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 Rather than classical mechanics, his interest shifted towards chemistry, to which he devouted the unpublished Institutions chymiques.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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