‘The Lord God said: It
is not good for the man to be alone.’
‘The Lord God then called to the man and asked him: “Where are you?” He
answered, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so
I hid.”’
In the beginning of his Introduction
to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger approaches the question of faith by way
of the experience of doubt, of uncertainty, which he identifies as a
characteristic of our time.[1] In
the same post-war milieu the literary scholar and medical doctor Jean
Starobinski wrote a dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ratzinger discusses
the common difficulty facing believer and unbeliever today: neither one can
claim the certainty of “being possessed of full knowledge.” The believer “is
always threatened by the plunge into the
void,” while the unbeliever who “may assert that he is a pure positivist,
who has long left behind him supernatural temptations and weaknesses and now accepts only what is immediately certain,”
is also afflicted by doubt about whether positivism really has the last word….
In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man.”[2]
In addition to the shared concern for “immediate certainty,” engaging the
theologian’s contemporary voice is important because Starobinski’s interest is
“anthropological in the broadest sense of the word,” exactly like Rousseau’s,
and therefore both (Starobinski and Rousseau) are fundamentally religious
thinkers, in the Christian sense of that term with its Hellenic and Hebraic
roots.[3]
Starobinski observes that Rousseau’s oeuvre represents “a continuous treatise
on man”[4] as
opposed to a great philosophical system. And in this continuous treatise
Starobinski has rightly withheld from distilling a series of syllogisms or
Questions along the lines of Thomas’s great Summa
Theologica; rather he has identified a motif that helps to understand the
unity of Jean-Jacques’ search for freedom. That motif is transparency and obstruction. Thus, Rousseau’s fundamental concern
is with overcoming the media between the self and the other which prevent
certain, immediate knowledge.
In his multi-work treatise on man, Rousseau is a participant in a very
long tradition, and his concerns reflect his place in that tradition, his
proximity to and distance from other writers and other concerns. But the
fundamental questions are immediately recognizable: 1) the search for true knowledge,
which for Rousseau is characterized by immediacy;
2) the relationship between man and his neighbor, between I and thou; 3) the
place of God and of physis or kosmos. These three questions are
obviously interrelated, and the answers to them have ever played upon one
another, from Plato and Aristotle, through the Stoics, Augustine, Aquinas, and
down to Rousseau.
Starobinski begins be leading us (or by letting Rousseau lead us, in his
Confessions) to Rousseau’s earliest
memories, in order to introduce us to transparency and to the veil of
obstruction. At Bossey, Rousseau writes, he experienced a loss of transparency,
with implications for his relationship with Nature (physis), with reality
(kosmos), and with other persons, and, by the language he uses, we may suggest
that this veil also had implications indirectly for his relationship with God:
“From that moment paradise is
lost, for paradise was the state of transparent communication between mind and
mind, the conviction that total, reliable communication is possible.”[5]
The
allusion to paradise is telling: in the book of Genesis, paradise was the place
of the right ordering of God’s creation, with his plan for the human person in
his proper sphere. In Genesis, the fall of the man and the woman by their
disobedience leads to a rift between them and God (from whom they hide),
between one another (as they begin to hide their nakedness), and between them
and Nature (as they are cast out of the garden and forced to till the soil by
the sweat of the brow and to labor in great pain to deliver new life). The
experience of alienation expressed through the biblical language has begun for
Rousseau: “Before the self senses its distance from the world, it experiences
its distance from others.”[6]
Thus the motif of transparency is immediately followed with that of
obstruction—the veil—covering others, covering the world, covering oneself
through memory (as one’s innocence and happiness is lost to the past).[7]
By this notion of obstruction
Rousseau is engaged in a common theme. Morrison notes that Starobinski, making
use of the contrast between paraître and
être, appearance and being, is
drawing upon the tradition of phenomenology: Starobinski recognizes that
Rousseau’s thirst for true, immediate knowledge—particularly in regard to
nature, when he leaves the company of men for solitude and experiences a
lifting of the veil—is a reaching for being,
for fundamental reality and not merely for correct facts. Given Rousseau’s
milieu, this is an important point. The trajectory of the philosophic
“mythology”—Reason lifting the veil of superstition from man’s face, allowing
him to see true knowledge—involved a
prizing of knowledge of the natural world (consider the apotheosis of Newton or
the popularity of Franklin) and at the same time a dropping away of concern
with being as such, with the ground of all being. (I suppose in Aristotelian
terms, the final cause of the whole and of man fell away in favor of close
application of the first three causes). But Rousseau remained concerned with être; his moral education and political
philosophy are part of the treatise on man that consists in his
study—explicitly in his latter works—of himself.[8]
Starobinski identifies as the common feature across Rousseau’s works his goal
of a “restoration of transparency”.[9]
If Rousseau is set apart from the philosophes he lived among (broadly
speaking), what about the more distant voices in the tradition “on man”? The
removal of obstruction in the way of true knowledge is as old as Plato in the
Greek tradition (and as we have seen goes back to Genesis in the Hebrew tradition,
though in a covenantal rather than epistemological relation). It would seem
Rousseau shares in the platonic epistemological structure: he can see true
realities behind or above the level which the mass of mankind knows, and he
places great importance upon memory and distant origins of man, which is
reminiscent of platonic nostalgia. Moreover, his inner conviction, articulated
by his character Julie as immaterial, “immediate communication” with no need
for speech or writing (or even bodies), is suggestive of platonic
knowledge-as-participation. The connections are there perhaps, yet Rousseau’s
is not platonic philosophy: his are intensely personal, individual concerns
(think of his descriptions of the love affairs in his own life, and the
relationships in La nouvelle Héloïse).
Furthermore, for that classic figure of the sage, whether for Plato or
Aristotle or (especially) the Stoics, control of the passions and obedience to
Reason was essential.[10] Consider
Aristotle’s three kinds of life described in Book I of the Ethics: the life spent in pursuit of pleasure, the life of public
affairs, and the life of contemplation. All those who are ruled by their
emotions and have no self-control are “choosing the kind of life lived by
cattle.” Aristotle considers the vast majority of men to be “absolute slaves.”
If Rousseau also holds that men are everywhere in chains, the cause lies in
society itself, not in the common man’s ignorance of philosophy.
In fact, for Rousseau, emotions are
of entirely different import: “In these extraordinary moments immediate feeling
is immediately expression. To be moved and to display emotion are one and the
same.”[11] In
philosophizing itself, in making judgments, one participates in the veiling
rather than in unveiling. That is why for Rousseau childhood and origins are so
important. “Sensation is always correct,” and, with Condillac: “if error enters
in, it does so only insofar as we presume to judge.”[12]
It becomes clear thus that Rousseau
is a thinker who is firmly situated after
or within Christian thought, and also
that his position is closer to that of Augustine than that of Thomas Aquinas.
Rousseau’s concern with universal human dignity bear the mark of Christian
influence, yet his experience of alienation which is so fundamental for him is
strongly at odds with the great stability of Aquinas’s system. Indeed, it is
the confidence of scholastic (and
classical) thought in its own judgments which is so lacking in Rousseau. If
Aquinas distinguished between the rational and sensitive souls in sober
statement of man’s place at the summit of the material world, Rousseau is
confident in sensation and emotion, but distrusts ratio.
Rousseau is in a conundrum: he has
the same concern with être, but not
the same confidence in reaching it. Josef Pieper describes the
scholastic/classical position:
“The spiritual being is [in
Aquinas’s words] ‘capable of grasping the whole of being’… That is the
tradition of Western philosophy: to have spirit, or to be spirit, means to
exist in the midst of the whole of reality and before the whole of being… That
is what is meant by the proposition omnes
ens est verum (everything that is, is true)—though we have almost ceased to
understand it—and by the complementary proposition that being and truth are
interchangeable concepts. (What does truth mean, where things are concerned,
the truth of things?) ‘A thing is true’ means: it is known and knowable, known
to the absolute spirit, knowable to the spirit that is not absolute.”[13]
Starobinski
puts Rousseau’s goals thus: “To be oneself and to see the truth: he wants both,
and he wants each by means of the other.”[14]
The problem is that Rousseau is distrustful of communication itself, and
therefore of the means of knowing. Society did not see the truth of him, and
his own attempts through writing to convey himself fail as well (forcing him to
try again and again). He therefore withdraws from society.
In Rousseau’s final withdrawal to
inaction (as well as his request to be imprisoned) we are reminded of
comparisons: Albert Camus and his rebellion,
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and
Boethius and his consolation. His struggle to maintain authenticity is
intensely individualistic, always returning to himself and always questioning
his relationship with society as a whole and with other actual acquaintances.
Unlike Camus, his rebellion cannot involve actual brotherly charity. Unlike the
Underground Man, his isolation can achieve some measure of meaning and even of
freedom.[15]
But unlike Boethius, philosophizing can offer no remedy.
* * *
The religious element (especially the Fall) would seem to generalize
Rousseau’s strivings into an a-historical tradition of the essential condition
of man, and to some extent this is proper as such is the domain claimed by
philosophy in the broad sense in which Rousseau participated. But on the other
hand, Rousseau is asking timeless questions in a very particular time and
place. And to the extent which he critiqued the evils of history, which place
man “everywhere in chains,” he speaks to a particular experience of alienation and isolation in the midst even of society that is the condition of the
human person in the modern age. To the extent that he strongly criticized the
project of the philosophes, he
remains a defiant rebel today, as the iterations of the Enlightenment project
are continuously generated. In this way in particular, he speaks to the
post-modern doubt that characterized the milieu in which Starobinski worked and
in which Ratzinger wrote his Introduction.
Thus we return to the beginning: Christopher Bertram says that
Rousseau’s primary concern throughout is to preserve human freedom, yet he is
at the same time “consistently and overwhelmingly pessimistic that humanity
will escape from a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom.”[16]
As Starobinski well demonstrates, Rousseau’s pessimism was grounded for him in
the very experience of his own inability to convey his true self to others
immediately. But perhaps a path exists to break beyond Rousseau’s veiled “I”
(even if he himself never took that path). In his tales of the unveiling
statues (Galatea and the wicked idol), Rousseau provides the “initial gift,
given unconditionally” (of existence [Galatea] and truth [from Christ]).[17] But
does not that unconditional gift describe the place of each person—of Rousseau
himself? In contrast to the identity of man as having a freedom of unrestrained
volition which has been the achievement of the Enlightenment, this “givenness”
precedes the will in both the order of time and that of existence. Rémi Brague
has raised this point in the context of his call to return from Aristotle to
Plato and be confronted by ontological goodness. Brague asks, “How can I
tolerate not having created myself?...If and only if I come from some utterly
good principal”[18] The
soul of Descartes’s disembodied ego may be faced with insurmountable isolation,
obstructed by a veil that may hide nothing at all. But that is not in fact the
condition in which man finds himself. Man is from first to last in relationship.
In this way, Rousseau is closer to Augustine than to Aquinas. At the
time of his conversion, Augustine looks for God along the path of (platonic)
philosophy, in his dialogic Soliloquia.
How can I know that I know God? But much later, in his own Confessiones, Augustine reveals to us one side of his cor ad cor loquitor with God. Less Greek
and more biblical, Augustine is in a covenantal relationship rather than an
analytic epistemological act: You
have made me for yourself. Though the idea of personal relationship to God remains
at most in the background in Rousseau, inter-personal communion, communion personarum, does in fact arise
as at least an ideal of overcoming the obstruction. Rousseau, then, for all his
pessimism, is not a nihilist; there really is être behind the paraître,
and the way to reach it, as for Augustine, is through love. And so we return to
the milieu of Starobinski and of Ratzinger (perhaps not so different from our
own today) in the relevance of Rousseau’s thought. Ratzinger suggests that the
article of the creed that “expresses the unparalleled experience of our age” is
the descent into hell—the absence of God. This absence is for Rousseau the very
experience of human beings in their condition of living under a veil and
participating in the covering over of transparency. But perhaps Rousseau, in
his internal convictions, hinted at an Augustinian path beyond doubt through
love:
“God has drawn a veil across his
face, but Julie penetrates the veil that separates matter from spirit, life
from death.”[19]
Works Cited
Aristotle. Ethics. In The Philosophy of
Aristotle. Trans. J.L. Creed and A.E. Wardman. New York, NY: Signet
Classics, 2003.
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Baltimore, MD: Penguin
Classics, 1968.
——. Soliloquies. Trans. C.C. Starbuck. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol.
7. Ed. Philip Schaff.(Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing
Co., 1888.) Rev. and ed. for New Advent by Kevin Knight. .
Brague, Rémi. “Necessity of the Good,”
in First Things No. 250 (Feb 2014):
47-52.
Pieper, Josef. Liesure the Basis of Culture. Trans. Alexander Dru. London,
England: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1952.
Ratzinger, Joseph. Introduction to Christianity. San
Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2004.
Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
[1] He wrote this book in 1967.
[2] Ratzinger, 45 (emphasis
mine).
[3] Starobinski, xxxiv.
[4] Starobinski, 273.
[5] Starobinski, 8.
[6] Starobinski, 10.
[7] Starobinski, 11-12.
[8] “Rousseau was totally
preoccupied with one affaire: his own” (Starobinski, 22).
[9] Starobinski, 13.
[10] Aristotle, Ethics I, 317.
[11] Starobinski, 138.
[12] Starobinski, 26.
[13] Joseph Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture , 115-116.
[14] Starobinski, 80.
[15] “Rousseau, unlike most
previous moralists, is not content merely to criticize external things: he
incriminates the external in his very definition of evil. This condemnation is
merely the counterpart of an exculpation that claims, once and for all, to save
man’s inner essence” (Starobinski, 20).
[16] Bertram, Christopher, “Jean-Jacques
Rousseau,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
.
[17] Starobinski, 78-79.
[18] Rémi Brague, “Necessity of the
Good,” in First Things No. 250 (Feb
2014), 52.
[19] Starobinski, 118. It is true
that Starobinski reads this as a “triumph of the veil” in the inevitability of
death. But may one not question his reading of the gaze of the Judge (God) and
his opposition between community and salvation? For Augustine and Aquinas, and
perhaps also for Rousseau, to the extent that he received the Christian
tradition, the gaze of the beatific vision is
salvation is communion. As John
has it, “I and the Father are one”
and “If you remain in my word…, you will
know the truth, and the truth will
set you free” and “this is eternal life: that they know you” (10:30, 8:13, 17:3).
