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

By Heinrich Meier

On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life presents Heinrich Meier’s confrontation with Rousseau’s Rêveries, the philosopher’s most beautiful and daring work, as well as his last and least understood. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of study of Rousseau, Meier unfolds his stunningly original interpretation in two parts. 
           
The first part of On the Happiness of the Philosophic Life approaches the Rêveries not as another autobiographical text in the tradition of the Confessions and the Dialogues, but as a reflection on the philosophic life and the distinctive happiness it provides. The second turns to a detailed analysis of a work referred to in the Rêveries, the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” which triggered Rousseau’s political persecution when it was originally published as part of Émile.  In his examination of this most controversial of Rousseau’s writings, which aims to lay the foundations for a successful nonphilosophic life, Meier brings to light the differences between natural religion as expressed by the Vicar and Rousseau’s natural theology. Together, the two reciprocally illuminating parts of this study provide an indispensable guide to Rousseau and to the understanding of the nature of the philosophic life.

“[A] dense but precise and enthralling analysis.”—New Yorker
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2016
• ISBN: 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 Books

Heinrich Meier

Translated by Robert Berman

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

HEINRICH MEIER 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.

ROBERT BERMAN 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?

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Ecce homo

Contents

Preface

Preface to the American Edition

Note on Citations

Translator’s Note and Acknowledgments

First Book

I. The Philosopher among Nonphilosophers

II. Faith

III. Nature

IV. Beisichselbstsein

V. Politics

VI. Love

VII. Self-Knowledge

Second Book

Rousseau and the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar

Name Index

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 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 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, 6th 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. 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, 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 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.

* First Book *

Frontispiece of Discours sur les sciences et les arts from 1750

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 areintimately 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. 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 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 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 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 men⁷—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 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 inventor 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 enigmatic 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 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 project, to describe l’état habituel of his soul in the strangest position inwhich 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: 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 strangestposition in which a mortal could ever find himself, the scientific observationand 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 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 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 explicitly sets the Rêveries apart from Montaignes’s Essais, which fully in opposition 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,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,