Who was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and why did he turn against civilisation?

In the first of three Beyond the Text episodes on Rousseau, Samuel Woodall explores the life behind the arguments: the Confessions, Geneva, Madame de Warens, Paris and Diderot, the First Discourse, amour-propre, and the troubled relationship with David Hume.

Jack Thomson is unwell, so Samuel presents this opening episode solo. The Rousseau series continues on Wednesday.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
01:01 The Confessions
02:51 Geneva and Rousseau's early life
05:25 Apprenticeship
06:49 Madame de Warens
08:43 Les Charmettes
09:59 Paris and Diderot
11:38 Children and contradictions
12:36 The First Discourse
14:39 Civilisation
15:21 Amour-propre
16:34 Exile and David Hume
18:29 Conclusion

Explore Beyond the Text: https://beyondthetext.co.uk
The Intellectual Historian: https://theintellectualhistorian.com

READING
Rousseau, Confessions: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3913
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/

Transcript

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Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Beyond the Text. This is the first of three episodes on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Before we move in the next episode to the discourse on inequality and the social contract, and then to Emile and Julie, I want to begin with the man himself, that is unusually important with Rousseau, because he never allows us to separate the argument from the life for very long. Rousseau presents himself not merely as the author of a philosophy, but also almost as a piece of evidence. He asks what civilization does to a human being, and then he places his own longings, humiliations, friendships, quarrels, and failures before us, as part of the answer. This is very much the kind of Lacaprian intellectual history that I idolise in many ways, and you will have noticed that I'm doing this on my own. It's not because Jack's been scared off, he's unfortunately unwell. So welcome to the Beyond the Text, just solo with me, Samuel Woodall.

The Confessions

SPEAKER_00 1:01

The best entrance is the extraordinary opening of the Confessions, where Rousseau declares, I mean to present my fellow mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature, and this man shall be myself. That is not a modest beginning. It is a claim to originality, but also to complete exposure. Rousseau wants to show a whole self, including what is petty, ridiculous, or shameful. The confessions were written chiefly between 1765 and 1770. They were published only after his death in two instalments, in 1782 and 1789. So we should remember that this is an older Rousseau arranging the meaning of his life in retrospect. It is therefore not a neutral archive. Rousseau openly admits that memory may rearrange events. Now, Le Capra says something along these lines in his preface to Sartre that actually these kind of ego documents, these kind of, you know, self-modeled forms of writing are actually the worst way of understanding a thinker. I had an interesting discussion with Jack and Dr. Michael Green that will be coming out on Sunday on ego documents in relation to Rapandatoira, the focus of my PhD, and you can catch that at 10am on Sunday. But his more defensible claim is narrower for Russo. I cannot be deceived in what I have felt. That sentence gives us the method of the book. The chronology can wobble. But the felt truth, shame, tenderness, and resentment, and the hunger to be understood, is offered as the real subject, and whether it's being made up or not, even a little bit of sort of, you know, falsity and fabrication can give us some indication of the character of the individual we're dealing with.

Geneva and early life

SPEAKER_00 2:51

So into the content. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva on the 28th of June 1712. Geneva was not simply a Swiss city in the modern sense. It was an independent Calvinist republic, with a strong civic identity and a sharply stratified political order. Rousseau's father, Isaac, was a watchmaker and possessed the status of citizen. That mattered, it gave the family membership in the Republic's privileged political body, even if they were not rich. His mother, Suzanne Bernard, died nine days after Rousseau's birth. Rousseau later attached intense emotional weight to this fact. His birth and his mother's death were joined from the beginning. His father brought him up for roughly the first ten years of his life. And father and son read romances and crucially Plutarch's Lives, something I think Jack has come across. He'll have to have a look at that in the next session. Plutarch supplied stories of ancient Republican virtues, sacrificed and citizenship. Rousseau's later political imagination, Sparta, Rome, civic freedom and the corruption of luxury, has one of its roots in these childhood evenings. In 1722, when Rousseau was ten, his father famously quarrelled with a man of higher social standing, I think on the steps of the church in Geneva, and had to flee Geneva rather than submit to the judgment that was cast on him. So young Jean Jacques was sent away to Bosse, near the city, to live with a Protestant minister. The sequence is worth noticing the loss of mother, disappearance of father, removal from the city, the future theorist of belonging, began as a repeatedly displaced child. There is another point about Geneva worth keeping in view, its republican language. Sounded egalitarian, but political rights were graded. Citizens and their descendants, the bourgeois, enjoyed privileges denied to residents and natives without the same status. Rousseau therefore grew up with both sides of republicanism, the pride of belonging to a self-governing community, an independent community, a republic, and the knowledge that a community can draw hard lines around who properly belongs in it. So making it clear who is part of the social contract and who is not. Later, when he asks what makes a legitimate people, this is not an abstract question imported from nowhere, we can see its beginnings here.

Apprenticeship

SPEAKER_00 5:25

In 1724, Rousseau was briefly apprenticed to a clerk, and in 1725 to an engraver, these sort of more artisanal things we associate with Switzerland. He found the second master harsh, though. Rousseau later describes petty thefts, punishments, concealment, and the gradual formation of a divided self. The private person and the public mask. That experience mattered because his criticism of society is not only about palaces and governments, it's about how dependence on another person's will teach us to hide these things away, these truths, these feelings, these emotions. On the 14th of March in 1728, not yet 16, Rousseau returned late from a walk and found Geneva's gate shut to him. Instead of waiting to be readmitted like any of us would, even if we'd left our keys before going home to our parents after a night owl, he left. That almost theatrical exit turned a watchmaker's son into a wanderer. It also created a lasting paradox. Rousseau remained emotionally attached to Geneva, his birthplace, this loving sort of element of the Republic, and proudly used the title Citizen of Geneva, but yet he spent most of his adult life outside of Geneva. And actually, it doesn't go well in Geneva later on when his books are published, if we're being totally honest.

Madame de Warens

SPEAKER_00 6:49

So soon afterwards on his wanderings, he met Francois Louis de Warren, usually called Madame de Warren. She was about thirteen years older than him, a convert to Catholicism, and an agent of sorts in the conversion network supported by the Region of Savoy. Rousseau called her Mamon, mother. She became patron, teacher, surrogate mother, and eventually even a lover. These kind of prominent French figures, eh? Macron, Rousseau, there's something, something in the water of all these great political thinkers. The combination tells us something about the blurred emotional worlds Rousseau inhabited. She sent him to Turin. In April 1728, he converted from Calvinism to Catholicism. For a Genevan citizen this was not merely a change of private belief. Religion and civic identity were connected, and the conversion cost him his Genevan citizenship until he later returned to the Reformed faith. While serving in a household at Turin, he stole a ribbon. A trivial, trifling thing, as far as we're concerned. When it was discovered, he accused a young servant named Marion. In the confessions he says, I accused her with doing what I meant to have done. Marion was dismissed and disappears from the record. Rousseau's account is powerful because he does not excuse this act. He says Shay made him lie. He accused her because in front of others confession felt unbearable. This tiny episode contains a large part of Rousseau's philosophy. The original wrong is bad enough, but public judgment intensifies it. The need to manage appearances defeats ordinary sympathy. Civilized man does not merely want things, he wants to control what other people think he is. So by 1731, Rousseau had returned to Madame Doroyon at Chambéry.

Les Charmettes

SPEAKER_00 8:43

Through much of the 1730s, he lived in a household, especially at Les Charmettes, outside the town. This was his great period of self-education. He read philosophy, history, mathematics, theology, and music, these quintessential kind of enlightenment, you know, ideas of what an Enlightenment person would be, an Enlightenment philosoph, studying all the arts, the liberal arts, the culture, immersing oneself in it. He never followed the conventional route though through a university, and that outsider status was intellectually productive for him. It freed him from some academic habits, but it also contributed to his defensiveness around recognized experts. We hate experts, don't we, in this modern world, apparently. Music was not a side interest. Rousseau composed, wrote entries on music for the Encyclopedie, and argued fiercely about French and Italian styles. In 1740, he worked as a tutor in Lyon. His educational failures there later led to his Book Emile, where he would imagine education on a far grander and more controlled scale. And the music is beautiful. Le Divin de Village is a gorgeous piece. There's lots of criticism because it's he copying Italian styles of opera and things like this, but it was gorgeous, so I'd very much recommend a recommend a listen. In

Paris and Diderot

SPEAKER_00 9:59

1742, Rousseau arrived in Paris with a proposed system of musical notation using numbers. He presented it to the Academy of Sciences. The system was not adopted. The episode is characteristic. He enters the capital, convinced he has transformative ideas, encounters established judgment, these people who have been to university have this kind of learned attitude, and experiences rejection as both intellectual and personal. He nevertheless entered the world of the philosophs now. He defended Denis Diderot and contributed to the Encyclopédie. In 1743 and 1744 he served as a secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. There he saw diplomatic hierarchy at close range and concluded that political office and social rank did not reliably correspond to merit. The scale of the Encyclopédie project helps us see the world Rousseau was joining. Under Diderot and Dalambert, its original edition eventually ran to 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates. Published between 1751 and 1772. So long innings in terms of a publication of this work because it encompassed everything again associated with the Enlightenment and this expansion of epistemology, this expansion of knowledge. It aimed to collect human knowledge and make reason publicly useful. Rousseau was therefore not criticizing the Enlightenment from a position of ignorance. He worked inside one of its defining enterprises, then asked whether the increase of knowledge necessarily produced better human beings.

Children and contradictions

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Back in Paris in 1745, he began his lifelong relationship with Therese Lavasseur, a laundry maid. Rousseau says that they had five children and that each was sent to the Paris Founding Hospital. Survival rates in such institutions were appalling. My friend Derek Van Voorst has written on the infanticide levels in France, and it is pretty dreadful. And the decision has always shadowed the author, having later written on education himself. And his influential books about the care of children, whether it be Emile or Julie. We should not soften the contradiction. Rousseau's life is philosophically valuable partly because it refuses to be morally tidy. Again, this sort of intellectual history sense in La Caprian terms of coherence. Why do we need to see coherence? Why do we always seek coherence? A myth of coherence in the Cambridge school kind of vein.

The First Discourse

SPEAKER_00 12:36

The decisive intellectual event came in 1749. Diderot had been imprisoned in Vincennes, and Rousseau walked out from Paris to visit him. On the way, he read the prize question announced by the Academy of Dijon. Had the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals, so this idea that the modernity was returning to these great ancient ways of investigating science and the arts and really focusing on it now that we'd got into the eighteenth century. The respectable Enlightenment answer seemed obvious. Knowledge improves humanity. Rousseau's answer was no. He later described the moment in dramatic language. I saw another universe and became another man. I was dazzled by a million lights. I realized that it was not Diderot who was imprisoned, but everyone outside of the prison. He submitted his discourse on the sciences and arts and won the prize in 1750, and he published the work in 1751. This made him famous because he seemed to turn the Enlightenment against itself. Was he counter-Elightenment or not? This is a question we can address going forwards. The polished arts may decorate our chains, refinement can produce elegant manners without virtue, learning can become a route to distinction rather than truth. Public life rewards the appearance of goodness, while vanity replaces independent thinking. The provocation was sharpened by its timing. The prize was awarded in 1750 and the discourse appeared in print in 1951, the same year as the first volume of the Encyclopedie to which he had contributed. At the moment when an enormous monument to knowledge was beginning publication, the Bible of the Enlightenment, Rousseau became famous by asking whether intellectual progress and moral progress might move in opposite directions. Are we actually improving ourselves as we get more of this knowledge? He was not saying that ignorance is automatically virtuous, he was asking what knowledge serves, what incentive shapes it, and whether brilliance can coexist with cowardice, vanity, and domination. So

Civilisation

SPEAKER_00 14:39

did Russo simply turn against civilization at this point? I think that formulation is useful only if we immediately complicate it. He did not consistently ask Europeans to abandon language, books, cities, and government and return to the forest, as many people sort of joke about his sort of theory of the state of nature that we'll see later. He was himself a writer, composer, and political theorist. He's utilizing the toolkit of the Enlightenment. He is, in the Derodean sense, a bricolur. He is picking up the language of enlightenment and using it, but to his own ends. His target was a particular form of social mechanism. Dependence through comparison.

Amour-propre

SPEAKER_00 15:21

The key is the movement from simple self-preservation to what he later calls amour propre. We do not merely want to live, we want to count. We compare ourselves with others and depend on their recognition in modern society. Once esteem becomes scarce, another person's success can feel like diminishment to us. Wealth, style, wit, and learning become signs in competition for standing. That is why Rousseau's criticism remains uncomfortable for us. A society can become more sophisticated while making our members of it feel less free. If my sense of worth is permanently outsourced to an audience, I may obey public opinion even when no law commands me. I might think I'm being a great citizen, I'm, you know, going out doing cultured things, people are seeing me and saying, oh look, Sam's off to the opera, or Sam's off to see some art, or Sam's off to see, you know, some sort of musical event or yeah, cultural event or festival or whatever. But actually, these things need to be important to me. Rousseau's deepest political concern is dependence, material dependence on the powerful, and psychological dependence on the judgment of everyone

Exile and David Hume

SPEAKER_00 16:34

else. In 1754, Rousseau returns to Geneva. He reverted to Calvinism and recovered his citizenship. Yet the reconciliation did not last. Over the following years his break with Diderot and the other philosophs widened. His major works brought celebrity and persecution altogether. Julie appeared in 1761. The social contract and Emile followed in 1762. Both were combined and condemned, and Rousseau fled. In 1766 he went to England with David Hume. Within months, Rousseau became convinced that Hume was involved in a plot against him. Their public quarrel was spectacular. It's tempting to reduce the later Rousseau to this sort of paranoia. But even here we should see the continuity. The man obsessed with sincerity also feared being authored by other people's accounts of him. He was worried that because he was moving in these circles, that people were judging him and making a appearance of him that he didn't lay claim to. He returned to France in 1767, and he died on the 2nd of July 1778, aged 66, at Ermanville. Sixteen years later, in 1794, during the French Revolution, his remains were transferred to the Pontheon in Paris. The social outsider had become a national ancestor, and it's a beautiful thing to go and see. I mean, I I've tried when I saw it. The tomb of Rousseau with a little door opening on the tomb and a little wooden hand coming out with a torch that holding the beacon of hope to humanity, that it can be better, that it can be good, that we do have compassion, that we do care about one another. I thought it was very, very beautiful. But ironic that he's placed opposite Voltaire, who they had a tumultuous relationship, to say the least, against something we can go into in this series.

Conclusion

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Rousseau's biography does not prove his philosophy, though. Sometimes it exposes his hypocrisy. But it does explain why his central questions arrive with such force. Can we live among others without becoming creatures of their opinion? Can political membership give us freedom rather than dependence? Can education preserve something natural without producing another artificial role? The child of Geneva, the runaway apprentice, the convert, the musician rejected by the Academy, the companion of the philosophs who quarrelled with nearly all of them, and the autobiographer, determined to secure the last word. These are not separate Rousseaux. They are the recurring forms of one problem. How to be oneself in a world forged by other people. So in the next episode, when Jack is better, when he's cured of his sickness, we will take that problem into politics. We will ask how inequality emerges, what Rousseau means by a social contract, how is it different to Hobbes who we've looked at thus far? And how can a person be both subject to such laws and be free? For now, the question to keep is this if civilization teaches us to perform for one another, what would it take to recover a life that is genuinely our own? Thank you for joining me on Beyond the Text. It's been a pleasure. It's been sad to have Jack absent, but I hope I will do for now, and I shall look forward to seeing you on Wednesday. Thank you and good night from Beyond the Text.