Rousseau on the state of nature

January 4, 2012 in Individual, Methodology, Nature, Rousseau | No comments

“I had a dismal Prospect of my Condition, for as I was not cast away upon that Island without being driven, as is said, by a violent Storm quite out of the Course of our intended Voyage, and a great Way, viz. some Hundreds of Leagues out of the ordinary Course of the Trade of Mankind, I had great Reason to consider it as a Determination of Heaven, that in this desolate Place, and in this desolate Manner I should end my Life; the Tears would run plentifully down my Face when I made these Reflections, and sometimes I would expostulate with my self, Why Providence should thus compleatly ruine its Creatures, and render them so absolutely miserable, so without Help abandon’d, so entirely depress’d, that it could hardly be rational to be thankful for such a Life.”
D. Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, VI (1719)

Robinson Crusoe described the fable of a civilized man left in a desert island, far from all commodities and tools, -away from civilization-, having to develop, in his solitude, primitive modes of subsistence and technologies to assure his survival. Daniel Defoe’s book did not only propose a self-centred individual and the fundamental traits of the homo oeconomicus, -an accounting of utilities and preferences according to a scale of profitability. He incarnated the real story of a Scottish sailor, named Alexander Selkirk, who decided toleave the company with whom he was travelling and was abandoned on an island in the coast of nowadays Chile.

His adventures served as a mental experiment on the possibilities of a man procuring his subsistence with the sole fruit of nature and his labour, without any mediation, in the absence of social institutions. An individual left to his own devices on an island, isolated. Solitude became a central aspect of Rousseau’s life and work, amplifying the classical individual, providing with the possibility of criticizing the world of appearances, of stepping back from the societal ties to obtain a wider picture of human nature.

Crusoe’s example had to serve the purpose of educating an adolescent. It was the book that Émile had to be acquainted with in order to develop his capacities, it showed him all the abilities required to subsist on his own. “Le plus sûr moyen de s’élever au-dessus des préjugés et d’ordonner ses jugements sur les vrais rapports des choses, est de se mettre à la place d’un homme isolé, et de juger de tout comme cet homme en doit juger lui-même, eu égard de sa propre utilité.”(1) Utility had to be taught as the measure of one’s actions, it provided with an appropriate guide to one’s endeavours.

Robinson’s island took the legacy of utopian thought to which Rousseau somehow adhered. Unfortunately, the outcome of his constitutional project for the Corsicans had a similar result to Plato’s renovation plans for Syracuse. Jean-Jacques’ utopian project did not adhere yo a non-existing tópos but was related to a hypothetical time, to a golden age when men were naturally good. This conjectural recession in time implied not only a phylogenesis of society but also an ontogenesis of the individual. Not only did primitive virtues excel modern morals, also the development of man made explicit the close link with his immanent origin: nature. Once more no transcendental or external time was proposed, like in Christian accounts, but a mere recoil into a hypothesised past, into pre-civilization.

(1) Émile III [Seuil III, p. 130].

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Rousseau on a botanical model of science

December 27, 2011 in Epistemology, Nature, Rousseau | No comments

Jean Jacques’ self-contained passion for botanic endeavours, his love for ‘herborisation’, confirmed a certain organization and system in nature, a ‘chaîne de rapports et de combinaisons’.(1) This acknowledgement was not from a theoretical order, it was obtained from his own cultivating experience in his retreat to L’Ermitage. A major shift in the observation of nature occurred based on the recollection of actual elements rather than on the exemplification of rules and models. In his letters on botanic he deployed meticulous and careful observations,(2) introducing technical concepts for the teaching of a neophyte. The series of eight letters addressed to Mme. Delessert witnessed this circumstance. Botanic provided with a strong counterpart to classical science based on manipulation rather than on mere observation.(3)

Rousseau also cultivated, as an amateur, the sciences. Rather than classical mechanics, his interest shifted towards chemistry, to which he devouted the unpublished Institutions chymiques. Here he reflected on Stahl’s distinction between aggregate and mix, by which the latter adquired novel properties by means of the combination of the previous discrete elements. Physics, classical modern science, more deemed to a static analysis, would be in charge of describing the exterior of a body, meanwhile chemistry would be concerned rather with the interior, in the same vein as Rousseau devouted his effort to displaying all his dynamic interiority. The chemical paradigm helped distilling the theological content of Bossuet’s concept of organism and refurbishing the noetic space with new central metaphors and alignments of elements that would reappear in the division within the individual and in the achievement of an internal conglomerate by means of the nation.(4)

His later ideas on nature point to a continual flux and, on the other hand, an individual wish for stability: “Je voudrais que cet instant durât toujours.” (5) Time and continuity were reconciled with the consistency of the I that always escaped definition, either because of external change or because of inner motions. Observation, focusing the attention externally, provoked a certain forgetfulness of the self. Self-conscience was released and projected on the entire nature; the absence of self-awareness unveiled the being, sparse, opaque to attention, conveying experience and communion.

Only the perpetual tides of change impeded human welfare. The object of fulfilment was also in continuous movement producing an endeavour, a strife never to be accomplished, with no possible halcyon, -a never ending agitation. Change was related to a certain concept of golden age; a lost paradise that lied in a hypothetical past, not in any metaphysical or mysterious doctrine.

(1) Confessions XII [Seuil I, p. 369].
(2) “La Corolle du Lis n’est pas d’une seule piéce comme il est facile à voir. Quand elle se fane et tombe, elle tombe en six piéces bien séparées qui s’appellent des Pétales.” [Pléiade IV p. 1153].
(3) Cf. P. Saint-Amand “Rousseau contre la science: l’exemple de la botanique dans les textes autobiographiques” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 219, 1983, pp. 159-67.
(4) An ambitious portrait of chemistry’s influence in other areas of Rousseau work can be found in B. Bensaucle- Vincent and B. Bernardi, Rousseau et les sciences, Paris, 2003. Chemistry allowed him “… constituter, si je puis risquer cette expression, le terreau dont ses concepts politiques en formation avaient besoin pour se nourrir.” B. Bernardi, “La place des référents scientifiques dans l’invention conceptuelle: Une étude de cas”, B. Bensaucle- Vincent and B. Bernardi, op. cit., p. 311. Chemistry and both the idea of composition and organism were still consistent with Rousseau’s endeavor, both the description of the individual and the arrengement, the politicalformula, behid the constitution of the sovereign. The orography had included this new element an was to be affected, once more, on other areas of knowledge and the representation of power. Besides the few scientifical writings of Rousseau, as a divulgator, included spherical geometry in his Traité de la sphére (1760-7), he showed a deflection from cartesian analytical geometry. Rousseau actually used the mechanical image to despise his enemies “…je compris que mes contemporains n’étoient par rapport à moi que des êtres méchaniques qui n’agissoient que par impulsion et dont je ne pouvais calculer l’action que par les loix du mouvement…” Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire VIII [Seuil I, p. 535].
(5) Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire V [Seuil I, p. 523]. Starobinski observed the incompatibility of Rousseau’s aimed transparent reference with his empirical reality, “…je suis authentiquement cette infidélité à un équilibre que me sollicite toujours et qui se refuse toujours.” J. Starobinski, op. cit., p. 76.

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Nature’s integrity and its signs

December 25, 2011 in Nature, Rousseau | No comments

Being part of nature it was difficult to segregate its components into parts, there was rather an all-embracing wholeness that did not admit distinction. An identification with nature as a totality occured.(1) Nevertheless the individual creature became also the sign that encapsulated experience and conveyed the reverie. “La fleur desséchée est le ‘signe accidentel’ qui réveille le paysage, la journée, la lumière, la bienheureuse solitude de la promenade où elle fut cueillie. Elle est le signe qui permet au bonheur révolu de redevenir un sentiment immédiat.”(2) Emotional memory encompassed Jean Jacques’ joy and happiness, his relatedness to nature, the freedom to savour the pleasures and cupidity of nature. Feelings were kindred to those accidental signs, they were recorded and contained in its utmost purity in those receptacles. Nature became a place of inner peace and renewed confidence.

Rousseau also professed a deep trust in nature’s healing capabilities rather than in any sort of medicine or curing. No important disease ever happened to him during his sojourns to the countryside. Whenever he might be in his last trance, close to expiring, he should be put under the shadow of an oak and he would recover.(3) Health was not produced by any human practice or art, but appeared rather as a certain primordial harmony with nature that could be restored and refreshed.(4) Therefore any practical application of nature regarding healing, preparation of unguents and ointments, and, in last resource, any sort of instrumentation of nature, had to be despised by the amateur botanist, who saw in his practice an end in itself.

(1) “Cependant cet univers visible est matière, matière éparse et morte, qui n’a rien dans son tout de l’union, de l’organisation, du sentiment commun des parties d’un corps animé, puisqu’il est certain que nous qui sommes parties ne nous sentons nullement dans le tout.” Émile IV (Foi du vicaire savoyard) [Seuil III, p. 190]. 389 “Il faut quelque circonstance particulière resserre ses idées et circonscrire son imagination pour qu’il puisse observer par parties cet univers qu’il s’efforçait d’embrasser.” Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire VII [Seuil I, p. 529].

(2) J. Starobinski, op. cit., p. 197. “Rousseau, lui, voit dans la plante, dans la fleur, comme le rayon venu d’un soleil lointain, comme le reflet d’un monde perdu, la réminiscence de quelque chose qui fut une fois, dans une autrre vie, en un temps d’avant le temps, où la nature était la création et où tou encore sortait des mains de Dieu,” M. Raymond, “Rousseau et la rêverie” VV.AA., op. cit., p. 162. For a contemporary homomorphism between man and plant cf. J.O. de La Mettrie, L’Homme Plante, Postdam, 1748.

(3) Confessions VI [Seuil I, p. 210].

(4) “Quinze ans d’expérience m’ont instruit à mes dépens; rentré maintenant sous les seules lois de la nature, j’ai
repris par elles ma première santé. ” Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire VII [Seuil I, p. 530].

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Nature and its creatures

December 23, 2011 in Nature, Rousseau | No comments

The most delicate and simple creatures are those preferred by a harmless simple soul. Those that were still affected to nature could not be evil.(1) Simplicity was decanted into man’s soul asseverating his emplacement among creatures. All intellectual and social abilities were shadowed by the authentic simplicity of nature. His treatise on education, Émile, was also foremostly preoccupied with allowing the child to relish all the benevolence of innocence and infancy, -of freedom and genuineness. The natural moves and drives were not to behastened and children had to be treated as such, avoiding to spoil their most intimate liaison to nature.

Jean-Jacques also praised animals to whom he could feel a certain attachment in liberty, without any contraction: “Je voulais qu’il m’aimassent en liberté.”(2) Something he apparently did not achieve among his peers. Animals have to defend from man, but as soon as they do not see aggressiveness they become docile creatures, pure and reliable. It is stale man who profited from the creatures’ confidence to hurt them.(3)

Notwithstanding his cherish for creatures he maintained living matter as the ultimate constituent of the universe,(4) in accordance with the plain of consistence but loosening its central connection to body. He rejected the Aristotelian idea of plants as living beings without sentiments, provided solely with a ‘vegetal soul’, men and animals felt because of their ‘sensitive soul’. Opposing vitalism to materialism, he spread like Goethe the seeds of organicism, of a cosmos populated with sentient matter.

(1) “Auprès des végétaux, qui attestent la pureté de la nature, Jean-Jacques se purifie lui-même: tout se passe comme si l’innocence végétale avait le pouvoir magique d’innocenter le contemplateur.” J. Starobinski,op. cit., p. 280.
(2) Confessions VI [Seuil I, p. 210].
(3) Confessions VI [Seuil I, p. 213].
(4) “Cependant cet univers visible est matière, matière éparse et morte, qui n’a rien dans son tout de l’union, de l’organisation, du sentiment commun des parties d’un corps animé, puisqu’il est certain que nous qui sommes parties ne nous sentons nullement dans le tout.” Émile IV (Foi du vicaire savoyard) [Seuil III, p. 190]. 389 “Il faut quelque circonstance particulière resserre ses idées et circonscrire son imagination pour qu’il puisse observer par parties cet univers qu’il s’efforçait d’embrasser.” Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire VII [Seuil I, p. 529].

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Rousseau on reverie and natural inclinations

December 21, 2011 in Nature, Rousseau | No comments

Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin, Society Taking a Promenade (1760, 1761)

Summarizing, those were the three main functions of nature instilled in Rousseau’s plane of construction: Nature as a historical, positive, origin, nature as a counterpoint to the civilized, and finally nature as the place of ultimate re-ligation and primordial entanglement.

Referring to this last function, we ought to underline the place of the reverie as a specific modality of creativity in contrast to a purely intellectual endeavour. The reverie conveyed an unintentional awareness that debouched in undivided attachment. Reverie was also the ideal souvenir, unexpected, sudden. Remembering his joyful days, playing with his cousin, he offered an account of the vanishing of his infancy. It occurred as soon as they started hiding, revolting, and lying.(1) The intervention of adults correcting children spoiled their inventions and inspired vanity and, subsequently, all civilized vices and treacherous conventions.

Originally children, like all natural creatures linked to their origin were good. Education caused vice and forgetfulness about their truthful probity.(2) Nature provided us with the means to conservation. There was an intimate belonging to nature loosened and not perceived any more. An artificial obstacle to natural inclinations was imposed: civility. These claims show Rousseau as an ecologist avant la lettre,(3) swan’s chant of the pre-industrial society.

(1) “Nous commencions à nous cacher, à nous mutineer, à nous mentir.” Confessions I [Seuil I, p. 127]. Education in the wrong hands serves the right purposes of society. “Voilà comment j’appris à convoiter en silence, à me cacher, à dissimuler, à mentir, et à dérober, enfin : fantaisie qui jusqu’alors ne m’était pas venu, et dont je n’ai pu depuis lors bien me guérir.” Confessions I [Seuil I, p. 132].
(2) “Tous les premiers mouvements de la nature sont bons et droits. Ils tendent le plus directement qu’il est possible à nôtre conservation et a nôtre bonheur: mais bientôt manquant de force pour suivre à travers tant de résistance leur première direction, ils se laissent défléchir par mille obstacles qui les détournant du vrai but leur font prendre des routes obliques, où l’homme oublie sa première destination.” Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques I [Seuil I, p. 381].
(3) Cf. Y. Giraud and M.-E. Chantre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ou La Pensée verte, Paris, 1978.

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Rousseau on Children

October 14, 2011 in Nature, Rousseau | No comments

Giacomo Ceruti-Boy with a basket

Originally children, like all natural creatures linked to their origin, are good. Education caused vice and forgetfulness about their truthful probity.(1) Nature provided us with the means to conservation. There was an intimate belonging to nature loosened and not perceived any more. An artificial obstacle to natural inclinations was imposed: civility. These claims show Rousseau as an ecologist avant la lettre,(2) swan’s chant of the pre-industrial society.

The most delicate and simple creatures are those preferred by a harmless simple soul. Those that were still affected to nature could not be evil.(3) Simplicity was decanted into man’s soul asseverating his emplacement among creatures. All intellectual and social abilities were shadowed by the authentic simplicity of nature. His treatise on education, Émile, was also forsmostly preoccupied with allowing the child to relish all the benevolence of innocence and infancy, -of freedom and genuineness. The natural moves and drives were not to be hastened and children had to be treated as such, avoiding to spoil their most intimate liaison to nature.

(1) “Nous commencions à nous cacher, à nous mutineer, à nous mentir.” Confessions I [Seuil I, p. 127]. Education in the wrong hands serves the right purposes of society. “Voilà comment j’appris à convoiter en silence, à me cacher, à dissimuler, à mentir, et à dérober, enfin : fantaisie qui jusqu’alors ne m’était pas venu, et dont je n’ai pu depuis lors bien me guérir.” Confessions I [Seuil I, p. 132].
(2)“Tous les premiers mouvements de la nature sont bons et droits. Ils tendent le plus directement qu’il est possible à nôtre conservation et a nôtre bonheur: mais bientôt manquant de force pour suivre à travers tant de résistance leur première direction, ils se laissent défléchir par mille obstacles qui les détournant du vrai but leur font prendre des routes obliques, où l’homme oublie sa première destination.” Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques I [Seuil I, p. 381].
(3) Cf. Y. Giraud and M.-E. Chantre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ou La Pensée verte, Paris, 1978.

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Nature and the civilized

October 13, 2011 in Uncategorized | No comments

Francisco Bayeu - Lunch on the Field - WGA01518

Rousseau’s idealization of nature ran parallel to his deprecation of man’s creativity and invention. “Les hommes, dans leur travaux, ne font rien de beau que par imitation. Tous les vrais modèles du goût sont dans la nature.”(1) Other thinkers opted for a denaturalization of man. An example thereof can be found in his controversy with Voltaire regarding the goodness of creation.(2) To Rousseau all evil is caused by the abuse and misuse of man’s faculties awakened by his self-awareness. An awareness that stemmed from a distorted image, a mirage of his actual involvement within nature. Hence the enervation of certain elements and a novel configuration in the plane of construction.

Thus the other purpose served by Rousseau’s idea of nature was to contrast it with nurture, education, and human conventions.(3) Nature was related to the naïve, to the innocent, to childhood; human institutions and their ineluctable injustice were related to adulthood and falsity. Nature was symmetrically opposed to the civilized, to the urban, to men’s achievements.

Rousseau transmuted the manipulative modern conception of a caesura between man and nature into the possibility of an ecstatic communion. He established a Platonic dialectic commencing from the vegetable reign that ended in a quietist rapture, an absence from preoccupations, from the noise and coldness of the city. Rather than ascending through the human form to achieve the contemplation of ideas, it was by means of a direct involvement in nature, in creation, that a vital sacred communion could be gained.

(1) Émile IV [Seuil III, p. 233]. Cf Discours sur les sciences et les arts where Rousseau related the moral decadence associate dto the progress of the arts and sciences, establishing a counterpoint on relation to his enlightened contemporaries.
(2) Voltaire, Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne ou examen de cet axiome ‘tout est bien’ (1756). His attack on Leibniz is clearly felt in this work that will have a follow up in his Candide (1759), mocking again on the idea of the most perfect of all possible worlds. Nonetheless Rousseau who did not read this last work, saw in it a response of Voltaire on the content with him.
(3) Despite this general character there are certain contradictions in his account. Dealing with his own wife he states, “Je voulus d’abord former son esprit: J’y perdis ma peine. Son esprit est ce que l’a fait la nature; la culture et les soins n’y prennent pas,” Confessions VII [Seuil I, p. 248].

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Rousseau on Nature

October 11, 2011 in Nature, Rousseau | No comments

Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich - Italianate Landscape - WGA6337

Rousseau signed an eclogue to countryside life in which he grew from his infancy with its simplicity and easiness.(1) Mother nature, rather than father God, depicted a plentiful and loving caregiver, unconstrained, open. Nature was assimilated to a fresh woman, a radiant mother redden in sensuality. The recovery of the maternal bosom was at hand for Rousseau, soon plucked off from her young dead mother. In his Nouvelle Héloïse Julie also experienced the whole mistery and beauty of nature extended before her eyes. In a private letter, Rousseau also expressed this sentiment:

Je rencontrois de tems en tems des touffes obscures, impénétrables aux rayons du soleil comme dans la plus épaisse forêt; ces touffes étoient formées des arbres du bois le plus flexible, dont on avoit fait recourber les branches, pendre en terre, et prendre racine, par un art semblable à ce que font les mangles en Amérique. Dans les lieux plus découverts, je voyois çà et là, sans ordre et sans simétrie des broussailles de roses, de framboisiers, de groseilles, des fourrés de lilac, de noisettier, de sureau, de seringa, de genêt, de trifolium, qui paroient la terre en lui donnant l’air d’être en friche. Je suivois des allées tortueuses et irrégulières bordées de ces boccages fleuris, et couvertes de mille guirlandes de vigne de Judée, de vigne vierge, de houblon, de liseron, de couleuvrée, de clématite, et d’autres plantes de cette espece, parmi lesquelles le chevrefeuil et le jasmin daignoient se confondre.(2)

Irregularity freed nature from any constriction or organization, imposing no human model or ideal on the simplicity of its performance. Since the seventeenth century gardens raisonés prescribed a linear ordering, an arrangement of exuberance. Rousseau accentuated the beauty of the rustic, of the picturesque. Nature was haunted by a mysterious halo that mirrored the unfathomable human soul, it was ‘sublime’.(3) The arrangement of yards also hinted at other aspects of society; meanwhile French rational gardens portrayed a centralized model of authority, the English fields purveyed with an ode to the bourgeois, to privacy.

Diversity in nature was also related to alternative inner landscapes and moods. Thus recurred the metaphor of inner states, of interiority. Man being part of nature, sharing its characteristics was affected similarly. A harmony between moods, external landscapes, and seasons was phrased. Man perceived subtly all alterations in the medium in which he was embedded. Rousseau extracted this analogy between the aspect of nature and his sentiments.(4) In the fifth promenade of his reveries the term ‘romantiques’, introduced in France from a translation of Shakespeare’s romantic, occurred in relation to a landscape description. This concept was metaphorically extended to clasp those moods and situations that were related to a natural setting, to a mental mise en scène, to an inner prospect.

(1) “O nature, ô ma mère, me voici sous ta seule garde; il n’y a point ici d’homme adroit et fourbe qui s’interpose entre toi et moi. ” Confessions XII [Seuil I, p. 370].
(2) Lettre XI à Milord Edouard [Pléiade II, pp. 472-473]. “Vous ne voyez rien d’aligné, rien de nivelé; jamais le cordeau n’entra dans ce lieu; la nature ne plante jamais rien au cordeau; les sinuosités dans leur feinte irrégularité sont ménagées avec art pour prolonger la promenade, cacher les bords de l’Isle, et en aggrandir l’étendue apparente, sans faire des détours incomodes et trop fréquens. ” Ibid., p. 479.
(3) Cf. E. Burke A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). For a depiction of the development of the romantic idea of nature in English literature cf. ‘Sublime in external nature’, P.P. Wiener (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. IV, New York, 1973-4, pp. 333-337.
As an example 1744 James Thomson’s Seasons
Nature! great parent! whose unceasing hand
Rolls round the Seasons of the changeful year.
How mighty, how majestic are thy works!
With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul,
That sees astonish’d, and astonish’d sings!
(“Winter,” lines 106-10).
(4) “Il résultait de son aspect un mélange d’impression douce et triste trop analogue à mon âge et à mon sort pour que je ne m’en fisse pas l’application.” Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire II [Seuil I, p. 507].

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Music and the quest for authenticity

October 9, 2011 in Nature, Rousseau | No comments

Antoine Watteau - Mezzetin - WGA25467

Music, to which he would dedicate much of his life as composer, copyist, and amateur, could communicate this natural harmony. Its cathartic effect on the audience, experienced in his acclaimed Le Devin du village, conveyed a communion that surpassed conventions and unveiled pure sentiments, transmitting them without the obstacles of social, educated, manners. Music was the language of the heart, the vernacular of nature. It was able to express the bonheur, the interior, to which language, an external social artifact, could not accede. Music was able to recreate the same motions without the presence of the object, not in a mimetic sense strictly, but rather kinetically, encompassing the most primitive natural feelings of harmony and thus its moral character.(1) Hence Rousseau’s changes in the mode of representation both of musical notation and botanic classification can be understood under his goal of making the signs more intuitive, more immediate. On the other hand, the search for applications, both in nature and in society, deviated this idealization of a kingdom of self-fulfilling, unsubmitted, ends, following a quest for a language of emotion, immediate, departing from conventional signs.

Authenticity, in the sense of a primordial origin, was not to be found in any arrant ideal, but in a remote yet probable past. Similarly, originality was apt to empirical research by means of history, it was not an absolute postulate but relative to a certain hypothetical moment in time. “D’où je conclus que qui cherche en sincérité de cœur la vérité doit remonter pour la connaître aux temps où personne n’avait intérêt à la déguiser.”(2) Truth was closely linked to this reappropriation of nature and regained by means of natural history, being displaced to these categories, -authenticity and originality.

(1)M. Qvortrup, The political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Impossibility of Reason, Manchester, 2004.
(2) Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques II [Seuil I, p. 417].

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Rousseau and the appraisal of nature

June 18, 2011 in Nature, Rousseau | No comments

Antoine Watteau 004

“Es ist wunderbar: wie ich hierher kam und vom Hügel in das schöne Tal schaute, wie es mich rings umher anzog. – dort das Wäldchen! – ach könntest du dich in seine Schatten mischen! – dort die Spitze des Berges! – ach könntest du von da die weite Gegend überschauen! – die in einander geketteten Hügel und vertraulichen Täler! – o könnte ich mich in ihnen verlieren! – - ich eilte hin, und kehrte zurück, und hatte nicht gefunden, was ich hoffte. O es ist mit der Ferne wie mit der Zukunft! Ein großes dämmerndes Ganzes ruht vor unserer Seele, unsere Empfindung verschwimmt darin wie unser Auge, und wir sehnen uns, ach! Unser ganzes Wesen hinzugeben, uns mit aller Wonne eines einzigen, großen, herrlichen Gefühls ausfüllen zu lassen – und ach! Wenn wir hinzueilen, wenn das Dort nun Hier wird, ist alles vor wie nach, und wir stehen in unserer Armut, in unserer Eingeschränktheit, und unsere Seele lechzt nach entschlüpftem Labsale.”

J.W. Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Am 21. Junius (1774)

The success of Goethe’s epistolary novel was an unprecedented occurrence in Europe. After its publication a wave of suicides that imitated Werther’s resolution facing a non-corresponded love splashed throughout the continent. Rousseau was among the writers that started forging a new imprint, a new style. His Nouvelle Héloïse, also in the form of a series of collected letters, precluded the classical canon of literature and evolved into novel heights of expression and emotion. Early Romanticism already made an emphasis on passions’ lyricism, contravening the preponderant classical mood. Emotions, the reasons of the heart, were elevated far from an interest in soundness and speculation. These features provided with the hallmark of a new sensibility, a novel tone and fashion, -the ‘courant sensible’.

In close relation to this change in sensibility, a renewed interest in nature loomed. The Christian conception of nature operated an abjection of the senses and equaled nature to Platonic appearance, distant from man’s origin, a place of exile, a re-placement for a fallen nature. Since the inception of a city of God and its myth of an ever closer redemption, -a cure that implied a rejection of the sensible-, it was still common in the seventeenth century to refer to nature as ‘mendosa natura’.(1) The semantic field that also corresponded in Latin to birth, ‘naissance’ (nascere, natum, natura) was closely tied to something tainted, corrupted, ‘id vitium omnibus innatum est, vel ingenitum’. Nature maintained that characterization throughout much of the eighteenth century. It was opposed to the original state of grace, it was an imposture. “Il se dit encore de l’état naturel de l’homme opposé à l’état de grâce. La nature corrompue. La nature est fragile. Dans l’état de nature, dans l’état de grâce.”(2) Nature was related to conscience and thus to morality as opposed to bliss. It remained as an extension of man’s defiance, of his offense by eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

This was briefly the cadre in which the notion of nature was still inserted, in opposition to any sort of transcendence, to grace and salvation. Nature thus became easily object of appropriation and inquiry, it was objectified. In Hobbes and Bacon the exaltation of nature’s manipulability was related to its deprecation, to its materialization, to its annihilation. It supposed a realm subdued to the noblest creature, a creature that exceeded it. A de-naturalization of man took place by means of the concept of individual, shaping him as homo faber. Christian faith and Reformation inserted and nested both man and nature into concrete relations of implication.

(1) J. Nicot, Thrésor de la langue françoyse (1602). An important classical work in this regard is John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667):
“They looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng’d and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.” (vv. 1532-1540).
(2) Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française 1762.

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