Nature and Self-Love: A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's "Passion Primitive"Author(s): Juliet Flower MacCannellReviewed work(s):Source: PMLA, Vol. 92, No. 5 (Oct., 1977), pp. 890-902Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461844 .Accessed: 15/08/2012 15:12

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JULIET FLOWER MACCANNELL

Nature and Self-Love: A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's "Passion primitive"

I. The Question of the Self

QCs U'EST-CE que le moi? Ou est donc ce moi s'il n'est ni dans le corps, ni dans l'ame?" Pascal's question opened

the "historical era of the 'moi,' " which may be drawing to a close.' Claims for the pri- macy of linguistic structures that operate inde- pendently of any individual and subjective intention2 have supported a view of the "self" as a linguistically and socially constructed con- ceit indebted to rhetorical and gestural devices for its very existence. "Self," like the "I," is a term that implies more substance than it can convey, more unity and individual specificity than a reflexive pronoun available for any refer- ent can provide.3 Specialists in a variety of fields are able to treat the self as the very symptom of its definitional opposites: divisiveness and other- ness. Psychoanalysis finds frustration and aliena- tion in the essence of self; sociology finds the self thoroughly dependent upon the other for its determination. Attempts to widen the definition of self to include multiplicity and difference and to show it as a dialectical concept, like Georges Poulet's cogito and Felix Guattari's group-level self,4 reflect the current tendency to dissociate self from the individual subject.

Some leading critics have placed the dissolu- tion of the individual-level concept of the self at the center of a crisis in literature.5 If, under certain romanticisms, the author's self and its interests were considered characteristics essen- tial to the definition of modern literature, the current trend toward selflessness correlates with putting the very notion of literature into ques- tion.6 What had once appeared to be the indis- putable point of intersection between self and literature-the author-is now being seriously questioned: Foucault's substitution of the term "author-function" for "author" is emblematic of an awareness that the self is inaccessible to defi-

nite knowledge.7 Ironically it is literature, of all disciplines, that has been most articulate (at least since Montaigne in modern times) about the impossibility of self-knowledge, though liter- ature has lost centrality as this view has ex- tended to other disciplines.

With this situation in mind, then, I bring up the curious case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's writing is most identified with the literature of the self (self-expression, self-suffi- ciency, le sentiment de soi), and yet his political and social works have also served as example to a succession of writers most identified with the demythologizing of the self-from Emile Durk- heim through Claude Levi-Strauss and indirectly Erving Goffman.8 Rousseau's exact place in the history of the concept of the self cannot, of course, be determined by any of his artistic or intellectual offspring, but one ought nevertheless to bear in mind, when dealing with self and lit- erature in Rousseau, that his work seems to have been capable of inspiring both pro- and antiself stances.

In the treatment of the self in Rousseau's oeuvre, there is a sharp contrast between the autobiographical, intimate writings directly con- cerned with the self and the political works, where self is to be arbitrarily suppressed. How- ever, the fictional works (Julie, Emile) and the philosophical ones (Les Discours) occupy a somewhat ambiguous middle ground.

In the autobiographical works Rousseau in- truded himself upon the literary sensibility in a way that violated neoclassical decorum and still annoys readers.9 And yet he never made his idiosyncratic tastes and feelings the basis of his fiction, which, if anything, seems to lack indi- viduation in style.

The loss of self, or the self-sacrifice required by sociability,'0 appears in Rousseau at times as a gain (Le Contrat social) and at times as a loss (Deuxieme Discours). At still other times it

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Juliet Flower MacCannell seems to be society alone that engenders con- sciousness of self (Essai sur l'origine des langues) .11

However ambiguous his treatment, Rousseau did attempt an answer to Pascal's "Qu'est-ce que le moi?" in the most differentiated forms of writing. If in so doing he formulated final defini- tions of self that canceled each other out (though it is our task to show their dialectical relationships), it nonetheless remains clear that Rousseau's oeuvre can be considered the quin- tessential instance of linking literature-even writing in general-to the concept of the self, and vice versa. From Narcisse through the "Preface" to the Deuxieme Discours (OC, III, 122) to the Reveries' "qui suis-je moi-meme?" (OC, I, 995), Rousseau constantly kept alive the possibility that a definition of self could emerge in his writing.

It further remains to be seen whether Rous- seau's obvious failure to define the self under- mines (his) literary enterprise.12 Perhaps his writing, like Hegel's description of the language of the "figure of the heart," is condemned to bad faith and alienation purely because it chose self as its point of departure. Then his linking the destiny of literature to that of the self-a clas- sical procedure, if never before so thoroughgoing -would be a capital error. All such efforts would necessarily appeal to a nebulous "refer- ent" whose existence could be implied only via signifiers that could never convey it. But if, with a somewhat different emphasis, one could show that Rousseau's special contribution was to de- fine the self specifically as a literary existant, and one whose being was suspended,13 then the structure of bad faith would not apply. There would be, that is, no appeal to a referent beyond or apart from textual signifiers. On the other hand, the problem of how he could designate a linguistic structure as a "self" has yet to be understood. The present essay is an effort to clarify this particular aspect of Rousseau's oeuvre.

II. Amour de soi: The One Absolute Sentiment

For Rousseau, amour de soi is the source of all our passions, the one absolute from which all others are derived:

La source de nos passions, l'origine et le principe de toutes les autres, la seule qui nait avec l'homme et ne le quitte jamais tant qu'il vit est l'amour de soi; passion primitive, innee, anterieure a toute autre et dont toutes les autres ne sont en un sens que des modifications. En ce sens toutes si l'on veut sont naturelles. Mais la pluspart de ces modifications ont des causes etrangeres sans lesquelles elles n'auroient jamais lieu, et ces memes modifications loin de nous etres avantageuses nous sont nuisibles, elles chang- ent le premier object et vont contre leur principe; c'est alors que l'homme se trouve hors de la nature et se met en contradiction avec soi.

(Emile, Pt. iv, OC, iv, 491) Rousseau's first impatience lies with the self- contradiction that seems to flow naturally but mysteriously from self-love. Self-contradiction, the distance from one's self, self-sacrifice-these are, we know, the chief characteristics of so- ciability not only for Rousseau but for his era. In order to be sociable one must be self-contra- dictory, violate the primary passion for the self, and become "l'homme de l'homme" rather than "l'homme de la nature." In order to do so one must posit an equality with others that would allow for the continual transfer of identity (communication, language, metaphor) that self- negation implies. We assume that the other has a self that must be put aside, sacrificed, in order to enter into social relations with us. We under- stand the other to have a self and we attempt to interpret it in various ways.

Yet Rousseau finds this an illusion: J'ai remarque souvent que, meme parmi ceux qui se piquent le plus de connoitre les hommes, chacun ne connoit gueres que soi, s'il est vrai meme que quel qu'un se connoisse; car comment bien determiner un etre par les seuls rapports qui sont en lui-meme, et sans le comparer avec rien?

(Ebauches des confessions, OC, I, 1148) How can one know the self of anything without comparison? This perfectly respectable semiotic stance is hardly one that indicates a belief in a transcendental referent for the self. Rousseau's anxiety seems to be that self has become defined by the reflexive and ritual metaphors of sympa- thetic introspection (the analogical method whereby one "understands" the intentions of the other): Cette connoissance imparfaite qu'on a de soi est le seul moyen qu'on employe a connoitre les autres.

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A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's "Passion primitive" On se fait la regle de tout, et voila precisement ofu nous attend la double illusion de l'amour-propre; soit en pretant faussement a ceux que nous jugeons les motifs qui nous auroient fait agir a leur place; soit dans cette supposition meme, en nous abusant sur nos propres motifs, faute de savoir nous trans- porter assez dans une autre situation que celle ou nous sommes. (OC, i, 1148) Rousseau moralistically reproves man's vanity for assuming an easy identification with the other. Moreover, he reproves the vanity of the assumption that one knows the self from which one transfers identity to the other in the basic act of sociability. He proposes a corrective:

Sur ces remarques j'ai resolu de faire faire a mes lecteurs un pas de plus dans la connoissance des hommes, en les tirant s'il est possible de cette regle unique et fautive de juger toujours du coeur d'autrui par le sien; tandis qu'au contraire il faudroit souvent pour connoitre le sien meme, de commencer par lire dans celui d'autrui. (p. 1149) To pull men away from this erroneous stan- dardization of hearts could only be to make them deviate from the original deviation: that is, to return to amour de soi from amour-propre (amour de soi is Rousseau's transcendental ex- ploration of the ideal conditions under which self could exist; it is not empirical), to compare oneself to the "natural" rather than the "rhetori- cal" man. Such is the moralistic and primitivistic tonality of Rousseau's writing. Yet the method that the Neufchatel preface proposes for this redeviation is not an imperative to others to take solitary, meditative nature walks. Rather start- lingly, Rousseau interposes himself between the others and themselves. He begins on a note of unselfish humaneness, "Je veux tacher que pour apprendre a s'appr6cier, on puisse avoir du moins une piece de comparaison," but he then immediately intrudes his own self-love: "Que chacun puisse connoitre au moins soi et un autre, et cet autre se sera moi. Oui moi, moi seul . . ." (p. 1149). The "self" of which he speaks can thus be only a literary (linguistic) and not a natural form. Yet Rousseau claims that con- fronting it is in effect parallel to confronting Nature in terms of discovering an "other" self.

Rousseau always asserted that he was able to conceive of an "other self" by contact with Na- ture, and it is Nature upon which he relied as his

sole ally against the Christian and empiricist versions of (and aversions to) the self. The concept of self, weak and unsupported in its own right, and insupportable to some, often derived its subsistence, especially with the advent of romantic literature, by being analogized to a substantial and permanent Nature. Recent criti- cal work14 has helped to divest this process of its primitivistic appearance, and I should like to carry this work one more step by demonstrating how, in Rousseau, Nature lends support to the self not by its substantiality but by its failure to be substance for the subject. Nature has no na- ture when it appears to consciousness, when it is intended by consciousness. This phenomenon gives Rousseau an initial formulation for the "nature" of the self, its essential deviation from Nature into freedom.15

In each major text in which he undertakes to examine the self (general or individual) Rous- seau claims he was inspired by a solitary walk in nature. Whether it was the forest of St. Ger- main (Deuxieme Discours), the woods of L'Hermitage (Julie), the landscape of Mont- morency (Emile), or the enchanting grounds of Ermenonville (Les Reveries), Rousseau always associated a specific natural setting with his capacity to conceive of the self. Solitary reverie, withdrawing from social action for meditation, is, of course, a commonplace of moralistic re- flections. Yet the aim in Rousseau is not to look back into the world he has left from a utopian standpoint; instead he intends to use Nature as a backdrop for conceiving a self radically different from the social self (OC, i, 388). In contrast to the topos of the moralized landscape prevalent in eighteenth-century literature, in which the subject read moral lessons into and out of Na- ture with equanimity, Rousseau hopes that Na- ture will engender a reading of the self. The production of a self from Nature is no simple logical and philosophical task-especially if, after Pascal, the plenitude and seemingly infi- nite fecundity of Nature appear to have gaps.16

A series of texts in which Rousseau gives this "derivation" in microcosmic form include his "Troisieme Lettre a M. de Malesherbes" (OC, I, 1138-42), Saint-Preux's "Lettre sur le Valais" in La Nouvelle Heloise (OC, ii, 76-84), and the passage on the "ideal world" in the Premiere Dialogue de Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques

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Juliet Flower MacCannell (OC, I, 668-73). In each of these Nature ap- pears as a powerful attraction, a tempting entity whose initial appeal is attenuated or neutralized by its own contradictions. A series of moves made by Rousseau denatures Nature and leaves the self nowhere, just as the social self is made a no one by the basic failure of the minimal social unit (no two persons can ever fully communi- cate or "transport" themselves).

III. The Derivation (and Deviation) of the Self from Nature

In the third of his autobiographical letters addressed to the sympathetic censor Malesher- bes, Rousseau describes his retreat into Nature as an alternative to the omnipresence of mis- understanding in society: C'etoit la qu'elle [La Nature] sembloit deployer a mes yeux une magnificence toujours nouvelle. L'or des genets, et la pourpre des bruyeres frapoient mes yeux d'un luxe qui touchoit mon cceur, la ma- jeste des arbres qui me couvroient de leur ombre, la delicatesse des arbustes qui m'environnoient, l'etonnante variete des herbes et des fleurs que je foulois sous mes pieds tenoient mon esprit dans une alternative continuelle d'observation et d'admira- tion: le concours de tant d'objets interessans qui se disputoient mon attention, m'attirant sans cesse de l'un a l'autre, favorisoit mon humeur reveuse et paresseuse, et me faisoit souvent redire en moi- meme: Non, Salomon dans toute sa gloire ne fut jamais vetu comme l'un d'eux. (OC, i, 1140) Aside from the biblical comparison of Solo- mon's wisdom and natural beauty ("Consider the lilies of the field . . ."), this passage is a straightforward focusing on Nature's attractive- ness to the man of senses. Nature is "voluptu- ous," "attractive," and Rousseau ("the sensual man is the man of nature," Premiere Dialogue, OC, I, 808) admires it sensually. But at the same time his reason wishes him to observe it naturalistically. This conflict between mind and body is paralleled by a complexity and competi- tiveness within the heart of an illusory natural harmony: "The competition of so many interest- ing objects vying for my attention. . . ." It is not its harmony that draws Rousseau to Nature as an alternative to society, even though the chief vice of society, in his view, is its competitions and rivalries. What Rousseau finds in his contact

with natural objects is that Nature's divisions throw into relief the divisions of his own human "nature"-the contraries of mind and body- and he suspends them in favor of the "dreamy side" of his character. Rousseau describes how this imaginary supplement to his nature turns aside from the equal solicitations of sense and reason and substitutes visions for them:

Mon imagination ne laissoit pas longtems deserte la terre ainsi paree. Je la peuplois bientot d'etres selon mon coeur, et chassant bien loin l'opinion, les pre- juges, toutes les passions factices, je transportois dans les asiles de la nature des hommes dignes de les habiter. Je m'en formois une societe charmante dont je ne me sentois pas indigne. Je me faisois un siecle d'or a ma fantaisie. (OC, i, 1140) It is no accident that Rousseau here uses the term "transport" in the same way he used it in the sketch for the Confessions cited above: "for not knowing how to transport ourselves fully enough into a situation other than the one we are in." He is here consciously fashioning the model for the "heart of others" that one needs to read for self-understanding. The first movement of the self away from nature-which is "de- serted," "barren," and totally meaningless-is to elaborate a second nature, an alternative system, fully subject to authorial will and intention. Rousseau vies with Nature as a source of crea- tion; with the Creator in making men in his own image ("d'apres mon cceur"). The Golden Age is an intentional metaphor, a conscious use of the freedom from nature that language as system gives. Yet these imaginary transports, in becom- ing a second nature, an intentional rather than an unintentional nature, are from the point of view of the self also susceptible to deviation. In such a case, the deviation from the intention to mean could only result in an intention not to mean or to suspend meaning. The elaborate metaphorical system-the Golden Age-is, like the "figurative language" that precedes "proper meaning" in the Essai sur l'origine des langues, subject to a suspension of its willful human inten- tional activity:

Cependant, au milieu de tout cela je l'avoue, le neant de mes chimeres venoit quelque fois la [mon ame] contrister tout a coup .... Je trouvois en moi un vuide inexplicable que rien n'auroit pu remplir.

(OC, I, 1140)

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A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's "Passion primitive" Here the metaphorical rather than the natural is the source of self-consciousness. The elaborate alternative to nature, figured language, pauses to confront its own freedom,17 its being a part of a system of signs that can generate other such metaphors only by pretending such metaphors are a specialized activity.

It is the concept of self that offers this pause or moment of suspension. For if the essence of metaphor is self-contradiction (the transferral of identity, or, in Rousseau's terms, the "transport- ing ourselves into another situation") it can offer the self no form of support. Accepting the self as "merely a metaphor" is a logical impos- sibility. It is this understanding that allows Rousseau to intrude the question of the self into the most self-satisfied intentional system, just as he intrudes himself upon his dream of a Golden Age and ends the dream. Self, then, is for Rous- seau the difference: it is metonymic rather than metaphoric in its structure. It can never be ex- pressed, transported, or conveyed in and of it- self, not because it is "authentic," but because its structure is that of difference from itself.

Confronting the self's emptiness generally in- spires the desire to lend the self an imaginary content: one knows-since Montaigne and Pas- cal, at least-that one of the constants of human action is to fill the gap with nothings, vanities. Rousseau writes to the Comtesse de Berthier:

Ce vide interne dont vous vous plaignez ne se fait sentir qu'aux cceurs faits pour etre remplis; les cceurs etroits ne sentent jamais de vide, parcequ'ils sont toujours pleins de rien; il en est au contraire dont la capacite vorace est si grande que les chetifs etres qui nous entourent ne la peuvent remplir.18

But Rousseau takes the process of filling the void with metaphors one step further by using the hypothesis of a self to show these very meta- phors their freedom not to follow the tendency of all linguistic acts and become sterile, ritual definitions, mere forms.

He continues from the Golden Age metaphor to the suspension of the metaphor, and from there to the self in the "Lettre 'a Malesherbes":

Je trouvois en moi un vuide inexplicable que rien n'auroit pu remplir; un certain elancement du coeur vers une autre sorte de jouissance dont je n'avois pas d'idee et dont pourtant je sentois le besoin. He

bien Monsieur cela meme etoit jouissance, puisque j'en etois penetre d'un sentiment tres vif et d'une tristesse attirante que je n'aurois pas voulu ne pas avoir. (OC, i, 1140)

Examination of this passage for its intellectual and historical significance rather than for its psychology will uncover how Rousseau struc- tures sentiment from a neutralization of sense perception, in particular the sensual perception of a natural scene. "Le sentiment de l'exis- tence," "le sentiment de soi," has long been re- garded as Rousseau's philosophical achieve- ment; the Savoyard Vicar asks the capital ques- tion, "Do I have a feeling of myself apart from sensation?" ("Ai-je un sentiment propre de mon existence ou ne la sens-je que par nes sensa- tions?" [OC, iv, 570-71]). It is clear that the notion of self was, for him, as yet unsupported: it was never the object of an unmediated sense perception (the playing with mirrors in the Con- fessions, [OC, i, 75-77], is exemplary),19 and religion certainly offered no encouragement to its pretension to be. By his choice of terminology for the discussion of its existence, Rousseau sig- nals that he situates the problem of self within the framework of Christianity and sensualist philosophy.

The great systems of belief that, up to Rous- seau's time, controlled the question of the self were religion and moral philosophy. In speaking of the self as a vanity, a void, Rousseau "dis- covers," in the "Lettre a Malesherbes," the age- old discovery (at least since Ecclesiastes and Socrates) of man's vanity, insubstantiality, and emptiness. Yet he does not react to this knowl- edge with the traditional humility, self-irony, or self-hatred. He terms this knowledge a joy and celebrates the feeling, if not the knowledge itself.

In stressing the feeling rather than the onto- logical or epistemological status of this knowl- edge, Rousseau is utilizing the resource of the empirical spirit that had come to undermine the authority of religion and the prestige of classical philosophy: the evidence of sense experience. From a theological and theoretical point of view the self is nothing compared with Being. Yet Rousseau insists on the importance of his feeling of it; and though couched in a spiritualist frame- work (the ecstasy of reverie; the meditative mood) Rousseau's speculations on the self actu- ally subvert any spiritual intention. Rousseau, in

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Juliet Flower MacCannell the face of all Christian doctrine (at least since Augustine's uti et frui)20 and of the elevation of the dispassionate sage as the best model for man, insists on desire as one of the constituents of his "self": "If all my dreams had become realities I would have imagined, dreamed, de- sired still. .... A certain launching of the heart towards another sort of enjoyment. ..." And he can do so, of course, because of the empiricist equation of consciousness and desire, the origi- nating of conscious will in a desire to be else- where (Locke's "attention"; Condillac's "inter- est").

On the other hand the empiricists are far from offering support for the concept of self: at the optimum, "self" is a construct without any real substance. Locke and Condillac assert a self that is copresent with sensation, but explicit self- consciousness depends upon a memory of prior sensations. Locke's "identity" is an assertion of "selfsameness" through time that his followers saw through as tenuous at best; Condillac's fa- mous statue achieves self-consciousness through a comparison of present and past sensations that occurs only in the thoroughly temporal mode of memory. Rousseau uses the vocabulary of the sensualist philosophers-need (besoin), desire (desir), attraction (attirante), interest (interet) -and even idea (idee) has a technical meaning as a concrete sense perception. But Rousseau purposely misdirects these terms, abuses them: they are independent of an external object that solicits them; the desire to be transported else- where (Locke's uneasiness; Condillac's inqui- etude), into "another situation," is not into a literal other place but into another state of feel- ing ("another kind of joy"). And this "other situation" that solicits desiring consciousness is not perceptible by the senses: "of which I had no idea." Rousseau rejects the derivation of self- consciousness from sensation; he will make it explicitly derivative of a failure of sensation. In the Premiere Dialogue Rousseau refers con- stantly to "a distinct feeling" that does not coin- cide with sense perception: J. J. esclave de ses sens ne s'affecte pas neanmoins de toutes les sensations, et pour qu'un object lui fasse impression il faut qu'a la simple sensation se joigne un sentiment distinct de plaisir ou de peine qui l'attire ou qui le repousse. II en est de meme des idees qui peuvent frapper son cerveau; si l'impres-

sion n'en penetre jusqu'a son coeur, elle est nulle. Rien d'indifferent pour lui ne peut rester dans sa memoire, et a peine peut on dire qu'il appergoive ce qu'il ne fait qu'appercevoir. (OC, i, 808) The attractive force is a sentiment, not an object as it is for the sensationalists. And the capital sentiment is amour de soi.

To recapitulate: Nature, divested of its "proper" place in the Great Chain of Being lead- ing to the Divine Will, becomes the focus of empirical scrutiny. It is no longer a secondary expression of divinity21 but something of inter- est in its own right. It offers itself to the specta- tor as temptation to consciousness, soliciting consciousness in the mode of a desire for its substantiality. Yet the lesson of empiricism is that substances are unreachable (though there is much nostalgia for this substantial, supportive level, this ground of Nature on the part of the empiricists).22 Rousseau extends this one step further to place the origin of consciousness in self-consciousness23 (sentiment de soi), rather than in sensation. And he renders Nature (in- cluding human cultural nature) secondary once more-but without implying that it symbolizes the Divine. The hypothesis of a self is totally unsupported; yet Rousseau audaciously makes it original. Rousseau, like the empiricists, first reduces Nature to a phenomenon ("to my eyes" often accompanies his nature descriptions) and then overcomes its temptations by encompassing all its contradictions in its appearance. One example is a passage describing reverie as the fruit of a sensual imagination and an intellectual passion that is nonetheless not abstract and ra- tional (Les Dialogues, OC, i, 816). This reverie renders natural objects subject to its perspective: "La nature s'habille pour lui [Jean-Jacques] des formes les plus charmantes, se peint a ses yeux des couleurs les plus vives, se peuple pour son usage d'etres selon son coeur... ."

The neutralization of Nature as a force is also found in Saint Preux's "Lettre sur le Valais" (La Nouvelle Heloise). The Alpine scene Saint Preux describes is initially overwhelming, just as Saint Preux's emotional turbulence threatens to overwhelm him before his voyage. As he ascends the mountain, Saint Preux-provisionally-re- solves his internal conflicts; and he does the same with the natural oppositions he perceives. He ac- cepts a failure of natural meaning:

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A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's "Passion primitive" [L]a nature sembloit encore prendre plaisir a s'y mettre en opposition avec elle-meme, tant on la trouvoit differente en un meme lieu sous divers aspects. Au levant les fleurs du printemps, au midi les fruits de l'automne, au nord les glaces de l'hiver: elle reunissoit toutes les saisons dans le meme in- stant, tous les climats dans le meme lieu, des ter- rains contraires sur le meme sol, et formoit l'accord inconnu part tout ailleurs des productions des plaines et de celles des Alpes .... Apres m'etre promene dans les nuages, j'atteignois un sejour plus serain d'ou l'on voit, dans la saison le tonnerre et l'orage se former au dessous de soi; image trop vaine de l'ame du sage, dont l'exemple n'exista jamais, ou n'existe qu'aux memes lieux d'oiu l'on en a tire l'embleme. (OC, ii, 77-78) Saint Preux meditates upon his recaptured calm, telling Julie that the calm, the moderation of passions, can be atrributed to the lighter gravita- tional effects of height. He concludes by proffer- ing mountain air as an actual cure for ills of both body and soul.

Without any logical reason, and adopting a less personal manner, Saint Preux now intro- duces a different dimension-another "nature" -into this seemingly concluded description. One is suddenly in a bizarre, unnatural nature, which erupts in the letter without any specific salutory, instructive, or even merely communica- tive interpersonal intent:

Supposez les impressions reunies de ce que je viens de vous decrire, et vous aurez quelque idee de la situation delicieuse oiu je me trouvois. Imaginez la variete, la grandeur, la beaute de mille etonnans spectacles; le plaisir de ne voir autour de soi que des objets tout nouveaux, des oiseaux etranges, des plantes bizarres et inconnues, d'observer en quelque sorte une autre nature, et de se trouver dans un nouveau monde. Tout cela fait aux yeux un melange inexprimable dont le charme augmente encore par la subtilite de l'air qui rend les couleurs plus vives, les traits plus marques, rapproche tous les points de vue; les distances paroissant moindres que dans les plaines, oiu l'epaisseur de l'air couvre la terre d'un voile, l'horison presente aux yeux plus d'objets qu'il semble n'en pouvoir contenir: enfin, le specta- cle a je ne sais quoi de magique, de surnaturel qui ravit I'esprit et les sens; on oublie tout, on s'oublie soi-meme, on ne sait plus ou l'on est.

This new dimension is the metaphorical imagi- nation, transporting one from the assumption of an identity in the realm of Nature to the loss of

assurance about the identity of a natural self. The imaginary plenitude here diverts one from any nostalgic or elegiac tonality: the self, as Rousseau wrote, loves to "lose itself in imagina- tion" (OC, I, 1141). The emptiness of the self is diverted from consciousness by this metaphor- ical, artful "second nature" that language and culture are.

But, if the self loves to lose itself in this imag- inary fullness, where and how does self-love emerge? It can follow only upon a movement of pity toward the lost and unsupported self, a sec- ond diversion from the selflessness into self.

Another text in which Rousseau examines an imaginary "natural" setting, like Saint Preux's above, and in which he explicitly derives self- love, is the passage on the "ideal world" from the Premiere Dialogue de Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques (OC, i, 668-73). Like the other passages examined here, this one occurs as a kind of special address to a general reader within an address to a specific person, with a command to "imagine for yourself."

IV. Desire, Love, and Joy: The Derivation of Self-Love

In this passage a character named "Rous- seau" tirades against his proper name (sake), "Jean-Jacques." He tries to explain to a French- man his hatred for this

"Jean-Jacques." Inter- rupting the flow of this argument, and rather malapropos, "Rousseau" says he will explain himself:

Figurez-vous donc un monde ideal semblable au notre, et neanmoins tout different. La nature y est la meme que sur notre terre, mais l'economie en est plus sensible, l'ordre en est plus marque, le specta- cle plus admirable; les formes sont plus elegantes, les couleurs plus vives, les odeurs plus suaves, tous les objets plus interessans. Toute la nature y est si belle que sa contemplation enflammant les ames d'amour pour un si touchant tableau leur inspire avec le desir de concourir a ce beau systeme la crainte d'en troubler l'harmonie, et dela nait une exquise sensibilite qui donne a ceux qui en sont doues des jouissances immediates, inconnues aux cceurs que les memes contemplations n'ont point avives. (OC, i, 668) Here Nature is fully reduced to its characteristic properties: color, sound, smell, form, and order,

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Juliet Flower MacCannell though it lacks time and space, or depth. It is perfectly sensible, visible, present in all senses, to the senses. Rousseau here takes the phenom- enalism of the sensationalists to its idealist limit, turning the natural into an ideal world reduced to the organization of its accidental (insubstan- tial) properties. All is clearly present, and, in contrast to the empiricists, Rousseau has no trace of nostalgia for any substance underlying or hid- ing behind the ideal. Nature is beautiful, it is true, but it elicits no desire for it: the only desire it evokes is the desire to compete with it. It is all surface, and Nature's cardinal temptation-its apparent substantiality-is neutralized. In its ideal form (natural harmony) as well as in its empirical form (absolute contradictions, or dis- harmony) Nature has no direct relevance to one who perceives it, except as an origin of the spec- tator's self-consciousness (a consciousness of a difference or distance from Nature). Rousseau goes on to describe the souls that are "enliv- ened" (or given life by consciousness of differ- ence) as hanging suspended:

Les passions y sont comme ici le mobile de toute action, mais plus vives, plus ardentes, ou seulement plus simples et plus pures, elle prennent par cela seul un caractere tout diff6rent. Tous les premiers mouvemens de la nature sont bons et droits. Ils tendent le plus directement qu'il est possible a notre conservation et a notre bonheur: mais bientot manquant de force pour suivre a travers tant de resistance leur premiere direction, ils se laissent deflechir par mille obstacles qui les detournant du vrai but leur font prendre des routes obliques ou l'homme oublie sa premiere destination.

(OC, i, 668-69)

(In this passage one may well choose to inter- pret the de in "mouvemens de la nature" as "from" rather than "of," since one must wonder how a Nature lacking time and space could "move." We are so accustomed to thinking of man's having left Nature as a catastrophe for Rousseau that we fail to appreciate how radical freeing oneself from [one's] nature is.) This text is Augustine via Malebranche,24 and it is perfectly acceptable to the Christian, who would urge man not to forget his primary spiritual destination-death, then life in the other world. Strong souls would, "Rousseau" continues, force aside obstacles in quest for their goal; weak

souls take "the angle of reflection," like a rico- cheting cannonball.

The ideal souls do neither. They are not de- flected, but they have fallen short. They are nevertheless somehow supported, suspended in their intentional flight toward their goal. They keep the aim in view (p. 670) but are uncon- cerned with overcoming the obstacle that causes them to fail to attain it:

Les passions primitives, qui toutes tendent directe- ment a notre bonheur, ne nous occupent que des objets qui s'y rapportent et n'ayant que l'amour de soi pour principe sont toutes aimantes et douces par leur essence: mais quand, detournees de leur objet par des obstacles, elles s'occupent plus de l'obstacle pour l'6carter que de l'objet pour l'atteindre, alors elles changent de nature et deviennent irascibles et haineuses, et voila comment l'amour de soi, qui est un sentiment bon et absolu, devient amour-propre; c'est-a-dire, un sentiment relatif par le quel on se compare, qui demande des preferences, dont la jouissance est purement negative, et qui ne cherche plus a se satisfaire par notre propre bien, mais seulement par le mal d'autrui. (OC, i, 669) What is the obstacle that promotes and fosters self-consciousness here and that has been rightly shown to be central to Rousseau's thinking?25 What is it that deflects "true aim" (absolute freedom from Nature) and gives rise to self- love? And what is it that supports these inhabi- tants of the ideal world, who have no force, yet do not fall? What restrains the willful movement from Nature-a movement that can only be, in the imagery of the passage, a movement toward meaning, direction, and willful intention? What suspends or interposes itself between the eager desire to create a "world" linguistically to com- pete with the natural world?

Let us begin by examining closely the vocabu- lary of the passage. It is the mixture of two pas- sions, desire and love, that is responsible for both the initial wish to elaborate a system of intentions and the suspending of these inten- tions.

Desire has a practical aim: possession of its object. Love, by contrast, is unpractical: the subsistence of its object is its goal. Desire ful- filled destroys itself and its object; "le besoin satisfait, tout le desir est eteint," as Rousseau writes in the Deuxieme Discours (OC, III, 158). Love, on the other hand, conserves itself as an

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A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's "Passion primitive" illusory state as much as it conserves its object; it is already and always reflexive. Desire, em- blem of the conscious striving will, motive force of all human action, constantly is transmuted into love in Rousseau; and the reverse process also occurs. Desire turned to love becomes weak, faltering before seizing hold of its goal; yet it gains in that this falling short prevents its self-destruction. The term Rousseau uses to translate between desire and love, the two ver- sions of the relationship of consciousness to its object, is the ambiguous jouir. Often in Rous- seau, the expectation that desire will extinguish itself in physical enjoyment is disrupted. Desire and enjoyment coexist: "Si [Jean-Jacques] aime a jouir c'est seulement apres avoir desire, et il n'attend pas pour cesser que le desir cesse, il suffit qu'il soit attiedi" (OC, i, 808); and again, "Desirer et jouir ne sont pour lui qu'une meme chose" (OC, i, 857). An enjoyment that fades if desire fades deflects the trajectory of desire, of which it should be the completion, and turns it into a consciousness indistinguishable from that of love. This jouissance is a supplementary structure that is neither satisfaction nor renunci- ation. The translation of consciousness as desire into consciousness as an uneasy illusory state (love) is termed a joy by Julie: Tant qu'on desire on peut se passer d'etre heureux; on s'attend a le devenir; si le bonheur ne vient point, l'espoir se prolonge, et le charme de l'illusion dure autant que la passion qui le cause. Ainsi cet etat se suffit a lui-meme, et l'inquietude qu'il donne est une sorte de jouissance qui supplee a la realite.

(OC, II, 693) The joy arises not with the culmination of desire but with the constitution of an imaginary, tem- poral dimension-a state that can also be called a "self" ("se suffit 'a lui-meme"). Deflection of desire from its object allows for both love and self to appear.

Julie terms this joy also an "inquietude": the word is that of the sensualist philosophers, who describe the motive for action in time and space as "uneasiness," or "mesaise" (Locke), and "inquietude" (Condillac).26 Consciousness is composed of a cycle of desire-satisfaction-ennui for the sensualists; there is a total lapse between the cycles (Locke, p. 73). Consciousness-as- desire appears in the mode of a fall from Being;

it would have appeared in much the same way to the Christian. And for the empiricists self- consciousness, via sense memories and compari- son, depends upon the constant (re)birth of de- sire for its being. Self-consciousness thus is a further fall from Being, hanging as it does on an original desire or an intention directed toward the temporal world of objects. The Christian would have condemned this self based upon concupiscence; that the empiricist does not is a rhetorical choice that does not modify the struc- turing of the self through its dependence on con- sciousness in the mode of a desire that has no hope of sustained being.27

In Rousseau, however, desire lacks the force to carry it to satisfaction. It moves neither toward extinction in the world of objects nor toward fulfillment in the world of the spirit. De- sire fails to end its own life in preparation for the new life to follow (which for the empiricist is the renewed present moment of consciousness and for the Christian is God). From an empiri- cal point of view such delaying is an impossible anomaly; from a theological standpoint such tar- rying is a deplorable involvement with the things of the fallen world.

Yet, from the point of view of a self, continu- ally constructed only to be sacrificed to another such construction, this deflection of desire (will, intention) is a respite from death, a stay of exe- cution. Deflection-the intention, or desire, gone astray to become self-involvement-is a provi- sional reprieve for the self, a freeing of it from dependence upon the discontinuities of the de- siring (and "sinful") mode of consciousness. The "obstacle" that prevents the satisfaction of desire in Rousseau, its turning aside from its true aims and meanings, is the sole "life" for which a self can hope. The self is vivified and sustained only by imagination's temporal resis- tance to the practical and self-destructive inten- tionality of consciousness-as-desire: "L'illusion cesse ou commence la jouissance. Le pays des chimeres est en ce monde le seule digne d'etre habite," Julie writes (OC, II, 696). This life- giving or life-sustaining power is traditionally associated with love, and in this Rousseau con- curs by naming it as such.

Just as love conserves our being by preventing it from going straightaway to its true aim (death), it animates our being. The animation is

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Juliet Flower MacCannell not the motive force of the desiring, intentional relation to the object of consciousness. It is in- stead the animation of sensibility: "Un etre, quoiqu'anime, qui ne sentiroit rien, n'agiroit point: car oiu seroit pour lui le motif d'agir?" (OC, i, 805); and Julie writes: Mon ami l'on peut sans amour avoir les sentimens sublimes d'une ame forte: mais un amour tel que le notre l'anime et la soutient tant qu'il brule .... Di-moi, que serions-nous si nous n'aimions plus? Eh! ne vaudroit-il mieux cesser d'etre que d'exister sans rien sentir. (OC, in, 225-26) But Rousseau revises the traditional love in sev- eral ways. Venus and Caritas, Natural and Spir- itual Love, are associated with an overpowering life-engendering force; in Rousseau, love is weakness, faiblesse (foolishness, vacillation, error, illusion; even physical shortsightedness), and it functions to sustain neither body nor soul. It has instead a fondness for the weakest of all entities-the self: "What would we be if we no longer loved?" Love lends its support to the most unsupportable of hypotheses, the hypothe- sis of the self. Love's "power" is purely nega- tive, consisting solely of its resistance to the practical intentionality of desire; it has only the force of illusion, imagination. Rousseau de- scribes a hypothetical "Jean-Jacques" thus: En un mot son ame est forte ou foible 'a l'exces, selon les rapports sous lesquels on l'envisage. Sa force n'est pas dans l'action mais dans la resistance; toutes les puissances de l'univers ne feroient pas flechir un instant les directions de sa volonte. L'amitie seule eut eu le pouvoir de l'6garer, il est a l'epreuve de tout le reste. Sa foiblesse ne consiste pas a se laisser detourner de son but, mais a man- quer de vigueur pour l'atteindre et 'a se laisser arreter tout court par le premier obstacle qu'elle rencontre, quoique facile a surmonter.

(OC, i, 818-19) Moreover, the "life" this Rousseauistic love

lends the self is the very opposite of the defini- tion of "life" (willful, though guilty, striving for the constant renewal of consciousness) made by the sensualists. Love suspends this striving, and thus it is deathlike from an empirical point of view. Yet paradoxically this death-life is the only support for the self, which is such a failure at being. The love lavished on the self (which is a mere hypothesis, even a fiction or a lie) is the

very model of Augustine's mi-sapplied love, a moral abomination. Rousseau is willing to sacri- fice both sense and spirit to the existence of the self: even at his most ecstatic he maintains the feeling for the self, even though it is deprived of all conscious attributes: "Je ne pensois pas, je ne raisonnois pas, je me sentois avec une sorte de volupte ecrase du poids de cet univers" (OC, I, 1141). Amour de soi is an original ambiguity, death-dealing and life-giving, cardinal sin and cardinal virtue. It is the passion primitive-the first passion that supersedes desire; yet it is sus- ceptible to deviation and weakness as well. It can fail to resist desire; it can settle for physical or mental satisfaction, ending its tenuous exis- tence in the plenitude of bodily needs and literal definitions. It is in this way that what Rousseau terms amour-propre shows its face. But there is a further possibility for deviation in the heart of amour de soi, one not initially concerned with the literal-mindedness of amour-propre. Its name is la pitie.

V. The Deflection of amour de soi: The Origin of la pitie

In the description of "Jean-Jacques," supra- Rousseau claims that his weakness is not that of deflection; it is simply an incapacity to bypass the category of the self. Yet Rousseau also indi- cates that he is susceptible to forgetting himself or deviating from his self-love, in turning from self to other. "L'Amitie seule eut eu le pouvoir de l'egarer"; universal forces cannot bend him from himself; friendship alone could have made him "flechir." The fragile sentiment de soi is prey to a temptation away from itself, to a devi- ation from its absoluteness: it succumbs to pity.

This "temptation" is that of attaching one's heart, one's affections, "a des etres qui nous sont etrangers. ... II est tres naturel que celui qui s'aime cherche a etendre son etre et ses jouis- sances" (OC, i, 805). Rousseau constantly speaks of this movement toward the other as the "degeneration" of amour de soi (Emile, OC, iv, 303). Self-love succumbs, like Julie, not to de- sire, but to pity (OC, ii, 693). It is no accident that the term used to describe the manner in which

"Jean-Jacques" would stray from the absoluteness of self-love is flechir, meaning both to bend and to move to pity. Rousseau writes in

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A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's "Passion primitive" the Deuxieme Discours that pity moderates the activity of amour de soi (OC, III, 156); and Derrida argues: "Pity is neither the source itself nor a derived passionate flux, a passion acquired among others. It is the first derivation of amour de soi" (p. 248), the eruption of an exterior in the interior, otherness within the self. The pri- mary temptation to otherness seen here as an error (egarer) is also the arch-virtue. Pity is the other face of amour de soi: self-sacrifice.

Both pity and amour de soi are literary or fictional in their essence (Derrida, pp. 259-63). Since the self is merely a hypothesis that ap- pears as a phenomenon only via reflection, imagination, or everyday-life acts that allude to, but do not prove, its existence, a not illogical next step is to hypothesize the existence of other beings of similar constitution. We can now trace the fate and the story of pity in Rousseau's writ- ings: The greatest act of pity undertaken by Rousseau was his turning himself into another in order to "make one step more in the knowledge of man," his deviating from pure self-love. Paradoxically, and very much in the spirit of such an enterprise, this pity could only make its appearance as an act of the greatest self-love: his autobiography.

In my analysis I have tried to show how Rousseau distinguishes his primary passion for the self (amour de soi) from the egoism or self-

love (amour-propre) traditionally held to be the motive force for human action in the temporal or fallen world. His deconstruction of the con- cept of self-love proceeds along empirical, logi- cal, and finally literary grounds. Rousseau first puts the empirical existence of a self into radical question-like Pascal-ruling out both natural and sociocultural definitions of it. Nature and society (including its philosophy and religion) have been mined as sources for metaphors that approximate the self. But Rousseau shows that the self is not susceptible to definition by meta- phor (the transfer of identity). Metaphors are necessarily in bad faith, since the self has no demonstrable or knowable primary identity that could be transferred either to or from it.

The self is a hypothesis, a fiction, that exists, as do all fictions, in the manner of its presenta- tion. Its mode, that of the as if, suspends from the outset questions of definite knowledge. The self exists by virtue of love's lending it the imaginary space, the temporal extension that desire would otherwise usurp; it exists moreover by virtue of pity's lending it support by believing in it despite its failure at being. The self exists, in sum, by virtue of its "author's" and its "audi- ence's" concurrent entrance into what we may call the literary dimension.28

Davis, California

Notes The author wishes to dedicate this essay to the mem-

ory of her mother, Patricia Mary Flower. 1 Blaise Pascal, Pensees, No. 306, in CEuvres com-

pletes, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 1165. Jacques Lacan claims this is so, in The Lan- guage of the Self, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), p. 46. Fredric Jameson writes, "The polemic [is] . . . on the status of the 'sub- ject' or of individual consciousness: a debate whose more notorious monuments are Foucault's celebration of the 'end of man' and Althusser's anti-humanism" ("On Goffman's Frame Analysis," Theory and Society, 3 [1976], 130-31).

2 Paul de Man, "Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau's Second Discourse," Studies in Romanticism, 12 (1976), 475-98. See esp. p. 495.

3 Kenneth Burke calls the self a "reflexive form, a subject that is its own object," in The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1957), p. 307. A follower of Burke, Erving Goffman, has spe-

cialized in the rigorous detailing and analysis of just these rhetorical devices, not in literature per se, but in daily social life. Goffman makes no claims as to the real existence of the self; he carefully keeps self and anti- self positions in view. See his The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Double- day, 1959) and Frame Analysis (New York: Random, 1974). See also Paul de Man, p. 495; Juliet Flower MacCannell, "Fiction and the Social Order," Diacritics, 5 (1975), 7-16.

4 Lacan, p. 11; George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behavior- ist (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967); R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Penguin, 1965). See also Felix Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalite: Essais d'analyse institutionnelle (Paris: Francois Mas- pero, 1972), pp. 93-97.

5 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 209-12; Paul Ricoeur, Le Conflit des interpretations (Paris:

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Juliet Flower MacCannell Seuil, 1969), p. 54; and Paul de Man, "Criticism and Crisis," in Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 3-19.

6 For the older view, see Meyer Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradi- tion (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 237. On the current trend, see Tzvetan Todorov, "The Notion of Literature," New Literary History, 5 (Autumn 1973), 5-16.

7 Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris: NRF- Gallimard, 1971), pp. 30-31.

8 Emile Durkheim, who analyzed many of the social components of the self, saw Rousseau as his intellectual forebear in his Montesquieu and Rousseau (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1965); and Jacques Derrida's expos6 of the Rousseauistic roots of Levi-Strauss' thought in De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967) is well known. Erving Goffman's basic sociology re- mains faithful to Durkheimian outlines throughout.

9 Walter Jackson Bate submits to judgments by Wil- liam Hazlitt and Irving Babbitt here: From Classic to Romantic (New York: Harper, 1961), p. 165.

10 Robert Mauzi, L'Idee du bonheur au XVIIIe siecle (Paris: Colin, 1969), pp. 580-81, 590-99. Epistemolog- ically, as well as socially, knowledge was often based upon putting oneself in the place of the other, as it is, for example, in Condillac's "Avis important au lecteur," which introduces the Traite des sensations (Paris: Dela- grave, 1919), p. 133.

11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, CEuvres completes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1965-69)-hereafter cited as OC; and the Essai sur l'origine des langues, ed. Ch. Porset (Bordeaux: Guy Ducros, Editeur, 1968). The spelling of all quotations follows that established in the Gagnebin-Raymond edi- tion.

12 This critique is a lieu commun of traditional French commentary on Rousseau; a modern representa- tive is Jean Starobinski, though his grounds are psy- chological rather than purely literary. See L'CEil vivant (Paris: NRF-Gallimard, 1961), pp. 178-80; La Trans- parence et 1'obstacle (Paris: Plon, 1957), pp. 235-49.

13 Lacan, p. 13; de Man, "Theory of Metaphor," p. 490.

14 For the best summation of the romantic problem of the self see Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Tempor- ality," in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. C. S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp. 182-89. De Man shows how certain romantics, among them Rousseau, were able to overcome the dialectical impasse of always attempting to relate "self' to "Na- ture," turning instead to a temporal self-comprehension. Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie is also greatly corrective in Rousseau's case, by its exposition of Rous- seau's "theory of the supplement." One must also not neglect to mention Marcel Raymond's most important study, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Quete de soi et la re'verie (Paris: Corti, 1962); or Paul de Man's "L'Image de Rousseau dans l'ceuvre de H6olderlin," Deutsche Beitrage, 5 (1965), 157-83; or Georges Poulet's "Rousseau," in The Metamorphoses of the Circle (Bal- timore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966).

15 Paul de Man, "Theory of Metaphor," pp. 479-84;

and I. Kant, "Idea for a Universal History with a Cos- mopolitan Purpose," Kant's Political Writings, ed..H. Reiss & trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Eng.: Cam- bridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 45. Kant echoes much of Rousseau's thinking in the relationship of Nature, will, and freedom (also called "perfectibility").

16 1 refer, of c6urse, to Pascal's "Experiences touchant le vide," CEuvres, pp. 360-91. See also Arthur Love- joy's Great Chain of Being (New York: Harper, 1965), esp. pp. 244-48 on the dissolution of the "principle of plenitude" in the eighteenth century.

17 Paul de Man, "La Structure intentionelle de l'image romantique," Revue Internationale de Philoso- phie, 14 (1960), 68-84, esp. p. 82; "Theory of Meta- phor," p. 492.

18 Lettre No. 3872, Correspondance generale de J. J. Rousseau, ed. Th. Dufour (Paris: Colin, 1933), XIx, 212.

19 Lacan discusses a parallel narcissistic structure in the imagination (pp. 11-12).

20 Saint Augustine, "On Christian Instruction" ("De Doctrina Christiana"), trans. John J. Gavigan, O.S.A., I. iii-iv, in The Writings of Saint Augustine (New York: Ludwig Schopp, 1947), Iv, 29. Augustinian doctrine inveighed against all autonomy: of sign without referent (m.v.9 and in.ix.13; Iv, 124-29) or of loving one's self without reference to God. The problem of the self is intimately bound up, for Augustine, with the insis- tence that language ultimately refer to God. Erich Auerbach relates Augustine's stand against classical self-sufficiency to his recourse to rhetorical devices (Mimesis, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1957, pp. 60-66).

21 De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," p. 190. See also Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlight- enment, trans. F. C. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove (Bos- ton: Beacon, 1965), pp. 37-45.

22 For example, while demonstrating "how obscure is our idea of substance," Locke nonetheless does not re- linquish the category. He derives a kind of proof of spirit, which is as invisible as substance, from the ob- vious, though imperceptible, existence of substance (John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Under- standing, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, n.d., p. 55).

23 Jean Starobinski has seen this in its psychological appearance as a guilty conscience in L'CEil vivant.

24 No one, I believe, has pointed out the relationship between this passage and Augustine's distinction between enjoyment and use: Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used. Those things which are to be enjoyed make us blessed. Those which are to be used help and, as it were, sustain us as we move toward blessedness in order that we may gain and cling to those things which make us blessed. If we who enjoy and use things, being placed in the midst of things of both kinds, wish to enjoy those things which should be used, our course will be impeded and some- times deflected, so that we are retarded in obtaining those things which are to be enjoyed, or even prevented altogether, shackled by an inferior love. To enjoy some-

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A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's "Passion primitive" thing is to cling to it with love for its own sake. To use something, however, is to employ it in obtaining that which you love, provided that it is worthy of love. For an illicit use should be called rather a waste or an abuse. Suppose we were wanderers who could not live in blessedness except at home, miserable in our wander- ing and desiring to end it and to return to our native country. We should need vehicles for land and sea which could be used to help us reach our homeland which is to be enjoyed. But if the amenities of the journey and the motion of the vehicles itself delighted us, and we were led to enjoy those things which we should use, we should not wish to end our journey quickly, and en- tangled in a perverse sweetness, we should be alienated from our country. (I. iii-iv; IV, 29) I define charity as a motion of the soul whose purpose is to enjoy God for his own sake and one's self and one's neighbor's self for the sake of God.

Lust, on the other hand is a motion of the soul bent upon enjoying one's self, one's neighbor and any crea- ture without reference to God. (m.x.16; iv, 130)

Clearly the Rousseau whose aim is "jouir de rien d'exterieur a soi" sins. Jean Starobinski, in "Le Peril de la reflexion" (L'CEil vivant, pp. 158-59), cites the rela- tionship between this and a passage from Malebranche's Recherche de la verite, Vol. II, Bk. I, chs. i-ii.:

De meme que l'auteur de la nature est la cause univer- selle de tous les mouvements qui se trouvent dans la matiere, c'est aussi lui qui est la cause generale de toutes les inclinations naturelles qui se trouvent dans les

esprits; et de meme que tous les mouvements se font en ligne droite, s'ils ne trouvent quelques cause etrangeres et particulieres qui les determinent et qui les changent en des lignes courbes par leurs oppositions; ainsi toutes les inclinations que nous avons de Dieu sont droites, et elles ne pourraient avoir d'autre fin que la possession du bien et de la verite s'il n'y avait une cause etrangere qui determinat l'impression de la nature vers de mauvaises fins. Or c'est cette cause etrangere qui est la cause de tous nos maux et qui corrompt toutes nos inclinations. [as cited by Starobinski]

25 Jean Starobinski, La Transparence et l'obstacle, passim.

26 Paul Hazard interprets this to be the mood of the Enlightenment and cites Condillac: "To desire is the most urgent of all our needs; and so; no sooner has one desire been satisfied, than we begin to long for some- thing else . . . and we live on only that we may desire, and only insofar as we desire" (European Thought in the Eighteenth Century from Montesquieu to Lessing [Cleveland: Meridian, 1963], p. 363). And Locke: "The motive for continuing in the same state or action is only the present satisfaction in it; the motive to change is always some uneasiness . .." (Essay, p. 48).

27 Condillac, one might note, stresses that his is a dis- cussion of the soul in "un etat de peche" (Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, Paris: Colin, 1924, pp. 9-10).

28 Here a fruitful ground for further analysis would be Rousseau's "Lettre a D'Alembert." A comparison between Rousseau's and the modern dramatistic views of the self (as in Goffman and Burke) would prove most instructive.

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Issue Table of ContentsPMLA, Vol. 92, No. 5 (Oct., 1977), pp. 867-1054Volume InformationFront Matter [pp. 869 - 1027]Editor's Column [pp. 867 - 868]Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel [pp. 873 - 889]Nature and Self-Love: A Reinterpretation of Rousseau's "Passion Primitive" [pp. 890 - 902]Blake and the Artistic Machine: An Essay in Decorum and Technology [pp. 903 - 927]Coleridge's Marginal Method in the Biographia Literaria [pp. 928 - 940]Literature and Law in Medieval England [pp. 941 - 951]Plato's Four Furors and the Real Structure of Paradise Lost [pp. 952 - 962]The Easter Cantata and the Idea of Mediation in Goethe's Faust [pp. 963 - 976]Hopkins' Linguistic Deviations [pp. 977 - 986]Old Testament Poetry: The Translatable Structure [pp. 987 - 1004]ForumLovelace and Impotence [pp. 1005 - 1006]Misrepresenting the Eighteenth Century [p. 1006]The Beckett Hero [pp. 1006 - 1008]

Professional Notes and Comment [pp. 1026 - 1028]Back Matter [pp. 1029 - 1054]