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The Music of Reason in Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2012

Michael Davis
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Abstract

The argument of Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages is intimately connected with that of his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men. The origin of political society is inseparable from the origin of language, which, in turn, is inseparable from the origin of reason. That so much of the Essay is concerned with music leads us to wonder what music has to do with reason, politics, and language. These two books share what is a regular feature of Rousseau's manner of writing—presenting what seem to be logical foundations as temporal origins. In emphasizing the priority of melody to harmony in music, the Essay on the Origin of Languages articulates the necessarily melodic, and hence temporal, character of thinking, which proves to be the key to understanding both why Rousseau must write as he does and what it means for language to be musical.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , Summer 2012 , pp. 389 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2012

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References

1 I have written on the structure of the whole of the Essay elsewhere (“The Essence of Babel: Rousseau on the Origin of Languages,” in The Companionship of Books: Essays in Honor of Laurence Berns, ed. Udoff, Alan, Portnoff, Sharon, and Yaffe, Martin D. [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012], 229–49Google Scholar); my intention here is to treat the account of music.

2 For these references see Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Launay, Michel, vol. 2 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971), 219 and 254–57Google Scholar. The translations from the Discours are my own.

3 See Davis, Michael, The Autobiography of Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 89–92Google Scholar.

4 For just a few of the many examples see Œuvres complètes 2:222, 230, 239, 242 (these are in the Second Discourse) and 523, 536, 563 (these are in On the Social Contract). Consider also my Autobiography of Philosophy, 183 and Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2006), 109–12Google Scholar.

5 See Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, 113–29 and 169–88.

6 Consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, bk. 1, paras. 150–56, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Launay, vol. 3 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971), 45–46Google Scholar.

7 Unless otherwise indicated, parenthetical references are by chapter and paragraph number to Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Essai sur l'origine des langues, ed. Starobinski, Jean (Paris: Gallimard, 1990)Google Scholar. All translations are my own.

8 See Davis, “The Essence of Babel,” 238–44.

9 In, for example, Rousseau's Examen de deux principes, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Gagnebin, B. and Raymond, M., vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 355–59Google Scholar; the entries on “Harmonie,” on “Aristoxéniens,” and on “Pythagoréciens” in his Dictionnaire de musique (http://www.archive.org/details/dictionnairedemu00rous); and Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (Paris: Flammarion, 1967), pt. 1, letter XLVIII, pp. 85–88.

10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, sec. 16, para. 3, in Werke in Drei Bänden, ed. Schlechta, Karl (Hanser Verlag: Munich, 1966), 1:90Google Scholar. The translation is my own.

11 Letter to d'Alembert, June 26, 1751, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Gagnebin, B. and Raymond, M., vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 160Google Scholar.

12 What is at issue in the sentence is revealed by Rousseau's intentionally ambiguous use of the word “him,” which seems to apply now to the one recognized and now the one recognizing. It calls our attention to what ties the two together. Both are indirect objects—beings to whom things happen. They are only indirectly objects, for their similarity really consists in being subjects.

13 Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Launay, 2:248. The translations from the Discours are my own.

14 Rousseau, of course, makes this point in a note and relies on an external authority—Buffon—to make the argument for the primacy of inner sense.

15 Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Launay, 2:208.

16 Ibid., 2:248.

17 Ibid., 2:209.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 2:211.

20 This melodic character of thought has something to do with why Aristotle makes story or plot the soul of tragedy (Poetics 1450a37–38) as well as with the fact that Plato wrote dialogues. The goal of thinking is to articulate the connections among things, but these connections show themselves fully only by the ways in which things invite, or even seduce, us into thinking other things. Oedipus's error at the end of Oedipus Tyrannus has, as Sophocles points out in his language, the same structure as his initial error. He unwittingly seeks to replace his father and become his own cause. Yet one does not understand the play until one works through what the difference is between the two moments and sees precisely how one leads to the other.