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A Provisional Reading of Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2012

Victor Gourevitch
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Abstract

Rousseau speaks of his last work, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as an informal record of conversations of his soul with itself in its quest for his—our—naturel purged of artifice and convention. In the course of these conversations he addresses many of the problems that he explores in his other writings: man's place in the scheme of things, hence God, divine justice, immortality; freedom; the contrasts between the active, citizen life and the circumscribed, solitary life; what we owe to our fellows and what we owe to ourselves; amour-propre, shame, and amour de soi; the conditions for individual happiness, its kinds, and how they might (or might not) compose with public happiness. However, in the Reveries he addresses these problems from an explicitly nonpolitical perspective. While he says that he did not reduce his reflections—meditations, reveries—about them to a system, his account of them is remarkably comprehensive and carefully crafted.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , Summer 2012 , pp. 489 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2012

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References

1 All otherwise unidentified page references in parentheses are to the edition of the Reveries in volume 1 of the Pléiade Rousseau, Œuvres complètes (hereafter OC), ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1995); to Emile in OC, vol. 4; to Social Contract (SC) by book, chapter, and paragraph; to the Essay on the Origin of Languages (EOL) by chapter and paragraph. Translations are my own.

On rêverie very generally, see M. Raymond's introduction in OC, 1:lxxxvi–lxxxviii. On an earlier occasion Raymond had noted that Descartes spoke of his Meditations as his “reveries” in two letters to Huygens: 1 June 1639 and 12 November 1640 (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La quête de soi et la rêverie [Paris: Corti, 1962], 162–63)Google Scholar. Montaigne dismisses those who disparage the quest for self-knowledge as “revery and idleness” (Essais II.6 i.f.) and speaks of his own “resverie de me mesler d'escrire” (II.8 i.p.). Diderot had initially called “reveries” the conjectures that became his Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature (Oeuvres complètes, ed. Varloot, J. and Dieckmann, H. [Paris: Hermann, 1981], 9:49nGoogle Scholar. Sorbière, in the Epistle Dedicatory to his 1649 French translation of Hobbes's De cive, had expressed his preference for “the reveries of Hobbes, Gassendi and Descartes” to the more serious thoughts of some other philosophers. Rousseau had spoken of “the dangerous reveries of such men as Hobbes and Spinoza” in his First Discourse (OC, 3:28; see also OC, 1:1150); in a letter to Voltaire (10 September 1755) he had referred to his Second Discourse as his “sad reveries” (OC, 3:226). The term traditionally makes what is being said appear more innocuous than it is: see Friedrich, Hugo, Montaigne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 26–27Google Scholar.

On the work as a whole and rêverie in particular, see Meier's, Heinrich searching Über das Glück des philosophischen Lebens: Reflexionen zu Rousseaus “Rêveries” (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Dédomagement(s): 996, 1002, 1019, 1020, 1021, 1047, 1088, 1089, 1096, 1081.

3 Cf. “But I do not yet know sufficiently clearly what I, myself, am” (Descartes, Méditations II [AT VII 25]); the Emile's Savoyard Vicar asks, “Who am I?” (OC, 4:570; Rousseau, J.-J., Emile, or On Education, trans. Bloom, Allan [New York: Basic Books, 1979], 270)Google Scholar.

4 Plato, Theaetetus 189e; Sophist 263e.

5 Rousseau does not consistently distinguish between “reflect,” “think,” “meditate,” “contemplate,” and “revery”: 999–1000, 1004.

6 “Insoluble objections” is Bayle's expression: e.g., Dictionnaire, Éclaircissement II, “Sur les Manichéens” (4th ed., 1730), IV 627; see Leibniz, Théodicée, Discours sur la conformité, §§ 24, 27.

7 Juvenal, Satires 4.91; Rousseau, À M. d'Alembert, in OC, 5:120n; Lettres écrites de la montagne, epigraph.

8 Fontenelle, cited by Helvétius in a passage commented on by Rousseau in Notes sur “De l'Esprit” de Helvétius, in OC, 4:1126; see also Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis III.1.ix(1); Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens IV.1.ix–xxi, with Barbeyrac's important note on IV.1.vii. Pufendorf correctly points out that on this definition Aristotle's categorical condemnation of lying (Nicomachean Ethics IV.7 1127a29–30) is a tautology—forbidden falsehoods are forbidden—and not a blanket rejection of falsehood.

9 True as well as false is not said of propositions only: Hamlet I.iii.78–80.

10 See Lucretius, De rerum natura III.124–29, 215, 241–57; Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 6, on “vitall motions”; Rousseau, Letter to Voltaire, para. 11, in OC, 3:1063 (see my “Rousseau on Providence,” Review of Metaphysics 53, no. 3 [2000]: 593–94 = “The Religious Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Riley, P. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 208)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and consider Rousseau's regaining consciousness after being run over by the Great Dane (OC, 1:1005).

11 “Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen / Verweile doch! Du bist so schön! / Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen / Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!” (Faust I, lines 1699–1702; see 1851–67 and Faust II, lines 11581–86).

12 About “However,” Davis, Michael, The Autobiography of Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 183Google Scholar. About “supreme felicity,” the Savoyard Vicar exclaims near the end of his Profession of Faith: “Source of justice and truth, merciful and good God! In my trust in you, the supreme wish of my heart is that your will be done. In joining my will to yours … I believe that I partake betimes [d'avance] of the supreme felicity that is its reward” (Emile, 605 [294 Bloom]). St. Preux writes in an early letter that “a sensitive soul will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is human; his heart and his reason will forever be at war” (La Nouvelle Héloïse I.xxxvi, in OC, 2:89). “I sighed more than ever after the sweet quietude of mind and of body which I had coveted so much and to which my heart had restricted its supreme felicity once it had recovered from the chimeras of love and friendship” (Confessions, 650). “All our projects for felicity in this life are chimeras” (Reveries, 1085).

13 See Rousseau, “Last Reply,” para. 3 (OC, 3:72–73); Second Discourse, note X, para. 14 (OC, 3:207–8).

14 Second Discourse, Epistle Dedicatory, para. 22 (OC, 3:120–21); “the yoke of public felicity”: SC II.7.xi–xii, III.6.iv, IV.8.xxv; see Plato, Republic 497a.

15 First Discourse, para. 39; Reveries, 1059 and var. (b).

16 See also Second Discourse, Exordium, para. 7; Dialogues, in OC, 1:833; Fragments de Botanique, in OC, 4:1250.

17 1064–65; consider Second Discourse, epigraph; Preface, para. 6; note XII, para. 4.

18 “It were better to credit the myths regarding the gods than be enslaved by the physicists' fate; for the first leaves the hope that we may sway the gods by honoring them, while the other is inexorable necessity” (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus [Diogenes Laertius, Lives 10.134]; see Plutarch, Nicias 23.5).

19 “In all evils (maux) that befall us we look to the intention more than to the effect. … Material pain is what one feels least in the blows of fortune, and when unfortunate people do not know whom to blame for their miseries they blame destiny which they personify and endow with eyes and intelligence with which deliberately to torment them. Thus a gambler distraught by his losses grows enraged without knowing against whom. He imagines a fate (sort) that deliberately sets out to torment him and, finding fuel for his anger, gets wrought up and infuriated at the enemy he created for himself. The wise man … feels only the material impact of the evil of which he is a victim, and while the blows that strike him may hurt his person, none reaches his heart” (1078 and var. (a); 1029). See Second Discourse II, para. 57; Dialogues, 669; Cicero, De finibus I.xii.40–46 ; Spinoza, Ethics I, Appendix.

20 “I was made to live” (1004 with nn.); “living is the craft [le métier] I want to teach him,” i.e., Emile (Emile, 521–22, 543, 253); “My craft [métier] and my art is living” (Montaigne, Essais II.6); wisdom as the art of living, ars vivendi (Torquatus the Epicurean in Cicero, De finibus I.xiii.42).

21 More fully, Sacks, Robert, The Book of Job with Commentary (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 297–99Google Scholar.