Who is the most important public figure in your life? The one who, more than anybody else, shapes your understanding of the world and the role you play in it?
The answer, of course, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (with a possible argument for Francis Bacon). Rousseau developed anthropology, the modern autobiography, a great deal of Romanticism, a great deal of modern political philosophy. Modern left-wing politics is more or less an offshoot of Rousseau. But, most crucially, Rousseau developed the emphasis on “authenticity,” on “naturalness,” which may well be the single most confusing aspect of modern culture.
The point here is that “naturalness” is actually something of an unnatural (or at least unpopular) way of being. Societies around the world tend to configure themselves around various initiations: a person, one way or another, ‘earns’ their social position and then the good life is understood as a conscientious fulfillment of the duties of that social station. I wouldn’t claim that that’s universal, but it certainly is a prevalent perspective.
With Rousseau, a very different idea comes to the fore, which is that the ‘true self’ is the self that exists prior to any social roles. The good life, then, becomes a stripping away, finding ‘authentic’ modes of expression, tapping into pure unfiltered emotion, and, ideally, developing a social architecture that does away with hierarchies of any sort, that preserves an ‘equality of spirit.’
I do think that the jury has finally returned its verdict on Rousseau’s politics: that they just don’t work. Two and a half centuries of left-wing economics has struggled to come up with a mode of wealth redistribution that isn’t itself inherently violent and hierarchical. And Rousseau’s non-belief in representation makes his politics, as far as I’m concerned, a non-starter: there just is no way to get around the need for executive decision-making, and the ‘general will’ seems inevitably to lead to some sort of populist autocracy.
But, culturally, Rousseau leaves an even more enduring legacy. Romanticism is largely his. The ‘60s were a Rousseauian event. The aesthetic of casualness that pervades contemporary society is an offshoot of his beliefs in the ‘noble savage,’ in a society that precedes status. The shift from a society in which men wore suits and hats to a society in which men wear blue jeans; the shift from a society in which women wore long dresses and emphasized ‘modesty’ to a society in which female sexuality is considered a part of acceptable public discourse; the shift from a society of high-fallutin, bookish speech in which inscrutability was considered a mark of achievement to a society in which cursing, earthy language and raw emotionality are part of acceptable social expression are all — with only slight hyperbole — extensions of Rousseau’s underlying beliefs.
So is it worth it? Do we prefer a society where people wear blue jeans to a society where people wear suits? do we prefer poets writing in free verse to poets writing in meter? stories anchored in daily life as opposed to stories with neoclassical themes and salutary lessons? an ethos of proud classlessness in the way people dress and carry themselves, even if distinctions of social status are, in fact, far from eradicated?
The way I guess I would put it is that Rousseau is the patron saint and champion of everyone under the age of about 35. Everybody older than that has to start looking for different deities. Before Rousseau, the good life was more or less to be understood as an orderly progression to a greater age. To be an ‘elder’ was a real achievement. Exceptions could be made for things like the brave soldier sacrificing themselves in battle, for the religious mystic following in a Christlike example of renunciation, but the whole inchoate period of youthful longing, of irresponsibility and self-regard, was understood to be more or less a preliminary and deficient stage. With Rousseau, that age finds its champion. It’s not a coincidence that left-wing politics — exactly of the Romantic but somewhat indistinct Rousseauian variety — has been a badge of young people from that time forward. And the ‘Illumination of Vincennes’ becomes understood as a youthful rebellion on the epochal scale — a saying ‘no’ to everything in the adult world and its cherished myth of ever-unfolding progress.
But Rousseau has much less to offer people over the age of, say, 35. Most infamously, he — the author of a celebrated treatise on education — gave away five of his children to state orphanages. And his politics are notoriously non-specific on the actual mechanics of governance.
With Rousseau, there is a kind of schism not only in the political philosophy of the West but in the lives of all Westerners. He represents a heretical turn against the guiding principle of Baconian progress. And everybody, in their lives, has to sort of choose whether they’re for or against Rousseau — or, as it often plays out, choose to be with Rousseau until adult responsibilities catch up to them and then abruptly select a different philosophy. Once Rousseau enters into the culture, everybody has a strong sense of dual identity. You have one identity as your youthful, rebellious, Romantic, revolutionary self; and then another identity that you get stuck with for the rest of your life.
Sam Kahn writes Castalia.
Sam, I'm no expert on Rousseau--and am not sure, for perhaps the first time with your prolific and eloquent essays, what your argument posited here really is. I would say at my age that I don't feel at all "stuck" with some identity, changeable as I am. I was more rebellious when I turned fifty than any other year in my life, perhaps: Quit a high paying corporate job at age 49 for art's sake and no income, some minimal savings--to the alarm of my dear father who saw my high executive position as "success". So what do you make of that? Or am I totally missing your point?
"Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." I'm certainly guilty of a Rousseauian gloss on rural Montana, even though I know that the noble yeoman is a myth. Maybe Rousseau was a more influential Bernie Sanders?
Yet his notion of natural rights is a bit more than adolescent rebellion. I wrote one of my mentors a while back that I'd made peace with my Romantic tendencies. He wrote back, "You have made peace with what is good." I am now 49. So perhaps I'll be a Rousseauian until I die.