writes in the Rêveries, his “expansive soul.”67 The âme expansive, with its striving to take in as much of the world as possible and its inclination to identify with what transcends it, is at risk of losing sight of itself. This is true of the identification with other living creatures, and holds to a particular degree for the identification with the political community, and although the consequences are quite different, it holds for the identification with the whole of nature.68 Here the criticism of imagination has its place, for the identification, the blending into a greater, higher whole happens by means of the imagination. But the Promeneur Solitaire can lose himself not only by means of  his imagination; he can also lose himself in botanique. In devoting himself to the individual and particular, he can be as outside himself as in the drunkenness of rêverie. Therefore, Rousseau makes the “madness” of the love for botany explicitly into an object of self-­interrogation. The study of nature is in need of self-­reflection, it demands reflection on the reasons and interests that precede it, research into the wishes and hopes that inspire it. Rousseau’s laughter at the beginning of the Septième promenade over his “enthusiasm” for botany, like his laughter at its end over the illusion that he could escape his enemies in the study of nature, his laughter over his own pride, like his laughter over the naiveté of the righteous man who would sooner have put him in mortal danger than violate a self-­imposed law, are signs of his self-­knowledge. And as a sign of the knowledge of his own nature, his laughter is the expression of Rousseau’s Beisichselbstsein.

66. IX, 17 (1093). No promenade comes close to showing as great a concentration of  “voir” as the Neuvième. The use of the verb in promenades VII (14 times), VIII (24 times), and IX (43 times) is far higher with 81 than its use in the seven remaining promenades, with a total of 56. 67. VII, 17 (1066); VIII, 2 (1074). 68. Cf. VII, 16 (1065–­66).

Chapter 4

Beisichselbstsein

Rousseau has given a poetic presentation of his Beisichselbstsein in the Cinquième promenade. All the rhetorical means characteristic of the Rêveries are deployed in concert and exhibit a charm of their own. Rousseau chooses for the setting an episode of his life that is sharply circumscribed in space and time. It takes him back twelve years into the past, rounded by the author to fifteen years, to a place with the evocative names “l’Isle de St Pierre au milieu du lac de Bienne.” Since he described in detail his sojourn on St. Peter’s Island in the twelfth book of the Confessions, Rousseau gives readers with eyes to see an opportunity not only to understand how little they have before them in the Rêveries a “continuation” of the Confessions, but also to compare the seventeen paragraphs of the Cinquième promenade with the seventeen paragraphs the Confessions devoted to describing the same episode. Thus, they can see for themselves that the author of the Rêveries certainly does not fall short of his earlier intellectual and poetic power.1 The Cinquième, which according to unanimous judgment is the most beautiful of all the promenades, seems to stand entirely on its own in the Rêveries, without any connection to what surrounds it, what precedes or succeeds it, like an island, exempt from all mediating relations, a festival of immediacy. Indeed, not only the episode treated in it, but the Cinquième itself falls outside the narrative time of the Rêveries. It lies in a temporal nowhere between the Quatrième, which begins with the temporal reference “The day before yesterday I was reading,” and the Sixième, which begins with “Yesterday crossing.” 1. Les Confessions XII, pp. 637−46. Cf. Rêveries II, 4 (1003).

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The single promenade in which eternity is mentioned, a single time, has no place in time in the sequence of the Rêveries between “the day before yesterday” and “yesterday.” This certainly does not mean that it has no place in the development of the argument that comes to light in that sequence. That it has no assigned place of its own in the time of the Rêveries goes together with the fact that the book revolves around the Cinquième promenade, that the lines of the train of thought run into it, through it, and back into it, that what is thought or given to be thought in it concerns all the parts of the book, insofar as it joins them together in a whole. The mediations that the Cinquième seems to forget are the subject matter of thought, which breaks through and interrupts the temporal sequence, which can pause and reverse. In order to think the Cinquième, not only what precedes it but equally what succeeds it must be taken into consideration and given attention. The Cinquième promenade thus demands a double reading,  just as Beisichselbstsein demands a double approach: The consideration of the island, which is sufficient unto itself. And the entering into the center, which reaches out and attracts, which radiates and is illuminated by its reflection. “Of all the places I have lived (and I have lived in some charming ones), none has made me so truly happy nor left me such tender regrets as St. Peter’s Island in the middle of Lake Bienne.” The first sentence sounds the theme and sets the direction. Of all the promenades none will speak of Rousseau’s happiness as does the fifth. The walk approaches it in a movement that leads from outer to inner. It begins with space, describes the environment, names the place that contributed more than any other to letting Rousseau be happy. St. Peter’s Island in Lake Bienne, which he recalls with such tender regret, is so little known “even in Switzerland” that, Rousseau adds, in Neuchâtel it is called “l’Isle de la Motte,” apparently in view of its natural shape. Rousseau knows of no traveler who has mentioned “this small island.” “However, it is very pleasant and singularly placed for the happiness of a man who loves to close himself off.” The island, which soon enough will come to be called “l’Ile de Rousseau,”2 is very pleasant and singularly placed for Rousseau’s happiness, 2. The first writing that described “Rousseau’s Island” may be cited here as representing the triad of the religious, natural, and philosophic designation of the island. Its author, Sigmund von Wagner, a young man from Bern, published it with the title Die Peters-­Insel im Bielersee (Bern: König und Lafon, 1795, 84 pp.). A French edition of the book appeared around 1815: Sigismond Wagner, L’Ile Saint-­Pierre ou l’Ile de Rousseau, dans le lac de Bienne (Bern: G. Lory et C. Rheiner Peintres, 56 pp.). The French version was reissued with an introduction and additional materials by Pierre Kohler: L’Ile Saint-­Pierre ou l’Ile de Rousseau. Un Opuscule de Sigismond Wagner, Collection “Vieille Suisse” (Lausanne, 1926). Cf. Chapter I, P. 9.

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not for the happiness of  Everyman. That is why up until now the island was barely noticed and praised perceptibly by no one. Its singularity is determined by the happiness of  the man “who loves to close himself off.” It is evaluated according to the one who finds his happiness in being for and with himself. The situation on this patch of earth enabling him to live pleasantly accommodates him: surrounded by water, it is closed off  by the element of the unlimited. “Circonscrire,” which returns in the Septième in a decisive passage in the course of the critique of imagination,3 joins together the beginning and the end of the walk. For to the “man who loves to close himself off ” of the first paragraph there corresponds in the last the “fertile and solitary island naturally closed off and separated from the rest of the world.”4 Although Rousseau makes known openly that he would love to close himself off, limit himself, concentrate himself, which is why the “Isle de la Motte,” naturally closed off, suffices for his need, he immediately follows the explanation of the need “to close himself off,” separated only by a semicolon, with the point that he is “perhaps the only one in the world whose destiny has imposed this on him as a law.” The reference to the law essentially anticipates the political justification Rousseau will give for his happiness in the Cinquième promenade. Rousseau is forced to do what he wants to do. The law, which his destiny imposed on him, compels him to follow his inclination. Politics, morality, religion banish him to himself. History throws him back to his nature. The need to close himself off, to withdraw, to turn inward to himself, is so in accord with his nature that he “cannot believe he is the only one” who has “so natural a taste.” Nevertheless, he was not able to find this inclination “in anyone else thus far.” To the distinctiveness of St. Peter’s Island corresponds the distinctiveness of the one whom it “has made genuinely happy,” a distinctiveness that is natural in the emphatic sense. The observer’s view of the surrounding “happy shores” belongs to the distinctiveness of St. Peter’s Island. The description of these shores commences with the horizon opened up by the island. “The banks of Lake Bienne are wilder and more romantic than those of Lake Geneva, because the rocks and woods border the water more closely; but they are not less graceful.” The memory of the “lac de Genève” introduces Rousseau’s native city into the Rêveries for the first time and, as concerns the original clean copy, the

3. See Chapter III, P. 96 with Footnote 64. “Circonscrire” appears only twice in the active voice: V, 1 (1040) and VII, 9 (1063). 4. V, 1 (1040) and V, 17 (1048).

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only time.5 It shows no trace of yearning desire or of patriotic prejudice. If at Lake Bienne there is less culture, fewer fields and vineyards, cities and houses, “there is also more natural greenery, more meadows, grove-­shaded retreats,” a more varied nature. Since its “happy shores” are not open to large thoroughfares, “the country” is seldom sought out by travelers, “but it is interesting for solitary contemplatives who like to become intoxicated with the charms of nature at leisure and collect their thoughts.” The charms of nature are not tied to homeland and descent. They transcend the political community and make “the country” in which they are found attractive to one who is able to lead a contemplative life. They allow a contemplatif  solitaire, who takes delight in those charms and knows how to reflect on himself, to achieve a successful existence outside the city, far from the polis or republic, even in banishment or in exile.6 Nature, which is mentioned by name only once in the Cinquième promenade, only in connection with the “contemplatif solitaire,” contributes to such an existence as external nature in two ways: it invites observation and grants silence for concentration. Rousseau speaks of a silence “that is troubled by no noise other than the cry of eagles, the intermittent chirping of a few birds, and the rushing of torrents as they fall from the mountain.” He continues his poetic accentuation when, passing from the depiction of the banks to the lake, he ascribes an “almost circular form” to the “beautiful basin” that “has two small islands in its center.” The Cinquième rounds out the “almost regular oval” of the Confessions7 almost to a perfect circle, and thus makes the natural shape of the lake, which closes off the solitary contemplative on St. Peter’s Island, nearly congruent with the horizon the solitary walker carries with or in himself. Of the two islands we have reached on our way from the periphery to the center, the one is inhabited and cultivated, the other desolate and uncultivated. The larger, cultivated by men, exists at the cost of the smaller one, which has no guardian who could defend it. The smaller one “will ultimately be destroyed,” since earth is constantly being taken from it in order to repair the damage the waves and storms cause to the “large” island, which measures no more than half a mile around. “Thus it is that the substance of the weak is always used for the advantage of the powerful.” Rousseau’s sentence, which constructs the 5. The second mention of  Geneva appears only in IX, 17 (1093). 6. Cf. Plutarch, How One Can Profit by One’s Enemies 87 A, on the loss of one’s fatherland as the beginning and advancement of the way of philosophy. 7. Les Confessions XII, pp. 637–­38 ( paragraph 2 of the description of the sojourn on St. Peter’s Island).

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bridge from natural history to politics, concludes the account of the natural ensemble, part of which is St. Peter’s Island. The last two of the five concentric circles interlinked and traversed by Rousseau’s description call to mind the cultivated island and the solitary walker on it. The culture of the island has as its center the only house there. We are told about the economic foundation, the political relationship, and the social division of the house in the first sentence of the new approach. Like the whole island, it is the property of  the Bern Hospital, is subject to Bern rule, and is inhabited by a tax collector who lives in the large house with his family and servants. From the poultry farm, birdhouse, and fish ponds he maintains, we are led through fields, vineyards, groves, orchards, pastures, and woods, over a range of  hills along the entire length of the island to a “pretty reception hall” or pavilion, in which the inhabitants on the neighboring banks gather and dance on Sundays during the wine harvest. It is in this ambiance that we encounter Rousseau. “This is the island on which I sought refuge after the stoning at Môtiers.” We arrive at the innermost circle. It is moved by an I that can expand and contract, extend into the circles that are traversed and concentrate in a point. In his wake the island comes into contact with history, which up to this point has occurred beyond it. For the “stoning at Môtiers” means precisely this: the incursion of  history into the space of natural observation. It links the sojourn on St. Peter’s Island with a historical event that is not only precisely datable but also obvious in its symbolic concentration beyond the history of  Rousseau’s life.8 Rousseau did not come as a nameless wanderer and of  his own volition to the island, which like the countryside all around it is attractive to a contemplatif solitaire. Instead he sought refuge on the island from theologico-­political persecution. Having arrived on it, he realizes that it permits him to lead a life that so accords with him that he wishes for nothing other than to continue to live this life, in the same place, without disturbance from the outside, without any prospect of change, with necessity. Rousseau expresses the necessity of this life paradoxically: He would have wished to be compelled to what he wished for himself.9 He would have wanted that they had made his asylum a “perpetual prison,” that they had confined him to it his entire life, that they had taken from him every possibility and every hope of  leaving the island again and denied him every kind of tie to the mainland. Stated from the Everyman perspective, which he adopts here in the Cinquième

8. See Chapter III, P. 77 with Footnote 11. 9. Consider V, 1 and P. 100.

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promenade for the first time, he adds: “so that being unaware of all that went on in the world I might forget its existence and that it might also forget mine.”10 The world would not forget about Rousseau. “One let me spend scarcely two months on this island.” The final paragraph of the first part of the Cinquième, which situates the sojourn, introduces a temporal dimension. It specifies the period of time measured by the happiness on St. Peter’s Island until one—­until the world in the form of Bern rule—­put an end to it, by driving the alien out of the country.11 Although apart from his companion Rousseau had no companionship on the island other than the tax collector, his wife, and his servants, he could have spent “two years, two centuries, and the whole of eternity” there without being bored for a moment. The Promeneur Solitaire needs no companionship against boredom. He who suffices for himself  is rich enough that he will not be bored by eternity. And he who is bei sich selbst will also not be diverted by companionship from what is more important or kept from what is better, at least not if the companions are “very worthy people but nothing more.” For Rousseau was not another Robinson on St. Peter’s Island.12 He could distance himself from fellow inhabitants there by at most a hundred paces or a few boat lengths and protect himself from “unforeseen and importunate visits”13 less easily than would have been possible in Paris or anywhere else on the mainland. Thus, making the time “more round,” as he had before made space more round, and abstracting from all minor matters in order to highlight the essential, typical, and informative, Rousseau was able to explain: “I consider these two months the happiest time of my life, and so happy that it would have sufficed for me for my whole existence without the 10. Cf. the analogous case in III, 1 and 2 and consider the further development of the argument. 11. Rousseau first wrote: “On ne m’a laissé passer que deux mois dans cette Isle,” but subsequently added “guéres.” In fact, the sojourn lasted six and a half weeks. Rousseau arrived at St. Peter’s Island on September 9, 1765. Upon order of  the Bern City Council, which according to a final instruction issued on October 21, 1765, was to be “enforced without further delay against this dangerous man” (CC XXVII, p. 154), Rousseau left the island on October 25, 1765. In contrast to the Confessions (pp. 646–­48, 652–­53), Rousseau does not utter a word in the Rêveries about the order and the role of the city of Bern as a whole. He limits himself to the hint in V, 3 that St. Peter’s Island was the property of the Bern Hospital. In this way the “lapidation de Motiers” remains the single historical event to which reference is made in the Cinquième. One is tempted to say that the memory of the stoning in Môtiers is the counterpart in the Cinquième promenade of the mention of  Pontius Pilate in the credo of  Christianity. 12. Cf. Les Confessions XII, p. 644 (paragraph 14 of the description). 13. V, 11 (1045).

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desire for another state arising for a single instant in my soul.” At the end of the exposition Rousseau returns to its beginning. But in between lies the description of the space-­time that comprises the happiness treated by the fifth walk. And the return to the beginning contains a yield that is fundamental for everything that follows. The last sentence explains what the first sentence meant in speaking of  being “so truly happy”: an existence would be called truly happy in which there would not be a single instant at which a desire for another state would arise. The remainder of the walk serves the explication of the determinations of the sentence with which the first part ends. It is, therefore, only logical that both the second and the third parts of the Cinquième promenade explicitly take up once again the question of happiness.14 “Now what was this happiness and in what did its enjoyment consist? From the description of the life I led there, I will let all the men of this century divine it.” The second, central part of the Cinquième will answer the question about what the happiness was that so fulfilled Rousseau on St. Peter’s Island that no desire for another state arose in his soul. But he will answer the question indirectly. On the basis of the description Rousseau gives of the life he led there, the reader must “divine” by his own reflection what this happiness is that is un­ der discussion. Most readers, those determined by the opinions, valuations, and self-­understandings of their time, can at best “divine” what Rousseau’s enjoyment consisted in by what feelings and thoughts his life was determined “in those two months.” The “men of this century,” who lack access to “so natural a taste” of which the opening of the Cinquième spoke and for whom, therefore, “the happiness of a man who loves to close himself off ” must remain a riddle, Rousseau accommodates with information promising general accessibility: Among his enjoyments, his first and main one was the “precious far niente.” Rousseau prefaces the “description of the life” presented in the next four paragraphs with a memorable formula that makes a classification from the Everyman perspective and prompts a judgment as harmless as possible. Considered from a distance, the activity of the solitary contemplative appears as doing nothing. Inspected closely, it turns out to be doing nothing when measured against political duties and social demands. For Rousseau makes clear in the same breath that the slogan “precious  far niente” refers to an activ­ ity of a unique sort when he speaks of the “delightful and necessary pursuit of a man who has devoted himself to idleness.” The devotion of the solitary 14. The first part comprises paragraphs 1–­5, the second paragraphs 6–­11, and the third part paragraphs 12–­17. “Bonheur” is used once in the opening paragraphs of each of the three parts, thus in 1, 6, and 12, and then another four times in the third part, twice in 13 and 14, respectively.

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contemplative does not count as a duty, not even as the self-­chosen duty of stepping forward to act as witness to the truth, which was the object of the Quatrième promenade. His devotion counts as “idleness,” of which the adage claims that it is the beginning of all the vices,15 while for the solitary contemplative it goes together with a pursuit “that alone suffices to make life happy and sweet.”16 Rousseau begins the description of  his life on St. Peter’s Island by mentioning a double hope. To the hope that “one” could not wish for anything better than to leave him alone in his self-­chosen isolation, from which he could not be in communication with the world, not to mention get off the island, without help from strangers and without being noticed, he joined the further hope that he would end his days more peacefully there than he had spent them before. This hope, which turned out to be deceptive in both parts, misled him to the idea that he had time to arrange his affairs in full leisure, so that, as he asserts, at first he made no plans at all to make arrangements for himself. Abruptly transported to the island “alone and naked,” as if he found himself again in a new Garden of Eden, he first has his companion, whom he now calls “my governess,” brought over, then his books and belongings. But he does not unpack anything, and he lives in a place in which he thinks he will remain until his end as if in an inn he would have to leave again on the next day. “All things, such as they were, went along so well that to want to arrange them better would have been to spoil something.” Not arranging things for himself on St. Peter’s Island, which might be read as expressing the Promeneur Solitaire’s awareness of  being totally at home in his homelessness, serves Rousseau as the first illustration of the slogan “precious  far niente.” He adds, with more precision: “Above all, one of my greatest delights was to leave my books well packed up and to have no writing tool. When wretched letters forced me to take up a pen to reply, I grudgingly borrowed the tax collector’s writing tool, and then hastened to return it, in the vain hope of not needing to borrow it again.” The translation of “precious  far niente” into not having to read and write, which appears as confirmation, underscores the rhetorical character of the slogan and makes clear the intention of the presentation in relation to its addressee. In fact, during his six and a half weeks on St. Peter’s Island Rousseau not only carried on an extensive correspondence—­we have thirty-­one 15. “L’oisiveté est la mère de tous les vices.” Apart from talk of  “oisiveté” in V, 6 (1042), the term also appears in the Rêveries in V, 17 (1048) and in VII, 6 (1062). 16. VII, 23 (1069). Cf. in the same paragraph: “La botanique est l’étude d’un oisif et paresseux solitaire,” alternatively a “oiseuse occupation.”

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letters in his hand, which are in no way merely replies to burdensome mail—­ but also occupied himself, reading and writing, with his draft for the new political order of Corsica; he had, consequently, neither forgotten the world nor given up working on his œuvre.17 By concretizing “precious far niente” with the examples of his books and his writing tool, Rousseau puts the attentive reader in the position to examine the formula and to recognize the intention of the rhetoric. The Cinquième provides him with everything he needs. The very next sentence introduces botany, which serves to illustrate that “delightful and necessary pursuit” with which the Promeneur Solitaire busies himself in his leisure. He has filled his room with “flowers and dried plants” instead of with “depressing papers” and “heaps of  books,” since he was in his “first botanical fervor.” Shortly thereafter, Rousseau speaks of a plan that simply cannot be started without books and writing tool: “I set about doing the Flora petrinsularis and describing all the plants of the island without omitting a single one in sufficient detail to occupy myself for the rest of my days.” For enterprises that accorded with his “delightful and necessary pursuit,” Rousseau unpacked his books and writing tool, whether it was the Flora petrinsularis or the Projet de constitution pour la Corse. Rousseau gives the actual description of the life he led on St. Peter’s Island in the form of an overview of the course of the day, divided into morning, afternoon, and evening.18 It begins with breakfast, “which we all had together.” Afterward, Rousseau went off with “a magnifying glass in hand and my Systema naturae under the arm,”19 to seek out a specific district, which he had previously divided into small squares, with the intention of researching the flora of the island square by square and covering them season by season. After portraying the “raptures” and “ecstasies” triggered by each new observation and discovery he made—­Rousseau mentions the structure and organization of plants, 17. In 1828 Guillaume Moultou, the son of  Paul Moultou, Rousseau’s literary executor, writes about the genesis of the text in the preface to the Projet de constitution pour la Corse, which he has prepared for publication: Rousseau “s’en occupa pendant son séjour dans l’île de Saint-­ Pierre. Pendant ses promenades, il portait toujours avec lui deux petits livres sur lesquels il écrivait les fragments qu’on va lire, et dont le développement devait un jour former un ouvrage qui aurait peut-­être rendu heureux le peuple auquel il était destiné.” The preface was included by Guillaume Moultou’s grandson in the first edition of the Projet de constitution pour la Corse (the title is not Rousseau’s): Guillaume Streckeisen-­Moultou: Œuvres et correspondance inédites de J. J. Rousseau (Paris, 1861), p. 53. Cf. V, 4 and Pp. 102–3 with Footnote 10. 18. The “description de la vie que j’y menois” announced in V, 6 starts in V, 7 with the words: “En consequence de ce beau projet, tous les matins après le déjeuné . . .” 19. Rousseau leaves Linnaeus unmentioned: He unpacked his book.

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especially “the role of the sexual parts in sporulation”—­and after stressing the meaning he attributed to the distinction between the generic features and their application to determinate species, he has the presentation of the daily morning botanizing peak in an illustration, as astonishing as it is memorable, of his enchantment. In contrast to the Deuxième and the Septième, in which Rousseau calls the plants by their Latin names, in the Cinquième promenade, which speaks to the common reader in a particular way, he abstains from using scientific nomenclature, recurring entirely to the ordinary names: “The forking of the two long stamens of the self-­heal, the spring of the nettle and the pellitory, the explosion of the fruit of the balsam and the pod of the boxwood, a thousand little games of sporulation I observed for the first time, filled me with joy, and I went around asking whether anyone had seen the horns of the self-­heal plant, like La Fontaine asking whether anyone had read Habakkuk.” This comparison makes us pause. For it produces a riddle. What do the horns of the self-­heal have in common with Habakkuk? This much is clear as day: Rousseau contrasts his enthusiasm for something he has seen in nature with the enthusiasm of a poet for something he has read in the Bible. The single mention in the Rêveries, if not of the Bible, then nevertheless of a book of the Bible, is reason enough to cast a glance at the story that brings the prophet Habakkuk into play. Rousseau refers to an anecdote that Racine’s son tells about his father and La Fontaine. One day Jean Racine took La Fontaine, who always wanted to talk only about Plato, with him to church. When Racine noticed that La Fontaine was becoming bored with the service, he gave him a volume of the Bible to read, which contained the Minor Prophets. La Fontaine came upon the prayer of  the  Jews in the Book of  Baruch and was full of admira­ tion for the author. Even days later he directed a question in a raised voice to acquaintances whom he met on the street: “Have you read Baruch? He was a real genius.”20 In his comparison, Rousseau substitutes for the apocryphal 20. Louis Racine writes about La Fontaine: “Autant il était aimable par la douceur du carac­ tère, autant il l’était peu par les agréments de la société. Il n’y mettait jamais rien du sien, et mes soeurs qui dans leur jeunesse l’ont souvent vu à table chez mon Père, n’ont conservé de lui d’autre idée, que celle d’un homme fort malpropre et fort ennuyeux. Il ne parlait point, ou voulait toujours parler de Platon, dont il avait fait une étude particulière dans la traduction Latine. Il cherchait à connaître les Anciens par la conversation, et mettait à profit celle de mon Père, qui lui faisait lire quelquefois des morceaux d’Homère dans la traduction Latine. Il n’était pas nécessaire de lui en faire sentir les beautés, il les saisissait: tout ce qui était beau le frappait. Mon Père le mena un jour à Ténèbres; et s’apercevant que l’Office lui paraissait long, il lui donna pour l’occuper un volume de la Bible qui contenait les Petits Prophètes. Il tombe sur la Prière des Juifs dans Baruch, et ne pouvant se lasser de l’admirer, il disait à mon Père: C’était un beau

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Book of Baruch the Book of Habakkuk, which counts as part of the canon of Scripture, and which, with its three chapters and scarcely a handful of pages, is one of its shortest books. Whoever follows Rousseau’s hint and reads Ha­ bakkuk encounters a prophet who complains of the misery of  his oppressed people, who believes in the justice of the Lord and hopes that Yahweh will punish his enemies. In the second chapter, he reads the famous saying from which the Protestant reformers drew power and consolation: “The just shall live by his faith.”21 In the third chapter he finally comes upon the even more famous vision in which God himself shows himself in his majesty, metes out justice, and annihilates the godless. Here the riddle is solved. For the horns, les cornes de la Brunelle, which is how Rousseau designates “la fourchure,” the forking or forklike split that characterizes the two long stamens of the self-­heal in the careful word choice of the comparison, are found once again in the appearance Habakkuk describes. They correspond to the horns that emerge from the hands of God: cornua in manibus eius.22 Rousseau opposes the insight into the life-­giving play of organs of a plant to a prophet’s vision of splendor, the workings of nature to a miracle of  the Bible. The end of the part devoted to botany in the Cinquième promenade prefigures the opposition between nature and authority, between Theophrastus and Adam, which is expressed in the Rêverie about botany.23 Let us return to the course of  Rousseau’s day. After two or three hours of field research, the botanist carried back home a rich yield of  plants with which he could occupy himself during the afternoon in the event of rain. The rest of the morning was taken up with social activities. In the company of the tax collector, his wife, and his companion, whom he now, and only in this paragraph of the Cinquième, calls Thérèse, Rousseau visited the landlord’s laborers during the harvest and “most often” or occasionally lent a hand when fruits were picked. The exercise he provided for himself in the morning, “and the good génie que Baruch: qui était-­il? Le lendemain et plusieurs jours suivants lorsqu’il rencontrait dans la rue quelque personne de sa connaissance; après les compliments ordinaires, il élevait sa voix pour dire: Avez-­vous lu Baruch? c’était un beau génie.” Mémoires contenant quelques particularités sur la vie et les ouvrages de Jean Racine, in Racine, Œuvres complètes, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris, 1999), I, p. 1187. 21. Habakkuk 2: 4. 22. Habakkuk 3: 4 (Vulgate): “splendor eius ut lux erit / cornua in manibus eius / ibi abscondita est fortitudo eius.” Luther translates: “Sein glantz war wie liecht / Glentzen giengen von seinen Henden / Daselbst war heimlich seine Macht.” The word “Glentzen” he accompanies with the note: “Ebre. Cornua ut de Mose.” 23. See VII, 12 (1063–­64) and Chapter III, Pp. 81–­85.

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temper that is inseparable from it,” made the midday respite “very enjoyable.” However, when lunch lasted too long or fine weather was inviting, he would steal away while “one” was still at the table—­presumably his companion, perhaps also the other inhabitants of the house—­in order to “throw himself alone into a boat,” which he steered out “into the middle of the lake” when the water was calm. Stretched out full-­length in the boat, eyes turned to heaven, he let himself “slowly drift with the water, sometimes for several hours.” When sunset warned him to retreat, he often found himself, as he asserts, so far from the island that he had to row with all his might to arrive before nightfall. The afternoon plays the key role in Rousseau’s presentation. For here we seem to be dealing with empty time that has to be filled if we want to “divine” the happiness under discussion. In describing his activity during the afternoon, Rousseau uses for the first time in the Cinquième the enigmatic term rêverie. During the hours he spent on the lake, he was immersed “in a thousand confused but delightful reveries,” which although they “had no very determinate or constant object,” he “preferred a hundred times” to all of what he “had found sweetest in what one calls the pleasures of  life.” The description at first discloses nothing further about his activity or about the pleasures that accompany it and that he enjoys a hundred times more than the best he was able to gain from the ordinary “pleasures of  life.” Thus, the “thousand confused but delightful reveries” linger in memory, which in their indeterminacy connect the Rousseau lying on his back in the boat and letting himself drift with the water under the title “precious doing nothing” with the most suggestive image of the book that would determine the reception of the Rêveries for centuries. Rousseau hastens to attach a deviating description of the afternoon, according to which he does not cast his eyes to heaven, to the sun or to the clouds sweeping over him, but instead turns to the plants, animals, and men: “D’autres fois,” other times, instead of taking the boat out onto the lake, he liked to navigate it along the verdant banks of the island, where the clear water and cool shade “often” invited him to bathe. However, one of his “most frequent” boat trips took him from the large to the small island, where he would disembark in order to spend the afternoon taking “very circumscribed walks” in the midst of sallow, alder-­buckthorn, willow weed, and shrubs of all kinds, or to the summit of a sandy knoll where he would set himself down surrounded by grass, thyme, flowers, even coxcomb and clover, belated witnesses of earlier attempts to cultivate the area. If Rousseau was enraptured in the morning by observing the ways and organs used by plants for their propagation, he formulated the thought in the afternoon of  populating the small island with rabbits, “which could propagate in peace there without fearing

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anything and without doing any harm.” The enthusiasm for the sporulation of  the self-­heal and the promotion of the fertility of the rabbits arise from one and the same source.24 The Promeneur Solitaire’s happiness finds its manifest expression in the joy of seeing that and how life is engendered, bestowed, transmitted. Rousseau gets the tax collector to allow male and female rabbits to come from Neuchâtel, and accompanied by the tax collector’s wife, one of  his sisters, and Thérèse, whom Rousseau calls by her name for the second and last time, he brings the rabbits himself to the island, which in the future will come to be called “Rabbit Island.” “The founding of this little colony was a festival. The pilot of the Argonauts was no more proud than I, leading the company and the rabbits in triumph from the large island to the small.” In contrast to  Jason, Rousseau undertook his expedition not with a troop of  warriors but with three women, and the goal of the adventure was not to capture a holy treasure, to carry off  the golden fleece of a mythical animal that was sent by the Gods and sacrificed to the Gods, but rather to let natural beings go free and, for a certain period of time, to populate an island and increase its natural wealth, which was subjected to continued depletion. The founder of the colony was not only proud of  his deed. He noted “with pride” that the tax collector’s wife, who had the greatest dread of water and whom in addition it always made sick, sailed confidently under his leadership and showed no fear during the crossing. With exquisite irony, Rousseau, who arrived on St. Peter’s Island “alone and naked,” gives an example of the effectiveness of  his amour-­propre. He presents himself at the end of the deviating description of the afternoon as a sociable man. After the climax and anticlimax of the double presentation of the afternoon, Rousseau inserts two paragraphs that outline an alternative. The digression interrupts the description for which up to that point he used solely the seventh paragraph, which is by far the longest in the Cinquième and together with the tenth, which is the shortest, comprises the whole course of the day, from early morning until late evening. In this way the alternative presentation of the afternoon in paragraphs eight and nine comes to stand in the center of the description Rousseau gives of  his life on St. Peter’s Island. The two paragraphs, each of which begins with “When,” do not portray mere variants that result from Rousseau’s liking to strike out in his boat in one direction or another. Instead, they concern the fact that necessity, which Rousseau had wished for himself, held him imprisoned in his asylum and kept him from gaining even an inch of distance from the island. When the rough lake, rain, or wind 24. See Du contrat social III, 9, 4, p. 420 and Projet de constitution pour la Corse, OCP III, pp. 904, 918, 928; cf. pp. 907, 915, 935, 937–­38.

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did not allow him to row out with his boat, he spent the afternoon wandering over the island on foot. He looked for plants left and right, he sometimes sat down “in the most cheerful and solitary nooks” in order to “dream” undisturbed, sometimes “on terraces and knolls” in order to “let my eyes wander” where he could not go on foot. He enjoyed the “superb and breathtaking view of the lake and its shores,” which on the one side were “crowned by the nearby mountains,” while spreading out on the other side onto rich and fertile plains, above which the view was “limited” by “distant bluish mountains.” From his elevated perspective, Rousseau marks the middle of a circle that includes the “almost round basin” of the lake in its fullness and reaches far beyond it. When evening approached, the Promeneur Solitaire came down from the heights of the island in order to sit at the edge of the lake on the sandy beach, which he liked to do, as he especially remarks,25 “in some hidden asylum.” Nature opens up for Rousseau asylums within the asylum that St. Peter’s Island was for him, offering refuge from claims, duties, habits of sociability, putting at his disposal asylums for concentration, for reflection, for turning back to himself.26 The roar of the waves and the agitation of the water captivated his senses and banished every other agitation from his soul, plunging it “into a delightful reverie” in which the night often surprised him without his having been aware of it. The roar he hears and the agitation to which his sight is directed put Rousseau in a state of calm. The agitation of the water, which he sees, quiets every agitation of the soul, which could stir him up or divert him. His seeing creates a space of silence in which “a delightful reverie” can unfold, which so fills his soul that the passing away of day and night does not touch him. The alternative presentation of the afternoon brings the second and shortly thereafter third use of rêverie in the Cinquième. The vague plural, “a thousand confused but delightful reveries,” of the first portrayal now gives way to the plain singular, “a delightful reverie.” The concentration of a thousand in one rêverie cor­ responds to the concentration that is the object of the description. And the description this time provides hints of the object of the rêverie: “The ebb and flow of  this water and its noise, continual but magnified at intervals, striking my ear and my eyes without respite, took the place of the internal movements that 25. “et j’allois volontiers m’asseoir au bord du lac sur la gréve . . .” V, 9 (1045). This is the sole use of “volontiers” in the Cinquième. Cf. V, 7 (1044): “et j’allois me jetter seul dans un batteau . . .” 26. V, 9 contains the only mention of an asylum within the asylum that St. Peter’s Island offered Rousseau in the face of theologico-­political persecution. Cf. V, 4 (1041) and V, 17 (1049). See P. 103.

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the reverie extinguished within me and was enough to make me feel my exis­ tence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think.” The central sentence of the central paragraph of the Cinquième promenade directs attention to the back and forth, the running forward and going back, the approaching and receding of the water. The surging and ebbing of the waves on the beach, which continually occupied his eyes, and their roar, steady but swelling at intervals, which struck his ear incessantly, the rhythmic movements of the water, which communicated to Rousseau by sight and hearing, took the place of the inner movements that the rêverie extinguished in him. While the agitation of the water that affected Rousseau’s sense of sight and hearing was able to banish from his soul the agitation by the affects, the unrest, and the lack of concentration, and thus make a place for a rêverie, evidently only the rêverie is able to suspend the emotions preceding the agitation, affects such as fear and hope or pity and pride. But that means that the rêverie cannot be understood as the expression of those emotions. Instead it appears as their true antagonist. When Rousseau’s soul plunges into rêverie or is elevated to rêverie, it gains distance from the affects. It remains open what lends rêverie the power to distance itself from or to suspend the affects. The perception of the constant back and forth of the waves sufficed in order for Rousseau to have the sentiment of his existence with pleasure, without, as he stresses, needing to take the trouble of thinking in order to have it. The sentiment of  his own existence is so fundamental that it is already felt with the resonance in the rhythmic movement of nature that sight and hearing transmit, and with it the pleasure bound up with this sentiment, without needing the delight of rêverie itself. “From time to time some weak and short reflection about the instability of things in this world arose, for which the surface of the water offered me the image.” The rêverie articulates itself as reflection, which is triggered by the movement Rousseau sees, and which includes the movement in which he senses his existence. From the sole clarification of a rêverie that he gives in the description of the course of the day, Rousseau rapidly returns to the baseline of the sentiment of existence, above which the rêverie unfolds and to which it can as it were be pulled in: “but soon these weak impressions were erased by the uniformity of the continual movement that lulled me and that, without any active assistance from my soul, held me so fast that, called at the appointed hour and by the agreed-­upon signal, I could not tear myself away without effort.” If Rousseau had to mobilize all his physical power in order to reach the island before nightfall, when in his boat, immersed “in a thousand confused but delightful reveries,” he had let himself drift with the water, so his psychic power is required in order to end

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the “delightful reverie” into which the contemplation of the water on the bank of the lake transports him. The description of the evening is joined seamlessly to the presentation of the afternoon that preceded the alternative of paragraphs eight and nine. “Af­ ter supper, when the evening was fine, we would all go for a little walk together on the terrace to breathe in the air of the lake and the cool breeze.”27 One would relax in the pavilion, one would laugh, chat, sing an old song, “and finally go to bed content with one’s day and wishing only for a similar one the next day.” In the last part of the description of the course of  his day, Rousseau no longer speaks in the first person singular. The Promeneur Solitaire not only goes on a walk together with all, as he had breakfast together with all. He immerses himself  in a “we,”  in which everything appears familiar, in which moderation prevails and what is conventional has validity. He complies with a fivefold “one” that still permits contentment with one’s own existence and allows the wish, which confirms this contentment, that one day might be akin to another, to appear as a unanimous wish and as universal contentment. The sociable conclusion of the description builds a bridge over the solitary digression to the end of the fair-­weather variant of the afternoon. The walker who draws his solitary circles, takes his distance from what is familiar, thinks at his own risk, who stands for himself and remains a stranger because he does not get absorbed into the “one,” has his center in the hidden asylum from which he must tear himself in order to return to society. His I is where he is bei sich. What, then, does Rousseau want to have us figure out by the presentation of his life on St. Peter’s Island? “This is,” he affirms following the description of the course of the day, “leaving aside the unexpected and importunate visits, the way I spent my time on this island during my sojourn there.” And he adds that he wishes someone would tell him what it is about the island that is so attractive that it still arouses in his heart such a vivid, tender, and lasting feeling of painful regret that it is impossible for him to think about the beloved place without feeling transported back there again as he does each time full of desire.28 The request with which the second part of the Cinquième concludes points back 27. Compare the beginning of  V, 10: “quand la soirée etoit belle . . .” with the beginning of the digression in V, 8: “Quand le lac agité ne me permettoit pas la navigation . . .” Rousseau first wrote: “Quand la pluie ou le vent ne me permettoit . . .” 28. “il m’est impossible de songer à cette habitation chérie sans m’y sentir à chaque fois transporter par les élans du désir.” V, 11 (1045) my emphasis. Cf. V, 7 (1042): “Transporté là brusquement seul et nud . . .”

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in popular speech to the question with which it began. The opening of the Cinquième, in stressing that the island is “very pleasant and singularly placed for the happiness of a man who loves to close himself off,” already indicated, in anticipation of the description of the second part, what makes St. Peter’s Is­ land so attractive to Rousseau. The description then vividly shows the space for contemplation and reflection the island opens up for a contemplatif solitaire who turns to nature and wants to collect himself. We have known about what is at stake in closing oneself off and collecting oneself, se circonscrire and se recueillir, at the latest ever since Rousseau determined in the introduction to the Deuxième promenade the relation among solitude, meditation, and nature, and explicitly maintained about the title-­bestowing rêveries with which he is occupied on his solitary walks and which appear as soon as his head is completely free and his ideas are allowed to take their course without hindrance: “These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day during which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, and during which I can truly claim to be what nature willed.”29 The happiness that so fulfilled Rousseau on St. Peter’s Island that there was never an instant when in his soul a desire for another state or sojourn arose was the happiness of  Beisichselbstsein. But in what did its enjoyment consist? Or asked more precisely: How is Rousseau’s Beisichselbstsein to be thought? The carefully composed and no less carefully formulated presentation of the course of the day indicates where the attempt to think Rousseau’s Beisichselbstsein has to start. It directs attention with circumspection to the peak and circumscribes the gaps, which demands of the reader that he collect himself if  he wants to be adequate to the activity of the author. The peak is reached in the afternoon, when according to external appearance we encounter a time without activity, which, as we have seen, Rousseau’s description repeatedly steers around. The first presentation has the advantage of suggestiveness. It compresses the slogan précieux far niente into an emblematic mnemonic and connects it with the indeterminacy of a thousand rêveries confuses. The final presentation has by contrast the privilege of singularity. It allows a look at the one case on which everything depends, and allows in the presumed doing nothing the highest activity to come to light. Rousseau reserves the peak for the one who thinks for the center of the description. He places it in the second paragraph of the bad-­weather alternative, which is exactly in the center of the Cinquième promenade, and which contains the episode that is distinguished from among all the other episodes in the course of the day by Rousseau’s 29. See Chapter III, Pp. 73–­74.

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recording at the beginning his preference for the activity portrayed and by his emphasizing at the end how much he had to tear himself away from the activity when he had to interrupt it for external reasons. The peak of the presentation is reached when we see Rousseau sitting on the bank of the lake and observing calmly the ebb and flow, le flux et reflux, of the water.30 Here, on the firm ground of  the island and in the concentrated serenity of  contemplation—­not in the boat rocking and drifting on the lake with his face turned toward heaven—­ Rousseau is lulled by a steady movement. This lulling, which lays down a uniform baseline for the peak, is not brought about by the movement of the waves themselves. It is not a lulling in immediacy. The movement that carries Rousseau is a movement he sees, hears, and feels within himself. It is mediated by sight, by perception, by feeling. And it is accessible to reflection. The paragraph that makes the lulling of the steady movement the theme exhibits a linguistic rhythm that brings it nearer to lyric than any other paragraph of the Rêveries before or after. The musicality that has been ascribed to the presentation31 mirrors the musicality of the state presented.32 The composition of the three sentences and the accentuation of the words from which the paragraph is built follow the movement under discussion in mimetic correspondence so that it can be communicated to the reader who concentrates on the movement of the text. At its peak Rousseau’s presentation approximates elliptically the middle of his existence. In the back and forth from outside to inside and inside to outside it lays bare beat by beat and ring for ring the omitted core: From the mirroring of the described state in the manner of description to the interplay of sense perception and reflection, to the intertwining of rest and motion, to the interweaving of observation and inwardness, to the unity of feeling and thinking. The Promeneur Solitaire is able to think what he feels and to feel what he thinks. He is able to do that after he has called the unity of feeling and thinking radically into question. It was for him neither a self-­evident givenness nor based on the assumption of a preestablished harmony. He was also not satisfied with the opinion taught by common prudence that feeling clouds 30. That this is the peak of the presentation is confirmed by Rousseau in the third part, in which he refers back to the description of the course of the day with the subtlety to be expected from him, and with the clarity to be wished for in regard to the substance. See V, 14 in fine (1047). 31. Cf. Robert Osmont, Contribution à l’étude psychologique des “Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire” (La vie du souvenir—­Le rythme lyrique) (Geneva, 1935), pp. 84, 96–­99. 32. Frédéric Chopin’s Berceuse might be a musical approximation of the state evoked by the ninth paragraph of the Cinquième promenade.

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thinking and thinking often hinders feeling. Instead he consciously adopted an eccentric position. To keep his distance equally from humanistic illusions, anthropocentric prejudices, and doctrinal familiarities of the tradition, not to assume anything in favor of reason, thinking, and reflection or to presuppose anything in the course of examination and self-­investigation, he pursued the path of a genealogy of disparity, of opposition, and of conflict. He dug down to the constitution of things, which precedes reason, thinking, reflection. He sought out men in the state of animality. He went back behind sociability and language, love and awareness of death, in order to attain a horizon within which what distinguishes man from the animals can be grasped as a problem, in which the difference, which is at once the basis for his greatness and his danger, is to be thought, in which the highest possibilities of his nature and its depravity become visible. It was within the horizon of animality that Rousseau proposed to consider man who meditates as a depraved animal and the state of reflection as a state contrary to nature.33 The change of perspective that Rousseau carried out, and with which he would tempt the best among his readers, presented an unprecedented attack not only on the Western tradition in general, but on its valuation of philosophy in particular. The thought Rousseau kept in mind in his attempt to see reflection from the point of view of health or usefulness for life and to measure it against the standard of self-­ sufficiency can be outlined as follows: Reflection ruptures the closed existence of unquestioned immediacy in which natural man follows his amour de soi. It distances him from the sentiment de l’existence that nature has given him, a sentiment that allows him to be bei sich and that preserves his life. Reflection opens up a world of divisions, of orientation toward the opinion of others, and of rupture within oneself. This is the anthropological statement of the problem to which Rousseau’s œuvre is a reply, which designs and works out diverse possibilities of successful existence for diverse natures under diverse historical conditions. This glance at the eccentric position with which Rousseau’s self-­ reflection begins makes clear what takes place at the center of the Cinquième promenade. It shows which path the Promeneur Solitaire had to travel in order to be able to say of  himself that only in times of solitude and meditation is he wholly bei sich, and thus is what nature willed. It shows which path of experience in seeing and attempting, thinking and feeling the solitary contemplative sees and feels at the peak of the presentation. For the knowledge of this path, with its turns and obstacles, with its dangers and advances, belongs insepa­ rably to the existence of which the sentiment fills him with joy, to his exis­ 33. Discours sur l’inégalité, Première partie, p. 88.

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tence. Rousseau speaks en pleine connaissance de cause when he writes that the back and forth of the water he observed sufficed “to make me feel my existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think.” Rousseau no longer has to convince himself that his thinking does not contradict the sentiment of his exis­tence, an existence mediated by his thinking. He no longer needs to assure himself  by thinking the unity of his thinking and feeling. Le flux et reflux, the movement in the center of the Cinquième promenade, is the movement in which Rousseau’s thinking and feeling meet. When Rousseau observes the coming and going of the water, he feels himself in the movement that lies at the basis of all life. And at the same time he sees the movement that has proven to be fundamental for his thinking: Going back to a universal from which the particular is accorded its distinctive character, going back to some­thing elementary from which the integrative achievement of what is complex is set off, to something undifferentiated that gives distinctions their sharpness, without losing sight of the affiliation with the universal, the persistence of the elementary, the rootedness in the undifferentiated. Going back to the movement of le flux et reflux, which is sufficient unto itself, is, as a movement of thinking, essentially a movement of negation. In going back to the state of nature, we have before us the most important case, the one that literally lays the basis, which Rousseau not only reconstructs as the original state, the starting point of a long development that in the end leads to man, to the citizen, and to the philosopher, but which he also thinks as the natural state. As the natural state, the state of nature is self-­sufficient. It is not driven by an inner necessity beyond itself. Without the intrusion of contingent external factors, the state of nature could remain as it is “eternally.”34 Thus, it is the negation of every teleological orientation. It embodies the rejection of anthropocentrism and at the same time of philosophocentrism. Only the rejection of the most obvious, gaining distance from one’s own, only conscious negation gives the inward turn, the appropriation, gives the philosopher’s ultimate affirmation its true significance and full scope. What links the natural state and the state of  happiness is Beisichselbstsein. In the original state, in which the homme sauvage lives, Beisichsein results from the necessarily closed-­off character of solitary existence. In the natural state attained by the Promeneur Solitaire, Beisichselbstsein is based on love for being closed off, for being collected within oneself, and on the far-­reaching undertaking to incorporate the necessity of this love within thinking. The Beisichselbstsein of  the state of nature serves as the mea­ sure of  this undertaking, which proceeds antagonistically against one’s own 34. Discours sur l’inégalité, Première partie, p. 166.

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preferences, wishes, and hopes. This antagonistic orientation is the unmistakable sign of the movement of thought, which is the basis for the state of  happiness. Whether it will ever bring thinking and feeling together appears very doubtful at its outset. That the état de réflexion is consistent with the sentiment de l’existence is what is not expected. If  philosophy can be reconciled with life, it will be achieved contrary to the assumption with which the movement of thought begins. For the Promeneur Solitaire it does not constitute the least part of the happiness of  his Beisichselbstsein that the return succeeds against expectation. That what for him is improbable occurs. That what he set up in opposition comes together in him. That he forms a whole without having concealed his partial character. Not even the joy with which the homme sauvage senses his existence in the state of nature seems to remain closed to him while observing the movement of the constant flux et reflux. The happiness of the Promeneur Solitaire is accentuated by the contrast, and his Beisichselbstsein is deepened by his knowledge of the difference. But the accentuation is not tied to the perception of someone else’s unhappiness, and the deepening does not result from the depreciation of other forms of Beisichselbstsein. When Rousseau sits on the bank of the lake and observes the ebb and flow of the water, his happiness is not nourished by the comparative glance at the shipwrecked who struggle against the waves. His joy is fed neither by the “sweet” sentiment of being on secure land freed from the evils to which those are exposed whom the water batters,35 nor by profit gained from the no less “sweet” sentiment of pity, which according to Rousseau’s analysis is closely related to amour-­propre.36 His happiness is bound to his own exis­ tence, drawn from his own nature, based in his own life. It is underlined by the experience of withdrawal and return, borne by confidence in what is most important, and strengthened by the success of the unhoped for. The Beisichselbstsein of the philosopher is distinguished from the Beisichselbstsein the citizen can achieve by his identification with the moi commun of the corps moral, of which he understands himself to be an inseparable member. It is likewise distinguished from the Beisichselbstsein pertaining to the savage in the enclosure of  his natural horizon and in the unity of  his corps physique. The fundamental determination that joins together the successful existence of a Heraclitus or 35. “Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis / e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem; / non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas, / sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est.” Lucretius, De rerum natura II, 1–­4. 36. See Émile IV, pp. 503–­4 and Lettre à Philopolis in the critical edition of the Discours sur l’inégalité, p. 476.

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Socrates, of a Nietzsche or Diogenes, and the successful existence of the Roman citizen or the citizen of Geneva, that of a Carib or Hottentot and that of a “Pongo” or “Orang-­Utan,”37 is variously shaped depending upon the capabilities and circumstances in each case. Yet can Beisichselbstsein be differentiated into a “higher” and a “lower,” an inferior and superior? The Beisichselbstsein of the self-­identical savage, whose amour de soi lets him enjoy his sentiment de l’existence without break and without extension, is in its simplicity and limitedness complete and in this completeness not sur­ passable. That of the citizen, who identifies himself  with the well-­ordered po­ litical community, is much more complex, but also much more precarious. It rests on the extension of amour de soi to amour de la patrie and on the placement of  amour-­propre in service to the political whole. It needs the development of all human abilities and the cultivation of all the political virtues, especially of imagination and justice. Finally, it remains tied to historical presuppositions over which he has no command, and dependent on political institutions that others must set in motion for him. The Beisichselbstsein of the citizen is the most precarious, since the citizen taken alone has the least autarky, and since what is needful for him is more wished for than found. What holds for the Beisichselbstsein of the citizen as well as for the savage in the original state of nature is that it is essentially supported, formed, and guaranteed by external factors. The fragility of a Beisichselbstsein that is not based on knowledge of difference, on mediation by the negativity of thinking, on conscious negation and return to oneself, Rousseau has shown concisely in the draft constitution for Corsica with which he was occupied while on St. Peter’s Island. The manuscript that conceives a political institution for the “one country left in Europe” that appeared to Rousseau “capable of receiving legislation”38 that in stark contrast to modern convictions and to common European progress could open the way to the successful existence of the citoyen, laconically asserts: “The equality and simplicity of rural life have, for those acquainted with no other mode of existence, an attraction that leaves them with no desire to change it.”39 37. Cf. Discours sur l’inégalité, Note X, pp. 332–­36; Note XVI, pp. 376–­78. 38. Du contrat social II, 10, 6, p. 391. 39. Projet de constitution pour la Corse, paragraph 9, p. 905. Cf. paragraph 84, p. 925: “Au lieu qu’ici toutes les vues de l’institution tendent à rendre cet état [du cultivateur] heureux dans sa médiocrité, respectable dans sa simplicité. Fournissant tous les besoins de la vie, tous les tributs publics sans ventes et sans trafic, tous les moyens de la considération, il n’en laissera pas même imaginer un meilleur ou plus noble. Ceux qui le rempliront ne voyant rien au dessus d’eux en feront leur gloire, et s’en frayant une route aux plus grands emplois ils le rempliront comme les prémiers Romains. Ne pouvant sortir de cet état on voudra s’y distinguer, on voudra le remplir

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A Beisichselbstsein that rests on ignorance cannot do without the protection of necessity or the assistance of one who understands, of his foresight, his wisdom, his persuasion.40 Insofar as the Beisichselbstsein of the philosopher is able to compare itself with other forms of  Beisichselbstsein and to exist without that protection and alien assistance, it proves to be superior. But the last word the Promeneur Solitaire arrives at in his knowledge of the difference is not the superiority of his Beisichselbstsein. The last word is the superiority being taken back into the movement of  flux et reflux. The superiority of his Beisichselbstsein is proven in his knowing how to think and ground the other forms of  Beisichselbstsein, and in knowing how to affirm them in their own right without his being in need of their affirmation in turn. The deepening of this knowledge of the difference reaches its basis with the insight that the highest affirmation and the broadest perspective are proper to the philosopher’s Beisichselbstsein without the other forms of  Beisichselbstsein therefore suffering a defect. If the perspective and affirmation without which the philosopher’s Beisichselbstsein cannot be thought are inaccessible to the Beisichselbstsein of the savage or of the citizen, it remains no less Beisichselbstsein. Sub specie naturae the various forms of  Beisichselbstsein are self-­sufficient. Stated in popular form: nature would be “justified” even if it did not turn back to itself. This thought does not lessen the happiness that lies in the contemplation of nature. Just as little does abstracting from oneself, the cross-­check of nonexistence or death, ruin the happiness that accompanies the turn into oneself. The Promeneur Solitaire is presented with the image for the one as well as the other when he looks out on the water of the lac de Bienne. In the third part of the Cinquième promenade Rousseau offers his own interpretation of the happiness of his Beisichselbstsein.41 The interpretation of the third part no more leaves political compatibility out of consideration than the presentation of the second part did. Like the earlier description of the course of the day, it makes use of the means of the appropriate framework or of the calming conclusion, and like the former it avails itself  in the most important respect of  the device of  the opening left free, a free space or an empty time, which mieux que d’autres, faire de plus grandes recoltes, fournir un plus fort contingent à l’état, mériter dans les élections les suffrage du peuple” (my emphasis). 40. Cf. Dernière réponse, OCP III, pp. 90–­91; Discours sur l’inégalité, Note IX, p. 318; Du contrat social II, 7, 1 and 9–­11, pp. 381 and 383–­84; II, 11, 4, pp. 392–­93; II, 12, 5, p. 394; Projet de constitution pour la Corse, pp. 935–­36 and 950; Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, pp. 955, 956–­59, 969, 1004. 41. Rousseau opens the concluding part, which comprises paragraphs 12 to 17, with “Je.” The twelfth paragraph is the only one in the Cinquième beginning with “I.”

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the reader has to fill and to close by precisely the activity that has been left out. Rousseau classifies the happiness that he links with St. Peter’s Island. He himself complies with the request that at the end of the second part he directed to an indeterminate addressee, and tries to explain why the island is still able to attract him and arouse in him the feeling of vivid regret. Looking back upon “the vicissitudes of a long life,” he maintains that it is in no way “the periods of the sweetest enjoyments and most lively pleasures” whose recollection most attracts and touches him. The “short moments of delirium and passion” are for all their liveliness and just because of their liveliness “still only scattered points along the path of  life.” They are too rare and too rapid to provide the basis for a state. The happiness Rousseau’s heart misses, that attracts and touches him, is not put together out of fleeting moments, but is rather a state, un état simple et permanent. It is a state that does not allow even for an instant the desire for another state to arise.42 It is a state that is in itself not lively; however, it is vividly missed in recollection, in the mode of absence, in Außersichsein. It is a state whose duration so increases its charm that Rousseau finds in it finally the supreme felicity. Thus, Rousseau connects nothing less than la suprême félicité with “St. Peter’s Island in the middle of Lake Bienne.”43 Nothing less than the state of supreme felicity is the object of the Cinquième promenade. And nothing less is expressed by the connection the Cinquième establishes with the episode, clearly circumscribed in space and time, of the sojourn on St. Peter’s Island than that for Rousseau supreme felicity did not remain a state of wishing and hoping, which belongs to another world, but rather took place in space and time. Not in heaven but on earth.44 Obvious objections can be raised against the attainability of happiness insofar as it is conceived as a state and essentially bound up with duration. The inconstancy of the world, the power of the affects, the variability of  life, death. “Everything is in continual flux on earth.” How to escape the continual flux? In what can stability be found on earth? “Nothing on it retains a constant and static form, and our affects, which are attached to external things, necessarily pass away and change as they do.” The affects make us dependent upon what 42. See V, 5 (1042) and Pp. 103–­4. 43. Compare “le bonheur que mon cœur regrette” in V, 12 (1046) with “ce qu’il y a là d’assés attrayant pour exciter dans mon cœur des regrets si vifs” in V, 11 (1045) and with “aucune ne m’a rendu si véritablement heureux et ne m’a laissé de si tendres regrets que l’Isle de St Pierre au milieu du lac de Bienne” in V, 1 (1040). 44. The twelfth paragraph, which begins with “Je,” ends with “enfin la suprème félicité.” No other passage in the Rêveries mentions la suprême félicité. See Chapter II, P. 62.

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is external to us and leave us outside ourselves in a past that no longer is or in a future that perhaps never will be. They bind us, in hope or fear, in aversion or longing, to something that lies either ahead of us or behind us, but they show us nothing “to which the heart might attach itself,” nothing constant, nothing that offers fulfillment in the present. “Thus, here below we have hardly anything but transitory pleasure; as for happiness that lasts, I doubt that it is known here below.” Thus, it appears that we have arrived at the opposite position: Rousseau seems to put happiness as a state into question, to contest the possibility of duration and to deny supreme felicity. However, his doubt whether “happiness that lasts is known here below” is not exhausted by calling to mind the transience of everything earthly and making the reader aware of something no one needs to make him aware of, since it is a commonplace of prudence commune.45 The following sentence already makes known the meaning of the recourse to the topos: The duration of  happiness under discussion is not so much a measure of time as a judgment. For this reason, Rousseau also strongly emphasizes the role of the affects, which he already stressed in the preceding paragraph. “In our most lively enjoyments, there is hardly an instant when the heart can genuinely say to us: je voudrois que cet instant durât toujours.”46 The fleeting character of  “our most lively enjoyments” is no longer made the theme in regard to the observation that the “short moments of delirium and passion” are all too scattered along the path of  life. This transitoriness is no longer measured against moments too rare and too rapid to be able to provide the basis for a state. Now at issue is the far more fundamental question whether “our most lively enjoyments” are the fulfillment that withstands the test of duration. Whether “delirium and passion” deserve to last forever. In the thirteenth paragraph of the Cinquième promenade, Rousseau names the touchstone on which happiness proves itself. The wish for unlimited duration formulates the judgment that determines the moment as happy. The wish does not formulate unlimited duration as the condition of happiness: 45. At the beginning of the Neuvième promenade, Rousseau repeats the position that prudence commune teaches, right down to the specific formulations he uses in V, 13: “Le bonheur est un état permanent qui ne semble pas fait ici bas pour l’homme. Tout est sur la terre dans un flux continuel qui ne permet à rien d’y prendre une forme constante. Tout change autour de nous. Nous changeons nousmêmes et nul ne peut s’assurer qu’il aimera demain ce qu’il aime aujourd’hui. Ainsi tous nos projets de felicité pour cette vie sont des chiméres. Profitons du contentement d’esprit quand il vient; gardons-­nous de l’éloigner par notre faute, mais ne faisons pas des projets pour l’enchainer, car ces projets-­là sont de pures folies” IX, 1 (1085). 46. I follow the manuscript, which without doubt reads “je” and not “Je,” as the editions uniformly reproduce the passage. Rousseau underlined the seven words.

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The moment is happy if we can say about it, let it last forever; but we do not say about the moment that if it were to last forever, it would be happy. How could it be more plainly expressed that no one is happy so long as he makes his happiness depend on what lies in the future? On the fulfillment of that wish, on the overcoming of this last obstacle, on the advent of that single thing still lacking for happiness? Knowledge of transience, knowledge of death, does not negate the judgment Rousseau’s chosen formulation contains. It belongs to Rousseau’s wisdom that he ties happiness to the question whether we can truly say of the moment: I would like this instant to last forever. This statement of  happiness is the response to the counterstatement of tragedy: I would wish never to have been born. Faust explicitly denies Rousseau’s statement, the only one in italics in the Cinquième, and makes it the object of  his bet with Mephisto, only to arrive, at the end of the first part of Goethe’s poem, no less explicitly at the counterstatement of tragedy. At the close of the second part, the happiness so emphatically negated returns, yet as a mere presentiment of something unreal, in a state of  blindness and of  hopeless “too late,” in which the enjoyment of the supposedly supreme moment and death coincide.47 In the moment of death, what comes to light is what life could have been but was not, since flight in the face of perpetual dissatisfaction let reality fall into ruin and the horror of eternity denied damaged everything. The blindness of tragic man is one with his lack of self-­knowledge,48 which prevents him from Beisichselbstsein. The fleeting state that Rousseau denies can count as happiness in the demanding sense is a state that does not pass the test of duration. It is fleeting because it “leaves our heart still worried and empty,” because we miss something that was prior to it, or desire something that will only be after it. It is “un état fugitif ” with respect not to its actual duration but rather to our not truly affirming its duration. The duration of a state can be truly affirmed “that leaves in the soul no emptiness it might feel the need to fill.” Rousseau characterizes such a state in the first of the two central paragraphs of the third part. He determines it as “a state in which the soul finds a solid enough base to rest itself on entirely and to collect its whole being without needing to recall the past or encroach upon the future.” A state in which the soul finds a sufficiently solid base to rest 47. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust. Der Tragödie Erster Teil 1699–­1706, 4596; Der Tragödie Zweiter Teil 11585–­11586. 48. In the words of its creator spoken on the stage: “Er kennt sich nicht, er weiß nicht, was er soll . . . / Und wird zuletzt verderblich überrennt / Von einem Schicksal, das er auch nicht kennt.” Prolog zu Eröffnung des Berliner Theaters im Mai 1821, in Goethes Werke, Sophien-­ Ausgabe, (Weimar, 1894), vol. 13, p. 116, ll. 34, 37, and 38.

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entirely on this base and to collect its whole being is a state of fulfillment, which escapes neither into the past nor into the future, since the centrifugal forces of the affects are suspended or bound by a force Rousseau does not refer to by name.49 It is a state in which “time is nothing” for the soul, “where the present lasts forever without, however, making its duration noticed and without any trace of time’s passage,” since the soul in its serenity is attached to nothing it would allow to be outside itself, and since in its concentration it is at every moment present to itself. It is a state of inwardness “without any other sentiment of deprivation or of enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear, except that alone of our existence, and that this sentiment alone can fill completely.” As long as this state of rest, of collection, of inwardness lasts, based on the sentiment of one’s own existence and filled by it,50 “he who finds himself in it can call himself  happy.” He may count as happy in the demanding sense. For at the end of  his characterization of the fulfilled state Rousseau makes a distinction regarding happiness that in substance was present from the very outset in his treatment. He now speaks explicitly of an “imperfect, poor, and relative happiness,” which would be classified as a fleeting state. He contrasts with the limited happiness “such as one finds in the pleasures of  life”51 the happiness that belongs to the state of timeless duration. He who finds himself in it can, “as long as this state lasts,” call himself  happy “with a sufficient, perfect, and full happiness.” According to the testimony of the fifth walk, Rousseau “often” or, as he first writes, “sometimes” experienced nothing less than such a sufficient, perfect, and full happiness, during his “two months” or six and a half weeks on St. Peter’s Island: “Such is the state in which I (sometimes) often found myself during my solitary reveries on St. Peter’s Island, either lying in my boat as I let it drift with the water or seated on the bank of the agitated lake; or elsewhere, at the edge of  a beautiful river or of  a brook murmuring over pebbles.” In the middle of the interpretive part Rousseau refers back to the two prominent scenes of  the descriptive part, which has to support the interpretation and which challenges the reader to think what is unstated to the end. The first scene recalls the fine-­weather version of the afternoon, which illustrated so strikingly the slogan “precious doing nothing”: Rousseau, “in the middle of the lake” lying in a boat, his eyes turned to heaven, letting himself drift slowly 49. Cf. V, 9, 2 (1045) and see P. 112. 50. The use of “existence” in V, 14 is the fourth of seven uses of the term in the Cinquième promenade and the seventh of thirteen in the Rêveries as a whole. 51. Cf. V, 14 (1046) with V, 7 (1044): “ce qu’on appelle les plaisirs de la vie.”

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with the water, “plunged into a thousand confused but delightful reveries.” The second scene evokes by contrast the key situation of the Cinquième promenade, which belongs to the bad-­weather version of the afternoon: Rousseau sitting on the bank of the island in a hidden asylum “in the middle of Lake Bienne,” contemplating the constant ebb and flow of the water, meditating about himself and the world, immersed “in a delightful reverie,” feeling his own existence with pleasure. The special position of the second scene is confirmed by the third, which Rousseau has take place at the edge of a beautiful river or brook murmuring over pebbles. With the third scene, which has no counterpart in the description of the second part, Rousseau reaches fictionally beyond the unity of space and time, for there is neither a river nor a brook on St. Peter’s Island.52 Common to all three scenes is that they bring the rêveries solitaires into connection with the water. But only the second and the third deal with the contemplation of  water, with an activity that is intensely occupied with the element, is concerned with its surface and its depth and simulta­ neously preserves its distance from it. And only the second scene resides on St. Peter’s Island, not merely in its vicinity or in a fictive supplement. The supplement that Rousseau provides in referring back to the description of  the course of the day makes the peak in the center of  the fifth walk into the central example of  his perfect happiness. How sufficient, how perfect, and how full can a happiness be that is experienced often or sometimes but not always, that begins and stops, returns and finally ends? Evidently, as sufficient, as perfect, and as full as can be ascribed to a being who knows his happiness and his finitude. In the two central paragraphs of the third part Rousseau twice inserts with the same words the qualification tant que cet état dure, and nowhere gives the impression that for him “a sufficient, perfect, and full happiness that leaves in the soul no emptiness it might feel the need to fill” would in truth be tied to the abolition of this qualification or to the temporary forgetting of the condition of his existence. The peak of the Cinquième promenade, collecting himself in the necessary movement of 52. The third scene has left commentators who do not pay the required attention to Rousseau’s art of writing clueless, or it has occasioned hasty conclusions: “Légère incohérence (il n’y a pas, dans l’île, de rivière ni de ruisseau) qu’explique un premier jet insuffisamment amendé.” Marcel Raymond ad locum. “A-­t-­on suffisamment remarqué qu’il n’y a pas de rivière à l’île Saint-­ Pierre? Insensiblement, l’analyse de la rêverie tend à se généraliser, et à rejoindre celle du Second Dialogue.” Henri Roddier ad locum. To be able to recognize the points Rousseau’s fictional supplement brings out, the reader is not dependent upon any external information. He only has to take seriously the description of the course of the day in the second part of the Cinquième and reflect on both, the description as well as the reference back to it in the third part.

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flux et reflux, speaks a clear language. The suprême félicité to which Rousseau refers is not the felicity of an imaginary being, and the duration that contributes to it is not measured by an imaginary time standard. The duration that leads to Rousseau’s supreme felicity is primarily a cognitive determination and, derived from it, mediated by insight, a temporal determination. This connects suprême félicité with the thought-­space of the monde idéal, to whose timeless present there is no entry without the knowledge of finitude, without the knowledge of necessities, without insight into one’s own nature. What does Rousseau enjoy when in his rêverie solitaire he contemplates from the bank the waves of the agitated lake? The second half of the third part begins in almost so many words with this question. “What does one enjoy in such a situation?” Rousseau asks in closest proximity to the reference back to the peak of the promenade.53 His answer: “Nothing external to oneself, nothing if not oneself and one’s own existence.” We have been familiar with the substance of this answer since the first treatment of the peak.54 Its brevity, its rigor, its directness are astonishing, even if the foundations of self-­enjoyment remain unstated: the innocence or the awareness of one’s own goodness, the absence of pangs of conscience or the freedom from torment of sin. Yet the answer has a continuation arousing no less astonishment, which designates the vanishing point of the line of thought: “as long as this state lasts, one is sufficient unto oneself, like God.” In the state of supreme felicity Rousseau is wholly bei sich. He enjoys himself, since he is good and insofar he suffices unto himself. If we conceptualize God as a perfect being or as the highest being that is a person, we can say that this being is to the highest degree bei sich, good, and sufficient unto himself. Rousseau’s state of supreme felicity is, consequently, for as long as it lasts, a divine state.55 Rousseau has the single mention of the sentiment de l’existence follow immediately the fourth mention of Dieu in the Rêveries. It goes back to the determination that connects God and 53. The question with which Rousseau begins the second half of the third part takes up the second half of the question with which he began the second part: “Quel étoit donc ce bonheur et en quoi consistoit sa jouissance?” What deserves all the more attention is that Rousseau concentrates the original question on the high points of  his life. Only the description of the second part makes us divine his happiness as a whole. Paragraphs V, 6 and V, 15 are the only paragraphs of the Cinquième promenade that begin with questions. 54. See V, 9, 2 and V, 14, 1 as well as Pp. 112 and 124. 55. Cf. Chapter II, Pp. 68–­69 and 70–71. “if we understand by God the most perfect being that is a person, there are no gods but the philosophers (Sophist in princ: θεoς τις ἐλεγκτικoς). Poor gods? Indeed, measured by imaginary standards.” Leo Strauss, Reason and Revelation, in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-­Political Problem, p. 163.

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animal, which is common to the divine and the natural state: “The sentiment of  existence, stripped of any other affect, is in itself a precious sentiment of contentment and of peace which alone would suffice to make this existence dear and sweet to anyone able to spurn all the sensual and earthly impressions that incessantly come to distract us from it and to trouble its sweetness here below.” The sentiment of existence is common to the divine and to the natural state as the baseline that distinguishes the nondepraved from the depraved state. In the nondepraved state, the sentiment of existence suffices, since it is intrinsically a “precious sentiment of contentment and of peace” of soul, in order to make the existence of the one who feels it “dear and sweet.” In the depraved state, the passions and social needs distract from its “sweetness.” They drown out and silence the sentiment that supports life in the nondepraved state. The sentiment that makes existence “dear and sweet” is deeply rooted in nature. It supplies the individual’s self-­preservation with reason and it justifies the one who knows how to capture it in thought when he formulates the affirmation of  his life in the judgment: Le tout est bien. The sentiment of exis­ tence is the foundation for everything, but it is not everything for Rousseau. Unlike Diderot, who at the time of their friendship was willing to have the sentiment of existence coincide with the sentiment of happiness in the “delightful calm” of a “wholly passive enjoyment,” and to form “the concept of the greatest and purest happiness that man can imagine” in accord with such a “situation of pure sentiment,”56 Rousseau connects “contentment and peace” 56. Diderot’s article, Délicieux, which was published in the fourth volume of the Encyclopédie in October 1754, deserves attention owing to its proximity to the Cinquième promenade, a proximity that makes the specific difference of Rousseau’s account appear all the more clearly: “Le repos a aussi son délice; mais qu’est-­ce qu’un repos délicieux? Celui-­là seul en a connu le charme inexprimable, dont les organes étaient sensibles et délicats; qui avait reçu de la nature une âme tendre et un tempérament voluptueux; qui jouissait d’une santé parfaite; qui se trouvait à la fleur de son âge; qui n’avait l’esprit troublé d’aucun nuage, l’âme agitée d’aucune émotion trop vive; qui sortait d’une fatigue douce et légère, et qui éprouvait dans toutes les parties de son corps un plaisir si également répandu, qu’il ne se faisait distinguer dans aucun. Il ne lui restait dans ce moment d’enchantement et de faiblesse, ni mémoire du passé, ni désir de l’avenir, ni inquiétude sur le présent. Le temps avait cessé de couler pour lui, parce qu’il existait tout en lui-­même; le sentiment de son Bonheur ne s’affaiblissait qu’avec celui de son existence. Il passait par un mouvement imperceptible de la veille au sommeil; mais sur ce passage imperceptible, au milieu de la défaillance de toutes ses facultés, il veillait encore assez, sinon pour penser à quelque chose de distinct, du moins pour sentir toute la douceur de son existence: mais il en jouissait d’une jouissance tout à fait passive, sans y être attaché, sans y réfléchir, sans s’en réjouir, sans s’en féliciter. Si l’on pouvait fixer par la pensée cette situation de pur sentiment, où toutes les facultés

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with the general sentiment of existence. His felicity is not exhausted by the sentiment de l’existence, which he proclaims after his comparison to the self-­ sufficiency of God. Rousseau’s sentiment of his existence is the basis for his “perfect happiness,”57 and it is this base on which Rousseau’s soul “collects” its “whole being,” a being to which all—­Rousseau’s thinking, his experience with thinking, and his recollection of the path of thinking he has traveled—­ belong as integral constituent parts. Therefore, when contemplating the flux et reflux, the contemplatif solitaire can concomitantly see, think, and feel what no nonphilosopher, whether he is an “Orang-­Utan,” a Hottentot, or a citizen of Geneva, concomitantly sees, thinks, and feels. For the same reason, Rousseau’s Beisichselbstsein cannot be conceived as the state of a “wholly passive enjoyment,” nor can his collecting himself be conceived as a “moment of enchantment and weakness” in the transition from wakefulness to sleep. We have known since the end of the Première promenade that Rousseau traces the méd­ itations solitaires whose fruit are the Rêveries to a source or activity without which his soul cannot be. And the Deuxième promenade, at whose beginning Rousseau assures us that the hours of solitude and of meditation are the only hours in the day during which he is wholly himself and with himself, contains the memorable portrayal of the slow return to life from the temporary loss of consciousness following a serious fall, a kind of transition from sleep to wakefulness that, in conspicuous contrast to the strange Außersichsein it places before our eyes, illuminates the Beisichselbstsein that the Cinquième promenade describes. It does so precisely because Rousseau praises the “rapturous calm” that he felt “in his whole being” during the extraordinary moment, neither recurrent nor prolonged, which, as it were scattered, without the center and the context of  his own existence, flowed and hovered externally.58 du corps et de l’âme sont vivantes sans être agissantes, et attacher à ce quiétisme délicieux l’idée d’immutabilité, on se formerait la notion du bonheur le plus grand et le plus pur que l’homme puisse imaginer.” Diderot, OC VII, Encyclopédie III (Lettres D–­L), p. 9. 57. Cf. V, 14, 1: le sentiment “seul de notre existence”; V, 9, 2: “pour me faire sentir avec plaisir mon existence” (my emphasis). 58. “La nuit s’avançoit. J’apperçus le ciel, quelques étoiles, et un peu de verdure. Cette prémiére sensation fut un moment délicieux.  Je ne me sentois encor que par là.  Je naissois dans cet instant à la vie, et il me sembloit que je remplissois de ma legere existence tous les objets que j’appercevois. Tout entier au moment présent je ne me souvenois de rien; je n’avois nulle no­ tion distincte de mon individu, pas la moindre idée de ce qui venoit de m’arriver;  je ne savois ni qui j’étois ni où  j’étois;  je ne sentois ni mal, ni crainte, ni inquietude.  Je voyois couler mon sang comme j’aurois vu couler un ruisseau, sans songer seulement que ce sang m’appartint en aucune sorte.  Je sentois dans tout mon être un calme ravissant auquel chaque fois que je me le rappelle je

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As soon as Rousseau has had the determination of supreme felicity culminate in the connection of self-­enjoyment with the self-­sufficiency of God, he begins the descent. Not only the most challenging sentence of the Cinquième promenade, but also the description and explication of the happiness of the philosophic life as a whole, at whose end or peak the sentence stands, is in need of political embedding. Rousseau devotes the remainder of the walk to such an embedding, moderating, and attenuating. After making the comparison with God, he directs his gaze at the great majority of men: “But most men, agitated by continual passions, are little acquainted with this state.” With the statement, interposed to lessen the steep incline, about the universal effect of the sentiment de l’existence, which characterizes it as the “precious sentiment of contentment and peace,” “from which sensual and earthly impressions in­ cessantly distract us,” the distance from the divine state is blurred to the point that it remains unclear whether the state “most men are little acquainted with” is the state of perfect happiness or a state of contentment and peace.59 Since most men “have tasted” cet état “only imperfectly for a few instants,” they have only an “obscure and confused idea of it, which does not let them feel its charm.” After this bland and cautious formulation, it is not surprising that Rousseau in no way proceeds with admonition or encouragement, de­ manding or inviting abandonment of the depraved state. He explains, on the contrary, that “in the present structure of things,” i.e., under conditions of sociability, it “would not even be good” if men, “avid for those sweet ecstasies,” would in the state in question develop an aversion to the active life and, we may assume, consequently become attached to a “precious far niente” as they understand it. For their constantly recurring social needs make la vie active a duty. What for most would not even be good, not to mention amenable to universalization, can be good for one whose natural capabilities make a life of contemplation into a necessity. Rousseau does not express this thought. Instead he follows immediately with a second opposing “but,” which releases the contemplatif solitaire from the duty of the active life by recourse to external compulsion: “But an unfortunate person who has been cut off from human ne trouve rien de comparable dans toute l’activité des plaisirs connus” II, 10 (1005). Cf. Diderot’s description in Footnote 56 above. 59. After he has reached in V, 14, 1 the state of one who can call himself “heureux,” in the sense of “un bonheur suffisant, parfait et plein,” in the remainder of the Cinquième, in the entire second half of the third part, Rousseau does not speak again even once of “bonheur” or of “heureux.” In the Cinquième, “bonheur” appears seven times, culminating in the seventh use with “bonheur suffisant, parfait et plein” in V, 14, 1; “heureux” is used five times, likewise culminating in V, 14, 1.

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society and who can no longer do anything here below useful and good for another or for himself can compensate for all the human felicities in this state that fortune and men could not take away from him.” Prevented by persecution from doing good, whether for others or for himself, Rousseau is able only to be good, to be bei sich selbst, to be happy. Beisichselbstsein offers him “compensations” that neither fortune nor men can take away from him. What compensates him “for all the human felicities” is supreme felicity.60 What counts for the Promeneur Solitaire does not count for everyone. At the beginning of the penultimate paragraph Rousseau admits: “It is true that these compensations cannot be felt by all souls or in all situations.” Following the rhetoric of the entire Cinquième promenade, Rousseau leaves unclear which capabilities of his soul are highly special to it among “all souls.” The power that puts him in a position to enjoy those “compensations” to which not Everyman has access still remains unnamed. Likewise, he passes over in si­ lence the reason that makes the return to oneself “for most men” not so much a blissful joy as “unbearable,” a finding he will address in the Huitième promenade.61 Instead of discussing the diversity of natures, Rousseau continues by distinguishing among “situations.” In order to be able to enjoy the “compensations,” the heart must be at peace. No passion may be permitted to disturb its calm. “There must be certain dispositions on the part of the one who experiences them [compensations], there must be the conjunction of the surrounding objects.” Again, Rousseau does not engage with the question of the natural dispositions or of the foundations of the enjoyment of those “compensations.” He takes the dispositions of the subject in a single breath with the effect of the objects surrounding it, in a casuistry that directs attention to the “situations” and suggests general accessibility: Neither an absolute rest nor too much agitation, but a uniform and moderated movement without  jolts or interruptions is required. For without movement life is nothing other than lethargy, while on the contrary, movement if it is irregular or too strong arouses us by having us remember objects that surround us, destroys the charm of rêverie, and tears us out of ourselves in order to subject us instantly again to “the yoke of fortune and men.” An absolute silence leads to sadness. It offers an image of death. In this place, in a situation in which the objects surrounding us fail in their effect, in which we are reminded of death and seem to be as far as possible from “contentment and peace,” imagination makes its first appearance in the Cin60. Cf. Chapter II, P. 58 and Chapter I, Footnote 11. See I, 1 (995); I, 13 (1000) and I, 4 (996); I, 11 (999); I, 12 (999); II, 3 (1002–­3). 61. Cf. VIII, 4 (1075).

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quième promenade and Heaven its last in the Rêveries.62 “Then the assistance of a cheerful imagination is necessary and comes naturally enough to those whom Heaven has favored.” A cheerful imagination brings about movement from within that fails to come from without, and thus points the way out of the impasse into which Rousseau’s casuistry has led the reader. It is true that there is less rest in the case of the movement produced by imagination, yet it is more pleasurable “when light and sweet ideas only skim the surface of the soul, so to speak, without disturbing its depths.” But no more is needed in order to be reminded of oneself and thereby to forget all one’s sufferings. For everyone to whom Heaven has given the gift of a sunny imagination, independence from external circumstances seems achievable, autarky seems easily achievable, a state of contentment and peace in reverie seems almost everywhere and always available: “This species of reverie can be enjoyed wherever we can be quiet, and I have often thought that in the Bastille—­even in a dungeon where no object would strike my sight—­I would still have been able to dream pleasurably.” Imagination, which Rousseau presents like a deus ex machina shortly before the conclusion and has dominate the end of the walk, has had a lasting influence on the image of the Cinquième promenade. It has helped to conceal the nature of what Rousseau treats in his presentation of  his life on St. Peter’s Island. It has essentially contributed to the forgetting of the hard core of his thinking and to anchoring in memory the idea, as pleasant as it is reassuring, not to say light and sweet, of the harmless walker who, although a strange character, is not all that different from an Everyman and whose self-­sufficiency would not need to disturb anyone, since it would hardly have more significance than a dream. Rousseau has sufficient imagination and enough experience as an author to assess these effects. He could without difficulty foresee that very few readers would examine the casuistry of the situations against the description of the central part and would measure the rêverie of the conclusion, born from imagination, against the peak of the Rêverie. He could in particular count on the vast majority of readers not to distinguish between genus and species and to be all too ready and willing to equate “this species of reverie” with the rêveries that come to light in the title of the book.63 What would be more obvious than to read into the so prominently placed “species” rêverie, which 62. Rousseau uses the term “imagination” once in the Cinquième promenade in V, 16 (1047) and afterward twice more in V, 17 (1049). “Le ciel” appears in II, 24 (1010), III, 19 (1019), IV, 2 (1025), IV, 28 (1034), and V, 16 (1047). (In passages IV, 2 and IV, 28 the manuscript has, as the meaning demands, “le Ciel” and not “le ciel,” as the editors reproduce Rousseau.) 63. See Chapter III, Pp. 79–­80. Cf. V, 7 (1043).

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stems from the imagination, the rêveries about which the second part of the Cinquième and the Rêveries in general speak? And thus to lose sight of or not to have in mind at all the specific activities that the “genus” rêverie comprises and subsumes? The Everyman rêverie at the end of the walk solidifies the impression of the idle walker, who turns out to do nothing and has found refuge, substitution for, consolation from reality in a fantasy world. Accordingly, few readers will connect serious and profound meditation with the designation rêverie, and it will barely occur to any that the Promeneur Solitaire could have worked on his draft of a well-­ordered political community during his sojourn on St. Peter’s Island, for which he drew upon and researched the most various realities—­geographic, historical, political, economic, and demographic. An undertaking about which Rousseau also said that it was a rêverie.64 The exoteric conclusion stands entirely under the sign of imagination. From the imagined prison in which Rousseau “would still have been able to dream pleasurably,” the author turns back to St. Peter’s Island, but he no longer calls it by its name. On a “fertile and solitary island, naturally closed off and separated from the rest of the world,” as Rousseau must “admit,” he would dream “much better and more pleasurably” than in the Bastille. In an environment in which he felt thoroughly cheerful, and in view of the very manageable society that did not unduly demand his attention, he was able throughout the day to give himself over to preoccupations of  his liking or to the most indolent idleness without hindrance or concerns. Rousseau says nothing more about the “preoccupations of my liking.” Instead, he assures the reader that the island “undoubtedly” offered beautiful circumstances “for a dreamer” who “knew how to nourish” himself “with pleasurable fancies in the middle of the most unpleasant objects.” How much more must “all the lovely objects” that surrounded him there and that he could assimilate to the productions of his imagination have encouraged his dreams. The rêveur replaces the contemplatif solitaire.65 Poetry and truth blur. “Fictions” and “realities” are no longer separated. Past and present are mixed together in the longing for the “collected and solitary life” he led during “that beautiful sojourn.” “Could it not occur again?” 64. In 1764, Rousseau speaks of “mes rêveries” in regard to his task as Législateur for Corsica,  just as in 1771, at the end of the Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, he will speak of his analysis of the situation and of his suggestions for reform as “mes rêveries”: Rousseau to George Keith, Earl Marischal, December 8, 1764, CC XXII, p. 184 and Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, p. 1041 (the next to last sentence of the writing). For the realia Rousseau draws on when working out his draft constitution for Corsica, cf. Rousseau to Matthieu Buttafoco, October 15, 1764, CC XXI, pp. 258–­60. 65. “Réveur” appears in the Rêveries only this one time in V, 17 (1048).

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The longing expressed in the wish that the life led earlier might be resur­rec­ ted, as in the renewed wish to return to the “beloved island” and be able to end his days there without ever leaving it again and without ever having to see there “any inhabitant of the continent” who would remind him of the “calamities of all kinds” they brought down upon him “for so many years,” this longing could mislead one to the assumption that la vie recueillie et solitaire was for Rousseau a thing of the past. Everything would date back “fifteen years.” Rousseau works against such an impression by using the possibilities of the “species” rêverie introduced shortly before and exploiting the scope of  imagination. His imagination allowed him, whether he was on the island or far from it, to cast off all earth-­bound gravity and raise himself to the “celestial intelligences”:66 “Delivered from all the earthly passions the tumult of social life engenders, my soul would frequently soar up above this atmosphere and commune in advance with the celestial intelligences whose number it hopes to augment in a short while.” The imagination seems to liberate him from the bonds of the body and thus from bondage to space and time. If men deny Rousseau the “sweet refuge” for which he longs, they still cannot keep him from transporting himself there every day “on the wings of imagination” and “from enjoying for a few hours the same joy” as if  he still lived on the island. Even more, if he can dream that he dreamt on the island, then he can also dream that he dreamt more beautifully than he did on the island. The rêverie that is the work of imagination in the present is able to surpass the imagined rêverie of the past: “to the allure of an abstract and monotonous reverie, I join charming images that make it more vivid.” The freedom that imagination opens up seems limitless, the longing consequently without reason and content. Rousseau goes so far as to explain that he now is “often more and even more pleasantly” in his “ecstasies” than at the time in which he actually was in them. The “misfortune” is that imagination “cools.” It belongs to becoming. It is subject to changes in time. It ages. Its independence from the body proves to be an illusion. “Alas, it is when one begins to leave one’s skin that it hinders one the most!” The last sentence of the Cinquième promenade is designed to constrain the expectation of universal liberation by imagination. Thus, it becomes the harbinger of the revision to which Rousseau subjects the conclusion of the Cinquième. Stated more exactly, the revision concerns the two most prominent positions Rousseau exposes on his way back to the mainland: The justification of supreme felicity by alien coercion, which denied him an active life, will be taken up again in the Sixième. And the adulation of  rêverie, which appears 66. For the “intelligences celestes” cf. Discours sur l’inégalité, Note IX, p. 320.

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essentially as imagination, will be examined in the Septième. Indeed, the conclusion of  the Cinquième demands a critique of  imagination as it unfolds in the triad of the Septième, Huitième, and Neuvième. The critique does not come unprepared, since the ambivalence of imagination counts among the prominent themes in Rousseau’s œuvre. Rousseau could have said with almost as much right about imagination what he said about amour-­propre: “we owe to it what is best and what is worst among men.”67 It can burst bonds and put on chains, help to reach the truth and cradle in illusions. It can surrender us to depen­ dence on êtres imaginaires, but no less inspire our efforts to overcome bondage to opinions and prejudices of the time. It can fortify Außersichsein as well as promote Beisichselbstsein. Imagination is able in itself to liberate neither from social passions nor from hope or fear. It can, on the contrary, serve the affects, be used as mediator, set to work as enforcer. As Rousseau maintains, looking back in the Huitième promenade, the affects of sociable man accompany him with their “sad retinue” in his solitude and occupy his imagination even in the refuge nature affords him. Rousseau’s imagination is populated by the “tumult of the world” as long as he has not freed himself from the “tumult of the world” by means of his reason, on the basis of his reflection, and by the force of his decision, as long as he has not consciously withdrawn from the “tumult of social life” of which he speaks at the end of the Cinquième. The poetic presentation of the fifth Rêverie conceals the presuppositions of the self-­sufficiency that supplies the basis for Rousseau’s confidence that even in the Bastille he would still be able “to dream pleasantly.” It passes over in silence that the imag­ ination riante is also subject to the “test of reflection.” The eighth Rêverie will provide a reminder of this. At the same time it will make plain with a clarity not achieved anywhere else why the Promeneur Solitaire’s Beisichselbstsein is a state of movement.68

67. Discours sur l’inégalité, Seconde partie, p. 256. For the effect of imagination cf. Discours sur l’inégalité, Première partie, pp. 108, 156; Seconde partie, p. 206; Note IX, p. 308; Émile IV, pp. 504–­5 and 651; Du contrat social I, 6, 10, p. 361; II, 7, 3, pp. 381–­82; II, 7, 10, p. 383; II, 12, 5, p. 394; IV, 8, 1, p. 460; IV, 8, 18, pp. 464–­65; IV, 8, 33, p. 468; Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques, pp. 815–­16. 68. VIII, 22 (1083); VIII, 2 (1075); VIII, 23 (1084).

Chapter 5

Politics

Persecution drives Rousseau to St. Peter’s Island. Persecution drives him off the island. Persecution circumscribes the episode he chooses in order to treat supreme felicity in the Rêveries. The Beisichselbstsein of the Promeneur Solitaire is encircled by politics. Politics surrounds his Beisichselbstsein on all sides in the medium of its depiction. And it challenges him to self-­examination. What does Außersichsein contribute to Beisichselbstsein? What significance, what rank does politics deserve to have in his life? Was it right or wrong to expose himself to the public, to speak to humanity, to step forward as a witness to the truth? These questions connect the two promenades that flank the Cinquième and explicitly serve self-­investigation or at least self-­clarification.1 The Quatrième makes the motto Vitam impendere vero, under which Rousseau placed his public existence, into the object of a discussion. It investigates in what way he conformed to the self-­proclaimed virtue. The Sixième gives the argument a radical turn. In it Rousseau considers political virtues, moral obligations, and social claims from the point of view of his own good, and in having recourse to his nature comes to the conclusion that he did not raise himself to political virtue, he is not built for obedience, and thus was never truly suited for civil society or political community.2 At first glance, the Cinquième promenade might be taken for an obstacle erratically placed between the two walks, to say nothing of its appearing as an inclusion belonging to another world. It seems to interrupt the course of the argument, where it does 1. IV, 1 (1024); VI, 1 (1050), VI, 3 (1051), VI, 6 (1052). 2. Cf. Discours sur l’inégalité, Seconde partie, p. 172 and commentary ad locum.

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not conceal it, since it permits the tight interconnection between the fourth and sixth walks to step into the background. In fact, the interruption becomes the turning point of the investigation. Beisichselbstsein, around which the Cinquième circles, introduces the shift of perspectives that occurs between the Quatrième and the Sixième and provides first and foremost the basis for the attitude the contemplatif solitaire adopts toward politics. The knowledge of Beisichselbstsein finds its conspicuous expression in Rousseau’s laughter, a laughter of self-­knowledge and of serenity, which is reserved for the second half of the Rêveries. Rousseau’s laughter at himself and others moves between a laughter of casual conviviality, the first laughter of the book—­immediately after stepping past the center and peak of the Cinquième—­and nature’s laughter, the last laughter of the Rêveries: No matter what men might believe or say about Rousseau, with whatever hostility they might encounter him, to whatever persecution they subject him, nature “always laughs” with him.3 Following the political presentation of his self-­sufficiency in the fifth walk, Rousseau turns in the sixth to the fundamental determination of his relationship to politics. An abrupt change of scenery brings us from “St. Peter’s Island in the middle of Lake Bienne” to a place with a name no less meaningful, the “Tollgate of Hell.” Rousseau’s reflection, which could hardly be more far-­ reaching, has its starting point in an everyday observation. During a walk he took “yesterday,” in order to do some botany along the Bièvre in the outlying district of Paris, it occurred to him that several times he had taken a detour in order to arrive at the “little river.”4 He had “machinalement” taken a detour around the Tollgate of Hell. As he reflected on his unconscious behavior in order to investigate its cause,5 he had to laugh, since he realized that he had avoided his encounter with a small boy who, day in and day out during the 3. V, 6 (1045) and IX, 20 (1095). In the Rêveries Rousseau uses the verb “rire” twelve times and the noun “le rire” twice. He himself laughs seven times, or nine times if one counts the shared laughter in V, 6 (“on rioit”) and the laughter of nature in IX, 20 (“la nature me rit toujours”). His own laughing starts in the Sixième, VI, 1 (1050), and reaches its point of greatest concentration in the Septième, VII, 1 (1060), VII, 26 (1071), VII, 28 (1072), VII, 28 (1073); in the Huitième he twice laughs about his persecutors, VIII, 7 (1076) and VIII, 23 (1084). The Neuvième mentions the laughter of others: IX, 2 (1086) noun; IX, 2 (1086) twice; IX, 10 (1090); IX, 17 (1093) noun. 4. VI, 1 (1050). Cf. V, 14 (1047) and Chapter IV, P. 125. 5. The opening sentence of the Sixième, which Rousseau later added to the text, contains the program of self-­investigation under whose banner the walk begins: “Nous n’avons guére de mouvement machinal dont nous ne pussions trouver la cause dans notre cœur, si nous savions bien l’y chercher.” VI, 1 (1050).

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summer, stayed in the vicinity of the Tollgate of Hell begging the passersby for alms. Rousseau had at first found the boy, who was “very nice, but lame,” to his liking. When he went by him, “this little fellow” would make a “little compliment,” and Rousseau would “very goodheartedly” give his “little offering,” which he still did for some time “with the same pleasure.” But as the pleasure gradually became a habit, it was transformed “into a kind of duty” that Rousseau soon felt to be onerous. Especially because every time he had to listen to the harangue of the supplicant that preceded the offering, a harangue “in which he never failed to call me Monsieur Rousseau many times, to show that he knew me well; but to the contrary, that taught me only that he knew me no more than those who had instructed him.” From then on he liked encountering him less, and finally he “machinalement” got into the habit of  making a detour most of the time in order to avoid the Tollgate of Hell.6 Just this, Rousseau says, he discovered the day before as he reflected upon his observation, and “a multitude of other observations” he remembered, occasioned by that one, convinced him that “the true and primary motives” of most of his actions were not as clear to him as he had imagined. Reason enough for Rousseau to consider himself more precisely, in closer detail, without reservation—­ and in this way to grant the reader glimpses earlier denied to him, to let him in on a clarification a good many might find shocking. Rousseau begins his attempt at self-­clarification cautiously. Once more he makes use of the justification from external compulsion, appealing to the “wretched lot” that hinders him from doing good, and continuing seamlessly with what he stated in the Cinquième about “human felicity” upon his descent from the peak. “I know and I feel that to do good is the truest happiness the human heart can savor; but it is a long time now since this happiness has been put out of my reach, and it is not in such a wretched lot as mine that one can hope to perform selectively and fruitfully a single really good action.” In the world of deceptive appearance in which his enemies seek to confine him, “an occasion for virtue” is only bait to lure him into the trap, virtue a means of exercising domination over him. The only good he is henceforth able to do remains for him, therefore, to “abstain from acting, out of fear of doing evil without wanting to and without knowing it.” This is a conclusion familiar to us since the Première promenade, in a prelude that corresponds without innovation to the political rhetoric of the book, with which in the meantime we have become well acquainted.7 Yet, Rousseau then goes back to an earlier 6. VI, 2 (1050–­51). 7. VI, 3 (1051); V, 15 (1047); I, 13 (1000). Cf. VII, 3 (1061).

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epoch of  his life and recalls “happier times,” in which, following the impulses of his heart, he could “sometimes make another heart content,” which, as he points out, filled him with extraordinary  joy: “I owe myself the honorable testimony that, whenever I was able to savor this pleasure, I found it sweeter than any other.” The inclination to make another content of one’s own free volition finds its fulfillment in the joy of seeing the other’s contentment as the fruit of one’s own action.8 Rousseau calls his inclination “lively, true, and pure,” immediately adding that also in those happier times he “often” felt the burden of his own good deeds “through the chain of duties” they brought with them. The pleasure was extinguished, and he found in the continuation of the actions that had initially provided him joy “nothing but an almost unbearable onerousness.” The analysis Rousseau offers of the time prior to his persecution agrees completely with the analysis occasioned by the observation from the previous day. La gêne, the onerousness, the constraint, the distress that is made prominent by Rousseau in his consideration of the encounter with the small boy sets the tone for the discussion of the Sixième and delineates the main lines Rousseau will pursue: first, the constraint that implies the transformation of a pleasure into a duty; then the distress that results from being familiar to others who do not know one and becoming the addressee of their claims. At the point where the consideration of the earlier epoch coincides with the introductory analysis, Rousseau’s choice of words gains a sharper edge.9 Out of the good deeds that sprang from his heart arose the “chains of successive obligations” he had not foreseen and whose “yoke” he could no longer shake off. Still more: the “free and voluntary first good deed” he rendered for someone became for this recipient “an unlimited right to all those he might need subsequently.” “That is how very delightful enjoyments were transformed into onerous subjections for me subsequently.”10 What is at issue for Rousseau in the opposition between pleasure and constraint, free good deed and duty or right, enjoyment and submission, is the preservation of his natural independence and his natural orientation. Thus, the question of his public existence necessarily moves to the center of attention. The “chains,” Rousseau continues, did not appear to him to be very burdensome as long as he “lived in obscurity, unknown to the public.” But this was no longer true as 8. See IX, 1 (1085) and IX, 17 (1093). 9. “ La gêne” in VI, 2 becomes “une gêne presque insupportable” in VI, 4. Of the eight uses of “gêne” in the Rêveries four of them occur in the Sixième: VI, 2 (1050); VI, 4 (1051); VI, 8 (1053); VI, 21 (1059). 10. VI, 4 (1051–­52).

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soon as his person became well-­known through his writings and, connected with them, achieved public visibility—­“a grave mistake without a doubt,” as Rousseau concedes or provocatively puts before us as a question. From then on he had the opportunity, through consideration of the course of his own life, “to understand that all natural inclinations, including beneficence itself, carried out or followed imprudently and indiscriminately in society, change their nature and frequently become as harmful as they were useful in their first direction.” It was only through Rousseau’s public existence founded upon his authorship that he was able to recognize fully the effects, the power, the necessities of sociability on his own body and soul. “Many cruel experiences” gradually changed his “original dispositions,” “or rather, eventually confined them within their genuine limits,” and taught him “to follow less blindly” his “inclination to do good.”11 After looking back at the time prior to his persecution and his fame, Rousseau arrives again in the present. He explains with full specificity and without restriction that he in no way regrets the cruel experiences—­experiences he had in the wake of the “grave mistake” of exposing himself politically with his œuvre—­since these experiences provided him “through reflection” with new insights in regard to his “self-­knowledge and into the true motives” for his conduct “in a thousand circumstances” in regard to which he “so often” suffered under “an illusion.” The explanation, which opens the development of the theme touched upon in the first five paragraphs of the Sixième promenade, stands in conspicuous contrast to the impression that the opening of the Troisième promenade awakened, when Rousseau spoke about experiences, insights, and illusions from Everyman’s perspective and seemed to give preference to ignorance over a sad knowledge. What was implicit in the progress of the promenade in which Rousseau treated the beginning of the philosophic life, the Sixième makes explicit.12 This holds not only for the constellation of experience, reflection, and self-­knowledge, which Rousseau defines clearly before he begins the development of the theme, but equally so for the prominent objects of the thematic development itself, above all for the attitude toward duty and obedience. Rousseau begins with duty. In light of his reflection, which has shown him that the transformation of a pleasure into a duty made even the “sweetest enjoyments” into a burden for him,13 he sees himself 11. VI, 5 (1052). 12. See III, 1 and 2 (1009–­10); consider III, 5 (1012–­13); III, 8–­10 (1015); III, 14 (1016–­17). 13. What difference the mode—­voluntariness or duty—­makes for him in the case of the same action, Rousseau underscores with an example in which he effortlessly calls to mind the range of

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compelled to distance himself from the opinion he had “for a long time” about his own virtue: “for there is no virtue at all in following our inclinations and in giving ourselves the pleasure of doing good when they lead us to do so. But virtue consists in overcoming them when duty commands, in order to do what duty prescribes, and that is what I have been less able to do than any man in the world.” The teacher of political and moral virtue says in clear language that, measured against his determination of virtue as fulfilling one’s duty regardless of one’s own inclinations and without regard for one’s own good, he was not virtuous.14 He was good, as we know from his œuvre; he was “humane, beneficent, and helpful” from inner drive, “even from passion,” as long as only his heart spoke; he would have been “the best and most merciful of men” if he had been the most powerful; to extinguish any desire in him for vengeance, it would have sufficed for him to be able to take vengeance. But he was not virtuous; if he found his duty and his heart in conflict, duty was “rarely” the victor, unless it merely demanded of him to refrain from an action; however, it was “always impossible” for him to act against his inclination. Rousseau was not virtuous because he was not able to obey. “Whether it be men, duty, or even necessity commanding, when my heart is silent, my will remains deaf, and I am unable to obey.” Whether they are “men” who command, whether “duty,” whether “necessity” of  law15 or of destiny16 commands, to obey an order means to subordinate oneself  to an alien will, it means to subject oneself to the rule of an authority. This Rousseau is unwilling to do. He can obey only so long as his “heart” consents, so long as he wants to obey, so long as he does not have to obey. The Promeneur Solitaire is in the precise sense not made for obedience. The clarification of his attitude toward the necessities of sociability is important enough to Rousseau that he returns once again, and now no longer bound to one epoch but rather spoken in the continuous present, to the opposition between voluntariness and constraint, pleasure and duty. Even if constraint is in harmony with desire, it is sufficient to destroy Rousseau’s desire

theologico-­political commands, laws, and prescriptions: “J’ai vû que pour bien faire avec plaisir, il falloit que  j’agisse librement, sans contrainte, et que pour m’ôter toute la douceur d’une bonne œuvre il suffisoit qu’elle devint un devoir pour moi. Dès lors le poids de l’obligation me fait un fardeau des plus douces jouissances et . . . j’eusse été chez les Turcs un mauvais mari à l’heure où le cri public les appelle à remplir les devoirs de leur état.” VI, 6 (1052). 14. Cf. inter multa alia Émile V, p. 817 and see Chapter I, Pp. 43–44 with Footnote 99. 15. Cf. Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne I, 5–­6, p. 955; III, 4, p. 961; XII, 12, p. 1019. 16. See I, 3 in fine (996) and II, 24–­25 (1010).

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and to invert it into an aversion. Rousseau’s inclination to do good exemplifies this in turn: “A purely free good deed is certainly an action I love to perform.” But as soon as the recipient of the good deed derives from the free gift a claim of right, in order to demand “under penalty of hate” the continuation of the good deed, and “makes it into a law” for Rousseau “to be his benefactor forever,” the onerousness begins and the pleasure of following inclination vanishes. If Rousseau gives in to such a demand, he does so out of weakness or shame. He no longer acts from inclination, but rather against his conscience. For if “the good work” keeps him dependent and weak, it is no longer good for Rousseau, and if it is not good for him, he cannot do it in good conscience. The third appearance of  “la gêne” in the Sixième promenade marks a new peak in the development of the theme: Conscience becomes an agency that keeps watch that Rousseau’s action agrees with his “heart,” that he is adequate to his nature.17 His conscience does not pronounce the valuations, claims, and commands of others. Conscience does not subject him to an alien will. It is not the agent of sociability. Its voice warns him to have in mind what he owes himself. The call of conscience directs all that Rousseau does toward his own good. Rousseau underlines this understanding when later—­under the protection of an appropriate distance from the determination of political and moral virtue, whose requirement he does not meet according to the testimony of the Sixième promenade—­he attributes to himself a “great virtue” according to the standard of his own good. To give himself over to “amusements” that delight him, he writes in the Septième promenade, is, given the situation in which he finds himself, “a great wisdom and even a great virtue: it is the means of not letting any germ of revenge or hatred spring up in my heart.” At first glance, Rousseau’s explanation seems to tolerate a moral interpretation. Yet the very next sentence dispels any possible doubt that the “great virtue” that consists in pursuing an “amusement” like “botany” must be measured not against a moral command or prohibition but solely against Rousseau’s own good: “I thus avenge myself of  my persecutors in my own way, I would not know how to punish them more 17. VI, 7–­8 (1052–­53). The statement about conscience that Rousseau places at the end of the eighth paragraph is formulated in such a way that most readers take it in the ordinary understanding of  “conscience” and can assimilate it to the concept they assume: “dès lors la gêne commence, et le plaisir s’évanouit. Ce que je fais alors quand je cede est foiblesse et mauvaise honte, mais la bonne volonté n’y est plus, et loin que je m’en applaudisse en moi-­même,  je me reproche en ma conscience de bien faire à contrecœur.” Its true meaning is uncovered only if the reader follows and thinks through step by step the first paragraphs of the Sixième, which culminate in the seemingly conventional statement. Consider the role played by “cœur” in the context of the first and second uses of  “gêne”: VI, 2 (1050); VI, 4 (1051).

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cruelly than to be happy in spite of them.”18 The principle of the grande vertu, to remain free of feelings of revenge and reaction that constrict one’s own existence, that diminish the soul, that leave one außer sich rather than bei sich, Rousseau concisely expressed in the Sixième: “in short, I love myself too much to be able to hate anyone whoever it may be.”19 The last step in Rousseau’s reflection on the necessities of sociability, however, is yet to come. “I know,” he starts afresh, after having highlighted the “onerousness” of the good deeds demanded of him, “that there is a kind of contract, and even the most sacred of all, between the benefactor and the beneficiary.” A kind of contract is the answer to the question of socialization, which the Sixième promenade treats on the basis of the elementary relationship that constitutes the gift. Through the good deed and its acceptance, the benefactor and the beneficiary form “a sort of society” that is more restricted than that kind of society “that unites men in general.” The society relating the benefactor and the one bound to him by his reception of the good deed is more restricted, more concrete, more real than the society encompassing all who bear a human face, since it is a particular society. It consists in individualized relations and, in contrast to the “société générale” of the human race, rests on obligations.20 Rousseau speaks, therefore, of a contract. For obligations are founded upon contract, regardless of whether one enters the contract explicitly or , as in the case of the society of the “bienfaiteur” and the “obligé,” tacitly, and notwithstanding the question whether the parties bound by the contract remain the sole judges of compliance or, as in the case of the political community, a power is instituted to oversee the fulfillment of the obligations imposed by the social order. Still, why does Rousseau call the contract that the benefactor enters into the most sacred of all contracts? In Du contrat social he called the social order “a sacred right, which provides the basis for all the others.” That the right from which all rights and duties of civil society derive is understood as “sacred” and is so designated by Rousseau does not mean that we would be directed to a divine source of right, superior to and withdrawn from human will. The “sacred right” Rousseau calls upon is instead based upon 18. VII, 3 (1061). 19. VI, 14 (1056). Cf. Rousseau’s statement about the “inhabitants of the ideal world” in Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, “le monde idéal” 6, p. 671: “Enfin s’ils ne sont pas plus vertueux qu’on ne l’est ici, du moins par cela seul qu’ils savent mieux s’aimer eux-­mêmes, ils sont moins malveillans pour autrui.” 20. Cf. Rousseau’s critique of the conception of the société générale in the chapter “De la société générale du genre humain” of the Geneva Manuscript of  Du contrat social I, 2, OCP III, pp. 281–­89.

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human conventions, which in turn go back to a first convention, the “contrat social.” It has its ultimate source of right in the will of the political subject, which is constituted by the “contrat social.” The right of the social order is “sanctified” solely by the “sanctity” of the social contract, a sanctity in which two moments stand out and deserve attention: First, the voluntariness of the conclusion of  the contract, by which the contracting individuals call into being a “common I,” to which each belongs henceforth “as an inseparable part of the whole.” Next, the belief  in the sanctity of  the contract, which the religion civile sanctions as one of its “positive dogmas” or “sentiments of sociability,” “without which it is not possible to be either a good citizen or a faithful subject.” For the sanctity of the contract the benefactor enters into, as for “la sainteté du Contract social,” it evidently holds that it points us to voluntariness and to faith as the essential determinations.21 When Rousseau calls the contract of the benefactor the “most sacred of all,” we may assume that here both determinations apply to the highest degree: The conclusion of the contract is voluntary to the highest degree, since it is—­at least as concerns the benefactor—­owing to inclination and not to necessity, whereas, on the contrary, the social contract is derived from the common need to avoid the danger of the war of all against all. And the inviolability of the contract rests to the highest degree on faith, since the contract is guaranteed only by the recognition or sentiment of obligation of the contracting individuals, for it neither establishes a higher power with coercive authority nor presupposes such a power, unless in the faith of the associates. The beneficiary tacitly obligates himself to gratitude toward the benefactor, while the latter tacitly obligates himself to maintain goodwill toward the beneficiary, to which he has attested of his own free will as long as the associate does not prove to be unworthy of this goodwill, and to favor him anew with the good deed already bestowed whenever he can and it is demanded of  him. Rousseau explains the obligation of the associates as “natural effects” of the relationship that has developed between them. But the decision whether such a relationship is developed, whether a contract comes into effect or not, lies with the benefactor. For if from the outset he refuses a “voluntary service” someone demands from him, “he gives to the one to whom he has refused it no right to complain about the refusal.” If the benefactor resists the inclination or the temptation to bestow a good deed, he assumes no obligation to grant further good deeds. If, on the other hand, he grants a favor and refuses repetition demanded by the beneficiary, he thus “frustrates a hope he has 21. Du contrat social I, 1, p. 352; I, 6, 9 and 10, p. 361; I, 7, 3, p. 363; IV, 8, 32 and 33, p. 468. Consider I, 7, 2, p. 362; II, 12, 2, p. 394 and III, 18, 9, p. 436 in connection with IV, 8, 1, p. 460.

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authorized him to conceive,” he contradicts an “expectation” he has nourished. “In this refusal, one feels an inexplicable injustice and greater harshness than in the other; but it is no less the effect of an independence the heart loves and does not renounce without effort.” Against the “natural effects” of a sociability founded upon good deed, favor, or gift, against the hope and expectation it awakens and raises to claims, Rousseau calls upon “the effect of an independence the heart loves.” He insists without wavering on the independence his nature demands. “A purely free good deed” corresponds to this independence, since it springs from his inclination. For the duties that arise from the gift, this no longer holds. It does not hold for the most voluntary “contract” of sociability conceivable. “When I pay a debt, it is a duty I fulfill; when I give a gift, it is a pleasure I give myself.” The author who informed us that what he does not do with pleasure he will soon no longer be able to do22 now adds that “the pleasure of fulfilling his duties” is among the pleasures that alone “the habit of virtue engenders.” The pleasure of  fulfilling his duties is in need of  lengthy training, of  constant practice and ultimately the habituation of  virtue. The con­ cept of  “éducation publique,” which Rousseau designed for the education of the citizen, rests on this insight.23 The pleasures “that come to us immediately from nature do not rise so high,” and only these Rousseau claimed for himself in his reflection. Even the most sacred contract can in the end not bind Rousseau’s independence, it cannot compel his natural inclination.24 In order to be able to follow his inclination without having to bear the yoke of duty, in order to do good without having to subject himself to the necessities of sociability, “the most sociable of men”25 would have to live invisibly or in obscurity. If he had remained libre, obscur, and isolé, for which he seemed made, Rousseau would have “done only good,” since in his heart he does “not have the seed of any harmful passion”: he would have “done only good,” since he has the reason to know the good and the judgment to realize it—­for to do only good does not at all mean only to want to do good. And if  he had remained invisible “like God,” he would have been beneficent like a God: universally, without turning to individuals and without expecting gratitude.26 22. “En toute chose imaginable, ce que je ne fais pas avec plaisir m’est bientot impossible à faire.” VI, 7 (1053). 23. Cf. Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne I, 5–­7, p. 955; II, 5 and 7, pp. 957, 958–­ 59; III, 1–­14, pp. 959–­66; IV, 1–­2 and 8, pp. 966–­67, 969–­70. 24. VI, 9 (1053–­54). 25. I, 1, 2 (995). 26. VI, 17–­18 (1057). Consider Du contrat social II, 6, 10 and II, 7, pp. 380–­84. See Chap­ ter II, Pp. 69–­71.

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Yet Rousseau lives visibly among men, his nature unknown.27 They know his name, which his œuvre has made generally familiar far beyond the societies at whose outskirts he takes his solitary walks. He is one of the most famous authors in Europe. Pictures, paintings, sculptures, engravings, drawings that depict his facial features, his shape, episodes from his life, have also given him a visual presence in his century like no one else. Correspondingly great are the hopes and expectations the benefactor encounters, the claims directed at the public person, the duties that accompany the philosopher’s gift, not to speak of the attacks by enemies and persecutions by authorities whom he challenged. The presentation of the conflict that the Sixième promenade discloses reaches its final peak when Rousseau, in the single passage in the Rêveries in which société civile is mentioned, contests his suitability for civil society and denies his capacity for sociability. For the fourth and last time, “la gêne” makes its mark: “The conclusion I can draw from all these reflections is that I have never truly been suited for civil society where everything is onerousness, obligation, and duty and that my independent natural temperament always made me incapable of the subjections necessary to anyone who wants to live among men.” 28 The tension between the Promeneur Solitaire and the political community can hardly be emphasized more sharply, calling to mind the famous explanation in Aristotle’s Politics that he who, either owing to his nature or based on his self-­sufficiency, is not capable or in need of political community is either a beast or a God.29 It is so important to him to emphasize the gulf between his independent nature and the constraint of society, so much depends for him on profiling the contrast between self-­sufficiency and the dependence of sociable man, who is ready to obey in order to be able to command, that Rousseau finally grants to his contemporaries that they would not have done wrong had they “dismissed” him “as a useless member of society.” Instead, their wrong consisted in proscribing him from society “as a pernicious member,” for, he admits, he had “done very little good,” but never during his life had the will to do something evil, and he doubts that any other man in the world “has really done less evil” than he. Rousseau apparently concedes and confesses too much. The conclusion of the Sixième promenade abstracts overtly from Rousseau’s œuvre. Only as long as his œuvre remains ignored can Rousseau pass for a “membre inutile” of  society, only if  this very offering is neglected, around 27. See VI, 2 and 20 (1050–­51, 1059). 28. VI, 21 (1059). 29. Aristotle, Politics 1253a1–­5 and 1253a26–­29; cf. 1267a10–­12. Consider Discours sur l’inégalité, Note X, p. 336.

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which everything revolves in the Sixième, can it be said that he has done “very little good.” For that the author takes his œuvre to be anything but “useless” he has once again put on record in the Rêveries, and precisely with a view to and express mention of the writing that earned him the most bitter persecution.30 At the end of the walk Rousseau speaks about himself as if he had never been a benefactor, never an author, never a public person. In “the result” of the reflections that determine the movement of the promenade, he imagines an existence outside of society. He imagines that he would not have given in to the inclination “to do good” and would have remained “libre, obscur, isolé.” He crosses out of  his life the “faute grave” of having exposed his very own person through his writings, of having posted his name.31 Or better still: he tentatively brackets his writings, in order thereby to pose the question all the more urgently that had to be addressed once the words “grave mistake” were spoken: Was the œuvre, as measured by Rousseau’s own good, in fact a mistake? The œuvre would no doubt have been a grave mistake if it had made Rousseau’s Beisichselbstsein impossible. It could also be called a mistake if in regard to his life Rousseau arrived at the judgment that the œuvre had more hindered than promoted the actualization of his nature. We have seen that the former is not true. Whether the latter is the case will occupy us still further. Let us begin with, as it seems, a more limited reading. Assuming that it was a mistake, could Rousseau have avoided it, i.e., known of it in advance? Did Rousseau perhaps lack prudence32 when he connected his writings with his person? Yet this connection is an integral part of the work that we know as his œuvre and that we mean when we speak about his œuvre. He had important reasons to come forward as citizen, as teacher of humanity, as witness to the truth, reasons that lead to the center of his enterprise, political and philosophic reasons that make the œuvre into a gift for diverse addressees.33 Does the mistake consist, then, in the orientation of the œuvre? In the ambitious aims Rousseau pursued with it? In the intention of  promoting the happiness of very diverse natures? In the free good deed with which the author subjected himself to constraints to which he should not have subjected himself ? With this we would be brought back to our initial question. Or did the mistake consist in the attitude toward the œuvre? Did the author permit himself to be misled by his teaching? Was he subject to the duty of a virtue for which he was not created? Did the witness 30. III, 17 (1018). See Chapter I, P. 26 and Chapter II, Pp. 60–­62. 31. VI, 5 (1052); VI, 18 (1057); VI, 21 (1059). 32. Cf. VI, 5, 3 (1052). 33. See Chapter I, Pp. 20–­27.

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to the truth owe Everyman the truth, at all times and in every respect, including the truth about his person and his writings? Before denying in the Sixième promenade that he has the capacity for virtue, obedience, sociability, Rousseau employs an entire walk of its own, the longest of all the Rêveries, to pursue the question whether he satisfied the duty to the truth and practiced moral or political virtue, to which he pledged himself publicly with his motto, Vitam impendere vero. The walk, which illuminates Rousseau’s attitude toward his œuvre in the light of politics and stands under the demand of justice, leads us back prior to the ascent and descent of the Cinquième promenade. The meditation of the Quatrième, like the reflection of the Sixième promenade, has its starting point in an inconspicuous event that gets its significance from Rousseau’s gaining from it a reason for questioning and for deepening the knowledge of  himself. While arranging some pamphlets that had been sent to him by their authors, Rousseau came across “one of the journals of Abbé Rosier,” whose title page bore the handwritten inscription: “Vitam vero impendenti, Rosier”—­“For the one who consecrates his life to the truth, Rosier.” The dedication, from whose wording nothing can be ascertained about the author’s intention, is understood by Rousseau as the attempt under the semblance of politeness “to state a cruel countertruth.” He interprets Rozier’s reference to his slogan “To consecrate one’s life to the truth” as an attack, although his interpretation is evidently supported solely by his knowledge or classification of the author of the dedication, whom he insists on calling “l’Abbé Rosier.”34 In order to apply for his own benefit “the teachings of the good Plutarch,” whose treatise Comment on pourra tirer utilité de ses ennemis he read on the same day, Rousseau is determined not to reject the Abbé’s attack out of hand or to let the matter rest, but rather to investigate what occasion he could have been given for the “sarcasm” of the dedication. He decides to 34. In the Quatrième Rousseau refers to François Rozier three times as “l’Abbé Rosier”: IV, 1 (1024); IV, 2 (1015); IV, 42 (1039). The proper name recedes in significance behind “Abbé.” The only other Promenade in which Rousseau speaks about abbés is the Sixième. There he mentions Abbé Palais and Abbé de Binis, old acquaintances, whom he accuses of having betrayed him, i.e., of having helped his enemies: VI, 10 (1055). In a letter François Rozier wrote to the Marquis Girardin shortly after Rousseau’s death, he revealed himself as an admirer of Rousseau: “Vous avés Eu La Triste consolation de fermer Les yeux de L’homme unique, du vrai philosophe dont je Regrete vivement La perte . . . Ma vénération pour cet homme qui meritoit d’etre mieux connu a toujours èté extrême Et Sa mort ajoute à Sa vivacité. J’ai son portrait en medaillon, dessiné et modelé pendant qu’il feuilletoit mon herbier . . .” CC XLI, p. 33. It is quite possible, not to say highly probable, that Rozier’s dedication was not intended as an attack, was free from irony, and was an expression of his admiration for Rousseau.

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examine his attitude toward lying on his walk the following day, in order to use his enemy’s attack for his self-­knowledge.35 In fact, the Abbé’s attack does not concern a deficiency of behavior or a minor detail in Rousseau’s life. It has to do with his public existence. It aims at his œuvre. Rousseau had introduced in the Lettre à d’Alembert the motto Vitam impendere vero,36 with which he later sealed the letters of his extensive correspondence and which he finally had printed in capital letters as the vignette on the title page of the Lettres écrites de la montagne, the last political and philosophic book that he published and that the Abbé could have had before him. The Abbé’s attack, therefore, gives Rousseau the opportunity not only to clarify whether “that proud motto,”37 which is not repeated in the Rêveries, is one he “deserves,” but also at the same time to reflect on his attitude toward the œuvre itself, for which the motto stands. “When I adopted my motto, I felt deserving of it, and I did not doubt I was worthy of it when, owing to the phrase of Abbé Rosier, I began to examine myself more seriously.”38 That the examination for which the Abbé’s “phrase” gave the impetus concerns the signet of his œuvre and does not touch the substance of his philosophic life, Rousseau makes clear before he presents the course of his investigation for his reader.39 As he began to examine himself seriously, he was “most surprised” by how many things he had passed off as true that rested on his invention, and he did this while he was proud of his love for the truth, since he had made the greatest sacrifice for it: “I was sacrificing my security, my interests, and myself to it with an impartiality of which I know no other example among human beings.”40 The “amour pour la vérité” Rousseau 35. IV, 1 (1024). 36. “Si mes Ecrits m’inspirent quelque fierté, c’est par la pureté d’intention qui les dicte; c’est par un desintéressement dont peu d’auteurs m’ont donné l’éxemple, et que fort peu voudront imiter. Jamais vüe particuliére ne souilla le desir d’être utile aux autres qui m’a mis la plume à la main, et j’ai presque toujours écrit contre mon propre intérest. Vitam impendere vero. Voila la devise que  j’ai choisie et dont  je me sens digne. Lecteurs,  je puis me tromper moi-­ même, mais non pas vous tromper volontairement; craignez mes erreurs et non ma mauvaise foi. L’amour du bien public est la seule passion qui me fait parler au public,  je sais alors m’oublier moi-­même . . . Sainte et pure vérité à qui j’ai consacré ma vie, non jamais mes passions ne souilleront le sincére amour que j’ai pour toi, l’intérest ni la crainte ne sauroient altérer l’hommage que j’aime à t’offrir, et ma plume ne te refusera jamais rien que ce qu’elle craint d’accorder à la vengeance!” Lettre à d’Alembert, p. 120n. 37. IV, 41 (1039). 38. IV, 3 (1025). 39. The introductory part of the Quatrième, paragraphs 1–­5, ends with the announcement: “voici de quelle maniére je parvins à me l’expliquer.” IV, 5 (1026). 40. IV, 4 (1025).

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speaks of here is not the love for the truth that lends wings to the philosophic life and maintains it in motion until the end, not the passion for knowledge that drives it to get to the heart of things. It is not to be mistaken for the “zeal for the truth” of which Rousseau spoke in the Troisième promenade, for the burning longing to know “the nature and the destination of my being,” for “the dominant interest in knowing the truth.”41 The love for the truth, which Rousseau says, in retrospect, he sacrificed his security, his interests, and his person to, is the virtue needed to proclaim the truth, not to discover the truth for oneself. It is the virtue he claims for himself with the motto. Vitam impendere vero issues a call to the witness, not to the investigator of truth, characterizes a public, not a private persona.42 Nowhere in the Rêveries are the statements from the Troisième promenade regarding the love of truth revised or relativized in the least. Entirely different is the claim to “love for the truth” that Rousseau calls to mind before beginning the investigation in the Quatrième in order immediately to call it into question. How was it possible that Rousseau pronounced so many things as true that he had invented, without being prevented by his “moral instinct,” without stirring his “conscience,” without his feeling “any true repentance”? 43 Rousseau begins his investigation of lying with a noteworthy setting of direction. He remembers having read a definition in a “book of philosophy” that to lie means to conceal a truth one ought to make manifest.44 From this it follows, he explains, not only that to conceal a truth one is not obligated to state 41. III, 5 (1012–­13); III, 22 (1021). Cf. III, 15 (1017). 42. In Juvenal’s Fourth Satire, from which Rousseau takes his motto, it is said about the conduct of Q. Vibius Crispus, three times consul, at the court of the tyrant Domitian: “Ille igitur nunquam direxit brachia contra / Torrentem, nec civis erat, qui libera posset / Verba animi proferre, et vitam impendere vero” (he thus never attempted to swim against the torrent and was also not a citizen who would freely make his opinions known and stake his life for the truth) (IV, 89–­91). Isaac Casaubon, the Geneva humanist, wrote in his famous edition of the Satires (Leiden, 1695, p. 98), in reference to verse 91: “Vero: Pour dire la vérité: haec enim, ait vetus verbum, odium parit.” The rendering “To consecrate one’s life to the truth” corresponds to Rousseau’s translation. See Footnote 36. 43. IV, 4–­5 (1025). 44. Rousseau marked the following passage in his copy of Claude-­Adrien Helvétius’s book De l’esprit, anonymously published in 1758: “M. de Fontenelle a défini le mensonge: Taire une vérité qu’on doit. Un homme sort du lit d’une femme, il en rencontre le mari: D’où venez-­vous? lui dit celui-­ci. Que lui répondre? lui doit-­on alors la vérité? Non, dit M. de Fontenelle, parce qu’alors la vérité n’est utile à personne” (p. 79 n. c). Two decades before the Quatrième promenade he noted regarding this passage: “plaisant éxemple! Comme si celui qui ne se fait pas un scrupule de coucher avec la femme d’autrui, s’en faisoit un de dire un mensonge! Il se peut

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does not mean to lie. It also follows from this, as he emphasizes, that he who in such a case states the opposite of the truth also does not lie. If the definition Rousseau draws upon serves as the basis for the discussion, the question whether a lie under certain circumstances is permitted or even required no longer needs to be treated as the question of the permitted, the required, or the noble lie. For if a lie in the ordinary sense were permitted or required, it would not be a lie in the sense of the definition. In substance, however, the question of the permissible or required lie is present in Rousseau’s investigation from the first to the last step, and is to be thought at every turn, with every branch in the argument. The course set in the prelude directs all attention to the truth that is owed. We first encounter the question of truth as the question of  justice. Rousseau formulates two initial questions: When and how does one owe others the truth, since one does not always owe it to them? And are there cases in which one can innocently deceive? “In books where the most austere morality costs the author nothing,” he remarks, the second question is answered negatively; “in society, where the morality of books is considered idle chatter impossible to put into practice,” the question in contrast is answered in the affirmative. Given the “mutually contradicting authorities,” Rousseau does what a philosopher does. He leaves behind the authorities, the opinion that the moral-­theological books pronounce as well as the opinion that shapes social practice, and tries to answer the question for himself according to his principles.45 To be able to answer the question when and how one owes others the truth, Rousseau introduces a distinction within the truth itself. He contrasts the universal and abstract truth, which is the most precious of all goods, with the particular and individual truth, which is in no way always a good: “General and abstract truth is the most precious of all goods. Without it, man is blind; it is the eye of reason. By it, man learns to direct himself, to be what he ought to be, to do what he ought to do, to head toward his true end. Particular and individual truth is not always a good; it is sometimes an evil, very often an indifferent thing.” Rousseau does not elaborate more closely the distinction between universal and particular truth, returning to it nowhere. We might, in order to contemplate the most important case, make the distinction clear to ourselves between philosophic and political truth, whereby philosophic truth would designate the genuinely common good, because it can be shared without loss to oneself, while the political truth would have to do with historical events and qu’un adultére soit obligé de mentir; mais l’homme de bien ne veut être ni menteur ni adultére” OCP IV, p. 1126. Cf. Chapter III, Pp. 92–93 with Footnote 57. 45. IV, 6–­7 (1026). Cf. Chapter III, Pp. 81–­84.

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facts, such as the origin of a tradition or founding of a political community. Yet if Rousseau never comes back to the distinction between “vérité générale et abstraite” and “vérité particuliére et individuelle,” that does not mean that it remains without consequences for the investigation. In making this distinction, he explained that not every truth is a good, that the truth sometimes can be an evil and very often a matter of indifference. In the ensuing discussion Rousseau treats only two of the three varieties: what is owed to others if the truth is a good, and what is owed to them if it is a matter of indifference. By contrast, the central question he passes over in silence, namely, what one owes others if the truth should turn out to be an evil. Insofar as knowledge of the truth is necessary to a man for his happiness, it is “a good that belongs to him.” He “has the right to demand it wherever he can find it.” One cannot withhold it from him “without committing the most iniquitous of all robberies,” since the truth “is one of those goods common to all and one whose sharing does not take from the one who gives it.” If this can be said of a bien commun, then it can be said of  philosophic truth. For it, Rousseau’s determinations and statements hold true in every respect, to the highest degree and without qualification. The philosophic truth is evidently a good that is owed to another, insofar as he needs it for his happiness, and concerning the How, we may thus assume that it should be communicated to him in a form that contributes to his happiness.46 Matters are different with truths that lack any “usefulness whatever”: “How could they be a good that is owed, since they are not even a good?” One can speak of  justice only where one can speak of goods. Rousseau explicitly leaves open whether in fact there are “truths so perfectly sterile” that they are useless from every point of view, for everything and for everyone. Nevertheless he bases his answer to the second of the two initial questions, namely, whether there are cases in which one can deceive without being guilty of an injustice, on the assumption that there are such truths. If the truth is indifferent, “he who deceives by saying the opposite of the truth is no more unjust than he who deceives by not declaring it.” The example Rousseau offers as a “useless truth” shows the weakness of the argument: “Whether I believe the sand at the bottom of the sea to be white or red matters no more to me than not knowing what color it is.” One does not need any special ingenuity to realize that circumstances can arise in which “useless truths” such as these become useful, and that there might be men for whom they are important. What Rousseau has in mind with his answer to the second question—­an answer he more intimates than expresses—­he gives us to understand by the contrasting rhetorical 46. IV, 8 (1026).

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question that concludes the discussion of this point: “How could one be unjust when one harms no one, since injustice consists only in the wrong done to someone else?”47 Justice presupposes a good that can be owed, injustice, consequently, a harm in relation to such a good. The mention of  harm reminds us of the case Rousseau mentioned in order to omit it from the discussion: the case of a truth that is an evil. What about the truth that would cause harm to another? And what about untruth that is useful? The orientation toward the good, which determines Rousseau’s treatment of the questions when and how one owes others the truth and whether one may mislead others, provides him “still no sure, practical rule.” Since the good for the various participants is no genuine common good but is for each a particular, consequently multifarious, not infrequently mutually antagonistic good, the question arises concerning right judgment. Advantages and disadvantages have to be weighed. Short-­term consequences and effects reaching far into the future have to be taken into consideration. It is necessary to recognize and classify interests. Prudence is required, knowledge and experience. “Very often, what is to one person’s advantage is to another person’s prejudice; particular interest is almost always opposed to public interest.” The orientation toward the good leads, and itself  belongs, to the political. The questions it poses, correctly understood, are political questions. In a series of seven questions that Rousseau poses in rapid succession, the middle three read as follows: “Must what is useful to an absent person be sacrificed to what is useful to the person to whom we are speaking? Must the truth that profits one person while harming another be concealed or stated? Must we weigh everything we say only on the scale of the public or only on that of distributive justice, and am I confident of understanding all the relationships of the matter well enough so as to apply the insights I possess only according to the rule of equity?” Questions that demand political judgment and in the end political decision. Standing in the center once again is the reference to the crux of every political discussion of truth and lying, now with the specification that the truth can be simulta­ neously a good and an evil, useful to one and harmful to another. Concerning the question “Must the truth that profits one person while harming another be concealed or stated?,” the reader might think of the famous case of the perpetrator who inquires after the whereabouts of a person whom he wants to make the victim of his crime, a case that certainly would not have perplexed Rousseau. But the reader can also recall the constellation, fundamental for 47. IV, 9–­11 (1026–­27). The eleventh is the central paragraph of the second part of the Quatrième, which comprises paragraphs 6–­16.

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Rousseau’s œuvre, that the frontispiece of the prize essay of 1750 presented in its three-­figured picture with Prometheus, the youth, and the satyr, and make vivid for himself the answer the author found in order to conceal the truth in cases in which it seemed advisable, and nevertheless to state it, so that it would be useful to him to whom it could be useful and not harm those whom it could harm.48 Remembering the rhetorical orientation of the œuvre, for which the Discours first showed the way, and which the Dialogues conclusively confirmed, helps to put into the correct light that the eminently political motto he now subjects to a late revision had been adopted by Rousseau with knowledge and awareness of the necessary distinctions. Against this background, we also understand why in his political reflection Rousseau does not come back to the one instance of the bien commun that we have called the philosophic truth. It is a common good insofar as he who shares it, as Rousseau emphasized, does not lose what he gives. But that means neither that he who shares it nor he with whom it is shared would have nothing to lose or would in no case have to fear any harm. The political questions of the paragraph we are considering concern the “vérité générale et abstraite” no less than the “vérité particuliére et individuelle.” The most important political question for the author, the question of his own good, is not forgotten in them. Rousseau formulates it as follows: Has he, as he examined what he owed to others, adequately examined what he owes himself ? If  he harms no one else by deception, does it follow that he does not harm himself, and is it sufficient never to be unjust in order always to be innocent? Rousseau questions in the language of justice beyond the limits of justice.49 How far beyond justice he has gone he makes clear when he formulates in the following paragraph the principle of  belief  in  justice and the uncon­ ditional duty to truth. All political questions would be irrelevant, every further discussion would be superfluous, if one were to abide by the moral command always to be truthful no matter what might follow or happen. “Justice itself is in the truth of things.” As soon as the answer of moralism is expressed, the lie returns: “the lie is always iniquity.” The lie always offends against equity, and regardless of what the consequences of truth are, one need not fear any accusation if one tells the truth, since one has then added nothing of one’s own, since one has preserved one’s innocence. Rousseau maintains against this view that the answer of political innocence does not settle the question. At issue is not “whether it would always be good to tell the truth, but whether we were always under an equal obligation to do so.” Thus, he blurs to the best of his ability 48. See Chapter I, Pp. 5–­7, 11–12 and Chapter II, Pp. 62–­63. 49. IV, 12 (1027–­28).

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the opposition he earlier brought sharply to the fore. For whether it would be good always to tell the truth is exactly what the whole discussion made its question, since it denied that the truth in every case and for all is good. The meaning of the moral objection again consisted precisely in the assertion that one is obligated always to tell the truth. In a second step, Rousseau appeals, in view of the return of the lie, to the definition that abandoned the ordinary understanding of lying. On the basis of that definition he assumed that one is not always equally obligated to the truth, and sought to distinguish the cases in which the truth is strictly owed from those in which one can be silent without injustice and can conceal without its being a lie: “for I have found that such cases really existed.” Thus, at the end of a serpentine political discussion we have arrived at a positive statement: There are cases in which the lie is justified and consequently is no lie.50 By far the most important lie of another that Rousseau treats in his œuvre while not speaking of a lie can be found in the seventh chapter of the second book of Du contrat social, which deals with the lawgiver. It is the philosophically most significant chapter of the Principes du droit politique, since it addresses the fundamental problem of legitimate order, how sovereign power that conforms to the principles of  political right can be connected with the nec­ essary insight or how the political will for the common good can be brought together with knowledge of this good. In the preceding chapter, “Of Law,” Rousseau’s elucidation of the principles culminates with the definition of the law as an act in which the general will of the sovereign gives expression to a general matter affecting the whole people, and he explains that every state in which the laws rule in the sense of his teaching he calls a republic. The legitimate order is republican. In such an order the legislative power resides with the people, and as Rousseau makes clear at the end of the second book,51 if it makes bad use of its sovereignty, according to the principles of political right, no one, whoever it might be, can prevent the sovereign from acting against its own interests. Yet the will of the people always wants the good for the people, for each wants the good for himself, and no one is willingly unjust to himself. That is the Platonic premise of the doctrine of the volonté générale. The politi­ 50. IV, 13–­14 (1028). In the Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont Rousseau determined the attitude to the truth he as an author adopted as follows: “Pour moi, j’ai promis de la dire en toute chose utile, autant qu’il seroit en moi” (p. 967, my emphasis; cf. p. 994 n.). 51. “un peuple est toujours le maitre de changer ses loix, mêmes les meilleures; car s’il lui plait de se faire mal à lui-­même, qui est-­ce qui a droit de l’en empêcher?” Du contract social; ou, Principes du droit politique II, 12, 2, p. 394.

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cal problem par excellence thus consists in orienting the will toward knowledge of the good, making it see, giving it eyes, helping it to judge, and bringing the enlightenment that the will needs in order to be able to achieve its goal: “How will a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wills because it rarely knows what is good for it, carry out an undertaking as great, as difficult as a system of legislation? By itself the people always wills the good, but by itself it does not always see it. The general will is always right, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened. It must be made to see objects as they are, sometimes as they should appear to it.” To characterize the problem with a vivid embodiment, Rousseau introduces the figure of the Législateur: “Hence arises the necessity of a lawgiver.” The principles of political right provide the basis for the necessity of a lawgiver, who himself has no support from them, a “higher intelligence” who has no constitutional place in the legitimate order.52 Rousseau shows the insuperable tension between politics and philosophy by nothing more clearly than by the extraconstitutional position he assigns to the Législateur in regard to the political community of the Contrat social, than by the outside and above in which he keeps and leaves wisdom.53 The Législateur neither has command over the means of coercion in order to enforce his insight with the sovereign, nor is able to communicate his wisdom to the people in the language appropriate to them and to convince them with reasons. “The wise who want to speak to the vulgar in their own language rather than in the language of the vulgar would not be understood by the vulgar.”54 Since for his task of “instituting” the people so that the volonté générale expresses itself and achieves its goal he can find support neither from la  force nor from le raisonnement alone, he must “of necessity have recourse to an authority of a different order,” to an authority that has the power to control without having to exert force and to persuade without convincing. “This is what has at all times forced 52. Du contrat social II, 6, 5–­7, 9 and 10, pp. 379–­80; II, 7, 1, p. 381. 53. In Du contrat social, sagesse is spoken about only four times. The only two applications of the term to individuals are found in II, 7, 10 and 11, pp. 383–­84 and concern the Législateur. The two other uses refer to the aristocratic institution of the Senate: III, 5, 5n. and III, 6, 13, pp. 407 and 412. Consider the use of “sage”—­“le sage instituteur” and “quelque homme sage”—­at the beginning and end, respectively, of the three chapters “Du peuple,” which treat the “matter” of the Législateur: II, 8, 1 and II, 10, 6, pp. 384 and 391. 54. “Or il y a mille sortes d’idées qu’il est impossible de traduire dans la langue du peuple. Les vues trop générales et les objets trop éloignés sont également hors de sa portée; chaque individu ne goûtant d’autre plan de gouvernement que celui qui se rapporte à son intérêt particulier, apperçoit difficilement les avantages qu’il doit retirer des privations continuelles qu’imposent les bonnes loix.” Du contrat social  II, 7, 9, p. 383.

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the fathers of nations to resort to the intervention of heaven and to honor the Gods with their own wisdom, so that peoples, subject to the laws of the State as to those of nature, and recognizing the same power in the formation of man and in that of the city, freely obey the yoke of public felicity, and bear it with docility.” The noble lie Rousseau speaks about without ever referring to it by name concerns not only the “fathers of nations,” the mythic lawgivers who appeal to the intervention of heaven and honor the Gods with their own wisdom in order to bestow the authority of divine revelation upon legislation; it concerns no less the belief that peoples could be subjected to the laws of the state just as they are subject to the laws of nature, and that in the formation of the political community the same power would be discerned as in the development of man, opinions people should take to be true so that they freely obey in accord with their will and their own good, and bear with docility “the yoke of public felicity.”55 “Sublime reason” dictates the lie. Since reason, which is needed for the institution and the maintenance of the well-­ordered political community, exceeds the capacity of  hommes vulgaires, the Législateur places its decisions, which are his own, “in the mouth of the immortals,” “in order to rally by divine authority those human prudence could not move.”56 As little as legislation is a work of the Gods, whom the lawgivers make speak for them,  just as little does its permanence rest on the miracles to which the lawgivers have recourse, for “empty tricks” might bring about a transitory bond, yet “only wisdom can make it durable.” The Législateur needs wisdom both in order to find belief as witness of the truth and to create a political institution that justifies that belief. “The great soul of the lawgiver is the true miracle, which must prove his mission.” The work of the Législateur has its basis in raison sublime, in sagesse, in the grande âme that distinguish him, and thus in his nature: it is the truth of the noble lie, if truth is proper to it. As examples of the founding fathers who attributed their own wisdom to the Gods, Rousseau draws upon neither Minos nor Numa. Instead he speaks solely of the law of  Judaism and the law of Islam, which each appeal to the one God of faith in revelation as their author 55. Du contrat social II, 7, 10, p. 383. 56. Rousseau adds a footnote to the statement in II, 7, 11, p. 384, which cites Machiavelli’s Discorsi I, 11. Chapter II, 7 contains three footnotes. The first praises the legislation of Lycurgus, which caused the “happiness of the Spartans,” p. 381. The second speaks about the credit Calvin earned as political founder as distinct from his role as theologian: “Quelque révolution que le tems puisse amener dans notre culte, tant que l’amour de la patrie et de la liberté ne sera pas éteint parmi nous,  jamais la mémoire de ce grand homme ne cessera d’y être en benediction,” p. 382, my emphasis. While in the earlier footnotes Rousseau speaks about Lycurgus and Calvin, in the third footnote he lets Machiavelli speak for himself.

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and of which Rousseau says that they “still bear witness today to the great men who dictated them.”57 In sharp separation from the philosophes, who carried out their struggle against revealed religions in the name of enlightenment and under the banner of the treatise De tribus impostoribus, which became a slogan, he adds that where “prideful philosophy or blind party spirit” sees only imposters who were lucky, the true political theorist “admires the great and powerful genius who animates and dominates the enduring institutions.” With that we return to the Quatrième promenade, in the center of which Rousseau undertakes a far-­reaching distinction: whoever praises or blames contrary to the truth lies, insofar as what he praises or blames is a “real person.” If, on the contrary, it is an “imaginary being,” he can say whatever he likes without lying, assuming that he does not “lie against the moral truth, which is a hundred times more worthy of respect than that of facts.”58 The distinction stands in the middle of the third part of the Quatrième, which concerns fictions. Rousseau first states the definition: “To lie without profit or prejudice to ourselves or another is not to lie; it is not a lie; it is a fiction.”59 It seems to make the discussion of fiction in political respects superfluous. For a definition according to which the lie that causes profit or harm neither to oneself nor to another should be called fiction would declare from the outset that a fiction is morally or politically a matter of  indifference. Things are different if the definition, which will prove to be in need of revision in the course of the discussion, should lead us right at the beginning to dissociate the elements of the definition, and to pose the question of what occurs as soon as one excludes, for example, profit for oneself but not for the other, or harm to the other but not to oneself.60 In fact, Rousseau begins his discussion with fictions that have a moral purpose and are called apologues or fables: they wrap “useful truths” in 57. Du contrat social II, 7, 11, pp. 383–­84. Rousseau mentions Numa in IV, 4n., and he gives him a prominent treatment in the Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne II, 6, pp. 957–­ 58. In that writing, within the triad of  Moses, Lycurgus, and Numa, “le vrai fondateur de Rome” represents the exemplary religious lawgiver. In his reference to Numa Rousseau follows Machiavelli’s presentation in Chapter I, 11 of the Discorsi, the chapter from which he cites verbatim in Du contrat social II, 7, 11n. (Compare for Numa nevertheless Discorsi I, 19.) For Moses, who makes his single appearance by name in Du contrat social IV, 8, 4, p. 461, consider Considérations II, 6, 2–­4, pp. 956–­57. Other than Moses, who is not referred to by name in Du contrat social II, 7, “l’enfant d’Ismaïl” makes an explicit appearance. For this mention in II, 7, 11, see the judgment about Mohammed in IV, 8, 11, pp. 462–­63. 58. IV, 21 (1030–­31). 59. IV, 16 (1029). The third part comprises paragraphs 17–­24. 60. Consider for this IV, 20 (1030) as well as IV, 23 (1031) and IV, 24 (1032).

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appealing and pleasing forms that undoubtedly can redound to the benefit of others. The lie of the fable in the world of facts is nothing other than “the cloak of truth,” and “he who merely sets forth a fable as a fable in no way lies.” Rousseau arrives at the relevant case with fictions that are not set forth as fictions but rather pass themselves off as historical facts. Rousseau adduces as an example Le Temple de Gnide, whose author presented his work as the translation of a Greek manuscript and incorporated into the fiction the story of the alleged discovery of the ancient text as corroboration of the truth of the fiction. “If that is not a very positive lie, then can someone tell me what lying is?”61 Rousseau’s rhetorical question seems not only to abandon the distinction between lie and fiction, which is the basis for the third part, but also to pass judgment on the author of the Nouvelle Héloïse and the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard. For the case Rousseau treats using the example of  Le Temple de Gnide is essentially his own. He passed himself off to his female and male readers as having merely edited the letters of two lovers from a town at the foot of the Alps, and with the profession of faith of the Vicar as having transcribed the writing of another, which contained the teachings of a man who “was worth more” than he.62 Yet Rousseau did not introduce the distinction between lie and fiction in order to forget it right away or to leave it alone. The question, what would deserve to be called a lie if not the story the modern author invented about the ancient manuscript, gives Rousseau the opportunity to speak about the distinctions that “every man of good faith” must keep in mind, for instance, the distinction between a “learned public” and “the hordes of simple, credulous readers,” who are actually deceived by the fictitious history of the manuscript, since it was presented to them by a serious author with an appearance of  “good faith,” and who thus “fearlessly drank from a goblet of ancient form the poison of which they would at least have been suspicious had it been presented to them in a modern vessel.”63 Fiction becomes the garb of truth when it serves a moral purpose and creates benefit. It remains a lie when it becomes the vessel of a poison for the virtue of the hommes vulgaires and causes harm. Rousseau leaves no doubt about the meaning of his discussion of fiction. In the middle of the third part he draws the “exact line” that separates the lie from fiction, 61. IV, 18 (1029–­30). 62. “Lecteurs, ne craignez pas de moi des précautions indignes d’un ami de la vérité: je n’oublierai jamais ma devise; mais il m’est trop permis de me défier de mes jugemens. Au lieu de vous dire ici de mon chef ce que je pense, je vous dirai ce que pensoit un homme qui valoit mieux que moi. Je garantis la vérité des faits qui vont être raportés. Ils sont réellement arrivés à l’auteur du papier que je vais transcrire.” Émile IV, p. 558; cf. p. 635. 63. Cf. the two uses of  “de bonne foi” in IV, 19 and 20 (1030) with III, 17 (1018).

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and thereby supersedes his earlier definition: “Everything that, contrary to truth, hurts justice in any way whatsoever is a lie.” “But everything that, contrary to truth, in no way concerns justice is only fiction.”64 The real disputed question, which at first glance seems to be omitted once more, thus receives an answer. For everything that, contrary to truth, either does not hurt justice or promotes justice does not belong to the lie, according to this exact definition of the exclusive line of demarcation. With appropriate distance Rousseau will come back to his example in order at the end of the third part to record the gain made from the distinction between lie and fiction for the evaluation of Montesquieu’s writing and thus of his own writings, to the extent that they make use of untruth: “If Le Temple de Gnide is a useful work, the story about the Greek manuscript is an entirely innocent fiction; it is a lie very worthy of punishment if the work is dangerous.”65 Yet before Rousseau applies the distinction between lie and fiction in such a way and makes visible its meaning for his own case, he introduces a fictitious figure who embodies the demand for truthfulness commanded by morality. He outlines an homme vrai who, in contrast to what one is used to calling homme vrai “in the world,” would deserve to be called true or truthful in the strict sense. In matters “that are completely indifferent,” the truth does not worry the truthful one. He has no scruples about “amusing” the people around him “with contrived facts,” if no unjust judgment results against anyone living or dead. It is quite different with a speech from which “profit or hurt, esteem or scorn, praise or blame contrary to justice and truth” arises. Such a lie will never approach “his heart, his mouth, or his pen.” He is vrai insofar as he seeks to deceive no one, insofar as he remains no less faithful to the truth that indicts him than to the truth that honors him, and insofar as he never deceives to gain an advantage for himself or to harm his enemy. He is even truthful, he is indeed precisely truthful, when, “contrary to his interest,” he must be truthful. The amour de la vérité that determines 64. IV, 20 (1030). Rousseau adds, “et  j’avoue que quiconque se reproche une pure fiction comme un mensonge a la conscience plus délicate que moi,” with which he stated for the record, as casually as possible, that conscience might speak one way to him and another way to others or that it implies a different standard for different men. See in light of IV, 20, IV, 5 (1025), IV, 15 (1028), and IV, 31 (1035), as well as IV, 33 (1036). Consider Pp. 141–­42. 65. IV, 24 (1032). Rousseau mentions Le Temple de Gnide in the Quatrième twice, without naming the author. He thus respects the anonymity the author wanted to protect in order to gain an advantage from it. Immediately before the formulation of the “exact line” between lie and fiction Rousseau says: “Donner l’avantage à qui ne doit pas l’avoir c’est troubler l’ordre et la justice, attribuer faussement à soi-­même ou à autrui un acte d’où peut résulter louange ou blame, inculpation ou disculpation, c’est faire une chose injuste” IV, 20 (1030), my emphasis.

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the homme vrai is entirely the emanation of  his amour de la justice. Truth is for him subordinate to justice. It becomes the “sacred truth, which his heart adores.” And the sanctified truth elevated to the synonym for  justice demands not only adoration, but also sacrifice. In fact, the homme vrai, whom Rousseau imagines for the majority of his readers, distinguishes himself because, in contrast to the one who is called homme vrai by the world and who adheres faithfully “to every truth that costs him nothing,” he “never serves it so faithfully as when it is necessary to sacrifice himself for it.” Rousseau’s just man is compensated for his sacrifice by his self-­esteem. Or more correctly stated: Self-­ esteem, the self-­admiration for an action that is adequate to the requirements of moral virtue and earns the approval of his conscience, appears to him as the good he can least do without and for which he is willing to offer any sacrifice.66 In the fourth part of the Quatrième Rousseau puts the example to the test. In a biographical retrospective, he sheds light on his attitude toward lying, beginning with the “criminal lie whose victim was poor Marion,” a lie he told, according to the account in the Confessions, when, still almost a child, he accused a young cook in the Turin household of Madame de Vercellis of having given him a ribbon of the deceased mistress, which he had stolen.67 There is already a reference to this lie at the beginning of the consideration of the first part.68 Here as well as there the story, to which only he attests, serves Rousseau’s goal of making credible to male and female readers that the “great crime” of his youth immunized him for the rest of his life against “that vice” and, as he now adds, not only against “every lie of that kind,” but against all lies that in any way whatsoever “could affect another person’s interests and reputation.”69 Rousseau affirms that he has forbidden himself both the mensonge nuisible and the mensonge officieux, the lie that harms someone as well as the lie that works to someone’s advantage and favors him contrary to justice. The mensonge utile and the mensonge pieux, the useful lie and the pious lie, go unmentioned. Rousseau asserts in the first part of the retrospective, whose subject is lies in conversation and in immediate sociable dealings, that he has never lied with premeditation or to his own advantage, but often out of shame. He speaks of lies to which he had recourse “in matters that were indifferent” 66. IV, 22–­24 (1031–­32). 67. Les Confessions II, pp. 84–­87. 68. “la prémiére idée qui me vint en commençant à me recueillir fut celle d’un mensonge affreux fait dans ma prémiére jeunesse, dont le souvenir m’a troublé toute ma vie . . .” IV, 2 (1024). (What is written in the OCP is at odds with the wording of the manuscript: “dans la prémiére jeunesse.”) 69. IV, 3 (1025) and IV, 25 (1032).

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or in matters that concerned at most himself alone in order to extricate himself from an embarrassment; of fictions to which he resorted to be able to carry on a conversation; of fables he invented in order not to be left mute. The only concrete example Rousseau offers, his reply to an indiscreet question of a young lady whether he had had children, presents us, however, with “a very positive lie,” assuming that the case causing a sensation to which Rousseau confessed in the Confessions corresponded to the truth. Rousseau explains his denial, which was dictated by neither his judgment nor his will, as “the mechanical effect” of his embarrassment and the lies in conversation altogether as effects of  his shame and timidity. At the outset of the Quatrième he also attributed the “dreadful lie” concerning Marion to his false shame and timid natural temperament—­to a weakness that surely is accessible to Everyman and that just as surely must be remote from the homme vrai.70 After the lies in speech, the second part of the retrospective treats written lies. Rousseau limits himself to the Confessions, which he writes about entirely from the post-­œuvre perspective, as if the book were already published and he could no longer change, correct, or add anything to it.71 As a prelude Rousseau explains that he never felt his “natural aversion to lying” more distinctly than when he was writing his confessions. Far from having kept silent about or concealing anything burdensome, he was inclined “to lie in the contrary sense by accusing myself with too much severity.” Rousseau was simultaneously his strictest accuser and his strictest judge. He had no tribunal to fear, no one’s judgment to dread: “my conscience assures me that one day I will be judged less severely than I have judged myself.”72 Rousseau confirms the claim he made in the Confessions, that in this writing he had driven sincerity, frankness, and truthfulness further than any other man had ever done. But unlike his homme vrai, Rousseau did not have to sacrifice either himself or his interest to the truth: “feeling that the good surpassed the evil, it was in my interest to say everything and I said everything.” He who has subjected himself to the strictest examination, who knows his own nature, and who knows his goodness can afford to be truthful. If he wants to convince others of his truthfulness, however, he must be circumspect in doing so. And if  he sets out to “exhibit himself ” to readers who are unknown to him as “a man in the whole truth of nature,” he certainly has 70. IV, 26–­30 (1033–­35) and IV, 2 (1024–­25). 71. IV, 31–­38 (1035–­38). The references to “poor Marion” in the first half of the fourth part also of course presuppose knowledge of the story told in the Confessions. 72. IV, 31 (1035). Compare with what conscience assures Rousseau IV, 1 in fine (1024) and IV, 15 in fine (1028). See Chapter II, P. 66.

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reason to deliberate well about what clothing to choose for the truth. Le meilleur des hommes has to appear less good than he is in order to be believed. He is not allowed to say everything he would have said about himself and everything there would be to say about him. For the sake of moral truth, he can afford only a truthfulness that pays tribute to political prudence. That in the Confessions Rousseau has in no way said everything is, therefore, the theme of the second part of his retrospective. He admits that he sometimes said more, not concerning the facts, but regarding the circumstances, “and this kind of lie was the effect of a delirious imagination rather than an act of will.” He speaks of gaps of memory in old age needing to be filled in and of occasional embellishments. He concedes that sometimes, when depicting himself in profile, he involuntarily hid his deformed side—­a practice for which in another place he reproached Montaigne. Still, all these limitations contribute only to highlighting the truth of the self-­portrait with regard to its substance73 and to preparing the decisive message: In the Confessions he seldom presented to its fullest extent the good there was to tell about himself and was often completely silent, whereas with respect to what was bad, he told everything about himself and where possible even more, in order to avoid the appearance of providing his own eulogy. Rousseau supports his disclosure by the vividness of two episodes he suppressed in the Confessions because they would have cast him in too favorable a light. Both lead us back to the time of childhood and have to do with bodily pains he suffered due to the carelessness of other children. On both occasions he kept silent about the course of events leading up to the incident and about those who caused his wounds. The first of the two stories, which forms the center of  the part about the Confessions, is of  particular significance, since it not only documents that in the Confessions Rousseau kept silent about evidence of his good character, but also contains the last lie he describes in the Quatrième: A playmate who crushed Jean-­Jacques’s two fingers by deliberately turning a printing cylinder implored him not to tell on him, and Rousseau subsequently told everyone that a large stone fell on his hand and smashed his fingernails. Evidently, the case of a mensonge officieux, which Rousseau twice before presented as incompatible with justice74 although a good deed, for which he cred­ 73. “Je prêtois quelquefois à la vérité des charmes étrangers, mais jamais je n’ai mis le mensonge à la place pour pallier mes vices ou pour m’arroger des vertus” IV, 32 (1035–­36). 74. “Ce qu’on appelle mensonges officieux sont de vrais mensonges, parce qu’en imposer à l’avantage soit d’autrui soit de soi-­même n’est pas moins injuste que d’en imposer à son detriment” IV, 21 (1030). “en regardant l’un et l’autre [le mensonge nuisible et le mensonge officieux] comme coupable[s] je me les suis interdits tous les deux” IV, 25 (1032).

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its himself even decades later and which he praises by citing two lines from a poet’s song, the only words of a poet that appear in the Rêveries: Magnanimous lie! When is the truth So beautiful that it would be preferred to thee?75

Along with the two stories he adds in the Quatrième, Rousseau suppressed “a hundred others of a similar nature.”76 If he gains an advantage thereby, this does not mean that it is not owed to him.77 If he could help the “best of men” to achieve credibility only by making him appear less good than he was, his art works to the advantage of his readers.78 If the Confessions should prove to be a useful work, the lies it contains are praiseworthy fictions. As the yield of the promenade dealing with lying and his reflection on justice, Rousseau establishes that his public commitment to truthfulness, to which he attested with the adoption of his motto, is founded more on his sense of uprightness and equity than on the reality of things, and that in practice he followed the dictates of his conscience more than abstract concepts of the true and the false. Whatever “fables” he made up—­for he “very rarely lied”—­he inflicted no harm on anyone and awarded himself no more advantage than was due him. But did he acknowledge what was due him? Did he adequately question and consider—­here is the onset of the countermovement in the fifth and final part of the Quatrième—­what he owed to himself ?79 His public existence was just to others. Was it good for him? “If it is necessary to be just to others, it is necessary to be true to oneself.”80 To be true to oneself in our case means to lead a life that does justice to one’s own claims with respect to providing 75. “Magnanima menzogna! or quando è il vero / Si bello che si possa a te preporre?” Torquato Tasso, La Gierusalemme liberate II, 22. Sophronia confesses to a robbery she has not committed in order to save the Christians. Rousseau left out the two lines in his translation, Olinde et Sophronie tiré du Tasse (OCP V, p. 1290), which he completed around the time he wrote the Dialogues. “Il s’applique à lui-­même les vers qui célèbrent le courage de Sophronie: il a donc été, à l’occasion, une Sophronie. L’étourderie de Rousseau oubliant de traduire deux vers que pourtant il admirait signifie (pourrait-­on croire) qu’ils appartenaient désormais moins au texte du Tasse qu’à celui de Rousseau.” Jean Starobinski, “L’imitation du Tasse,” Annales Jean-­Jacques Rousseau 40 (1992): 274. 76. IV, 38 (1038). 77. Cf. Footnote 65 and IV, 39 (1038). 78. See Chapter I, P. 26. 79. Cf. IV, 12 (1028) and P. 153. 80. IV, 40 (1038). The fifth part comprises paragraphs 39–­42.

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reasons and to consistency and so allows for unanimity with oneself.81 Concessions to the presumed requirements of sociability for amusing conversation, or letting oneself engage in the seductive possibilities of poetry when doing serious writing, come into focus as sources of self-­deviation or self-­transgression. In the end all of Rousseau’s considerations return to the question whether it was right to choose Vitam impendere vero as his motto. Was it good for him to present himself as the witness to truth? His motto obligated him more than any other man to stand up for the truth. The proclamation of virtue imposed on him the compulsion of political virtue. It was tantamount to binding himself. “I should have had the courage and the strength to be truthful always, on every occasion, and never to let fictions or fables come out of a mouth and a pen that had been specifically consecrated to the truth. That, indeed, is what I should have said to myself upon adopting this proud motto and should always have repeated to myself as long as I dared to keep it.” Rousseau showed courage when for him everything was at stake: he deployed all the forces available to him and called upon all the virtues he needed in order to provide the ground for his life as a philosophic life.82 The courage his motto demanded from him is another matter. Now, facing the choice either to live up to the demands of moral virtue, which the motto proclaimed, or to give up the motto, he decides to abandon the motto. Solon’s maxim, with which he prefaced the Troisième in order to deny it at the end, is affirmed at the end of the Quatrième:83 “it is never too late to learn, even from one’s enemies, to be wise, true, modest, and to presume less of oneself.” Now, as the œuvre is complete and he has fulfilled his task, Rousseau can afford to be wise, in unanimity with himself, and modest.84 What the end of the fourth walk announces is made true in the sixth, which in the narrative time of the Rêveries is linked seamlessly to the fourth.85 Rousseau will be vrai according to the standard of his nature and no longer pretend to appear vrai with respect to moral virtue. He no longer raises a claim to virtue in the conventional sense of the term, he denies his suitability for sociability, contests his capacity for obedience. He does not once again step forward as witness to truth, as teacher of mankind, as citizen. The Sixième promenade, 81. See Chapter II, P. 51. 82. See Chapter II, Pp. 53–­55 and consider there Footnote 17. 83. Solon’s dictum, “I continue to learn while growing old,” which brackets the third and fourth walks, proves to be false as regards the choice and the grounding of the right way of life. It is vindicated as regards the learning and the deepening of self-­knowledge in this way of life. 84. IV, 41 and 42 (1038–­39). See Chapter I, P. 45. 85. See Chapter IV, Pp. 98–99.

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whose overarching movement leads from nous, with which it began, to moi, with which it ends, provides the vantage point from which Rousseau now considers his public persona and everything it demanded from him. It is the one-­ sided, not for that reason any less illuminating perspective of the bienfaiteur, who approaches society as it were from the outside and for the sake of his œuvre moves away from it, remaining libre, obscure, isolé. Although it is later supplemented by other points of view and thus modified, the perspective of the benefactor makes clear that Rousseau does not face society as a debtor. This perspective thus expresses the indelible insight into his fundamental independence, which is grounded in his nature.86 It is an insight that leads into the center of his thinking and that puts his œuvre into perspective from the very beginning.87 A statement like the one with which Rousseau at the end of the Sixième formulates the result of  his reflection, that he has “never truly been suited for société civile,” is for good reason not found within the œuvre. Not in so many words. But Rousseau never tired of  pointing to the tension that necessarily exists between société civile and nature. For this we do not need to draw on the most philosophic book of the œuvre, the Discours sur l’inégalité. In our context, it is enough to remind ourselves of the sentence from Du contrat social: “Everything that is not in nature has its inconveniences, and société civile more than all the rest.”88 Even in the book in which he appears as the advocate of the citizen and pleads for a legitimate contract, Rousseau speaks, as we have seen in the consideration of Chapter II, 7, about the “yoke of public felicity” peoples have to bear with docility, and, as everyone knows, he explains in the 86. “The independence of the philosopher, as far as he is a philosopher, is only one aspect of a more fundamental independence, which was recognized equally by those who spoke of a presocial ‘state of nature’ and by those who emphasized so strongly the fact that ‘man is generated by man and the sun,’ not by society.” Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Social Research 8:4 (November 1941): 503 n. 21. Cf. Footnote 29. 87. “S’il faut permettre à quelques hommes de se livrer à l’étude des Sciences et des Arts, ce n’est qu’à ceux qui se sentiront la force de marcher seuls sur leurs traces, et de les devancer: C’est à ce petit nombre qu’il appartient d’élever des monumens à la gloire de l’esprit humain.” Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 29. See Chapter I, P. 7. 88. “Quoi! la liberté ne se maintient qu’à l’appui de la servitude? Peut-­être. Les deux excès se touchent. Tout ce qui n’est point dans la nature a ses inconvéniens, et la société civile plus que tout le reste. Il y a de telles positions malheureuses où l’on ne peut conserver sa liberté qu’aux dépends de celle d’autrui, et où le Citoyen ne peut être parfaitement libre que l’esclave ne soit extrêmement esclave. Telle étoit la position de Sparte. Pour vous, peuples modernes, vous n’avez point d’esclaves, mais vous l’êtes; vous payez leur liberté de la votre. Vous avez beau vanter cette préférence; j’y trouve plus de lâcheté que d’humanité.” Du contrat social III, 15, 10, p. 431. Cf. Lettres écrites de la montagne IX, 45–­47, p. 881.

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opening to Chapter I, 1, that man who is born free “is everywhere in chains,” whereby Rousseau holds out the prospect not of freeing the citizen from these chains, but rather solely and certainly of being able to show him how the civil condition, the condition in chains, “can be made legitimate.”89 What such a legitimating would require and how far the well-­ordered political community would be from resolving the tension between société civile and nature, Rousseau again most clearly expressed in the chapter “Of the Lawgiver” in the Contrat social: “Anyone who dares to institute a people must feel capable of, so to speak, changing human nature; of transforming each individual who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole into a part of a larger whole from which this individual, as it were, receives his life and his being; of weakening man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature. In a word, he must take from man his own forces, in order to give him forces which are foreign to him and of which he cannot make use without the help of others.”90 At the end of  his life Rousseau confesses that he was constitutionally incapable of giving up an integral and natural for a partial and moral existence. He was not suited to be absorbed in identification with the political community. He was not made to achieve felicity in the political life. Although in the course of its argument as well as in its outcome the Sixième promenade accords with the œuvre, Rousseau makes a subtle correction in its final sentence. When he says about his contemporaries that the wrong they have done to him was not “to dismiss me from society as a useless member, but to proscribe me from it as a pernicious member,” he silently refers to a famous sentence from his prize essay of 1750: “In politics as in morals, not to do good is a great evil, and every useless citizen may be looked upon as a pernicious man.” In contrast to the author who stood at the beginning of his œuvre, who wanted to win public attention for politics and morality and spoke from the perspective of the citizen,91 the Promeneur Solitaire rejects the identification of the useless citizen with the pernicious man. If Rousseau had remained libre, obscur, isolé, and spent all of  his life existing at the periphery of society without giving it his œuvre, he would have been a citoyen inutile, but not for that very 89. Du contrat social I, 1,1, p. 351. Consider I, 9, 8, the last sentence of the first book, p. 367. 90. Du contrat social II, 7, 3, pp. 381–­82. For this consider Rousseau’s statement about aliénation totale in I, 6, 6, p. 360 and cf. II, 4, 5, p. 373; III, 2, 7, p. 401. 91. Immediately following the cited sentence of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 18, Rousseau continues: “Répondez-­moi donc, Philosophes illustres . . .” Cf. p. 30: “Pour nous, hommes vulgaires, à qui le Ciel n’a point départi de si grands talens . . .”

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reason an homme pernicieux.92 He would have given himself over to useless botany, but would have done as little evil as any man in the world. He would have been the harmless dreamer whom the Rêveries describe. The political justification of the philosopher in Rousseau’s œuvre is his œuvre. If the solitary walker makes it known that he could have done without this justification, the question arises anew what the œuvre implies for Rousseau in regard to his own good. Would he have been able to become who he was according to his nature without the œuvre? What did his taking up the task he imposed upon himself disclose in him and open up for him that otherwise would have remained inaccessible to him? How could the self-­understanding of the Promeneur Solitaire be thought without the medium of the œuvre, to which all the walks refer, directly or indirectly, commenting and reflecting on it, distancing from it, confirming or deepening it? Such and related questions, which the Quatrième and the Sixième suggest, remain in the background of the walks with which Rousseau resumes the Rêveries following the announced conclusion in the Septième in order to continue them all the way to their natural end. Our interest concerns first the Neuvième promenade, which in a way forms the companion piece to the Sixième. While in the sixth walk Rousseau highlights the onerousness, the constraint, the distress that accompanies sociability, in the ninth he emphasizes the joys sociability has in store for him.93 Not accidentally, the Neuvième calls to mind, by allusions in the text and a subsequently inserted prefatory paragraph, Rousseau’s first political writing in the popular sense, with which he explicitly addressed “no longer the small number but the public,” and in which he proclaimed his motto for the first time.94 By way of nine episodes, Rousseau provides a glimpse of the type of sociable intercourse he felt to be so agreeable, satisfying, and alluring that he 92. Rousseau had first written in the final sentence of the Sixième: “de m’en proscrire comme un membre dangereux.” He then made a correction, replacing “dangereux” with “pernicieux,” with which he takes up exactly the opposition of the Discours between inutile and pernicieux. Cf. Chapter I, P. 10. 93. This does not mean that “la gêne,” mentioned four times in the Sixième, is absent from the Neuvième. It appears twice, first in relation to Rousseau, then in relation to a reaction Rousseau does not want to provoke: IX, 6 and 7 (1088). 94. In the original opening, the Neuvième refers right at the beginning and later once more to a writing of d’Alembert, who is not mentioned in any other promenade: IX, 2 and 3 (1086). Later Rousseau employs the first two verses of a citation from Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus, which he quoted at the end of the Lettre à d’Alembert, in order to make clear to d’Alembert, to his fellow citizens of Geneva, and to the world what sort of spectacles a republic needs: IX, 21 (1095). The paragraph with which Rousseau finally began the Neuvième culminates with the description of

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actively sought it. The examples he selects show encounters with all ages, from a small boy to an old veteran. The central and politically most revealing episode depicts the encounter with twenty young girls under the supervision of “a sort of nun.”95 With the help of a ticket seller to whom he gives the necessary instructions and whom he pays in full, Rousseau obtains pleasure for the girls by purchasing lottery tickets that only a few of them would have been able to afford, so they can get the desired wafers the ticket seller offers as prizes. Rousseau gives the festivity a well-­conceived order. He regulates access to the tickets and arranges the group of girls in conformity with the purpose. Deviating from the normal practice of a ticket lottery, he has the ticket seller correct for the luck of the draw, so that sufficiently many wafers end up in the hands of the girls. His wife persuades the girls more strongly favored by luck to share their wafers with the less lucky. In disputes the girls plead their cases before Rousseau, whose tribunal rulings are decided in terms of distributive justice and eventual satisfaction of all the participants. Even the nun who, before Rousseau intervened and took over the direction for the best for all, had forbidden the girls to buy the lottery tickets, is drawn into the common game. Encouraged by Rousseau, she also tries her luck and draws a winning ticket. Rousseau’s joy in the joy that he triggered in the recipients of  his gift is of such a kind that afterward he returns several times to the same place at the same hour, hoping to meet the little group again and be able to regale them and himself once more. In contrast to the good deed in which he yielded to the begging youth at the Tollgate of Hell, Rousseau finds in this good deed, which owes its execution and success to his initiative, his oversight, his skill, so much delight that he wants to repeat it.96 The Neuvième promenade reflects the reasons that could induce the author to commit himself to his œuvre, to take on the task that gave him public visibility, that earned him political effectiveness and made him accountable for the enjoyment it gives Rousseau to see “a whole people give itself up to joy upon a festival day,” and thus with one of the most prominent themes of the Lettre à d’Alembert: IX, 1 (1085). 95. The episode of the girls of Passy is the fifth of nine episodes, or the fourth of seven if one does not insist on the specific time frames Rousseau uses to mark the temporal divisions for the beginnings of each episode. In the twenty-­four paragraphs composing the Neuvième this episode takes up the four central paragraphs, paragraphs 11–­14. 96. Also in the episode of the boy from Clignancourt, which immediately precedes the episode of the girls from Passy, Rousseau mentions that he often sought out the place again where he had encountered the small boy and responded to his spontaneous affection with a gift: IX, 8–­9 (1089–­90).

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this effectiveness. The episodes of the walk, above all the episode of the girls of Passy, in contrast to the story of the “little fellow” from the beginning of the Sixième, refer to aspects of sociability that were attractive enough for Rousseau or were strong enough in him that they were able to move him, within specific limits, to enter into the “most sacred of all contracts,” which arises from the gift. That is, beyond his weakness, for the sake of what he is most capable of and for his joy. Unless we count amour-­propre as Rousseau’s weakness and consider his self-­love as the real source of the self-­deviation that the talk of the “grave mistake” of the œuvre seemed to identify. For insofar as the episodes shed light on Rousseau’s sociable side, they necessarily also display his amour-­propre, without which sociability is unthinkable and without which there is no politics. At the party Rousseau initiates for the fosterlings under the nun’s charge, amour-­propre played its part, and Rousseau alludes to it no less clearly in another episode, involving a small girl who guarded a dozen apples on her tray, which drew the covetous glances of a few Savoyard boys, when he cast himself in the role of a second Heracles, who helped the boys acquire the apples in their “Garden of the Hesperides.” This is similar to his portrayal of himself, full of self-­irony, as a second Jason at the head of the Argonauts in the sociable afternoon variant of the Cinquième, during the boat ride to the small island in the company of three women and a few rabbits.97 In the Huitième promenade Rousseau states straightaway that as an author he had a “prodigious amount” of  amour-­propre, even if  “perhaps still less of it than others.”98 A broader perspective, which is relevant for the decision for the œuvre, is made vivid in the ninth walk in a variety of adaptations: the joy of being able to share joy with another, communicate it or make it accessible to him, and to anticipate the other’s joy and his own. The theme outshining everything, however, is Rousseau’s delight in seeing: the observation of men and their reactions, with a primary focus on the observation of children, who in their behavior are the least shaped by the opinions and requirements of society,99 as part of his study of human nature; his seeing with his own eyes what his gift triggers, which the idea painted by his imagination is far from approaching;100 also, accordingly, 97. “et moi qui partageois à si bon marché cette joye, j’avois de plus celle de sentir qu’elle étoit mon ouvrage” IX, 15 (1092–­93); cf. V, 7 in fine (1044). 98. VIII, 16 (1079). 99. In the final episode of the Neuvième, Rousseau emphasizes how much as an old man he retained of the spontaneity of a child: IX, 23 (1096). 100. “Si je ne vois la satisfaction que je cause quand même j’en serois sûr je n’en jouirois qu’à demi” IX, 17 (1093).

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the observation of the effects of the œuvre and of the fates that the children of his imagination have, for instance, Héloïse and Émile, the books mentioned by name in the Neuvième, as soon as they are released into reality and are left to develop a life of their own.101 Rousseau’s “pleasure of seeing contented faces,” faces whose contentment was caused by him, names a strong motivating reason for the œuvre. Rousseau himself speaks about a “kind of sensual pleasure.”102 The application to a political writing in the narrower sense, such as the Lettre à d’Alembert, is obvious when, at the beginning of the Neuvième, in a movement that reproduces politically the descent of the Cinquième,103 Rousseau makes the transition from the observation of happiness “that has no exterior sign,” which is why one would have to be able to read in the heart of the happy man in order to be able to know his happiness, to the observation of the contentment that can be read in the eyes, the bearing, the tone of voice, and in the gait, in order to declare at the end of the opening: “Is there a sweeter enjoyment than to see a whole people give itself up to joy on a festival day and every heart expand in the broad rays of pleasure that pass rapidly but intensely through the clouds of life?” The political author has in view the contentment of the whole people, which constitutes the political community and which manifests itself in the real present on the festival day. Geneva, which in the œuvre represents the concrete political community of the citizen-­philosopher, also figures in the Neuvième as the paradigm for the festival the opening evokes. With its festivals, Geneva makes its appearance—­and apart from the comparison at the beginning of the Cinquième, it is mentioned in the Rêveries only this one time104—­precisely in the paragraph in which Rousseau explains his “pleasure of seeing contented faces.” Rousseau does not neglect to mark in the same breath his place at the periphery of society: “For me to enjoy these friendly festivals, I do not need to be a part of them, it is sufficient for me to see them, in seeing them, I share in them.”105 101. IX, 5 (1087–­88). 102. IX, 17 (1093). Consider the suggestion of the reason why Rousseau would have refused the Ring of Gyges in VI, 19 (1058). 103. V, 15–­16 (1047); cf. V, 7 (1044) and V, 10 (1045) and see Chapter IV, Pp. 129–­30. 104. V, 2 (1040). See Chapter IV, Pp. 100–101 and consider for this Pp. 166–67. 105. 105 IX, 1 (1085) and IX, 17 (1093–­94). In the Lettre à d’Alembert Rousseau used a long footnote, the last one in the book, to praise the public festivals in Geneva (p. 124n.). In the depiction of one of these festivals, he interpolated the warning from his father: “Jean-­Jacques, me disoit-­il, aime ton pays. Vois-­tu ces bons Genevois; ils sont tous amis, ils sont tous fréres; la joye et la concorde régne au milieu d’eux. Tu es Génevois, tu verras un jour d’autres Peuples; mais, quand tu voyagerois autant que ton Pére, tu ne trouveras jamais leur pareil.” Concerning

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Rousseau’s participation is essentially observation.106 If he participates in political life, then he does so by observing it, by reflecting on it, by writing for it, in order to observe it again and to reflect on it anew. For the sake of his own good, Rousseau was eager to learn, not in order to teach others, but to know himself. “Of all the studies,” he asserted in the Troisième, that he undertook “in the midst of men” during his life, “there is hardly any” he “would not just as well have undertaken” “alone on a desert island” to which he would have been confined for the remainder of his days.107 To the studies he would not have undertaken would belong, we may thus surmise, investigations occasioned by those parts of the œuvre in which he took a political position toward political communities of  his time, whether giving advice or exercising criticism, and intervened in their disputed matters. Despite the significance they have assigned to them within the œuvre, which reaches far beyond the contemporaneous situation, the Lettre à d’Alembert and the Lettres écrites de la montagne count among the writings Rousseau would perhaps hardly have written if he had been exiled from the social world up to the end of his life. Equally obvious candidates are the draft constitutions for Corsica and Poland. Unlike the two books on Geneva, Rousseau did not publish the manuscripts dealing with Corsica and Poland. They also do not trace back, at least not immediately, to his own initiative. They do not occupy in the œuvre, for that reason, a less important place. If the publications concerning Geneva show the philosopher as citizen, the writings about Corsica and Poland allow a glimpse of  the philosopher as lawgiver. The fact that they are requested works, political commissions, makes the question of the extent to which the œuvre was good for Rousseau arise all the more sharply. The Plan de Gouvernement for Corsica is of additional interest for us, since Rousseau was preoccupied with it on St. Peter’s Island, and since moreover in this work we have before the spectacle that the festival offered him, the Citoyen de Genève remarked: “Je sens bien que ce Spectacle dont je fus si touché, seroit sans attrait pour mille autres. Il faut des yeux faits pour le voir, et un cœur fait pour le sentir. Non, il n’y a de pure joye que la joye publique, et les vrais sentimens de la nature ne régnent que sur le peuple. Ah! dignité, fille de l’orgueil, et mére de l’ennui, jamais tes tristes Esclaves eurent ils un pareil moment en leur vie?” 106. Cf. Rousseau’s account of his fondness for children: “je ne crois pas que jamais homme ait plus aimé que moi à voir de petits bambins folatrer et jouer ensemble et souvent dans la rue et aux promenades je m’arrête à regarder leur espieglerie et leurs petits jeux avec un interest que je ne vois partager à personne” IX, 3 (1087). “Si j’ai fait quelque progrès dans la connoissance du cœur humain, c’est le plaisir que j’avois à voir et observer les enfans qui m’a valu cette connoissance” IX, 5 (1087). 107. III, 5 (1013).

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us an example of a “duty” that arose from a “gift.” For when Mathieu Buttafoco, the Corsican from the entourage of the national hero, Pasquale Paoli, addresses Rousseau in a long letter of August 31, 1764, in which he asks him to serve Corsica as its Législateur, he explicitly appeals to the “eulogy” Rousseau bestowed on the Corsicans in the Contrat social.108 At the end of  the three chapters “Du peuple,” which continue Chapter II, 7, “Du Législateur,” Rousseau had placed a paragraph that credited the “Island of Corsica” alone in Eu­ rope with being suitable for a législation and thus with being a worthwhile field of activity for a Législateur. The short paragraph is of general impor­ tance, since it pointedly refers to the improbability of coming to a well-­ordered political community, and it caused a stir in 1762, since it supported the struggle of the Corsicans, watched across Europe, for independence under Paoli’s leadership. The efforts of  “this brave people” to win back and defend its freedom, Rousseau explained, deserved an homme sage, who would teach it to safeguard its freedom.109 Two years later Buttafoco challenged Rousseau to be “this wise man” and to draft a “political institution” for Corsica. The captain in the French armed services appealed to Rousseau’s virtue. He speaks candidly of the sacrifice Rousseau should make for the felicity of the Corsican nation. And he reveals himself  to the author of  the Contrat social as an accurate reader of Chapter II, 7, when in the decisive passage of his letter he seizes verbatim upon the three determinations Rousseau had demanded of the Législateur in order to ascribe them to Rousseau with the appropriate adaptations. All of this with the intention of convincing Rousseau that he is the Législateur that Corsica needs.110 After brief  hesitation, Rousseau takes on the task. He speci108. “Vous avez fait mention des Corses dans votre Contrat social d’une façon bien avantageuse; un pareil eloge est bien flatteur quand il part d’une plume aussi sincere; rien n’est plus propre a exciter l’emulation, et le desir de mieux faire. Il a fait souhaiter a la Nation que vous voulussiez etre cet homme sage qui pouroit procurer les moyens de conserver cette liberté qui a couté tant de sang a aquerir. Les Corses esperent que vous voudrez bien faire usage pour eux de vos talens, de votre bienfaissance, de votre vertu; de votre zèle pour l’avantage des hommes, sur tout pour ceux qui ont été le jouet de la tirannie la plus affreuse. / Les hommes de genie, ceux qui sont vertueux, ceux qui vous resemblent, ne dedaignent pas, monsieur, de consacrer quelques veilles à la félicité d’une nation: plus elle est malheureuse, plus elle a droit d’esperer un tel sacrifice.” Buttafoco to Rousseau, August 31, 1764, CC XXI, pp. 85–­86. 109. “Il est encore en Europe un pays capable de législation; c’est l’Isle de Corse. La valeur et la constance avec laquelle ce brave peuple a su recouvrer et défendre sa liberté, mériteroit bien que quelque homme sage lui apprit à la conserver. J’ai quelque pressentiment qu’un jour cette petit Isle étonnera l’Europe.” Du contrat social II, 10, 6, p. 391. 110. “Une nation ne doit se flatter de devenir heureuse, et florissante, que par le moyen d’une bonne institution politique. Notre isle, comme vous le dite tres bien, monsieur, est capable de

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fies the information he needs, demands that he be sent various materials, and finally begins a project for which he estimates at least a year and a half for a first draft and an additional three years for a final product—­although the “Corsican patriot” who commissioned him produces no authorization by any organ of his nation, although he is aware that the precarious international situation Corsica faces can very shortly make the undertaking politically pointless, although he runs the risk as Législateur for Corsica of  falling into open opposition to the great power interests of France at the peak of his political persecution and of becoming entangled in new intrigues of his enemies.111 Why? The prospect of “distant glory” that Buttafoco, citing Rousseau, holds out to him as his reward for sacrificing a period of his life will hardly have enticed Rousseau.112 Assuming that he was interested in seeking glory in posterity, had he not taken care for a glory of another order with the œuvre, that is, already with the parts of the œuvre he himself would have worked out, or could still work out, on a desert island without further connections to his contemporaries? One can also eliminate the weakness of not being able to reject a request, not being able to say no to the patriotic commission of an admirer. Rousseau does not commit himself to Buttafoco. He hides in his correspon­ dence with the Corsican just how intensively he is already working on the draft, and does not put off his commissioner with assurances. When in March 1765 recevoir une bonne legislation; mais il lui faut un legislateur: il lui faut un homme dans vos principes, un homme [1] dont le bonheur soit indépendant de nous; un homme [2] qui, connoissant a fond la nature humaine, et [3] qui dans les progrés des temps se menageant une gloire eloignée, voulut travailler dans un siecle, et jouir dans l’autre. Daignerez-­vous en traçant le plan du sisteme politique cooperer a la felicité de toute une nation?” CC XXI, p. 86, my emphasis. Buttafoco refers to three of the four determinations by which Rousseau identifies the Législateur as a divine being: “Pour découvrir les meilleures regles de société qui conviennent aux Nations, il faudroit une intelligence supérieure, [1] qui vit toutes les passions des hommes et qui n’en éprouvât aucune, [2] qui n’eut aucun rapport avec notre nature et qui la connût à fond, [3] dont le bonheur fût indépendant de nous et qui pourtant voulut bien s’occuper du notre; enfin [4] qui, dans le progrès des tems se ménageant une gloire éloignée, put travailler dans un siecle et jouir dans un autre. Il faudroit des Dieux pour donner des loix aux hommes.” Du contrat social II, 7, 1, p. 381. Consider Footnote 53. 111. See Rousseau’s letters to Buttafoco of September 22, 1764, and October 15, 1764, CC XXI, pp. 173–­75 and 258–­60; cf. the letters of March 24, 1765, and May 26, 1765, CC XXIV, pp. 299–­301 and CC XXV, pp. 337–­39. 112. When Rousseau in Chapter II, 7 suggested a “distant glory” for the Législateur, he did this not so much in order to motivate a divine being to take an interest in legislation for men, as rather to highlight the problem that consists in the lack of a common good. Consider Rousseau’s footnote to II, 7, 1, p. 381.

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he inquires whether he might be able to receive asylum on Corsica, he even writes that in the event of his relocation to Corsica he will not continue to work on the Plan de Gouvernement, since he never wants to blame and criticize or reform in any way a government under which he lives.113 Rousseau took on the “commission” to conceive an order for Corsica, not because a reader of the Contrat social struck his point d’honneur, or because he could not disappoint the Corsicans, but because the task was of intrinsic interest to him, because it offered him a welcome opportunity to build upon a main wing of the œuvre, because he recognized in the task a new challenge, to learn for himself and exercise abilities that would otherwise lie dormant: from the perspective of the founder, Rousseau explores in the Projet de constitution pour la Corse the possibility or impossibility of confronting the European development with a countermodel. Therefore, from the outset the draft opposes the “prejudices” of the Corsicans, which concern precisely that development and could mislead them to use their newly won national independence to follow the model of France or England, i.e., to catch up by committing themselves to a progressive commercialization with the promise of general prosperity. The prominent importance the draft attaches to “agriculture” is the sign of the attempt to counter universalism with anchorage in the particular. Is there any prospect that the move to general equilibrium and to general assimilation, to undifferentiated compatibility, for which money stands as the universal “value,” can be resisted by the strengthening of rootedness in the soil, of national character, and of autarky? The draft constitution for Corsica gives Rousseau additionally the opportunity to put forward an illuminating supplement to the Contrat social. 113. “Mais, M[onsieu]r, je dois vous tout dire: il faut que cette hospitalité Soit gratuite, non quant à la Subsistance,  je ne Serai là-­dessus à charge à personne, mais quant au droit d’asile qu’il faut qu’on m’accorde Sans intérêt. Car Sitôt que je Serai parmi vous, n’attendez rien de moi Sur le projet qui vous occupe.  Je le répéte,  je Suis désormais hors d’état d’y Songer; et quand je ne le Serais pas,  je m’en abstiendrais par cela même que je vivrais au milieu de vous; car j’eus, et j’aurai toujours pour maxime inviolable de porter le plus profond respect au gouvernement Sous lequel je vis, Sans me mêler de vouloir jamais le censurer et critiquer, ou réformer en aucune maniére. J’ai même ici une raison de plus, et pour moi d’une trés-­grande force. Sur le peu que j’ai parcouru vos mémoires,  Je vois que mes idées différent prodigieusement de celles de votre Nation. Il ne Serait pas possible que le plan que je proposerais ne fît beaucoup de mécontens, et peut-­être vous-­même, tout le premier.” Letter of March 24, 1765, CC XXIV, p. 300. Buttafoco passes the test and offers Rousseau asylum on Corsica without expecting anything in return (letter of April 11, 1765, CC XXV, pp. 77–­78). Rousseau rejects the offer, invites Buttafoco to visit (which does not come to pass) and lets him know that he has not buried the project of the draft, as he had claimed before (letter of May 26, 1765, CC XXV, pp. 337–­39).

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It shows, on the one hand, how Rousseau thinks the well-­ordered political community in its concrete shape beyond the principles of political right: in the orientation toward a way of life that should allow for political legitimacy and at the same time present the purpose of the political institution. He makes it plain, on the other, how the Législateur is able to have influence on “the customs, the habits, and above all on the opinion” of a people, about which Rousseau said in the Contrat social that it is the “most important kind of laws” and the part “to which the great Lawgiver attends in secret.”114 The reader of the text can follow in detail to which institutions Rousseau the lawgiver has recourse in order to shape the way of  life of the people, to stabilize the political system, to achieve autarky for Corsica; how he orchestrates public education by means of economic measures, national tasks, festivals and honors, rewards and punishment; which ways he chooses to try to implant in the political class new valuations, to put amour-­propre in the service of the political community, and to make possible the citizens’ identification with the moi commun. Thus, it might be more accessible to the reader why Rousseau the author highlighted mœurs, coutumes, and opinion as the most important kind of laws, although according to the principles of political right they are precisely not this: laws.115 The Plan de Gouvernement meant a new challenge for Rousseau, finally, insofar as unlike with a treatise about the principles of political life, a discourse on fundamental questions of philosophy, or a novel about education, with the shaping of a corps politique in space and time he had gotten himself involved with the contingencies of reality and the experience of its recalcitrance. That Rousseau promised himself a special kind of profit and that he drew such a profit from the actualization of the figure of the Législateur as well as from the required rhetoric within the horizon of the possible implementation of his conception is indicated by the fact that he ceased working on the draft when the occupation of Corsica by the French thwarted the prospect of the realization of his political project. If Rousseau looked upon his work on the draft constitutions for Corsica and Poland as so worthwhile for himself that he was prepared to spend months or years on them,116 then that was all the more true for the primary parts of the 114. Du contrat social II, 12, 5, p. 394. 115. Du contrat social II, 6, 5 and 7, p. 379. Consider Pp. 154–­57. 116. Over the course of several months during 1765, Rousseau worked on the Plan de Gouvernement for the Island of Corsica, which remained a fragment and is known today by the title Projet de constitution pour la Corse, given by its first editor in 1861. While he left behind most of his papers from 1765 with Du Peyrou in Neuchâtel, he took the manuscript of the draft with him to England upon his forced departure from St. Peter’s Island. When Choiseul annexed Corsica

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œuvre. That he would have undertaken the investigations demanded by the core of the œuvre even alone on a desert island does not mean that working out the œuvre did not essentially increase the gain for himself. What he envisioned early on as his “system”117 received clear contours in comparison with competing doctrinal edifices, in consideration of the possibilities for development inherent in its conception and in its presentation in relation to its addressees. The engagement with the addressees, with their opinions, needs, capabilities, expectations, which makes the œuvre into a gift in the eminent sense, is inseparable from the advancement of the author’s self-­knowledge, which grows out of his attention to the diverse addressees and from his reflection on them. The works he composed at a distance for Geneva, Corsica, and Poland are the parts of the œuvre that present in a certain way Rousseau’s greatest distancing from himself. And the conclusion of the Contrat social would suffice to testify how much Rousseau was aware of the distance from himself even in his main political work.118 But the distance from himself under discussion here is a distance that does not exclude the richer return to himself, Rousseau’s rentrer en soi-­même and his se rendre à soi-­même,119 but instead makes it possible. Just as Rousseau’s œuvre first makes possible the Rêveries, a book that revolves around Rousseau’s Beisichselbstsein and a book that can be what it is only because it is distinct from the œuvre. The Neuvième promenade, which stresses the sociable side of Rousseau more than any other promenade, does not fail at the same time to recall the center of gravity both of his existence and of the in 1768, Rousseau gave the text in a box marked with the label “Affaires de Corse” to an abbess for safekeeping. From autumn 1770 until spring 1771, Rousseau wrote the Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, his draft constitution for the kingdom of Poland, at that time the state with the largest landmass in Europe. In June, he submitted the clean copy to the man who had commissioned him, Michel Wielhorski, the envoy of the Bar Confederation in France. The commission originated in a decision of the Diet in 1769 to seek advice from experts. In July 1771 Abbé de Mably, who was likewise working on a draft, had seen Rousseau’s text. In April 1772 copies circulated, which among others went to Choiseul and his successors, La Vrillière and d’Aiguillon. As with Corsica, Rousseau had also explicitly mentioned Poland in a publication before he was asked for a draft constitution. Yet in contrast to Corsica, it was not praise but rather a reference to the reasons for the decline of the Polish government: Lettres écrites de la montagne VII, 13, p. 816. 117. Préface d’une seconde lettre à Bordes (1753/1754), pp. 105–­6. 118. Du contrat social IV, 9 in fine, p. 470. 119. II, 3 (1002); III, 20 (1019); VI, 14 (1056); VIII, 23 (1084 in the middle); cf. II, 25 (1010); VIII, 16 (1079); VIII, 21 (1082); VIII, 23 (1084 top).

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book: “I am my own only when I am alone.” It also comes back full circle to the Deuxième promenade, which singled out the time during which Rousseau is in the full sense himself and with himself: the time of solitude and of reflection. The time of which he can truly say that during it he is what nature willed. The time of his solitary walks and of rêveries, meditations and reflections, that fill them, when he leaves his head entirely free and lets his thoughts go “sans resistance et sans gêne.”120

120. IX, 19 (1094); II, 1 (1002). See Chapter I, Pp. 15–16 and Chapter III, Pp. 73–­74. Cf. Footnotes 9, 28, 93.

Chapter 6

Love

Love occupies a special place in Rousseau’s reflection on his œuvre, and the same is true for the consideration of the philosophic life as a whole. Love yields a gift of a special kind. It produces a “free good deed,” which also follows inclination in the actions that grow out of it, as long as love lasts. It is the outstanding case of a shared joy, which becomes joy duplicated. In regard to the œuvre, love comes into play as love of familiar persons and as love of the most distant, as love of kindred natures, as love of oneself and as self-­love. The philosophic life is supported by love of the truth, by love of  knowledge, by love of  learning. It is nourished by the loving turn to the world. It presupposes a “loving soul,” which knows how to find its “inner delights” in contemplation. It becomes actual only for a “truly loving heart,” which engages with objects of contemplation in their particularity and takes an interest in them in themselves, which pays attention to them as they are for themselves because it wants to know them and because it wants to know itself.1 Yet how is Rousseau’s being alone related to his love? When he presents himself at the outset of the Rêveries as “the most sociable and most loving of humans,” does the second determination, insofar as love of others is concerned, prove to be as misleading as the first determination in the further course of the promenades? Is Rousseau, who writes the Rêveries for himself as a future friend, as he informs us in the Pre­ mière promenade, able to be a friend only to himself ?2 As we learn in the Dixième 1. I, 1 (995); I, 15 (1001); II, 3 (1003); III, 5 (1013); III, 22 (1021); V, 2 (1040); VI, 8 (1053); VI, 14 (1056); VII, 21 (1068); VII, 23 (1069); VIII, 16 (1079); IX, 7 (1088). 2. I, 14 (1001).

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promenade, however, Rousseau had a female friend who sufficed for his heart. And his love for her is more to him than a pleasant memory; it is to him a pres­ ent happiness, since he understands it as the event of his life that led him to embark on the path on which he became what he is. Rousseau dedicates the final walk to his first love. The Dixième consists in one paragraph and twenty-­nine sentences, of which eight begin with “Je.” Next to the Cinquième it is the most intimate of the ten promenades and the only one to which Rousseau affixes a date: “Today, Palm Sunday, it is precisely fifty years since I first met Madame de Warens. She was twenty-­eight then, having been born with the century. I was not yet seventeen.”3 The encounter deserves to be marked historically, since, as Rousseau records, it would be decisive for his entire life, “and by an inevitable chain of events, shaped the destiny” that determined his path up to the very end. His reflection on the be­ ginning of the encounter is dated exactly, since in this moment it presents his adult life to him in as it were a single piece. Today, on April 12, 1778, it becomes present to and is present in Rousseau’s thinking and feeling. The destiny he discerns in returning to the beginning is no longer an impenetrable weave of threads, stitches, meshes that made him into a plaything of alien intentions and purposes, but rather the expression of an inner necessity that commenced as he discovered himself through the love for Madame de Warens. For she first freed Rousseau for himself. She awakened what lay concealed within him and helped to give his soul its own shape. The first encounter with the “charming woman full of spirit and grace,” whom he called Maman his entire life, made him feel gratitude. Along with gratitude she gave him “more tender feelings,” which at the outset he nevertheless did not know how to distinguish: “My soul, whose most precious faculties my organs had not yet developed, still had no determinate form. It (Elle) awaited, with a sort of impatience, the moment that would give it that form, and this moment, accelerated by our encounter, did not, however, come at once, and owing to the simplicity of morals that education had given me, I saw this delightful but fleeting state in which love and innocence inhabit the same heart prolonged in me for a long time.” After Rousseau has introduced love into the promenade—­there will be only this single mention of l’amour—­he changes the subject: “She (Elle) sent me away.” She, 3. X, 1–­3, numbered according to sentences (1098). Rousseau’s dating of the promenade is accurate, although his information about age is not: Madame de Warens was born on March 31, 1699, and was twenty-­nine in 1728; Rousseau, born on June 28, 1712, was not yet sixteen. Françoise-­Louise-­Eléonore de La Tour married Sébastien-­Isaac de Loys de Warens in 1713. She left her husband in 1726, renounced her Protestant faith, and settled in Annecy.

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either his soul or the woman who awakened the love in his soul, had distanced him or sent him away from her. In the text, Rousseau’s soul and Madame de Warens, by whom in the next breath his soul will be completely fulfilled, pass smoothly into one another. A device that announces the decisive turn: “Every­ thing called me back to her; I had to come back to her. This return fixed my destiny, and for a long time yet before possessing her, I lived only in and for her.”4 The return to Madame de Warens fixed Rousseau’s “destiny,” since the expansive feeling of love found support and fulfillment in her and at the same time his expansive soul assumed its “form.” In Rousseau’s presentation of the development of his love, like that of the formation of his soul, “retour” is the key term. Turning back, in contrast to wandering forth, supplies content and orientation for the sentiment expansif, transforms his longing and seeking into goal-­directed and conscious action. It translates an indeterminate possibility into concrete reality, allowing the âme expansive by its concentration on one human being to experience the sources of its power and to know the range of its capabilities. An experience and knowledge essential to the developed “form” of the soul. Rousseau owes to the reality of his first love the knowledge that his heart can find satisfaction in something, that when it comes to what is most important his heart does not need the movement of distancing or change, but rather of return or of deepening. What remains indelible for him from his love for Madame de Warens is that in this love “I was myself, fully, without admixture and without obstacle,” and that for once in his life he could truly claim “to have lived.”5 The experience of  his capacity for love, the knowledge of  his power, the con­ sciousness of  being able to say yes to life, was the basis for Rousseau’s inner independence and his confidence in himself. “Without this short but precious time,” he begins the second presentation of the genesis of  his love and the formation of  his soul, “I would perhaps have remained uncertain about myself.” Now for the first time Rousseau speaks of  being loved: “But during those few years, loved by a woman full of desire to please and of gentleness, I did what I wanted to, I was what I wanted to be, and through the use I made of my leisure, aided by her lessons and example, I was able to give to my still simple and new soul the form that better suited it, and that it has always kept.” Being loved promoted Rousseau’s harmony with himself, the trust in his nature, the unfolding of his capabilities. In the second iteration of the presentation being loved 4. X, 6–­10 (1098). I have corrected the punctuation of sentence 9, bringing it into line with the manuscript. 5. X, 10 and 14 (1098–­99).

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precedes loving.6 This accentuation makes good sense, since being loved, or the requiting of love, leads back to oneself, to the confirmation of one’s own capability, to the clarification of identity, which first allows loving in the most demanding sense, as a life in and for another, a life that neither flees from nor forgets itself but is aware of itself. The love for Madame de Warens, his being loved and loving in that sense, made Rousseau free for her and for himself. 7 And for his later way of  life. For Rousseau traces his inclination to solitude and to contemplation back to the formative time of his first love. Love and preference for solitude and for contemplation have the same origin in him: “The taste for solitude and contemplation arose in my heart along with the expansive and tender feelings made to be its nutriment. Tumult and noise constrict and stifle them; calm and peace restore and exalt them.” How is the inclination to solitude to be brought into harmony with love for another human being? Rousseau first wrote: “The taste for retreat and contemplation,” only later to replace retraite with solitude.8 The inclination to reclusiveness would certainly not have stood in tension with the happiness of  the togetherness that the Dix­ ième promenade describes. Rousseau’s tension-­filled correction is all the more remarkable. It is based on the thought that the love that tied Rousseau to Ma­ dame de Warens must be understood as an expansion of his soul and at the same time as the circumscription of the lovers that liberated them from the tumult of the world. Maman was in a certain way a part of  Rousseau’s Beisichselb­ stsein, part of a common autarky, consequently, part of his solitude. Until the end of his life, Rousseau will be dependent upon solitude, on circumscription, on being collected in order to be able to love, which is what he expresses suc­ cinctly in what immediately follows: “I need to collect myself  in order to love.”9 Conversely, the solitude within which Maman was enclosed opened Rousseau up for the first time to the experience of a kind of self-­sufficiency. Substituting 6. In the Dixième, amour, aimé, and aimer each appear once: amour in the first iteration of the account (sentence 7), aimé and aimer in the second iteration (sentences 17 and 20). The peak of the account, which determines the articulation, is sentence 15: “Je puis dire à peu près comme ce Prefet du pretoire qui disgracié sous Vespasien s’en alla finir paisiblement ses jours à la campagne: j’ai passé soixante et dix ans sur la terre, et j’en ai vécu sept.” (The punctuation is corrected, bringing it into line with the manuscript.) 7. X, 16–­17 (1099). Cf. the repetition and confirmation in sentence 24: “j’étois parfaitement libre, et mieux que libre, car assujeti par mes seuls attachmens, je ne faisois que ce que je voulois faire.” 8. The apparatus of the OCP does not mention this important variant. It is not difficult to discern in the manuscript and is correctly reproduced in the editions of  Spink and Roddier. 9. X, 18–­20 (1099).

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solitude for retraite thus goes far beyond providing insight into the genesis of Rousseau’s love. It sheds light on the path the solitary walker has traveled. The connection between solitude and contemplation—­this is the final use of solitude in the Rêveries—­confirms the outstanding significance of the constellation of solitude and méditation, in which we first encountered nature in the Rêveries. Rousseau closes the circle at the opening of the Deuxième promenade in which he determined his nature and his Beisichselbstsein when he spoke about his solitary walks and about the rêveries that fill them: “These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day during which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, and during which I can truly claim to be what nature willed.”10 At the end of the Rêveries Rousseau considers the most important event in the prehistory of the philosophic life. He looks back at the opening up of his erotic nature, which becomes visible in the devotion to “the best of women,” in coming back to himself in solitude, and in the love of contemplation. This not only allows him to think the alpha and omega of the book from a single origin, but also puts him in the position to see his happiness together with the happiness of the good beginning that continues to have an effect on him. The exact point in time and the more specific circumstances are contingent. Even the sequence could significantly deviate from Rousseau’s own sketch without affecting the importance of the event. I offer an example. Let’s suppose the encounter with the great love had occurred a few years later. Our philosophically talented young man would have become clear to himself about his inclination to solitude and contemplation. He would perhaps already have taken a few steps on the path from “contemplation” to “meditation,” whether the objects with which he occupied himself sent him back to himself or his expansive soul was compelled by the encounter with political enmity to turn back to himself. In such a state of being collected, he would thus be struck by the love of “the best of women.” Then the happiness of the good beginning would consist in the experience of  being able to accord with this love despite the preference for solitude and contemplation, and beyond this, it would consist in the insight, owing to that preference, of  being able to accord with this love so that it would suffice for him: that he collected himself in solitude, contemplation, meditation did not stand in the way of his capacity for loving another human being, but rather strengthened it and made it richer. To return to the Dixième promenade, the happiness of the good beginning is expressed by the fact that in his love for Madame de Warens Rousseau “desired nothing but the continuation of such 10. II, 1 (1002). Compare with this in particular X, 14 and 18.

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a sweet state.” The love broke up, since it did not suffice for the heart of the beloved as it did for his heart. However, its formative significance for Rousseau, for his coming to himself, for his confidence in himself, and for his later happiness is not lessened by the breakup. Rousseau speaks in the Dixième promenade, therefore, without any bitterness. There is no echo of a complaint aired in public, as in the case of the broken friendship with Diderot.11 Instead, Rousseau emphasizes that not a day goes by without his remembering “with joy and tenderness” the time of his love for Madame de Warens, when he “was fully myself ” and acquired his shape.12 The time spent with Maman at first comes to mind in the last part of the walk within the horizon of that time’s potential permanence, its duration, its timelessness. This belongs to the happiness of the good beginning, even though we know that it will be a brief, limited span of time.13 Rousseau got his beloved to come live with him in the country. Their refuge was an isolated house on the slope of a valley. There, “for a period of four or five years,” he “enjoyed a century of life and a pure and full happiness.” A happiness “that covers everything with its charm,” everything “dreadful” in Rousseau’s “pres­ ent lot.”14 This judgment coming at the end of the book strikes a very different tone from that of the exposition of the Première promenade and eloquently underscores the continually effective force of the good beginning. In his first love Rousseau had what he needed, he was where he desired to be, he enjoyed the freedom he needed. He had a woman friend suited to his heart, was withdrawn in the country, and did only what by inclination he wanted to do. The state seemed to suffice as far as Rousseau was concerned. How else in this state could he have enjoyed “a pure and full happiness”? He wished only for its continuation. But the state was not stable, since it did not concern Rousseau alone. Rousseau had reason to fear that it would not last: “My only worry was the fear that it might not last for long; and this fear, born of the distress of our situation, was not without foundation.”15 The final use of la gêne in the Rêveries, which in regard to the biographical chronology is the first, refers once more to the onerousness, the constraint, the distress that sociability carries within itself. Rousseau’s self-­sufficiency rested on a borrowed and consequently fragile 11. III, 2 and 11 (1011 and 1015). See the complaint about the loss of the friend in the Lettre à d’Alembert, Préface 9, p. 7. 12. X, 11, 14, 17, 26, 29 (1098–­99). 13. X, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17 (1098–­99). 14. X, 22 (1099). 15. X, 27 (1099). See Chapter V, Pp. 176–77 with Footnote 120.

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autarky. He remained dependent upon Madame de Warens and her fate. Her misère had to penetrate to him. The Beisichselbstsein, which included her, would break apart as soon as his love no longer sufficed for her and she turned to another. This fission finally put them both again in relation to one another in a sociable situation in the strict sense. To counteract the breakup, yet also already in anticipation of the end of their autarky, Rousseau tried to mobilize what was in him and up to him: “I thought that a provision of talents was the surest resource against misery, and I resolved to use my leisure to put myself in a position, if it were possible, to give back one day to the best of women the help I had received from her.” Rousseau utilized the leisure that the years with Madame de Warens offered him. He occupied himself with philosophy and mathematics. He learned Latin. He acquired knowledge of natural science, literature, and music. He developed his abilities. He worked on himself in order to suffice for the woman who for him was the first and the best, in order to be able to support her as she supported him, in order to instruct her as she had instructed him, in order to provide an example to her as she had been an example to him.16 The conclusion of the two manuscript pages making up the Dixième prom­ enade indicates a dynamic from which Rousseau’s later development can be derived. The efforts he undertook out of love for Maman, to form himself and develop his talents, created the presuppositions for his career and thus for the œuvre. In view of his public existence and the enmity to which it will be exposed, Rousseau speaks of “destiny,” which was sealed by his “return” to Madame de Warens. Mention of the “inevitable chain” into which his love flowed supplies reason for the assumption that Rousseau, if  he had proceeded to recount his life to himself, would not have presented the œuvre as a “grave mistake.” The approach he chooses in the Dixième, the recourse to his erotic nature and the emphasis on the inner necessity his life followed, suggests that he classified the œuvre rather as the expression and the means of his ability to perfect himself. And it was up to him, he gives us to understand, to put the ability to perfect himself in the service of precisely that erotic nature. The development of his talents was merely the first step toward the œuvre that Rousseau took on many years later. When he explains that the first moment of his encounter with Madame de Warens was decisive for his entire life, he refers to the principle that sets this life in motion, which determines it step by step and which has persisted from challenge to challenge. If Rousseau had continued 16. X, 17 and 29 (1099).

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the narrative he begins in the Dixième, if he could have gone through his life once more, he would perhaps have come back to the friendship with Denis Diderot and its significance for the œuvre, which was strongly aided by and received its precise direction from their close familiarity as well as undeniable conflicts. It is possible that Sophie d’Houdetot also would have been assigned a place in the narrative in regard to a considerable side wing of the œuvre. Nor should it be excluded that Rousseau would even have said more about Thérèse, who represents in the Rêveries that residue of sociability in contrast to which the Promeneur Solitaire’s solitude in what is most important stands out all the more sharply.17 If Rousseau offers no evidence that she was included in his Beisichselbstsein, she nevertheless supported the œuvre in her own way.18 Whatever Rousseau could still have taken up in a late retrospective glance and illuminated more closely, the main lines are discernible from what we have before us in the Dixième. On the one hand, they lead from love to the œuvre. On the other, from a kind of second birth, which Rousseau ascribes to his love for Maman, to the philosophic life. The philosophic life begins neither with the first nor with this second birth. But it presupposes clarifying and becoming aware of one’s own nature, just as it presupposes philosophizing. The clarification might take place gradually, becoming conscious might be accomplished in phases, whereas the beginning of the philosophic life cannot be thought but as an outstanding moment, as an insight that makes a difference in the whole. As we have seen, Rousseau treated the beginning of the philosophic life in the Troisième promenade and marked the deep break by speaking of the “great review” and the “great revolution.” The first and sole mention of  Ma­ dame de Warens outside the Dixième is in the Troisième. She is so much a part of the prehistory of his philosophic life that in the biographical sketch Rousseau prefixes to the great review she was not allowed to be left out—­no other person from Rousseau’s life is mentioned by name in the sketch—­even if he could not have shed light on the most profound reason for her special position in the final walk. Another reason for mentioning her, immediately relevant for 17. Consider Chapter IV, Pp. 108, 110, and 113. Cf. Chapter V, Pp. 168–­69. Rousseau mentions Thérèse twice by name: V, 7 (1043–­44). He refers to her four times as “ma femme,” II, 12 (1006), IV, 29 (1034), IX, 11 (1090), IX, 12 (1091); once as “ma compagne,” V, 5 (1041); and once as “ma Gouvernante,” V, 7 (1042). The four references that deviate from “ma femme” concern the time when Rousseau was not yet married to Thérèse. 18. In the Confessions Rousseau wrote about himself and Thérèse: “pour que, de quelque façon que je m’y sois pu prendre, nous ayons toujours continué d’être deux.” IX, p. 415, my emphasis.

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the subject of the third walk, is the importance of faith, which Rousseau highlights with the “lessons and examples” he in the bloom of his youth received from her, a convert. Madame de Warens thus stands in the Troisième first of all for the seriousness of the confrontation that grounds the beginning of the philosophic life, and for that from which the Promeneur Solitaire freed himself. The Dixième offers a glimpse into the source from which the strength for that confrontation, the courage, and the confidence in himself grew and which kept him going on his path up to the end.19 In the center of the tenth walk Rousseau praises the time of his first love as “that unique and brief time of my life when I was myself, fully, without admixture and without obstacle, and when I can truly claim to have lived.” To underscore the hyperbolic praise even more, he continues: “Almost like that praetorian prefect who, disgraced under Vespasian, went off to the country to bring his days peacefully to a close, I can say: I have spent seventy years on earth and lived seven of them.” One last time Rousseau agrees to a judgment that appears plausible from the perspective of Everyman and supports the overarching rhetoric of the Rêveries. Does not the claim to have lived only in his youth, only during the brief period that was set for his love, testify to the misery of the persecuted, whom “one sequestered from the society of men”? It will make a much stronger impression on many and linger longer in memory than what Rousseau earlier, “alone and forsaken,” told himself: “I was made to live, and I am dying without having lived.”20 For, eight promenades later, it can certainly no longer be hidden from any reader that the Promeneur Solitaire at least at times experienced profound happiness. The most obvious mollification of which the author can now avail himself is to locate this happiness far back, to make it a matter of the past. In the œuvre, however, Rousseau had already applied the memorable formula of affirmation for honoring the true life. He could be sure that the praise in the Dixième promenade would be compared with the earlier praise. In the Lettre à Malesherbes from January 26, 1762, he put forward the Roman saying in order to characterize the time corresponding to his life of withdrawal in the Hermitage: “I first began to live on April 9, 1756.”21 The years 1756–­62, which in the third Lettre à Malesherbes 19. III, 6 (1013). Cf. X, 16 (1099) with III, 14 and 15 (1016–­17). See Chapter II, Pp. 53–­55. 20. II, 6 (1004). 21. “Mes maux sont l’ouvrage de la nature mais mon bonheur est le mien. Quoi qu’on en puisse dire j’ai eté sage, puisque j’ai eté heureux autant que ma nature m’a permis de l’etre: je n’ai point eté chercher ma felicité au loin, je l’ai cherchée aupres de moi et l’y ai trouvée. Spartien dit que Similis courtisan de Trajan ayant sans aucun mecontentement personnel quitté la Cour et tous ses emplois pour aller vivre paisiblement à la campagne, fit mettre ces mots sur sa

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Rousseau elevated to the time of  his true life, are the years in which the greatest part of the œuvre came into being, from the Lettre à d’Alembert and the Nou­ velle Héloïse to the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard to Du contrat social and Émile. But if the exposed formulation in the center of the Dixième invites a comparison with praise for the œuvre, the praise in the Dixième as a whole calls for comparison with the Cinquième. It induces one to return to the middle of the book, where Rousseau treats the happiness of his life with an intensity and exactitude that he never equaled either before or after. The sojourn on St. Peter’s Island from the fall of 1765, which he chose as his example, he calls, without restriction or reservation, “the happiest time of my life.” He adds that it was so happy, “it would have sufficed for me for my whole existence without the desire for another state arising for a single instant in my soul.”22 The time with Madame de Warens, the time in the Hermitage, the time on St. Peter’s Island, are three examples of Rousseau’s Beisichselbstsein. That Rousseau singles out various episodes through elicitations of praise that seem at first glance to be incompatible with one another has the purpose of making the reader aware that the Promeneur Solitaire in the most multifarious circumstances and in the most diverse phases of  his existence emphatically knows how to live, to be bei sich selbst, to be happy.23 The variable, contradictory, or overlapping information about the duration, beginning, and end of the “delirium” Rousseau was plunged into by his persecution apparently serves the same purpose.24 In fact, Rousseau explains in just so many words at the end of the Huitième promenade that the state of happiness he described in the Cinquième prom­ enade is his most constant state.25 The comparison to which the praise in the Dixième promenade induces us leads to a further, no less important result. The two episodes that the Dixième and the Cinquième have as their subject share in common that they precede by years and decades, respectively, the time of the Rêveries. What distinguishes them is the “great review” that took place

tombe: J’ai demeuré soixante et seize ans sur la terre, et j’en ai vecu sept. Voila ce que je puis dire à quelque egard, quoique mon sacrifice ait eté moindre. Je n’ai commencé de vivre que le 9 Avril 1756.” Lettres à Malesherbes III, p. 1138. For the historical source of Rousseau’s appeal to Similis under Trajan and his deviating memory of the pretorian prefect under Vespasian in the Dixième promenade, cf. John S. Spink ad locum. 22. V, 5 (1042). 23. Cf. II, 3 (1003). 24. Cf. I, 2 (995); I, 3 (996); I, 7 (997); II, 2 (1002); II, 3 (1003); II, 22 (1009); III, 1 (1011); VI, 11 (1055); VII, 6 (1062); VII, 15 (1065); VIII, 12 (1078). 25. VIII, 23 (1084). Consider II, 1 (1002) and II, 3 (1002–­3).

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between them. Rousseau treated both in detail within the œuvre. In the Rêveries the episode of  Les Charmettes presents the peak of happiness prior to the beginning of the philosophic life, and the episode on the Île de St. Pierre refers to the happiness of this very life. In the Dixième, Rousseau speaks of a bonheur pur et plein, in the Cinquième of a bonheur suffisant, parfait et plein. In Les Charmettes, Rousseau could not know why his happiness was not sufficient and not perfect.26 The line leading from love to the œuvre is not drawn out in the Rêveries. The tenth walk directs one’s gaze to the beginning and recalls the end without tracing the development of what lies in between. But it not only shows the beginning of the development. It names the principle. Rousseau early on incidentally pointed out to his reader that when “two facts are given as real,” if the history is lacking, the task of thinking is to establish their connection. Beyond the initial biographical constellation, to which the final promenade returns, what connects love to the œuvre? Evidently, the answer lies in the addressee, that is, in that addressee to whom Rousseau turns with the œuvre as a whole. This is the addressee who has an overview of the diverse conceptions Rousseau has worked out for diverse readers and who can correctly classify what the teacher of humanity presents to citizens, lovers, and moral men, respectively. This is the addressee who knows how to think the œuvre in its inner structure, and knows how to understand the œuvre from its underlying intention. In short, this is the addressee whom Rousseau determined from the outset as the primary or ultimate, in any case as the true addressee of the œuvre: the few “who know how to understand.” Translating into the three-­figure image of  the frontispiece Rousseau chose for the prelude of the œuvre, we must consider the youth on whose shoulder Prometheus lays his left hand and for whom he carries the fire in his right. We have to return to the Dialogues: Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques once more, which bring the œuvre to a close by treating definitively the question of diverse addressees, and in which the author puts Rousseau the reader before us as his ideal reader.27 In the allegory of the “monde idéal,” which Rousseau the reader offers at the outset of the Dialogues in order to get his interlocutor, the Frenchman, to understand that the author Jean-­Jacques appears to the Frenchman to be a “monster” because Jean-­Jacques belongs to a world alien to the Frenchman that will always remain closed, Rousseau comes to speak explicitly about why someone belonging to that world becomes an author. The allegory, which 26. X, 22 (1099) and V, 14 (1046). Cf. V, 12 last sentence and V, 15 last sentence. 27. See Chapter I, Pp. 5–­7 and 27ff., 44–­45.

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treats the problem of the philosopher among nonphilosophers in a complex manner, ends with a discussion of what is able to motivate the “inhabitants of the ideal world” to write books and to publish them. Rousseau mentions four reasons that could motivate his “superlunary beings,” who follow their amour de soi and care about their fundamental independence, to write and publish books, for they would never make a profession of writing. “Interest” and “even glory” would not supply a sufficient motive,28 but very much so (1) “a felicitous discovery to publicize”; (2) “a beautiful and great truth to share,” which in contrast to a lucky, surprising, and felicitous discovery, might be an ancient truth, only to be presented anew or in a new way; (3) “a general and pernicious error to combat”; (4) “finally, some matter of public utility to establish.” These are “the only motives that can bring them to take up the pen; and even then the ideas must be new enough, beautiful enough, striking enough to put their zeal in effervescence and force it to express itself.”29 Rousseau the reader, who seeks to show and protect Jean-­Jacques the author in his uniqueness, wants to convince his interlocutor that there is one thing the “inhabitants of the ideal world” are not: authors who write to make a living. No less than three times he stresses that for them being an author is not a métier. It is an accident of their manière d’être, something ephemeral in regard to their nature, something secondary by contrast with their primary activity, which distinguishes them and makes them unique. Rousseau’s remarkable catalogue thus leaves the impression that their writing amounts to, as it were, discrete interventions or isolated undertakings that stand alone. In fact, the context is presupposed. The inhabitants know themselves in their belongingness to the ideal world and are in a constant exchange. To produce an œuvre, by contrast, goes decisively beyond a communication of this discovery or that insight. It requires above all creating a context. Constructive energy belongs to the œuvre, an architectonic overview, a center that founds its unity. It makes the question concerning the author’s intention and the appropriate understanding of the reader urgent. The reasons Rousseau names might suffice to explain why the “uniquely constituted beings” of the “ideal world” take up the pen. They do not suffice to explain why Jean-­Jacques the author devoted a great part of his life to his œuvre. And none of those reasons answers the question why the author of the œuvre might want his intention to be understood by the few who know how to understand. What is most remarkable about the catalogue of the 28. Cf. Du contrat social II, 7, 1, p. 381 and Chapter V, Pp. 173–74 with Footnote 112. 29. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, “le monde idéal,” the eleventh and last paragraph, p. 673.

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four motivating reasons is the fact that the most profound reason is missing. It is not spoken about as part of the doctrinal content. It is not a fifth reason that could be added to the four cited reasons on the same level. The most profound reason is submerged in the action of the dialogue. The reader must discover it himself, raise it to the surface, name it. In the digression of the first dialogue, into which Rousseau places the key words of the opening of the Rêv­ eries, “alone on earth,” Rousseau the reader confesses that he was alone until he found himself again in the writings of  Jean-­Jacques the author.30 For Rousseau, who finds himself in the writings of  Jean-­Jacques, this means that he is no longer alone, since he discerns in Jean-­Jacques a kindred nature, who by his writing made possible precisely Rousseau’s self-­discovery and recognition, the experience of understanding and of not being alone. From the author’s perspective, it means conversely: Jean-­Jacques writes in order to be understood by Rousseau. He wants to put Rousseau in the position to understand himself and to find himself again in Jean-­Jacques. For the Rêveries, which proclaim the unity of author and reader, this follows: Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, who communicates in the Rêveries that he now writes only for himself, is no longer alone at that moment in which he anticipates the reader who understands that the Rêveries are written for him. Still, let us return to the œuvre, which is directed to diverse addressees. It pertains to what we are discussing, namely, the erotic relationship of  knowing-­ oneself-­in-­another and finding-­oneself-­again, that the author can predict the experiences of the reader, experiences he has had and recognized as necessary or felt as felicitous and that, since experiences cannot be taught, he communicates to the reader in such a way that the reader is able to have them himself. Here is the most profound justification for the art of exoteric-­esoteric writing, of which Rousseau availed himself from the Discours sur les sciences et les arts on and in which he achieved mastery in his work on the œuvre. For this art not only permits one to have diverse addressees understand different things. It opens to the philosophic addressee the possibility of experiences that no philosophic doctrinal content can convey: There is no other way for the philosophic addressee to find out what the author has thought about a subject matter he treats than to engage wholly with the movement of thought that underlies the exoteric-­esoteric presentation. He must respond to the art of careful writing with the art of careful reading, and starting from the given work, 30. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques I, pp. 728–­29. See Chapter I, Pp. 31–­33 and Chapter III, Pp. 93–­94.

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which demands his full attention to the rhetorical details as well as to the internally structured whole, move back to the question of the author’s intention and employ his own powers in order to be adequate to the philosophic activity that has found its precipitate in the work without being absorbed or at one with it. The philosophically inspired art of writing thus does not have solely the task of  protecting within the limits of the possible the political community from philosophy and philosophy from the political community. It especially serves the purpose of leading those who are capable of it to philosophy and of accompanying them in philosophy, not in the sense of exhorting them to philosophy, but instead as a challenge to and testing of their specific potential. Philosophers who practice the art of careful writing, whatever their differences in the doctrinal contents of their published works, agree that the philosophic life is good. If they did not understand it as good for themselves and for kindred natures, they would not in full awareness lead by their works to that life, being uncertain whether future philosophers will agree with their teachings or contradict them. The wish of the author to be understood by the true addressee of the œuvre attests to the same fundamental experience and is confirmed by an analogous reflection. Rousseau would not want to be understood by the youth whom the etching of the Discours places in the middle, if  he harbored doubts whether this understanding, this finding-­oneself-­again in the confrontation with the œuvre, is good for his ideal reader. Love is a sufficient motive for the œuvre of the philosopher. Unlike glory, love stays with the author. The profit from love remains with the lover regardless of whether the œuvre will yield glory. In comparison with the striving for glory, love is not at a disadvantage regarding the intensity it sets free or the disciplining effect that starts from it, the care it maintains or the concentration it promotes. But above all, the author who is determined by his philosophic eros and the reader for whom the author determines the œuvre come together in their love for truth, for learning, for knowledge. They share a common good. And this common good opens a common space in which the separations of time are suspended, past and future fluid and collected: interlaced in thinking and feeling. Rousseau calls this shared space “the ideal world.” Its inhabitants recognize one another, as we have seen, with a sign that is characteristic for those who gain access to the common space and know how to move within it. The sign is visible in their whole mode of  being; it can be read off from their conduct of life as well as from their works; and it is not dependent on the time in which they exist. He who belongs to the “ideal world” is not subservient to his age, is not bound historically concerning what is most important. The

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“ideal world” rests not on the fusion of historical horizons, but rather on the encounter of kindred natures. Their exchange is carried out in timeless si­ multaneity.31 It is supported by the unanimity of the fundamental experiences. It is inspired by the desire to make plain the insights of the other “inhabitants of the ideal world” and to expose one’s own insights to their judgment. It is maintained by the restless interest in the truth, an interest that remains in motion both forward and backward, following the force of argument that affects both sides. Thus, in the evening Machiavelli, royally attired, invites the “antiqui huomini” into his study, in order to gain from his conversation with them the only food that suits him and for which he was born.32 And Rousseau goes to the school of Athens in order to present to those of his own kind the philosophic speech he addresses to man, and to hear what they have to say to it.33 31. In the second Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung Nietzsche speaks about “individuals who form a kind of bridge over the wild stream of becoming” and live in “timeless simultaneity” “thanks to history, which allows for such cooperation”; “they live as the republic of geniuses, of  which Schopenhauer speaks somewhere.” Individuals live in timeless simultaneity insofar as they are inspired in turn “to the production of what is great” by the great individuals of the past, who are made present by the monumental consideration of history. Schopenhauer, who in his last work will make Rousseau’s motto, Vitam impendere vero, his own, using it as an epigraph, says about the republic of geniuses: “In this it goes as follows:—­one giant calls out to another across the bleak interval of centuries, without the world of dwarfs, creeping along below, perceiving any more than noise and without understanding any more than that something is happening: and again, this tribe of dwarfs below ceaselessly pulls its pranks and makes a lot of noise, drags along what those giants have let fall from above, proclaims heroes who are themselves dwarfs, and more of the same, which leaves those giant minds undisturbed, to continue their elevated conversation of spirits. I mean: each genius understands what those of  his kind once said, without being understood by the living, either contemporary or during the interval, and he says what those he lives among do not understand, but which someday his equal will appreciate and answer.” The agreement with Rousseau is obvious. Still, there are differences. Unlike Rousseau’s “inhabitants of the ideal world,” Schopenhauer’s “giants,” to judge by this short text, remain in their historical location. And neither Schopenhauer’s geniuses nor Nietzsche’s individuals are more specifically determined or more precisely identified by un signe caractéristique. Despite all his dissatisfactions with historicism, Schopenhauer’s speech about the conversation of spirits among the geniuses, which impressed the young Nietzsche on his way to philosophy, does not rise to the concise reply Rousseau gave to historicism in his allegory of  the world of the philosophers. See Arthur Schopenhauer, Der handschriftliche Nachlaß, vol. 3: Berliner Manuskripte (1818–­1830), ed. Arthur Hübscher (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), p. 188. Friedrich Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben IX, 6; KGW III, 1, p. 313; KSA 1, p. 317. 32. Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, Florence, December 10, 1513, in Opere VI, Let­ tere, ed. Franco Gaeta (Milan, 1961), p. 304. 33. Discours sur l’inégalité, Exorde, pp. 72–­74. See Chapter III, Pp. 82–­83.

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That glory is not a sufficient reason to motivate the philosopher of the “ideal world” to write in the most demanding sense does not mean that glory should be neglected. Whoever “wants to live beyond his century” in order to reach the philosophers of the future34 cannot be entirely indifferent to his glory. For an author who expends considerable energy and ingenuity to work out an œuvre that speaks to diverse addressees, this is all the more true. A minimum of public visibility is the gateway to the attention also of those to whom the œuvre is primarily addressed and who do not yet count as “inhabitants of the ideal world.” And even for those inhabitants the principles of an economy of attention remain in force. It is no accident that when speaking in the Dialogues about “fatal celebrity,” for which Jean-­Jacques felt no need at all and which was not made for him, Rousseau mentions at least one gain from his celebrity: The “unfortunate question of the Academy” threw his soul into the “lively effervescence” that is able to compel the “superlunary beings” to the publication of books;35 from this arose his œuvre, which demanded the most extreme concentration from him; “he learned to meditate profoundly, and for a time he astounded Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw only eloquence and wit, but in which those who occupy our ethereal regions joyfully recognized one of their own.”36 As little as la gloire, which he was able to earn with les âmes vulgaires, might have mattered to Jean-­Jacques, the sensation caused by the œuvre proved no less helpful for Rousseau, i.e., for reaching the true addressee. The glory the author can reap with the œuvre in the “régions éthérées” depends upon whether it contains a significant discovery or opens up an entrance to truth worth considering, whether it effectively opposes a general and pernicious error or increases public utility. Last but not least, the relationship between his glory and the œuvre must be considered. In the long run the contribution to the common good is determinative for glory. The author enters a competition by means of  his œuvre. He compares himself with others, interprets them, draws on them, deviates from them, falls behind them, outstrips them. The agreement about what is most important, the way of life common to the inhabitants of the “monde idéal,” does not contradict the agonal character of their exchange. However, it gives the struggle for recognition that takes place there its peculiar stamp of seriousness and playfulness. Its seriousness lies in the fact that the agon is about the truth. It remains play insofar as the individual’s glory does no harm to the common good. 34. Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 3. See Chapter I, P. 21. 35. Cf. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, p. 829 and “le monde idéal” 11, p. 673. See P. 189. 36. Rousseau juge de Jean-­Jacques II, pp. 827–­29.

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Philosophic eros provides entrée to the “ideal world.” It does not have to have a precipitate in an œuvre or be expressed in a writing. Yet if the inhabi­ tant of that world involves himself in an œuvre, along with love recognition plays a role. What share is due to love, what share to striving for recognition, is a question of the self-­knowledge of the author. Bringing together in love the love for kindred natures, the love for knowledge, the love for oneself in order to place it in opposition to the struggle for glory and recognition, puts the accent on the main issue. The opposition goes back to the distinction between amour de soi and amour-­propre, which Rousseau introduced as an analytical distinction for purposes of self-­knowledge. As an homme de la nature éclairé par la raison, Rousseau remains oriented toward amour de soi-­même. As an author he has according to his own judgment a prodigious amour-­propre.37 In the œuvre, the two, amour de soi and amour-­propre, encounter one another. If  Jean-­Jacques Rousseau can say yes to the œuvre, since it contributed to his having come to be what he is according to his nature, he can in the end say yes to the amour-­propre of the author, insofar as amour-­propre was governed by amour de soi, put into service by the latter, and consequently brought back into the “order of nature.” But the distinction with which he creates distance from himself and his œuvre is necessarily prior to the yea-­saying of the philosopher. The questioning gives content and significance to his affirmation.38 In his self-­ consideration of  what is owed to love and what to striving for glory, it is not purity of the heart that matters. He gives an account of his reasons. He tries to gain clarity about himself. He examines the deviation from himself  in view of the return to himself. His self-­investigation is the expression of his love of himself.

37. VIII, 16 (1079). Consider Discours sur l’inégalité, Seconde partie, p. 256 and commentary ad locum. 38. Cf. Chapter IV, Pp. 117–18.

Chapter 7

Self-­Knowledge

The Promeneur Solitaire’s Beisichselbstsein is essentially the return to himself. It is bound to the movement of self-­knowledge, which presupposes a distancing from oneself or an Außersichsein. It is a state of being collected, in a feeling and thinking that has gone through and has been able to pass the “test of reflection.” Rousseau’s Beisichselbstsein is mediated by the confrontation with faith, by the knowledge of politics, by the contemplation of nature, by the experience of love. Rousseau made politics and faith, nature and love, into the great themes of his œuvre. They return in the Rêveries as objects of his self-­ knowledge. And now, the œuvre having been completed, the relationship between self-­knowledge and Beisichselbstsein becomes a theme in its own right. Rousseau uses two promenades to investigate the interplay of  Beisichselbstsein and self-­knowledge in the philosophic life. The Première presents an insistent attempt at clarification, which is taken up again in the Huitième and undergoes a decisive turn. The twofold presentation makes conspicuous the deepening inherent in the movement of self-­knowledge. And since the decisive turn is achieved by recourse to the distinction between amour de soi and amour-­ propre, a crucial conception of his doctrinal edifice, the second execution of the theme points back to the œuvre, which Rousseau thought through and brought to fruition during the course of a quarter of a century. In having done so, in having treated a central question of his self-­knowledge in the center of his philosophy, Rousseau does not stand alone.1 1. See Nietzsche, Ecce homo. Wie man wird, was man ist  I, 6; consider Vorrede, 3, I, 3 and II, 10; KGW  VI, 3, pp. 271, 256–­57, 265, 293–­295.

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Rousseau introduces the question of self-­knowledge in the first paragraph of  the first walk. The seventh sentence of the book envisages a questioner who, separated from men and the order of things, is left entirely on his own: “But I, detached from them and from everything, what am I? That is what remains for me to seek.” Rousseau chooses as radical a formulation as conceivable. However, unlike many a philosopher before and after him, he is attentive to a social contextualization of the question. He does not begin with the question, but introduces it politically. He concerns himself with the question because the unique position in which he finds himself compels him to it. He follows no inner drive, but instead bows to external coercion. When he turns back upon himself, he acts with the right of one to whom it is forbidden to do good for others, for whom the only option remaining open is the investigation of himself, the concern with his own good. Without delay, the author follows the clarion call of the opening, from which the reader can continually find new gains in the course of his perusal of the Rêveries—­“I am thus now alone on earth, no longer having any brother, any neighbor, any friend, any society but myself ”—­with the emphatic assurance of his sociability and philanthropy: “The most sociable and the most loving of men has been proscribed from society by a unanimous agreement.” He adds that men violently broke the bonds that bound him to them. He would have loved them nonetheless. Only when they ceased to be human beings could they remove themselves from his affection. “They are now strangers, unknowns, in short, nonentities to me because that is what they wanted.” After he has shown the human justification for his undertaking, the sixty-­four-­year-­old can begin an investigation for which he had been preparing his entire life,2 and to which, with the Discours sur l’inégalité, he had directed his philosophically most groundbreaking and rhetorically most sophisticated work. The political introduction of the self-­knowledge of the Promeneur Solitaire is in itself an eloquent expression of Rousseau’s self-­knowledge.3 No philosopher is born entirely on his own, immediately separated from men and their opinions about the order of things, “detached from them and from everything.” To arrive at the starting point of his investigation, “to get from them to me,” Rousseau first has his detachment pass in review as a social 2. The appeal to self-­knowledge can already be found in the writings that precede the œuvre. For instance, with respect to the body, in the first paragraph of the Institutions chimiques (ed. Bernardi and Bensaude-­Vincent, p. 9). 3. The second sentence of the beginning of the introduction might remind the reader of  Aristotle and Plato: “Le plus sociable et le plus aimant des humains . . .” Descartes’s starting point is reached in the seventh sentence: “Mais moi, détaché d’eux et de tout, que suis-­je moi-­même?”

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drama in space and time. He dresses up his return to himself in the garb of a story of alienation and rejection, of disorientation and reorientation, of loss of all certainty and eventual recovery of tranquillity. Before he can speak about his happiness, “unfortunately” he has to speak about the condition in which he has found himself, as he says, “for fifteen years and more,” and which still appears to him like “a dream,”4 as if without knowing it he had “made a jump from wakefulness to sleep or rather from life to death.” Rousseau pulls out all the stops to highlight the “strange position” he has been put in owing to his exclusion from society. “Dragged, I know not how, out of the order of things, I have seen myself cast into an incomprehensible chaos where I distinguish nothing at all; and the more I think about my present situation the less I can understand where I am.” The “incomprehensible chaos” into which persecution cast him was intensified by the “delirium” in which his revolt against his persecutors held him prisoner for “no less than ten years.” It is “not yet two months ago,” he confides, that “a complete calm was reestablished” in his heart. The look back at his Außersichsein, which is marked by two temporal specifications—­for more than fifteen years and less than two months ago 5  —­does not report that he tried to assure himself of his identity, which he saw so vehemently put into question by his enemies: “I, the same man I was, the same that I still am, would without the slightest doubt pass for and be taken as a monster, a poisoner, an assassin.” Instead, he takes himself to task for his indignation over the injustice done to him, for the errors, mistakes, folly it made him commit, for the vain effort to struggle against the “masters of my destiny,” which entangled him in a constant dependence. Indignation kept him from his Beisichselbstsein. It did not accord with his own good. The vanishing point of Rousseau’s critique of indignation is tranquillité, which he introduces in the fourth paragraph of the Première promenade as “compensation for all my hurts” and about which he says that it was bestowed upon him once he resigned himself to his destiny “without rebelling against necessity any longer.” Just as Rousseau passes off the first mention of tranquillity, the central theme of the Première, as “compensation,” he will likewise in the Cinquième, after 4. The first of the two uses of  “rêve” in the Rêveries has a negative connotation. Rousseau’s dream is construed as a nightmare in the following sentence: “ Je m’imagine toujours qu’une indigestion me tourmente, que je dors d’un mauvais sommeil, et que je vais me réveiller bien soulagé de ma peine en me retrouvant avec mes amis.” I, 2 (995). For the use of “rêves” in VII, 1 (1060), see Chapter III, Pp. 77–­80. 5. The two temporal specifications open paragraphs 2 and 7, respectively (995 and 997), whereby the first (“Depuis quinze ans et plus”) is modified in paragraph 3: “un délire qui n’a pas eu trop de dix ans pour se calmer” (996). Consider Chapter VI, P. 187 with Footnote 24.

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the peak of the book has been reached, pass off supreme felicity in its sole mention as “compensation,”6 and both times, guarding him against envy and resentment, he lets his action be determined by a moderation that attests to his self-­knowledge.7 Next to the affects of sociable man, hope and fear are most opposed to tranquillity. In his look back as well as in the ensuing reflection on his return to himself, Rousseau concentrates on these two affects. The treatment of them is of particular importance for his attitude toward death, within whose horizon the first three walks take place, just as for the belief in life after death, which he speaks about in the third walk. According to the presentation of his look back, the persecutors contributed significantly to his tranquillity, since they freed him from the affects of hope and fear. His persecutors made his misery so complete that there remained for him nothing to hope for or fear. They did not have the “cleverness” to leave him with that “glimmer of hope” that would have made him permanently their “plaything,” with which they could have lured him and continually tormented him anew. They deployed so excessively the means available to them to pursue his social ostracism that “all human power aided by all the tricks of Hell” could not worsen his situation.8 Since there is no prospect of  improvement and in the future nothing more can frighten him, he is “freed from any new fear and delivered from the turmoil induced by hope.” As he did formerly with overcoming the affect of indignation, Rousseau puts the accent entirely on the fatality of external circumstances. He seems to attribute the recovery of  his tranquillité to the blind action of a third party and to persist himself essentially in passivity. But Rousseau’s presentation is not exhausted by what he says. It shows more than he expresses. The hyperbolic rhetoric of the description of  his misery and of the appeal to his fate cannot belie the fact that what he conceives as his fate remains with Rousseau, that he decides when and in what sense his misery is “complete,” and that it is up to him to discern the necessity he must acknowledge sub specie boni sui. The critique of his indignation is due to his insight. And again it is his insight that makes him master of the affects of hope and fear, when he does become master of his hope and his fear. With 6. I, 4 (996); V, 15 and 16 (1047); see also II, 3 (1002). 7. “L’aspect d’un homme heureux inspire aux autres moins d’amour que d’envie; on l’accuseroit volontiers d’usurper un droit qu’il n’a pas en se faisant un bonheur exclusif, et l’amour-­propre souffre encore, en nous faisant sentir que cet homme n’a nul besoin de nous.” Émile IV, p. 503; consider pp. 506–­7. 8. “La diffamation, la depression, la dérision, l’opprobre dont ils m’ont couvert ne sont pas plus susceptibles d’augmentation que d’adoucissement; nous sommes également hors d’état, eux de les aggraver et moi de m’y soustraire.” I, 5 (996–­97).

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the example of his imagination, which in its first appearance in the Rêveries Rousseau connects with his Außersichsein, he demonstrates how much the affects can be fueled by fantasy, by speculations about an unknown state and illusions of a future terror, and consequently, restrained by the sobriety of knowledge.9 Rousseau’s persecutors are so far from determining the measure of  his affects that they do not even possess the “cleverness” to harness them for their purposes. When he says about the persecutors: “in leaving me nothing, they deprived themselves of everything,” i.e., they have robbed themselves of all power over him, he is saying, in other words, that they lack knowledge of the human soul, which he has. The superiority of his knowledge puts him in the position to avail himself  of  his persecutors as the basis for his ataraxia. He is the one who procures “the good” for himself, of which he says that they did it for him. Conscious of the superiority of his knowledge, he can mock them “henceforth” instead of becoming indignant at them. “Ils se sont otés sur moi tout empire, et je puis desormais me moquer d’eux.”10 The look back at the time of  his Außersichsein comes to an end in the most recent past: “Not yet two months ago, complete calm was reestablished in my heart.” We now learn that while Rousseau has no longer feared anything “for a long time,” he had nevertheless still continued to hope, although his persecutors left him with not even a glimmer of hope. The hope he harbored until a few weeks ago brought with it “a thousand diverse passions.” Apparently, it is much harder to free oneself from hope than from fear, and at the same time this liberation is much more important for tranquillity. The “weak ray of hope” Rousseau had retained was extinguished by “an event as sad as it was unforeseen.” We do not learn what event occasioned his résignation, to which in the middle of the look back, before he entered into the discussion of the affects of hope and fear, he attributed by anticipation his recovered tranquillité.11 We may assume that the specific details do not affect the issue. By contrast, what is germane to the issue is that the hope from which Rousseau was freed was dependent upon external events that might or might not occur, and that the knowledge of the liberation is bound up with the recollection of the discrete point in time at which it took place. The external event Rousseau places at the conclusion of the narrative of  his detachment corresponds to the “strange 9. Cf. Chapter III, Pp. 96–­97 and Chapter IV, Pp. 133–­34. 10. I, 1–­6 (995–­97). 11. The narrative arrives at the “résignation,” to which Rousseau referred in the last sentence of paragraph 4, in the last sentence of paragraph 7: “Dès lors je me suis résigné sans reserve et j’ai retrouvé la paix.”

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revolution” with which he let the narrative begin. In contrast to the “great revolution” that stands at the beginning of the philosophic life in the Troisième promenade, the “strange revolution” was set to work not by Rousseau for himself, but by others against him, and while the former revolution created the order he wanted to give himself, the latter plunged him into a “chaos” from which he had to extricate himself. Despite the opposition separating them, the revolution he carried out and the revolution that befell him have in common that they mark two paths that lead to Rousseau’s Beisichselbstsein. The contingent event that at the end of his narrative moved Rousseau to turn away from hope for external success or foreign favor stands in for the most diverse circumstances, encounters, hardships, which yield for him in what is most important one and the same result. Rousseau immediately follows his look back with a reflection that goes through the detachment once more and, going even further in the repetition, puts the accent on his inner attitude.12 He now reports that as soon as he discerned the enmity against him “in its whole extent,” he gave up “forever” the idea of being able to win back the public during his lifetime. In addition, he makes it understood that contempt for his contemporaries helped him to cast himself off and to rid himself of his affective dependence on them. Finally, he indicates that it was not “complete” misery that enabled him to detach himself, but the happiness he experienced in his solitude: “I am a hundred times happier in my solitude than I could ever be living among them.”13 Rousseau confirms that he is finished with his contemporaries: “my contemporaries will never mean anything to me.” But to make oneself independent of the opinions of one’s time and of the judgment of the living is one thing. To bid farewell to one’s own posthumous life is quite another. Especially since the orientation toward posterity is able to support independence from one’s own time.14 In the second step of his reflection, Rousseau construes caring about his posthumous life as the ultimate source of his Außersichsein. The hope he maintained until the occurrence of the “event as sad as it was unforeseen” was the hope for a “better generation,” which “would finally see me as I am.” This hope, he says, 12. Paragraph 8 “repeats” in a certain way paragraph 6, paragraph 9 paragraph 5, para­ graph 11 paragraph 4, and paragraph 12 “returns” to paragraph 1. 13. I, 8 (998). The first passage in the Rêveries in which Rousseau speaks of his solitude is the first passage in which he speaks of  being happy. “Heureux” and “solitude” appear only this once in the Première promenade, and they stand at its center. Almost fifteen years earlier Rousseau publicly stated in the Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont: “Je n’ai pas toujours eu le Bonheur de vivre seul” (p. 963). 14. See Chapter I, P. 21.

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made him write his Dialogues, the book that conceives of the ideal reader and seeks to prepare the ground for the intended reception of the œuvre. The mention of the Dialogues broaches for the first time the theme of the relationship to the œuvre, a preeminent object of self-­knowledge in the Rêveries. Right at the beginning, Rousseau poses the question that has to be asked at the end: How can the author, once the œuvre has been completed, free himself from its future success or failure? Or: detached from the œuvre, what is he himself ? To ensure that the œuvre would be transmitted to posterity in its integral shape, complete and unaltered, Rousseau lost himself “in a thousand foolish attempts.”15 The hope of reaching a “better generation” in the future put him, according to his self-­criticism, in a state of agitation no less than when he had kept his hope within the bounds of  “the century.” He remained the “plaything of the men of today.” Only turning away from caring about his posthumous life has opened up the prospect, “fortunately early enough” before his death, of 15. Rousseau’s worry was that his manuscripts could fall into the wrong hands and could be destroyed or used for forgeries. This was a worry not only about the manuscripts of books, above all the Dialogues and the Confessions, whose publication it was not granted to him to see during his lifetime, but also the extensive posthumous works, bundles of writings, drafts, fragments, and letters, which he had to deposit in various places during his escape through Europe. Rousseau’s imagination was easily inflamed by the forgeries he witnessed. Thus, the Paris publisher of Émile, Néaulme, entrusted Pastor Jean-­Henri-­Samuel Formey with an Emile chrétien, consacré à l’utilité publique, about which Formey reported decades later: “Je substituai à la confession du vicaire savoyard un morceau où la doctrine contraire étoit exposée.” In a letter dated January 8, 1763, to his Amsterdam publisher, Marc-­Michel Rey, Rousseau addresses Formey’s undertaking (“une entreprise inouïe jusqu’ici dans la litterature, de S’emparer de mon vivant de mon propre bien, pour l’estropier et le défigurer”), and refers Rey to an apocryphal writing that was added to a pirated edition of Du contrat social: “Vous savez sans doute qu’on a fourré sous mon nom dans une édition contrefaite du Contract social une lettre à laquelle je n’ai aucune part et que je n’ai même jamais vue. On fait aussi courir je ne sais combien de lettres manuscrites qu’on m’attribue, et qui sont ou supposées ou falsifiées par mes ennemis au point d’être méconnoissables” (CC XV, p. 16 and n. c). The text, which appeared not only in one but in at least a half  dozen editions of the Contrat social with the false information “A Amsterdam, Chez Marc Michel Rey, MDCCLXII,” had the title “Lettre de J. J. Rousseau de Genève, Qui contient sa rénonciation à la Société Civile, et ses derniers adieux aux Hommes, adressée au seul Ami qui lui reste dans le monde.” It was signed, “ J. J. ROUSSEAU, jusqu’à ce jour homme civilisé, et Citoyen de Genève, mais à present ORANG-­OUTANG. Donnée la . . . année de mon âge à l’entrée de la Forêt noire, qui est au pied du Mont-­Jura près des Alpes.” I have in my possession an edition of the Contrat social with the “Lettre” falsely attributed to Rousseau, in which on the title page the vignette of the original, which shows an allegory of  Freedom, is replaced by an im­ age of  Nero with laurel wreath and lyre that has Rousseau dedicating the Contrat social to Nero who is glorified as “Apollo.”

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“an interval of complete calm and absolute rest.” Almost daily, he sees the correctness of his turning away confirmed by “new reflections.” Rousseau mentions the thought, which is not tied to any contingent event and for which there is no counterpart in the earlier look back, that while the individual persecutors will die, the “collective bodies” will carry on his persecution. The institutions and organizations of the enemies will fight him in their “immortal” hatred even after his death. Thus, he is able to convince himself that the radical re­nuncia­ tion of caring about his posthumous life is the presupposition for preserving the tranquillity in which he, without hope or fear regarding others or exter­nal events, can be bei sich, serene, unmoved, equanimous, “like God himself.”16 After the double presentation of his detachment, which conforms to the polarity between the perspective of  Everyman and the emphasis on singularity, Rousseau arrives at the starting point of the Rêveries. He can “henceforth” separate himself from everything external, from everything that does not belong to him and leaves him outside himself.17 He will dedicate his “last days” to studying himself. He will reflect on his “inner dispositions,” and if he succeeds in putting them in a “better order,” his meditations will “not be entirely useless.” Indeed, he knows from long experience—­the reflection on his return to tranquillity has once again invoked it—­that his self-­reflection works to his own good. He will give himself over “entirely to the sweetness” of conducting a dialogue with his soul. It is “the only thing” men cannot steal from him, and he finds in his soul everything that he needs: consolation that no one needs to offer him, peace that only he himself could destroy, hope that does not make him dependent on others, since it is focused on his own capabilities and based upon his own nature in which his gratitude has its addressee. He wants to be concerned with nothing but himself, and with what the activities distinguishing him can take in or bring forth. By writing them down, he wants to preserve the “charming contemplations” that have often filled his daily walks, in order to enjoy them anew when he rereads them. He wants to keep a “shapeless diary” of his rêveries, from which he promises himself  “a new understanding of my natural temperament and disposition” through the knowledge of “the 16. I, 8–­11 (997–­99). See Chapter II, Pp. 63–­65 and Chapter III, Pp. 83–­84. 17. “Tout ce qui m’est extérieur m’est étranger desormais. Je n’ai plus en ce monde ni prochain, ni semblables, ni fréres. Je suis sur la terre comme dans une planette étrangére où je serois tombé de celle que j’habitois.” I, 12 (999). In agreement with the rhetoric of the first walk, which presents as just beginning what for Rousseau has been reality for a long time, the Première promenade shows the greatest frequency of “desormais” in the Rêveries (seven out of sixteen instances altogether): I, 6, 8 (twice), 12, 13, 15 (twice).

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feelings and thoughts that constitute the daily fodder of my mind in the strange state I am in.” Finally, he wants to “consecrate” his “last moments of leisure” to the examination of  “such a singular situation,” which “surely deserves to be examined and described,” and for this purpose, like the physicists who seek to know the changes in the air, he wants to apply “the barometer” to his soul in order to give an account of its modifications and their sequence. What should gain entry into the Rêveries is what to Rousseau is most important in his life, what fulfills it and what makes it distinctive. The Rêveries will revolve around his Beisichselbstsein, note his deviations from himself and confirm his return to himself. They will promote his self-­knowledge. And what they examine and describe, disclose and show, will be of significance not only for Rousseau. Nevertheless, Rousseau says that he writes the Rêveries only for himself.18 He is determined solely by his own good. When he later reads them, they will not only make present the rêveries that moved him earlier and preceded the writing. They will also remind him of the “sweetness” he felt as he wrote. Reading them will resurrect the past and “so to speak double” his existence: “In spite of  men, I will still be able to enjoy the charm of society; and decrepit, I will live with myself in another age as if I were living with a younger friend.” With the Rêveries Rousseau creates for himself an entirely distinctive society. He writes a younger friend into existence for himself.19 The conclusion of the Première promenade makes the serenity that results or should result from self-­knowledge palpable in the altered attitude toward the œuvre. Rousseau looks back at the “constant anxiety” that dogged him as he composed the final writings of the œuvre, the Dialogues and the Confessions, published only posthumously, which he calls, arousing a misleading

18. “ Je fais la même entreprise que Montagne, mais avec un but tout contraire au sien: car il n’écrivoit ses essais que pour les autres, et je n’écris mes rêveries que pour moi.” I, 14 (1001). The editors of the Rêveries could have reproduced the passage as “je n’écris mes Rêveries que pour moi” with the same right with which they write “mes Dialogues” three times in paragraphs 9 and 15 and “mes Confessions” three times in paragraphs 12, 13, and 15. For “mes dialogues” (or once “mes Dialogues”), “mes confessions,” and “mes rêveries” are found in the manuscript, a mode of writing retained only in the edition of  John S. Spink. The same holds for the analogous passage VIII, 23 (1084), Rousseau’s final use of  “rêveries”: “ J’ai décrit cet etat dans une de mes Rêveries.” 19. I, 12–­14 (999–­1001). The concepts, expressed in plural form, méditations, contemplations, rêveries, sentiments, and pensées are introduced in paragraphs 12 and 13 in this sequence. Réflexions preceded them in paragraph 10.

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expectation, his “first” Confessions.20 “I wrote my first Confessions and my Dialogues in constant anxiety about ways to keep them from the rapacious hands of my persecutors in order to transmit them, if it were possible, to other generations.” With the writing to which he now turns his attention things are different: “With this writing, the same worry no longer torments me.” That with the Rêveries Rousseau is no longer plagued by the same worry as in the case of the Confessions and the Dialogues, which he wrote not only for himself but with an eye to the political effect they would unleash in the future, implies first that the Rêveries no longer belong to the œuvre. Yet Rousseau’s new serenity is not limited to his decision not to continue the œuvre. There would be no necessity to continue, since the œuvre has already been fashioned into a whole. The serenity to which his self-­knowledge counsels him explicitly concerns also those writings that have filled him with “constant anxiety.” It concerns his relationship to the œuvre in the strict sense, which he determines anew: “The desire to be better understood by men has been extinguished in my heart, only profound indifference remains about the fate of my true writings and of the monuments to my innocence, which perhaps have already all been forever destroyed.” Rousseau has freed himself from hope, he no longer even has the desire to correct the judgment “men” have made about him. The expectation of being known and understood by the “superlunary beings” as one of their own he can safely leave unmentioned, since it is not at all detrimental to his Beisichselbstsein.21 Rousseau’s perhaps in his consideration that the “monuments” to his innocence “perhaps have already all been forever destroyed” indicates most clearly the equanimity that is due to his self-­knowledge. This new equanimity does not rest on resignation in the face of blind fatality, that the manuscripts of the Confessions and the Dialogues were destroyed. The peut-­être would leave sufficient room for the fear that the persecutors could seize the writings in order to destroy them, and for the hope that precisely this 20. First Rousseau said that in the Rêveries he would “take up again the severe and sincere examination” he “formerly called my Confessions.” He then suggested that the Rêveries could be seen as “an appendix to my Confessions,“ for which, however, he would no longer use this title, since he has nothing more to say that would deserve using it. The reference to “first Confessions,” suggesting that new or other Confessions would follow them, comes at the beginning of a paragraph that leaves no doubt that the Rêveries will be precisely not that: a continuation of the Confessions or an appendix to them. The Rêveries are distinguished from the Confessions, a work that already bears its social relation in its title, as fundamentally as conceivable: in its intention, its addressee, and in the subject matter treated in it. I, 12 (999); 13 (1000); 15 (1001). See Chap­ ter I, Pp. 18–­19 and 45. 21. See Chapter I, Pp. 28 and 40 and Chapter VI, P. 194.

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could still be avoided. The imperturbability with which the Première promenade comes to its close rests on the insight that it is good for Rousseau to master the affects of fear and hope. He knows that his ataraxia is not compatible with his dependence on the fate of his œuvre.22 L’Œuvre est fini. But as for the Rêveries, Rousseau, “detached from men and from everything,” will neither hide nor show them. “If they take them away from me while I am living, they will not take away from me the pleasure of having written them, nor the recollection of their content, nor the solitary meditations whose fruit they are and whose source can be extinguished only when my soul is.” When Rousseau writes the Rêveries he is wholly bei sich. They do not fill him with any anxiety that distances him from himself, since they are “un bienfait purement gratuit.” They cannot be taken from him any more than can the méditations solitaires to which they owe their existence. They arise from the activity that is not extinguished in him until his soul dies. And as the Première promenade shows, Rousseau’s tranquillité  23 is founded upon the same activity, upon meditation in solitude, which his persecutors “henceforth” can no longer disturb: “let them enjoy my disgrace at will, they will not prevent me from enjoying my innocence and from finishing my days in peace in spite of them.” The Huitième promenade is the natural continuation, corresponding as it does to Rousseau’s nature, of the Première promenade. It drives his self-­ knowledge out beyond the point reached in the Première. But first of all it presents a new beginning. After Rousseau has written out clean copies of  walks one through seven, he gets to work again in order to bring together and deepen what deserves to be brought together and deepened. He looks at his life as a 22. John S. Spink (ad locum) points out that Rousseau had copies of  both the Confessions and the Dialogues in his possession at the time that he formulated his consideration. But he errs when he tries to get out of his perplexity regarding the transmitted facts by suggesting that Rousseau is talking about the writings he left behind in Neuchâtel in 1765. The context makes it clear that the “monumens de mon innocence” can only be the Confessions and the Dialogues: ”Rousseau avait, à coté de lui, dans la pièce même où il travaillait, au moins une copie de ses Confessions et une copie de ses Dialogues, mais il pense peut-­être aux papiers qu’il avait laissés à Neuchâtel entre les mains de du Peyrou.” The commentator does not pay Rousseau’s peut-­être the attention it deserves. With it the author makes available to the reader everything he needs to think the thought that is at the basis of  Rousseau’s statement, and to be able to understand the movement of self-­knowledge in the Première as a whole. 23. Paragraphs 4 and 15 are the only ones in the Première promenade that begin with “ Je.” In paragraph 4 he introduces “la tranquillité”; in paragraph 15 with “les méditations solitaires” he names its foundation. Of the terms cited in Footnote 19 in the sequential order of their appearance, only “méditations” makes another appearance in the final paragraph.

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whole and reflects on his soul as it found itself in the most diverse situations.24 The objects of his reflection are more specifically his happiness and his Beisichselbstsein, precisely the same objects to which he devoted the introduction to the Deuxième. The introduction to the Huitième, like that of the Deuxième, comprises four paragraphs, so that the two introductions, which convey one and the same meaning, respectively precede and succeed in perfect symmetry the treatment of the happiness of Beisichselbstsein in the Cinquième. Rousseau’s meditation confirms the findings of the previous Rêveries and reinforces the argument that the Deuxième, the Cinquième, and the Septième developed step by step.25 Rousseau’s happiness presupposes circumscription. It is essentially being collected. And it is advanced by mediation. Rousseau begins with the contrast between the almost completely faded memory that the periods of his “brief prosperity” left behind and the “agreeable memory” that remained with him of his inner state “in all the miseries” of his life. The external adversities, which forced him to concentrate on himself, increased the intensity of his existence. “It seems to me that I have savored the sweetness of existence more, that I have really lived more, when my sentiments, drawn back around my heart, so to speak, by my fate, were not being wasted on all the objects of men’s esteem that are of so little merit in themselves, and that are the unique occupation of the people one believes to be happy.” Far greater than the danger of losing oneself in the “objects of men’s esteem” that can be understood as baseless, however, is the danger to a loving or, as Rousseau says, expansive soul of forgetting oneself in the devotion to objects that correspond or seem to correspond to one’s own inclinations. Rousseau discusses this danger in his diachronic presentation by referring to periods in which “all was in order” around him, he was “content with all,” and there was “no enemy” in sight: “My expansive soul extended itself to other objects, and continually drawn outside myself by a thousand different kinds of fancies, by gentle attachments that continually busied my heart, I somehow forgot myself; I was entirely devoted to what was alien to me; and in the continual agitation of my heart, I experienced all the vicissitudes of human things.” He was seemingly happy. But he knows that he was not happy. For he “had not one sentiment that could pass the test of reflection.” 24. The opening reads as follows: “En meditant sur les dispositions de mon ame dans toutes les situations de ma vie je suis extrémement frappé de voir si peu de proportion entre les diverses combinaisons de ma destinée et les sentimens habituels de bien ou mal être dont elles m’ont affecté” (1074). It is the final use of  “méditer” or “méditation” in the Rêveries. 25. See Chapter I, Pp. 15–­17 and Chapter III, Pp. 73–­74.

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The criticism to which Rousseau subjects his seeming happiness—­that it was a state of  losing oneself  in the world, of Außersichsein, of self-­forgetfulness—­ creates a sharp contrast with true happiness, which, as he will say at the end of the walk, he has “described in one of my Rêveries.” The introduction to the Huitième, like the introduction to the Deuxième, provides an illuminating commentary on the Cinquième. This is particularly true for the explicit recourse to reflection as the ultimate authority, l’épreuve de la réflexion, which underscores that reflection has been absorbed into “the supreme felicity” of the Promeneur Solitaire and that the statement of  happiness in the Cinquième is a judgment.26 Rousseau’s criticism can be stated as follows: His supposed happiness lacked the return to himself. Rousseau can take up the insight of the Septième promenade that the erotic nature of the Promeneur Solitaire, in its orientation to the whole, in its striving to incorporate the whole, in its inclination to expand itself to the whole, all too easily loses sight of itself. The “expansive soul,” to the extent that its reflexivity is occasioned from the outside, is referred back to itself, above all by the requital of  love and the encounter with enmity. The significance for self-­knowledge of being loved is spoken about in the Dixième promenade. Enmity forms the background for all the Rêveries that concern the time of the philosophic life. And it is considered in all of them. In the eighth Rousseau notes its absence during the time of his seeming happiness; its presence on the contrary causes his turn to himself and demands of him the proof of  his self-­sufficiency. “Left only to myself, I nourish myself, it is true, from my own substance, but it is not depleted, and I am sufficient unto myself, even though I ruminate, so to speak, on an empty stomach.” In order to nourish oneself from one’s own substance, there must certainly be sufficient substance present, and in order to be able to find one’s happiness within oneself one must carry sufficient treasures within oneself.27 The adversity of 26. See Chapter IV, Pp. 122–­23 and consider Pp. 113–­20. In my interpretation of the Cinquième I have not for a moment left out of consideration the commentary of the Deuxième and of the Huitième. 27. Rousseau already spoke in the introduction to the Deuxième promenade of having nourished himself on his own substance: “ne trouvant plus d’aliment pour mon cœur sur la terre, je m’accoutumois peu à peu à le nourrir de sa propre substance et à chercher toute sa pâture au dedans de moi.” What he explains in this connection is fundamental for the Rêveries and immediately relevant for the introduction to the eighth: “Cette ressource, dont je m’avisai trop tard devint si féconde qu’elle suffit bientot pour me dédomager de tout. L’habitude de rentrer en moi-­même me fit perdre enfin le sentiment et presque le souvenir de mes maux,  j’appris ainsi par ma propre expérience que la source du vrai bonheur est en nous, et qu’il ne dépend pas des hommes de rendre vraiment misérable celui qui sait vouloir être heureux.” The discovery of his

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destiny, which compels the return to oneself, gives Rousseau the opportunity to remark that “the greater part of men” do not feel at all fortunate to turn to themselves. “Adversity forces us to this return to ourselves and that is perhaps what renders it so unbearable for the greater part of men.” The happiness of Beisichselbstsein, which the Promeneur Solitaire experiences, is tied to a goodness that is different from goodness as it is commonly understood.28 The introduction sets the tone for everything that follows. First there is a recapitulation of the narrative the Première promenade gave of the drama of detachment. Rousseau depicts the disturbed state that the “first suspicion of the conspiracy” caused him. He speaks of  “the indignation, the fury, the delirium” that overwhelmed him, of the “first surprise” when he saw himself  “suddenly misrepresented as a dreadful monster the likes of which have never existed.” He looks back once more at the “strange revolution” to which he was exposed and whose cause remained an impenetrable secret for him. He mentions that he wanted to force his persecutors to explain themselves to him, and that he long hoped to find “sensible men” who would not share the “delirium” with others or “just souls who detest knavery and traitors.” Finally, he establishes clearly and distinctly just how much he himself still bore without realizing it the yoke of opinion against which he turned. But despite all of this, the recapitulation highlights the good end the drama has for Rousseau. Rousseau soon interrupts his report in order to characterize his life, even in the “dreadful state” in which he still finds himself, as “happy and tranquil,” and to confirm that he laughs at his persecutors and their vain efforts.29 The account of the Huitième is borne by a serenity that could not be inferred from the Pre­ mière promenade. In fact, Rousseau now asserts that he has once again found not only tranquillity and peace, but also serenity and happiness,30 whereby he lends expression to happiness at the place of its first mention in the eighth walk, in just the way he did at the end of his description of the course of his days on St. Peter’s Island: that every day of his life would remind him with inner treasures he ascribes to his persecutors: “sans eux je n’aurois jamais trouvé ni connu les tresors que je portois en moi-­même.” II, 2–­3 (1002–­3). 28. VIII, 1–­4 (1074–­75). See V, 15 and 16 (1047) and Chapter IV, Pp. 126, 128, 130. 29. “ j’y vis heureux et tranquille et j’y ris des incroyables tourmens que mes persecuteurs se donnent sans cesse en vain tandis que je reste en paix . . .” VIII, 7 (1076), my emphasis. In the edition of the OCP “en vain” is missing. 30. “ j’ai retrouvé la sérenité, la tranquillité, la paix, le bonheur même . . .” VIII, 9 (1077). It is the only passage in the Rêveries in which Rousseau uses the term “sérénité.” “ Bonheur” appears only once in the Première as part of the expression “par bonheur”: I, 9 (998).

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pleasure of the previous day and that he would wish for nothing other for tomorrow.31 The recapitulation of the detachment serves Rousseau above all as a foil for the treatment of his Beisichselbstsein: “left only to myself, I have finally regained my composure. Pressed on all sides, I dwell in equilibrium because, no longer attached to anything else, I depend only on myself.”32 Rousseau ascribes his regained tranquillity to “only one thing”: “I have learned to bear the yoke of necessity without a murmur.” In this statement, the recapitulation in the Huitième agrees with the Première.33 The necessity Rousseau bows to, however, is no longer embodied in an event that robs him of the hope of being able to reach “a better generation” in the future. The necessity Rousseau acknowledges is just as little the result of his consideration that the immortality of his enemies would seal the fate of his œuvre. Anxiety about the posthumous life is not mentioned. Instead, Rousseau speaks of his altered relationship to those who are living. He introduces a new thought in order to make himself independent of the will, of the thinking and sentiment of the present generation. He will no longer look upon his contemporaries as moral beings, but rather will assign their actions and reactions entirely to the realm of necessity. He abstracts from the intentionality of their action. This thought also receives a biographical-­historical explanation. Through lengthy investigations, Rousseau became convinced that in regard to him “reason was banished from every head and equity from every heart.” He saw a “frenetic generation” cede to “the blind fury of its leaders against an unfortunate man,” who never did anything evil or ever wanted to do so. After ten years during which, like another Diogenes, he searched for a man, he had to extinguish his lantern and cry out: there is no man anymore. With this, Rousseau arrives again at the starting point of the Rêveries: “Then I began to see myself alone on earth and I understood that in relation to me my contemporaries were nothing more than mechanical beings who acted only on impulse and whose action I could cal­ culate only from the laws of  motion.” The necessity Rousseau acknowledges is the necessity of the world of  pure natural events, in which he does not encounter an alien will to which he would have to subject himself or against which he would be able to rebel. If he were to succeed in distancing his contemporaries to “mechanical beings” that follow the laws of motion, he would put them and himself  back into the nonsociable, premoral state of nature. “I no longer saw 31. 31 VIII, 9 (1077); V, 10 (1045). 32. VIII, 5–­11 (1075–­77). For “j’ai repris enfin mon assiete,” see V, 14 (1046). 33. VIII, 10 (1077); I, 4 (996); I, 7 (997).

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in them anything but differently moved masses, destitute of all morality with respect to me.” As “differently moved masses” in space and time, they could physically injure him, yet they could not do any harm to his psychic integrity. Just as “the Great Dane” that floored Rousseau on his walk on October 24, 1776, injured him without leaving behind any trace of feelings of revenge or reaction in him. Rousseau describes the fall in the Deuxième promenade as an accident, not as an attack. He sees in the mastiff an instrument neither of his persecutors nor of providence. It is the paradigm case of a “moved mass.” If, in order to free himself from the antagonism toward an alien will, Rousseau seeks out the world of pure natural events,34 he does precisely the opposite of those “unfortunate men” who, in order to find meaning in the suffering and evil that befall them, “blame fate, which they personify and to which they ascribe eyes and an intelligence to torment them intentionally.” Wisdom is the basis for another view of things. The homme sage sees in all suffering and evil “only the blows of blind necessity.” He “cries out in his pain,” but without anger. He remains free from moral indignation. In the evil that befalls him he perceives “only the material damage.” The blows that strike him might wound his person, “not one reaches his heart.”35 In the center of the Huitième promenade, Rousseau issues a rejection of the attempt to invoke divine providence, a rejection that could hardly be more succinct. At the end of the Deuxième he considered the thought of replacing blind fate with a fate that sees. He would detach himself from affective depen­ dence on the will of men if he were to see them as the instrument God’s will uses in order to achieve the purposes of the divine decree. The intentions of his enemies would lose any significance of their own if they were all governed by a single intention in whose irresistibility they would be absorbed. In this case Rousseau’s tranquillity would have its guarantors in the knowledge of his innocence and faith in God’s justice. Instead of tracing back the work of the “wickedness of men” to the “secrets of heaven unfathomable to human reason,” as he did in the second walk, in the eighth Rousseau abstracts from 34. “Dans tous les maux qui nous arrivent, nous regardons plus à l’intention qu’à l’effet. Une tuile qui tombe d’un toit peut nous blesser davantage mais ne nous navre pas tant qu’une pierre lancée à dessein par une main malveillante. Le coup porte à faux quelquefois mais l’intention ne manque jamais son atteinte.” VIII, 13 (1078). 35. VIII, 12–­13 (1077–­78); II, 5–­13 (1003–­7). At the end of the thirteenth paragraph of the Huitième there is a sentence crossed out by Rousseau, which would have conformed completely to the rhetoric of the Première promenade: “ J’étois bien loin d’être cet homme là [sc. cet homme sage] mais j’ai appris à le devenir, mes persecuteurs ont été mes maîtres.”

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morality or sees right through it. Instead of postulating a single intention that steers and rules throughout the whole, he now contemplates a world that is self-­sufficient in the natural necessity that is devoid of any intentionality. From his criticism in the thirteenth paragraph of the Huitième of the misguided undertaking of giving fate eyes and ascribing intentionality to it, Rousseau makes it clear that the two attempts to overcome dependence upon the intentions and wills of men—­in the first by their subordination to the will of God, in the second by their integration into the realm of necessity—­cannot count as parallel options. The criticism is completely correct regarding the attempt to invoke providence, with which Rousseau had the Deuxième Promenade culminate. The step from the attempt of the second to the criticism of the eighth walk was after all necessary, since Rousseau’s analysis of the depraving effects of dependence upon the will of another holds for the dependence upon every alien will. I have referred in the appropriate place to the theological implications of the conception of the homme naturel, which Rousseau thought about from the very outset. Rousseau confirms them one last time in the Huitième promenade. He assigns to the homme sage the task of drawing the conclusions that emerge from the absence of a moral world order. In light of the eighth walk, which explicitly turns back to the opening of the Rêveries,36 the prelude already seems to announce the reduction of his contemporaries to “mechanical beings” or “differently moved masses,” so that the Huitième is not so much the development of a new thought as rather the unfolding of a thought inherent from the very beginning.37 The reference to men who have ceased to be men, with which Rousseau confronted the reader right at the beginning, allowed, however, for a purely moral interpretation. And Rousseau had to leave open such an interpretation. Without this openness, the attempt to invoke providence would have been simply impossible. But when we reread the opening of the book, to which the Huitième Promenade invites us, the direct, the shortest connection between the prelude and the thought at the center of the Huitième becomes discernible, a straight linearity that underscores the deviation of the attempt at the end of the Deuxième. This does not mean that the deviation would remain without consequences for the argument. 36. The sentence “Alors je commençai à me voir seul sur la terre . . .” stands exactly in the center of the Huitième promenade: in the middle of  VIII, 12 (1078). 37. “ J’aurois aimé les hommes en dépit d’eux-­mêmes. Ils n’ont pu qu’en cessant de l’être se dérober à mon affection. Les voila donc étrangers, inconnus, nuls enfin pour moi puis qu’ils l’ont voulu. Mais moi, détaché d’eux et de tout, que suis-­je moi-­même?” I, 1 (995), my emphasis.

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Above all, it does not mean that its object would be of subordinate significance. With this deviation, Rousseau introduces into the Rêveries the God of faith in revelation.38 Still, let us follow the movement of self-­knowledge in the Huitième Promenade, which we have not yet traversed. For Rousseau does not let the matter rest with the rejection of providence, nor does he stop with the prehuman or superhuman view of his contemporaries, in which he is not affected by their wills. Instead, he asks about the root from which belief in the moral world order grows, and about the source from which indignation and being hurt by alien intentions are fed: “It is a lot to have reached this point, but it is not all. If we stop here, we have indeed cut out the evil, but we have left the root. For this root is not in the beings who are alien to us, but in ourselves; and that is where we must exert ourselves to extract it completely.” The wise man knows that he has to construe “all the details” of his fate “as so many acts of pure fatality,” to which he is “not permitted to ascribe direction, intention, or a moral cause.” His reason teaches him that for his own good he should submit himself to fatality. Reason pleads for conformity to the insight into necessity in “all the details,” but the heart “murmurs” and refuses to follow reason. The eighth walk provides the explanation as to why the attempt of the first to have the wills of the enemies absorbed into a compact fate to which Rousseau could bow “without rebelling any longer against necessity” did not achieve the success that Rousseau’s insight and resoluteness seemed to promise. The second walk showed that the subordination to blind fate did not sufficiently free Rousseau from his affective dependence on the individuals, actions, expressions in which it is present and experienced concretely. The response to this was the experiment of replacing a blind fate with a fate that sees, which would be able to force together individuals, actions, and expressions, by means of an irresistible direction and in obedience to a single intention in line with morality. When Rousseau now regards “all the details of my fate as so many acts of pure fatality,” he has in mind each of the concrete cases in which there can be an outbreak of the conflict between raison and cœur. A conflict whose outcome with the recognition of necessity in general is not yet decided. The question of  where the murmuring against reason comes from leads Rousseau to amour-­ propre. At first amour-­propre eludes self-­investigation, since it appears in the guise of amour de la justice and disguises itself as estime de soi-­même, which can easily be confused with amour-­propre. But precisely that garb also puts Rousseau in the position, as soon as he has freed himself from the illusions in 38. II, 24–­25 (1009–­10). See Chapter II, Pp. 65–­67 and 170–­71.

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which amour-­propre is rich, to determine amour-­propre as the root from which the personification of fate arises, and to discern in it the true source of moral indignation.39 Only in the Huitième promenade does Rousseau’s presentation of his self-­ investigation reach the conceptual level he worked out in the œuvre. While in the Première promenade he spoke only of the amour-­propre of the enemies,40 he now speaks explicitly about his own amour-­propre. “I never had much of a bent for amour-­propre, but this factitious passion had become magnified in me when I was in the world, and especially when I was an author; I still had perhaps less of it than others, but I had it prodigiously.” The admission of one’s own amour-­propre is the presupposition for its critique, its constraint, its direction. Rousseau must constrain his amour-­propre, which rises up against his reason and keeps him in dependence on others. Amour-­propre is in need of critical attention, if Rousseau does not want to bind himself, without any awareness of doing so, to society’s valuations and deliver himself over to the opinions of his contemporaries, either by means of self-­esteem, “the greatest motive force of proud souls,” or via the virtue the tradition designated as megalopsychia or magnanimitas. The right direction of amour-­propre ultimately demands, in Rousseau’s fundamental formula, its thoroughgoing orientation toward amour de soi. When Rousseau one last time characterizes amour-­propre as “factitious,” i.e., as having come to be in society and as shaped by society, he comes back full circle to the locus classicus in the Discours sur l’inégalité, which introduced the distinction between amour-­propre and amour de soi.41 In what follows he expresses the thought, more sharply formulated than ever before, that it is possible to bend amour-­propre back upon itself and, as it were, to resolve it in amour de soi: “By withdrawing into my soul and severing the external relations that make it demanding, by renouncing comparisons and preferences, it was content with my being good for myself, then becoming amour de moi même again, it returned to the order of nature and delivered me from the yoke of opinion.” Rousseau indicates how the thought is to be disclosed with the reference he makes immediately preceding the sentence about amour-­propre and amour de soi, namely, at the beginning his amour-­ propre revolted against injustice, in the end, by contrast, it disdained injustice. 39. VIII, 14–­15 (1078–­79). 40. I, 10 (999). 41. Discours sur l’inégalité, Note XV, p. 368 and see Chapter II, P. 69. Rousseau makes his conception more precise when in the Rêveries, in contrast to the Discours, he no longer designates amour-­propre as sentiment factice, but rather as passion factice.

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If  amour-­propre, which sets up the comparison to others, to their opinions and actions, instead of fighting for recognition and calling for justice, casts itself off from their judgment by its disdain for their lack of understanding and their injustice, then it introduces the turn away from Außersichsein. The comparative glance at the enemies that shows Rousseau the superiority of his insight, the mockery of the persecutors, the laughter at their vain efforts in making him unhappy are expressions of his amour-­propre that strengthen Rousseau’s independence, free him from the competition for social esteem and preference, and thus contribute to his being content with being good for himself. If amour-­ propre contributes to his accord with being good for himself, it works in the same direction as does amour de soi. Amour-­propre “becomes again amour de soi,” the analytic distinction can be retracted, insofar as the one as well as the other aims at the real and not the merely seeming good. If amour-­propre promotes Rousseau’s Beisichselbstsein, it returns “to the order of nature.” Quite similarly, Rousseau determined and oriented anew his conscience in the Sixième and his virtue in the Septième according to the standard of amour de soi, in such a way that they can pass the test of reflection.42 As he explains by making the earlier report more precise, from the moment he put amour-­propre in the service of amour de soi, Rousseau “again found peace of soul and almost felicity.” Untamed amour-­propre alone makes one “constantly unhappy.” “When it is quiet and reason speaks, reason eventually consoles us for all the evils we have not been able to avoid.” Reason appears as the true antagonist of amour-­propre. It is the power that allows Rousseau to see through the “illusions” of amour-­propre. Reason enables him to transform his unhappiness into happiness. He owes to reason the return to the world of pure natural events and his reflection on himself, whose yield he outlines once more: “Offenses, acts of revenge, slights, insults, injustices are nothing for him who, in the evils he endures, sees only the evil itself and not any intention, for him whose rank in his own esteem does not depend on the one others are willing to accord him. However men may wish to view me, they cannot change my being.” Rousseau makes sure that the paragraph that begins with the praise of reason ends with the reference to the good his enemies did him. His profound indifference, he emphasizes in line with the Première promenade, is their work, not the work of his wisdom. His enemies made him “insensitive” to all the adversities that might befall him in the future. Nothing more worries him. There is nothing he would still fear. Remembering the adversities to which he was exposed, the adversities in which his enemies played a prominent role, once 42. VIII, 16 (1079); VI, 8 (1053); 14 (1056); VII, 3 (1061). See Chapter V, Pp. 141–­42.

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more serves Rousseau’s profile of the happiness of his life, which all those blows cannot harm in its core: “Everything brings me back to the happy and sweet life for which I was born.” Rousseau designates in abbreviated form the activities of the life for which he was born. “Three-­fourths” of his life he spends (1) occupied with “instructive and even agreeable objects,” (2) dealing with the children of his fantasy, and (3) in company with himself alone, content with himself. We may assume that the children of his fantasy comprise not only the creatures Rousseau engenders on his own in his books and on his walks, but likewise the “superlunary beings” in which he has created for himself interlocutors capable of judgment in their own right. The triadic articulation of the activities to which he devotes himself “with delight” (1) and which leave him “full of  happiness” (3), accordingly, stands in for (1) the contemplation of nature, (2) the dialogue with beings of the most various nature and ancestry, and (3) the investigation of his own nature. In all these activities Rousseau follows his amour de soi.43 Things are different with his life to the extent that it involves sociability. Here amour-­propre retorts with power. In the “sad moments” Rousseau still spends among men, he becomes the “plaything of their treacherous flattery, bombastic and derisive compliments, and honeyed malignity.” When he “sees” the hatred and animosity in the heart of his opponent, he cannot escape the immediate impression. The sting he perceives here and now reaches well into his heart. Distancing himself from contemporaries as mechanical beings does not immunize him against an affective reaction when he actually encounters them. The insight that they are subordinate to necessity and are not governed by a free will does not prevent the spontaneous feeling of anger and hurt. Rousseau erred when, without adding the required qualification, he said about amour-­propre that, once recognized, it is easy to subjugate. He must concede that there are situations in which he is unable to subjugate amour-­propre, although it stands clearly before him in its “complete stupidity.”44 Amour-­ propre is so firmly rooted that it can be neither “stifled” nor “subjugated” once and for all. It makes itself felt as soon as Rousseau finds himself in society or comes into contact with society. Rousseau’s self-­investigation agrees with 43. VIII, 17–­19 (1080–­81). 44. “mais quand la fraude enfin se decouvre et que l’amour propre ne peut plus se cacher, dès lors il n’est plus à craindre et quoiqu’on l’étouffe avec peine on le subjugue au moins aisément.” VIII, 15 (1079). “et l’idée d’être ainsi sottement pris pour dupe ajoute encore à cette douleur un dépit très puerile, fruit d’un sot amour-­propre dont je sens toute la bêtise mais que je ne puis subjuguer.” VIII, 19 (1081—­82), my emphasis.

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the anthropological analysis of the Discours sur l’inégalité, according to which amour-­propre and sociability are coeval in origin.45 From the insight that his attempts to overcome his affective dependence on others by means of a fundamentally new orientation or a general approach do not penetrate all the way to the direct encounter and spontaneous reaction, Rousseau draws a conclusion I would like to designate as sensory reduction. He bows to the necessity of the sensory impression and his affective reaction while the impression lasts, certain that the end of the sensory impression also means the end of his affective dependence: “Dominated by my senses whatever I do, I have never been able to resist their impulses; and as long as an object acts upon them, my heart does not fail to be affected, but these passing affections last only as long as the sensation that causes them.” Rousseau cannot evade the sting that the sight of the persecutor sets off in him. But as soon as he no longer sees the persecutor, the latter is nothing more for him, i.e., Rousseau remains free of the feelings of revenge and reaction. On the days when he sees no one, he no longer thinks about his manmade fate, and since he no longer thinks about it, he does not feel it. He is “happy and content without distraction, without obstacle.” His tranquillity has its limit in the sensory perception of the obstacle and distraction.46 In sensory reduction, in knowing of the ephemeral character of the distraction and obstacle, his tranquillity finds its support. That sensory reduction presupposes the preceding steps of self-­ investigation and of detachment and certainly does not ignore them or retreat back behind them Rousseau makes clear by his remembering a time when he had not yet bent his amour-­propre back upon itself and put it in the service of amour de soi.47 While he now finds calm as soon as he is alone with himself, at that time the social passions clung to him and still occupied his imagination even when he was far away from every society. The promenades solitaires, which “are so delightful today,” appeared dull and boring to him at that time. The “fumes of amour-­propre and the tumult of the world” followed him into 45. VIII, 19 (1081–­82). Cf. Discours sur l’inégalité, Seconde partie, p. 268 and commentary ad locum. 46. “Mais j’échape rarement à quelque atteinte sensible, et lorsque j’y pense le moins un geste, un regard sinistre que j’apperçois, un mot envenimé que j’entends, un malveillant que je rencontre, suffit pour me bouleverser.” VIII, 21 (1082); in the edition of the OCP and equally in Spink “un geste” is missing. 47. Rousseau places the contrastive comparison immediately prior to the last paragraph of the Huitième. Paragraph 22 refers back to paragraph 16, which spoke of the earlier status of amour-­propre in Rousseau’s life. Paragraphs 16 and 22 are the only paragraphs of the Huitième promenade that begin with “je.”

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his solitude and veiled “all of nature” to him: “It is only after having detached myself from social passions and their sad retinue that I have again found nature with all of its charms.”48 At the end of his self-­investigation, after he has laid out diachronically all of his attempts at detachment, Rousseau arrives at a reasonable way of handling his second nature. He will neither ignore his sociable affects nor try to suppress them. Instead he will give in to their first involuntary stirring so that he can master them. Thus, to begin with, he lets anger and indignation over a slander take possession of his senses: “I yield to nature this first explosion, which all my strength could neither stop nor delay. I try only to stop its consequences before it produces any effect.” He does not hinder the physiological manifestation of the sociable affects, which reason can do nothing about, in order to have reason subjugate them as soon as reason knows how to make itself heard: “but after having let one’s natural temperament have its first explosion, one can become one’s own master again as one regains one’s senses bit by bit.” Supported by knowledge of what is possible and by the recognition of what is necessary, Rousseau sets the direction of his immediate affective reactions by means of reason for the sake of his own good, just as he did this before with respect to the relationship between amour-­propre and amour de soi. But while in the middle of the Huitième promenade he made vivid with great clarity the dominating role of reason, he overtly diminishes its significance at the conclusion of the walk.49 Contradicting what he just showed step by step, he asserts that reason has “hardly any part” in the “triumph” over the sociable affects. Everything stems from his “versatile temperament.” “My ardent natural temperament agitates me; my indolent natural temperament pacifies me.” Where what is needed gets employed, as it were, on its own, the force of reason appears dispensable. One last time Rousseau pivots to the general line of the rhetoric of the Rêveries, which was first expressed in the title of the book and reached its peak in the fifth walk. However much a “versatile temperament” might help Rousseau quickly to find calm when he has been agitated, it is obvious that the tranquillité that is the subject of the Première and the Huitième promenade cannot be conceived as the result of self-­regulating mood swings. Thus, the last case in which Rousseau refuses his reason the “honor” it deserves illuminates the cases in which 48. VIII, 20–­22 (1082–­83). 49. “ j’attends le moment de vaincre en laissant agir ma raison, car elle ne me parle que quand elle peut se faire écouter. Et que dis-­je hélas! ma raison? J’aurois grand tort encor de lui faire honneur de ce triomphe car elle n’y a guéres de part.” VIII, 23 (1083–­84).

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he did the same without, however, formally drawing attention to his doing so. Rousseau’s tranquillity is built upon reason, just as his happiness is based upon insight. Knowledge of his first nature, the nature most his own, allows him the serenity that is expressed in the final paragraph of the Huitième, in dealing with his second, his sociable nature. “I am what men please, as long as they can act on my senses, but in the first instant of respite, I again become what nature willed; whatever anyone may do, this is my most constant state and the one through which, in spite of fate, I savor a happiness for which I feel myself constituted. I have described this state in one of my Reveries.” The happiness the Cinquième promenade described corresponds to Rousseau’s nature so much that, as he continues, he wishes for nothing other than the duration of that happiness and fears only that it could be disturbed. Confirming this, he adds that the evil men did to him in no way touches him, only fear of the evil they could do to him in the future is still able to unsettle him. If the latter were true, or if Rousseau were to stop with the realization of his fear, then, as shown by the Première promenade, it would certainly look bad for his tranquillité. By coming back to fear once more in the final sentence of the walk, he calls to mind the crux of  his attempt at sensory reduction. For I have to add that when he asserted that his affective dependence ends with the sensory impression that triggers it, Rousseau added the qualifying reference to the fear of the next possible encounter, a fear that would suffice to impair his happiness. 50 The “versatile temperament” does not suffice to silence the fear of future hardships. Rousseau will be able to master his fear only if he is persuaded by his reason that his happiness remains beyond the reach of others’ machinations, since as long as he lives no one can keep him for long from his Beisichselbstsein. And so he closes with a statement that does not deny the preceding reflections, including the bending back of amour-­propre upon itself: “but certain that they have no new hold anymore by which they can affect me with a permanent feeling, I laugh at all their intrigues and enjoy myself in spite of them.” The Première and the Huitième are the only promenades that end with the same word. Both flow into Rousseau’s casting off from “them,” from the others, from the contemporaries. Yet at the end of the eighth, in contrast with the first, Rousseau laughs. Between the two lies the description and more specific 50. “Le trouble de mon cœur disparoit avec l’objet qui l’a causé et je rentre dans le calme aussitot que je suis seul. Ou si quelque chose m’inquiete c’est la crainte de rencontrer sur mon passage quelque nouveau sujet de douleur. C’est là ma seule peine; mais elle suffit pour altérer mon bonheur.” VIII, 21 (1082). Rousseau at first formulated it even more sharply: “pour empoisonner mon bonheur.” (Variant in Spink, not in OCP.)

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determination of the happiness of his Beisichselbstsein in the second, third, seventh, and especially in the fifth promenade, to which the final paragraph of the eighth expressly refers back, marking the peak of the book, after which Rousseau laughs for the first time in the Rêveries.51 The Huitième takes up again the self-­investigation of the Première within the horizon of the concepts and results that Rousseau’s self-­knowledge supplied in the interim. Beginning with the danger of the “expansive soul” losing itself, it continues via the critique of imagination to the appreciation of the significance of the enemy for one’s own good, from the self-­sufficiency of contemplation to the ambivalence of the œuvre for coming to be oneself, to the explanation of lacking suitability for civil life. With the preparation of the seven Rêveries behind it, the eighth digs deeper. It uses the frame the Première chose for self-­investigation, the conspiracy of the persecutors, in order to play out, following up on the first and second promenades, the radical options this framework allows. Yet it goes beyond this frame and takes within its purview Rousseau’s entire life, which, as the walk makes clear, is not affected in its substance by that conspiracy. In the end, both promenades strengthen Rousseau’s serenity, the first with respect to his posthumous life, the eighth with respect to his second nature. But only the Huitième names the force that causes Rousseau’s serenity in the one as well as in the other case. Only the promenade that was not at first envisaged lays bare the main strands that lead to the center of Rousseau’s existence and maintain and provide support for his life. This does not mean that the Huitième would take from the reader the task of constructing the connections and drawing the necessary conclusions for himself. It also remains reserved for him to retrieve the gains of the individual attempts at detachment that Rousseau undertook in the first, second, and eighth walks, and that, each considered in its own right, proved to be insufficient. The reader for whom the Rêveries are written will be in the position to bring Rousseau’s expression épreuve de la réflexion together with Rousseau’s sentiment de l’existence and to discern that the test the sentiment of existence had to pass in the fifth walk was nothing less than the fundamental self-­interrogation of  Rousseau’s philosophy.52 The reader for whom the Rêveries are thought will be in the position to understand the aporia of the duration of  l’état le plus constant, so that the state of  happiness Rousseau speaks about is a state of return. Of a return that is experienced not as diminishment, but as strengthening and 51. See Chapter V, P. 136 with Footnote 3. 52. A sentiment that has passed this test might be experienced with joy, “sans prendre la peine de penser.” See V, 9 (1045) and Chapter IV, Pp. 115–­18.

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deepening. A state that unfolds its duration by means of  the reasoned expectation of the return beyond the immediacy of its present. The reader for whom the Rêveries are written will see in Rousseau’s knowledge of  his own nature the basis for his confidence that he is able repeatedly to return to himself and to be bei sich. Rousseau put himself in “the strangest position in which a mortal could ever find himself ” in order to confirm for himself the ancient proposition: Naturam expelles furca tamen usque recurret.

Rousseau and the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar

The Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard occupies a special place in Rousseau’s œuvre. Conceived as an independent work and attributed to an unnamed author, it found its permanent place in the fourth book of  Émile, where its task is to make vivid in an exemplary way how an homme vulgaire can be instructed in matters of religion, in accord with reason, corresponding to his nature, and taking into account historical circumstances. Since, according to Rousseau’s repeated declaration, religion and faith are foundational for morality and of the greatest importance for politics, the profession of faith bears a significance that reaches far beyond that of an exemplar in a treatise on education. In the third Rêverie Rousseau testifies that the work could one day bring about a revolution among men, were bon sens and bonne  foi ever to arise again among them. Still, independent of its possible political effect, apart from the practical utility the profession of  faith might or might not have—­in fact, the Savoyard Vicar was destined to set not only common men straight—­it is first and foremost of theoretical interest. The writing, which has a priest with a moral intention advocate and dogmatically unfold the credo of Natural Religion, articulates the problems of religion it treats with concrete vividness and artfully lays bare the presuppositions on which the faith of moral man necessarily rests. Rousseau indicates to the philosophic reader the theoretical interest of the work when he mentions, again in the third Rêverie, that the result at which he arrived in his in-­depth confrontation with the question of the right life, with faith’s demand for obedience and the promises of religion, can be found “approximately” in what he “set down” in the meantime in the Profession de foi

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du Vicaire Savoyard.1 What in particular he has placed in the work for the philosophic reader is not disclosed straightaway. For the work is secured with circumspection. What most securely blocks access to the work is the belief that the Vicar’s profession of faith is the profession of faith of Rousseau, that Rousseau and the Vicar are of one mind, that both pursue essentially the same end. To take the Vicar’s speech about Natural Religion to be Rousseau’s credo is no less mistaken than to want to take the teaching of Natural Religion that the Athenian Stranger presents to his interlocutors, Kleinias and Megillos, in the tenth book of the Nomoi for Plato’s faith. Especially since Rousseau much more than Plato is concerned with distance and keeps his distance. Not only does he use an ecclesiastic as the mouthpiece for his version of Natural Religion; upon publication he denies in every respect that he is the author of the writing. Rousseau places ahead of its printing in Émile the assurance that he has reproduced the “paper” of another, which he has merely “transcribed,” and he confirms this assurance in the first paragraph that follows upon the alleged transcription.2 The transcription itself does not comprise the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard alone, but commences with a framing narrative, in which the nameless author has embedded the Vicar’s speech, which he recorded from memory, thirty years after he heard it. The chain of transmission is thus lengthened by a link and the profession of faith is removed to an even greater distance. Many have discerned in these fictional features precautionary measures, easily seen through and therefore ineffectual, which Rousseau seized upon in view of  the explosive criticism the Vicar levels against revealed religion in the second part of his speech. But few have understood them as provisions that refer to the first part of the speech for no less a reason, albeit a contrary one. The persecution that the second part of the profession of faith brought down upon Rousseau, only a few days after the distribution of the book,3 helped to conceal the problematic character of the first part. What 1. The seventeenth paragraph of the Troisième promenade reads in its entirety and in the original spelling of the manuscript as follows: “Le résultat de mes pénibles recherches fut tel à peu près que je l’ai consigné depuis dans la profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard, ouvrage indignement prostitué et profané dans la génération presente, mais qui peut faire un jour révolution parmi les hommes si jamais il y renait du bon sens et de la bonne foi.” 2. Émile IV, pp. 558 and 635. 3. In May 1762, the first copies of  Émile begin to circulate in Paris. On June 7 the theological faculty of the Sorbonne condemns the book. Two days later political authorities follow the example of the theologians: The Upper Chamber of the Parlement de Paris expresses the state’s condemnation and has an arrest warrant issued for Rousseau, who on that same day flees in the direction of Geneva. On  June 11 a copy of  Émile is burned on the steps of the Palais de  justice by

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could have borne witness to the sincerity of the profession of  Natural Religion more strikingly than the boldness of the critique of revealed religion?4 Rousseau assigned to the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar the doubly special place of being, like none of his works, part and whole, and of be­ ing, unlike any other of them, his work and not his work. The fiction that it is the writing of a third party, which the author of Émile includes in his education novel and as editor makes known to the world, allows Rousseau to express his critique of revealed religion and gain a hearing for the teaching of Natural Religion in his œuvre, without failing to practice the caution prudence commands and without giving up the distance insight demands. The device makes plausible the unusual length of the text, which in the first edition takes up 204 printed pages, and justifies the prominence that the confrontation with religion receives in Émile: The editor must faithfully reproduce the transcription. He is dealing with a work in its own right. Its subject, its inner coherence, its literary quality, its range—­all this makes it more likely that it will receive

the executioner. On June 18 the Petit Conseil meets in Geneva in order to condemn both Émile and Du Contrat social. At the request of  the attorney general of  Geneva,  Jean-­Robert Tronchin, both books are burned in public on June 19 and an arrest warrant is issued for the author. On June 23 the states of Holland and West Frisia forbid Rousseau’s publisher Rey to sell Émile. On July 1 Rousseau is forbidden to sojourn in the territory of Bern. On the same day the Sorbonne begins a thorough Censure of the work, which concerns above all the second part of the Profession de foi. On July 8 Bern bans Émile. On August 2 a ban in the Austrian Netherlands follows. On August 20 the archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, signs off on his pastoral letter against Rousseau, which is read in the churches of the diocese, and reading as well as possessing the book, condemned as “fallacious,” “godless,” “blasphemous,” and “heretical,” is made a punishable offense. On September 9, 1762, Émile is placed on the Index in Rome. (The pastoral letter of the archbishop of Paris is printed along with other revealing contemporary reactions in Documents officiels et contemporaines sur quelques-­unes des condamnations dont l’Emile et le Contrat social ont été l’objet en 1762, ed. Marc Viridet [Geneva, 1850], pp. 41–­65). 4. In his reply to the archbishop of Paris, Rousseau avails himself of a related argument when he emphasizes the credibility of a nonorthodox profession: “ Je n’ai pas trop, ce me semble, l’air d’un homme qui se déguise, et il n’est pas aisé de voir quel intérêt j’aurois à me déguiser ainsi. L’on doit présumer que celui qui s’exprime si librement sur ce qu’il ne croit pas, est sincere en ce qu’il dit croire . . .” Moreover, Rousseau stresses, it would have been far more in his interest, he would have been subjected to a less terrible persecution, he would sooner have been left, “like the others,” in peace and not vilified as a despicable monster, had he openly declared himself in favor of atheism. Four times in rapid succession and in the most compact space Rousseau repeats the phrase si je me fusse ouvertement déclaré pour l’athéisme. Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, pp. 962 and 964–­65.

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attention for itself and unleash its effect.5 At the same time it is an integral part of  Émile, which frees the author from instructing the pupil in religion in his own name. Thus, the conversation of the instructor with Émile is withheld from us, the conversation that would have to take place in the fourth book, after the pupil has reached puberty and the “progress of passions,” accelerated by society, requires an acceleration of the “progress of insights” in order to maintain a balance between Émile’s passions and lumières, i.e., in order to curb the newly erupting passions by rules. Rousseau leaves no doubt that the religious instruction he withholds from us would belong in the context of moral education.6 At age fifteen Émile knows nothing about whether he has a soul, nor has he heard anything about God. The complete absence of religion from Émile’s education up to age fifteen, or if possible, to age eighteen, will, Rousseau foresees, “surprise many readers.” What to Christian readers, from whom Rous­ seau demands a great deal,7 must appear strange, not to say shocking, has its 5. The Profession de foi has already been available for quite a while as an independent publication. First to deserve mention here is the monumental edition of Pierre-­Maurice Masson which, with its 718 large octavo pages, has remained until today the most complete edition of the text and of the manuscripts that have come down to us: La “Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard” de Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Édition critique d’après les Manuscrits de Genève, Neuchâtel et Paris avec une introduction et un commentaire historiques par Pierre-­Maurice Masson (Fribourg: Librairie de l’Université; Paris, Hachette, 1914). Additional single editions, each with introduction and commentary, have been published, respectively, by Georges Beaulavon (Paris: Hachette, 1937) and Bruno Bernardi (Paris: Flammarion, 1996). 6. Émile IV, p. 557. For what follows, see pp. 549–­58. 7. “Si j’avois à peindre la stupidité fâcheuse, je peindrois un pédant enseignant le cathechisme à des enfans; si je voulois rendre un enfant fou, je l’obligerois d’expliquer ce qu’il dit en disant son cathechisme. On m’objectera que la pluspart des dogmes du christianisme étant des mistéres, attendre que l’esprit humain soit capable de les concevoir ce n’est pas attendre que l’enfant soit homme, c’est attendre que l’homme ne soit plus. A cela je réponds, premiérement qu’il y a des mistéres qu’il est non seulement impossible à l’homme de concevoir mais de croire, et que je ne vois pas ce qu’on gagne à les enseigner aux enfans, si ce n’est de leur apprendre à mentir de bonne heure.” “l’enfant qui professe la réligion chrétienne que croit-­il? ce qu’il conçoit, et il conçoit si peu ce qu’on lui fait dire, que si vous lui dites le contraire, il l’adoptera tout aussi volontiers. La foi des enfans et de beaucoup d’hommes est une affaire de geographie. Seront-­ils recompensés d’être nés à Rome plustôt qu’à la Mecque? On dit à l’un que Mahomet est le prophête de Dieu, et il dit que Mahomet est le prophête de Dieu; on dit à l’autre que Mahomet est un fourbe, et il dit que Mahomet est un fourbe. Chacun des deux eût affirmé ce qu’affirme l’autre s’ils se fussent trouvés transposés. Peut-­on partir de deux dispositions si semblables pour envoyer l’un en paradis et l’autre en enfer? Quand un enfant dit qu’il croit en

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basis in a “negative education” Émile receives in childhood. It is supposed to put him in the position, in as close an approximation as his nature allows, to live as an homme de la nature.8 Although Émile, whom Rousseau characterizes as an esprit commun and homme vulgaire,9 is not destined to become a philosopher, he is being given an education that, with its goal of counteracting the entrenchment of prejudices, the domination of opinion, the subordination to authorities, cannot deny the philosophic orientation. At the end of his childhood, Émile does not draw the sentiment of his own existence from the judgment of others. He has not become practiced in the obedience of faith. He gives priority at all times to knowledge of ignorance over the semblance of knowledge. With instruction in matters of religion, however, “negative education” runs up against its limit. Rousseau lends eloquent expression to the difficulty he faces in the two paragraphs that immediately precede the reproduction of the writing he has transcribed. “  A child has to be raised in his father’s religion; he is always given powerful proofs that this religion, whichever it might be, is the only true one, that all the others are only folly and absurdity. The force of the arguments on this point depends absolutely on the country where they are propounded.” The truth of religion is a question of geography, of ancestry, of authority. Like customs and laws, like mœurs and nomoi, religion rests on convention. It is a matter of opinion. C’est surtout en matière de Religion que l’opinion triomphe. “But we who pretend to shake off the yoke of opinion in everything, we who want to grant nothing to authority, we who want to teach nothing to our Émile that he could not learn by himself in every country, in what religion will we raise him?” Religion proves to be not only the most difficult case for an educational enterprise that is supposed to guard against the rule of opinion. Religion turns out to be the primary case at issue

Dieu, ce n’est pas en Dieu qu’il croit, c’est à Pierre ou à Jacques qui lui disent qu’il y a quelque chose qu’on appelle Dieu; et il le croit à la maniére d’Euripide. O Jupiter! car de toi rien sinon

Je ne connois seulement que le nom.” Émile IV, pp. 554 and 555. 8. “voulant former l’homme de la nature il ne s’agit pas pour cela d’en faire un sauvage et de le reléguer au fond des bois, mais qu’enfermé dans le tourbillon social, il suffit qu’il ne s’y laisse entraîner ni par les passions ni par les opinions des hommes, qu’il voye par ses yeux, qu’il sente par son cœur, qu’aucune autorité ne le gouverne hors celle de sa propre raison.” Émile IV, pp. 550–­51. 9. Émile I, p. 266; cf. IV, p. 537.

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in this educational enterprise, the case that from the outset the defense against opinion and authority had in view. And finally, it will be religion that separates the case of the homme vulgaire, who needs Rousseauian education, from the case of one who educates himself and is able to go his way alone.10 On the question of the sect with which the homme de la nature is to be associated, Rousseau’s answer is “quite simple”: neither this one nor that one, “but rather we will put him in a position to choose the one to which the best use of his reason must lead him.” To put him in such a position, however, seems anything but simple or indubitable. Rousseau interrupts the flow of the discussion with the saying of  a poet, which indicates the dangerous terrain on which he is operating. Incedo per ignes Suppositos cineri doloso.11

The dubiousness of the undertaking is underlined by a declaration with which Rousseau turns to his readers in order to assure them that they need not fear that the “precautions” he is compelled to take might be “unworthy of  a friend of the truth.” Rousseau will never forget his motto Vitam impendere vero. But he will not give the speech about religion that Émile needs and to which everything seemed to lead. He explicitly communicates to the readers of  Émile that he will not tell them here and now what he thinks. As a substitute he offers to tell them “what a man thought who was more worthy” than he. Rousseau guarantees “the truth of the facts” reported in the writing he transcribes. They “really happened” to the nameless author. Rousseau does not guarantee the truth of the content of the speeches that the writing reproduces. He does not vouch for the dogmas contained in the Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith. It is left to the readers to gain from the work he presents to them “useful reflections” about religion, about faith and morality. Rousseau will not relieve anyone of the task of  his own examination.12 10. Cf. Émile I, p. 266 and Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 29. 11. “I walk on fires covered by deceitful cinder.” Rousseau appropriates two verses from Carmina II, 1 (7–­8), with which Horace addressed the consul, writer, and historian Gaius Asinius Pollio, who wrote a history of  the civil wars of  his time and who, according to Horace, intervened on behalf of the accused. By replacing Horace’s incedis (you walk) with incedo (I walk), Rousseau takes the place of the one who has to deal with deadly conflict and takes over the defense of the accused. 12. Émile IV, p. 558.

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The work consists of three parts and has three voices. It begins with a framing narrative of the nameless author, which comprises 19 paragraphs. The Profession de foi follows, extending across 181 paragraphs and in turn divided into three main parts: Paragraphs 1–­105 reproduce the Vicar’s speech about Natural Religion, paragraphs 108–­81 his confrontation with revealed religion and his advice about religious practice. The two parts of the Vicar’s speech are interrupted by the reaction of the narrator to the sermon about Natural Religion and a short dialogue with the Vicar in paragraphs 106 and 107. The third part is constituted by eighteen Notes that are added to the Vicar’s speech—­nine to part I, nine to part II—­and in which Rousseau himself comes to speak.13 The framing narrative is no ornamental add-­on, but the part of the writing that puts the speech about religion in perspective and determines its task. It supplies information about the circumstances in which the profession of faith takes place, outlines the history of the young man to whom it is addressed, and characterizes in a first approximation the capabilities and needs, the interests and qualities of the ecclesiastic who propounds it. The opening specifies the time and place of the action and designates the point of departure where the attempt at the moral-­religious education begins: “Thirty years ago in an Italian city a young expatriate found himself reduced to utter misery.” The nameless one had fallen into a state of extreme misery, when—­fugitive in a foreign land without resources as a result of  youthful immoderation—­he changed his religion in order to have bread from which to live. For the convert, who was born a Calvinist, religion was a matter of convention, something that can be exchanged or discarded when expediency changes. In the Catholic hospice for proselytes in which he seeks refuge, he first encounters religion as something that affects him existentially: (1) He is given instruction in the dogmatic controversy over faith, which awakens doubts he has not had before. (2) Along with the “new dogmas” with which he becomes acquainted, he sees “still newer morals,” which he resists in order not to become their victim. (3) He sees himself at the mercy of  “tyrants,” who treat him as a criminal because he did not want to give in to crime, and who rob him of  his freedom. While the first point, the 13. I cite according to the text of the edition by Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin in OCP IV, pp. 558–­635, specifying the paragraphs of the framing narrative using Roman numerals, the paragraphs of the Profession de foi using Arabic numerals, and designating Rousseau’s footnotes with “Note.” The page numbers of the OCP are given in parentheses following the specification of the paragraph. Manuscript variants are cited according to the edition of  Pierre-­Maurice Masson, which I have consulted throughout. His edition is the richest and most clearly laid out critical edition of the text, but for most readers it is not readily available.

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cognitive encounter with religion that awakens doubt, in a certain way stands alone, points two and three, moral distress and political exposedness, are most closely bound up with one another. The narrator highlights the experience in the hospice, the first embodiment of particular religion, as “the first test of violence and injustice” in the life of the proselyte. The nameless one implores heaven and men for support and is heard by no one. Only the acquaintance with an “honnête Ecclesiastique,” bestowed by chance, allows the oppressed to escape. The ecclesiastic, who is introduced as decent, poor, and in need of others, does not hesitate to risk “making a dangerous enemy for himself ” for the sake of the liberation of the proselyte. When the framing narrative evokes a dangerous enemy at the end of the first paragraph, it points fittingly to the enmity to which the Vicar’s enterprise is exposed from the outset. And it reminds the reader of the precautions to which the “friend of truth” saw himself induced. The homeless one does not know how to use the newly won freedom to good purpose. Once again in need, he remembers his benefactor to whom he showed no gratitude. He returns to him and is well received. The sight of the young man reminds the ecclesiastic of the good deed, of the merit he earned in doing it, “and the soul always rejoices in such a memory.” The ecclesiastic, “naturally humane, compassionate,” seeks lodging for the young man, helps him in every way, and shares with him the little he has. He instructs him, consoles him, teaches him “the difficult art of patiently bearing adversity.”14 We learn that the ecclesiastic had “a good natural temperament,” which “the lessons of  wisdom and an enlightened virtue had strengthened.” Taking up once again his first characterization, the narrator reports that the “honnête Ecclesiastique” was a “poor Savoyard Vicar” who, owing to “a youthful adventure,” had fallen into disfavor with his bishop, which is why he left his country and came over the mountains to Italy. There he soon found sponsors who procured a position for him as the teacher of a minister’s son. Although he earned the esteem of the minister, he gave up the position, since he preferred poverty to dependence. He “lived wisely” and made himself liked by all. Thus, he harbored the hope of being taken up once again into the good graces of  his bishop and obtaining a small parish in the mountains where he could spend the remainder of his days. For he had no ambition beyond this. In other words, the Vicar’s ambition was exhausted in an office that would give him the possibility of doing good within the manageable sphere of personal 14. For les philosophes the narrator adds: “Gens à préjugés, est-­ce d’un prêtre, est-­ce en Italie que vous eussiez espéré tout cela?” III (560).

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acquaintance and familiarity—­to help and to advise, to be sought out and to be loved. He aspired to achieve his own good in caring for others. We learn in addition about the intellectual stature of the Vicar, who is distinguished by his humanity and modesty, that he was “ni sans esprit ni sans lettres.” This cautious characterization makes us think of Émile, who would evidently find in the Vicar an adequate counterpart. With the Vicar and Rousseau’s pupil, kindred natures would encounter one another.15 The Vicar believes he discerns in the young fugitive a kindred nature. “  A natural inclination” led the Vicar to take an interest in him and “carefully to examine” him. The natural inclination of which the narrator speaks goes decidedly beyond compassion for one who has fallen into need. This inclination is far more specific than the general humanity repeatedly ascribed to the Vicar before and after. The particular interest the Vicar takes in the proselyte’s history rests on his seeing in it essential features of his own history. With great clarity he faced the crisis of faith in which the proselyte found himself. He saw that ill-­fortune, opprobrium, and contempt had discouraged the proselyte “and that his pride, changed into bitter spite, took men’s injustice and hardness only as proof of the viciousness of their nature and the chimerical character of virtue. He had seen that religion serves only as the mask of interest and sacred cult only as the safeguard of hypocrisy.”16 The first steps leading to the rejection of religion are the experience of injustice, the belief in the badness of human nature, and the observation of the hypocrisy of the believers, both laymen and ecclesiastics. The further steps in this rejection concern the doctrinal content of revealed religion. He had seen that in the subtlety of the dogmatic controversy “paradise and hell were made the prize of word games,” i.e., hairsplitting was elevated to the requirements of orthodoxy necessary for salvation. In addition, he had seen that “the sublime and original idea of divinity was disfigured by the fantastic imaginations of men,” and since he came to the conclusion “that in order to believe in God, one had to renounce the judgment one had received from him,” he developed the same disdain for “our ridiculous rêveries,” for the traditional teachings of faith, as for “the object to which we apply them.” The only passage in the framing narrative in which Dieu is 15. II–­IV (559–­60). 16. The text underscores the kindredness of  natures the Vicar believes he discerns by having the change of subject from the Vicar to the proselyte, which takes place between the Il vit and the subsequent three instances of Il avoit vû, vanish in the same personal pronoun and effect nothing but a change in tense from passé simple to plus-­que-­parfait. The Vicar saw in the proselyte’s present something from his own past. V (560).

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mentioned makes clear the task the Vicar faces. It will be possible to rescue the young man for faith in God, only if God is freed from the incredibility of the dominant teaching and a teaching about God is put in its place that meets the requirements of the young man’s judgment. As the Vicar sees it, the proselyte did not possess the means to accomplish by himself the constructive part of the task. He knew nothing of what is, and had no idea of the origin of things. But, above all, he seemed to make himself at home in “his stupid ignorance,” not prepared to be taught by others, since he was filled with a profound contempt for all who thought they knew more than he about being, about coming to be and passing away, about morality, about God. The Vicar must, therefore, first of all gain a reputation that will make the proselyte receptive to religious instruction, which from a moral point of view he apparently needs urgently. For his incredulity and misery put the “freethinker,” as the report asserts, in danger of ending up with “the morals of a beggar and the morality of an atheist.”17 “The forgetting of all religion leads to the forgetting of the duties of man.” “Progress” in religious-­moral “forgetting” in the heart of the libertin had already reached “more than half ” but was not yet complete. After his examination of the young man, the Vicar resolves to “lead back to virtue the victim he had snatched from infamy.” The noble motive spurs on his courage. He makes far-­reaching plans for the realization of the project, which is not born from duty, but springs from his inclination.18 A retarding factor accommodates him: The soul of the proselyte was not yet subjugated to the “furies of the senses” that Rousseau sought to defer for as long as possible in the case of his pupil and in regard to whose onset he envisioned Émile’s religious education. The author of the work shows himself well-­informed about Rousseau’s conception when, addressing Rousseau, he notes the delay in the development of the fugitive’s passions: “A native shame, a timid character, took the place of constraint and prolonged for him this stage in which you keep your pupil with so much care.” The attempted abuse he had to ward off in the hospice contributed to keeping the proselyte’s imagination from being animated earlier: “For a long time disgust took the place of virtue for him in preserving his innocence; it was to succumb only to gentler seductions.” Thus, the Vicar can direct his full attention to the current moral state of the lad. By prudent reserve and comradely company he earns the lad’s trust. Full of understanding and empathetic, he gets him to speak. Of his own volition the proselyte finally makes a general 17. V–­VI (560–­61). 18. “Quel que fût le succés, il étoit sur de n’avoir pas perdu son tems: on réussit toujours quand on ne veut que bien faire” VIII (561). Cf. V (560).

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confession.19 The picture he sees alarms the priest: “without being ignorant for his age, he had forgotten everything it was important for him to know,” and “the opprobrium to which fate had reduced him stifled all feeling of good and evil in him.” The nameless one does not know how and for what he should live. This is his true misery. The Vicar sees before his eyes the “moral death” of the proselyte. To protect him from this death, the Vicar begins to awaken in the “unfortunate young fellow,” as the author lets us know precisely in the center of the framing narrative, amour-­propre and self-­esteem. He holds out to him the prospect of a “happier future,” provided that he puts his talents to good use. He reanimates in the lad’s heart “a generous ardor” by the account of the “beautiful deeds of others.” By making him admire those who performed the noble deeds, he gives him the desire to do the same. The Vicar exploits the possibilities opened up by amour-­propre to draw the proselyte out of  his numbness, his despondence, his disorientation. He encourages him by comparing his present misery with the hope of future happiness, inspires him by uplifting examples, by role models that spur him on and stimulate him to make his own efforts by measuring himself against others. He uses amour-­ propre in order to orient the proselyte toward the beautiful, toward the noble, toward virtue, and to awaken in him the feeling of self-­worth indispensable for such an orientation. By means of smaller jobs, he gives him the opportunity to practice showing gratitude. The selection of appropriate readings is part of moral education. The Vicar helps him to regain a “sufficiently good opinion of himself ” so that he no longer believes he is a being useless for anything good. After the framing narrative has reached the point where the nameless one no longer appears contemptible in his own eyes, the author tells Rousseau that he himself is the unhappy fugitive about whom he has until now reported in the third person.20 He believes that the disorders of his youth lie far enough behind him that he is able to admit to them. Moreover, he wants to bestow on “the hand” that once drew him out of that disorder the honor it deserves for its good deeds. He will, therefore, narrate the history as his history and lend 19. “Le plaisir avec lequel il se croyoit écouté augmentoit celui qu’il prenoit à tout dire. Ainsi se fit sa confession générale, sans qu’il songeât à rien confesser” IX (562). In passing, as it were, the author alludes to the anthropological foundation of a prominent church institution. As long as revealed religion with its institutional manifestations is not taken into consideration as responding to deeply rooted needs, hopes, and yearnings, its historical success will remain unintelligible. 20. The narrator begins the twelfth paragraph with Je and turns for the second time to Rousseau, whom he now addresses as “cher concitoyen.” He knows for what purpose Rousseau needs the text, and discloses himself as a citizen of  Geneva. XII (563); cf. VII (561).

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expression in the first person to “the noble sentiment of gratitude” that the Vicar thirty years earlier “nourished in him” for his own good.21 What impresses the narrator initially and enduringly about the Vicar is the conduct of life. He saw in him “virtue without hypocrisy, humanity without weakness, speeches that were always straightforward and simple, and conduct always in conformity with these speeches.” His “worthy teacher” won him over by modes of action and qualities that were opposed precisely to those by which les dévots had pushed him away. In particular, he noticed that the Vicar exercised his virtue whether or not those whom he helped satisfied ideas or demands of the Church. By contrast, the priest’s faith was a puzzle to him. He did not disclose that he took offense at the mode of thinking of the “freethinker.” Sometimes he approved dogmas contrary to those of the Roman Church. And he did not seem to value especially all its ceremonies. The convert would have taken him for a disguised Protestant, therefore, had he not seen him observe and carry out faithfully those very practices, rites, prescriptions that apparently mattered so little to him. Since he fulfilled his priestly duties as punctiliously without witnesses present as when in the public eye, the charge of hypocrisy presumably did not cross the young man’s mind. But he did not know how he should judge “the contradictions.” Despite this, his judgment of the Vicar’s life was decisive: It was exemplary, the morals of the Vicar were irreproachable. With the one qualification that he “had not corrected all that much” the “mistake” that had once forced his flight, and of which we will later learn from the Vicar himself that it concerned intercourse with the female sex. If in the eyes of the proselyte the priest’s love escapades did no harm to his exemplary life and irreproachable morals, the author’s pointed reference nevertheless raises the question what orientation morality, what support religion can offer in matters of love, thus in regard to that for which Rousseau originally required religious instruction for Émile. And the further question that immediately follows is to what extent the Vicar needs religion. Is the religion that did not put him in a position to correct his mistake the constant witness of a weakness that his conduct of life was so incapable of overcoming that it can instead count as the expression of that weakness? At any rate, the Vicar’s conduct of life made such an impression on the proselyte that he awaited with “curious agitation” the moment when he would learn, i.e., receive from the Vicar an explanation of the principle on which the teacher grounded what to the student appeared as the “uniformity of so singular a life.” How things stand with the unity of 21. VI–­XII (561–­63).

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the life that the Vicar led, the reader will be able to judge only when he knows more about “the principle” that is supposed to form its basis and that remains as little external to the question of the unity as does the self-­understanding of that life. Before the Vicar depicts for his student what maintains and supports his life, a second important step in the moral education of the proselyte still waits to be taken. It concerns, as did the first, amour-­propre. The narrator states retrospectively about himself that what was most difficult to eradicate in himself back then was “a proud misanthropy, a certain bitterness against the rich and the happy of the world.” If the Vicar wanted to show him a feasible way to happiness, he had to cure him of his hatred of and his disfavor toward those presumably better off. He had to free him from the delusion that others were happy at his expense and that “their pretended happiness” had usurped his. In short, he had to tame his amour-­propre, which had motivated these misleading comparisons and trapped him in unhealthy dependencies of ressentiment. If the first step was about “awakening” amour-­propre, i.e., deploying its constructive power in order to elevate the unhappy one, to raise his feeling of self-­worth, it is now about the moderation of amour-­propre, which led the proselyte to pride and made men appear “still more vile” to him, so that his contempt for them added to his hatred. Thus, amour-­propre is recognizable with its Janus-­face. The two passages in the framing narrative in which amour-­ propre is spoken of leave no doubt as to the central importance it has for moral education, in the first as well as in the second step. What importance amour-­ propre has in religious education, and whether the twofold treatment it receives in the framing narrative is repeated in the two parts of the Vicar’s profession of faith, will deserve our special attention.22 To tame his pupil’s amour-­propre, the Vicar makes an effort “to ensure the germination of the seeds of reason and goodness he was sowing in his soul.” Instead of combating his pride directly, he strengthens his raison and his bonté by making him see men with other eyes. He clarifies for him their—­and his—­errors and shows men to him as beings to whom compassion is due. Behind the facade of their happiness he uncovers their misery, behind the vain semblance of their wealth their real evils, objects not of  his envy and disfavor, but of  his regret and pity. The student learns to see men everywhere as victims of their own vices and the vices of others. And so now he sees “the poor groaning under the yoke of the rich and the rich under the yoke of their prejudices.” This new view of his fellow men and of himself 22. In the framing narrative amour-­propre is mentioned once in paragraph X (562) and once in paragraph XV (564), la divinité and Dieu each appear once in paragraph V (560).

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grounds a new superiority, which is different from the old pride owing not only to its clemency, but above all to its insight into his own neediness. The student has learned, it seems, the most important lessons. At the end of the second part of the moral education, the author gives us for the first time immediate insight into the instruction the proselyte undergoes. He gives the floor to the Vicar, who in his short speech discloses himself more as a disciple of Stoic wisdom than as a teacher of Christian faith: “ ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘our illusions, far from hiding our evils from us, increase them by giving a value to that which has none and by making us sensitive to a thousand false privations we would not feel without them. Peace of soul consists of contempt for everything that can trouble it; the man who sets the greatest store by life is he who knows least how to enjoy it, and the one who aspires most avidly to happiness is always most miserable.’ ”23 Following upon the Vicar’s first speech comes the first of two dialogues with the narrator within the work. The narrator poses no question about the first part of the speech. He does not inquire how the remarkable sentence that provides the prelude is related to the Vicar’s faith. He is entirely under the impression of the second part, which he construes as a bleak rejection of  happiness: “If one must turn away from everything, what then has been the use for us of being born, and if one must disdain happiness itself, who knows how to be happy?” “I” is the Vicar’s concise reply, and the follow-­up question, wondering with astonishment what he has done to be happy, is met with the announcement of the profession of faith: “My child, I shall be glad to tell you.” Happiness is something that really interests the proselyte, intrinsically and not merely conditionally as does the Vicar’s faith with its contradictions. But the proselyte’s question concerning the Vicar’s happiness requires the Vicar to explain his faith in context, since he conceives of faith as the foundation of his happiness or as the principle on which rests the unity the proselyte supposes the Vicar’s life has. To present his faith comprehensively means to lay bare his soul. The Vicar will have his own confessions follow the pupil’s. He will spread out before him all the sentiments and convictions of his heart. He will allow the pupil to see him as he sees himself. The Vicar confirms the prospective psychic intimacy by an embrace, a gesture he will repeat at the beginning of the second part of the profession of faith, before he presents his critique of revealed religion to the narrator. Once the proselyte has listened to the Vicar’s entire profession de foi and knows the state of his soul, not only will he comprehend why the Vicar takes himself to be happy, but he will also know—­assuming 23. XIII–­XVI (563–­64).

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that he thinks like the Vicar—­what he must do to be happy himself. The profession of faith promises to answer the question how the Vicar achieved his happiness in order to show the student the way to his own happiness. The discipleship, however, is bound up with the presupposition that the student agrees with the teacher about what is most important and thinks as he does. The happiness made available by the Profession de foi neither exhausts itself in noble enthusiasm nor discloses itself through sheer empathy. It is founded upon a particular way of thinking, which the Vicar, following his “natural inclination,” believes corresponds to the proselyte’s nature. The Vicar wants to explain to him in a conversation “everything” he thinks “about the lot of man and about the true value of  life.” The conversation, which will turn out to be a long speech with a short intervention by the listener, takes place on a summer day on a hill outside the city. It begins under the rays of the rising sun with an unobstructed view of the course of the Po and the chain of the Alps. “One would have said that nature displayed all its magnificence to our eyes in order to present them with the text for our conversations.” Nature, mentioned only once before, when the belief in the badness of the nature of man was spoken of, which played an essential part in the proselyte’s crisis of faith, is restored in its integrity at the end of the framing narrative and receives a grand entrance. It is the text of nature, the One Book that precedes all books of religion, that the Vicar will try to interpret. Referring back to the peace of soul, the central subject of his speech about happiness, and pointing ahead to the peace of religion, the political purpose of his speech about revelation, the narrator now calls the Vicar the man of peace: “l’homme de paix me parla ainsi.”24 The interpretation of the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard stands or falls with the question of whose profession of faith we have before us. It depends upon our knowledge of the Vicar, his history and his nature, his view of the addressee to whom he directs his profession of faith, and the purpose he pursues in doing so. This is why the framing narrative is fundamental for understanding the profession of faith. This is true especially for its centerpiece, the teaching of  Natural Religion. It is neither placeless nor timeless, indifferent neither to the one who presents it nor to the one to whom it is presented. If 24. XVI–­XIX (564–­65); cf. V (560). In the final sentence of the framing narrative, Rousseau at first used the formulation “mon digne maître” (ed. Masson 34), which he used earlier in paragraph XIII (563). The designation “l’homme de paix” for the Vicar is found only in this exposed passage. Corresponding to the “homme de paix” of the framing narrative is the expression “Dieu de paix” of the profession of faith, which the Vicar opposes to the God of faith in revelation: 170 (624); cf. 115 (610) and 125 (614).

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we want adequately to understand the teaching of  Natural Religion, or what amounts to the same, if we want to understand the intention of the author who has it presented, both the precise formulation he chooses for it and the framework in which he presents it deserve careful attention. Thus, to offer an example that is more than an example, the report the author prefixes to the Profession de foi discloses that the answer to the question whether or not the teaching of Natural Religion will succeed with the proselyte depends upon whether the Vicar correctly evaluates and classifies the nature of the pupil. If the student were another Émile, it might be successful; if he is Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, it will not be. The teaching of  Natural Religion is directed to nonphilosophers, and it is presented in the Profession de foi by a nonphilosopher. In the event that the speech about illusions and peace of soul in the framing narrative let one or another reader suspect that the Vicar could be a philosopher in disguise—­for at this point the reader does not yet know how the Vicar understands “peace of soul”—­he will soon be disabused of this suspicion by the profession of faith. Right at the beginning of the Profession de foi, which adopts the form of address of the announcement and commences with “Mon enfant,” the Vicar explains that the “child” should expect from him neither “learned speeches” nor “profound reasonings.” He states that he is “not a great philosopher” and also does not care to be one. But sometimes he has good common sense and he always loves the truth. He will reveal to him in good faith what he thinks in the simplicity of his heart. That this opening is not only a rhetorical gesture that is supposed to divert or distance from philosophy a listener having no talent for it, that we are thus not dealing with a distancing from philosophy with philosophic intent, a gesture often used by Rousseau, is shown by the autobiographical sketch that the Vicar has follow. In fact, the most important function of the confessions that come immediately thereafter might well consist in making vivid that the Vicar is no philosopher and why he cannot be one. For the Catholic priest, religion is in the first place, as it is for the Calvinist nameless one, a matter of convention. Custom and convenience determine him to aspire to the “métier de Prêtre.” Means were found for him, poor and born a peasant, to begin to study, but neither his parents nor he is concerned with the search for what is bon, véritable, utile; rather they are concerned solely with acquiring the knowledge expected in order to receive ordination. After he has taken his priestly vow, he realizes that when he obligated himself  “not to be a man,” he promised more than he can keep. A scandal ensues when he gets in­ volved with an unmarried woman. He is arrested, interdicted by the Church,

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and driven out. The priest sees himself as a victim far more of  his scruples than of his incontinence; indeed, it was his “respect for the bed of others” that let his “mistakes” come to light.25 From his youth on, he had respected marriage as “la prémiére et la plus sainte institution de la nature.” From the point of view of the teacher of  Natural Religion, the breach of marriage would have been a crime, since he believes today as he did then that marriage is sanctified by nature. By contrast, the breach of his vow was at most a faute, since the vow rested upon convention and he recognized its content as contra naturam. The appeal to “the first and most sacred institution of nature” gives us three first examples of the Profession de foi in one: It is the first example of the faith of the young Vicar, who certainly will have understood his faith in the sanctity of marriage differently from the way the Vicar now understands it. Secondly, we see the first application of the teaching of the priority of the order of nature over all the laws and institutions of man or the first evidence of a concrete moral demand, which the Vicar bases on the belief that one should obey nature more than men. And finally, we have before us the first case of a doctrine of the Vicar that, as every reader of the Discours sur l’inégalité  knows, stands in blatant contradiction to a famous position of Rousseau’s, so that already in the fourth paragraph of the profession of faith the difference between Rousseau and the Vicar is marked and provision made against their mutual identification. The teaching of Natural Religion is not yet at the disposal of the young priest at whom the Vicar looks back. He finds no support in the awareness of the agreement of his conscience with the ordre de la nature and no clarity in the orientation toward what la nature bien ordonnée permits or prescribes to him.26 From the punishment his scruples earned him, he draws the conclusion that one often needs only to make a greater mistake in order to evade punishment. He remains caught in the maze of incoherent orders and hypocritical behavior. The experience of injustice plunges the priest into a crisis of faith, just as he later will observe it in the convert whom he helps 25. Whether the Vicar wants to confess more with the admission of  “fautes” than the narrator ascribed to him with “une avanture de jeunesse,” whether, therefore, the “mistakes” refer to relations to several women or whether they designate repeated violations of his vow, may remain open. 5 (567); IV (560); cf. XIV (563). 26. The autobiographical sketch, which begins in the second paragraph by opening with “Je suis né pauvre et paysan,” is interrupted in the third paragraph by a statement of the Vicar directed to the listener, addressing him as “Ô! bon jeune homme.” The Vicar introduces the basic concepts of  his teaching of  Natural Religion in light of which he evaluates the disorders of his youth, and thus blends together the two levels of report and reflection.

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to flee from the Catholic hospice. His ideas “of the just, the decent, and all the duties of man” are overturned, most of the opinions he hitherto held are in ruins. He no longer knows what he should think and finally arrives at the point where the proselyte finds himself: he reaches the state of incrédulité.27 The Vicar stresses, encouraging the student, that the incredulity in which he found himself was “more difficult to destroy” than that of the proselyte, since he had reached it at a riper age and with greater pain. Yet he stresses even more that the incredulity was unbearable for him, indeed, that incredulity is simply unbearable and therefore necessarily must be destroyed or given up. From the outset he makes it unmistakably understood that the student would be poorly advised if he were to hope to overcome the incredulity through philosophy. He compares his former incredulity to the state of “uncertainty and doubt that Descartes requires for the search for truth,” adding immediately that this state cannot last and that only “the interest of vice or laziness of soul” can leave us in it. The Vicar knows that philosophers maintain themselves in doubt out of a theoretical interest and a highly lively longing of their souls and can operate within the uncertainty. He sees that for them the state of reflection and contemplation is in no way unpleasant. Even with the moral criticism he makes against their “idle passion” and “self-­contentment,” he concedes in his own way that the activity that determines their life is self-­sufficient.28 But that means: their doubt and uncertainty cannot concern everything, they cannot concern what is for them the most important. “Doubt about the things it is important for us to know is too violent a state for the human mind; it does not hold out in this state for long, it decides in spite of itself one way or the other, and prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.”29 The Vicar believes that the search for truth does not lead to knowledge that is capable of answering the question of the right life and of grounding a coherent way of life. He believes, therefore, that the philosophic life can only rest on a belief. He believes in addition that the belief that provides the basis for the philosophic life, or the knowledge the philosopher alleges as the foundation, does not suffice to be able to lead a good life. We may assume that by the “things it is important for us to know,” the Vicar understands the questions to which his teaching of  Natural Religion gives an answer, and that to be in doubt about the answer to these questions appears to 27. The Vicar reaches the state of incrédulité  in the sixth paragraph of  the profession of faith (567), the proselyte reached it in the sixth paragraph of the framing narrative (561). 28. “rien ne conserve mieux l’habitude de réfléchir que d’être plus content de soi que de sa fortune” 7 (567). Consider 177 (631). 29. 2–­10 (566–­68).

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him as “too violent a state” or as an incredulity that must be overcome by a new certainty of faith. This above all distinguishes the Vicar from a philosopher. It distinguishes him from Rousseau who, despite many protestations,30 proved before and after the Profession de foi that he knew how to live with “doubts” regarding the Vicar’s teaching, and of whom a modern philosopher said that he had that “well-­contrived head for which doubt is a good cushion.”31 The picture the Vicar draws of the philosophers is clear enough. He was, to be sure, not so “corrupted” that he would have found enjoyment in the state Descartes demands for the inquiry into truth. But to escape from the misery of incredulity, of wandering from doubt to doubt, of lack of clarity “about the cause of my being and the rule of my duties,” he “consulted” the philosophers. He “leafed through their books,” familiarized himself with their opinions, found them “all proud, assertive, dogmatic,” constantly contradicting one another, strong only when attacking and destroying, powerless when on defense, all rightly mocking one another, agreeing solely in disputation. To listen to them showed no way to a new certainty of faith. He traced the doctrinal confusion of the polyphony that presented itself to him back to the insufficiency of the human mind and the pride of the philosophers. The great whole to which man belongs as a small part exceeds our power to grasp in regard to “the first laws” and “the final cause” as well as the “impenetrable mysteries” that surround us. In the midst of enumerating the objects that elude our knowledge, he mentions that we know “neither our nature nor our active principle,” and “hardly know if man” is a “simple or composite being.” Thus, the pride of the philosophers consists in arrogating to themselves a knowledge not fit for man, or in wanting to fathom what must remain closed to him. And even this is not enough. What drives the philosophers, as the Vicar formulates his moral verdict, is not their love of truth, but their striving for glory, for distinction, for making a difference. Each knows that “his system” is no better grounded than all the others. He advocates it because it is his.32 The Vicar goes even further:

30. Cf. Lettre à Voltaire, August 18, 1756, CC IV, p. 29. 31. Leo Strauss, “On the Intention of Rousseau,” Social Research 14:4 (December 1947): 482. For the background of this characterization, see Nietzsche, Morgenröthe I, 46, KGW V, 1, p. 49; Diderot, Pensées philosophiques XXVII, OC II, p. 33; Montaigne, Essais III, 13, ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Œuvres complètes [Paris, 1962]), pp. 1050–­51; ed. Jean Balsamo et al. (Paris, 2007), p. 1120. 32. “L’essentiel est de penser autrement que les autres. Chez les croyans il est athée, chez les athées il seroit croyant” 14 (569). In the manuscript the last sentence at first read as follows: “Chez un peuple croyant il est incredule chez un peuple athée il seroit croyant” (ed. Masson 56).

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“There is not a single one among them who, if he came to know the true and the false, would not prefer the lie he has found to the truth discovered by another.” After this warning against the philosophers, the turn inward is not at all surprising. Instead of the philosophers, from this point on he “consulted” la lumière intérieure. It would still be less harmful for him, more conducive to his independence, to follow “my own illusions” than to yield to “their lies.” The Vicar reviewed those opinions that had made an impression on him one after another since his birth, in order to put them to a vote in fore interno according to the degree of their probability. “In the silence of prejudices,” he came to the conclusion that the first idea and the one most common among the various ideas was also the simplest and most reasonable. If nevertheless it was not able to garner all the votes for itself, it had to be because it was not proposed last, it had not been advocated by the philosophers who were polled last. The Vicar says nothing about how he silenced his prejudices for the vote. How could this have succeeded without subjecting these prejudices to a radical critique, to an examen sévère? Instead, he shows how he remedied the defect that the first and most widespread idea was not at the same time the final one in the inner vote, so that it would be unanimously acknowledged as binding. He entertains a historically counterfactual thought experiment and invites the student to imagine that “all your ancient and modern philosophers” would have at first presented “their bizarre systems [1] of forces, [2] of chances, [3] of fatality, [4] of necessity, [5] of atoms, [6] of the animate world, [7] of living matter, [8] of materialism of every kind,” and would thus have exhausted their possibilities; but then after them, “the illustrious Clarke” would have entered and “enlightened the world,” proclaiming at last “the being of beings and the dispenser of things.” “With what universal admiration, with what unanimous applause this new system would have been received,” the Vicar exclaims. If only it had stayed the last word, and each had said to himself what the Vicar said to himself: Indeed, this system, like all that have preceded it, is exposed to “insoluble objections,” since the human mind does not suffice to solve the basic problems, but it is “the only one that explains everything,” and by contrast with the others, it has in its favor above all “direct proofs.” What kind of proofs the Vicar speaks of becomes clear from a glance at the characterization of the English ecclesiastic’s “so consoling system,” which he contrasts with the “bizarre systems” of the philosophers, nota bene, of all philosophers, ancient as well as modern: In contrast to necessity and atoms standing in the center of the enumeration of the philosophical doctrinal edifices, there stands in the praise of the theistic doctrinal edifice at the corresponding place the double characterization that

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the system is “so fit to lift up the soul, to give a foundation to virtue.”33 The superiority of the “new system” is proven by its usefulness for practice. The thought experiment prepares the answer as to how the first, simplest, and most reasonable idea can be made into the “final” one. The reference to Clarke, who died shortly before the supposed time of the Vicar’s speech, and whom the Vicar furnishes with an epithet famous thirty years later, is not itself this answer.34 The Vicar knows that the universal admiration and unanimous applause he imagines for the “final” system never came to pass. The praise serves to mark the Vicar’s fundamental critique of the philosophers. It is not meant to summon up Clarke as an authority, who is never mentioned again in the Profession de foi. The turn inward that the Vicar has taken cannot stop with the vote in fore interno concerning the opinions of others. As illustrated by the thought experiment, the turn demands going beyond the historical chronology of “systems,” and likewise interrupting the biographical sequence of  “ideas.” In order to turn his “first” into his “final”  idea, the Vicar must work out the most simple and most reasonable idea with his own means, that is, in such a way that he is able to recall his certainty of faith at all times and have an overview of the essential steps in the course of its grounding. The Vicar leaves “all philosophy” behind in order to pursue only his love of truth. He turns his back on the “vain subtlety of arguments” and adheres to the simple rule to consider as evident all knowledge to which he cannot “in the sincerity of my heart” withhold his consent, to accept as true all that seems to have a “necessary connection” to 33. “ce nouveau sistême si grand, si consolant, si sublime, si propre à elever l’ame, à donner une base à la vertu, et en même tems si frapant, si lumineux, si simple, et ce me semble offrant moins de choses incompréhensibles à l’esprit humain qu’il n’en trouve d’absurdes en tout autre sistême!” 17 (570). 34. Samuel Clarke was born in 1675 and died in 1729. The two books that made him famous came out of sermons he had given in 1704 and 1705 in St. Paul’s Cathedral: A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God: More Particularly in Answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their Followers: Wherein the Notion of Liberty is Stated, and the Possibility and Certainty of it Proved in Opposition to Necessity and Fate and A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation. I cite according to the edition in one volume: The Fifth Edition, Corrected (London, 1719). Voltaire writes about Clarke in the Lettres philosophiques in 1734: “Mais le plus ferme patron de la doctrine Arienne est l’illustre Docteur Clarck. Cet homme est d’une vertu rigide et d’un caractere doux, plus amateur de ses opinions que passionné pour faire des Prosélites, uniquement occupé de calculs et de démonstrations, une vraie machine à raisonnemens.” Septiéme lettre. Sur les Sociniens, ou Ariens, ou Anti-­Trinitaires, ed. Gustave Lanson (Paris, 1909), I, p. 79.

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the first, and to leave all the rest without further investigations in uncertainty. The Vicar does not trouble himself with gaining knowledge, with illuminating problems, with answering questions, “if they lead to nothing useful for practice.” He advocates an unconditional primacy of practical reason.35 The turn inward raises the question who it is who can give or withhold his consent to opinions, who judges knowledge to be evident, true, or indifferent, and in what his judgments about things have their justifying reason. The Vicar begins his undertaking to achieve on his own a new certainty of faith with an attempt to gain self-­certainty, in which the reading of  the philosophers has left its trace. “I exist and I have senses by which I am affected.” The first truth or—­as we should rather say to accord with the distinction he has proposed—­the first evidence from which he begins leads to the first doubt: “Do I have a particular sentiment of my existence, or do I sense it only through my sensations?” Neither thought nor sentiment but sensation establishes the Vicar’s first certainty, the distinction between I and non-­I. The sensations through which he is affected by something outside himself assure him of his own existence and the existence of the universe without his thereby concluding anything about the character of the I and the non-­I, i.e., the first certainty is neutral regarding the dispute carried on between the “idealists” and the “materialists.” Reflection on the objects of his sensations leads the Vicar to make a further distinction. He senses within himself the faculty of actively producing relations between the objects of sensations, of comparing them, of judging them, and of not remaining only passive toward them. From this he infers that the être passif of the sensations is joined by an être actif, to which comparing and judging, attention, méditation, réflexion belong. “ According to me, the distinctive faculty of the active or intelligent being is to be able to give a meaning to the word is.” The meaning of  being rests on a judgment. Without the être actif ou intelligent, there would be no articulation of the world and no identity of the I, at which the Vicar’s first doubt was directed. The faculty of judging includes the possibility of judging falsely. The distinction between sentir and juger, which is translated into the dualism of être passif and être actif, leads, therefore, to the identification of the être actif as the source of mistakes and errors. If the understanding determines individuals, distinguishes kinds, classifies properties, judges relations, “it mixes its errors in with the truth of the sensations, which show only the objects.” The sensations, which grounded the certainty of the first dualism, the existence of the I and the existence of the universe, migrate in the second dualism with which the Vicar operates to the side of the immediate, 35. 7, 9, 12–­18 (567, 568–­70).

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error-­free, unquestionable truth. The être sensitif et passif is in no need of critique, since it is postulated as being free of judgment. On this basis, the Vicar builds an argument that is supposed to convince the student of the priority of sentiment over reason. He will approach the truth, which is in the things and not in the mind that makes judgments about the things, more assuredly the less “of himself ” he transports into the judgments he makes, i.e., the less his être actif et intelligent has a bearing on them: “thus my rule of yielding to sentiment more than to reason is confirmed by reason itself.” Up until this point, sentiment had been mentioned only once, when the Vicar made the sentiment of  his existence the object of his first doubt. Sentiment must pass through doubt and needs confirmation by reason in order to become a reliable court of appeal. The privileged position toward the truth in which the Vicar places the être sensitif et passif allows him to plead for the priority of sentiment in the smooth transition from sensations to sentiment. At the same time, however, the privileged position of sentiment assigns to the être actif ou intelligent, on which the Vicar will base the dogmas of  his credo, the part of being susceptible to errors and of standing in danger of self-­deception.36 The turn inward is followed by the turn outward. The Vicar does not proceed directly from the asserted priority of sentiment to the voice of conscience. He also does not transition from the certainty of himself to the inquiry into his duties. The longest path seems required in order to arrive at morality following the primacy of practical reason. Viewing himself  “with a sort of shudder,” the Vicar sees himself “cast out,” “lost” in the vast expanse of the universe, “as if drowned in the immensity of  beings,” not knowing of them what they are, neither among themselves nor in relation to himself. He investigates them, observes them, and compares them with himself. Everything he perceives through the senses is matter, which he sees partly in motion, partly at rest. From this he infers that motion is not essential to matter. If nothing acts upon matter, it does not move, so that its natural state is to be at rest. Rousseau intercedes with a Note at this point, which is important for the argument to follow, in order to correct and elucidate the Vicar’s claim: The rest the Vicar sees is only a relative rest. We are inclined to take rest that is only relative to be absolute, because we “very clearly conceive” of rest as the extreme end of a scale of more or less. If matter can be conceived as being at rest, it is not true that motion must be attributed to its essence. From the fact that we can imagine matter at rest, however, it follows as little that rest is the natural state of matter as it follows from the Vicar’s idea of être passif and être actif that sensations 36. 19–­32 (570–­73).

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remain free from judgments and consequently remain within the immediacy of the truth of the objects by which the senses are affected, or that the matter at rest that the Vicar sees is what he believes he sees. The Vicar believes that matter is inherently passive and without motion. Therefore, he must or thus can postulate a being that is active and not matter in order to put matter into motion. With bodies, he observes two kinds of movement: mouvement communiqué and mouvement spontané ou volontaire. The movement of the clock is an example of a transmitted motion or one externally communicated. That animals are capable of spontaneous movement he infers by way of  analogy. He knows that there are spontaneous movements, since he feels within himself the faculty of voluntarily bringing about movements: “I know it because I sense it. I want to move my arm, and I move it without this movement’s having another immediate cause than my will.” It is in this place, it is for securing the will as the starting point of a spontaneous movement, neither transmitted nor derivative, that the Vicar makes the claim for sentiment as the final certainty and court of appeal against every conceivable argument: “It would be in vain to try to use reason to destroy this sentiment in me; it is stronger than any evidence; one might just as well try to prove to me that I do not exist.” The feeling of being able, by virtue of  his will, to move matter, to be able to initiate a chain of cause and effect and to transmit it to other bodies, encourages the Vicar to an extrapolation as bold as it is consequential. From the spontaneity of human actions that he traces back to human will, he infers a first cause of every motion, which must be posited by a spontaneous act and thus likewise must be traced back to a will: The visible universe is in motion. Its motions are subject to constant laws, which are accessible to observation. It does not show the freedom that appears in the spontaneous movements of animals. As a whole it does not exhibit the unity, the organization, the feeling connecting all the parts of an animate body. It is not a large, self-­moving animal. The scattered and dead matter of which it is composed must, therefore, be moved by a cause that is external to the universe, and of which the Vicar says that he does not perceive it; “but inner persuasion makes this cause so sensible that I cannot see the sun rotate without imagining a force that pushes it, or if the earth turns, I believe I sense a hand that makes it turn.” What the Vicar presents about the cause he supposes is outside the world—­that it is inaccessible to his sensations, but his inner conviction, or more precisely, persuasion, makes it so sensible to him that he believes he senses the hand that turns the earth, if the earth turns—­shows that the final court of appeal for the Vicar is not so much his sentiment as instead his belief. Belief is not sufficient to attain “the truth that is in the things,” which is why the Vicar leaves open whether the sun revolves around the earth

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or the earth around the sun. But belief provides a practical orientation in the world. Thus, it informs the Vicar’s extrapolation in its presuppositions as well as in its result: Since matter is naturally in a state of rest, motion must be communicated to it by a being that is not matter. And since the world does not seem to be a large animal, but does indeed seem to be a whole governed by laws, the cause of its movements must be sought outside the world of matter. The first line of reasoning is in harmony with a second one, which leads to the goal: In order to avoid a regressus in infinitum of cause and effect, what is required is to go back to a first movement, which is itself set in motion not by a movement, but rather by a spontaneous, voluntary act. And inanimate bodies are incapable of such an act, since “they act only by motion, and there is no veritable action without will.” Thus, from the most inner certainty, the Vicar arrived at the most external cause, and yet always maintained his “prémier principe.” But when he announces the result of the extrapolation, he no longer speaks of sentiment, but rather explicitly of  foi: “I believe, therefore, that a will moves the universe and animates nature. This is my first dogma, or my first article of faith.”37 With this first article of faith, the decisive step has been taken. If it is accepted, the additional articles can without difficulty be aligned with it, based upon it, linked to it. Therefore, its status deserves special attention. The Vicar concedes that the dogma he has put forward is obscur. “But in the end it makes sense” and contains nothing at odds with reason or observation. Since the cause the dogma names eludes observation, as the Vicar has maintained, it cannot contradict observation. And that the dogma does make sense is not in question. Precisely for that reason it was proposed. Yet how is its obscurity compatible with reason? Is what is neither known nor conceivable not at odds with reason? The Vicar confesses his ignorance in regard to the highest principle, the act of will that provides the basis for his credo: “How does a will produce a physical and corporeal action? I do not know, but I experience within myself that it does so.” He wants to move his body, and his body moves. He experiences that something happens, but he does not know how what he experiences happens. “The will is known to me by its acts, not by its nature.” In the case of the will that is supposed to move the universe, however, the Vicar knows neither the nature nor the acts that he postulates. When he acts on other bodies by his will, he succeeds in doing so only by means of his body, even where he causes animate bodies to move by gestures or speech acts without making bodily contact. The Vicar must assume with his extrapolation that the 37. 33–­40 and Note 2 (573–­76).

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will can be without the body, that the être actif can appear separately from the être passif. Yet the Vicar declares in the strongest terms that the union of “the two substances” that takes place in him appears to him “absolutely incomprehensible.” If that which he knows from experience solely in the state of union cannot be conceived, what can then be stated about the state of separation of “the two substances,” from which his experience remains barred, without the statement’s being at odds with reason? The dogma of the will that moves the universe and animates nature is obscure because it goes back to an act of will. Its obscurity abates to the extent that it unlocks the meaning that is wanted from the outset. Already the Vicar’s next step distinctly brightens the picture: “If moved matter shows me a will, matter moved according to certain laws shows me an intelligence: this is my second article of faith. To act, to compare, to choose are operations of an être actif et pensant.” The will is determined by insight. The power that moves the universe orders it in accord with the standard of thought. The order of the world is not the play of chance and necessity, but rather the result of deliberate action. The act of will that the Vicar posits as the beginning is unconcealed in the work of the lawgiver who, according to the Vicar, is the guarantor that the whole has a purpose. The Vicar does not know the purpose, but the two articles of faith are an expression of  his persuasion intérieure, his desire, and his hope that there is such a purpose. The Vicar likens himself to a man who for the first time peers into an opened clock and, although he does not know what the device is used for and has never seen the dial, in view of the coordination of the parts with one another and of the interlocking wheels in the work, admires the workman and is convinced that all the details serve a common purpose he is unable to perceive. Just as the clock points to the clockmaker, so “the sensible order of the universe” points to the suprême intelligence, who presides over this order and pursues an intention with it. Only such an intention, solely the will of the highest intelligent being promises the meaning in which the Vicar’s certainty of faith can find its satisfaction. For this reason, the Vicar conceives the world according to the understanding of ouvrage and ouvrier. Therefore, he offers the craftsman model in order to make every attempt to explain or make plausible the motion of matter, the origin of  the world, the development of  life, the place of man, without having recourse to an intention, plan, determination of  purpose, appear mistaken. Therefore, it is not because he knows how to refute the argument38 to which 38. The Vicar concedes: “ Je ne dois point être surpris qu’une chose arrive lorsqu’elle est possible et que la difficulté de l’événement est compensée par la quantité des jets,  j’en conviens” 47 (579).

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the jarring example refers that he highlights the “lie” that a work of art like the Aeneid, which is obedient to the intention of its author, could ever have come to be in finished form from printed letters thrown around at random.39 No theoretical considerations, no weighing of the greater or lesser plausibility of a proposed explanation decides the issue here. The Vicar, who characterized as “absolutely incomprehensible” the two-­substance doctrine he drew upon, insists, following his practical interest, upon the “unity of intention” that supports the whole, and contrasts it to a “blind fatality” in which he finds no meaning. The meaning of  being depends upon the judgment of a being who is seeing to the highest degree, actif, intelligent, pensant.40 What the first two articles of faith encompass and to what end they are good for him, the Vicar shows in seven successive paragraphs that form the center of 39. The Vicar refers, anachronistically stated, to one of the most famous passages in Diderot’s Pensées philosophiques: “ J’ouvre les cahiers d’un professeur célèbre, et je lis: ‘Athées, je vous accorde que le mouvement est essentiel à la matière; qu’en concluez-­vous? . . . que le monde résulte du jet fortuit des atomes? J’aimerais autant que vous me dissiez que l’Iliade d’Homere, ou la Henriade de Voltaire est un résultat de jets fortuits de caractères.’ Je me garderai bien de faire ce raisonnement à un athée. Cette comparaison lui donnerait beau jeu. Selon les lois de l’analyse des sorts, me dirait-­il, je ne dois point être surpris qu’une chose arrive, lorsqu’elle est possible, et que la difficulté de l’événement est compensée par la quantité des jets. Il y a tel nombre de coups dans lesquels je gagerais avec avantage d’amener cent mille six à la fois, avec cent mille dés. Quelle que fût la somme finie des caractères avec laquelle on me proposerait d’engendrer fortuitement l’Iliade, il y a telle somme finie de jets qui me rendrait la proposition avantageuse: mon avantage serait même infini, si la quantité de jets accordée était infinie.” XXI, OC II, p. 28. Not only was Rousseau very familiar with the consideration of the contingent origin of the visible world in the twenty-­first pensée philosophique, he was also deeply impressed with Diderot’s argument. In a paragraph of the Lettre à Voltaire that was all too bold for this exoteric writing and that he finally suppressed, Rousseau wrote in 1756: “ Je me souviens que ce qui m’a frappé le plus fortement en toute ma vie, sur l’arrangement fortuit de l’univers, est la vingt et unième pensée philosophique, où l’on montre par les lois de l’analyse des sorts, que quand la quantité des jets est infinie, la difficulté de l’événement est plus que suffisamment compensée par la multitude des jets, et que par conséquent l’esprit doit être plus étonné de la durée hypothétique du chaos que de la naissance réelle de l’univers. C’est en supposant le mouvement nécessaire, ce qu’on a jamais dit de plus fort à mon gré sur cette dispute; et, quant à moi, je déclare que je n’y sais pas la moindre réponse qui ait le sens commun, ni vrai, ni faux, sinon de nier comme faux ce qu’on ne peut savoir, que le mouvement soit essentiel à la matiere.” CC IV, p. 61. For the Lettre à Voltaire I refer to the illuminating essay by Victor Gourevitch, “Rousseau on Providence,” Review of Metaphysics 53:3 (March 2000): 565–­611. Throughout the Discours sur l’inégalité Rousseau makes use of the argument that “the lapse of time compensates for the slight likelihood of events.” Première partie, p. 168; cf. commentary ad locum. 40. 41–­49 (576–­580). Consider First Book, Chapter VII, Pp. 210-­12.

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the first part of  his speech and contain the core of  his credo, the teaching about God and man’s position in the world.41 The Vicar begins with a specification that is linked to the formulation of the first article of  faith: “I believe, therefore, that the world is governed by a powerful and wise will; I see it or, rather, I sense it, and that is something important for me to know.” What is important for the Vicar to know is that in which he is to discover the cause of his being and the rule of his duties. The governance of the world by a powerful and wise will is important for him, because it concerns his place in the whole and his conduct of life. Yet he does not know what is important to know, but rather he believes it. His belief in the powerful and wise will is based not upon what he sees, but rather on what he senses or believes that he senses.42 On the other hand, the Vicar assures the student, what is not important for him to know is whether the world is eternal or created, whether there are one or two or many principles of things and what their nature is. If knowledge of such matters were to become of “interest” to him, i.e., urgent for his practical orientation, he would make the effort to acquire it. Until such time, he renounces such “idle questions,” which might arouse his amour-­propre but are “useless” for his conduct of life and exceed his reason. At the critical point his speech has reached, in view of the fundamental alternative, eternity or creation of the world, the Vicar not only confirms emphatically that he is determined by the primacy of practical reason but at the same time reminds the proselyte of his admonition not to turn to philosophy. For the philosophers, the question whether the world is eternal or created is certainly anything but a “question oiseuse.” In the formulation “necessity or creation from nothing,” in which the question has become decisive for the confrontation with faith in revelation, since it gives a name to the claim faith in revelation has to make if it wants to understand itself, nothing less than the possibility of  philosophy is at issue. If the world was created from nothing, there are no limits to the power that created it. It would be subject to no necessity that it itself had not created and, consequently, could not destroy, breach, annul. Creation from nothing is the necessary presupposition of talk of omnipotence. But talk of omnipotence means in just as many words that everything is possible and nothing is necessary. And if nothing is necessary, philosophy is impossible. For without necessity there is no knowledge and no “wisdom of the world.” The Vicar is familiar with these implications. That he wants to keep the proselyte away from philosophy does not mean that he 41. 50–­56 (580–­83). 42. See 38 (575) and P. 246.

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learned nothing from the philosophers. How much he has learned from them is shown by the fact that in the explication of his first dogma he ascribes the governance of the world not to an all-­powerful will, but instead to a volonté puissante et sage.43 How aware he is of what is in fact at stake in the question whether the world is eternal or created,44 he shows when he takes up the question again at the beginning of the next paragraph and in doing so replaces the world with matter: “Whether matter is eternal or created, whether there is or is not a passive principle, it is in any event certain that the whole is one and points to a single intelligence.” The Vicar seemingly leaves open what, after all that has previously been said, he cannot leave open. He defers the immediate confrontation with revealed religion until the second part of the speech. But it is clear to him that Natural Religion is incompatible with a credo that has recourse to omnipotence and creation from nothing. When the archbishop of  Paris sharply attacks Rousseau on account of the Vicar’s evasive treatment of the fundamental alternative, Rousseau dares in the Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont to go further than the Vicar. Not only does he point out that philosophers at all times “have rejected unanimously the possibility of creation.”45 He explicitly ranks the “idea of creation,” i.e., creation from nothing, as the idea that, “of all the ideas that are not clearly self-­contradictory,” is “the least comprehensible for the human mind.”46 Creatio ex nihilo would be the greatest

43. Needless to say, in the first article of faith of the Religion civile Rousseau speaks of a divinity that is puissante and not tout-­puissante. Du contrat social IV, 8, 33, p. 468. 44. Not accidentally, the Vicar opens the fifty-­first paragraph with the declaration: “Souvenez-­vous toujours que je n’enseigne point mon sentiment,  je l’expose” (581). A “précaution” that appears to be particularly apt here. 45. In his response, Rousseau simultaneously gives an instructive example of how authors who have written under conditions of censorship are to be read: “si l’existence éternelle et nécessaire de la matiere a pour nous ses difficultés, sa création n’en a pas de moindres; puis­ que tant d’hommes et de philosophes, qui dans tous les tems ont médité sur ce sujet, ont tous unanimement rejetté la possibilité de la création, excepté peut-­être un très-­petit nombre qui paroissent avoir sincerement soumis leur raison à l’autorité; sincérité que les motifs de leur intérêt, de leur sûreté, de leur repos, rendent fort suspecte, et dont il sera toujours impossible de s’assurer, tant que l’on risquera quelque chose à parler vrai.” Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, p. 955. Cf. Leo Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s “Laws” (Chicago, 1975), p. 150 and Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL, 1952), pp. 121 and 123–­25. 46. “l’idée de création, l’idée sous laquelle on conçoit que par un simple acte de volonté rien devient quelque chose, est, de toutes les idées qui ne sont pas clairement contradictoires, la moins compréhensible à l’esprit humain.” Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, p. 956.

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of all miracles. If it is granted, there is no reason to consider any other miracle impossible. From the attributes that the two articles of faith postulated, the Vicar infers the existence of a being that unites those attributes in itself and actualizes them in the governance of the world: “This Being, which wills and which can, this Being active by itself, this Being finally, whatever it may be, which moves the universe and orders all things, I call God.” Dieu is mentioned for the first time in the fifty-­first paragraph of the Profession de foi, and the Vicar adds that “with this name” he joins the ideas of intelligence, puissance, volonté, which he introduced previously—­whereby insight now takes over the leading position, and power, which was included in the articles on will and on insight, holds the middle position—­as well as the idea of bonté, “which is their necessary consequence.” He does not explain why the fourth must follow from the other three determinations, or alternatively, from one or two of them. But with the first mention of God, he maintains that God’s attributes stand in a necessary relation to one another, that God, consequently, is subject to necessity. Again, the Vicar shows how much he has learned from the philosophers to whose Natural Theology he has recourse regarding a point highly important for him, without explaining or being able to explain it, and despite what he concedes in the immediate sequel. For he continues that he does not know any better the being to whom he has given the name God, that this being eludes his senses and his understanding, and that he falls into ever greater confusion the more he reflects on this being.47 “I perceive God everywhere in his works; I sense him in me; I see him all around me; but as soon as I want to contemplate him in himself, as soon as I want to find out where he is, what he is, what his substance is, he escapes me, and my troubled mind no longer perceives anything.” The Vicar seems to be heading straight toward forbidding himself to ask the question of what God is. Yet the question, which can be rejected as idle or impermissible, as an expression of human curiosity or presumption if posed by theoretical reason, becomes urgent or justified if practical reason commands that it be pursued. Thus, in the fifty-­second paragraph, in which the orientation toward the primacy of practical reason celebrates its greatest triumph, the Vicar, suffused with his insufficiency, affirms that he will never subject la nature de Dieu to reason and its reasonings as long as he is not “forced to” by the sentiment of  God’s relations to him, i.e., as long as he does not have to gain clarity about the nature of  God because it concerns him in its consequences, 47. Cf. Cicero, De natura deorum I, 60.

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in his understanding of  himself and his duties, in his hope and fear. These reasonings of reason are “always presumptuous”—­which is why revealed religions have from the outset prohibited them—­and “a wise man ought to yield to them only with trembling,” for it is “more insulting to the divinity” to reflect badly about it than not to reflect about it at all. We become witnesses to how the Vicar, invariably following practical reason, at first confirms the interdict against the question concerning the nature of God only to overrule it for his own purposes, and then prepares the first ad hominem argument for the confrontation with faith in revelation when, starting from his opponent’s premise, he demands, by appealing to the honor of  God, a good, correct reflection on God that is adequate to his nature.48 From reflection on God, the Vicar returns to himself in order to provide an answer, in the center of his speech about Natural Religion, to the question of what rank the divinity has assigned to him in the order of things it governs. The proud result and the encouraging message for the proselyte is that by virtue of his species he “uncontestably” occupies the first rank. By his volonté and the instruments at his command to execute his will, he has plus de force than “all the bodies” surrounding him, and by his intelligence he is the only one who has a view of the whole. The determinations that provide the basis for man’s distinction and his domination on earth are the faithful picture of the first three attributes the Vicar ascribed to God—­albeit with a momentous demotion that cannot be missed of the second attribute. “What is so ridiculous,” he asks at the end of the fifty-­third paragraph, “about thinking that ev­ erything is made for me, if I am the only one who is able to relate everything to himself ?” Finalism reveals its meaning at a prominent place. In origin as well 48. Rousseau deployed this ad hominem argument when he defended his educational practice of leaving Émile ignorant about God up until the age of fifteen: “Gardons-­nous d’annoncer la vérité à ceux qui ne sont pas en état de l’entrendre, car c’est y vouloir substituer l’erreur. Il vaudroit mieux n’avoir aucune idée de la divinité que d’en avoir des idées basses, fantastiques, injurieuses, indignes d’elle; c’est un moindre mal de la méconoitre que de l’outrager. J’aimerois mieux, dit le bon Plutarque, qu’on crut qu’il n’y a point de Plutarque au monde, que si l’on disoit que Plutarque est injuste, envieux, jaloux, et si tiran qu’il éxige plus qu’il ne laisse le pouvoir de faire.” Émile IV, p. 556. The passage in Plutarch’s De superstitione 169E–­170A to which Rousseau refers has had its place in the critique of revealed religion for a long time. See Diderot, Pensées philosophiques XII, OC II, p. 21; Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm V, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 5th ed. (1732), I, pp. 40–­41; Bayle, Pensées diverses sur la comète, ed. A. Prat and Pierre Rétat (Paris, 1984), CXV, pp. 306–­8; Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall XVII, “Of Superstition,” ed. Kiernan, p. 54.

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as outcome it is anthropocentrism. In the anthropocentric center of  Natural Religion, the gulf separating the Vicar’s profession of faith from Rousseau’s philosophy becomes fully unconcealed.49 When the Vicar outlines the consequences for man’s self-­understanding, he does so in constant contrast to Rousseau.50 He offers the edifying speech about man as the “king of the earth,” who “can raise himself up to the hand that governs the universe” and who has bestowed upon man his royal dignity, as a contrast to a “sad philosophy” that makes man compare himself to the brutes and makes him similar to them.51 As a “simple and true man,” who—­unlike Rousseau—­has no “system” to uphold, he is satisfied with the place in which God has put him, indeed he considers it the best that he could have chosen for his species—­a reflection that makes him “less” proud than it touches him. “Can I see myself thus distinguished without congratulating myself on filling this honorable post and without blessing the hand that placed me in it?” He feels gratitude toward the “author” of his species and adores “the highest power,” which wins him over by its good deeds. Affection, gratitude, adoration are a “cult” that no one has to teach him, since it is “dictated by nature itself ” to him. “Is it not a natural consequence of love of oneself to honor what protects us and to love what wishes us well?” However, neither does the puissance suprême whom the Vicar adores protect man as it protects other animals, nor does this power wish man well as it cares for the good of those animals. Instead, it elevates man as Roy de la terre, and the sentiment of gratitude and of  benediction that the Vicar harbors for the “Auteur de mon espece” is directly related to his occupancy of the first rank in the ordre des êtres. The cult of Natural Religion is essentially nourished by amour-­ propre. Amour-­propre is as intimately bound up with the unique position the Vicar claims for man as the distinction that the Athenian Stranger ascribes to man of  being among all the animals the one that most reveres divinity is concomitant with the divinity’s preference for the human species.52 49. See First Book, Chapter IV, Pp. 115–­20. 50. The consequences for man’s self-­understanding are elucidated in paragraphs 54–­56 so that a perfect symmetry with the teaching about God in paragraphs 50–­52 results. In the seven paragraphs at the center of  Part I, Dieu is mentioned four times, divinité twice, and l’Auteur de mon espece appears once. 51. Pierre-­Maurice Masson and many commentators following him have recognized this criticism as an attack by Rousseau on Helvétius’s De l’esprit. None of them have considered that the Vicar could agree with the criticism, to which the author of the Discours sur l’inégalité saw himself exposed, not only from the side of the Church. 52. Plato, Nomoi X, 902b5–­6 (ed. Eduard des Places and Auguste Diès [Paris, 1956]). “The vanity of man is inseparable from his religiosity.” Seth Benardete, Plato’s “Laws”: The Discovery

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The features that the Vicar’s profession of  faith and the Athenian Stranger’s doctrine of faith are shown to have in common are far-­reaching and reason enough to pause for a moment. They begin with the declared intention of the speech that the Stranger addresses to an imaginary youth and weaves into the conversation with two old men from Crete and Sparta, to put the still malleable addressee in a position to lead “a noble life” by providing guidance to right thinking about the Gods.53 They find expression in the doctrinal content of the instruction, in important respects concerning morality, which we will soon encounter, as well as in the decisive presuppositions of belief, which we have already encountered: thus, the Stranger anticipates the essential postulates and arguments the Vicar deploys in support of the first two articles of faith.54 But above all, the Vicar and the Stranger seem to form a united front against the philosophers, who conceive the origin of the world from the interplay of nature and chance and the preservation of the world from a movement internal to the world, the same philosophers who, as the Stranger makes clear, hold that the Gods owe their existence not to nature but to convention.55 The Vicar’s credo and the Stranger’s teaching have in common that they represent variations on one and the same theme. Both are cases of historical adaptations of  Natural Religion. In contrast to positive or particular religion, Natural Religion does not rest upon tradition or institution. Natural Religion is neither enacted nor of Being (Chicago, 2000), p. 309. The Vicar originally said in the manuscript: “N’est-­ce pas un sentiment immediatement dérivé de l’amour propre et par consequent naturel au cœur humain d’honorer ce qui nous protége et d’aimer ce qui nous fait du bien” (ed. Masson 164). By speaking of amour de soi and not of amour-­propre at the end of the fifty-­sixth paragraph, and returning man as it were to his animality, the Vicar conceals or tones down what he emphasized before in regard to man’s special status. 53. Plato, Nomoi X, 888a4–­b4. 54. The Stranger traces a chain of  moving and of  being moved back to a self-­mover, which he identifies as the soul and as living. He postulates that ψυχή, νοûς, τέχνη are earlier than bodies and the visible world, and like the Vicar, makes use of the craftsman model of the work and the craftsman. In what way the soul moves the body—­for instance, the sun and the other stars—­ remains as unexplained by him as does the effect of active upon passive substance by the Vicar. That the motion of the whole is due to the best soul and thus is subordinate to the guidance of the divine intellect is a conclusion that the Stranger leaves to be drawn by the piety of the Cretan Kleinias; the contrary assumption would be impious. Plato, Nomoi X, 892a–­b, 893a6–­7, 893b, 894b–­895c, 896a–­b, 897b1–­3, 898c1–­9, 899a3–­4, 899b2–­8, 902e5–­903a3; cf. XII, 966d9–­967a5 and d4–­e2. 55. Plato, Nomoi X, 888c–­890a, especially 889b2 and c6 (nature and chance), 889e4–­6 and 890a5–­6 (existence of the Gods). Cf. Émile IV, pp. 552 and 646; Du contrat social  I, 1, 2, p. 352 and IV, 8, 1, p. 460.

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warranted by any authority, but rather maintains itself through pure reason in the sense that it traces back to and remains dependent upon persuasion enacted by reason. Natural religion is an answer by reason to the need of sociable man for faith. It gains historical relevance where positive religion has lost its credibility or is on the verge of losing it. This might be because obedience to religion is undermined by the practice of its representatives, or its internal contradictions erupt and lead to its rejection, or because the conflicts among particular religions compel going beyond them, or a competitor emerges who seriously shakes their authority. In the face of crises of cult, faith, morality, philosophy did not find and does not find itself in the position of a detached observer. The Savoyard Vicar and the Athenian Stranger point emphatically to the dangers that originate in philosophy. Yet no matter who proclaims it, Natural Religion, which should take these dangers into account, is indebted no less to the thought and action of philosophers. Rousseau and Plato have left no doubt that the teaching of  Natural Religion has the challenge of philosophy in mind.56 In the presentation, both undertook the adaptations that appeared advisable to them in view of the respective historical constellation, the situation of faith, and the influence of philosophy. Since Natural Religion has its raison d’être in promoting faith through reason, in order to have an effect on faith or be able to awaken it, Natural Religion necessarily needs to be oriented toward the historical horizon of the addressees of the teaching. It is entirely different with Natural Theology, which is neither presented by the philosophers as a teaching nor demands faith. Natural Theology has its subject in the question τί ἐστι Θεός, which is coeval with philosophy.57 Its task is reflection on the attributes, discussion of the determinations, identification of the criteria asked about by the question What is a God? It serves the clarification of the standard. Natural Theology designates an undertaking of reflection and critique.58 It is 56. See Note 10 (607) and Note 18 (632–­35); cf. 107 (606); Plato, Nomoi X, 886b10–­887a2, 891b2–­4; cf. XII, 948c. 57. Cf. Meier, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts, pp. 138–­41 and 3rd ed. (Stuttgart–­Weimar, 2009), pp. 299–­300 as well as Das theologisch-­politische Problem. Zum Thema von Leo Strauss (Stuttgart–­Weimar, 2003), pp. 45–­47 [The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, pp. 86–­88 and 205; Leo Strauss and the Theologico-­Political Problem, p. 26.] 58. Consider First Book, Chapter II, Pp. 70–­72 and Chapter IV, P. 126. When in the present writing Natural Theolog y is mentioned, it means exclusively the philosophical reflection and critique that are further determined in the text and in the cited passages from Chapters II and IV. I am aware that most authors do not distinguish between natural theology and natural religion, but rather use them synonymously. A distinction between the concepts that helps to clarify the substantive difference in the matter itself and does not neglect the intention of the

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not the Vicar’s cause, although we have seen that he has recourse to important results of philosophic reflection, insofar as Natural Religion cannot do without them or to the extent that it is able to incorporate them. From the clear heights of  his moral view of the universe, his pride in being of the first rank in the order of things, and his adoration of the highest power, the Vicar descends with a big But into the world of men, over which hangs the shadow of evil. The spectacle he sees when he seeks to know his place as an individual in the species stands in sharp contrast to the idea of the well-­ordered whole, which made him believe that the world is governed by a powerful and wise will: In nature only harmony and proportion, with mankind only confusion and disorder—­chaos. “The animals are happy; their King alone is miserable! O wisdom, where are your laws? O providence, is it thus that you rule the world? Beneficent Being, what has become of your power? I see evil on earth.” Anthropocentrism, which elevates man to the purpose of nature and to king of the earth by God’s grace, burdens God with the misery of the species he marks with distinction. If legislation of the world—­to say nothing of the direct governance of the world—­is to be understood as the work of wisdom, evil in the human world becomes the problem of wisdom. If all motion leads back to intentional action, everything is subject to the question of moral justification. The resort the Vicar adopts to exonerate God—­the delimitation of a realm of freedom, in which the responsibility for evil is transferred to man—­many before him have sought. The Vicar pursues this resort all the way to the answer of moderate moralism, namely, that evil has its justification in the felicity opened up by the consciousness of moral merit. The moderation the Vicar imposes on moralism with the orientation toward felicity would first be abandoned in the rigorous thinking of the moral law of the greatest student whom the Vicar found. Yet I am getting ahead of myself. The Vicar explains to the young listener, whom he addresses for the first time as “my good friend,” that the “sublime ideas of the soul” at which he has arrived are derived from precisely those “sad reflections” and “apparent contradictions,” i.e., from evil as the true stumbling block. By reflecting on human nature, he philosophers is all the more important. According to our distinction between Natural Theol­og y and Natural Religion, for instance, Raimundus Sabundus’s Theologia naturalis seu liber creaturarum, which went through no less than fourteen printings between 1485 and 1852, and through Montaigne’s translation and reception made natural theology famous beyond the traditions of  Thomism and Calvinism, presents a teaching of Natural Religion. Incidentally, the author did not himself choose the successful title of  his posthumous work, but instead spoke of Liber naturae sive creaturarum, which indicates the way for man “ad cognoscendum se ipsum et Deum.” Ed. Friedrich Stegmüller (Stuttgart–­Bad Canstatt 1966), p. 25.

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believed he discovered two distinct principles. The one elevated man “to the study of eternal truths, to love of justice and moral beauty, to the regions of the intellectual world whose contemplation constitutes the wise man’s delight”; the other “took him basely into himself, subjugated him to the domination of the senses, to the passions which are their ministers, and through the passions worked against all that the sentiment of the first principle inspired in him.” The Vicar experiences himself as the battlefield for these “two contrary motions.” An experience from which he first derives an anthropological and then a metaphysical dualism: “no, man is not one; I want and I do not want; I sense myself enslaved and free at the same time; I see the good, I love it, and I do evil.” The distinction between être actif and être passif, which led him from human action to the first two articles of faith, returns with new classifications. He now believes that he is active when he listens to reason, passive, by contrast, when he is carried away by his passions. The Vicar’s choice of words already allows one to discern that the new use of active and passive lacks that plausibility that common sense might have granted to the talk of the active will, which produces a motion, and of the passive body, to which a motion is communicated. In the new translation, to be active means to rule the passions and to be passive means to be ruled by the passions. The will is active or free when it is determined by reason, passive or unfree when determined by the passions. After we have arrived at the opposition, rule of reason or rule of the passions, the Vicar inserts a digression, which starts with the second emphatic appeal to la conscience in the instruction,59 in order to trace the “two principles” that are in conflict in man back to a moral antagonism that does not at all correspond to the dualism of reason and the passions: “if to prefer oneself to everything is an inclination natural to man, and if nevertheless the first sentiment of justice is innate in the human heart,” as the Vicar assumes in his doctrine of conscience he will later develop, then there is a need for more than “only one substance” to ground this antagonism.60 Out of moral considerations the Vicar postulates 59. “ Jeune homme, écoutez avec confiance, je serai toujours de bonne foi. Si la conscience est l’ouvrage des préjugés, j’ai tort, sans doute, et il n’y a point de morale démontrée; mais si . . .” 59 (583–­84). The Vicar appealed to conscience for the first time in the third paragraph and in doing so addressed the proselyte with “O! bon jeune homme”: “On nous dit que la conscience est l’ouvrage des préjugés; cependant je sais par mon expérience qu’elle s’obstine à suivre l’ordre de la nature contre toutes les loix des hommes. On a beau nous deffendre ceci ou cela, le remords nous reproche toujours foiblement ce que nous permet la nature bien ordonnée, à plus forte raison ce qu’elle nous prescrit” 3 (566). 60. In his formulation of the moral antagonism, the Vicar links “le prémier sentiment de la justice” to the central of the three purposes he ascribed to the “first principle”: “à l’amour de

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a metaphysical dualism, which he defends against the objections of the materialists. Once again he finds support for this in inner certainty, from which he concluded before that “the first cause of every motion” must be a will and thus must obey an intention.61 At the end of the digression, the distinction between être actif and être passif is transformed into that between être immateriel and être materiel, and the raising of the “voice of the soul against the law of the body,” to which the passions are joined, is identified with the “sentiment of freedom.” With the return to the question as to what determines the will that should be able to count as free, the Vicar steps into yet another territory. The will of man who listens to reason instead of being carried away by his passions follows, on closer inspection, the activity of his judgment, which is determined by his faculté intelligente or his puissance de juger. In short: “the determining cause is in himself ”—­an assertion that can do without the assumption of a metaphysical dualism. The same holds when the Vicar insists on the necessary orientation of the freedom of his will toward his own good, and in almost as many words maintains that freedom does not mean freedom from his own identity, not to mention from his own nature: “Without doubt, I am not free not to want my own good, I am not free to want what is bad for me; but my freedom consists precisely in this, that I am able to will only what is suitable to me, or what I deem to be such, without anything external to me determining me. Does it follow that I am not my own master, because I am not the master of being somebody other than me?” Only the formulation of the third dogma, which the Vicar obtains from the “active principle,” states the metaphysical yield from the digression. “Man is therefore free in his actions and as such is animated by an immaterial substance; this is my third article of faith.” All the remaining articles follow from these first three.62 The Vicar derives the exoneration of  God immediately from the third article of faith. If man is free and acts on his own, “all that he does freely does not enter the system ordered by providence.” The immaterial substance, in which man, in contrast to other animals, participates, opens up a realm of freedom, which “cannot be imputed” to providence, although, as it will soon become clear, it is supposed to be subject to divine jurisdiction. Providence “does not la justice et du beau moral.” The two other purposes, which refer to philosophy, he omits. 58 (583) and 59 (584). 61. “Nul être materiel n’est actif par lui-­même, et moi je le suis. On a beau me disputer cela, je le sens, et ce sentiment qui me parle est plus fort que la raison qui le combat.” 63 (585). Cf. 36 (574) and see Pp. 246–­47. 62. 57–­66 (583–­87).

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will the evil that man does in abusing the freedom it gives him, but it does not prevent him from doing it.” If it could prevent him, does providence bear no responsibility for what it lets happen in the enclave of the system it has ordered? Why, then, does providence not keep man from abusing his freedom? The Vicar offers two alternative answers, which correspond to the bifurcation of the first principle of the nature of man into philosophy, on the one hand, and morality, on the other. Either “this evil coming from a being so weak” is “nothing” in the eyes of  God, or God could not prevent evil without limiting man’s freedom and “doing a greater evil” by “degrading” man’s nature. The incompatibility of the first answer with the Natural Religion the Vicar presented so far is obvious. Not only does it deny man the very significance that the anthropocentric teaching granted to the “King of the earth.” Above all, it cannot be made consistent with the moral view of the whole that lies at the basis of the three articles of faith. To be sure, the Vicar hastens to ensure that providence has limited man’s strengths so that “the abuse of the freedom it reserves for him cannot disturb the general order.” And regarding the evil that man is able to do in the field of play granted to him within the ordre général, he adds appeasingly: “The evil that man does falls back on him without changing anything in the system of the world, without preventing the human species from preserving itself in spite of itself.” But all this cannot belie the decisive point of the first answer, namely, that the evil that man does would be nul in the eyes of providence, and divine wisdom accordingly would not share in the concern with human morality.63 The Vicar must, therefore, build entirely upon the second answer. God could not prevent man from doing evil if he wanted to achieve the purpose he had determined for the human species. For God is not all-­powerful. Yet he does share the concern of human morality. It is inextricably bound up with his purpose. He distinguishes human nature by the freedom to be moral. He “ennobled” man’s actions by morality. He gave him “the right to virtue.” He held out to him the prospect of happiness, of finding fulfillment primarily in moral merit. “The supreme enjoyment is in contentment with oneself; it is in order to deserve this contentment that we are placed on earth and endowed with freedom, that we are tempted by the passions and restrained by conscience.” The consciousness of moral merit presupposes the possibility of evil. It is in the enjoyment of the consciousness of self-­earned moral merit that evil receives its justification. And in the context of this justification the Vicar for the first time in his speech invokes God: “No, God of my soul, I shall never reproach you for having made man in your image, so that 63. Cf. Plato, Nomoi X, 885b7–­8, 888c4–­5, 899d5–­6, 900b2–­3, and 901b8–­c1.

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I can be free, good, and happy like you!” After all we have heard and seen, we have to assume that the Vicar conceives of divine felicity according to the image of moral man. This is also why the invocation of God also moves into the foreground the question of divine justice, which has apparently not been suf­ ficiently answered with the justification of evil from the necessity of freedom and merit. The Vicar takes a step back and, reaching farther, abstracts from the special determination of the purpose for the human species, in order to demonstrate first the goodness of general providence. “Moral evil is incontestably our work, and physical evil would be nothing without our vices, which have made us sense it.” Man appears in every respect as l’auteur du mal. Subtract his advances, his errors, his transgressions, without what he has contributed on his own, without his work—­everything is good.64 Where everything is good nothing is unjust. God’s goodness is the first answer to the question concerning his justice. Yet, unlike what the way of going through the order of general providence would lead one to expect, the Vicar does not tie God’s goodness to the goodness of  God’s work. In fact, in contrast to some proponents of  Natural Religion before and after him, the Vicar does not derive God’s goodness from its effect, but rather he conceives it itself as a necessary effect, namely, as “the necessary effect of a power without limit and of the love of oneself essential to every being aware of  itself.” Concerning his amour de soi, God, who actualizes his power in producing and preserving, and “expands his existence, so to speak, with the existence of the beings,” could not “be destructive and evil” without harming himself.65 And as regards puissance sans borne, the one who—­ within the realm of necessity—­can do “everything” can want only what is 64. In paragraphs 68 and 69, the Vicar avails himself of an argument Rousseau uses in the Discours sur l’inégalité and elsewhere, in order to “justify” nature by recourse to a state of animality or simplicity, in which man could have remained “eternally” had he not been compelled to leave that state owing to contingent changes that occurred in his external living conditions. However, in the teaching of natural religion, this argument loses all its force, since the world is ordered by design and the development of man into a moral being is conceived as the purpose of divine will. For instance, the Vicar says about the passions and death: “Combien l’homme vivant dans la simplicité primitive est sujet à peu de maux! Il vit presque sans maladies ainsi que sans passions, et ne prévoit ni ne sent la mort”; “la prévoyance de la mort la rend horrible et l’accélére; plus on la veut fuir, plus on la sent, et l’on meurt de frayeur durant toute sa vie en murmurant contre la nature des maux qu’on s’est faits en l’offensant” 68 (588). But according to the doctrine the Vicar has just presented, “la suprême jouïssance” that we can deserve as moral beings presupposes “que nous sommes tentés par les passions,” and the morality of actions, in which the Vicar places the distinction of man, is bound to the foresight of death. 67 (587). 65. Cf. Plato, Nomoi X, 902b8–­9.

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good. The Vicar here finds support from a foundational concept of  Natural Theology, which Rousseau underscores with a Note of  his own and which he unfolded in his reconstruction of the state of nature: Goodness results from power. Power understood as the strength that lets no ressentiment arise. Power understood as the capacity to maintain a balance between needs and the means of their satisfaction. Power understood as self-­sufficiency. When the Vicar explains that the being that is good to the highest degree is so because or insofar as it is powerful to the highest degree, he stands on the ground of Natural Theology and of Rousseau’s anthropology. But the Vicar does not stop with goodness. He aims at justice. The being that is good to the highest degree must, “thus,” also be just to the highest degree, “otherwise it would contradict itself ”: l’Être souverainement bon owes itself consistency.66 Were it inconsistent or irrational, it could not count as good in the highest degree. Once again the Vicar agrees with Natural Theology. He answers the question why the highest goodness without the highest justice would imply a self-­contradiction with definitions that determine bonté and justice as two aspects of a single thing: “for the love of order that produces order is called goodness, and the love of order that preserves order is called justice.” The will to the good that finds its expression in the love of order would be inconsistent if it did not want to preserve what it produces. In this way the Vicar constructs a bridge between the being that is good to the highest degree, that owes itself consistency, and the being that is just to the highest degree, that owes care to other beings. He leaves Natural Theology behind and opens the self-­sufficiency of the highest being to the demands of  Natural Religion.67 Thus prepared, he enters the territory of revealed religion—­the Vicar speaks for the first time of créatures—­in order to counter the teaching of Paul and his followers about grace:68 “God, it is said, owes his creatures nothing; I believe he owes them all he promised them in giving them being. Now, to give them the idea of a good and to make them feel the need of it is to promise it to them.” The good the Vicar demands by appealing to justice is nothing less than the highest good. He reads “these words written” in his soul: “be just and you will be happy.” The reward divine justice owes to the just is happiness. But in “the present state of things,” the just will not receive the reward he was promised. Rather, this holds: “the 66. Cf. First Book, Chapter II, P. 51. 67. Cf. First Book, Chapter II, Pp. 64–65 and 68–­69; Chapter V, Pp. 142–­44. 68. Paul, Romans 9: 11–­23. Consider Rousseau’s criticism of  Paul in Lettres écrites de la montagne I, 49, 58, 69, pp. 700, 702, 705; III, 31 n. 3, 95, pp. 735, 754; V, 122n., p. 798; and see First Book, Chapter II, P. 67 with Footnote 51.

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wicked prospers, and the just remains oppressed.” The moral indignation of the just over this situation and the statement that even conscience rises up “against its author” in order to charge him in the name of justice indicate that the supreme enjoyment that Natural Religion holds out to moral man, the consciousness of self-­earned moral merit, does not suffice for him as a justifica­ tion of evil.69 The insufficiency of the answer, which refers for the justification of evil to general providence and its special determination of the purpose of the human species, motivated the Vicar to demand God’s justice as care in great detail. The gulf that opened up between the expectation of particular providence and the état présent des choses now brings him to postulate just recompense in a life after death.70 Such recompense presupposes the teaching of the two substances. “If the soul is immaterial, it can survive the body, and if it survives the body, providence is justified.” The hope that with death “everything returns to order” that in life falls into disorder, disturbs or contradicts it, becomes the true exoneration of God and the most important support of the moral world order. “If I had no proof of the immateriality of the soul other than the triumph of the wicked and the oppression of the just in this world, that alone would prevent me from doubting it.” The practical intention to which the two-­substance metaphysics is subordinate could scarcely be clearer. The Vicar does not limit himself to showing that this metaphysics is the condition of the possibility of recompense in the afterlife, since he explains that the disintegration of the unity of body and soul on the assumption of two substances enables the belief that the body decomposes, whereas by contrast the soul is preserved. He goes so far as to disparage the unity of  body and soul in life as a “violent state,” and to pass off its destruction as a moment in which both “return to their natural state.” Thus, death appears as an act of  liberation. “The active and living substance regains all the strength it used in moving the passive and dead substance.”71 The concern of morality leads in the end to the reversal of life and death: “Alas! I sense it only too much by my vices: man lives only halfway during his life, and the life of the soul begins only with the death of the body.” Yet the Vicar confesses that he knows nothing about the life on which the hope of and for the just is based. He also does not know whether the soul is “by its nature immortal.” In fact, not once, neither before nor after, does he ever give voice to the concept of the immortality of the soul. “I believe 69. 67–­71 and Note 7 (587–­89). Cf. First Book, Chapter VII, P. 212. 70. Cf. Plato, Nomoi X, 903b1 and 904a6–­905d4. 71. Cf. Footnote 54.

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that the soul survives the body long enough for the maintenance of order; who knows whether that is long enough for it to last forever?” The hope for a life after death in the Vicar’s speech responds to the demand for justice. It is not anchored in the wish for immortality or derived from the assertion of a natural need for eternal life. Therefore, la vie à venir72 does not have to last longer than the period of time required for just recompense. And since the recompense is supposed to offer a “compensation” for the “oppression of the just,” or for the misfortune not redressed in this life, the time period might be quite different in individual cases. This has the consequence that for him who experiences felicity in this life, no just recompense in a life beyond and, consequently, no future life has to be postulated.73 The treatment of the question of what “compensation” is to be hoped for from a life after death points in the same direction. The Vicar knows “that the identity of the I is prolonged only by memory.” It rests on a judgment, which presupposes recollection.74 If he is to be compensated in a future life, he must be able to remember his real life, what he sensed, what he thought, and what he did. He bases his expectation on the single thing he knows regarding life after death, on the necessity of recollection for every possible compensation: “I do not doubt that this recollection will one day constitute the felicity of the good and the torment of the wicked.” On the one hand, the good, freed from the “illusions” brought about by the body and the 72. The sixth dogma of the Religion civile, which like the other nine dogmas is supposed to remain “sans explications ni commentaires,” consists of the four words: “la vie à venir.” There is no more mention of immortality in the Religion civile than there is in the Vicar’s profession of faith. Dogmas seven and eight read as follows: le bonheur des justes, le châtiment des méchans. Du contrat social IV, 8, 33, p. 468. In support of the dogma of the life to come, Rousseau offers—­ without any explication or commentary whatsoever—­in Note 8 of the Profession de foi (591) the single Bible passage that he cites in his Notes to the speech of the Vicar: “Non pas pour nous, non pas pour nous, Seigneur, / Mais pour ton nom, mais pour ton propre honneur, / O Dieu! fais-­ nous revivre! Ps. 115.” He takes the citation of Psalm 115 with the generally unknown third line in verse 1, O God, make us come alive again! verbatim from the text of the Songbook of  Psalms authorized by the Church of Geneva and in use at the time: Les Psaumes de David, en vers françois. Aprouvés par les Pasteurs et Professeurs de l’Eglise et de l’Academie de Geneve (Geneva: Pierre Jaquier, 1737), p. 229. (Consider the Vicar’s criticism of the assertion that God owes his creatures nothing in paragraph 71, which is directed against both Paul and Calvin.) 73. Cf. First Book, Chapter II, Pp. 62, 69, and Chapter IV, Pp. 121, 126, 130. 74. See 20 and 25 (571–­72). Can memory maintain the “identité du moi ” without the body, independent of the senses? The Vicar, who in the prior sentence says that he does not know what the “essence” of the soul is, says nothing about the classification of  la mémoire. The same holds for the relation of memory to the être pensant, of which he declared in the previous paragraph: “n’imaginant point comment il peut mourir,  je présume qu’il ne meurt pas” 75 (590).

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senses, will enjoy contemplating the “eternal truths” and the “supreme Being,” which they were able to enjoy by virtue of the first principle of human nature, albeit with greater efforts, in their former life;75 on the other hand, they will experience “pure delight,” which “arises from contentment with oneself,” an experience that was likewise not closed off to them before. In contrast to the good and the just, there remains for the wicked “the bitter regret at having debased themselves.” The Vicar rebuffs the question whether there will be “other sources of happiness and suffering” than those of recollection and of increased repetition of what was experienced in this life. He knows nothing about this. But he suggests that the good, whether in this life or in the beyond, will never find their happiness in anything other than in an existence according to their nature. The Vicar also refuses to address the question “whether the torments of the wicked will be eternal.” Again, he knows nothing about it. Yet he finds it difficult to believe that the wicked could be condemned to “endless torments.” Would infinite punishments be a just recompense for finite crimes? Hell, at any rate, which revealed religions hold open for eternal damnation, does not need to be sought for only in another life: “it begins in this one in the hearts of the wicked.” Are they not sufficiently punished to have to remember their own hell? The fate of the wicked gives the Vicar the opportunity to raise unsettling questions that entail considerable consequences for the teaching of the separation of body and soul. What can still be wicked about the wicked as soon as they are dead, i.e., when they are separated once and for all from their bodies, their passions, their crimes? “To what perversity would pure spirits be susceptible? Needing nothing, why would they be wicked? If they are deprived of our coarse senses, and all their happiness is in the contemplation of the beings, they would be able to will only the good; and can anyone who ceases to be wicked be miserable forever?” At the end of his considerations concerning life after death, the problem of identity to which the Vicar drew attention before returns. How can one speak of the continued existence of the wicked, the just, or the good, if what makes the good be good, the just be just, the wicked be wicked ceases to exist? How can the “identity of the I” be “prolonged,” if the unity of soul and body has disintegrated, the individual is destroyed, the nature constitutive of its identity is no longer intact? Instead of explicitly raising such questions, to which he has led, the Vicar exclaims: “O clement and good Being, whatever your decrees are, I adore them; if you punish the wicked, I annihilate my weak reason before your justice.” The But that has to follow this assurance of the readiness to annihilate his reason in the 75. Cf. 58 (583); see Pp. 257–­59 and Footnote 60.

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face of  justice leads to an example of moderation or of mercy, suited to restrain the fury of moral indignation: “Is the wicked not my brother?” If he should become happy in his future life, as I am, “his happiness, far from arousing my envy, will only add to mine.”76 Before the Vicar proceeds to place the keystone, the doctrine of the “immortal and celestial voice” of conscience, in the edifice of the moral world order, he provides in four paragraphs a compressed summary of the doctrine of God presupposed by this edifice.77 By considering God’s works and studying those of his attributes that were important for the Vicar to discern,78 the teacher of Natural Religion arrives at an idea of the “Etre immense,” which he characterizes as “nobler and greater” and at the same time as “less proportionate to human reason.” The God on whom the Vicar relies ought to be incommensurable for man in his being, although not in each of his attributes. Thus, he first puts him at an ungraspable distance. God is not corporeally or sensibly perceptible. The supreme intelligence that governs the world is not part of the world. When the Vicar hears it said that his soul is spiritual and that God is a spirit, he is “indignant” over “this debasement of the divine essence.” “As if God were not the only absolute being, the only one that is truly active, sensing, thinking, willing by itself, and from which we get thought, sentiment, activity, will, freedom, being.” We are free only because he wills that we are free, and his “inexplicable substance” is to our souls as our souls are to our bodies, i.e., it is “higher” than our souls without our being able to say what it is, and it moves our souls without our being able to understand how it does that. The Vicar repeats his ignorance and incomprehension in regard to belief in creation.79 He denies God the title “creator of the world,” only to recall in the same breath emphatically the great craftsman, of whom he professed in the 76. 72–­78 (589–­92). 77. 79–­82 (592–­94). Paragraphs 81 and 82 form the numerical center of the “transcription”: paragraphs 100 and 101 of the work, comprising two-­hundred paragraphs with the framing narrative and the profession of faith. 78. Paragraph 79 refers back to paragraph 50. See Pp. 249–­57 and consider Footnote 58. 79. “S’il a créé la matiére, les corps, les esprits, le monde, je n’en sais rien. L’idée de création me confond et passe ma portée; je la crois autant que je la puis concevoir.” 79 (593). Yet the Vicar follows this repetition of  his ignorance with a reference to the problem of the transition of  being into nothing and nothing into being, an inoffensive statement in itself that introduces the dangerous word absurdité: “Qu’un être que je ne conçois pas donne l’existence à d’autres êtres, cela n’est qu’obscur et incompréhensible; mais que l’être et le néant se convertissent d’eux-­mêmes l’un dans l’autre, c’est une contradiction palpable, c’est une claire absurdité” 79 (593). See 50–­51 (581) and Pp. 249–­52.

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first two articles of faith: “I do know that he formed the universe and all that exists, that he made everything, ordered everything.” And “without doubt,” God is eternal, as people say. But the Vicar’s mind cannot grasp the idea of eternity. As regards the attributes that the Vicar ascribed to God in his own name, he begins the new discussion with insight: “God is intelligent, but in what way? Man is intelligent when he reasons, and the supreme intelligence does not need to reason; for it there are neither premises nor conclusions; there are not even propositions; it is purely intuitive, it sees equally everything that is and everything that can be, for it all truths are only a single idea, as all places are a single point and all time a single moment.” The supreme intelligence, in the Vicar’s astonishing presentation, has scarcely more in common with human intelligence than the name. It has no need of discursive reasoning. It knows apparently no negativity, in contrast to the Vicar. It analyzes nothing, but keeps everything in the unseparatedness of pure intuition, i.e., it does not think. And as little as it articulates truth in propositional contents, just as little is the world articulated for it in space and time. The second attribute, power, also seems to be separated from man by an unbridgeable gulf. While human power is dependent upon means, is in need of the body, language, instruments, and institutions, divine power operates entirely from and for itself. In the case of  God, the will is power. “God can because he wills, his will makes his power.” If God’s first two attributes escape man’s capacity for comprehension, this by no means holds for the treatment of the third and fourth attributes. To be sure, the Vicar also distinguishes between goodness and justice with respect to God and to men, but the meaning of the determinations is precisely that they make God accessible to human insight, or bring God closer to men. “God is good; nothing is more manifest.” As we saw, the Vicar could find support here from a weighty argument of Natural Theology. The distinction between the goodness in man and in God he now explains as follows: With man goodness means “the love of his fellows,” with God, by contrast, “the love of order.” While before the Vicar obtained two attributes from the amour de l’ordre and analyzed it by formal definitions into goodness, which creates order, and justice, which preserves order, he now quietly abandons these definitions, in order, as it were, to retract justice and explicitly assign the preservation of order to God’s goodness: “for it is by order that he maintains what exists and links every part with the whole.” God’s goodness manifests itself in his order. Divine goodness is essentially self-­referential. When the Vicar continues: “God is just; I am convinced of it; it is a consequence of  his goodness; the injustice of men is their work and not his,” he seems merely to repeat what he said earlier. In fact, however, in the repetition he makes clear beyond any doubt that God’s justice

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is related entirely to men, that it is the necessary complement of injustice in the realm of freedom: The justice of  man consists in “giving to each what belongs to him,” God’s justice in “demanding from each an account of what he gave him.” The Vicar demands from God in the name of  justice that God carry out his duty as judge and make himself of service for the care of each individual. Wisdom no longer counts among the divine attributes.80 The two paragraphs that follow in the group of four with the discussion of the four attributes, intelligence, puissance, bonté,  justice, mark the greatest possible distance of  Natural Religion from Natural Theology. In the center of the writing of the unnamed one stands the Vicar’s confession of the incomprehensibility of God and of the humiliation of reason. “The worthiest use of my reason,” he says, addressing the “being of  beings,” “is for it to annihilate itself  before you.” Natural Religion can fulfill its meaning of  assigning man his proper place in the whole and of binding him morally without subjecting him to an authority only if  it is able to convince him that everyone carries within himself the source of his duties and rights and is their sufficient interpreter. After the Vicar has derived the truths most important to him—­about God’s care, about man’s place in the universe, and about evil in the world—­by means of his own “lumiéres naturelles,” he turns to the question of the maxims he must draw from these truths for his conduct, “and what rules I ought to prescribe for myself in order to fulfill my destiny on earth according to the intention of him who put me there.” He reminds the student of his “method” of being guided by the absolute primacy of  practice and of  holding as evident opinions to which his moral sentiment cannot refuse assent. Following this method, he does not obtain his rules from the “principles of  a high philosophy.” Rather he claims to find them “written by nature with ineffaceable characters” in the depth of his heart, and to have in conscience “the best of all casuists” for their application. Things seem to be clear as day: “everything I sense to be good is good; everything I sense to be bad is bad.” Yet complications quickly enter. Conscience encounters significant antagonists. “The first of all cares is the care for oneself; nevertheless how many times does the inner voice tell us that in doing our good at another’s expense, we do wrong!” If amour de soi orients us toward our own good, does conscience oppose it as the advocate of our duties to others, i.e., as the proponent of their good? Next, we learn that nature says to our senses something different from what it says to our hearts, that, consequently, it speaks to us not with one but with various voices. “Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body.” Yet within the soul itself, as we 80. Cf. 50 (580) and 57 (583).

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have seen, there is a conflict. For the Vicar does not go so far as simply to assign amour de soi to the “voice of the body.” Instead, third and last, he opposes conscience to raison. All too often reason deceives us, so that we “have acquired only too much right to reject it.” The Vicar says nothing about whether we have this right because reason tends to guide us too much or on the contrary too little in accordance with amour de soi. All that matters to him is for conscience to prevail over every conceivable competitor and for the certainty it promises to appear in the best possible light: “but conscience never deceives; it is the true leader of man; it is for the soul what instinct is for the body; he who follows it obeys nature and does not fear going astray.” The Vicar brought the doctrine of conscience into play for the first time in the third paragraph of his speech. That he elevates it to the level of an article of faith only after eighty more paragraphs shows the far-­reaching efforts of persuasion he thinks are required in order to make it credible. The dogma of conscience as the true leader of man, which points to what seems to be immediately given, turns out to be shot through with presuppositions. The author underlines the precarious status of this article of faith not only by the lengthy preparation and by circuitous explication, for which the Vicar will use the next thirteen paragraphs, but above all by an event that is without parallel in the entire Profession of Faith: As the Vicar has pronounced the dogma, the proselyte tries to interrupt him in order to pose a question or raise an objection. However, the Vicar does not allow him to speak. Instead, he begins without delay in order to explain and comment on the dogma to dispel doubt. He is concerned with having the student understand that morality is a true good and that conscience as the organ of morality is the true distinction of human nature. Whoever judges his actions as morally good—­and their “whole morality” resides in this judgment—­must be able to recognize these same actions as good for himself, if what is morally good is to be part of what is truly good. “If it is true that the good is good, it must be so in the depths of our hearts as it is in our works, and the primary reward for justice is to sense that one practices it. If moral goodness is in conformity with our nature, man could be healthy of spirit or well-­ constituted only to the extent that he is good.” The Vicar faces the task of showing that justice carries its own reward and that our nature determines us to be morally good, or that “moral goodness,” not the “natural goodness” envisioned by Rousseau, corresponds to human nature.81 For this purpose he refers to the disinterested pleasure in the happiness of others, to the agreeable impression left by good as opposed to wicked actions, to the way theater 81. Discours sur l’inégalité, Première partie, p. 150.

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audiences take sides, to the consolation and pleasure we gain from friendship, from humanity, and other sentiments of sociability, to the admiration for heroic deeds, to the love for great souls, to the enthusiasm for virtue. Without the love for the beautiful, without the brilliance of the noble, life loses all its charm. He who loves only himself no longer feels, no longer lives, is already dead: A strong argument for the claim that he who loves himself loves beyond himself, takes joy beyond himself, aims beyond himself. But does this prove that the just one enjoys his justice? Before the Vicar comes back to the just, he invokes the anger and indignation in view of acts of violence and injustice, feelings of hatred for the wicked and of pity for the unfortunate, and especially the “cry of remorse” that punishes crimes in secret, in order to reinforce further the determination of moral nature. In contrasting comparison with the wicked, who has to fear the voice of nature, the Vicar finally portrays for the just a picture of inner serenity. It rests on contentment of the just with himself and is nourished by the joy of feeling in harmony with his own nature. There is no longer any mention of the oppression of the just. Apparently, such oppression cannot harm the contentment of the just with himself and cannot diminish his deepest joy. The Vicar, however, not only treats the moral nature of the just. His dogma claims validity for man as such, and the explanation completes the elevation of conscience to an integral part of human nature. If the article of faith spoke of conscience as related to soul as instinct is to body, the commentary speaks frankly of the instinct moral, or of conscience designating un principe inné de justice et de vertu. This innate principle ensures that in all the nations of the world and everywhere in history the same ideas of justice and decency and the same concepts of good and evil are encountered.82 The Vicar illustrates the power of the anthropological universal of conscience with examples from the history of religions: Not even “the vice” represented by the “abominable 82. The Vicar opposes by name the “skeptic Montaigne,” whom he mentions twice in paragraph 90 (598–­99). Montaigne wrote about conscience: “Les loix de la conscience, que nous disons naistre de nature, naissent de la coustume: chacun ayant en veneration interne les opinions et mœurs approuvées et receuës autour de luy, ne s’en peut desprendre sans remors, ny s’y appliquer sans applaudissement.” Essais, ed. Thibaudet and Rat, I, 23, p. 114; ed. Balsamo et al., I, 22, p. 119. The Vicar holds against Montaigne that “the authority he gives to the most suspect traveler, he refuses to give to the most celebrated writers,” and unlike Rousseau the Vicar shows no interest in travel. For the philosophical significance Rousseau accords to instruction through traveling and the study of men in their diversity, consider Discours sur l’inégalité, Note X, pp. 322–­48, especially pp. 338–­42, as well as the chapter “Des voyages” in Émile V, pp. 826–­55, especially the first eighteen paragraphs, in which nothing is said about Émile, while after the first mention of Émile in paragraph 19 nothing more is said about philosophizing.

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Gods” of paganism, although they were “armed with a sacred authority,” could resist the moral instinct. The “sacred voice of nature” proved stronger than the Gods. By appealing to la sainte voix de la nature, Natural Religion can oppose all particular religions and put them in their place. Furthermore, the doctrine of conscience as the innate principle of justice and of virtue puts Natural Religion in a position to provide an answer to the question as to how the just can understand his contribution to the bien public in terms of his own good, even if his dedication to the common good works to his disadvantage or demands that he risk his life. The Vicar, who poses this question in the center of the Profession de foi, knows that the just sees the moral good as the good and that he must show him the good as the moral good. This is precisely what he has done with the article of faith that conscience is the true leader of man and with the explanation that the deepest joy is to be found in the accord with nature, which is recognized as good. “Without doubt, no one acts for anything other than for his own good,” as the decisive assertion reads, “but if there is not a moral good which must be taken into account, one will never explain by private interest anything but the action of the wicked.” Underlining the issue, the Vicar imagines “too abominable a philosophy,”83 which would be brought into difficulties by virtuous actions and could get out of them only by fabricating “base intentions and motives without virtue,” a blind or mean-­spirited reductionism that would be forced to “vilify Socrates and calumniate Regulus.” The Vicar does not say whether he believes that Socrates, as he led his philosophic life and in the end died the death of a philosopher, followed the same voice Regulus obeyed when the Roman consul, bound by an oath and captured by Carthage, advocated that Rome remain steadfast, making no concessions to Carthage, and died the death of a citizen who put love of his fatherland and of his honor above his life.84 But he does insist that both la voix de la nature and la voix de la raison rise up relentlessly against “such doctrines,” should they “ever be able to spring up among us,” doctrines that would neither satisfy the understanding of the good nor do justice to the self-­understanding of the virtuous.85 Following this attack on a perverse philosophy, the Vicar reminds 83. For his characterization of philosophy, from which he very clearly distances himself, the Vicar uses the same adjective he used earlier for the Gods produced by ancient paganism: abominable. 91 (599); 88 (598). 84. See Cicero, De officiis III, 99–­111 and consider De finibus bonorum et malorum II, 65. 85. In the numerical center of the Profession of Faith, which profiles the doctrine of bien moral, nature and reason are mentioned. God, the divine, or the holy does not come up. This does not mean, however, that the teaching of  Natural Religion regarding the moral determination

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his listener and himself that he did not want to philosophize with his student, but wanted to help him to consult his heart. He hopes that his student has in the meantime become familiar with his “method” and is ready to make it his own. “Were all the philosophers to prove that I am wrong, if you sense that I am right, I do not wish for more.” Nevertheless, he does not believe the heart’s acceptance of his article of faith can do without the support of a theoretical argument. For this reason he lays bare the assumption of  natural sociability, on which the doctrine of conscience rests: We have innate sentiments that serve our self-­preservation as individuals, on which, on the basis of  the sociable nature of man, further innate sentiments supervene that orient us toward the species and care for its preservation. “These sentiments, as far as the individual is concerned, are the love of oneself, the fear of pain, the horror of death, the desire of well-­being. But if, as one cannot doubt, man is by his nature sociable, or at least made to become so, he can be so only by means of other innate sentiments relative to his species; for if we consider only physical need, it ought certainly to disperse men instead of bringing them together.” The Vicar does not name the innate sentiments that relate to the species in contrast to those directed to the good of the individual. No doubt he includes conscience among them, which he has already characterized as a moral instinct and as an innate principle of justice and of virtue and which is the vanishing point of the entire discussion. Nevertheless, he does not express this. Reticent, not to say evasive, he continues: “It is from the moral system formed by this double relation to oneself and to one’s fellows that the impulse of conscience is born.” Once again the Vicar shies away from a direct confrontation between amour de soi and conscience,86 although his explication of the article of faith constantly conveys the message that conscience is fundamentally correlated with the bien moral in the sense of the duties of sociability and, as the voice of nature in us, asserts the claims others make upon us. The reticence in the treatment of amour de soi makes the contradiction to the conception that Rousseau advocated in his own name less conspicuous, without concealing it for that reason. For the innate sentiment of conscience has literally no place in the anthropological foundation of his political philosophy; a glance at the Discours sur l’inégalité, in which Rousseau does lay this foundation, suffices to convince oneself that, contrary to what the Vicar thinks, it is not impossible to doubt

of human nature could dispense with belief in God, which is evoked in the numerical center of the transcription. The second center presupposes the first. 91 (599); 81–­82 (594). 86. Compare the choice of words in paragraph 94 (600) and 83 (594) and see Pp. 268–69.

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whether man is by his nature sociable.87 And Rousseau’s last word on the matter will be an interpretation of his conscience as the call of his nature, which moves entirely within the horizon of amour de soi.88 While the Vicar circumvents the explicit determination of the relation to amour de soi, at the end of his theoretical attempt he speaks once more about the relation between conscience and raison: “To know the good does not mean to love it; man has no innate knowledge of the good; but as soon as his reason makes him know it, his conscience leads him to love it: it is this sentiment that is innate.” After everything we have seen, we are not surprised that the Vicar makes knowledge of the good and of the moral good coincide. But that he transfers to reason knowledge of the one as well as the other there was no compelling reason to expect, given the dogma of conscience as the true leader of man and the accompanying rejection of reason, which would all too often deceive us. Apparently, the moral instinct needs the eye of reason to become capable of seeing, and the innate principle of justice and of virtue does not know how to operate independent of the achievements and lapses of reason. This follows from the statement that reason must make it possible for man to know the good, to the love of  which he is determined. In view of all the difficulties his explanation of the final dogma has brought to light, the Vicar has the commentary culminate in a hymn that celebrates conscience as the “divine instinct,” exalts it as the “immortal and celestial voice,” and praises it as the “infallible judge of good and evil, which makes man like unto God.”89 A paean that brings together the articles of faith and locates the excellence of human nature in conscience and in the morality of action.90 The Vicar follows the hymn “Conscience, conscience!,” which will count among the most cited passages of  Émile and will find the widest dissemination, with a “Thank Heaven!” for the liberation from the burden of philosophy. “We can be men without being scholars.” With conscience as the “sure leader” for Everyman in the “immense maze of  human opinions,” the religious-­moral instruction seems to have reached its goal.91 “But it is not enough that this leader 87. With the qualification that the Vicar adds to his statement, “if, as one cannot doubt, man is by his nature sociable, or at least made to become so,” the contradiction is weakened rhetorically, but not remedied in substance. There is no way to get from the “perfectibility” of a non-­ sociable nature to the “innate principle of  justice and of virtue.” 88. See First Book, Chapter V, Pp. 140–­42 and Chapter VII, Pp. 213–­14. 89. In his commentary, the Vicar declared: “The acts of conscience are not judgments, but sentiments.” 93 (599). 90. 83–­96 (594–­601). 91. Cf. Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 30.

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exists; one must know how to recognize it and to follow it.” The true leader of man, we now hear, speaks the language of nature, “which everything has made us forget.” Conscience is timid. The world and noise intimidate it. Prejudices are its cruelest enemies. They prevent it from making itself heard.92 What is even worse: “fanaticism” counterfeits it and dictates crime in its name. A crime to which religion and morality help to give a good conscience is the peak of perversion. Conscience, which “loves refuge and peace,” becomes the weapon of persecution and war. Under these circumstances, the best the Vicar can say about conscience to save its reputation is: “It no longer speaks to us; it no longer responds to us.” Yet without the compelling power and unimpaired force of the “divine instinct,” the Vicar’s teaching lacks the guarantee of the simplicity, of the certainty, and of the binding character it promised. Morality again becomes a problem. Therefore, at the conclusion of his speech about Natural Religion, the Vicar once more begins at the beginning, in order, in returning to his history, to recapitulate and to authenticate by personal example the doctrinal content that he unfolded before, article of faith by article of faith, following practical reason. He remembers the state of incredulity and doubt, which was intolerable to him,93 a time of tristesse and ennui, when he took the moral good for a chimera and told himself that there is nothing good except for the joys of the senses. Once one has lost “the taste for the joys of the soul,” the Vicar comments, it is difficult to regain it. Yet why would one lose this taste, if it is as delightful as the Vicar presents it in his speech? Clearly, things would be different for one who had never experienced this taste. He who never experienced the joys of  the soul, who never did something good that made him content with himself, would not be in a position to know himself, “and since he did not feel which goodness corresponds to his nature, he would necessarily remain wicked and be eternally unhappy.”94 However, the Vicar excludes this kind of thing, since he takes “the temptation to do good” to be “so natural and so sweet” that it is impossible “always to resist it.” With the plaisirs de l’âme, the priest has the bien moral constantly in view. In his discussion, the pleasure of  learning, the delight of thinking, the happiness of the knowledge of theoretical reason, the joys of the solitary activities of the soul that are self-­supporting and self-­sustaining, remain hidden for the proselyte. The Vicar speaks solely of  the plaisirs de l’âme that he ties to the moral virtues. With them joy functions as the reward for the good deed. In the consciousness of  having deserved such 92. Cf. 3 (566) and 59 (584). 93. Cf. 6 (567) and 10 (568). 94. See 84 (595) and P. 269.

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a reward and being permitted to award it to oneself. In the sentiment of  having achieved a firm inner attitude. In the experience of having acquired another kind of nature through moral practice. “Nothing is more lovable than virtue, but one must enjoy it to find it lovable.” Thus, what can move the virtuous, who has found the strength to overcome the inner resistances and who enjoys virtue, to abandon it ever again? The Vicar makes the student understand that the reference to the joys of the soul is not sufficient to comprehend the virtuous and to support virtue, when he returns once again to his earlier state and emphasizes the deep strife between his “natural sentiments, which spoke for the common interest,” and his “reason, which related everything to me.” Only faith freed him from this “continual alternative,” from the dichotomy between moral virtue on the one hand, and reason on the other, which he portrays as self-­disintegration, “doing the bad, loving the good.” The Vicar explicitly rejects the attempt to want to trace virtue back to an “amour de l’ordre.”95 For everything depends on what stands in the center of the order that is loved. The explanation of  virtue out of  the love of  order disguises the fact that actually two kinds of order clash irreconcilably with one another, depending upon what in each case forms the reference point of the order: “the good man orders himself in relation to the whole, and the wicked one orders the whole in relation to himself.” The center of the order makes the difference.96 It shows the love of order either as virtue or as vice. But the good man can subordinate himself to the whole, he can love the moral order as virtue demands, only if he believes that the center of the whole is God. “If the divinity does not exist, it is only the wicked man who reasons, and the good man is nothing but a fool.” Faith makes a difference to the whole. For the second time in his sermon, and for the first time since its prelude, the priest calls the proselyte “mon enfant.”97 What he shows the “child” in what follows is that faith in the God of justice opens the right path to felicity. What he thus shows at the same time is just how much the happiness of the just is grounded in this faith. “All the duties of the natural law, which were almost erased from my heart by the injustice of men,” the Vicar explains the moral turn caused in him by faith, “return to it in the name of the eternal justice that imposes them on me and sees me fulfill them.” Faith gives his morality a threefold support. In the harmony between his will and the will 95. “La vertu, disent-­ils, est l’amour de l’ordre; mais cet amour peut-­il donc et doit-­il l’emporter en moi sur celui de mon bien-­être? Qu’ils me donnent une raison claire et suffisante pour le préférer.” 99 (602). 96. Cf. Pp. 261–62, 268–69. 97. 100 (602), 1 (565).

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of the “great Being” that wants the good and does the good, he feels himself supported by an order in which “everything is good” and promises him fe­ lici­ty “one day.” If his moral action remains without human witness and thus without recognition, he has faith that it is seen nonetheless, and that he can use it as credit for “the other life.”98 If he suffers an injustice, he trusts that “the  just Being that governs everything” will compensate him for it. In all three respects, faith holds out the prospect of a future reward or recompense. In all three cases, faith is essentially hope. All three underline that the intrinsic reward for moral action is apparently insufficient to maintain it, and that the appeal to the plaisirs de l’âme is not enough to show that it is good for the agent, if  hope is not to become the peak of the joys. In the next step of  his clarifying recapitulation, the Vicar turns once again to the cardinal problem of the moral world order, the justification of evil. He does not simply repeat the argument that evil is the price of freedom, which necessarily includes the possibility of evil, but takes into account his most recent discussion of virtue and vice. There is a basis for vice that reason can explain. Evil, understood as the disruption of or deviation from the moral order, has a fundamentum in re in the conflict between the interests of the “body” and of the “soul.” “United to a mortal body by a bond no less powerful than incomprehensible, the soul is incited by the care for this body’s preservation to relate everything to the body and give it an interest contrary to the general order, which the soul is nevertheless capable of seeing and loving.” The Vicar does not know why his soul is “subjected” to his senses and “chained” to the body “that enslaves it and constrains it.” But without being initiated “in God’s decrees,” he conjectures that the meaning of this arrangement is that man earns a merit that is not available to any other being: “if man’s mind had remained free and pure, what merit would he gain from loving and following the order he saw established and which he would have no interest in troubling?” Whoever loves and follows the moral order without having to overcome an opposing interest of his own, without having to sacrifice, does not achieve moral merit; to him happiness is denied, access to which is granted solely by such merit. “He would be happy, it is true; but his happiness would be lacking the most sublime degree, the glory of virtue, and the good witness of oneself.” If man had remained “free and pure” and had not been compelled to act against his own good in order to accord with the moral good, he would be “only like the angels,” while the virtuous man “without doubt will be more than they are.” After the Vicar has raised man above the animals in the name of freedom, he raises him above the angels in the name of 98. See First Book, Chapter II, P. 69.

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virtue. He makes vivid to the proselyte both le mérite et la récompense in the moral use of freedom. The merit he earns has its reward not only in the glory of virtue or the recognition by others, but above all in the self-­admiration of the virtuous, to which it entitles him both as an individual and in regard to the species. Self-­admiration certainly does not make him independent of the judgment of others, but it does make him independent of the reputation he enjoys or does not enjoy with them. With self-­admiration the Vicar constructs a bridge back to the plaisirs de l’âme, which the summary took as its point of departure. Self-­admiration is the last word on the question of how the just, who subordinates his own good to the moral good, can know his action as good for himself. The justification of evil, by contrast, has not yet reached its end. The Vicar follows up his “modest conjecture” to what end the soul is chained to the body and for what reason the mind of man is not allowed to remain free and pure with the assertion that the weakness men complain about is their own work, and thus the “author of things” should no more be blamed for it than for their “first depravity,” which stems from their will. In other words, we are originally neither too weak nor too corrupt “to make ourselves happy in practicing our duties.”99 Man has the freedom to become the master of  his passions, but he forfeits this freedom if  he gives in to them, if  he does not resist the temptations pressuring him, if he believes for too long that he has found happiness where he should not seek it. The moral world order demands that man was free to choose the moral good. The moral justification of evil requires the assumption that he was once free so that the responsibility for his lack of freedom can be handed over to him. The Vicar confesses that the “illusions” he cherished regarding his happiness lasted for too long. He recognized them too late and could “not destroy them completely,” which is why, fixed by habituation, they will last as long as the “mortal body that caused them” persists.100 The Vicar could have been free. He is not. But although the illusions, which he connects with his corps mortel, will continue to “seduce” him, they will not be able to “deceive” him. When he follows them, he no longer sees in them the way to his happiness. Rather they appear to him as the obstacle separating him from his happiness. The “body” of which he has not become master keeps him from satisfying the moral good and according with faith in action. Therefore, he longs for the moment in which he will be “delivered from the shackles of  the body,” finally will be “I without contradictions,” and thus will be bei sich selbst, will be happy. He lives in the hope for a state in which he will 99. Cf. First Book, Chapter V, Pp. 138–­40 and Chapter IV in toto. 100. Cf. IV (560), XIV (563), 5 (567) and Pp. 234 as well as 238.

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no longer be who he is. The actualization of the moral I is bound to the redemption from the actual I. The Vicar’s happiness seems to have death as its presupposition. Yet the Vicar does not stop with the tragic conclusion that his moral teaching prepares for him—­even if it is not inevitable for the “child” to whom he presents it. In “sublimes contemplations” he anticipates, as much as possible, “this state of  happiness, of  strength, and of  freedom,” which he longs for and which active life denies him. The happiness of the imaginary state certainly can no longer be understood as the happiness of moral merit and of moral self-­admiration, since the freedom now under discussion is supposed to be freedom from the body, from its needs, passions, and interests, and thus precludes freedom to do evil.101 For the same reason, the central determination of the triad of happiness, strength, and freedom can no longer be conceived as the backbone of moral virtue. The happiness the Vicar anticipates and that he experiences when he “meditates on the order of the universe” is the happiness of a being that, “free and pure,” is not diverted from the contemplation of the whole by anything, or kept by anything from admiration for the “wise author” of the order. Does this being need strength to bear his own imperfection? Is strength necessary in order for it not to close its eyes to the imperfection of the moral world order when engaged in “sublime contemplations”? Or does strength refer not so much to a capacity that must be called upon in the state of contemplation, but rather first and foremost to a quality attributed to the contemplative by virtue of the undividedness that is proper to him, and by virtue of the harmony he is in with the whole? With the turn to the happiness of contemplation, the wisdom of God returns.102 At the end of his speech about Natural Religion the Vicar speaks explicitly about sagesse, which lies at the basis of the order of the universe, the object of contemplation, and of providence, by which the order is maintained. That thereby he has in view a general providence and does not want to associate any particular providence with the sage auteur, he makes clear by decisively rejecting every supplication, every prayer, every request that God may change the course of things for him, deviate from the general order, perform miracles.103 But whatever the Vicar has learned from Natural Theology, the teacher of  Natural Religion cannot abandon God’s justice, the will to the protection of morality, the demand for individual accountability, the care for each individual. Thus, finally he makes follow in abrupt succession what he knows cannot be brought into accord with each 101. Consider 78 (592) and see Pp. 264–­65. 102. See Pp. 259–60 and 267–68. 103. “Non, ce vœu téméraire méritéroit d’être plustot puni qu’éxaucé.” 104 (605).

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other. Twenty-­six paragraphs after the exclamation “O clement and good Being,” and the Vicar’s assurance that he will annihilate his weak reason before the justice of the judge of good and evil, his profession of faith culminates in a formal invocation of God as the source of  justice and of truth: “Source of  justice and of truth, clement and good God!, in my confidence in you, the supreme wish of my heart is that your will be done!”104 After the admission of the inadequacy of  his morality and the emphasis on the happiness of  his contemplation, he appeals, in contrast to twenty-­six paragraphs before, to the clement judge and good ruler, not on behalf of his “brother,” but on his own behalf. For him, the meaning of being depends upon the judgment of a being whose will maintains and supports the world, on a will whose justice is expressed in the general order and in its particular attention to him.105 In the complete affir­ mation of the supreme will he sees his own elevation, and he believes in advance that he shares in the supreme felicity, which he hopes for as reward for such unreserved affirmation and subordination.106 The Vicar speaks in the Profession de foi only this one time of la suprême félicité. In speaking only one time of la suprême félicité, Rousseau will follow the Vicar in the Rêveries. But he will be speaking of something else.107 “The good priest had spoken with vehemence; he was moved and so was I.” After the Vicar has presented his teaching of  Natural Religion in one piece, the narrator begins to speak. He inserts two paragraphs that are unique in the Profession de foi. The first is the only paragraph in which he reproduces a brief report, the second the only paragraph in which he reproduces an utterance of his own. The two paragraphs, which break the Profession de foi into two 104. The invocations Ô Etre clément et bon! and Dieu clément et bon! each appear once, in paragraph 78 (592) and paragraph 104 (605), respectively. For this consider 52 (581) and see Pp. 252–­53. 105. That the Vicar wants more from God’s justice than the maintenance of the general order and that he does not merely acquiesce in God’s general will when he declares in paragraph 104, “Thy will be done,” he underlines in paragraph 105, when he asks God in the name of justice to intervene for his own sake: “Dans la juste défiance de moi-­même la seule chose que je lui demande ou plustot que j’attends de sa justice est de redresser mon erreur, si je m’égare et si cette erreur m’est dangereuse . . . L’illusion qui m’abuse a beau me venir de moi, c’est lui seul qui m’en peut guérir” 105 (605–­6). Consider 78 (592) and 82 (594) as well as Pp. 265 and 268. 106. Cf. 53 (582) and 96 (601) as well as Pp. 253–­54 and 273. The last sentence of para­ graph 104 began in the manuscript: “En y [sc. à ta volonté] joignant la mienne je fais ce que tu fais, je gouverne avec toi l’univers et je partage ta félicité suprême qui en est le prix” (ed. Mas­ son 296, my emphasis). 107. 97–­104 (601–­5). See First Book, Chapter IV, P. 121 with Footnote 44 and Pp. 126–­27.

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unequal halves, shed light on the effect of the first half on the student, and set the course for his instruction in the second. The listener conveys the impression the priest’s speech made on him with an unusual comparison: “I believed I was hearing the divine Orpheus sing the first hymns and teach men the cult of the Gods.” Not only does the narrator’s divinization of the mythical singer who proclaimed the Gods to men deserve attention. Even more remarkable is that he assimilates the Vicar to a founder of a religion or to a wise man who had the reputation of having founded the veneration of the pagan Gods in remote antiquity.108 Thus, he marks his distance from Christian revelation and expresses his understanding of Natural Religion as a kind of passe-­partout that can be filled in with the most diverse cults. Rousseau chose the comparison of the Vicar to the poet of the Gods as the subject of the frontispiece for the third volume of Émile, and with this pictorial representation emphasized the narrator’s statement like no other passage of the Profession de foi.109 Following an incisive 108. Pierre-­Maurice Masson pointed to a passage about Orpheus in the Dissertation sur les Hymnes des Anciens by Abbé Souchay, which was published in 1751 in the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions, in a volume from which Rousseau made excerpts: “Si Orphée a été un sage, un théologien, un législateur sacré, et que les hymnes qui portent son nom renferment sa doctrine, qui pourra les regarder avec Heinsius, comme une liturgie de Satan, ou, avec l’auteur de la Bibliothèque universelle, comme des évocations magiques? C’est avoir détruit une opinion si peu fondée que d’avoir établi qu’Orphée était un sage, et que sa doctrine est contenue dans les hymnes qui portent son nom” (ed. Masson 299 ad locum). What Masson does not mention is the interpretation, familiar to the circle of encyclopédistes, of  Orpheus as an allegorical figure embodying philosophy. Francis Bacon developed it in De sapientia veterum XI, Orpheus sive philosophia. In the very first sentence Bacon calls Orpheus “divine” ( plane divinus) and highlights in his interpretation the turn of philosophy from philosophia naturalis to philosophia moralis et civilis. The eloquence of Orpheus or philosophy makes it possible for a certain period of time to instill in men love for virtue, for fairness, and for peace, and have the peoples take upon them the yoke of  laws. That Orpheus taught men the cult of the Gods is not mentioned by Bacon. Could it be that the proselyte, following Bacon’s example while correcting him, is setting out to interpret Orpheus, whom he believed he heard, as the incarnation of an ancient wisdom? (Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis, Heath, VI, pp. 646–­48. Alexandre Deleyre, who maintained contact with Rousseau for well over a decade beginning in 1754 or 1755, treats Bacon’s fable under the title “Orphée, ou la Philosophie” in his two-­volume work Analyse de la philosophie du Chancelier François Bacon [Amsterdam and Paris, 1755], II, pp. 182–­85.) Cf. First Book, Chapter III, Pp. 87–­93. 109. In the first edition, the frontispiece comes with the caption “Orphée, Liv. IV.” and with the reference in the uppermost margin of the image “Tom. III. Page 128” at the left of the title of volume III, which begins with the framing narrative and contains the entire Profession de foi. Paragraph 106 can be found on page 128. In volume I Rousseau already announces in the Explications des Figures: “IV. La Figure qui appartient au Livre quatre, et qui est à la tête du Tome

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“However,” the narrator opposes to the hymns he believes he heard the “heap of objections” he saw. Yet he adds that he did not express the objections, since they were rather disconcerting to him. For morality seemed to speak in the Vicar’s favor. The narrator, who refers to “foules d’objections” in the center of his short reaction without naming a single one, leaves it to the reader to consider the objections that contradict the Vicar’s dogmas.110 We may assume that especially the dogma of conscience as the “true leader of man” met with the listener’s objections, although he assures us that his conscience “seemed” to confirm what the Vicar told him. Supporting this assumption is not only that the narrator inserted after the pronouncement of this dogma and nowhere else a half sentence to tell the reader that it was the Vicar who prevented him from speaking. There is also no other part of the Vicar’s speech that comes closer to a veritable hymn than the praise he sang of the “divine instinct.”111 Instead of letting us know of his objections to Natural Religion, the narrator reports what he said to the Vicar: The views of the good priest appeared to him more “novel” regarding what the Vicar admitted he does not know than in regard to what he affirmed he believes. Among the things the Vicar confessed to knowing no answer to belonged the questions about how the “two substances” can be connected, and how the body and soul can be separated, or how long the soul survives after death. He made clear that creation is not known, and he saw himself incapable of  reconciling justice with God’s wisdom. The Vicar’s speech works out what is not understood in faith, it emphasizes what is merely a postulate of faith. In the second sentence of his short speech, the student classifies the Vicar’s speech in a way that speaks against the assumption that we have in him another Émile. He, not the Vicar, introduces the concept Natural Religion into the Profession de foi and sets it apart from what “the Christians” fight against as irreligion: “I see in them pretty nearly the theism or the natural religion that the Christians pretend to confound with atheism or irreligion, troisieme, représente Orphée enseignant aux hommes le culte des Dieux. Voyez T. III. p. 128.” The edition of the OCP does not reproduce the frontispiece, which was included in all editions during Rousseau’s lifetime. It is also missing from the editions of Pierre-­Maurice Masson and Bruno Bernardi, while Georges Beaulavon reproduces the engraving (following Eisen) in the text next to paragraph 106. 110. Cf. First Book, Chapter II, P. 59. 111. 83 (595) and 96 (600–­601). The dogma of conscience is the most prominent of the Vicar’s dogmas. It is all the more conspicuous that Rousseau did not adopt it for the ten dogmas of the Religion civile. Consider the political explosiveness of the appeal to conscience, which the Vicar makes known when he speaks about “the fanaticism” of  knowing how to “counterfeit” conscience and to “dictate crime in its name”: 97 (601).

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which is the directly contrary doctrine.” But in the current state of  his faith or lack of faith, the student continues, he had to ascend more than descend in order to adopt the Vicar’s opinions, i.e., he would have had to believe more and not less than he now believes, and he finds it “difficult” to remain standing precisely at the point of ascent and descent in faith where he sees the Vicar stand. Thus, he poses the question how Natural Religion can assert itself in view of revealed religion’s demand for obedience or why the Vicar does not “ascend again” in his faith to faith in revelation. The question is all the more obvious, given that at the end of his speech the Vicar expressed the expectation that the God of justice care for him, and in a great concluding rhetorical gesture requested that the truth come to him, since he cannot reach it.112 The student explains that, following the Vicar’s example, he wants to be guided by his “inner sentiment” and reflect on his teacher’s speeches. “If after taking careful counsel with myself, I remain as convinced of it as you are, you will be my final apostle, and I shall be your proselyte unto death.” But if after thorough reflection he is not convinced as the Vicar is, the Vicar will not remain his “apostle.” And if it should turn out at a later time that he is cut out for subjecting all his opinions, including those he might adopt from the Vicar, to a severe examination, he will be no one’s proselyte and will begin an ascent of an entirely different kind.113 First of all, however, the student would like the Vicar to continue his instruction, since he has told him “only half ” of what he “must know.” He ends his speech with the request that the teacher speak about revelation, about the Holy Scriptures, about the “obscure dogmas” that since childhood he has been able neither to conceive nor to believe. Again, it is the student, not the Vicar, who introduces the decisive concept into the Profession de foi. His desire for enlightenment about revelation or about what he knows how neither “to accept nor to reject” will be the last word we hear from him.114 The Vicar’s second speech begins with “Yes” and ends with “Amen.”115 The Vicar introduces it with the address “mon enfant,” with which he began 112. The conclusion of the Vicar’s speech reads: “ J’ai fait ce que j’ai pu pour atteindre à la vérité mais sa source est trop elevée: quand les forces me manquent pour aller plus loin de quoi puis-­je être coupable? C’est à elle à s’approcher.” 105 (606). Consider Footnote 105. 113. See First Book, Chapter II, Pp. 49–­51 and 54–55. 114. 105–­7 (605–­6). 115. Amen is absent from the first edition. Rousseau had nevertheless added Amen to the last paragraph of the Profession de foi both in the printer’s copy and in the copy of the manuscript for Paul Moultou and supplied the missing word again in the text of his personal copy. The posthumous edition by Moultou and Du Peyrou (Collection complète des œuvres [Geneva, 1780–­ 82]) restored the original wording and printed Amen as the last word of the Profession de foi.

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the first speech and which he used a second time when he professed his faith in the just God. He will repeat the address three more times and through its use mark the articulation of  his treatment of historical religions into three parts.116 The first usage is accompanied by an embrace, with which he confirms the promise that preceded the Profession de foi, that the student would receive from him his “whole profession of  faith,” and thus would be able to see him as he sees himself.117 “Yes, my child, he said, embracing me, I shall finish telling you what I think; I do not want to open my heart to you halfway. But the desire you give me evidence of was necessary to authorize my having no reserve with you.” The second and last embrace indicates that the instruction only now arrives at its goal and enters at the same time its most intimate and risky phase. The Vicar comes to speak about revelation, which he intended from the outset. In order to speak his mind about revelation, however, he considered necessary a circumspect preparation and a particular authorization, namely, the discernible need and explicit desire of the addressee. For the examination that follows is “very different” from what he has presented up until now. It is essentially a critique and, contrary to the teaching of Natural Religion, which the Vicar believes “could only be useful” to the student, stands in danger of doing harm. Harm to the student, but also to the teacher who dares to conduct it. “With trembling” the Vicar engages in an examination where he sees “only perplexity, mystery, obscurity.” He does it with that trembling that befits the wise man who poses the question regarding the nature of God. And he does it knowing that the proselyte turned away from belief in God, because to him the God of faith in revelation had become incredible.118 The student’s request alone would not have sufficed for the Vicar to present the critique of revealed religion. Only the proselyte’s desire and real need for enlightenment—­a need about which the Vicar must come to his own judgment—­authorize the Vicar to continue his instruction: “If your views were more stable, I would hesitate to expound mine to you; but in the state you are in, you will profit, if you think 116. The Vicar uses the address mon enfant in the first part in paragraphs 1, first sentence (565) and 100 (602), in the second part in paragraphs 108 (606), 154 (617), 172 (627), and 181, the last sentence of the text (635). The second part is divided into sections A: 108–­53, B: 154–­71, and C: 172–­81, whereby A is concerned with faith in revelation, B with revealed religions, and C with questions of religious practice in view of the historical situation of revealed religions. 117. XVIII (565), see P. 236. Right before, in paragraph XVII (565), one finds the first use of mon enfant. Thus, in total the address appears seven times, once in the framing narrative, twice in the first part of the Profession de foi, and four times in the second part. 118. Cf. 52 (581) and Pp. 252–53; V–­VI (560–­61) and P. 232. Consider Rousseau’s “precautions,” Émile IV, p. 558 and P. 228.

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as I do.”119 Rousseau adds in a Note: “This is, I believe, what the good Vicar could say to the public at present.” Neither the Vicar nor Rousseau is determined by missionary zeal when presenting his critique of revealed religion. For the one as well as for the other, the judgment at which they arrive in regard to the situation of the addressee is determinative. They orient their speeches about revelation as well as about Natural Religion toward the concrete state of the individual or to the concrete historical state.120 And both agree that they attribute to their discourses “only the authority of reason,” i.e., that they claim no authority for themselves.121 The second speech turns to reason. It provides raisons de douter. It does not demand faith. If the proselyte were to “ascend again” to Natural Religion, this would correspond to the Vicar’s intention. For this he would need faith. Faith in God as the lawgiver and ruler of the world, faith in morality as the true distinction of man, faith in the organ of conscience guiding him with certainty. But he does not have to climb back still further. Therefore, for what he is now given to consider, he needs only to consult and activate reason, which he shares with his teacher. The Vicar takes up the concept of Religion naturelle and opens his critique of revealed religion with the question why and to what end he would need a religion beyond Natural Religion. “It is very strange that any other is needed! How shall I know this necessity? What can I be guilty of in serving God according to the understanding he gives to my mind and the sentiments he inspires in my heart?” That he could be guilty, that he could sin, in serving God solely by the actualization of his natural capacities, without accepting the obedience of faith in the historical events necessary for salvation and in traditional truths, refers us not to an opinion of the student, who labeled the Vicar’s teaching as Natural Religion and posed the question concerning revelation, but instead directly to the all-­decisive reproach revealed religion issues against Natural Religion: not merely is it insufficient, but whoever stops 119. Consider XVIII (565) and Pp. 236–37. 120. In the copy of the manuscript Rousseau sent to the Genevan pastor Moultou, one finds a note that expresses succinctly the historical position of the text and Rousseau’s political reflection: “Vous saurez bien remarquer, cher Moultou, que cet écrit ne seroit pas bon à publier en tout tems, mais que dans celui-­ci le public ne peut plus qu’y gagner” (ed. Masson 430). In his reply to the Parisian archbishop, Rousseau writes about the Profession de foi: “ je la tiendrai toujours pour l’Ecrit le meilleur et le plus utile dans le siécle où je l’ai publié.” Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, p. 960. See p. 996 and compare for the historical situation to which the Athenian Stranger adjusts his teaching of  Natural Religion, Plato, Nomoi X, 891b2–­6 and XII, 948c2–­8. 121. 108 and Note 10 (606–­7). Consider for l’autorité de la raison in 108 (607) la raison nous est commune in paragraph 1 (566), and cf. Émile IV, p. 558.

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with it and insists on disobedience is coupable. The Vicar has two rebuttals. First, he replies defensively. What could be added to “the duties of the natural law,” i.e., to the core of Natural Religion, “for the glory of God, for the good of society, and for my own advantage”? To want to go beyond Natural Religion, consequently, would be, in the best case, a vain undertaking. Then he launches the offensive: “The greatest ideas of the divinity come to us from reason alone. View the spectacle of nature; hear the inner voice. Has God not told everything to our eyes, to our conscience, to our judgment?” The first sentence has recourse to Natural Theology, the second to Natural Religion, and both are deployed against revealed religion. What can men tell us in regard to God beyond what reason knows to discern and what we are able to perceive by means of nature? “Their revelations are only degrading God by giving him human passions.” The Vicar begins his speech about revelation with great acuity. With the first use of the term he speaks of revelations in the plural and thus anticipates the central section of the speech, which is concerned with the plurality of revealed religions and their conflicting claims to truth. He speaks not of God’s revelation, but rather of the revelations of men. And from the outset he reproaches them for doing injury to God’s honor, since they make him into an irrational being.122 Formulating the objectionable consequences of revealed religions for God and men in a single sentence, the Vicar continues: Their dogmas do not clarify “the concepts of the great Being,” but rather confuse them; they do not ennoble them, but debase them; they “add absurd contradictions to the incomprehensible mysteries surrounding it”; they make men proud, intolerant, cruel; instead of creating peace on earth, they bring the sword and fire. When the Vicar asks himself what the revelations are good for, he knows no answer. He sees only “the crimes of men and the miseries of the human race” that result from them. With this prelude, the Vicar makes clear that Natural Religion, which he expounded in the first part, is far from needing revealed religion as a supplement or from preparing the way for it as the higher, true, genuine religion. Instead, Natural Religion is opposed to revealed religion, it is the harsh critic of  revealed religion and steps in to replace it.123 The 122. Rousseau inserted the sentence “Leurs révélations ne font que dégrader Dieu en lui donant les passions humaines” only in the final clean copy of the manuscript. In a draft he had noted: “Toutes les révélations ne font que degrader Dieu” (ed. Masson 306). See Footnote 24 and cf. Goethe, West-­östlicher Divan. Besserem Verständnis. Israel in der Wüste, ed. Hendrik Birus (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), p. 246. 123. The theologians of the Sorbonne, who in 1762 presented their Censure of Émile, insisted, in keeping with a long tradition with which Rousseau was familiar, on the necessity for salvation of the ordre surnaturel, which the Christian religion alone made available to faith

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first mention of revelation in the singular serves the Vicar to bring fantasy into play, from which the revelations originate: Someone tells him “that a revelation was needed to teach men the way God wanted to be served,” and as proof adduces “the diversity of bizarre cults” they instituted without seeing “that this diversity comes from the fantasy of revelations. As soon as peoples took it into their heads to make God speak, each made him speak in its own way and made him say what it wanted. If one had listened only to what God says to the heart of man, there would never have been more than one religion on earth.” Beginning with the opinion that the basis for revelation is God’s will to instruct men how they are to serve him not only affords the Vicar the opportunity to furnish the prelude of  his speech with an exclamation point: revelation appears in the plural, because in each case the particular will of men is expressed. 124 Above all, it offers the advantage of taking the self-­understanding of faith in revelation as its starting point and taking revelation into consideration first of all as God’s demand upon men. The Vicar keeps as it were to the rank order of the Decalogue, just as with the honor of God and the justice of God he referred and will refer to standards that faith in revelation itself advocates. Beginning with what “someone tells me” also allows the Vicar to enter immediately into the movement from particular to universal or from history to nature, which beyond a religion naturelle preceding it: “ordre qui suppose et confirme tout ce que la Religion et la Loi naturelles comprennent, et y ajoute beaucoup de vérités entiérement inconnues à la raison.” They did not tire of repeating that “natural religion” has merely a preparatory, conducive, and serving function, but can never be sufficient: “comme nous l’avons déja dit plusieurs fois, les hommes qui seroient privés de la révélation, s’égareroient et se diviseroient entr’eux sur les principaux points de la Religion naturelle. Cela arriveroit non-­seulement parmi le peuple, mais à l’égard des Philosophes mêmes.” It is in and through Christian religion that “natural religion” finds its fulfillment and authorization: “Une grande partie de cette Religion, sa base, pour ainsi dire, et ses premiers fondemens, ce sont les dogmes et les préceptes de la Religion naturelle: il a été nécessaire qu’ils fussent confirmés et promulgués par l’autorité de la révélation divine: sans cela, ils n’eussent pû se conserver entiers dans beaucoup d’articles de la plus grande importance: tant est grande la foiblesse de la raison humaine!” “les dogmes et la morale de la Religion naturelle tirent de notre Religion révélée une lumiere nouvelle, et une grande consis­ tence.” Censure de la Faculté de Théologie de Paris, Contre le Livre qui a pour titre, Émile ou de l’Éducation (Paris, 1762), pp. 69, 81, 127, 140. 124. The theologians of the Sorbonne render their judgment accordingly: “souverainement téméraire, impie et blasphématoire. On y parle en général de toutes les révélations, sans en excepter aucune. La révélation faite aux premiers hommes et aux Patriarches, la révélation donnée autrefois aux Juifs et la révélation Chrétienne, y sont confondues sans distinction avec les autres prétendues révélations que tant de divers peuples reçurent, et qui sont toutes fausses.” Censure de la Faculté de Théologie de Paris, p. 78.

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will be characteristic for his speech about revelation. From the revelations of men who had God say different things in different places and at different times, which are reflected in the diversity of  bizarre prescriptions about how God is to be served, he goes back to what God says always, everywhere, and universally, so that more than one religion would never be established. With this first movement he coordinates a second, which leads from external to internal or from society to the individual. The ceremony of religion concerns society, the religion in which God takes an interest concerns the individual. “The cult God asks for is that of the heart, and that cult, when it is sincere, is always uniform.” We may assume that the one form in which it manifests itself is the attitude of one who says to God, “Thy will be done,” and nothing more.125 That God would pay attention to the ceremony of religion is incompatible with his sublimity. If he “wants to be revered in spirit and in truth,” he presumably puts himself in service to the maintenance of order, and the “duty of all religions” to such reverence exists for the sake of the good of men. The cult of the heart is subject to no one’s regulation and inspection. “As to the external cult, if it must be uniform for the sake of good order, that is purely a question of public policy; no revelation is needed for that.”126 With the requirement of revelation for the “external cult,” the good priest denies the authority of the priests as interpreters and custodians of revelation for the public order of religion, which is allocated to politics and subjected ultimately to the decision of the sovereign. The distinction between external and internal cult sets the course for the third and final section of the speech.127 In the guise of an autobiographical flashback, which starts with the “prejudices” of his religious education, the Vicar offers a brief sketch of the emergence of faith in revelation. He assigns a key role in the genesis to amour-­ propre, which induces man into raising himself above what is proper to his nature and to drag down to his own level the “great Being,” which man cannot reach with his concepts, and to want immediate communications and special instructions from him. Amour-­propre operates in regard to the species when it makes God equal to man, just as it operates with respect to the individual or to the particular community to which the individual belongs when it motivates the community, in order to be privileged among its kind, to want to achieve supernatural insight, to have an exclusive cult, and to be dignified by a unique 125. Cf. 104–­5 (605–­6) and Pp. 278–­79. 126. Rousseau first wrote in the manuscript: “mais c’est au gouvernement à le prescrire, c’est une affaire de pure police . . .” (ed. Masson 310, my emphasis). 127. 109–­11 (607–­8).

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address by God or to be privy to a particular understanding of his word that is not granted to others. The will to the supernatural, which the Vicar speaks about here for the first time, as the will to distinction, to preference, to deviation from the general order, rests essentially on amour-­propre. The Vicar is well aware of the power of amour-­propre. Therefore he turns it into a leitmotif in his critique of revealed religion, and therefore he himself has paid high tribute to it in his presentation of Natural Religion, in the effort to orient amour-­propre, as concerns religion, as far as possible toward the species, in order to keep amour-­propre, tamed in this way, within firm constraints and not to withdraw its energy from morality.128 While Religion naturelle unifies within itself “the elements of every religion,” the particular, historical, conventional religions, “the sects that reign on earth,” exclude each other. They “accuse each other of lying and error,” since each claims to be the right religion, and accordingly each appeals to an authority, or to a succession of authorities, to an honorable tradition at whose beginning the authority of  God is said to stand. The critique of revealed religions that the Vicar presents in the name of Natural Religion is decidedly a critique of authority and of the exclusivity based on an authority of cult, of  the attainment of  salvation, of  access to truth. This is true for the Vicar’s speech as a whole, but especially for its first section, which is concerned with the foundations of faith in revelation. Rousseau seconds the Vicar with a Note in which, for the purpose of undermining the appeal to God’s authority, he cites the authority of a “good and wise priest” and quotes a passage from Pierre Charron’s De la sagesse, which denies the origin of religion from God, a passage that the Catholic theologian suppressed in the revised edition of his work owing to its offensiveness.129 The Vicar holds against the truth of faith founded upon authority, origin, tradition that it is not compatible with God’s justice. Obedience to authority would mean that “the method of the man who follows the right road and of the man who goes astray is the same,” so that neither he who lived according to the truth of faith, nor he to whom this is not granted, would have more merit or fault than the other. Their choice would remain the effect of a historical or geographic contingency, and to attribute it to them 128. Consider 53–­56 (581–­83), Pp. 253–­54, and 101 (603), Pp. 274–­77; compare 112 (608) with 96 (601); and see X (562), XV (564) as well as P. 235. 129. Rousseau makes sure to specify precisely the source of the extensive quotation from the first edition of De la sagesse, before it fell prey to Charron’s self-­censorship: “L. II. Chap. 5. p. 257. Edition de Bordeaux 1601.” In 1605 the title was placed on the Index of forbidden books by the ecclesiastical authorities. Rousseau adds this commentary to the passage: “Il y a grande apparence que la sincére profession de foi du vertueux Théologal de Condom n’eut pas été fort différente de celle du Vicaire savoyard.” Note 11 (609, my emphasis).

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would be inequitable, it would mean to reward or to punish them for being born in this or that country. “To dare to say that God judges us in this way is to insult his justice.” God’s justice demanded that either all religions are good and agreeable, i.e., that the choice of this or that particular religion is all the same to him, or instead, that if he prescribes a religion to men, with punishment for nonobservance, he furnished it with “certain and manifest signs” so that it can be distinguished and known as the only true religion. The signes certains et manifestes must be knowable “at all times and in all places,” i.e., they must satisfy the demands that the Vicar, taught by the philosophers, applies to Natural Religion, and in addition they must, if the true religion is going to be able to count as a duty of man, “be equally perceptible to all men, great and small, learned and ignorant, Europeans, Indians, Africans, Savages.” Thus, appealing to God’s justice, the Vicar not only excludes revelation as an event necessary for salvation, obligating Everyman to obedience. Forty-­four paragraphs after he opposed the theologians of revealed religion who, appealing to God’s sovereignty, advocated the opinion that God owes man nothing, he also indicates the meaning of  his insistence upon justice and the most extreme consequence of that opposition. “If there were a religion on earth outside of which there would be only eternal punishment, and if in some place in the world a single mortal of good faith had not been struck by the evidence of it, the God of this religion would be the most iniquitous and cruel of all tyrants.” Thus, the point of attack of the theologico-­political critique is identified. The Vicar knows that he who wants “sincerely to seek the truth” must follow another method. Instead of remaining obedient, he must subject everything he was taught about religion from childhood on to the “examination by conscience and reason.” Conscience speaks to the justice of the claims, reason passes judgment on the probative force of the reasons. The authorities disputing with one another compel awareness of one’s own reason. “They may very well cry out: subject your reason. He who deceives me can say as much; I need reasons for subjecting my reason.” What a human authority tells him about the truth of faith is subordinate to the judgment of his reason. And what his reason is able to confirm does not go beyond what the Vicar expounded as Natural Religion. The Vicar’s first speech contains “all the theology” he attained supported by his natural capabilities. “Extraordinary means” would be required in order to be able to believe more, i.e., means like those faith in revelation claims for itself by appealing to God’s authority. The Vicar makes this appeal into the subject of the first and shortest of three imaginary dialogues he includes in his speech: “Apostle of the truth, what then do you have to tell me of which I do not remain the judge? God himself has spoken; hear his revelation.” Revelation’s demand

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for obedience rests on the fact that God himself  has spoken, but those to whom his revelation is directed cannot themselves hear this revelation, because God has spoken at a specific time, and they must, therefore, believe men who tell them that he himself has spoken in the past. God has authenticated by prodigies the mission of his messengers who pass on and disseminate revelation. But the prodigies were witnessed by men whose testimonies are transmitted in books written by men. The Apostle of revelation’s appeal to the authority of God always refers the Vicar to the authority of men. “What! always human testimonies? Always men who report to me what other men have reported! How many men between God and me! Nevertheless, let us see; examine, compare, verify.”130 No revealed religion can adduce “certain and manifest signs” by which the true religion would be discernible always and everywhere. If, nevertheless, the Vicar announces that he is prepared to engage in examining, comparing, verifying the historical testimonies to which the “Apostle of truth” refers him, he does so because he knows he cannot refute his opponent in any other way than by engaging his claim to truth and by making the statements his opponent brings against him into the object of a dialectical confrontation. Therefore, the speech about revelation, in contrast to that about Natural Religion, also contains explicit dialogues and is dominated from the very outset by ad hominem arguments.131 The Vicar makes vivid for the student in “what a horrible discussion” one would have to engage and “what immense erudition” would be needed by one who would want to investigate the truth of the claims and demands of faith and to go through “the prophecies, the revelations, the facts, all the monuments of faith put forth in all the countries of the world” in detail. He asks him to bear in mind how much historical research, philological competence, and intensive source criticism would be required for this. In the second section he will highlight the sheer impossibility of such an enterprise for one who, in view of the absolute claim of each of the competing revealed religions, has to clarify his duty to obey. The reference to the “horrible discussion” is set here in the context of the central theme of the first part of the speech about revelation, the self-­assertion of reason against all authority, and is bound up 130. 112–­18 and Note 11 (608–­11). Rousseau takes up the Vicar’s famous exclamation “How many men between God and me!” in his letter to the archbishop of Paris and writes in his own name: “pourquoi en faut-­il [des intermédiaires] entre Dieu et moi, et pourquoi en faut-­il de si éloignés, qui en ont besoin de tant d’autres? Est-­il simple, est-­il naturel que Dieu ait été chercher Moïse pour parler à Jean Jaques Rousseau?” Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, p. 987. 131. Cf. Pp. 250–51 and 252–­53.

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with an argument being constructed, and intensifying step by step, that faith in revelation cannot dispense with reason if it wants to avoid the objection of gullibility or of self-­deception. The Vicar proceeds from the “monuments” of faith to the “proofs of their authors’ mission,” to miracles. Acquainted with the philosophers’ critique of miracles, he emphasizes the knowledge and reason needed to recognize miracles and to be able to judge an appeal to them. Knowledge of a miracle presupposes knowledge of nature, for ascertaining an exception or deviation from the order of nature is tied to knowledge of this order, of the necessities by which it is determined, and of the possibilities it permits. If God’s messengers, the intermediaries of revelation, are authorized by miracles, then establishing the authentication of their mission, and consequently, the knowledge of what is possible and impossible by nature, must be of the greatest importance for the believer in revelation. He must, for instance, as the Vicar purposely mentions, be well-­informed about the laws of chance and of probability in order to be able to evaluate whether or not the fulfillment of a prophecy justifies the assumption of a miracle. He must have a lively interest in separating miracle workers from impostors. Above all, he must arrive at “certain rules” in order to distinguish “true and false prodigies,” i.e., miracles he believes God worked and miracles he believes the devil has imitated. All questions surrounding belief in miracles lead to the question concerning the reason of God, who, according to the demand of faith, makes use of miracles: “why God chose, for attesting to his word, means that have so great a need of attestation themselves, as though he were playing on men’s credulity and intentionally avoiding the true means of persuading them.” In rapid succession the Vicar brings the reason, the justice, the equity, and the dignity of God into position against the doctrine of miracles, to have his ad hominem argument culminate ultimately in “the most important examination” of  his opponent and in the appeal to a story from the Bible. The most important objection is supported by something those who believe in miracles themselves say, namely, that God works miracles and that the devil sometimes imitates these. Thus, the Vicar returns to the question as to how the true and false prodigies are to be distinguished, assuming that supernatural powers could intervene in the order of nature. As scriptural evidence, he cites the magicians of Pharaoh, who “dared in the very presence of Moses to produce the same signs he did by God’s express order,”132 and asks: “why would they not in his absence have claimed, with the same credentials, the same authority?” Which means that the basis for the authorization by miracles has been undermined: “Thus, after the 132. Exodus 7: 10, 11, 20, 22; 8: 1–­3.

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doctrine has been proven by the miracle, the miracle has to be proven by the doctrine, for fear of taking the Demon’s work for God’s work.” Once more Rousseau himself speaks out to support and to sharpen the Vicar’s argument against the appeal by revealed religion to God’s authority. That the miracle has to be proven by the doctrine, i.e., that it is based solely in faith, emerges from “a thousand passages of Scripture” and among others from the thirteenth chapter of  Deuteronomy. There it is said that a prophet who proclaims foreign Gods and confirms his proclamation by prodigies should not be listened to if his prophecy is fulfilled, but on the contrary one must kill this prophet. For the mission he proves by miracles is God’s means of tempting the faithful in order to find out whether they love God with all their heart and soul. “Thus, when the pagans put to death apostles proclaiming a foreign God to them and proving their mission by predictions and miracles, I do not see what solid objection there was to the pagans that they could not instantly turn back against us. Now, what is to be done in such a case? One thing only: Return to reasoning and leave aside the miracles. It would have been better not to have had recourse to them.” Rousseau knows that the demonstration of unknowability suffices to reject the authorization of the intermediaries of revelation by prodigies, that, however, demonstrating unknowability does not suffice to refute the possibility of miracles. But when in his Note he concentrates on unknowability, as the Vicar does in the text, that does not mean the ad hominem argument he developed would be relevant only for the knowability of miracles. It is an example with further applications handed on to the reader to test. Rousseau also knows the force accorded to the confrontation with the “doctrine” of faith in revelation to which he directs attention, a confrontation which it is the officium of Natural Theology to engage in.133 The Vicar enters into the confrontation and 133. In the Lettres écrites de la montagne, Rousseau devotes the Third Letter, which comprises ninety-­six paragraphs, to a thorough confrontation with belief in miracles. This elaborated critique builds on Spinoza’s critique of  biblical miracles, yet goes beyond the famous sixth chapter of the Tractatus theologico-­politicus both in particular by extending the critique to the miracles of Jesus, and as a whole by its exposition of  Natural Theology. Rousseau develops the critique of belief in miracles guided by the theme of divine wisdom and with constant attention to the judgment of the wise. Thus, without neglecting in the least the ad hominem arguments of his predecessors, he turns the critique of miracles into a special place of philosophic self-­ interpretation (III, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 31, 32n., 36, 40, 51, 54, pp. 727–­28, 729, 734–­35, 736, 737, 738, 743, 744; consider III, 48–­49 and 41n., pp. 741–­42 and 738). The prominence Rousseau bestows on the attribute of wisdom distinguishes his treatment of belief in miracles both from that of Spinoza, who leaves wisdom unmentioned in “De miraculis,” and also from that of Locke, who refers to “God’s honour and goodness,” “the unity and majesty of his eternal godhead,” “the

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outlines it to the extent that it is compatible with Natural Religion. If the doctrine that is supposed to “prove” the miracle comes from God, it must have the “sacred character of divinity.” It must not only bring clarity to our ideas of God, instead of increasing obscurity, but also “present” to us “a cult, a morality, and maxims that conform to the attributes by which alone we conceive his essence.” Thus, the assertion of miracles, both in itself and because of the doctrine it is supposed to confirm, compels the Vicar to turn to the question quid est deus? and to confront the God of the revealed religions with the God of Natural Religion.134 If the doctrine of faith “depicted for us only a God who is angry, jealous, vengeful, partisan,” i.e., if it were to pass off as God a being dominated by passions, irrational and unjust, “a God of war and of battles,” a God of destruction, who would “boast of punishing even the innocent,” the Vicar would “take care not to give up Natural Religion” in order to accept the religion that would proclaim “this terrible God.” For since these two could not be made compatible with one another, one would “necessarily have to choose.” He would go so far, always paying attention to the subjunctive, to add for the adherents of such a religion a brief address: “Your God is not ours, I would say to its sectarians. He who begins by choosing a single people for himself and proscribing the rest of the human race is not the common father of men; he who destines the great majority of his creatures to eternal torment is not the

dignity of his majesty,” and “the glory of God” (A Discourse of Miracles, in The Works of John Locke [Glasgow–­Dublin, 1823], IX, pp. 260–­62). The high rank of Rousseau’s confrontation and the subtlety of execution leap to the eye, if the reader compares it, for instance, with Hume’s critique of miracles (An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding X, Of Miracles, Critical Edition, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp [Oxford, 2000], pp. 83–­99). Rousseau’s discussion of the miracles of  Jesus also has its vanishing point in the criterion of wisdom (cf. III, 3, 31, 32n. in fine, 94, pp. 727, 734, 736, 754). While Rousseau discusses the greatest miracle Jesus worked according to John 11, the raising of someone from the dead, he passes over in silence the incarnation, the greatest miracle concerning  Jesus himself. The Genevan theologian David Claparède, who replied to the Lettre troisième with a treatise of 262 pages, immediately highlighted Rousseau’s silence: Considérations sur les miracles de l’Évangile, pour servir de réponse aux difficultés de Mr. J. J. Rousseau dans sa 3.e lettre écrite de la montagne (Geneva, 1765), pp. 29–­35. 134. See 52 (581) and Pp. 252 as well as 256. The Vicar already placed this confrontation on record within the discussion of the belief in miracles: “et le plus grand de tous les miracles seroit que là où il y a des fanatiques persecutés il n’y eut point de miracles. C’est l’ordre inaltérable de la nature qui montre le mieux l’être suprême; s’il arrivoit beaucoup d’exceptions je ne saurois plus qu’en penser, et pour moi je crois trop en Dieu pour croire à tant de miracles si peu dignes de lui” 121 (612). Cf. Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-­politicus VI, De miraculis, ed. Carl Gebhardt, Opera (Heidelberg, 1925), III p. 86, 23–­27.

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clement and good God my reason has shown me.”135 If Natural Religion, as is held against it, is insufficient, then it is so insofar as it does not, in reference to “the great truths it teaches us,” create and disseminate the wished-­for clarity. The task would then fall to revelation to teach the truths of  Natural Religion in a way that would make these truths perceptible and comprehensible to the mind of man, “to make him conceive them in order that he may believe them.” In other words, the Vicar would grant to revelation a supporting, pedagogical, and serving function, within the framework delineated by Natural Religion and under the presupposition that it would promote clarity and not burden cult with “mysteries” and “contradictions.” For faith needs understanding for its protection and fortification, which is why “the best of all religions is infallibly the clearest.”136 The Vicar leaves no doubt that he reserves for his reason the judgment about who or what is to be honored as God. “The God I adore is not the God of shadows; he did not endow me with an understanding in order to forbid me its use; to tell me to subject my reason is to insult its author. The minister of truth does not tyrannize my reason; he enlightens it.” The opposition between reason and authority unveils its truth in the opposition between reason and tyranny.137 The opposition between reason and authority, between insight and obedience, between proof and hearsay, is of such importance in the confrontation with faith in revelation that after he has dealt with it in his own name, the Vicar takes up the opposition once more, making it the theme of the middle dialogue, the longest and by far the most conspicuous of the three dialogues he inserts into his speech about revelation. This dialogue forms the conclusion of the first section and lets its most significant subjects and questions, from prophecy to miracles to the nature of  God, pass in review in compressed form, formulated laconically, easy to grasp, polemically trenchant, soliciting attention less by new arguments, as it seems, than by the intransigence with which the dialogue articulates the fundamental conflict. The harsh exchange in which L’Inspiré and Le Raisoneur engage one another consists of  twenty-­six contributions and twenty-­ seven paragraphs: each of the interlocutors gets his chance thirteen times, but the thirteenth utterance of the Raisoneur, who has the last word, comprises two paragraphs (26 and 27). The Vicar prefaces the dialogue with a short paragraph that identifies its task. He reminds the student that “we,” i.e., the Vicar and his 135. For the Dieu clement et bon, see 78 (592) and 104 (605), Pp. 265 and 278–­79. 136. Rousseau first wrote in the manuscript: “La meilleure de toutes les religions est infailliblement la plus raisonnable” (ed. Masson 342, my emphasis). 137. 119–­125 and Note 12 (611–­14).

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listener, have excluded “all human authority” as proof. But without the appeal to an authority, the Vicar is not able to see “how one man can convince another by preaching an unreasonable doctrine to him.” The imagined dialogue stages such an attempt to convince that is condemned to failure, and it is not the course of the conversation, but rather the names of the interlocutors, that first make it clear who will represent the sermon of the doctrine déraisonable. The Inspiré will appeal to the source of his inspiration, as whose receptacle or organ he understands himself, and will speak in the name of an other, one who is higher, more powerful. The Raisoneur will refer to his reason, ask the Inspiré for reasons and hold his conclusions out to him.138 The advocate for revelation opens the dialogue with an attack on what reason teaches: “Reason teaches you that the whole is greater than its part; but I teach you on behalf of God that it is the part that is greater than the whole.”139 His opponent replies with questions that show reason in its rights: “And who are you to dare tell me that God contradicts himself, and whom would I prefer to believe, him who teaches me the eternal truths by reason or you who proclaim an absurdity on his behalf ?” Thus, the dividing line has been drawn and the tone has been set for everything to come. The confrontation reaches its peak when the Inspiré, after introducing “sin” as the corrupter of reason into the text (5), and before declaring the advocate of reason to be the “satellite of the Demon” (25), claims in the middle of the dialogue that his proofs are “irrefutable,” since they stem from “a supernatural order” (13),140 to which the Raisoneur counters in the central paragraph: 138. In earlier drafts Rousseau used the designations Le Missionaire, Le Prophète, and L’Apôtre, before he decided on L’Inspiré. For Le Raisoneur he first considered Le Théiste and L’Homme (ed. Masson 346). If he had kept these designations, there would have been no further way to moderate by interpretation the classification of the two parties into revealed religion and Natural Religion respectively, no way to dispute the classification by any apology. Cf. Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, pp. 998–­99. 139. Rousseau previously used the example in his own name and commented: “je suis l’ami de toute Religion paisible, où l’on sert l’Etre éternel selon la raison qu’il nous a donnée. Quand un homme ne peut croire ce qu’il trouve absurde, ce n’est pas sa faute, c’est celle de sa raison; et comment concevrai-­je que Dieu le punisse de ne s’être pas fait un entendement contraire à celui qu’il a receu de lui? Si un Docteur venoit m’ordonner de la part de Dieu de croire que la partie est plus grande que le tout, que pourrois-­je penser en moi-­même, sinon que cet homme vient m’ordonner d’être fou? Sans doute l’Orthodoxe, qui ne voit nulle absurdité dans les mistéres, est obligé de les croire . . .” Lettre à d’Alembert 7, pp. 11–­12; cf. the long Note about absurd dogmatic assertions that Rousseau added to the passage in the text. 140. The Inspiré’s appeal to the supernatural is the first use of surnaturel since the Vicar spoke of surnaturel in paragraph 112 (608), when he traced the demand for supernatural insight to amour-­propre. See Pp. 287–­88.

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“Supernatural! What does that word mean? I do not understand it” (14), 141 and receives the answer: “Changes in the order of nature, prophecies, miracles, prodigies of every sort” (15). At the conclusion (27) the Raisoneur comes back to the Inspiré ’ s “allegedly supernatural proofs” in order to express with epigrammatic acuity why “we,” why the Vicar, his listener, the Raisoneur, and whoever has an interest in the speech of reason, cannot allow any human authority to count as proof: to believe in prophecies, miracles, revelations on the basis of trust in the authentication by others would mean “to subject the authority of God, which speaks to my reason, to the authority of men.”142 The last word the Vicar has the defender of Natural Religion speak is: “If the eternal truths that my mind conceives could be impaired, there would no longer be any kind of certainty for me, and far from being sure that you speak to me on behalf of God, I would not even be sure that he exists.” The beginning and end of the speech, its final and its first sentence, are joined together in the vérités éternelles to which reason grants access and on the basis of which the assertions and assurances concerning God have to prove themselves, his existence not excepted.143 If the dialogue presents no new argument, it does nevertheless contain an argument that the Vicar nowhere brings to the fore as clearly: In order to believe a being exists that he can recognize as God, the Raisoneur must be convinced that this being would be in harmony with the truths his reason is able to discern as necessary truths, i.e., with truths that hold at all times and in all places. The Vicar later uses the term “raisoneur” once more in order to connect it ironically and with the appropriate distance with himself.144 Even if he had not done that, the proximity to the protagonist of the dialogue, which is grounded in the common cause, cannot be overlooked. The conclusion of the dialogue holds the answer to the Vicar’s crisis of faith and is an exhortation to the proselyte in his lack of  faith.145

141. Cf. Plato, Apolog y of Socrates 20d–­e. 142. Cf. P. 284 and Footnote 121. 143. In the manuscript, the first word of the dialogue, not of the speech of the Raisoneur, was originally Dieu. Rousseau replaced it with La raison (ed. Masson 346). 144. “A l’égard de la révélation, si j’étois meilleur raisoneur ou mieux instruit, peutêtre sentirois-­je sa vérité, son utilité pour ceux qui ont le bonheur de la reconoître” 171 (625, my emphasis). It is the only use of raisonneur in the entire text with the exception of the thirteen designations for the protagonist in the dialogue. 145. 126–­153 (614–­617). Paragraphs 1–­27 of the dialogue correspond to paragraphs 127–­53 of the Profession de foi. See V–­VI (560–­61) and 6–­10 (567–­68) as well as Pp. 231–­32, 237–38, 239–­41.

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Faith in revelation, according to its claim, provides the basis for one religion. It appeals to one truth and wants to understand itself in terms of obedience to one sovereign. It is, therefore, also one challenge for philosophy. But since it refers to historical revelations that conflict with one another, since it traces the truth to different traditions, and interprets the commandments of the sovereign differently, it appears not in the singular, but in the plural of revealed religions. After the Vicar considered faith in revelation as one matter and subjected it to a fundamental critique in the confrontation with Natural Religion, he starts anew, in order to engage, in the second section of his speech about revelation, which he begins once more with the address “mon enfant,”146 with revealed religions in their historical particularity. The perspective guiding him is their claim to be the exclusively right religion, the claim, common to all, that divides them all. Since each makes the claim, one must examine them all, compare them with one another, investigate what in each case they allege against the others, and what replies these others offer in return. Justice would demand giving each a hearing and proceeding impartially.147 Prudence would counsel not to take as proven what is closest to us, but rather to effect a change in perspective and ask why what is familiar to us is held by so many others not to be proven. After all, it is in our self-­interest not to make the position of the opponent weaker than it is, but rather to take its reasons more seriously than they are presented to us, if we would want truly to profit from refuting them. The assertion of their exclusivity induces the Vicar to consider revealed religions from a vantage point equidistant from them all. He begins with the book, the decisive medium of their tradition and their self-­ assurance. Not only in order to build on what in the first section he asked to bear in mind—­how much erudition, philological and historical knowledge would be 146. In the manuscript Rousseau first wrote mon ami, but then corrected it to mon enfant, the address he uses for the marking of the Vicar’s speech, in particular of sections A, B, and C of part II. See Footnotes 116 and 117. In addition to the address mon enfant (XVII, 1, 100, 108, 154, 172, 181) Rousseau uses the addresses bon jeunne homme (3, 181), jeune homme (59, 177), mon ami (44, 95, 111, 119, 172, 177), mon bon ami (58, 76, 175), mon jeune ami (85, 176), and mon fils (170, 179). The twenty-­four addresses with enfant (seven times), jeune homme (four times), ami (eleven times), and fils (twice) are distributed as follows: framing narrative. once; part I, paragraphs 1–­100, nine times; part II AB, paragraphs 108–­70, five times; part II C, paragraphs 172–­81, nine times. 147. Rousseau supports the Vicar’s statement “dans quelque matiére que ce soit on ne doit point condanner sans entendre” in Note 13 with a reference to Plutarch, whom he cites against the claim to a révélation exclusive, and provides it with the commentary: “Sitot que chacun prétend avoir seul raison, pour choisir entre tant de partis il les faut tous écouter, ou l’on est injuste.”

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required to come to a reasoned judgment on the basis of the books from diverse traditions—­but also to maintain from an ethnological perspective, from which he now speaks, that even the most competent study of the scriptural evidence can never replace field research. “In order to judge a religion well, it is necessary not to study it in the books of its sectarians, but to go and learn it amongst them; that is very different. Each has its traditions, its views, its customs, its prejudices, which constitute the spirit of its belief and must also be considered for it to be judged.” In contrast to the one faith in revelation, which demands a confrontation concerning principles, revealed religions are the objects of ethnological and sociological investigation. To highlight the difference between what is written and what is lived and what one can see and hear with one’s own eyes and ears, the Vicar does not refer to any of the books revered as sacred. He chooses an example from the denomination to which he belongs as a priest, and restricts himself to noting how misleading it would be to want to judge “the Catholic faith according to the book of Bossuet,” and how little the doctrine that the French court chaplain and Catholic theologian of history presented in response to the Protestants agrees with the doctrine “one teaches the people” or the doctrine the Church practices. Thus, the religious schism comes into view before the book over whose obedient interpretation Catholics and Protestants split has been identified by name, and before the Vicar has mentioned Christianity and Christians in his speech for the first time. The quarrel over right obedience is of greater evidence than the obedience of faith. The book as the clue to his approach to revealed religions provides the Vicar the opportunity to recall “how many great peoples print no books and do not read ours.” How can such peoples be included in the discussion of right religion? For we may suppose that even in the most remote countries there are “sensible people, people of good faith, decent people, friends of the truth,” who have something to contribute to this discussion. The Vicar will later give the floor to one of them, or the Vicar will in his stead give the speech he cannot give.148 From the peoples of the world that are addressed by the claim to truth of revealed religions, the Vicar redirects his focus back to the center of action. “We have three principal religions in Europe. One accepts a single revelation, the second accepts two, the third accepts three. Each detests and curses the other two, accusing them of being blind, hardhearted, obstinate, lying.” In view of the strife of the three among themselves which, as we know, is carried on not only in books and not solely with words, the advocate for Natural Religion

148. 154–­55 (617–­19).

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maintains neutrality until he has heard and weighed the proofs and reasons of all three. Yet what occurs to him immediately is that the religion that accepts only one revelation, which is the oldest of the three, seems to be the most certain, since the other two grant its revelation and it has been in exis­ tence the longest, while the one that accepts three revelations and is the most recent appears the most consistent. For if one takes revelation to be possible and accepts one or two, it is not evident on what grounds a third or further revelations can be excluded. For the religion that accepts two revelations and rejects the third, this means that of the three it “may very well be the best”—­ how is an unbiased judge, not to mention a priest, supposed to exclude this?—­ “but it certainly has all the prejudices against it; the inconsistency leaps to the eyes.” It also strikes the ethnological observer of the three revealed religions, to which he now assigns proper names, that their sacred books are written in languages unknown to the peoples for whom they possess obligatory force, constitute law, command, morality, order. “The Jews no longer understand Hebrew; the Christians understand neither Hebrew nor Greek; neither the Turks nor the Persians understand Arabic, and the modern Arabs themselves no longer speak the language of Mohammed.” The authoritative books have need of human authorities who translate and explain them to the peoples. If God is able to speak to men when he takes it to be required and deigns to do so, why does he need, why then does he avail himself of an interpreter? From the appeal to God’s reason, the Vicar makes the transition without any further intermediary step to the central argument of his critique of revelation. He objects to the three religions of the book that they cannot be made compatible with God’s justice. “I shall never be able to conceive that what every man is obligated to know is confined to books, and that someone who does not have access to these books, or to people who understand them, is punished for an ignorance that is involuntary.” And besides: “Were not all books written by men?” Following the exclamation with which the Vicar in the first section rejected the intermediary authorities between God and his own reason, he now exclaims in the second section in almost so many words: How many books between God and me! The criticism of faith based on books—­how can man be dependent on books in order to know his duties, to avoid God’s punishment, or to achieve salvation?—­holds for all three revealed religions. In Christianity, it holds above all for Protestantism which, however, the Vicar does not mention here. Instead, he continues with the remark that “our Catholics make a great to-­do about the authority of the Church.” They seem, in other words, not to be vulnerable to the criticism or not to the same degree as the Protestants. Yet this semblance deceives. For the Church has just as great a need to expend

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its efforts on scriptural proofs in order to provide a basis for its doctrinal authority as “the other sects” do “in order to establish their doctrine directly.” “The Church decides that the Church has the right to decide. Is that not an authority based on good proofs?” If the Catholic Church wants to go beyond a sheer decisionism, it must in the end, like the Protestants, have recourse to the authority of Scripture.149 The Vicar draws on the Jews and Mohammedans for the purpose of contrast with and critique of Christianity. Above all Judaism serves his purpose of confronting Christian biases and identifying Christian evils, although he does not, as the proselyte did before, speak of “the Christians,” distinguishing himself overtly, but rather of “us” and “we.”150 Supported explicitly by Rousseau, he denounces the oppression of the Jews. What they allege against Christianity is not only not “examined with care.” Even free speech and unimpeded instruction about  Judaism remain banned. If books openly endorse Judaism, one punishes the author, the publisher, the bookseller.151 The books of the  Jews are either forbidden or burned. “The tyranny practiced against them makes them fearful; they know how little Christian charity is troubled by injustice and cruelty; what will they dare to say without laying themselves open to our accusing them of blasphemy?” The persecution of the Jews furnishes the Vicar with the point of reference and “blasphemy” is the keyword in order to introduce the theme that holds the greatest danger for him in the treatment of revealed religions: the question of the divinity of  Jesus.152 This question stands in the center of the speech about revealed religions. The Vicar speaks four times of Jesus-­Christ in the four central paragraphs of the second section.153 149. 156–­59 (619–­20). 150. See 107 (606) and cf. 160–­63 (620–­21). 151. Rousseau pondered this in several attempts: “On ne laisseroit pas imprimer parmi nous des livres où l’on prouveroit ou croiroit prouver que Jesus Christ n’est pas le Messie[,] on puniroit l’auteur, l’imprimeur, le libraire, nous crierions aux pieux blasphêmes” (ed. Masson 368–­70). Subsequently, he reconstructed the passage, enlarged it, shifted the crucial statements to the next paragraph, and so arrived at the definitive arrangement and sequence of the argument. 152. The term blasphême appears only in paragraph 161 (621) and only this once. Consider the sole use of blasphêmer in paragraph 174 (629), when the Vicar speaks about himself and his attitude toward divine justice: “Quoi qu’il arrive je ne blasphêmerai point contre la justice divine.” 153. Jesus-­Christ is mentioned once in each of the paragraphs 161, 162, 163, and 164 (621–­22), which are, respectively, paragraphs 8, 9, 10, and 11 of the eighteen paragraphs composing the second section. Consider Footnote 151. The Vicar will return to Jesus in paragraph 172, which

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But the context in which he comes to speak of  Jesus is the denial, from which the enmity between Christianity and the two other revealed religions grows, the contestation of the claim that  Jesus is the Christ. The Vicar suspends his judgment. When he first mentions  Jesus Christ, he says that he still has no adequate understanding of the “reasons of the  Jews,” who denied the divinity of Jesus from the outset: “At the Sorbonne it is as clear as day that the predictions about the Messiah relate to Jesus Christ. Among the Rabbis of Amsterdam it is just as clear that they do not have the least relation to him. I shall never believe that I have seriously heard the reasons of the Jews until they have a free State, schools, universities, where they can speak and dispute without risk. Only then will we know what they have to say.” The Turks in Constantinople “state their reasons,” i.e., they declare Jesus to be a precursor of the prophet and deny that  Jesus is the son of  God. They make themselves heard by coercive means. “There it is our turn to crawl,” a reversal of roles from which the Vicar once more acquires an argument against Christian self-­certainty. “If the Turks demand from us for Mohammed in whom we do not believe the same respect that we demand for Jesus Christ from the Jews, who believe in him just as little, are the Turks wrong? are we right?” The comparison of  Jesus Christ with Mohammed in the second mention prepares us for the third: “Two-­thirds of the human race are neither Jews nor Mohammedans nor Christians, and how many million men have never heard of Moses, of  Jesus Christ, or of Mohammed?” In the sole passage in which the followers of the three revealed religions are mentioned by name and in a single breath, the Vicar levels what for Christians is the all-­decisive difference, not to be given up at any cost, between Christ and the prophets Moses and Mohammed. In the first section the Vicar expressed himself clearly concerning the God of Moses and the God of Mohammed, without mentioning the prophets.154 That their mention now aims at Christianity is underlined by the fact that only Christianity is spoken of in what follows. If man’s salvation depends on the right religion, and if the right religion demands faith that Jesus is the Christ, then God’s justice commands that no man may be excluded from salvation because he has never heard of Jesus Christ. The Vicar does not accept reference to the missionary efforts of Christianity as an answer. Even if the missionaries were to succeed in announcing the Gospel all over the earth, if they were to reach the remotest places and gain access to the most isolated districts, this could not satisfy the claim, as opens the third and last section of the second speech. There he speaks four times about Jesus, flanked by one mention of  Jesus-­Christ before and one after (626–­27). 154. See 124 (613–­14) and P. 293.

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universal as it is exclusive, of Christian revelation. “Surely on the eve of the day that the first missionary arrived in some country, someone died there who was not able to hear him.” The Vicar reserves the fourth mention of  Jesus-­Christ for the exposition of the problem of the historicity of the Christian doctrine: “If there had been only a single man in the whole universe to whom one had never preached about Jesus Christ, the objection would be as strong for the sake of that single man as for that of a quarter of the human race.”155 The objections the Christian doctrine must encounter, if it is announced to a man whom neither education nor tradition has prepared for faith in revelation, are the subject of the third and last dialogue the Vicar imagines in his speech. If in the first dialogue the Vicar himself appeared in order to question the authority of tradition, and if the second transferred the critique of faith in revelation as a whole to an advocate of reason, the third puts the response to Christianity in the mouth of a stranger, in whom we can see one of those “friends of the truth” who there are in every country. The stranger replies to a missionary who has tried to convert him by preaching the Gospel. The missionary comes to speak only to the extent that the stranger either takes up or reports the missionary’s utterances in order to oppose them, so that in fact the third dialogue is a speech by the stranger, the last speech within the Vicar’s speech.156 The stranger begins with what is most obvious to him about the Christian doctrine and what distinguishes it most overtly from the two other revealed religions: “You announce to me a God born and dead two thousand years ago at the other end of the world in some little town, and you tell me that whoever has not believed in this mystery will be damned. These are very strange things to believe so quickly on the sole authority of a man whom I do not know!”157 Just as the “Raisoneur” in his speech repeated the Vicar’s criticism in order in the end to clarify it in an essential respect, the stranger takes up what the Vicar presented, compressing and sharpening it. Why did the missionary’s God let the events that he wanted to make it man’s duty to be informed about happen at such a great distance from him? Is it a crime not to know what occurred in Jerusalem hundreds of years ago? What sort of a God is it who makes redemption or damnation depend upon belief in unbeliev155. 160–­64 and Note 14 (620–­22). 156. In the Discours sur l’inégalité Rousseau made the speech of a Hottentot who formally renounced the Christian religion after having been raised as a Christian the last discours dans le Discours and the subject of the frontispiece of the book. See Discours sur l’inégalité, Note XVI, pp. 376–­78 and commentary ad locum. 157. In his speech the stranger refers three times to the fact that God died or was murdered.

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able things? Why did the missionary arrive only when the stranger’s father, so good and so beneficent, always seeking nothing but the truth, was no longer alive? But above all: how can so many injustices be reconciled with the just God whom the missionary announces? The stranger declares that on the mere testimony of  his interlocutor he is unable to believe what the obedience of  faith demands he believe. He must see with his own eyes that country in which so many miracles happened that are unheard of in his country.158 He has to seek out the city in which the “deicide” took place and whose current inhabitants no more recognize as God the God in whom he should believe than the earlier inhabitants who, according to the missionary, were therefore driven out from there. He has to gather more detailed information about the book the missionary calls sacred, about its origin, its transmission, what the reasons are of those who reject it, although they are no less well-­informed about what the missionary teaches him than the missionary himself. In a word: he has to examine everything for himself—­“I would have to be mad to listen to you prior to that time.” After the dialogue between “L’Inspiré” and “Le Raisoneur,” the Vicar refrained from offering any commentary. He limited himself to the quod erat demonstrandum with which he had prefaced the demonstration. Now he does not impose this restraint on himself. The speech of the savage not only appears understandable to him. He calls it raisonable, which means that “every sensible man ought to speak thus in such a case.” The Vicar has shown once more that the attempt to convince a man of a doctrine déraisonable without the support of an authority is condemned to failure. He hastens to add “that there is no revelation against which the same objections would not have as much strength as against Christianity, or more.” It still remains for him to express the conclusion he never lost sight of in his treatment of revealed religions and which he shows the proselyte at the end in all its vividness. If there is only one true the one right religion, which every man is obligated to follow under penalty of damnation, then one must spend one’s life examining with the utmost meticulousness all of them, i.e., all that make this absolute claim and demand unconditional obedience. “No one is exempt from the first duty of man, no one has the right to rely on the judgment of others.” The one thing needful is to find out the truth about revealed religions.159 Which means that the duty 158. Originally the stranger spoke of “that marvelous country,” “where the virgins deliver and the Gods are born as men and where the Gods eat, suffer, and die” (ed. Masson 384). Rousseau replaced this challenging formulation with “ce pays lointain où s’opérerent tant de merveilles inoüies dans celui-­ci.” See Footnote 157. 159. Cf. Luke 10: 42.

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to live a religious life leads to the duty for Everyman to live a philosophic life. “The artisan who lives only by his work, the laborer who does not know how to read, the delicate and timid young girl, the sick who can hardly leave his bed, all without exception must study, meditate, engage in discussion, travel.” There is no longer a settled people, the world becomes a general site for pilgrimages, civil life comes to a standstill. “He who has enjoyed the most robust health, best employed his time, best used his reason, and lived the most years will hardly know what to think in his old age; and it will be a great deal if he learns before his death in what cult he ought to have lived.”160 All would have to live like philosophers in order to be able to afford to live out of the obedience of faith and thus not to live as philosophers. The rhetoric of the reductio ad absurdum with which the Vicar replies to the claim of revealed religions indicates an impasse from which there seems to be an exit only by abandoning that claim and instead letting divine tolerance hold sway. For if one wants to give up the rigorous duty of conducting one’s own examination, which corresponds to the seriousness of the absolute claim, and to loosen the Vicar’s “method,” one must rely on the assumption that God does not insist on any particular religion and does not demand any conventional cult. As soon as one “gives the least hold to the authority of men,” the Vicar emphasizes, one transfers “everything” to it. “If the son of a Christian does well in following his father’s religion without a profound and impartial examination, why would the son of a Turk do wrong in the same way following his father’s religion?” “All the intolerant of the world” are challenged to provide an answer to this question that is able to satisfy a “sensible man” such as the Vicar or the stranger who spoke for him. The renunciation of the examination of all religions presupposes God’s justice or indifference.161 The Vicar establishes the link when he mentions at the end two doctrines with which people try to defend the absolute claim of religion. In both cases it is a matter of justifying the claim that the redemption of man by his natural capacities and without belief in the historical events necessary for salvation is not possible. The first attempt concerns the doctrine of original sin, which wants to explain the exclusion of the greatest part of mankind from salvation by the Fall. In the dialogue with the representative of reason, the “inspired one” traced the corruption of reason to sin. The Vicar, who previously maintained silence about sin and the Fall, now expresses himself briefly but unmistakably, still avoiding as before the 160. 165–­67 (622–­24). 161. Cf. 115 (609) and Pp. 288–89.

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term “original sin.” Far from justifying the exclusivity of revealed religions, the doctrine of original sin itself contradicts God’s justice. Its proponents “prefer to make God unjust” and let him “punish the innocent for the sin of their father,” rather than abandon “their barbaric dogma,” the dogma of the religion that alone makes one blessed, the dogma of intolerance.162 The second attempt concerns the doctrine of the redeeming angel, according to which men who can exhibit a morally unobjectionable life but who have remained without knowledge of the events necessary for salvation supernaturally receive prior to their death access to redemption, from which they are naturally excluded.163 The Vicar rejects the second attempt at justification no less decisively than he did the first: “What a fine invention that angel is! Not content with subjecting us to their contrivances, they make it necessary for God himself to use them.” The two doctrines serve for him as the final evidence to show the proselyte, whom he calls “mon fils” for the first time, “to what absurdity pride and intolerance lead,” which are contained in the claim of revealed religions to unconditional obedience and exclusive salvation. In order to defend simultaneously the claimed exclusivity and God’s justice, the doctrines of original sin and the redeeming angel end up with a God who is either unjust or unreasonable. Against this God, the Vicar opposes the God of Natural Religion, “that God of peace whom I adore and whom I announce to you.”164 He closes “all the books,” i.e., especially all the sacred books of revealed religions, and returns 162. Rousseau had first written péché originel and then corrected it with péché de leur pére (ed. Masson 392). Cf. 124 (613) and P. 293. 163. Rousseau was able to learn about the doctrine of the redeeming angel, which derives from Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologica II, 2, quaestio 2, art. 7, 3 and Quaestiones disputatae, De veritate XIV, art. 11 in connection with Acts 10: 1–­7), from Abbé Morellet’s article “Foi” in the Encyclopédie, volume VII, 1757, which does not leave unmentioned the problem posed by divine intervention for the Christian doctrine of grace, i.e., for the doctrine of God’s sovereignty: “S. Thomas répond que si ces hommes observoient la loi naturelle, Dieu leur enverroit plûtôt un ange du ciel pour leur annoncer les vérités qu’il est nécessaire qu’ils croyent pour arriver au salut, ou qu’il useroit de quelque moyen extraordinaire pour les conduire à la foi, et qu’ainsi ils ne se sauveroient pas sans la foi; ou s’ils fermoient les yeux à la vérité après l’avoir entrevûe, leur infidélité cesseroit d’être purement négative. Mais cette réponse n’est pas encore satisfaisante; car on peut toûjours demander si Dieu est obligé, par sa justice et sa bonté, d’envoyer cet ange et d’accorder ce secours; s’il y est obligé, la gratuité de la grace de la foi est en grand danger; s’il n’y est pas obligé, on peut supposer qu’il n’employera pas ces moyens extraordinaires; et dans ce cas, il reste encore à demander si cet observateur fidele de la loi naturelle se sauvera sans la foi, auquel cas la foi n’est pas nécessaire; ou sera damné, ce qui est bien dur” (p. 23 a, my emphasis). 164. Cf. XIX (565) and P. 237.

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to the “only one open to all eyes,” the book of nature. From universal accessibility he derives the universal duty of man to read this book—­“no one can be excused for not reading it”—­in order to learn how “its divine author” should be served and worshiped. That the duties of man would have to be taken solely from the book of nature and that morality would have to be based on the belief in the God who discloses himself therein, the Vicar underscores by depicting for the listener what he would accomplish had he been born on a desert island and seen no other human being or ever learned “what took place in ancient times in some corner of the world”: If he were to exercise his reason, if he were to develop it and make good use of the immediate faculties God gave him, he would learn entirely on his own to know God, to love him, to love his works, to want the good that God wants, and, in order to please God, to fulfill all his duties on earth. It suffices to compare this brief description with the even briefer hint the Promeneur Solitaire will give to the reader of what he would have done and not done on a desert island, in order to see the characteristic difference between the Savoyard Vicar’s Natural Religion and Rousseau’s Natural Theology.165 After the harsh attacks contained in the second section of his speech about revelation, the Vicar seems to strike a milder tone in the concluding paragraph. He speaks of  “a respectful doubt,” of taking himself “not to be infallible,” and of course he claims no authority: “I reason for myself.” If he had been a better “raisoneur” or better instructed, he would “perhaps” have perceived the truth of revelation, “its utility for those who are fortunate enough to recognize it.” He sees the “proofs” that speak in its favor and the “objections” that speak against it. He goes so far as to declare himself as neutral, as it were, neither accepting nor rejecting the reasons for or the reasons against revelation. “I reject only the obligation to recognize revelation, because this presumed obligation is incompatible with God’s justice.” The Vicar rejects

165. See Rêveries III, 5 (1013) and First Book, Chapter II, P. 49. Needless to say, Rousseau does not imagine being born on an “Isle déserte” and growing up without any contact with other men. Rousseau was aware that under such conditions he could not have used or developed his reason, as the Vicar presupposes. He had not only presented a pertinent argument in the Discours sur l’inégalité, but also given a reminder in Émile, a few pages prior to the beginning of the “transcription,” with explicit reference to the Discours, that “those who, from childhood on would be isolated from all society would lead an absolutely savage life” and therefore “would be robbed of insight, which one acquires only in relations with others.” For a man born on a desert island and who has grown up alone, therefore, in contrast to what the Vicar suggests, the faith of Natural Religion would be unachievable. “Car il est d’une impossibilité démontrée qu’un pareil sauvage pût jamais elever ses reflexions jusqu’à la connoissance du vrai Dieu.” Émile IV, p. 556.

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only the claim constitutive for revealed religions: of being the true, the right, the one religion, which obligates to obedience.166 With the critique of faith in revelation and of revealed religions, the Vicar has fulfilled the student’s desire for enlightenment and has informed him of the other “half ” of what the listener “must know.” But he has still not presented the entire profession of faith he promised him. To show himself to the proselyte as he sees himself, the Vicar has to explain how he reconciles his office with his credo and how the two, his faith and his life as a priest, promote the happiness he ascribes to himself. It remains for the teacher of Natural Religion to show how he determines more specifically the relation to the historical religion that surrounds him, in which he grew up, and in which the listener has been raised. Therefore, the final section is, in the narrower sense, the most political part of his speech. The section has a highly political beginning. After the Vicar has closed all the books in order to attend solely to the book of nature, he opens the part on religious practice with the eulogy for one of the books he just closed. He uses the longest paragraph of the text to speak “about the beauty of the Gospel,”167 and thus to make his relation to Christianity appear in a more favorable light.168 How else should he avoid the accusation of sheer hypocrisy if he were unable to get something praiseworthy out of the particular religion in whose guise he appears in public? The “sanctity of the Gospel” speaks to his heart. The books of the philosophers “with all their pomp” can only look “petty” next to the book, or next to the four books, that transmit the Gospel, so “sublime” and so “simple.”169 In a short series of questions, which in each case seem to suggest either a positive or a negative answer in accordance with 166. 168–­71 (624–­25). Compare the conclusion of paragraph 171 with the conclusion of paragraph 105 (605–­6). 167. Only at a late stage did Rousseau insert into the manuscript the paragraph that now opens section II C as paragraph 172, first noting for himself in the margin: “N. B. parler de la beauté de l’évangile” (ed. Masson 398). 168. In his pastoral letter, the archbishop of  Paris says about the eulogy: “Il seroit difficile, M. T. C. F., de rendre un plus bel hommage à l’authenticité de l’Evangile” (Mandement de Monsieur l’Archevêque de Paris, in Documents officiels et contemporaines, ed. Viridet, p. 56; cf. Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, p. 993). Yet this homage was not sufficient to protect the book from being banned or the author from being persecuted. 169. The Vicar’s praise holds for the four gospels, which contain “the Gospel.” It does not extend to Paul’s thirteen Letters. Nowhere does the Vicar refer by name to the founder of  Christianity, which does not mean that he does not speak of  him. Thus, the last sentence of the eulogy for the Gospel is: “Jamais des auteurs Juifs n’eussent trouvé ni ce ton ni cette morale” (627). Consider 71 (589) and P. 262 with Footnote 68.

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Christianity, but permit the opposite answer just as well,170 the Vicar makes a transition from books to the one whose story they tell, to extoll the clemency and purity of his morals, the touching grace of his instruction, the elevated meaning of his maxims, the profound wisdom of his speeches, the presence of spirit, the finesse and exactness of his responses, the dominion over his passions. The praise of the life and of the teaching of the “hero” of the Gospel prepares the comparison of  Jesus with Socrates, which is where the Vicar is heading, joining a long Christian tradition. The appeal to the book of a philosopher, which enjoyed its reputation with the Church Fathers for the same reason the Vicar seems to draw upon it, establishes the connection. The perfectly just man, whom Glaucon depicts in his conversation with Socrates in Plato’s Politeia in order to distinguish him from the perfectly unjust man who perfects his injustice with the semblance of justice, the just man, therefore, who is burdened “with all the opprobrium of crime” while being “worthy of all the prizes of virtue,” prefigures Jesus “feature for feature.”171 From the outset the Vicar leaves no doubt about whom the comparison of the just man with Socrates has to favor: “What prejudices, what blindness must one have to dare to compare the son of Sophroniscus to the son of  Mary?” But the conspicuous asymmetry in the contrast between the son of Mary and the son of Sophroniscus, instead of the son of Phainarete, also makes clear that Socrates, who in the center of the Profession de foi was praised for his virtue, in his second appearance is not contrasted to the son of God.172 The substantive point of compari170. “Se peut-­il qu’un livre à la fois si sublime et si simple soit l’ouvrage des hommes? Se peut-­il que celui dont il fait l’histoire ne soit qu’un homme lui-­même? Est-­ce là le ton d’un enthousiaste ou d’un ambitieux sectaire?” The fourth question, which seems to highlight the uniqueness of Jesus, could make the reader think of Socrates and others of his stamp, even if Socrates were not explicitly treated in the immediate sequel: “Où est l’homme, où est le sage qui sait agir, souffrir et mourir sans foiblesse et sans ostentation?” 172 (625–­26). 171. See Plato, Politeia II, 360e–­361b. Shortly before, Glaucon relates the story of the Ring of  Gyges ( 359d–­360b), to which Rousseau will refer in the Sixième promenade. See Rêveries VI, 18–­20 (1057–­58) and First Book, Chapter II, P. 70 as well as Chapter V, Pp. 144–­46, 166–­67. 172. Pater semper incertus. Besides, owing to Socratic maieutics, for which Socrates explicitly appealed to his mother’s activity as a midwife, Phainarete is tied much more than is Sophroniscus to the name of Socrates. When, nevertheless, the Vicar begins with the “son of Sophroniscus,” he awakens the expectation that he will not continue with the “son of Mary.” Rousseau at first omitted the name Sophronisque in the manuscript, thus left a gap in the comparison with fils de Marie. Apparently, he had to look up the name of  Socrates’s father. (Ed. Mas­ son 400 and 405. Masson’s commentary turns the matter, the intention pursued with the asymmetry of the contrast as well as the evidence of the textual history, upside down: “Notons, qu’ayant désigné Socrate par le nom de son père. Rousseau ne lui a pourtant pas opposé ‘le

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son between Socrates and  Jesus in the eulogy for the Gospel is the question of which of the two can be considered as the greater, more influential, and more promising teacher of morality. This question apparently stands in the closest connection with their deaths. “Socrates, dying without pain, without ignominy, easily sticks to his character to the end; and if this easy death had not honored his life, one would doubt whether Socrates, for all his spirit, were anything but a sophist.” It must be difficult for nonphilosophers to distinguish a philosopher from a sophist, and even more to recognize the philosophic life for what it is. In their eyes, the death that Socrates died authenticates that he led an honorable life. The injustice of his death guarantees the justice of his life. What is compressed into one manifest event and can be carried on in memorable images is suited to reach Everyman and to determine common judgment. Does Socrates’s efficacy as teacher of morality remain limited because the violent death he suffered, in contrast to the violent death of Jesus, was a death without agony, without ignominy, and without the despair of being forsaken? Before he continues the contrast between their deaths, with which the comparison began and which ultimately decides it, the Vicar makes an observation about the historical originality of Socrates and Jesus, whose rhetorical character is written all over its face. First Socrates: “He invented, one says, morality.” An assertion the Vicar dispatches with ease. Who would not be convinced that there was morality before Socrates? Socrates did nothing but state what others had done. He did nothing but formulate their examples in teachings. “Aristides was just before Socrates said what justice is, Leonides died for his country before Socrates had made it a duty to love the fatherland, Sparta was sober before Socrates praised sobriety.” Otherwise with Jesus. While Socrates had before his eyes the virtuous men of Greece when he defined virtue, Jesus had to rely entirely on himself. He was himself the sole example of the “elevated and pure morality” he taught, and he taught it in an open break with the morality of his surroundings. To put the historical achievement of  Jesus in the right light, the Vicar makes “the highest wisdom” gain a hearing amidst the “most furious fanaticism,” and he elevates Jesus’s teaching of the “simplicity of the most heroic virtues” by lowering the people at whom the teaching was directed fils de Joseph.’ Il y a là un souci visible de ménager la conscience chrétienne.”) Socrates and Jesus are each mentioned ten times by the Vicar: Socrates once in the central paragraph of the Profession de foi 91 (599) and nine times in paragraph 172 (626–­27), Jesus once in each of the four central paragraphs of the second part of the second speech 161–­64 (621–­22) and six times in paragraph 172 (626–­27). Rousseau adds to paragraph 172 Notes 15 and 16, in which he refers to Plato’s Politeia and to the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew.

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to the “vilest of all peoples.” Jesus has the novel and the extraordinary on his side. Yet we learn nothing more specific about his new morality. By contrast, the Vicar conveys about Socrates that he was concerned with the political virtues of justice, love of the fatherland, and moderation. His innovation consisted in inquiring into the given virtues, determining what virtue is, and teaching the virtues he had investigated. He did what a good philosopher does, and said what a good citizen should do. According to the picture the Vicar portrays of him, Socrates was no less than Jesus a teacher of morality. But he was not at one with morality. He was not its embodiment. This is also expressed in its own way in the characterization of the deaths of Socrates and Jesus, in which the juxtaposition reaches its peak and ends: “The death of Socrates, philosophizing tranquilly with his friends, is the sweetest one could desire; that of Jesus, expiring in torments, insulted, jeered at, cursed by a whole people, is the most horrible one could fear; Socrates, taking the poisoned cup, blesses the man who gives it to him and who is crying; Jesus, in the midst of a frightful torture, prays for his relentless executioners.” Socrates dies the death of a philosopher. Jesus dies the agonizing and ignominious death of the perfectly just man. The martyrdom of his public and pious dying predestines him to the highest degree to be witness to the truth.173 The Vicar highlights the horror of the death of  Jesus. He does not waste a syllable on the significance it had for the history of salvation. The last word of the comparison reads: “Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a wise man, then the life and death of  Jesus are those of a God.” If we do not want to take this word, which would have surprised and appeared strange to the savage imagined previously,174 as a mere bow in the eulogy for the Gospel, then we have to understand it as confirmation of the option the Vicar chose when, in the teaching of Natural Religion, he was faced with the choice between the wisdom and the justice of God. In a similar sense, in a speech Rousseau directed to the citizen about the well-­ordered political community, he had contrasted Cato as the embodiment of the perfect citizen to Socrates, and had given preference to the former as “a god among mortals” over the wise man.175 The Vicar concludes his eulogy 173. See First Book, Chapter I, Pp. 26 and 41–­42. 174. See 165–­66 (622–­23) and Pp. 302–­3 with Footnotes 157 and 158. Voltaire noted in the margin in regard to this passage, “quesce que la mort d’un dieu!” and in another copy of the text in exactly the same place: “quelle extravagante absurdité / as tu vu mourir des dieux pauvre fou!” George R. Havens, Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau (Columbus, OH, 1933), p. 118. 175. “La vertu de Socrate est celle du plus sage des hommes: mais entre César et Pompée, Caton semble un dieu parmi des mortels. L’un instruit quelques particuliers, combat les sophistes, et meurt pour la vérité: l’autre défend l’état, la liberté, les lois contre les conquérans du

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with the assurance that the story transmitted by the Gospel cannot rest on an invention: “its inventor would be more amazing than its hero.” Yet a sentence immediately follows this praise that deprives the Gospel of all authority. “With all that, this same Gospel is full of unbelievable things, of things repugnant to reason and impossible for any sensible man to conceive or to accept!” With this, the Vicar repeats the judgment the savage reached in his speech to the Christian missionary. In view of  “all these contradictions” in the Gospel as well as in his attitude toward the Gospel to which he emphatically refers the listener, the priest counsels the proselyte to be “always modest and circumspect,” and to “humble himself before the great Being that alone knows the truth.”176 With respect to the particular religion he publicly represents, the Vicar maintains an “involuntary skepticism.” He could not convince himself of its truth, since he is unable to convince himself of a thing repugnant to reason, at least not if his will to quit the state of doubt can find support in a faith that appears to him compatible with reason. Yet “skepticism” toward the truth of religion does not trouble him, “since it does not extend to the points essential for practice,” and since he is “very decided” concerning “the principles” of his duties. Following from the outset the unconditional primacy of practical reason, the Vicar sought, as he reminds the listener once more, only to know what he took to be important to know for his conduct of life.177 Therefore, the dogmas having influence neither on action nor on morality cause him no trouble at all. His concern for morality is satisfied by Natural Religion. It supplies the basis for his faith and at the same time his serenity toward the theses and demands of particular religions. That holds not only for the religion in which he grew up and the dispute about the truth of those dogmas “about which so many people torment themselves,” although they have no significance for action and morality. It holds no less for the dispute among particular religions altogether, which is sparked precisely by such dogmas.178 Natural Religion puts the Vicar in the monde, et quitte enfin la terre quand il n’y voit plus de patrie à servir. Un digne éleve de Socrate seroit le plus vertueux de ses contemporains; un digne émule de Caton en seroit le plus grand. La vertu du premier feroit son bonheur, le second chercheroit son bonheur dans celui de tous. Nous serions instruits par l’un et conduits par l’autre, et cela seul décideroit de la préférence: car on n’a jamais fait un peuple de sages, mais il n’est pas impossible de rendre un peuple heureux.” Discours sur l’économie politique, OCP III, p. 255. 176. 172 and Notes 15 and 16 (625–­27). 177. Cf. 7–­10 (567–­68) as well as 17–­18 (570) and Pp. 239–­41, 243–­44. 178. In his Apology of the Profession de foi and of the Religion civile from the point of view of the “wise Législateur,” Rousseau will specifically reject the dogmas of the Christian religion that contribute nothing “to the earthly good”: (1) “the mystery of the trinity,” (2) the justification

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position to affirm conventional religions for the sake of the good, comparable to the insight that enables a philosopher to affirm the political laws despite their irrationality, which is necessarily proper to them. As soon as the claim to truth each makes for itself can be dismissed, and each one is considered sub specie utilitatis, all particular religions are good, i.e., good for their adherents, even if they can be more or less good, depending on circumstances. “I regard all the particular religions as so many salutary institutions that prescribe in each country a uniform manner of honoring God by a public cult, and these religions can all have their reasons in the climate, in the government, in the genius of the people, or in some other local cause that makes one preferable to another according to the time and place.” The good toward which Natural Religion is oriented allows the particular religions to be classified easily within the framework delineated by Natural Religion. They are all good insofar as the public cult is delegated to them: “The essential cult is that of the heart.” For the God of Natural Religion, the external form in which he is honored makes no difference. The Vicar attributes to God solely an interest in inner sincerity.179 The essential character of the inner cult, of what is private, frees the nonessential external cult, what is public, for convention, for the law, for an arrangement regulated by the standard of prudence. It hands over the culte public to politics. With reason the Vicar assigns to the government or to the system of government the central position among the determining factors. The political distinction between inner and outer, sincerity and conformity, faith and lip service, makes Natural Religion compatible with particular religions. What the compatibility looks like more specifically the Vicar shows by his own example. The Vicar fulfills with the greatest possible exactness all the tasks prescribed to him in service of the Church. Were he voluntarily to fail on any point whatsoever, his conscience would blame him for it. He reminds the proselyte that after the Church’s long interdict, “through the influence of M. de Mellarède”—­we may assume that this is the minister whose esteem the Vicar earned by educating his son180—­he obtained permission to resume activity as Vicar. He maintains that now, after he has gone through the crisis of incredulity and converted to the faith of Natural Religion, he reads Mass with “more revsola fide, which is equivalent to the rejection of the “merit of good works,” and (3) “the dogma of original sin.” Lettres écrites de la montagne, I, 69, p. 705. 179. Consider Pp. 275 and 278–­79. 180. See IV (560) and P. 230. The reference to the minister of state of the king of Sardinia, de Mellarède, who lived in Turin, underlines the anchorage of the Profession de foi in space and time and gives to the writing of the unnamed one the appearance of a historical report.

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erence” than he did before. The traditional ceremony no longer misleads him into the mindlessness of a kind of routine. It is for him a form he knows how to fill with content and to connect with feelings and experiences, for which Natural Religion offers no comparable form. When he practices the Church rites, he is suffused with the “majesty of the supreme Being,” with its “presence,” and with the “insufficiency of the human mind” adequately to conceive it. And since he celebrates these rites with the awareness that he “brings the prayers of the people in a prescribed form” to the divinity, he pays scrupulous attention to avoid deviating from the rite with either the slightest word or the least action. Before the consecration he collects himself in order to perform it with the disposition demanded by the Church and the sacrament. He adds that he “tries” to annihilate his reason before the supreme intelligence. Whether he succeeds, he does not say.181 So much for the explanation of his inner attitude toward the observance of the practices, rites, and prescriptions of the Church, of which the proselyte could make neither head nor tail.182 After the two speeches the student has heard, it will not be difficult for him to believe the Vicar when he assures him that, whatever there is to the “inconceivable mystery” of transubstantiation,183 he has no fear of being punished “on Judgment Day” for having profaned it in his heart. Regarding his priestly duties as pastor, the Vicar explains that he will always preach virtue to men, always admonish them to do good, and set a good example for them as far as he can. In other words: the historical religion he publicly professes offers him with the spiritual office the concrete possibility of living the faith of Natural Religion, of acting according to its principles, and of developing a moral efficacy in conformity with its meaning. For clarification, the Vicar pictures what he would do if one day a parish were to be handed over to him, a position to which he still aspires, for there is for him “nothing so beautiful as being a parish priest,” but which he no longer hopes to obtain. The description of  his life’s dream—­ being the priest of his own parish in the mountains—­concludes the profession he presents to the proselyte. It is the description of an imaginary happiness. The happiness of making others happy: “I would be happy, for it seems to me that I would be the cause of my parishioners’ happiness.” His happiness of having “never to do evil,” but rather of putting himself entirely in the service of goodness, the supreme attribute of the God of his Natural Religion: “A good parish priest is a minister of  goodness,  just as a good magistrate is a minister of  181. Cf. 78 (592) and 82 (594) as well as Pp. 266–­68. 182. See XIV (563) and P. 234. 183. Consider 127 (614) and P. 295 with Footnote 139.

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justice.” As priest he would alleviate the hardship of  his parishioners, console them and uplift them by his example. He would bring them to love concord and equality, in order to counteract their misery. He would share their poverty with them in order to remove the stigma and contempt from them that make it more unbearable than the need itself. He would make vivid for them that, although poor, he lives with contentment, and thus teach them to be reconciled to their lot and to be content to live as he does. In his instructions, he would “attend less to the spirit of the Church than to the spirit of the Gospel, in which the dogma is simple and the morality sublime and in which one sees few religious practices and many works of charity.” And he would always make an effort to be the first to practice what he would tell them one must do, “so that they would clearly see” that he believes everything he tells them. Considering all that the Vicar does not believe and consequently may not say or, however, what he would have to say as priest of the Church without being able to believe it, this resolve underlines just how much the Vicar reduces revealed religion to its practical content. The spirit of the Gospel is compatible with Natural Religion to the extent that it urges charity and exhausts itself in a moral teaching.184 For Natural Religion the limit of its compatibility with particular religions is reached at the point where what is at stake is of greatest importance for revealed religions, according to their own understanding: their claim to truth, their demand for obedience, their exclusivity. In the first two sections of his speech about revealed religions, the Vicar drew the line sharply. In the third section, he determines it politically. He formulates the political explosiveness of revelation’s demand for obedience with the concept of intolerance, and he opposes to this “intolerance” the same appeal to God’s justice with which he opposed the exclusive claim to truth of revealed religions in the two earlier sections. The Vicar will conscientiously fulfill “the sublime duties” of  his spiritual office. With the one exception that he will not incite men to “intolerance”: “God forbid that I ever preach to them the cruel dogma of intolerance, that I ever bring them to detest their neighbor, to say to other men, ‘You will be damned.’ ” The Vicar refuses allegiance to the Church that proclaims there is no salvation outside of it. If he were invested with a higher rank than the one he occupies, i.e., supposedly even if his dream of having his own parish were to be fulfilled, his “reservation” could cause him “troubles.” But as Vicar, at the lowest rank of the spiritual hierarchy, he is “too unimportant to have much to fear.” In any case, he will never “blaspheme against divine justice.” As little as the Vicar’s objection, which Rousseau adopts as his own cause in the Contrat 184. 173–­75 (627–­29).

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social, concerns damnation in general, but rather aims at the principle of faith Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, just as little does his and Rousseau’s criticism of “intolerance” have in view only historical excesses of fanaticism or political aberrations of Church authorities—­Rousseau speaks in the later writings in his defense, for instance, of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew or of the burning of Michel Servet in Calvin’s Geneva.185 Rather, “intolerance” serves in both cases as code for the more deeply rooted doctrine that men, owing to their wrong or lacking faith, must be considered as damned and, as Rousseau states more precisely, as “enemies of God,” an enmity that surpasses all other enmities and that, if believed in, must penetrate all other enmities. Rousseau illuminates the fundamental connection, which constitutes an important piece of political theology, in a Note he adds to the turn against “intolerance”: “The distinction between civil tolerance and theological tolerance is puerile and vain. These two tolerances are inseparable, and one cannot accept the one without the other. Even angels could not live in peace with men they regarded as enemies of God.” The identification of the believer with God’s distinction between friend and enemy, or with what he attributes theologically to God as enmity, is politically of the greatest consequence. Therefore, in his critique of “intolerance” Rousseau digs all the way down to faith, which is supposed to decide about salvation and damnation and which is the basis for the distinction between friends and enemies of God.186 And again it is Rousseau who furnishes the Vicar’s serene evaluation that all particular religions are good with the explicit, politically necessary qualification to which the Vicar himself actually adheres when he refuses to preach the dogma of “intolerance”: “The duty to 185. Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, p. 161; Lettres écrites de la montagne II, 53n., p. 726; cf. III, 50n. and 89, pp. 742, 752. 186. In Du contrat social IV, 8, 34 Rousseau presents the same argument he employs in Note 17 of the Profession de foi, without, however, mentioning les ennemis de Dieu and the angels: “Ceux qui distinguent l’intolérance civile et l’intolérance théologique se trompent, à mon avis. Ces deux intolérances sont inséparables. Il est impossible de vivre en paix avec des gens qu’on croit dannés; les aimer seroit haïr Dieu qui les punit; il faut absolument qu’on les ramene ou qu’on les tourmente. Partout où l’intolérance théologique est admise, il est impossible qu’elle n’ait pas quelque effet civil; et sitot qu’elle en a, le Souverain n’est plus Souverain, même au temporel: dès lors les Prêtres sont les vrais maitres; les Rois ne sont que leurs officiers” (p. 469). In the Geneva manuscript of the Contrat social Rousseau formulated it even more sharply: “Ceux qui distinguent l’intolérance civile et l’intolérance Ecclésiastique se trompent. L’une mène nécessairement à l’autre, ces deux intolérances sont inséparables. Il est impossible de vivre en paix avec des gens qu’on croit damnés. Les aimer ce seroit haïr Dieu qui les punit, il faut nécessairement qu’on les convertisse ou qu’on les persécute.” OCP III, p. 341.

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follow and to love the religion of one’s country does not extend to dogmas contrary to good morality, such as that of intolerance.” Rousseau has the critique of “intolerance,” which is an integral part of his critique of political theology, culminate politically in the tenth and only “negative” dogma of the Religion civile, which places a ban on “intolerance.”187 The Vicar concludes his profession of faith with an explication of the practical consequences he draws from his critique of “intolerance”: As priest he would not only include the Protestants in his neighborhood in Christian charity, but also motivate the members of his congregation and the Protestants equally “to love one another, to regard one another as brothers, to respect all religions and to live in peace, each his own.” The Vicar is so convinced that the particular religions are equally valid according to the God of Natural Religion that he opposes all missionary efforts. But he does not limit himself to rejecting attempts at conversion as superfluous or meaningless. He condemns them as evil. “I think that to urge someone to leave the religion in which he was born is to urge him to do evil, and consequently, is to do evil oneself.”188 If for the God of Natural Religion all particular religions deserve just as much respect, the missionary efforts of individual religions are apparently encompassed within divine indifference. The Vicar’s moral judgment would, accordingly, be determined politically, not theologically. In order to get from the theological tolerance of  Natural Religion 187. Du contrat social IV, 8, 33 pp. 468–­69. In paragraph 35 Rousseau refers by name to the doctrine that is the immediate target of the ban: “Maintenant qu’il n’y a plus et qu’il ne peut plus y avoir de Religion nationale exclusive, on doit tolérer toutes celles qui tolerent les autres, autant que leurs dogmes n’ont rien de contraire aux devoirs du Citoyen. Mais quiconque ose dire, hors de l’Eglise point de Salut, doit être chassé de l’Etat; à moins que l’Etat ne soit l’Eglise, et que le Prince ne soit le Pontife. Un tel dogme n’est bon que dans un Gouvernement Théocratique, dans tout autre il est pernicieux” (p. 469). 188. The theologians of the Sorbonne commented on this sentence of the Vicar’s with a sharp rebuke, which goes on for five pages: “Cette proposition est avancée en haine de la Religion Chrétienne, qui n’a pû être reçue des Payens sans qu’ils quittassent l’idolatrie où ils étoient nés, et qui étoit la Religion de leur peres. Elle est blasphématoire contre Jesus-­Christ, qui a envoyé ses Apôtres annoncer l’Evangile à toutes les Nations, pour les retirer de l’idolatrie, qui étoit la Religion qu’elles suivoient . . . Elle est injurieuse aux Apôtres, qui obéissant aux ordres de Jesus-­Christ, s’éleverent fortement contre le culte des idoles . . . Elle est injurieuse à tous les prédicateurs de l’Evangile . . . Elle est insensée et impudente, dans le reproche qu’elle fait aux premiers fidéles d’avoir mal fait en renonçant á l’idolatrie . . .” In conclusion, their judgment of the author was: “Il favorise toutes les erreurs sur la Religion, il en rend toute correction impossible, et sous le prétexte d’engager chacun à suivre la Religion où il est né, il introduit dans la Religion le scepticisme le plus pernicieux.” Censure de la Faculté de Théologie de Paris, pp. 305, 306, 307, 310.

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to the prohibition against intolerance and against missionary work, the Vicar must have recourse to the orientation toward the good of the citizens, and if he wants to assure himself of the support of Natural Religion, he has to assume that the God of  Natural Religion adopts this orientation, that order and peace among men matter to him. On the condition that God shares the concern for justice, considerations of political prudence can now take the lead, and the Vicar is able to reject theological demands or Church doctrines with respect to public order and obedience to the laws of the political community: “While waiting for greater enlightenment, let us protect public order; in every country let us respect the laws, let us not disturb the cult they prescribe, let us not lead the citizens to disobedience; for we do not know with certainty whether it is a good thing for them to abandon their opinions in exchange for others, and we know with great certainty that it is an evil thing to disobey the laws.” Thus, Natural Religion shows not only that it is compatible with the legitimate rule of the political sovereign, but also that it knows how to strengthen forcefully the primacy of politics against particular religions.189 With the political critique of revealed religions, the profession of faith of the Vicar has reached its end. But the Vicar has still not said everything. There has been as yet no exhortation of the proselyte. And before that the Vicar has more to tell about himself, which will shed some additional light for us on his credo. The first thing the Vicar has follow the profession of faith is a political justification of his speech. It takes up the justification that he put immediately before the part of the profession of faith that was the most alarming in regard to its possible consequences.190 The Vicar surrounds the treatment of faith in revelation with marks of moderation. He assures his “young friend” that he presented his profession of faith to him just as God reads it in his heart, i.e., that he spoke without dissimulation and without reserve. At the same time, he explains that the proselyte was the first and will remain “perhaps the only one” who gets to hear it from him, i.e., that his credo is not meant for the public or that he has no intention of addressing the public with it. The Vicar is not animated by the furor of enlightenment and is far from wanting to endanger an upright faith. “So long as there remains some sound belief among men, one must not disturb peaceful souls or alarm the faith of simple people with difficulties they cannot resolve and which upset them without enlightening them.” Matters are different when in the case of an individual or at a particular 189. 174–­75 and Note 17 (628–­29). Compare the last sentence in the Vicar’s profession ( paragraph 175) with the ninth dogma of the Religion civile (Du contrat social IV, 8, 33, p. 468). 190. See 107 (606–­7) and P. 284 with Footnote 120.

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time “everything is shaken.” In such a case “one must preserve the trunk at the cost of the branches.” “If consciences are agitated, uncertain, almost extinguished and in the state” in which the Vicar saw the conscience of his listener, then it is necessary to take down entirely the shaky pillars on which they are meant to depend and have support, in order to reestablish these consciences “on the foundation of eternal truths.” The images the Vicar uses for the explanation of his attempt to save the listener for belief in God and morality speak for themselves. On the other hand, it might not be superfluous to point out that the Vicar in his self-­interpretation appeals to the vérités éternelles, in whose name the “Raisoneur” opposed the inspired one, the prophet, the missionary, and that he thus, with appropriate distance, unambiguously takes sides in the central dialogue of the Profession de foi.191 The self-­interpretation raises the question why the Vicar is content to present his profession of faith to one man. For as the Vicar makes sufficiently clear, the nameless one is not the only one whose “trunk” would have to be saved “at the cost of the branches.” If the Vicar communicates the profession of faith to his “young friend,” because he believes he discerns in him a kindred nature, does his love—­in contrast to the charity the priest practices toward Everyman—­not suffice to put his Profession de foi down in writing for kindred natures with whom he is not personally acquainted? Does he limit himself in everything to the foreseeable efficacy of his immediate company and to what can be achieved with ease because he is lacking in amour-­propre? Does he not have the courage to expose himself to the public, or the confidence to open his profession of faith up to criticism? Or does he harbor the hope that the student will at some point write down his speeches and accomplish what he saw himself not capable of achieving or was not able to persuade himself to do? The Vicar entrusts his profession of faith to the “young man.” It is now for him to judge. The views that make sense to him he should make his own, the rest he should reject. That the student has taken his time makes the Vicar think “well” of him. He calls his caution “wise.” But he is not prepared to discuss the profession of faith with him. The discussion could turn into a dispute, in which he does not want to get involved. In a dispute, he opines, vanity and obstinacy would necessarily be involved. He even issues a formal admonition: “My friend, never dispute, for one enlightens neither oneself nor others by dispute.” The Vicar will not support his speeches with reasons. He does not want to get entangled in a quarrel and enter into a confrontation that could raise the question whether he leads the right life. He wants to cleave to his faith, to which he has tied his happiness, and have noth191. See 128 and 153 (614 and 617) as well as Pp. 294–­96.

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ing endanger it. “I shall stay as I am, lest the taste for contemplation gradually become an idle passion and make me lukewarm about the exercise of my duties, and lest I fall back into my former Pyrrhonism, without recovering the strength to get out of it.”192 It is not clear what the Vicar fears more, being tempted by the charm he cannot deny contemplation possesses, or falling back into the state of doubt, which he found unbearable.193 But it is clear that in the name of duty he rejects the one as well as the other, the “idle passion” of contemplation and the indecisive “Pyrrhonism” that cripples practice. He wants to win recognition for morality. He wants to protect the active life. The profession of faith of the Savoyard Vicar stands in service to a life that presents a stark contrast to the philosophic life. They relate to one another as figure and ground in a gestalt illusion.194 The exhortation of the proselyte comes with the proviso that the Vicar’s speech was able to convince the listener to the full extent. If the proselyte thinks as the Vicar does, if he makes the Vicar’s views his own and if both have “the same profession of faith,” i.e., if now, in contrast to the beginning of the speech, they have not only reason but beyond this faith in common, then the Vicar knows what is essential to what the younger alter ego needs in his life. The advice he offers the proselyte translates the credo of Natural Religion in­ to four practical teachings. (1) The proselyte should “no longer expose” his life “to the temptations of misery and despair,” he should not spend it in depen­ dence on strangers and live by alms, but instead he should return to his fatherland, resume the religion of the fathers, observe it in the sincerity of his heart, and never leave it again. The political message is: Natural Religion promotes a life of self-­esteem in the ancestral ties and institutions of the political community and of the particular religion belonging to it, although it sheds light on its contingent origin and conventional foundation. For the Genevan fugitive, the Catholic priest’s recommendation means that he must annul his conversion to 192. The contrast to the position of the Promeneur Solitaire is all the more striking, since the two previous sentences display a conspicuous proximity to the formulations in the Troisième promenade: “Pour moi ce n’est qu’après bien des années de méditation que j’ai pris mon parti; je m’y tiens, ma conscience est tranquille, mon cœur est content. Si je voulois recommencer un nouvel examen de mes sentimens, je n’y porterois pas un plus pur amour de la vérité et mon esprit déja moins actif seroit moins en état de la connoitre.” Consider First Book, Chapter II, Pp. 49–­51 and Chapter V, Pp. 141–­42 and 166–­67. 193. Cf. Pp. 240–­41 and 277–­79. 194. 176–­77 (629–­31). Cf. for the rhetoric of the conclusion of paragraph 177, which makes use of a play on Matthew 3: 9 and Luke 3: 8, respectively, the conclusion of paragraph 171 and the conclusion of paragraph 105.

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Catholicism and profess Protestantism anew, so that the religion of the fathers becomes for him the religion of his choice. The Vicar makes this choice easier by singling out the religion of Geneva above the other religions by a remark­ able praise: “It is very simple and very sacred; I believe that of all the religions on earth it is the one whose morality is purest and with which reason is most satisfied.”195 For the proselyte it thus has the advantage not only that it is his own religion, but also that he can look upon it as in a certain respect the best and the least repugnant to reason among the conventional religions. Yet the point of  view the Vicar highlights for the proselyte is obviously of  very limited consequence. The Vicar does not let himself be determined by it. He is quick to introduce an argument that has his doctrine of the indifference of all particular religions as its presupposition, without explicitly repeating the doctrine. In light of the “uncertainty” in which we dwell, it is “an inexcusable presumption to profess a religion other than that in which we were born.” The contingency or irrationality of historical religions is the basis for a pragmatism of nonaction: Hold onto one’s own and make no choice among the competing claims to validity. “If one goes astray, one deprives oneself of a great excuse at the tribunal of the sovereign judge. Will he not pardon the error on which one was weaned sooner than the error one dared to choose oneself ?” Whatever the listener, who has understood the conception of Natural Religion, might think of the argument for such an “excuse” to avoid punishment,196 he can at least take from it the confirmation that Natural Religion is the only religion whose choice promises him a merit. For Émile, who has no fatherland to which he could return and who was born into no religion he could hold onto, the Vicar’s late maxim would assert that he should choose no particular religion and thus follow none in the sincerity of his heart.197 (2) The Vicar exhorts the “son” to keep his soul in a state in which it “always wishes that there be a God.” Then he will “never doubt it.” That a God is, is the presupposition for the belief in the moral world order, the core of Natural Religion.198 If the soul is oriented towards this 195. Rousseau inserted the praise for the religion of Geneva only in the final version of the manuscript (ed. Masson 438). This praise did not stop the Genevan authorities from banning the book and issuing an arrest warrant for the author. To defend the Profession de foi Rousseau will later appeal to the “cult of my fathers”: Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, p. 961. Cf. Footnotes 167, 168. 196. Cf. 114–­15 (609–­10), 173 (627–­28), and Pp. 313–­14. 197. On this point, see the “choice” Rousseau speaks about shortly before the beginning of the “transcription” and immediately after its end: Émile IV, pp. 558 and 636; cf. P. 228. 198. Cf. 170 (624–­25), along with 179, the only paragraph in which the Vicar uses the address mon fils.

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belief and is fulfilled by the wish for the God of Natural Religion, it silences doubt. Regardless of whether he returns to his fatherland or not, and no matter which particular religion he observes or whether he follows none of them, the proselyte should not forget that “the true duties of religion are independent of the institutions of men,” that “a  just heart is the true temple of the divinity,” and that “to love God above everything and one’s neighbor as oneself is in every country and in every sect the sum of the law.” He should remember that there are no “truly essential” duties other than those of morality, and that the “inner cult” that keeps the soul in the state of faith is the first of these duties, since “without faith no true virtue exists.” That a God is becomes a postulate of practical reason, the wish a commandment of the moral law. (3) The exhortation to faith is joined by the warning against philosophers. It holds for the true as well as the contemporary “philosophers,” to whom the Vicar now directs attention.199 “Flee those who sow desolate doctrines in men’s hearts under the pretext of explaining nature and whose apparent skepticism is a hundred times more assertive and more dogmatic than the decided tone of their adversaries.” The Vicar extends the long catalogue of criticism of the philosophers he went through, from their “pride” all the way to their “bizarre systems,” adding two cardinal points he holds against the Enlighteners: the imperious spirit with which they subject “us” to their radical decisions and the immoderation with which they conduct their fight against religion. “By overturning, destroying, trampling underfoot all that men respect, they deprive the afflicted of the last consolation of their misery, the powerful and rich of the only bridle on their passions”; the damage they inflict reaches all the way into the “depths of the hearts,” where they “tear out” “the remorse for crime” and “the hope of virtue”; and with all that, “still boast that they are the benefactors of the human 199. In paragraph 180 the Vicar leaves those from whom the proselyte should keep his distance nameless. But in the next paragraph he urges the proselyte: “Osez confesser Dieu chez les philosophes” 181 (634). And he picks up from his criticism of the philosophers in paragraphs 12–­18 (568–­70), in part using verbatim repetitions. Consider Pp. 239–­41. Rousseau considered prefixing a critique of the dévots to the critique of the philosophes in paragraph 180, but in the end rejected this arrangement: “Ayez de la pieté, mon enfant, aimez ceux qui en ont, mais fuyez les devots, rien n’est si dangereux que leur commerce. Leur humble orgueil n’est point traittable, il faut qu’il[s] dominent ou qu’il[s] nuisent; ils sont envieux, jaloux, fourbes, vindicatifs, mistérieux dans toutes leurs affaires et sans cesse épiant celles d’autrui. Leur amitié n’est point sure, leur haine est irreconciliable, et ils ont toujours une ligue entre eux à laquelle on échape difficilement quand on a le malheur de leur déplaire. Le mieux est de s’en tenir loin, ils ne font que mépriser ceux qui les évitent, mais qui les quite en a tout à redouter” (ed. Masson 442–­44; reproduction of the wording according to the transcription in OCP IV, p. 874; my emphasis).

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race.” The Vicar concludes his warning with a rhetorical gesture: he takes up the assertion of Enlightenment, namely, that the dissemination of the truth and the advancement of the good go together seamlessly,200 in order to turn it against the Enlighteners: “They say that the truth is never harmful to men; I believe it as much as they do, and in my opinion this is a great proof that what they teach is not the truth.” (4) The Vicar’s final appeal has in view a public effectiveness of the proselyte. The talents he perceives him to have make the Vicar suppose that the student, unlike his teacher, will later speak to men in speeches and writings. Possibly, he will attain the stature to address mankind as witness to the truth. That might explain the pathos and emphasis of the appeal at whose center stands the challenge: “Always remain firm in the way of truth or what in the simplicity of your heart appears to you to be the truth, without ever turning away from it out of vanity or weakness.” If the proselyte ever does address the public, he should only follow his conscience and make nothing of the applause he can reap, pay no heed to whether he is loved or hated, whether one reads or despises his writings. What counts is the testimonial he gives to himself. It is the basis for his independence from men’s esteem and gives him the inner freedom to walk the way of virtue. But the reference to conscience, the will to listen to it, and the resoluteness to follow it undeterred are not sufficient to discern the “way of truth.” Therefore, the Vicar recapitulates the most important directives that his speech has available for the orientation of an homme vulgaire. Once more he warns against philosophy. And he offers a reminder of the deviation from the path of justice that he chiefly opposed, the subjugation under the tyranny of religion. Philosophy feeds doubt and lives the idle passion of contemplation. “The abuse of knowledge produces incredulity.” Those who make a claim to knowledge look down upon the sentiment vulgaire. “Proud philosophy leads to freethinking as blind devoutness leads to fanaticism.” The proselyte should avoid “these extremes” and, by keeping his distance from both, forge a middle way and a way of balance. “Dare to acknowledge God among the philosophers; dare to preach humanity to the intolerant.” The Vicar puts the moral message for the proselyte in a threefold formula: “Speak the truth, do the good; what does matter for man is to fulfill his duties on earth; and it is in forgetting oneself that one works for oneself.” Faith in the preestablished harmony of the truth and the good, to which the Vicar lends expression at the end of his exhortation, like faith in the ultimate balance between the moral good and one’s own good, is part of the faith in the 200. “rien de plus utile que d’éclairer les hommes. Les lumieres philosophiques, dit M. l’abbé de Fleury, ne peuvent jamais nuire.” Helvétius, De l’esprit (Paris, 1758), II, 19 n. e, p. 180.

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moral world order.201 On the foundation of this faith, happiness is promised to the future witness of the truth, the happiness Natural Religion promises to every man. It is the happiness of the unanimity of conscience and of the attunement to the whole, of contentment with oneself and with the active life in the consciousness of moral merit, the happiness of self-­admiration. The priest, who began the appeal to the “good young man” with the well-­meaning exhortation to deceive neither himself nor others, ends with the consoling assurance that only l’espoir du juste does not deceive: “My child, particular interest deceives us; it is only the hope of the just that never deceives. Amen.”202 After the second speech the narrator remains silent. We receive no hint at all that the critique the teacher of Natural Religion leveled against faith in revelation would have run up against the listener’s reservations or would have been contradicted by him. In contrast to the case of the speech about Natural Religion, the narrator made no attempt to interrupt the Vicar. After the first speech we learned, on the contrary, that the dogmas of Natural Religion caused him to have a great number of objections. Rousseau later lends additional significance to the listener’s varying reaction to the two parts of the Profession de foi, his resistance to the teaching and his tacit agreement with the critique, when in the Confessions he suggests that the nameless one could have been the young  Jean-­ Jacques—­a fact readers had no knowledge of during Rousseau’s lifetime.203 While nothing more is heard from the narrator in the second half of the Profession de foi, Rousseau accompanies the second speech with nine Notes, the last and by far the longest of which he appends to the Vicar’s warning against the philosophers.204 The Note, which consists of twelve paragraphs, contains not only a remarkable commentary on the Vicar’s warning, but in addition, immediately preceding the edifying concluding appeal, an illuminating political statement by Rousseau about the Vicar’s undertaking as a whole. The commentary starts out with a critique of “the two parties” who attack one another “with so many sophisms.” Who the parties under discussion are exactly is less clear than it might seem. For in the paragraph on which Rousseau comments, the Vicar assigns no name to either of the parties—­he himself does not even speak of parties. Moreover, the reader can relate Rousseau’s Note to the paragraph as a whole or instead to its conclusion in particular, in which case 201. Cf. to this faith, First Book, Chapter V in toto. 202. 178–­81 (631–­35); ed. Masson 473. See Footnote 115. 203. Cf. Les Confessions II, pp. 60–­70; III, pp. 90–­92; consider III, pp. 118–­19. 204. Notes 1–­9 to the first half explain, support, or correct the Vicar’s doctrine. Notes 10–­17 to the second half explain, support, and intensify the Vicar’s critique, in part considerably.

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the Vicar would oppose the party of the Enlighteners, holding up their own maxim against them: “The truth is never harmful to men”—­a proposition that, in the case of both parties, would be a veritable candidate for the critique of sophisms. With the first example Rousseau offers, he at least determines unequivocally the one party he attacks most sharply in the Note. It is one of the most widespread sophisms of the parti philosophiste to oppose a presumed people of good philosophers to a people of bad Christians, “as if a people of true philosophers would be easier to make than a people of true Christians!”205 Since no true philosopher ever propagated a people of philosophers, let alone thought it possible, it is obvious that the “philosophers” of the present are the primary target of Rousseau’s critique. Given this, however, it is not yet clear whether Rousseau restricts the “two parties” to les philosophes, on the one hand, and les dévots or les intolérants, on the other, or whether, in the confrontation between the party of the philosophists and the party of the believers in revelation, he does not, going much further, treat the political relationship between philosophy and religion. Rousseau says that he does not know whether it is easier to find a true philosopher than a true Christian among individuals, but that he does know very well that on the political level, as soon as peoples are at issue, one must assume peoples who will abuse philosophy without religion, just as “our,” i.e., Christian, peoples abuse religion without philosophy. In other words: in the eighteenth Note to the Profession de foi Rousseau will not ask about the best possibility, but will concentrate instead on the political abuse of philosophy and religion. He will not oppose the true philosopher to the true Christian, but rather will contrast the hypothetical condition of a political community in which philosophy would have become the common opinion and would leave no room for religion, with the condition of a political community in which religion rules and philosophy remains without political influence. He will not investigate the truth of philosophy and religion, but will consider their social consequences. Rousseau credits Bayle with having “proven” convincingly “that fanaticism is more pernicious than atheism,” i.e., that “fanaticism” causes more suffering and death by promoting war and persecution. This is “incontestable.”206 But Bayle did not take care to say what is 205. Cf. Du contrat social IV, 8, 22, p. 465: “On nous dit qu’un peuple de vrais Chrétiens formeroit la plus parfaite société que l’on puisse imaginer. Je ne vois à cette supposition qu’une grande difficulté; c’est qu’une société de vrais chrétiens ne seroit plus une société d’hommes.” 206. What Rousseau calls “proven” and “incontestable” is a formulation, modified and exaggerated for his purposes, of the famous proposition that Pierre Jurieu called “le dangereux paradoxe” of Bayle: Que l’Atheïsme n’est pas un plus grand mal que l’Idolatrie. Bayle, Pensées

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no less true, “that fanaticism, although bloodthirsty and cruel, is nevertheless a grand and strong passion that elevates the heart of man, that makes him despise death, that gives him a prodigious energy, that one needs only to direct better in order to produce the most sublime virtues from it.” Rousseau leaves unmentioned that everything he here grants to the passion of “fanaticism,” to religious devotion, to the identification with truth promising salvation, to the obedience of faith, he elsewhere attributes to the passion of love of the fatherland, to political devotion, to the identification with the “common I,” to the citizen’s fulfilling his duty. Instead, making a sharp division, he opposes le fanatisme to l’irréligion and l’esprit raisoneur et philosophique in general, “which causes attachment to life, makes souls effeminate and degraded, concentrates all the passions in the baseness of particular interest, in the abjectness of the human I, and thus almost quietly undermines the true foundations of every society; for what particular interests have in common is so slight that it diverses sur la comète, ed. Prat and Rétat, CXIV, pp. 303–­6; cf. CIII, pp. 280–­83; CLXI, vol. 2, pp. 77–­78; CLXXII, pp. 102–­5; CLXXX, p. 131; CLXXXIX, p. 155; CXCI, pp. 158–­59; CXCIII, pp. 160–­63. Bacon’s contrast of atheism and superstition belongs to the background of the “dangerous paradox”: “Atheisme leaves a Man to Sense; to Philosophy; to Naturall Piety; to Lawes; to Reputation; All which may be Guides to an outward Morall vertue, though Religion were not; But Superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute Monarchy, in the Mindes of  Men. Therefore Atheisme did never perturbe States; For it makes Men wary of themselves, as looking no further: And we see the times enclined to Atheisme (as the Time of Augustus Caesar) were civil Times. But Superstition, hath beene the Confusion of many States; And bringeth in a new Primum Mobile, that ravisheth all the Spheares of Government. The Master of Superstition is the People; And in all Superstition, Wise Men follow Fooles.” The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall XVII, Of Superstition, ed. Kiernan, pp. 54–­55; for the theological root of  “absolute monarchy,” which “superstition” establishes, consider De sapientia veterum XVIII, Diomedes sive zelus, ed. Spedding, Ellis, Heath, p. 658 (“dii ethnici zelotypia, quod est Dei veri attributum, non tangerentur”). While Bayle speaks of idolatrie and Bacon speaks of superstition, Alexandre Deleyre (see Footnote 108), in his article “Fanatisme” for the Encyclopédie, volume VI, 1756, speaks explicitly of the “fanaticism” to which Rousseau refers: “Le fanatisme a fait beaucoup plus de mal au monde que l’impiété. Que prétendent les impies? se délivrer d’un joug, au lieu que les fanatiques veulent étendre leurs fers sur toute la terre. Zélotypie infernale! A-­t-­on vu des sectes d’incrédules s’attrouper, et marcher en armes contre la divinité? Ce sont des âmes trop foibles pour prodiguer le sang humain” (pp. 400–­401). But Deleyre speaks at the end of his long article about yet another fanaticism: “Fanatisme du patriote. Il y a une sorte de fanatisme dans l’amour de la patrie, qu’on peut appeler le culte des foyers. Il tient aux mœurs, aux lois, à la religion, et c’est par-­là sur-­tout, qu’il mérite davantage ce nom. On ne peut rien produire de grand sans ce zele outré, qui grossissant les objets, enfle aussi les espérances, et met au  jour des prodiges incroyables de valeur et de confiance” (p. 401).

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will never outweigh what sets them in opposition.”207 Rousseau puts the danger stemming from a philosophy without moderation in the most glaring light he possibly can. The contrasting apology for “fanaticism,” at the end of a writing that subjected “fanaticism” to a thorough critique, is an act of moderation. And it contains a call to self-­knowledge: That the “atheism” of the philosopher, unlike “fanaticism,” sheds no blood is based less on the philosopher’s love of peace than on his indifference toward the moral good. The philosopher does not want to have his tranquillity disturbed. But his principles endanger the presuppositions of this very tranquillity, his own or that of his successors, since they threaten to destroy the mœurs on which the cohesion and continued exis­ tence of society depend. Rousseau compares “philosophic indifference” to the tranquillity that rules in a state under despotism, i.e., to a tranquillity without political virtue and thus without political freedom. He calls it a “tranquillity of death” and “more destructive than war itself.” “Thus, fanaticism, although more fateful in its immediate effects than what is today called the philosophic spirit, is much less so in its consequences.” The criticism of the lack of self-­ knowledge of the “philosophers” or of the political abuse of philosophy can hardly be more clearly expressed.208 After the critique of the abuse regarding the danger philosophy presents when detached from moderation, Rousseau turns to the abuse that consists in making no political use of religion. He begins the second part of the Note with a hyperbolic praise of the good that religion, by comparison with philosophy, is able to produce: “From the point of view of principles, there is nothing that philosophy can do well that religion does not do better, and religion does many things that philosophy could not do.” Yet he adds immediately that what he has said about “the principles”—­knowing well that it does not accord with the truth209—­is otherwise in practice. He concedes that “no man follows his religion in every point, if he has one.” He concedes further that most “barely” have

207. For Rousseau’s statement about particular interests, consider what he says about the art of politics in Du contrat social II, 3, 2n. (p. 371). 208. Note 18, 1–­4 (632–­33). 209. That philosophy can do nothing good that religion did not do still better is not even true in regard to the people, the society, the political community, thus from the point of view from which Rousseau exclusively considers the relationship between philosophy and religion in Note 18. The whole conception of Du contrat social provides eloquent testimony of this. In the Geneva manuscript of the political-­philosophic treatise, Rousseau noted: “La terre entiére regorgeroit de sang et le genre humain périroit bientôt si la Philosophie et les loix ne retenoient les fureurs du fanatisme, et si la voix des hommes n’etait plus forte que celle des Dieux” (p. 285).

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“one,” and those who do have one follow it “not at all.”210 “But, finally, some men do have one and follow it at least in part; and it is indubitable that religious motives often prevent them from doing evil, and demand from them virtues, laudable actions that would not have occurred without those motives.” This is a very qualified praise of the good that religion produces, given the praise with which Rousseau begins and with which he determines the height of the fall. He qualifies the praise further with the reminder of the subsequent cost the officeholders of religion cause: “All the crimes committed among the clergy, as elsewhere, prove not that religion is useless, but that there are very few people who have religion.” Scarcely less double-­edged is Rousseau’s judgment about the political effect in the narrower sense. “Our modern governments,” when compared with ancient governments, “incontestably” owe their “more solid authority” and “less frequent revolutions” to Christianity. In the Contrat social, published at the same time as Émile, Rousseau will not withhold the verità effettuale della cosa that he has in view when he highlights the stability of Christian monarchies: namely, that it rests on the usurpation of legitimate authority and that Christianity encourages tyranny.211 In addition, he will pay the greatest attention to the Roman Republic, which he prizes from the first all the way to the last of his political writings as the model of all free peoples, and will devote almost an entire book to the discussion of its institutions.212 In the eighteenth Note to the Profession de foi, by contrast, the Roman Republic not only remains unmentioned in the opposition between “modern and ancient governments.” Rousseau also ignores it when he contrasts the “gentleness” of Christian morals with the “cruelties of the Athenians, the Egyptians, the Roman emperors, and the Chinese,” where literature and science flourished although humanity was not treated, for that reason, with any greater respect. He omits the Roman Republic with a conspicuousness that is surpassed only by the conspicuousness of the seemingly misplaced return of “fanaticism” in the statement that lies at the basis of the contrast: “A better understanding 210. Without mentioning Bayle for a second time, Rousseau replies to objections Bayle raises against equating religious credo with moral practice. Cf. Pensées diverses sur la comète CXXXIII–­CXXXVI (vol. 2, pp. 5–­13), especially: Pourquoi il y a tant de différence entre ce qu’on croit et ce qu’on fait and Que l’homme n’agit pas selon ses Principes. 211. Du contrat social I, 3, 3, p. 355; II, 6, 2, p. 378; III, 6, 16, p. 413; IV, 8, 28, p. 467; cf. I, 6, 7, p. 361, and III, 1, 18, p. 399. Consider Discours sur l’inégalité, Seconde partie, p. 246 and the commentary ad locum as well as the introductory essay, pp. xli–­xlvii. 212. Du contrat social IV, 4, 2, p. 444 as well as IV, 2–­8 in toto. Cf. Discours sur les sciences et les arts, p. 11; Discours sur l’inégalité, Dédicace, p. 14; Note XIX, p. 382; Lettres écrites de la montagne IX, 45, pp. 880–­81; Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne II, pp. 956–­59.

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of religion, by dispelling fanaticism, has given more gentleness to Christian morals.”213 Rousseau’s praise of Christianity abstracts not only from what he will say about Christianity in Du contrat social, but also from what he has said in the first part about “the two parties.” The praise reaches its goal when, toward the end of the second part, Rousseau lauds revealed religions for their promotion of social cohesion. He points to the restitution, the reconciliation, the alms, the recompense, the beneficence brought about, respectively, by the Catholics’ confession, the Protestants’ communion, the Hebrews’ Jubilee Year, the Turks’ pious institutions. He especially emphasizes the works of charity the Gospel inspires and the fraternity in which Jewish law “united the whole nation.” But his treatment of revealed religions culminates with the contribution they make to upholding justice. He illustrates it with the Mohammedans’ idea of the Bridge of Hell, Poul-­Serrho, i.e., Poul-­i-­Sirat, and uses the third part of the Note for this, citing a lengthy quotation from Jean Chardin’s Persian travel report. “The Mohammedans,” Rousseau reproduces Chardin, “say that after the examination that will follow the universal resurrection, all the bodies will pass over a bridge, called Poul-­Serrho, which crosses over the eternal fire; a bridge, they say, that can be called the third and last examination and the true final judgment because it is there that the separation of the good from the wicked will be made . . . etc.” According to the second, far more extensive part of the citation from Chardin, the Persians believe that no one will cross the Bridge of Hell who has not repaid in this life the injustices he has done, since those to whom he has done injustice without repaying it will prevent him from crossing over the fire on Judgment Day. If, Rousseau comments, one were to take this idea away from the Persians and were to persuade them that there is neither a Poul-­Serrho nor anything comparable, where “the oppressed wreak vengeance on their tyrants after death,” that would put the tyrants at ease and would relieve them of the care of “placating those unfortunates,” i.e., of rectifying the injustices they have done or of not doing them in the first place. “It is false, therefore,” Rousseau’s conclusion reads, “that this doctrine,” namely, the doctrine that there is no Poul-­Serrho or that the doctrine that the Bridge of Hell is not true, “would not be harmful; it would, therefore, not be the truth.” With this sophism, formulated with sufficient confusion, Rousseau at the end of the Note he adds to the Jamais la vérité n’est nuisible aux hommes of the Enlighteners and of the Vicar opposes both parties, by parodying their maxim and driving it ad absurdum. Certainly, Rousseau does not regard the 213. The statement in paragraph 8 (my emphasis) contains the fourth and final mention of le fanatisme in Note 18. It is the only mention outside of the first part (paragraphs 1–­4).

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doctrine of the Bridge of Hell to be true any more than the Vicar or the Enlighteners do. So that no doubt can arise, he discusses religion’s contribution to justice by means of a Persian idea. Yet in contrast to both, he considers the truth about the Persians’ belief to be harmful for the Persians. How little the religious truth of the doctrine of the Bridge of Hell matters to him, that for him the only thing that matters is its practical utility, Rousseau indicates by an omission from Chardin’s quotation, an omission to which he calls attention by the division into two paragraphs, with the ellipsis marks at the end of the first paragraph and the insertion of “etc.” The reader who looks up the exact passage cited from Chardin learns that the bridge Poul-­Serrho is “thinner than a hair’s breadth and sharper than a razor blade,” which is why it “is impossible to go onto it without being held by the all-­powerful hand of God. The non­ believers and the wicked will stumble with their first step and so will fall into the abyss of hell; but God will guide the believers with sure footing on this sharp path.”214 In Rousseau’s reproduction of the passage, the all-­powerful God is not mentioned, for whose grace whoever wants to cross over the Bridge of Hell must hope, nor does the distinction between believers and nonbelievers play a role in the Last Judgment. Rousseau leaves it at the separation of the good and the wicked, in order to speak in his own name of the oppressed and of tyrants. In his presentation of the belief in Poul-­Serrho, the practice of justice seems to decide whether one will pass the final examination. This is the basis of the utility of that belief and of the harm from shaking it. Ever since the citizen of Geneva as another Prometheus warned common men of the fire of science in the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, the insight that the truth can be harmful remained determinative for Rousseau’s œuvre.215 214. The passage omitted by Rousseau and replaced by etc. reads in its entirety: “ils appellent ce Pont Poul serrha, mot qui signifie Pont sur le milieu du chemin. Voici comment leurs Livres de Religion en parlent: Il faut croire qu’il y a véritablement un Chemin réel, savoir un Corps materiel étendu sur le milieu de la Gehenne, dont la superficie est plus étroite qu’un poil délié, et le chemin plus aigu que le tranchant d’un rasoir, sur lequel il est impossible de marcher sans être soûtenu de la main toute-­puissante de Dieu. Les Infidéles et les Méchans y broncheront au premier pas, et tomberont ainsi dans la Gehenne d’Enfer; mais pour les Fidéles, Dieu affermira leurs pieds sur cette voye aiguë. Ils passeront ce Pont par la misericorde de Dieu plus vite qu’un Oiseau ne fend l’air, et ils entreront au Paradis Eternel.” Voyages de Mr. le Chevalier Chardin en Perse, et autres lieux de l’Orient, vol. 7: Contenant la description de la religion des Persans (Amsterdam, 1711), p. 50. 215. Note 18, 5–­11 (633–­35). Whether the idea of the Bridge of Hell unleashes a salutary effect not only on the morality of the “oppressed,” i.e., of the people, but also on the politics of the “tyrants,” i.e., of the few, depends upon whether the tyrants believe in the “Poul-­Serrho”

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While the Vicar begins the last paragraph of his profession of faith with the address “Bon jeune homme” and ends with “Amen,” Rousseau begins the last paragraph of his Note with the address “Philosophe” and ends with “Poul-­Serrho.” He challenges the philosopher to show the sanction for the moral laws the philosopher postulates and to tell him frankly what he has as substitute for the court of the Bridge of Hell that lies beyond.216 Rousseau’s challenge is directed not only at the spokesmen for the “parti philosophiste.” It concerns no less the Vicar from Savoy and the future teacher of the moral law in Königsberg. Rousseau’s last word in the Profession de foi contains a fundamental question about the Vicar’s teaching: Is it able to satisfy its claim and to promote sufficiently the moral good in whose practice it places the supreme felicity of man, without specifying an effective sanction against the practice of injustice? For in light of the idea of the “Poul-­Serrho,” the punishment the Vicar imagines for the unjust—­that they have to live with their injustice and consider it for a period of time—­appears exceedingly pallid, hardly a deterrent, and consequently of limited efficacy. With the last Note Rousseau turns himself into the Vicar’s first political critic. The question concerning the substitute for “Poul-­Serrho” anticipates an objection that will be raised against the profession of faith, and does so more tersely than the later critics will formulate it.217 But the criticism retains the status of a question. Rousseau or whether at least one or two of them believe it. Since “there are very few people who have religion,” there is a need for political provisions in order to places bridles on tyrants, as Rousseau will show in Du contrat social. His praise of the “Poul-­Serrho” turns out to be relatively restrained: “Should I believe that the idea of that bridge, which repairs so many injustices, never prevents any?” Note 18, 11 (my emphasis); see Note 18, 6 and 7. 216. Note 18, 12 (635). 217. With his Schreiben an den Herrn Vicar in Savoyen abzugeben bey dem Herrn Johann Jacob Rousseau, dated “Osnabrück, November 2, 1762,” Justus Möser counted among the earliest political critics of the Vicar: “It is of the highest importance for the good of a society that man says his prayers and by this is provided with good feelings, with healthy fear, and with necessary steadfastness. It is of the greatest necessity that we have certain strengthened articles of faith, which console the unfortunate man, constrain the fortunate man, humble the proud man, bend the kings, and limit the shopkeepers. I say, this is of the highest necessity in civil society.” Möser sees in such articles of faith strengthened for the benefit of society the “final purpose” of revelation and notes the palpable defect in the Vicar’s speech. In doing so, he has the Vicar assert more than he in fact does: “You have incorporated eternal punishments and rewards into your natural religion. Now do me the favor of depicting heaven and hell for the poor imagination of some men such as God has found it useful to give this idea to us, in order to make the necessary impression: thus, we are already in agreement about the first point, namely, that God certainly can bring some truths closer to intuition and that what we can know in natural religion merely as

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does not agree to any answer that would outstrip the imagination of the priest in his own name. He does not appear as a tragic poet, nor is he prepared as a political mythologist to come up with a substitute. The most Rousseau agrees to are the three relevant articles of the “purely civil profession of faith” that he proposes in the Contrat social: “the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked.” They should be, like all dogmas of the Religion civile, proclaimed “without explications or commentaries,” so that the credo, which is binding on all citizens in their capacity as citizens, remains beyond theological dispute.218 The laconic character of the three articles, however, has the further advantage that their concrete content can be adjusted according to political prudence to the circumstances of each political community and determined by “the morals, customs, and above all opinion” to which “the great Législateur attends in secret.”219 In our context, this means: the existing ideas of the duration of life after death, the reward of the just, and the fate of the wicked are able to flow, as it were, into the articles of faith and in their sensory vividness fill them with the fear and the hope on which the practical efficacy of the credo depends. In contrast to the Vicar’s profession of faith, which undermines them, the three dogmas of the Religion civile can be made compatible with the idea of the Poul-­Serrho. But if the belief in “Poul-­Serrho” is to be brought into agreement with the Religion civile, this is true only for Rousseau’s rendering of this belief. It is true for belief in punishment in hell, even an eternal punishment in hell, not for the belief that such a punishment would be the sanction for unbelief. Insofar as the idea of the court of the Bridge of Hell concerns the distinction between believer and nonbeliever, which Rousseau deliberately omits from his reference, it falls under the tenth dogma of the Religion civile, the prohibition against “intolerance.” The sole negative and prohibitory article Rousseau includes in the “purely civil profession of faith” marks the dividing line separating it from every particular religion that raises the claim that outside of it there is no salvation. The article seeks to put a stop publicly to a belief that delivers the nonbelievers to damnation due to their unbelief. It is Rousseau’s article for the defense against the political aspirations of revealed religions: against their pursuit of supremacy over state authority in the form of the religion du Prêtre; against their distinction between the friends and the enemies of the Holy God; conclusions and consequences we can reinforce, form, and confirm through a revelation.” New edition (Bremen, 1777), pp. 19–­20 and 25–­26; cf. pp. 31, 39, 55. 218. Du contrat social IV, 8, 32–­33, p. 408. 219. Du contrat social II, 12, 5, p. 394. Cf. First Book, Chapter V, Pp. 154–­57 and 175.

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against theocracy as the most extreme denial of the political sovereign, which the Contrat social constitutes as the sole binding source of right and legitimating power.220 Consequently, for Rousseau’s conception of political community the “negative” dogma of the Religion civile is of fundamental importance, and it makes good sense that “la sainteté du Contract social et des Loix” as the ninth and concluding positive dogma immediately precedes the rejection of “intolérance.” What results from this is a chiasmus of Rousseau’s and the Vicar’s positions with a double aporia. The Vicar accepts particular religions almost indiscriminately, since he has no political interest in them and focuses entirely on the inner cult. But with his profession of faith, he undermines their moral efficacy. Rousseau has a political interest in maintaining the moral efficacy of particular religions and in bringing them to bear by means of a civil profession of faith within the framework of the public cult. But since, owing to the same political interest, he cannot avoid denying the exclusive claim made by the historically given religions to rule and to salvation, in the end he does not call their moral efficacy into question any the less. For the latter cannot continue to exist in the long run without the former: The revealed religions draw their power from the belief in their absoluteness.221 Rousseau and the Vicar agree in the rejection of the claim to truth made by the revealed religions, which underlies all the other claims and especially the claim to obedience and salvation. Against the background of this rejection, they make attempts to implement moderation, attempts with distinct orientations. The Vicar opts for eschatological moderation and appeals to the “clement and good God.” The 220. Three times Rousseau refers by name to the counterposition opposed to his political conception in Du contrat social: the first time in the first sentence of paragraph 1, the second time in the second sentence of paragraph 18, and the third time in the third sentence of paragraph 35, i.e., in the first, the central, and the last paragraphs of Chapter IV, 8, De la Religion civile. 221.  Justus Möser holds against the Vicar what he can likewise hold against Rousseau: “What more would you think, if I were to venture against you the proposition that the economy of every religion demands the public assertion that outside of it there is no salvation? It seems to me that a religion could not have its civil effect without this principle. At least I persuade myself that if the doctrine for children, One can become blessed in any religion, were to stand in capital letters in a public catechism, the necessary enthusiasm would be significantly weakened . . . Such an indifference would, in my opinion, take from every religion its power to bind consciences; which is, however, necessary to preserve the final civil purpose of the oath, this indispensable, although sad tool. And this leads me to believe that every religion would have to exclude all others in its public teaching, and would have to allow the philosophers nothing more than salutary uncertainty, for further consideration.” Schreiben an den Herrn Vicar in Savoyen abzugeben bey dem Herrn Johann Jacob Rousseau, pp. 37–­39.

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citizen of  Geneva makes a plea for political moderation and has recourse to the “unalienable sovereignty of the body politic.” In agreement with the purpose they both pursue, the mitigation or the taming of revealed religions, the Vicar proclaims the dogma of the divine instinct of conscience, whereas the citizen of  Geneva by contrast elevates the sanctity of the Contrat social to an article of faith. Faith in the “infallible judge of good and evil” in man is not included in the Religion civile, and conversely its last positive dogma remains as the only one of its ten articles without an equivalent in the credo of the teacher of the Religion naturelle. The attempt at eschatological moderation gives priority to the private happiness of the homme vulgaire, regardless of the society he lives in and of the religion he publicly professes. The attempt at political moderation has in view the citoyen, who strives to achieve his happiness in political life, within a political community that assigns religion its place and determines the limits of its influence. The price for eschatological moderation is a moral teaching that has to make do without sufficient sanction. The price for political moderation consists in the foreseeable lessening of religious devotion and in the increasing depletion of enthusiasm, which “fanaticism” was in a position to unleash. Historically, both attempts immediately affect Christianity—­ just as the fact that Émile is instructed only in Natural Religion means, given the concrete circumstances, that he would not be raised to be a Christian.222 Considered historically, Rousseau contributed considerably—­through the advances the Vicaire Savoyard and the Citoyen de Genève made in the year 1762 as well as through the two writings, which generated a sensation, with which he subsequently opposed the persecution by the Catholic and Protestant authorities—­to Christianity’s internalization, to the shaking of the orthodoxy of both denominations, and to the ultimate erosion of their public bastions.223 222. Émile IV, p. 636; see P. 320 and Footnote 197. 223. In an extensive chapter of  his book, Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert ([Zollikon–­Zürich, 1947], pp. 153–­207), Karl Barth sought to acknowledge Rousseau’s importance for the history of  Christian theology and summarized it in the end in one sentence: “From Rousseau and for the first time from Rousseau there is what one can call theological rationalism in the full meaning of the term: a theology for which what is Christian is identical with what is truly human, as it is present to us in that depth of ratio, in that innermost anthropological province unalienable and ready to hand” ( p. 207). Barth adheres to the common opinion that the Vicar’s profession of faith is Rousseau’s profession of faith (pp. 174, 181). But he sees “every reason,” nonetheless, “to find” the Rêveries, Rousseau’s “most beautiful writing,” “theologically more suspect than all the rest,” and he maintains: “the Church doctrine of original sin has proba­ bly only seldom been denied with such amazing openness, so powerfully and existentially as it has by Rousseau” ( pp. 188, 199; cf. 201, 204–­5). From the Catholic side, Pierre Maurice Masson

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Stated historically, the very consequential detachment of Christian morality from belief in the Christian God is tightly bound up with the history of the reception of the Profession de foi and the unconditional primacy of practical reason that the Vicar advocates.224 Unhistorical, however, is a judgment that takes its reasons from the historical reception without engaging with the reasons that were determinative for the action of the philosopher, a judgment, therefore, that does not ask about the historical challenge as he himself understood it. Unhistorical would have to be called the criticism of a friend of the wisdom of the ancients whom I heard say in the spirit of  Note 18 of the Profession de foi that Rousseau would have done better to accept the persecutions and wars of religion than to want to tame “fanaticism” and thus encourage the loss of tension and effort that a century later would provoke the diagnosis of the “last man.” Unhistorical remain, in a related sense, my considerations concerning the price the attempts at moderation exacted. For these considerations, like that criticism, do not adequately acknowledge Rousseau’s judgment that the trunk can be saved, if at all, only at the cost of the branches, that the Christian religion, in other words, will not endure, since its God, in contrast to the God of Natural Religion, cannot be defended as credible. Also and above all, they abstract from Rousseau’s intention of making visible in the confrontation with Christianity an aporia that reaches much further than the two aporias we encountered, although it stands in a direct relationship with them: the aporia of modern politics, a politics that has no basis in Christianity but that also cannot retreat behind Christianity either—or bypass it altogether. The aporia of post-­Christian politics is the true subject of the famous pen­ ultimate chapter of the Contrat social. At the end of the first part, which deals with the genealogy of the antagonism between politics and religion, Rousseau says that it would be easy for him to refute the mutually opposing views of  Bayle had earlier contributed to the reception history of  Rousseau in his three-­volume study La Religion de J. J. Rousseau ([Paris, 1916], in particular vol. 3, Rousseau et la Restauration religieuse), in which he himself belongs with his account of as well as with his commentary on the Profession de foi. Masson’s interpretation also rests on what for him is the self-­evident assumption that Rousseau believes what he has the Vicar say. 224. Consider Nietzsche, Götzen-­Dämmerung, Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen 5, KGW VI, 3, pp. 107–­8. In the Lettres écrites de la montagne Rousseau sketches a dialogue in which les Chrétiens disputateurs reproach the followers of the religion of the Profession de foi, whom Rousseau has appear as les Chrétiens paisibles, for not believing in Jesus. The “peaceful Christians” give their reply: “Nous ne savons pas bien si nous croyons en Jésus-­Christ dans votre idée, parce que nous ne l’entendons pas. Mais nous tâchons d’observer ce qu’il nous prescrit” I, 41, p. 698.

Rousseau and the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar  335

and Warburton.225 The position of  the modern philosopher, on the one hand, that no religion is useful for the political community, and that of the Christian bishop, on the other, that the political community has its strongest support in Christianity. “One would prove to the first that no state has ever been founded without religion serving as its base, and to the second that the Christian law is at bottom more harmful than useful to a strong constitution of the state.”226 225. The reference to Pierre Bayle establishes a direct connection to Note 18 of the Profes­ sion de foi. Rousseau read William Warburton in Silhouette’s translation and adaption: Dissertations sur l’union de la religion, de la morale, et de la politique: Tirées d’un ouvrage de M. Warburton, 2 vols. (London, 1742). Warburton is relevant for Rousseau’s discussion in Note 18 not only owing to the detailed reference to Bayle, to whom Warburton devotes an entire chapter ( pp. 59–­112), but above all in regard to the emphasis on the necessity of religion for politics and on the indispensability of  belief in an otherworldly criminal court. For this see pp. 19, 20, 49–­50, 65, 90, 112, 128, 142–­43; vol. 2, p. 4ff. Warburton emphasizes that the ancient philosophers unanimously advocated in their exoteric teaching the reward of the just and the punishment of the wicked in a future life. In the Préface du Traducteur one can already read: “C’est dans la vue d’assurer l’établissement de la religion que tous les anciens législateurs ont prétendu à quelque inspiration divine, envisageant ce moyen comme un des plus propres à persuader aux hommes que la providence des Dieux veille aux afaires particulieres du genre humain” (pp. 7–­8). “On éxamine l’origine, le progrès, la perfection, le déclin et le génie de l’ancienne philosophie, et dans le cours de cet éxamen, l’on fait voir deux choses: l’une que les Grecs croyoient qu’il étoit permis de tromper le peuple pour son avantage, et par conséquent d’enseigner une chose et d’en croire une autre: la seconde, que les Philosophes avoient une doctrine publique et une doctrine secrete, roulant non sur des objets diférens, mais sur les mêmes sujets qu’ils traitoient d’une maniere contradictoire” ( p. 11). “Pour convaincre le lecteur de plus en plus que les anciens Philosophes ne croyoient point intérieurement le dogme des peines et des récompenses d’une autre vie, l’on fait voir que ce dogme étoit incompatible avec leurs principes métaphysiques sur la nature de Dieu et sur celle de l’ame” ( pp. 13–­14). At every turn, the reading of Warburton offered Rousseau rich material for the Profession de foi as well as for the Contrat social. Among many other things, he could find there a criticism avant la lettre, from the standpoint of theism, of his conception of the political sovereign as the sole obligatory source of right ( pp. 75–­78). Perhaps he came upon a citation that Warburton quotes, according to which Orpheus lashed in the bonds of society “savage men, who were without any knowledge of virtue and without any idea of law,” “by recommending to them piety towards the Gods and by inspiring superstition in them” (p. 147). See Footnotes 108 and 109. 226. Du contrat social IV, 8, 14, p. 464. The chapter is divided into three main parts. (I) paragraphs 1–­14, genealogy of  the relationship between politics and religion; (A) para­graphs  1–­7, prior to Christianity; (B) paragraphs 8–­14, since Christianity; (II) paragraphs 15–­30, typology of the relationship between religion and politics; (III) paragraphs 31–­35, determination of the relationship between politics and religion in terms of right. In the double center of part I, one finds the only mention of  Jesus within the Contrat social (paragraph 8.) In the double center of part II, Rousseau contests the proposition that “a society of true Christians” would still be “a society

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Bayle is mistaken, the state needs religion. But Warburton is doubly mistaken, for Christianity is not the religion the state needs. Quite to the contrary, it harms the legitimate corps politique more than it is useful to it. Rousseau’s political critique of Christianity begins with the “spiritual kingdom” Jesus established on earth. Since it subjugated the believers to a theologically deduced and politically based demand for obedience, consequently to two heteroge­ neous powers and two diverging  jurisdictions, Christianity had the effect “that the state ceased to be one, and caused the intestine divisions that have never ceased to agitate Christian peoples.” The “spiritual kingdom” that materialized in the institutions of the “religion of the priest” “made any good polity in the Christian states impossible.” The dualism of spiritual-­priestly and political rule is the first target of  Rousseau’s criticism: “Everything that destroys social unity is worthless. All institutions that put man in contradiction with himself are worthless.” The criticism of the divergence of the “two heads of the eagle,” which opposes political unity, and of the splits that hinder the oneness of the citizen, moves seamlessly to the immediate criticism of the Church and its will to power: “before long this supposedly otherworldly kingdom was seen to become under a visible chief the most violent despotism in this world.” The turn against the despotism of the spiritual power, which is the emblem of the political unfreedom of peoples and at the same time of the persecution of the philosophers, links Rousseau to his philosophic predecessors.227 But in his treatment of  Christianity Rousseau does not limit his criticism of “despotism,” of men” (paragraphs 22–­23). In the center of part III, he formulates the dogmas of the Religion civile, which culminate with the prohibition against “intolerance” ( paragraph 33). 227. Du contrat social IV, 8, 8–­10, 16–­17, pp. 462, 464. In his later defense of the writing, Rousseau will highlight the fight against “blind fanaticism, cruel superstition, stupid prejudice,” and indicate the goal of the libertas philosophandi, which he keeps in view no less than the philosophers who preceded him in this fight: “La Religion est utile et même nécessaire aux Peuples. Cela n’est-­il pas dit, soutenu, prouvé dans ce même Ecrit? Loin d’attaquer les vrais principes de la Religion, l’Auteur les pose, les affermit de tout son pouvoir; ce qu’il attaque, ce qu’il combat, ce qu’il doit combattre, c’est le fanatisme aveugle, la superstition cruelle, le stupide préjugé. Mais il faut, disent-­ils, respecter tout cela. Mais pourquoi? Parce que c’est ainsi qu’on mene les Peuples. Oui, c’est ainsi qu’on les mene à leur perte. La superstition est le plus terrible fléau du genre humain; elle abbrutit les simples, elle persécute les sages, elle enchaîne les Nations, elle fait par tout cent maux effroyables: quel bien fait-­elle? Aucun; si elle en fait, c’est aux Tyrans; elle est leur arme la plus terrible, et cela même est le plus grand mal qu’elle ait jamais fait.” “il importe que l’Etat ne soit pas sans Religion, et cela importe par des raisons graves, sur lesquelles j’ai par tout fortement insisté: mais il vaudroit mieux encore n’en point avoir, que d’en avoir une barbare et persécutante qui, tyrannisant les Loix mêmes, contrarieroit les devoirs du Citoyen.” Lettres écrites de la montagne I, 30, 68, pp. 695, 705 (my emphasis). In I, 58, p. 702 Rousseau

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of “servitude,” of “tyranny” to the religion du Prêtre. He does not stop with the criticism of a political abuse or of a historical aberration of  Christianity, but rather, adopting a radical approach, incorporates “the pure and simple religion of the Gospel,” which he assimilates to the “true theism” or to the Religion de l’homme, in contrast to the Religion du Citoyen. Also this Christianity, about which he says that it is not the Christianity of today but that of the Gospel, which is “altogether different” from today’s, also the Christianity whose pre­ sentation all the way down to the details of the formulation reminds one of the Vicar’s Religion naturelle, which is never mentioned in the Contrat social, thus also the Christianity that appears as the best possible, is subject to a sharp criticism, because it favors tyranny all too much: “Christianity preaches nothing but servitude and dependence. Its spirit is too favorable to tyranny for tyranny not always to profit from it. True Christians are made to be slaves; they know it and are hardly moved by it; this brief life has too little value in their eyes.”228 To this attack on the spirit of Christianity, which, considered historically, points back to Machiavelli and forward to Nietzsche, is added an attack that is decisive for Rousseau’s conception of the well-­ordered political community, and in which his political critique comes to its conclusion: Christianity in no way supports the identification of the citizen with the moi commun of the corps politique. Since Christianity, in anxious tension about the beyond, is “preoccupied solely with the things of  heaven”—­“the fatherland of the Christian is not of this world”—­and since it has a cosmopolitan orientation, it does not encourage the political virtue par excellence, but rather works against it.229 The Christian religion inspires the believer with a “profound indifference” toward the this-­ worldly success of his action and weakens his love of the fatherland. Since it has no particular relation to the “body politic,” which necessarily is particular, “it leaves to the laws only the force they derive from themselves,” i.e., it leaves to the laws the force that is proper to external coercion, without anchoring the laws in the heart of the citizens.230 “What is more: far from attaching the hearts of the citizens to the State, it detaches them from it as from all earthly characterizes Paul as “naturellement persécuteur.” Consider II, 53n., p. 726; III, 50n., 89, 95, pp. 742, 752, 754 and cf. Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, pp. 975–­76. 228. Du contrat social IV, 8, 15, 20, 28, pp. 464, 465, 467. Cf. Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio I, Proemio; I, 26; II, 2; III, 1 (Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Francesco Bausi [Rome, 2001]), I/2–­3, pp. 6, 138–­39, 317–­19, 532–­33, and Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall XIII, Of Goodnesse And Goodnesse of  Nature, ed. Kiernan, p. 39. 229. Cf. Lettres écrites de la montagne I, 65, 67, 71, and 71 n. 2, pp. 704–­6. 230. Consider Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne I, 5–­7, p. 955; III, 4, p. 961; XII, 12, p. 1019.

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things.” Rousseau adds emphatically in the first person singular: “I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.” For Rousseau, a “Christian republic,” with republic understood as the legitimate political community whose foundation is laid in the Contrat social, is a contradictio in adjecto.231 But the way back to the Religion du Citoyen, to the unification of theology and politics, to the belief in Gods who watch over the well-­being of the particular political com­munities, fight for them, and are revered for it by them, is blocked: “l’esprit du christianisme a tout gagné.” The Gods of the polis in their particularity and this-­worldly anchorage were not able to withstand the otherworldly God of Christianity, nor could they persist in the face of  Christianity’s universal claim to truth. They were vanquished and superseded. They died because they were no longer credible. The “religion of the citizen” perished with them. It was based on a lie which, recognized as a lie, lost its force. Moreover, it rested on an error. Precisely owing to its particularity, since it became “exclusive and tyrannical,” it made the people “bloodthirsty and intolerant” and kept it in a “natural state of  war” with other peoples, which was “very harmful” to its own security.232 All attempts to reestablish political unity post Christum natum by a political positivization of Christianity, or to force together the two heads of the eagle by making the prince the head of a national church, have failed. Their failures also testify that the spirit of Christianity has seized everything, has won everything, has infected everything.233 The laconically presented Religion civile brings out strikingly the aporia of post-­Christian politics.234 It stands in 231. Du contrat social IV, 8, 12n., 21–­28, pp. 463, 465–­67. Rousseau begins two of the thirty-­ five paragraphs with Je: paragraph 14, which concludes part I, and paragraph 23, which stands in the double center of part II. In paragraph 14 he comments on the question whether Christian­ ity is useful or harmful to the political community. In paragraph 23 he takes a stance on the assertion “that a people of true Christians would form the most perfect society imaginable.” 232. Du contrat social IV, 8, 4–­7, 11, 18–­19, pp. 460–­62, 464–­65. 233. Du contrat social IV, 8, 11–­13, pp. 462–­63. Of particular interest is Rousseau’s acknowledgment of the attempt of  Thomas Hobbes, whom he classifies, not without irony, in regard to his political use of the credal statement “that Jesus is the Christ,” among the “Christian authors”: “De tous les Auteurs Chrétiens le philosophe Hobbes est le seul qui ait bien vû le mal et le remede, qui ait osé proposer de réunir les deux têtes de l’aigle, et de tout ramener à l’unité politique, sans laquelle jamais Etat ni Gouvernement ne sera bien constitué. Mais il a dû voir que l’esprit dominateur du Christianisme étoit incompatible avec son sistême, et que l’intérêt du Prêtre seroit toujours plus fort que celui de l’Etat. Ce n’est pas tant ce qu’il y a d’horrible et de faux dans sa politique que ce qu’il y a de juste et de vrai qui l’a rendue odieuse.” IV, 8, 13, p. 463. 234. Apart from the title of the chapter, Rousseau uses the term Religion civile only once, in paragraph 33, p. 468.

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Rousseau’s typology in clear opposition to the religion du Prêtre, yet it corresponds neither to the Religion de l’homme nor to the Religion du Citoyen. Whether the sacralization of what is politically particular, which it lays down in general terms, promotes the identification of the citizen with the “common I” of the “body politic” is doubtful; that taken by itself it inspires love of the fatherland is not very probable. In a few hundred years the grand Législateur might find means and ways to give the Religion civile a particular shape and an effective character. Rousseau himself exercises the greatest restraint.235 He illuminates the problem. He points out that in Europe there is almost no people that would be suited in the foreseeable future for a législation in the demanding sense. And he asserts that the two words fatherland and citizen have to be stricken from modern languages.236 Émile neither has a fatherland nor is educated to become a citizen. He will be obedient to the laws of the state in which he resides. But he will not identify himself with any political community. He knows nothing of the “sanctity” of the Contrat social. His motto is: Ubi bene, ibi patria.237 The education he gets and the instruction he receives achieve their goal if they put him in the position to find his happiness in the accord with himself and in the self-­esteem that the moral life allows him. The Profession de foi shows the foundation in faith that he needs for this. The Profession de foi also supports, as Rousseau will later assert, “all the fundamental points” of the Religion civile.238 With the exception of the article that distinguishes the Religion civile from the Religion de l’homme and orients it toward the happiness of the political life. The Savoyard Vicar knows as little of the “sanctity” of the Contrat social as Émile needs to know of it. The citizen in the eminent sense has no place in the Vicar’s profession of 235. In the final version of the chapter, Rousseau drops all reference to a possible religion nationale or to a particular publicly shaped cult. In the Geneva manuscript he first wrote: “Cette profession de foi une fois établie, qu’elle se renouvelle tous les ans avec solennité et que cette solennité soit accompagnée d’un culte auguste et simple dont les magistrats soient seuls les ministres et qui réchauffe dans les cœurs l’amour de la patrie. Voilà tout ce qu’il est permis au souverain de prescrire quant à la religion.” Paragraph 24, p. 342; cf. paragraph 8, p. 338. Cf. Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, p. 973. 236. See Du contrat social II, 10, 6, p. 391. Émile I, p. 250: “Ces deux mots, patrie et citoyen, doivent être effacés des langues modernes. J’en sais bien la raison, mais je ne veux pas la dire; elle ne fait rien à mon sujet.” 237. See Émile IV, p. 681 and consider Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne II, 8, p. 963. 238. Lettres écrites de la montagne I, 29, p. 695.

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faith.239 When the priest advises the proselyte to return to his fatherland, he suggests to him that he dwell within the horizon of the familiar, stay true to his origin, to avoid foreign land and solitude. He does not put before him the existence of a citoyen. The Religion naturelle that the Vicar presents is intended for post-­Christian man.240 It accounts for the spirit of  Christianity just as it accounts for the objection of philosophy against faith in revelation. Yet nothing would be more false than to suppose that Natural Religion provides a synthesis or a higher third. The Natural Religion of the Vicar is as fundamentally different from the Natural Theology of  Rousseau as is the life of Émile from the life of the Promeneur Solitaire.

239. Citoyen never appears in the singular in the Profession de foi, in the plural only once, when the Vicar emphasizes that citizens should not be induced to disobey the existing laws: 175 (629). The Vicar presents his profession of faith on a hill outside the city, in natural surroundings: XIX (565). 240. The term Religion naturelle, which the student introduced and which Rousseau uses in his own name immediately after the end of the Profession de foi, is used four times by the Vicar. (Student, 107 (606); Vicar, 109 (607), 113 (609), 124 (613), 125 (614); Rousseau, Émile IV, p. 636.) Cf. Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, p. 996. The Natural Religion the Vicar presents was the utmost that Rousseau could ask of the citizens of  Geneva who supported him politically. In the same year in which Rousseau published the Émile, one of the most highly regarded leaders of the citoyens and bourgeois of Geneva, Jacques-­François Deluc, with whom Rousseau in the fall of 1754 had discussed the Dédicace of the Discours sur l’inégalité prior to its publication (see Dédicace, p. 40 ad locum), published an extensive writing that indicates the limits set politically to heterodoxy: Observations sur les savans incredules, et sur quelques-­uns de leurs écrits (Geneva: Avec permission, 1762). Deluc appeals to the Lettre à d’Alembert of the “vrai Chrétien Philo­ sophe Mr. Rousseau” ( p. 275), but is unsympathetic to the positive portrait of the atheist Wolmar that Rousseau painted in the Nouvelle Héloïse: “C’est donc en vain qu’on chercheroit à nous persuader qu’un homme vertueux à tous ègards, peut mèconnoître l’Auteur de son existence et de ses vertus: Aussi vois-­je avec peine mon Concitoyen Mr. Rousseau, nous dèpeindre comme tel ce Volmar, qui n’eut jamais d’original dans la Nature” (p. 407). In the Nouvelle Héloïse Julie writes about Wolmar: “Connoissez-­vous quelqu’un plus plein de sens et de raison que M. de Wolmar? quelcun plus sincere, plus droit, plus juste, plus vrai, moins livré à ses passions, qui ait plus à gagner à la justice divine et à l’immortalité de l’ame?” VI, 8, OCP II, p. 700.

Name Index

Abraham, 64 Adam, 83, 108 Aiguillon, Emmanuel-­Armand de Richelieu, Duc d’, 176n116 Alembert,  Jean Le Rond d’, 22–­23, 24–­ 25nn42–­43, 39n80, 43n95, 89–­91, 167n94 Amyot,  Jacques, 6, 11 Archimedes, 23n41 Aristides, 309 Aristotle, 88, 145, 145n29, 196n3 Augustine, 19, 19n32, 66–­67, 67n51 Augustus, 325n206 Bacon, Francis, 7, 87, 87–­88n41, 89–­90, 90n49, 253n48, 280n108, 325n206, 337n228 Barth, Karl, 333n223 Baruch, 107–­8, 107–­8n20 Bauhin,  Jean, 88n44 Bayle, Pierre, 253n48, 324, 324–­25n206, 327n210, 334, 335n225, 336 Beaulavon, Georges, 226n5, 281n109 Beaumont, Christophe de, 225n4 Benardete, Seth, 83n29, 254n52 Bensaude-­Vincent, Bernadette, 81n24

Bernardi, Bruno, 81n24, 226n5, 281n109 Bernays,  Jacob, 89n47 Binis, Abbé de, 147n34 Bossuet,  Jacques Bénigne, 298 Burgelin, Pierre, 229n13 Buttafoco, Matthieu, 132n64, 172–­73, 172n108, 173nn110–­11, 174n113 Caesar, 310n175, 325n206 Calvin,  John, 24n42, 156n56, 264n72, 315 Casaubon, Isaac, 149n42 Castex, Marie-­Madeleine, 13–­14n17 Cato, 310, 310–­11n175 Chardin,  Jean, 328–­29 Charron, Pierre, 288, 288n129 Choiseul, Étienne-­François, Duc de, 175–­76n116 Chopin, Frédéric, 115n32 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 252n47, 271n84 Circe, 83n29 Claparède, David, 293n133 Clarke, Samuel, 242–­43, 243n34 Columbus, Christopher, 77 Crispus, Q. Vibius, 149n42 Crogiez, Michèle, 14n17

342  Name Index Deleyre, Alexandre, 280n108, 325n206 Deluc,  Jacques-­François, 340n240 Derrida,  Jacques, 8n11 Descartes, René, 7, 12, 52n12, 89, 196n3, 240, 241 Diagoras, 18n25 Diderot, Denis, 22, 37, 37–­38nn77–­78, 43n95, 89–­90, 90n51, 93n60, 127, 127–­28n56, 129n58, 183, 185, 241n31, 249n39, 253n48 Diogenes, Laertius, 88n42 Diogenes of  Sinope, 119, 209 Domitian, 149n42 Du Peyrou, Pierre-­Alexandre, 13n17, 175n116, 205n22, 282n115 Dupin, Claude, 52 Dupin, Louise-­Marie-­Madeleine, 52 Eigeldinger, Frédéric-­S., xiii, 13–­14n17, 77n11 Eigeldinger, Marc, xiii, 13–­14n17 Eisen, 281n109 Euripides, 227n7 Faust, 123 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe, 49, 58n31 Fleury, Claude, 322n200 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouvier de, 149n44 Formey,   Jean-­Henri-­Samuel, 201n15 Francueil, Claude-­Louis Dupin de, 52 Gagnebin, Bernard, 4n1, 14n17, 87n40 Girardin, René-­Louis, Marquis de, 147n34 Glaucon, 308, 308n171 Goethe,  Johann Wolfgang von, 123, 123n47, 285n122 Gourevitch, Victor, xvi, 249n39 Gyges, 70, 170n102, 308n171

Heraclitus, 118 Hermes, 83n29 Herostratus, 33n62 Hippocrates, 90 Hobbes, Thomas, 18n25, 89, 338n233 Holbach, Paul Thiry d’, 89, 90n51 Homer, 83n29, 107n20, 249n39 Horace, 228n11 Houdetot, Élisabeth-­Sophie-­Françoise, Comtesse d’, 185 Hume, David, 293n133 Isaac, 64 Ishmael, 157n57 Jacob, 64 Jallabert,  Jean, 4n3 Jansen, Albert, 77n10 Jason, 110, 169 Jesus Christ, 292–­93n133, 300–­302, 300n151, 300–­301n153, 308–­10, 308n170, 309n172, 316n188, 334n224, 335n226, 336, 338n233 Jones,  James F., 19n30 Jupiter, 227n7 Jurieu, Pierre, 324n206 Juvenal, 149n42 Kant, Immanuel, xi Keith, George, 132n64 Kleinias, 224, 255n54 Kohler, Pierre, 99n2

La Fontaine,  Jean de, 38–­39n80, 107, 107n20 Launay, Michel, 14n17 La Vrillière, Duc de, 176n116 Leborque, Érik, 14n17 Leigh, Ralph A., 4n3 Leonides, 309 Leucippus, 18n25 Habakkuk, 107–­8, 108nn21–­22 Le Vasseur, Marie-­Thérèse, 108, 110, 185, Havens, George R., 310n174 185nn17–­18 Helvétius, Claude-­Adrien, 89, 92n57, 149n44, Linnaeus, Carol von, 75, 78, 106n19 254n51, 322n200 Locke,  John, 89, 292n133 Heracles, 169

Name Index  343 Lucretius, 118n35 Luther, Martin, 108n22 Lycurgus, 156n56, 157n57, 167n94 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 176n116 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 89, 156n56, 157n57, 192, 192n32, 337, 337n228 Malesherbes, Chrétien-­Guillaume de La­ moignon de, 52, 52n10, 186, 187n21 Marion, 160–­61, 161n71 Mary, 308, 308172 Masson, Pierre-­Maurice, 226n5, 229n13, 254n51, 280n108, 281n109, 308n172, 333–­ 34n223 Megillos, 224 Mellarède, Pierre Compte de, 312, 312n180 Minos, 156 Mohammed, 157n57, 226n7, 299, 301 Molière, 23 Montaigne, Michel de, 12, 18, 162, 203n18, 241n31, 257n58, 270n82 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 159 Montmollin, Frédéric-­Guillaume de, 77 Morellet, André, 305n163 Möser,  Justus, 330n217, 332n221 Moses, 82–­83, 108n22, 157n57, 209n130, 291, 301 Moultou, Guillaume, 106n17 Moultou, Paul, 13n17, 81n24, 282n115, 284n120 Murray,  Johann Andreas, 78 Néaulme,  Jean, 201n15 Nero, 201n15 Newton, Isaac, 7, 89 Nietzsche, Friedrich, v, x, xii, 119, 192n31, 195n1, 241n31, 334n224, 337 Numa, 156, 157n57 Orpheus, 222, 280, 280n108, 281n109, 335n225 Osmont, Robert, 115n31 Ovid, 45n100

Palais,  Jean-­Antoine, 147n34 Paoli, Pasquale, 172 Pascal, Blaise, 12 Paul, 67n51, 262, 262n68, 264n72, 307n169, 337n227 Phainarete, 308, 308n172 Pilate, Pontius, 103n11 Plato, 7–­8, 8nn9–­10, 30, 33n58, 44, 60, 82n26, 88, 93n60, 107, 107n20, 196n3, 224, 254–­56nn52–­56, 256, 260n63, 261n65, 263n70, 284n120, 296n141, 308, 308n171, 309n172 Pliny, 88n44 Plutarch, 6, 10–­11, 62–­63, 101n6, 147, 167n94, 253n48, 297n147 Pollio, Gaius Asinius, 228n11 Pompeius, 310n175 Pontedera, Giulio, 88n44 Prometheus, 2, 5–­7, 6n5, 6–­7n6, 11, 153, 188, 329 Pythagoras, 93n60 Racine,  Jean, 23, 107, 107–­8n20 Racine, Louis, 107, 107n20 Raymond, Marcel, xiii–­xiv, 4n1, 13–­14n17, 125n52 Regulus, Atilius, 271 Rey, Marc-­Michel, 201n15, 225n3 Robinson, 103 Roddier, Henri, xiii–­xiv, 14n17, 125n52, 181n8 Rousseau, Isaac, 170n105 Rozier, François, 147, 147n34 Sabundus, Raimundus, 257n58 Sacy, S. de, 14n17 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 192n31 Servet, Michel, 315 Shaftesbury, Anthony Earl of, 253n48 Silhouette, Étienne de, 335n225 Similis, 186–­87n21 Socrates, 8, 60, 119, 271, 308–­10, 308n170, 308–­9n172, 310–­11n175 Solon, 62, 164, 164n83

344  Name Index Sophronia, 163n75 Sophroniscus, 308, 308n172 Souchay,  Jean-­Baptiste, 280n108 Spink,  John Stephenson, xiii–­xiv, 13–­14n17, 187n21, 205n22 Spinoza, Benedictus de, 89, 243n34, 292n133, 293n134 Starobinski,  Jean, 163n75 Strauss, Leo, xi, 126n55, 165n86, 241n31, 251n45 Streckeisen-­Moultou, Guillaume, 106n17 Tacitus, 24–­25n42 Tasso, Torquato, 163n75 Thales, 93n60 Theophrastus, 83, 88, 88nn42–­44, 89n47, 92, 108 Theuth, 5, 7–­8, 8n11 Thomas Aquinas, 256–­57n58, 305n163 Toland,  John, 90n51

Tournefort,  Joseph Pitton de, 88n44 Trajan, 186–­87n21 Tronchin,  Jean-­Robert, 225n3 Vercellis, Thèrése, Comtesse de, 160 Vespasian, 181n6, 186, 187n21 Viridet, Marc, 225n3 Voltaire, François, 23, 24n42, 91, 243n34, 249n39, 310n174 Wagner, Sigmund von, 99n2 Warburton, William, 335–­36, 335n225 Warens, Françoise-­Louise-­Eléonore, 179–­87, 179n3 Warens, Sébastien-­Isaac de Loys, 179n3 Wielhorski, Michel, 18n25, 176n116 Wirz, Charles, 229n13 Xenocrates, 82n26 Xenophon, 50