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The Illusion of History
Time and the Radical Political Imagination
By Andrew R. Russ
The Catholic University of America Press
Copyright © 2013 The Catholic University of America Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8132-2005-5
Chapter One
Rousseau's Convoluted Personal Relation to Time
[t]he child does not explain the man but, perhaps, the man the child. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Origin of Speech
In studying the timelessness of Rousseau's political scheme, perhaps the most fertile starting point is Rousseau's vast autobiographical project. Not only does it furnish the investigator with many illuminating and disturbing bookmarks in his journey through life, it is also a rich pool of his personal attitudes to time. His desperate need to explain himself to his time, defend his past, to both create and annul his future, has left to history an awesome testament to self-understanding, or indeed self-deception. These works represent the headstone that Rousseau composed for himself. They are the legacy and memory he wished to bequeath to future reading and judging of his life and work. But most importantly, these literary testaments show a mind animated by the timeless while using various temporal measures, with various levels of success, to bring this atemporal state into being.
There are problems and reservations regarding this approach. Why begin with autobiographical works embarked on at the end of Rousseau's literary life, in a work concerned principally with the political and social works formulated earlier? What possible bearing could these later works have on the political, social, and philosophical timelessness already cast? What from the products of a man's later life can be isolated to throw light upon his development? One answer is to follow Rousseau's example and forage through his earliest making for the seed of his life. He himself pointed in this direction when he wrote, "I was almost born dead, and they had little hope of saving me. I brought with me the seed of a disorder which has grown stronger with the years." Certainly one legacy of Rousseau's ideas is the now popular assumption that one's life is shaped and formed in one's childhood. In his Confessions Rousseau scoured his life for the key to his woes, discovering the hypersensitive child to be the specter of his adult life. Rousseau considers his supposed uniqueness to be forged in youthful experience. Rousseau's educational novel Emile also bears witness to the belief that a child's experiences are the locus of its future path. Rousseau rebuked the thinkers of his day by saying, "We know nothing of childhood.... They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man." The modern obsession with discovering our nucleus within the explicitness of our infancy is pure Rousseau. Rousseau opened the Pandora's box of childhood, whose spillage seeped not only throughout the rest of his life, but through history itself. Indeed we will see that Rousseau is attempting, politically, nothing less than the rebirth of humanity itself. His philosophy is built on the promise and malleability of a society's regained childhood.
But perhaps for us the reverse is true, a reverse expressed by the quote at the beginning of this chapter. The man explains the child, and not the other way around. Could not the complex array of hopes, prayers, desires, fears, and resignations of adulthood provide richer illumination for a life than the unformed, unelaborated simplicities of the child? If we accept the direction of Rousseau's thinking, then his later work becomes detached from previous work. The three autobiographical writings would have little connection with the discourses or the social contract. There becomes nothing but a succession of events, each one pushing the next further from its origin—works divided by time contributing to the remoteness of their influence on each other, the progress of thought reaching no culmination and hence no ultimate explanation. If we reverse the investigation, however, we can give all of Rousseau's life and work a richer, stronger unity than the thin, impoverished unity that childhood affords it. The man looking back on his life provides a totality and comprehensiveness to that life, akin to a rebirth, that more profoundly illustrates his movements, motivations, and actions. In other words, in order to study how time and timelessness operate in a body of work, it is best to start from the work that encapsulates and recasts the times that man has lived. We must observe how time has coined this man. With this method there becomes a sense that each work anticipates the next, and that each work in some way completes the last, each text requiring the next. It is for this reason that we must begin with Rousseau's later attempts at autobiography. For only here can we view Rousseau's convoluted personal relationship to time.
Rousseau composed three important autobiographical works: The Confessions, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques—Dialogues, and Les Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire. In one of the more detailed explorations of Rousseau's autobiographical writings, Memory and Narrative, James Olney discusses the differing narrative structures of the three autobiographical works with relation to time. If the Confessions is a linear account of Rousseau's life, a narration, and the nature of the Dialogues is dialectic, or dialogue between Rousseau's perceived and true character, the Reveries is a circular work of self-circumscribed tranquility, or a meditation. Olney highlights the trilogistic nature of these three works to show how the whole movement is an attempt to transform the "opposition, conflict and violence of linear time and lived experience" into a timeless appreciation and escape into the eternal. For Olney, one work leads inevitably to the next as each attempt at autobiography is met with failure. The connectedness of the autobiographical project comes from attempting the same thing in three different manners. That same connecting theme is Rousseau's need to justify himself to others and ultimately himself. The autobiographies are hence also connected to his earlier work by being a response to the disdain, censure, spiteful pamphleteering, and burned effigies that work initiated. Olney's trilogistic argument is persuasive and helps us to map Rousseau's relation to time, rather than simply how he wished to portray himself to his audience.
Each autobiography is principally concerned with one aspect of time. The Confessions situates itself within Rousseau's past, while the Dialogues is most profoundly concerned with the future. Lastly, the Reveries is an exploration of the present of the instant. This approach involves the risk of imposing an overly rigid interpretation upon the texts, since they are all concerned with the triplicity of time. To suggest that each does not touch upon aspects of the past, present, and future of course is not true. But what is clear is that one dominant direction of time applies to each work and changes according to the success or failure of each work.
A Historiography of the Self? and The Solace of the Past
The beginning of the Confessions, just as of his lived life, begins with the promise and enthusiasm of a man newly introduced to his history and thereby reborn into time. The expectation and hope are palpable when he states unequivocally, "I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display myself to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself. Simply myself. I know my heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met." This buoyantly arrogant opening to an autobiography of unconcealed personal display presents to us the mood of one who wishes to be unfettered by time. The middle-aged man, giving himself the opportunity to live his life again through words, can think of himself as entirely unique to humanity. To be born again in the imagination and memory is to be filled to the brim with possibility and worth. This is an occasion to recast his life and effect a change in the public perception of his character. He is unique not only to his, but to all times. So too is his venture in characterizing his peerless originality. From the outset of the Confessions, Rousseau attempts to elevate himself out of time, both his own history by rewriting his life, and history in general by campaigning for his originality. However, by book 12 Rousseau is an empty shell destroyed by his reexperienced biography. The buoyant opening is deflated to a woeful despair.
Here begins the work of darkness in which I have been entombed for eight years past, without ever having been able, try as I might, to pierce its hideous obscurity. In the abyss of evil in which I am sunk I feel the weight of blows struck at me; I perceive the immediate instrument; but I can neither see the hand which directs it nor the means by which it works.
It is this profound change of attitude, not so startling, since it has taken hundreds of pages to come about, that gives us the clue to Rousseau's personal relation to time. The passage of time, real or reanimated, is a corrupting, destroying force he must escape. Once this is understood as a primary need for Rousseau, much of his work opens up as a myriad of attempts, failed and successful, to understand, harness, or flee time. From the height of the first position to the depths of the last, Rousseau's history is a sustained regression through the agency of time. And this mythical regression has its origin in his childhood.
Rousseau presents his early life as a utopian paradise, immersed in the anaesthetizing haze of the countryside. It is hard not to view it as an idyllic place before time, and forever only a sad but comforting memory for Rousseau. It has been observed that this time at Bossey is similar to the biblical Garden of Eden, where Rousseau's discovery of his taste for masochism corresponds to the Christian doctrine of the Fall. Contact with others dramatically shapes him, making him painfully aware of his lost innocence and virtue. This is the point where temporal descent begins.
It is this regret and remorse that gave rise to Rousseau's need to write his personal history in the first place. He wanted to realign and harness time in a more favorable reenactment. What makes the Confessions odd is the fact that Rousseau chose a literary vehicle such as the sequential life narrative, so shackled to a linear historical and temporal trajectory, to attempt an unraveling of its accumulated narrative and emotional weight. We should not underestimate Rousseau's concern and respect for the importance of showing his life as it unfolded in time. Rousseau did apply a historical methodology to the presentation of his life in the Confessions.
Commentators, concerned with the overwhelming assumption of Rousseau's lack of concern with time and history, have attempted to demonstrate Rousseau's adoption of some form of historical method. For example, Lionel Gossman writes, "I merely wish to emphasize, by examining his approach to the Confessions, that awareness of history is inseparable from Rousseau's thinking, that everything is understood by him in its historical being." Indeed, scholars like Gossman are right to emphasize Rousseau's historical outlook, as it is a method he employs not only in the Confessions, but also in the "Second Discourse on Inequality" and the writings on music and language. I do not doubt that Rousseau acknowledges the powerful medium of history in the shaping of not only our individual selves, but also our societies and institutions. But while historicity and temporality are considerable arrows in Rousseau's bow, their overemphasis by commentators tends to drown out a far more central aspect of Rousseau's thinking, an aspect that overturns Rousseau's credentials as a temporal thinker. The aspect that debunks Rousseau's use of the historical method as merely cosmetic and auxiliary is the constant reminder of his unchanging nature, or the constancy of his feelings. It would be more accurate to say, in a way denying neither the historical nor timeless concerns of Rousseau, that in the rush to ground things in a historical development and method he advances unjustifiably the aspects of constancy and eternity in his self, which are hence undisguised as the forefront of Rousseau's concern. The push to historicity advances the timeless.
Rousseau was an ardent believer in the natural goodness of man. It is a doctrine that is abundant in all of his work and shines in all of his most famous statements. The openings to both the Social Contract ("man is born free and everywhere he is in chains"), and Emile ("God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil"), convince us that a natural, unsullied goodness is the spring for Rousseau's imagination. It is a sentiment that suggests a sharp opposition between a natural goodness and its enemies, or the outside factors that corrupt its innocent probity. Such a division was not just a theoretical fissure for the purposes of social criticism, but was a manifestation of a deeply felt personal schism. Such was the strength of the conviction that the same creed, under a different guise, is to be found in the Confessions. The binary between goodness and corruption mutates into feeling and fact. Observe Rousseau's stated aim when he writes, "But I should not fulfil the aim of this book if I did not at the same time reveal my inner feelings." Rousseau's "inner feelings," or sentiments, are the real characters of his autobiographies. What is miraculous about the Confessions is the almost singular concern for divulging the feelings connected with events and facts to the almost complete overturning of those events and facts. Facts are Jean-Jacques's illusion; feelings are his truth. "I had no idea of the facts, but I was already familiar with every feeling. I had grasped nothing; I had sensed everything."
The disturbing machinations of the outside world become of little consequence when contrasted with the natural purity of one's vivid inner emotions, so shamefully neglected of serious account by the mechanistic philosophies of the day. Rousseau would balance this account by writing a confessional history of the unity of his feelings. Despite the disconcerted and contradictory picture we gain of Rousseau from his own actions and those directed toward him from others, all will be revealed and forgiven when Rousseau uncloaks the truth of his passions. In the outside world one's endeavors and actions become dispersed and corrupted, while in the soul the natural goodness of Rousseau's character is retained. By exposing the true feelings behind his actions, Rousseau had found the ultimate redemptive source: literary apologetic abundance. It is indubitable that this is the true narrative feature of the Confessions. Unconcerned with logic and reason, this is a subjective observation of the inner life, not an objective observation of outside reality. This powerful romantic drive behind the Confessions of course comes at the expense of facts. And while you cannot deny that the facts and events of Rousseau's life are the substance and structure of the Confessions, they are nearly always subordinated by the feelings that accompanied, caused, and rose from the ashes of those events.
This was seen clearly by Huntington Williams, who writes, "But the principle for selecting and ordering this material lies elsewhere, in the image of personal identity elaborated in the author's textual world, before the autobiography could begin. Although the image is aesthetic and fictional, it is whole and complete in a way which the actual autobiographer is not." Rousseau's perception of the settings, peoples, events, and actions is always presaged by, or filtered through, the artistic vision of inner harmony he has fashioned of and for himself. Whether it be Rousseau's abandonment of a friend in the throes of an epileptic fit, stealing apples from his master's larder, accusing a young girl of a crime he committed, exposing himself to ladies on the street, his opportunistic religious conversion, or forsaking his five children to the uncertainties of the foundling home, all of these tangible facts are explained away or justified by the nobility of his feelings. At the very least he attempts to garner sympathy from his readers through his gracious contrition and guilt. It is as if confessing these crimes is enough proof of his sterling character to overturn any doubts that the crimes themselves might throw upon the issue. By appealing to the inner core of his experience of events, Rousseau can rein in a life characterized by transition, disjunction, and movement by the stability and unity of his feelings. Of course these emotions can be as tumultuous and violent as the events they are connected to, suggesting that such unity of feeling is as illusory as any unity in real-world relations. But Rousseau views the real world with a distrust and suspicion of its value, while viewing his feelings as inherently good, unarguable, and truthful.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Illusion of History by Andrew R. Russ Copyright © 2013 by The Catholic University of America Press. Excerpted by permission of The Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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