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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2012
This article presents a reading of the Confessions as a spiritual drama. Rousseau tells the story of a man (himself) who, like the rest of civilized humanity, fell away from natural goodness as he was socialized. Yet unlike the rest of us, Rousseau managed to make at least a partial return to nature. In fact, the Confessions gives us two stories of return: one by the man whose life is recounted and one by the narrator who is doing the recounting. (These are of course the same man, presented in two aspects.) Yet the two stories share a common core: in each case the return occurs by means of a journey by the self to the self. This teaching regarding the sufficiency of the self has resonated with many, particularly in our own time: with Rousseau began the vindication of man as godlike not in his power but in his being.
1 Descartes, René, Discourse on Method, trans. Lafleur, Laurence J. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), 40 (AT VI:62)Google Scholar. Machiavelli launches the struggle for human sovereignty most strikingly in chapter 25 of The Prince, whose title indicates the theme: “How Much Fortune Can Do in Human Affairs, and in What Mode It Can Be Opposed.”
2 All page references to Rousseau's works are to The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Christopher Kelly et al., 13 vols. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990–). Rousseau's individual works will be identified by the following abbreviations (listed in order of appearance): Reveries = Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles; Confessions = The Confessions of J.-J. Rousseau, trans. Kelly; SC = On the Social Contract, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly; Emile = Emile, or On Education, trans. Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom; Mountain = Letters Written from the Mountain, trans. Christopher Kelly and Judith R. Bush; SD = Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall; NH = Julie, or the New Heloise, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché; Dialogues = Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly.
3 See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 1, chaps. 3 and 20.
4 The treatments of religion in the Social Contract and the Vicar's Profession in Emile are very different from one another. The former treats religion from a civil perspective, the latter from the standpoint of the individual—and that is only the first of the differences. Yet the two teachings can be seen as complementary parts of a single whole, albeit—as is so often the case with Rousseau—a complex and even paradoxical whole. In any case, the teaching Rousseau considered more relevant to modern man (i.e., man who is not a citizen of a virtuous republic) is the one conveyed in the Vicar's Profession. That teaching is echoed and defended in other works as well. See, for example, Julie's profession of faith in The New Heloise and Rousseau's discussions of the Vicar's Profession—in his own name—in the Reveries and Letters Written from the Mountain.
5 See Melzer, Arthur, “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 2 (1996): 344–60Google Scholar. Rousseau's critique of Christianity, on Melzer's reading, “takes the form of seven distinct, if interrelated, charges”: (1) “persecution and sectarian conflict”; (2) “the destruction of republican virtue”; (3) “the destruction of political unity”; (4) “clerical tyranny and personal dependence”; (5) “the weakening of morality”; (6) “the weakening of the family”; and (7) “the divided soul” (345–50). Melzer gives a superb account not only of Rousseau's critique of Christianity but of his explicit religious teaching as a whole as it is presented (predominantly) in Emile and the Social Contract. My own brief account of what I am calling Rousseau's “explicit religious teaching” is indebted to Melzer's analysis. Melzer does not treat the Confessions in his account of Rousseau's religious teaching.
6 Melzer, “Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment,” 355.
7 See, e.g., his Voltaire, 121: “I have suffered too much in this life not to expect another one.” Also see Reveries, 34 and Dialogues, 53.
8 The Vicar himself acknowledges the danger of wishful thinking, saying in response only that he would rather be led astray, if he must be led astray, by his own illusions than by someone else's lies (Emile, 269). In any event, there is no way to ensure that we won't be led astray. If sentiment is less than perfectly reliable as a pointer to the truth, so is our reason.
9 By the mid-eighteenth century Augustinian Christianity (using the term in its broadest compass) was besieged, to be sure. But it still prevailed in Europe—politically, ecclesiastically, and in the hearts of most who still professed religion. (Rousseau believed that the latter were few: “Religion, discredited in all places by philosophy, had lost its ascendency even among the people” [Mountain, 227].) He also suggested, however, that religious faith is natural to human beings and that it would therefore revive (Emile, 312–13; Reveries, 36–37; Dialogues, 241).
10 Just a little while ago I suggested that Rousseau's explicit religious teaching does not seem to presume a felt need for redemption. Yet now I am suggesting that, in the Confessions—i.e., with regard to himself (and other sensitive souls?)—Rousseau depicts just such a need as central to his experience of life.
11 Another likeness to Augustine is the parallel structures of the two Confessions—or rather, the near parallel structures, the “near” signifying Rousseau's purported correction of Augustine. See Hartle's, Ann outstanding study, The Modern Self in Rousseau's “Confessions”: A Reply to St. Augustine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), esp. 24–28.Google Scholar
12 In what follows I will not focus on the question of self-love—amour-propre versus amour de soi—but rather on what the answer to that question signifies: namely, dependence versus self-sufficiency, respectively. I have offered a lengthy treatment of the meaning of “nature” in Rousseau's thought, with special emphasis on the varieties of self-love, in Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
13 Melzer characterizes the Vicar's teaching as a call “to return to ourselves” (“The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment,” 352).
14 Rousseau's moments of greatest happiness and self-sufficiency find him living entirely in the present, free from hope and fear—and, at least in the later and most extensive episode, free from any acknowledged reliance on God. Might a belief in a divinely sanctioned moral order (i.e., the belief in the eventual triumph of justice) be a prerequisite for the self's ability to fulfill its spiritual needs for itself? Perhaps it is, though Rousseau gives no indication that I can see that he thinks it is. In his moments of spiritual self-sufficiency he seems less to have fulfilled moral needs than to have transcended them.
15 See Hartle, The Modern Self, 126.
16 See Hartle, The Modern Self, 136: “in The Confessions Rousseau shows us his return to the state of nature and the conditions for the possibility of that return” (emphasis in the original). Hartle focuses especially on what I am calling the story of Rousseau the narrator. The finest and most comprehensive reading of Jean-Jacques's story, in my view, is offered by Christopher Kelly, who sees the Confessions as a story that culminates in a kind of return to nature: “Particularly in Part One, the Confessions shows the unhealthy development of the passions in an individual who is given a defective education; in Part Two it shows how an extraordinary person comes to terms with, or even overcomes, his civilized corruption” (Rousseau's Exemplary Life: The “Confessions” as Political Philosophy [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987], 38–39)Google Scholar.
17 Both Kelly and Hartle highlight these features in their respective investigations of Jean-Jacques's happiness at Les Charmettes. See Kelly, Rousseau's Exemplary Life, 147–60 and 221, and Hartle, The Modern Self, 53–68.
18 That this description appears in the Reveries rather than the Confessions does not weaken its relevance. The Reveries, as Rousseau makes clear, is in many respects a continuation of the Confessions.
19 See Cooper, Laurence D., Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2008), 154–57Google Scholar.
20 Kelly, Rousseau's Exemplary Life, 247–48.
21 It was during the years 1756–1762, or roughly from ages 44 to 50, that Jean-Jacques was imbued with and elevated by a love of virtue (Confessions, 350). Also see Dialogues, 126–27.
22 I have offered fuller analyses elsewhere of the depiction of these experiences in the Reveries, along with reasons for deeming them a step above ordinary self-consciousness. See Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life, 175–80, and Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, 152–62.
23 Hartle, The Modern Self, 115.
24 This is the primary thrust of Kelly's argument—and of the title of his book on the Confessions: Rousseau's Exemplary Life.
25 Certainly this seems true of romantic love. Emile's awareness of his vulnerability, for example, lends his love for Sophie a “voluptuousness that nothing can disturb” (Emile, 446). I would suggest that friendship and civic relations too may be intensified and made more satisfying by awareness of vulnerability.
26 Melzer, “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment,” 358.
