Confessions in Classics and the Western Canon

Feb 08, 2012 Roger Burk rated it liked it

This is an important book, and much of it is fun and even fascinating to read, especially the First Part, before he departs for Paris and fame. Let's start by giving Rousseau his due. He indeed lays bare his soul with preternatural honesty. Every youthful folly, sexual experiment, ridiculous crush, infatuation, extravagance, missed opportunity, and betrayal is told directly and openly. Maybe we all do some really cringe-inducing things when young, but I think Jean-Jacques was going for a record. This is an important book, and much of it is fun and even fascinating to read, especially the First Part, before he departs for Paris and fame. Let's start by giving Rousseau his due. He indeed lays bare his soul with preternatural honesty. Every youthful folly, sexual experiment, ridiculous crush, infatuation, extravagance, missed opportunity, and betrayal is told directly and openly. Maybe we all do some really cringe-inducing things when young, but I think Jean-Jacques was going for a record. (He thinks no-one else will ever write so honest an autiobiography, perhaps underestimating 21st-century exhibitionism.) He tells the story simply and engagingly, if at a length that wears out one's fondness for this openhearted fellow. He knows well enough that he has unusual talents and is "a sort of being apart" (p. 643), but he also has warm human sentiments. He shows genuine affection for his uneducated longtime mistress, who bore him five children. He enjoys most of all a quiet retired life, walking in the woods, and "botanizing." He is equally willing to dine with a prince and sup with a peasant.

We should also take this into account: for most of his life it seems he suffered from an untreatable enlarged prostate that made urination painful and difficult. For a long time he suffered further from intrusive treatments guided by misdiagnosis as kidneystone. At one point a glass probe broke off in his urethra and could not be removed. Despite these afflictions, he seems genuinely to hold little malice towards others, even those he regards as underhanded enemies and treacherous false friends. He writes more in sorrow--great, lugubrious sorrow--than in anger.

On the other hand:

He does not suffer from false modesty. The bragging is not on every page, but Rousseau is careful to let us know of all the times he refrained from claiming credit for himself. His aims are the "most consistent with virtue than mortal has ever conceived" (p. 353). He has suffered "a fate of which there is no other example among mortal men" (408). He has "the most combustible temperament . . . that nature has perhaps ever produced" (436). He tells us, "Base vengeance is unworthy of my heart, and hatred will never find a foothold there" (462)--what a blessing to be so sure! His magnanimity is astounding (470). He is "all in all, the best of men" (505). He is sure that all the aristocratic women of Paris were available to him after the success of a novel (533). He expounds on his own rectitude, enthusiasm for equity, generosity of spirit, and innate love of justice (620). And he assures us, "I was never conceited" (432).

Of course, he makes enemies. To hear him tell it, he has a unique talent for picking as friends only those who will secretly turn on him. He must have an unnatural attraction for false friends and backstabbers, envious and capriciously malicious. They persecute him "out of inclination, out of caprice, and simply to amuse themselves" (p. 462). He may have developed real enemies, but it sure sounds to me like he had a touch of real paranoia, and his hold on reality was shaky at times. He saw conspiracies everywhere to defame, embarass, and annoy him. They are too pervasive, subtle, and pointlessly malicious to be believed.

He says that he would "eradicate from my heart everything that paid heed to the judgments of others" (p. 355). Maybe he should have paid some heed. He decides he will flout the customs of his time and place in order to be "independent," but then says he'd rather die than make an exhibition of himself (p. 370). When the people turn against him, he continues to invite jeers and abuse by going about in outlandish "Armenian" costume: caftan and fur cap. He says it is more comfortable because of his malady, and it would be "cowardly" to shed it to avoid public attention.

Dress may be a matter of principle, but religion is not. He converts to Catholicism as a youth after running away from an apprenticeship in Geneva. After his writings make him unpopular in France, he desires to return to Geneva (p. 383). He discovers that it is right and sensible to let local authorities decide forms of worship and points of unintelligible dogma, so returns to Protestantism. He assures himself that his own understanding of the Bible surpasses all others and that he has discovered the only way a reasonable man could be a Christian.

But even in Switzerland he is unpopular. He seems honestly bewildered that people could turn hostile just because he writes a few brilliant books that overturn all society, mores, and religion. How could people condemn a genius of such purity of heart? He cannot stay, and feels himself quite ill-used (622). He does not appreciate the irony of the great believer in the sovereignty of the popular will being driven out by popular antipathy.

I can't pass over his heartless treatment of his mistress and children. He praises Therese and seems to genuinely love her, but he declares he will never marry her, without saying why. (He finally did marry her after writing the Confessions.) He notes that his sometime friend Diderot did marry his mistress in similar circumstances, but attributes that to "a promise." I suppose this means a promise to marry, given in order to wangle sex. Apparently Therese extracted no such promise.

Most horrifyingly and unnaturally, Rousseau prevailed on Therese to deliver all five of their children anonymously to a foundling hospital at birth. He confesses this, of course, but it had become known anyway. He acknowledges that it was wrong, but says it was merely an intellectual error, and quickly forgives himself. He thought he was modeling his behavior on Plato's Republic, and that his children would be better off that way. It was not nearly so bad as the perfidy of whatever confidant revealed this secret! In his old age he bitterly regreted abandoning his children, but I think more because he was lonely than because he condemned them to lives of ignorance and toil at the bottom rung of society.

Rousseau takes Montaigne to task to confessing only to lovable faults in his memoirs. Rousseau himself mostly confesses to paltry or goldenhearted ones--laziness and youthful folly, trustfulness and unwise frankness. He is blind to his own intellectual faults--obliviousness to the opinions of others, and willingness to let an idea overrule common sense. He knows that "there is no human being in whose interior, however pure it may be, will not reveal some odious vice" (p. 505), but this is the man who said you can build a society on the asssumption that men are fundamentally good. Rousseau is blind to his own serious faults, and blind to the possibility of having faults he is blind to. ...more

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