We all want what is good. But what is good? Or, to begin with only slightly less ambitious a question, How can we discover the good? Classical philosophy taught that the route to knowledge of the good must begin with what is widely believed to be good: The good is the desirable, and the desirable either is, or is somehow suggested by, what we actually desire. In neither case is the inquiry an easy one, if only because we desire many mutually exclusive things. If the good is suggested by or even if it is included among what we actually already desire, we still must discover the principle by which to discern the “valid” aspect of our desires from those parts that, for reasons of accident or ignorance or misapprehension, do not point toward the truly desirable. Yet however difficult, there is a coherence and an intuitive sense to the philosophic enterprise thus conceived. The good is the desirable and the desirable is to be determined through an examination of our actual desires. Modern and postmodern philosophy have not always maintained this approach to discovering the good. Many, following Kant, have separated the moral good from considerations of desire and happiness, arguing that even if virtue does contribute to happiness, its demands must be determined and met without any regard for one's own well-being. Far from representing the fulfillment of desire, Kantian autonomy (i.e., adherence to the moral law) consists precisely in subordinating desire to duty.
Yet no one, not even those who deny that the good is somehow contained in our desires, would shrink from calling the good desirable. This is important: To call something desirable is to hold that it either satisfies or would satisfy some desire; and to call something most desirable (e.g., Kantian autonomy) is to hold that it would fulfill the highest or worthiest (though not necessarily the deepest or most powerful) desire (e.g., the desire for freedom and dignity). My point is simply that all serious moral and political thought, whether it would like to or not, is made by its own terms to concern itself with the factual question of desire. If even the least naturalistic, most deontological view of the good has a vital link to desire, then so does all moral and political thought.1
It is worth pointing out that, even if there were no connection between the good and desire, one would still need to know what we desire, if only to know what morality is up against.
The good, as the desirable, is fulfilling either of our deepest desire (Plato) or our highest desire (Kant, and also Plato). What, then,
are our deepest and our highest desires?
Rousseau has an answer worth considering. The structure of his moral and political thought is naturalistic in several ways and, thus, is more akin to Plato's than to Kant's. First, he avows that things are good only if and to the extent that they fulfill our natural desires. If men had the natures of wolves, he pointedly suggests, the man who resisted preying on his fellows would be depraved (Rousseau 1979, 287). Second, for all that his prescriptive political thought seems to eschew natural desire—Rousseau goes so far as to assert that the best political institutions are those that most denature man—that departure from nature refers to the means by which society can artificially replicate something of the natural man's soul and satisfy what, at bottom, are deep natural desires (Rousseau 1979, 40); and any adequate political solution must take its bearings from natural right, knowledge of which depends on knowledge of “the nature of man,” which itself includes and arguably is essentially constituted by the desires (Rousseau 1964, 93). Finally, Rousseau holds that there is one good, arising from one desire, that outranks all others and indeed comprehends them, in the sense that these other goods are good only to the extent that they participate in or contribute to the primary good. In this Rousseau's good is comparable to Plato's Good, and his understanding of the desire for this good is comparable to Plato's eros. Yet Rousseau's good is not, in its content, presented as synonymous with Plato's, and Rousseau does not endorse or otherwise indicate that he subscribes to the Platonic conception of eros. The kinship between his thought and Plato's appears to be formal or structural more than substantive. Rather than suggest that there is some particular condition or state of being or content of consciousness that constitutes the good for human beings, he holds that the good consists in maximized existence, that is, felt existence, or, as he calls it, the sentiment of our being, a good whose rather formal and abstract name points to the fact that it can be gained through a number of means. Rather than suggest that we all long for or are drawn to transcendence of our finitude and mortality (which would seem to be the core meaning of eros), he seems to hold that our desire for the good, i.e., our desire to exist, a desire whose name is self-love, is more a push than a pull, and an intrinsically directionless, nonteleological push at that.2
Self-love of course goes by two names in Rousseau, amour de soi and amour-propre. As will be discussed below, though, each of these versions of self-love is fundamentally constituted by the desire to maintain and extend existence, or the sentiment of existence. In the rest of this paper the words “being” and “existence” will always refer to the feeling or sentiment of existence.
Self-love is inherently expansive, seeking to extend one's very being or self, but not, apparently, toward any particular end.
Whether Rousseau's divergence from Plato is as considerable as it appears is debatable, for Rousseau's chosen standpoint, his determination to examine phenomena in strictly empirical and phenomenological ways, arguably would lead him to eschew Plato's more “metaphysical” language even if he believed in something like Plato's Good and Platonic eros. Yet precisely because he adopts this more modern-scientific perspective, his thought commends itself to those inclined to the Platonic view, for this perspective allows Rousseau to offer a supplementary articulation, an articulation “from below,” as it were, of the same phenomena treated by Plato. Interestingly, it does something comparable for the Kantian view of the good (though here, I think, there is definite disagreement regarding the status of that good), for Rousseau's good allows for and explains the goodness of virtue and autonomy (or, in Rousseau's terminology, moral freedom). For these reasons, Rousseau's notion that existence is the good and his notion that, as creatures of self-love, we all desire the maximization of this good, are worthy of our serious consideration. There are other reasons as well, not least among which are the surface plausibility and the explanatory power of these ideas. Indeed, Rousseau offers a credible basis for a comprehensive interpretation of the human problem. His thought on these matters is not in the least metaphysical but it is metapsychological, and as such it speaks to the wellsprings of all sorts of behavior, including political behavior, and to the question of moral and political standards and their basis in nature.
The focus of the following inquiry will be less existence itself (i.e., less the sentiment of existence) than the desire for existence, that is, the desire to maintain and extend our being. This emphasis matches Rousseau's own: perhaps because his perspective is phenomenological, concentrating more on our inner experience than on that toward which our experience seems to point, and perhaps too because he sees that this desire attaches itself to myriad objects, he says more about the desire than the thing desired.3
If this single desire can attach itself to various objects, why call it a single desire? The answer is that these various objects are pursued for the sake of a single, unvarying aim or “meta-object,” namely, maximized existence. This expansive use of the word “desire” is consistent with Rousseau's usage: It is he who speaks of “the desire to extend our being” (1979, 168). Compare to Aristotle's coinage of the relatively expansive “orexis,” or “reaching-out” (Aristotle 1986, 433a–b; Arnhart 1998, 19), usually rendered as “desire.”
Nevertheless, Rousseau does speak about existence, both directly and by implication. Indeed, it is not clear that one can speak coherently about a desire without at least a brief preliminary look at the object, even if that object is a kind of meta-object that is rarely experienced as the focus of longing. Let us then look briefly at what existence means to Rousseau and why we may conclude that he considers it the good for human beings.
4 The meaning and significance of existence, or the sentiment of existence, in Rousseau's thought have been addressed by a number of interpreters, among whom I would cite two as particularly worthy of note: Grace (2000) and Melzer (1990, 39–46, 64–69, 103–105). (For brief surveys of other interpreters, see Grace 2000, 37 n. 38, and Melzer 1990, 40 n. 20.) I have explored these issues myself in Cooper 1999, chap. 1. In its investigation of “the desire to extend our being” the present paper goes beyond my earlier discussion, but the following brief survey is based on that longer account.
BEING
To experience the sentiment of existence seems to mean nothing other than simply to feel alive, and to experience the sentiment of existence to a great extent means to feel intensely alive. Rousseau nowhere addresses the matter systematically, and it is not clear that one could capture such a thing systematically. He neither catalogs the modes of existence or its dimensions nor states the relation between existence and lesser or more proximate goods. Fortunately, though—so, at least, it seems to me—he does not need to. For we all have some sense of what it is to feel alive, to feel particularly alive, and of the variability of the degree or extent to which we feel alive; and we would probably all agree that some people, in some basic way, seem “larger” than others, seem to experience life more intensely and act with greater verve than others. The way to convey this phenomenon is indirectly, either through poetic representation of inner experience or through descriptions of behavior that are novelistic enough to convey the inner life behind the behavior. Rousseau (1979) offers examples of both—the former in various autobiographical passages (to be considered below), the latter in his portrayals of certain literary characters (Emile chief among them) and in the occasional general statement such as this one: “To be something, to be oneself and always one, a man must act as he speaks; he must always be decisive in making his choice, make it in a lofty style, and always stick to it” (40). Immediately prior to this explanation of what it means to “be something” (note the existential language) Rousseau had described “the men of our days,” the bourgeois, as “nothing.”
We learn more about the sentiment of existence from Rousseau's discussions of what does and does not contribute to or enable us to feel it. “To live is not to breathe,” he writes, “it is to act; it is to make use of all our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of existence” (Rousseau 1979, 42). Rousseau's various depictions of impressive and strong-souled individuals, from the savage to Emile to the exemplary citizen to the legislator to himself, serve to confirm this statement and to articulate its various permutations. As this range of the personalities suggests, these permutations are many. The faculties chiefly employed by, say, Rousseau himself are far removed from those of the savage (and each of the others, for that matter), and so, presumably, is the manner in which he experiences the sentiment of existence: through reverie and meditation Rousseau experiences a pure version of the sentiment of existence, “stripped of any other emotion” and apparently all the more intense for that, whereas others seem to enjoy a less pure experience of existence through the exercise of more ordinary physical, social, and mental faculties (Rousseau 1959–69b, 1063–64, 1992–69). One experiences being through doing, though the modes of doing are innumerable.
That Rousseau considers existence good in and of itself is incontrovertible. In the passage just cited from the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, he speaks of the peace and contentment and sweetness of the sentiment of existence, and in the letter to Voltaire he famously proclaims that, “for anyone who feels his existence, it is better to exist than not to exist” (Rousseau 1959–69b, 1070).5
Rousseau's belief in the goodness of “enlarged” existence and his disdain for smallness of soul (or being) are perhaps most strikingly displayed in his famous comparison between religious fanaticism and the “philosophic indifference” of “the allegedly wise man.” The former, though destructive, at least manifests “a prodigious energy that need only be better directed to produce the most sublime virtues.” The latter, in contrast, is irredeemably contemptible for exemplifying and encouraging an existentially constricting egoism. See Rousseau 1979, 312n.
That existence is the highest good, indeed
the good or the comprehensive good for Rousseau (in that it is the source or standard by which other goods are good), is less obvious but no less true. That existence holds this status can be established by examining how Rousseau describes, and that for which he praises or recommends, other goods. Virtue, for example (which various neo-Kantian interpreters mistakenly consider Rousseau's highest good),
6 For the neo-Kantian interpretation, see Cassirer 1954, 1963; Gurvitch 1932; and Levine 1976.
is treated as praiseworthy because it in some way satisfies the desire for more being. (In
what way will be addressed below.) Even happiness, the only other plausible contender for highest good, proves to be second to existence in two senses. First, the content of happiness consists in feeling, which always means in enjoying, one's existence. This is true at the highest reaches, the happiness, described in the
Reveries and cited above, which consists in the sweet sentiment of existence “stripped of any other emotion”; but it is equally true of more commonly available kinds of happiness. The latter is implied both in Rousseau's various depictions of happiness and in his argument that happiness depends not so much on pleasure or any other positive thing but on the relative absence of pain and psychic conflict: That the mere absence of pain yields happiness can only mean that the positive element of happiness is already present by virtue of one's being and feeling alive. The second important sense in which existence is a good prior to happiness is that it can be attained, and can thereby give meaning and quality to life, apart from happiness. Happiness, as Rousseau (
1992, 137) uses the term (
bonheur), depends partly on our own conduct and internal state but also on external conditions beyond our control. Sadly, external conditions are often worst for those whose character is most admirable. Too often the best among us have been made to suffer precisely for what is best about them. Yet those individuals are not foolish or without earthly compensation, for, though obviously not happy, their contentment with themselves and their intensity of experience yield them a magnificent share of existence and render their lives exemplary. To be sure, happiness is a great good. Probably we ought to think of it as the crowning good, since true happiness does not entail the compromise of any other good. Nevertheless, I call existence the greatest good since it is the
source or substance of other goods.
The means and conditions required for attaining a “large” existence are many and complex and in some ways ultimately mysterious. It is possible to say something now about the “shape” of the endeavor, however; and it will be possible to say something more once we have examined Rousseau's treatment of the “desire to extend our being.” In brief, an examination of the various character types admired or endorsed by Rousseau reveals that, for all their (enormous) differences, they all share two basic features, or meta-features.7
The character types to which I refer include the virtuous citizen; “the natural man living in the state of society [i.e., Emile]”; the contemplative Rousseau as he portrays himself in his autobiographical writings; and even the tribal savage, the denizen of “nascent society” (Rousseau 1964, 150–51). These four hardly exhaust the list of types approved of by Rousseau. But they do seem to me to occupy the “pure” positions and thereby to constitute the “markers” by which to understand all other worthy individuals.
First, they all approximate the “negative” perfection of the first man, whose soul was troubled neither by inner conflict nor by a painful excess of desire. None of them, it should be noted, quite attains that ideal. Yet the means by which they approximate it more than compensate them for that imperfection, for these means themselves derive from the second, and “positive,” shared feature of all good human types—namely, the harmonious development and employment of faculties which in and of themselves constitute extended or enlarged being. This is seen most clearly in Emile, whose imagination and passion keep him from quite attaining the savage's equality between desire and faculty but whose
will is kept from outpacing his power. The part of his desire that exceeds his faculties is mastered by virtue, which, being both a kind of rationalized passion and a faculty (will), yields a certain satisfaction and an extension of being (Rousseau
1979, 80).
Existence, then—which, we recall, means felt existence—requires, first, a sufficient freedom from inner division and distraction so that one's being may be felt and, second, that there be something to be felt. The extent of one's existence depends on the degree to which these requirements are met. The second requirement is the one which admits of greater variability: The faculties which can contribute to the enlargement of existence are numerous and diverse. To the extent that most of us fail to achieve a desirable level of existence, though—and it is quite clear that Rousseau would find the vast majority of us wanting, just as he found the vast majority of his contemporaries wanting—the primary locus of the failure would seem to lie in the first or “negative” part of the project. Our smallness is first and foremost a product of inner conflict and excessive, unfulfillable desire; it is they, along with the consequent tendency to obsess over the past and to fret over the future, that keep us from living with whole hearts in the present moment. The ultimate source of this evil is society. By making us dependent on one another, society puts our most urgently felt needs and interests, themselves the product of socialization, into contradiction with the requirements of our desire—our need—to enhance the degree of our existence.8
For an illuminating discussion of the “contradiction of society,” see Melzer 1990, 69–85. Regarding the connection between this contradiction and the sentiment of existence specifically, see Grace 2000, 22–24.
(We see now why liberal or bourgeois society comes in for particular scorn from Rousseau: It deliberately intensifies personal dependence.) Society's existence-diminishing effects are not inevitable, however. In principle, they can be checked either by the construction of a regime based on the principles of political right as articulated in the
Social Contract or by isolated individuals, through education or moral reform. Rousseau (
1978) sees the former as highly unlikely, for reasons explained in the
Social Contract (70–75). What about the latter?
Whether in the case of the naturally exceptional individual as exemplified by Rousseau himself or that of an ordinary person as exemplified by Emile, the key to a high level of existence is the proper ordering of self-love. (Note that both men were raised amid an unregenerate society.) Neither case seems very encouraging from a practical standpoint. The exceptional individual by definition is not a model for most, and Emile, practically, is no proof at all, for Emile was not only conceived by a philosophic genius, but raised by one as well. Nevertheless, improvement is possible, as indicated by Rousseau's various efforts to stimulate social and moral reform. One of these efforts is the Lettres morales, whose rhetoric is designed to persuade individuals to self-reform and whose prescriptive content is designed to yield a more natural life and hence a greater degree of existence (Rousseau 1959–69b). Yet even this more modest but accessible possibility is remote for most people. Most of us, Rousseau would say, fail to understand—in fact, resist understanding—that we might increase our happiness and existence by shedding illusory hopes and false attachments. Here we arrive at a key cause of our diminished existence and return to the primary focus of our inquiry. For it turns out that the proximate cause of this tragic blindness—and, indeed, the cause of much of our existential diminishment in the first place—is precisely the desire to extend our being.
“THE DESIRE TO EXTEND OUR BEING”
It is a peculiar ethical naturalism that identifies our greatest good with the object of our deepest desire but then identifies that desire as the source of our diversion from the good. Yet that is Rousseau's view—in part. In any number of forceful passages he warns against the desire to be more than we already are. This is one of the more pronounced strains in Emile, from the rather Stoical discourse on happiness at the start of Book II (“O man, draw your existence up within yourself, and you will no longer be miserable” [Rousseau 1979, 83]) to the account of the young man's study of history in Book IV (“He will be afflicted at seeing his brothers… turn into ferocious animals because they do not know how to be satisfied with being men” [242]) to the tutor's counsel near the end of the book:
I have only one precept to give you, and it comprehends all the others. Be a man. Restrain your heart within the limits of your condition. Study and know these limits. However narrow they may be, a man is not unhappy as long as he closes himself up within them. He is unhappy only when he wants to go out beyond them. (446)
To be sure, the latter two of these admonitions concern not the desire to extend our being in toto but only the desire to be more than human. Yet the latter, inherently dangerous desire is arguably the logical endpoint of the desire to extend our being and in fact is the hidden desire of “every civilized man” (Rousseau
1964, 195).
9 “[A]fter long prosperity, after having swallowed up many treasures and desolated many men, my hero will end by ruining everything until he is the sole master of the universe. Such in brief is the moral picture, if not of human life, at least of the secret pretensions of the heart of every civilized man” (emphasis added).
Therefore Rousseau's counsel against wanting to elevate our being above the realm of the human effectively comes down to counsel against, or at the very least an urgent plea for caution regarding, the desire to extend our being as such; and often the counsel he gives is directly concerned with extension as such.
Yet if Rousseau counsels against the desire to extend our being—and if he would leave his readers above all with a sense of the danger of that desire—that does not mean that he views this desire in an altogether negative light. I wish to argue, in fact, that Rousseau views the desire to extend our being as a highly ambiguous thing. Belonging to the essence of self-love, the desire to extend our being is natural in its origins and potentially good even for civilized human beings, even if that potential is rarely realized. Indeed, it is the motive force directing us to the greatest good, just as, as we have just seen, it also directs us to the greatest evils. In this the desire to extend our being resembles Platonic eros, which is the motive force of both the best and the worst of men.10
The ambiguous potential of eros is one of the great themes of the Republic, in which the philosopher, the most self-sufficient and just of men, and the tyrant, the most avidly insatiable and unjust of men, are identified as erotic beings. See, respectively, 475e, 485a–b, 501d, 573b–579d. Also see 491d–492a, where Socrates links these two extremes by suggesting that those with highly erotic natures are destined for one or the other, with little likelihood of a middle position.
One of my hopes in this paper is to distinguish between these divergent potentials, that is, to ascertain the defining criteria of what, for lack of more elegant terms, I will simply call “good” and “bad” versions of the desire to extend our being. But before considering versions or species we would do well to look into the genus. What
is the desire to extend our being?
I remarked above that this desire belongs to the essence of self-love. That statement requires elaboration and qualification. Rousseau famously divides self-love into two types, amour de soi and amour-propre, the latter being the unnatural but inevitable outgrowth of the former in civilized human beings.11
Rousseau's most succinct articulation of the distinction between the two types of self-love appears in note “o” of the Second Discourse (1964, 221–22). When I use the English term “self-love” I will be speaking of both amour de soi (or amour de soi-meme) and amour-propre.
It is not difficult to discern the centrality of the desire to extend one's being to
amour-propre, which, being a relative passion, always seeks preeminence over others and typically wishes for mastery over others (recall “the secret pretensions of the heart of every civilized man” [Rousseau
1964, 195]). Preeminence and mastery bring, and are surely sought for the sake of, recognition by others; and for social man this recognition is the very stuff of being (179). Although born in response to the frustration of desire,
amour-propre, much like Plato's
thymos, soon grows beyond the proportions demanded by its initiating provocation and takes on a very large (indeed, a typically tyrannical) life of its own.
12 Rousseau gives several accounts of the genesis of amour-propre out of amour de soi. The one that most highlights the triggering role of obstacles or frustration appears at Dialogues (1990), 9. Regarding Plato's account of the birth of thymos, see Cooper 2001; Newell 2000, 3–4 et passim; and Pangle 1976.
Rather than seek merely to overcome a particular obstacle to a particular desire, it comes to see the world as full of obstacles and to view everything outside itself, including, especially, other people, as little else than obstructions or threats or objects of conquest:
As soon as th[e] absolute love [of oneself] degenerates into amour-propre and comparative love … as soon as one adopts the habit of measuring oneself against others and moving outside oneself in order to assign oneself the first and best place, it is impossible not to develop an aversion for everything that surpasses us, everything that lowers our standing, everything that diminishes us, everything that by being something prevents us from being everything. (Rousseau 1990, 112; emphasis added)
Whatever the initiating provocation, then,
amour-propre comes to experience it as merely the edge or “presenting symptom” of the
real provocation, namely, the fact that we are limited or finite beings, the fact that we are not “everything.” How far we have traveled from the benign self-love of the indolent natural man.
Yet amour-propre is not injected into the soul by an alien force. It is born when self-consciousness, the awareness of one's separateness and relatedness to others, triggers the transformation, the relativization, of amour de soi. That self-consciousness should relativize self-love, making self-esteem problematic and giving it a moral dimension, seems logical enough. (One would like to say, “seems natural” enough, but that would be to settle an important question without first asking it.) But that self-consciousness should ignite infinite passion where before there had been only contentment with one's level of being is baffling—so much so, in fact, that we might question our premise and wonder whether the longing for infinity was not in fact already present in amour de soi, either in latency or in some live but benign way. For it would be much easier to make sense of the birth of amour-propre, of the sudden rebellion against finitude, if the amour de soi out of which it is born were already expansive. And so it is. We might recall that Rousseau's (1979) single explicit reference to “the desire to extend our being” occurs in connection with the preadolescent Emile, in whom amour-propre had yet to be born (168). In Rousseau's view self-love, by its very principle, is expansive—which is to say that human beings, who, after all, are motivated exclusively by one kind of self-love or another, seek to be all that they can be. Human being as such is expansive.13
Regarding self-love as the source of all human action, consider that passion is the source of all action and that self-love is the source of all passion (Rousseau 1979, 183, 212–13; 1990, 9).
To register the precise meaning of this expansiveness it would help to take note of what it does not mean. That self-love and human being are expansive does not mean that the longing to be everything belongs to amour de soi. “Everything” is a relative term and as such can be the object only of the relative form of self-love. Nor does it mean that the desire to extend our being is an essential or universal feature of amour de soi. In the strict sense, at least, the desire to extend one's being would seem to require that one be capable of desiring more than just the satisfaction of physical needs, a condition that excludes men and women in the pure state of nature as well as (perhaps) very small children amid civilization. (True, I just said that self-love, by its very principle, is expansive; but this principle can be operative only where a certain level of cognitive development has taken place; more on this below.) Nor does it mean that every person, at every moment, somehow or other seeks to be more than he or she already is. Those who are weak or weakening seek only to preserve the being they already enjoy. For them, seeking to be all they can be is more in the nature of a defensive enterprise than an expansive one. Yet even this defensive posture testifies to the positive inclination of self-love and human being, i.e., testifies to the reach for maximum existence. Let us then examine this inclination and let me specify what I think it does mean.
Stated positively, my interpretation of Rousseau's view of self-love and the expansiveness of human being consists in the following points, the first of which has already been stated. (1) Self-love of every variety, and human beings in whatever condition, seek the maximum possible degree of existence. (2) In those who are capable—those who are sufficiently energetic and sufficiently advanced cognitively—the pursuit of maximized existence manifests itself as the desire to extend their being. This desire for extension appears both (a) in amour-propre, in which case it manifests itself as the desire to be everything, and (b) in amour de soi, in which case it manifests itself as a more benign reach for extension. (I am assuming that amour-propre and amour de soi are in principle distinguishable in the soul of civilized human beings and that they can, and do, coexist in the same soul.) (3) In those who are weak, the pursuit of maximized existence manifests itself in the desire only for preservation, not expansion. (4) In those who may be sufficiently strong but who lack the requisite cognitive capacity to conceive and desire things that are superfluous to their physical well-being (i.e., human beings in the pure state of nature and the very young amid civilization), the inclination to maximize existence manifests itself not as the desire to extend being but simply as a love of being that manifests as exuberance or overflowing activity and that, being love—indeed, being a passion (Rousseau 1979, 213)—would seek extension if it knew enough to be able to. (Perhaps one could say that this primitive self-love is latently expansive.) Finally, (5) what transforms the not-yet-expansive self-love and being of the savage or the infant into one or more versions of the desire for extension is the advent of self-consciousness, or the awareness of oneself as a separate self related to other selves. With self-consciousness comes the capacity to desire more than what would satisfy one's physical needs, and the principle of self-love (the fact that it is love) dictates that this capacity will be employed.
(1) The first and most basic point is nowhere categorically stated by Rousseau, but it is suggested, definitively I think, by the principle of self-love. Self-love, we recall, is not only the source of passions but a passion itself, whether in the form of amour de soi or as amour-propre (Rousseau 1964, 195, 221–22; 1979, 213). Passion implies desire. When one loves something one desires either to obtain it (or to obtain more of it) or to maintain possession of it, or both. When the object of love is something as unending as being itself, one never stops wanting more of it, at least not until one feels oneself somehow in possession of it (or more likely, union with it—about which more below). That most people do not consciously seek or desire extended being does not count against my interpretation. It does indicate, though, that most of us are ignorant of what we most deeply want. Now this analysis by itself is hardly proof of anything. It does, however, represent a key premise of Rousseau's moral and political philosophy, which will become apparent as we consider some of the particulars of Rousseau's treatment of the expansiveness of self-love and the desire for extended being. Let us therefore proceed to those particulars, beginning with what I take to be Rousseau's most complete summary statement of the nature and sources of human action (and hence human being). Besides testifying to Rousseau's belief in a universal tendency of self-love to maximize existence, this passage from the Dialogues also lays out the distinction between the two basic versions of the desire for extended being:
Sensitivity is the principle of all action. … There is a purely passive physical and organic sensitivity which seems to have as its end only the preservation of our bodies and of our species through the direction of pleasure and pain. There is another sensitivity that I call active and moral which is nothing other than the faculty of attaching our affections to beings who are foreign to us. This type, about which study of nerve pairs teaches nothing, seems to offer a fairly clear analogy for souls to the magnetic faculty of bodies. Its strength is in proportion to the relationships we feel between ourselves and other beings, and depending on the nature of these relationships it sometimes acts positively by attraction, sometimes negatively by repulsion, like the poles of a magnet. The positive or attracting action is the simple work of nature, which seeks to extend and reinforce the feeling of our being; the negative or repelling action, which compresses and diminishes the being of another, is a combination produced by reflection. From the former arise all the loving and gentle passions, and from the latter all the hateful and cruel passions.… Positive sensitivity is directly derived from amour de soi. It is very natural that a person who loves himself should seek to extend his being and his enjoyments and to appropriate for himself through attachment what he feels should be a good thing for him. This is a pure matter of feeling in which reflection plays no part. But as soon as this absolute love degenerates into amour-propre and comparative love, it produces negative sensitivity, because as soon as one adopts the habit of measuring oneself against others and moving outside oneself in order to assign oneself the first and best place, it is impossible not to develop an aversion for everything that surpasses us, everything that lowers our standing, everything that diminishes us, everything that by being something prevents us from being everything. (Rousseau 1990, 112; emphasis added)
Prior to and cutting across the distinction between
amour de soi and
amour-propre is the distinction between the (passive, physical) sensitivity that tends to the preservation of our being and the (active, moral) sensitivity that tends to the extension of our being. The point of immediate relevance is that the expansive tendency belongs to self-love as such—i.e., that it is expressed, however differently, by both
amour de soi and
amour-propre—and that, belonging to the
nature of self-love, it does not arise only in response to some threat. (See also Rousseau
1959–69a, 1324–25;
1979, 79.)
(2, 3) I noted above that expansiveness, or the desire for extended being, requires sufficient force; absent such force self-love or the desire for maximized existence manifests itself defensively, as the desire for preservation only. “In the state of weakness and insufficiency concern for our preservation concentrates us within ourselves. In the state of power and strength the desire to extend our being takes us out of ourselves and causes us to leap as far as is possible for us” (Rousseau 1979, 168).14
Compare to Nietzsche 1974, sec. 349: “The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation” (emphasis in the original).
Although in this line from
Emile, Rousseau seems to speak of a singular “state of power and strength,” the more comprehensive analysis in the
Dialogues indicates that the force requisite for the desire to extend one's being can come in either of two variants—either strength of soul, in which case the result is a “positive” expansiveness, or the energy of those less strong of soul but nevertheless full of desire, in which case the expansive tendency is “negative,” seeking its own fullness only by diminishing others.
15 In absolute terms, one who expands his being only by diminishing others (even assuming such a thing is possible) is not expanding one's being at all. But that is just the point: Such a person is entirely relative in his being; caring only about his standing vis-à-vis others, he only cares about proportions and, thus, feels himself more for their being less.
Examples of the former include the adolescent Emile and indeed all adolescents who have not fallen into dissipation: “a superabundance of life seeks to extend itself outward” and brings about friendship, compassion, and romantic love (Rousseau
1979, 220). Of the newly compassionate Emile, Rousseau observes, ”He feels himself to be in that condition of strength which extends us beyond ourselves and leads us to take elsewhere activity superfluous to our well-being” (229).
16 Rousseau does not claim that strength of soul and healthy expansiveness belong only to the young. But it is a bit discouraging that his most compelling portrait of adult strength of soul and healthy expansiveness is found in his fantastic depiction of an “ideal world” (Rousseau 1990, 9–12).
Examples of the expansiveness born of the desire or energy of those who are not strong of soul are found throughout Rousseau's corpus, from the “agitated” sociable man of the
Second Discourse to the assiduous conspirators persecuting Rousseau (
1964, 179;
1990, passim).
(3) Just as there is a distinction among those with the psychic force to desire extended existence, so there is a distinction to be made among the weak. Those who are weak from old age, husbanding what they understand to be waning resources, seek only calm, whereas those who are weak because they are still too young to provide for themselves are active and rambunctious in anticipation of greater power (and perhaps too because, unlike the old, they are confident that their preservation needs will continue to be met by others). See, in this regard, Rousseau's (1979) comparison of the child, whose strength is not great but whose “activity … is superabundant and extends outward,” to the similarly (but of course not similarly) weak “old man,” whose “failing activity” is “concentrated in [his] heart” (67). Also note Rousseau's observation that it belongs to every age but especially to childhood “to want to create, imitate, produce, give signs of power and activity,” a propensity that can be seen in children as a harbinger or even direct evidence of the desire to extend their being (98). Though weak in an absolute sense, children typically have the energy and confidence to let them take preservation for granted and seek extended being according to their own lights and capacities.
(4, 5) I suggested above that the discovery of amour de soi's expansiveness makes the birth of amour-propre, with its aggressive expansiveness, somewhat less baffling. What occurs with the birth of amour-propre is not the creation but rather the transformation, the relativization, of a preexisting tendency. Amour-propre and amour de soi prove to have more in common than is initially apparent. Yet precisely by grasping this link we come to see a different disjunction and are faced with another baffling evolutionary step: How are we to understand the development of an expansive self-love (i.e., self-love as it appears in civilized human beings, whether in the form of amour de soi or amour-propre) out of the apparently nonexpansive self-love of the savage? Why did contentment give way to infinite and usually insatiable longing?
Rousseau famously describes the savage as idle and lazy (1964, 118, 208; 1986c, 266n.)—and not only lazy, but content: What little he wanted was in his power to procure (1964, 116). Rousseau does not even hint that there was in the soul of the savage any deep-seated agitation or any impulse to overflow himself. The extent of the savage's expansiveness was his repugnance at seeing sensible beings perish or suffer, a phenomenon that does denote a kind of extensive impulse but one whose smallness Rousseau (1964) underscores by attributing to horses as well as to men (95, 130). Yet the savage was a creature of self-love, and self-love, as noted earlier, is a passion that carries a desire for maximized existence. This desire is the principle of self-love as such, as applicable to the savage as to civilized humanity. (It is important to recall Rousseau's insistence that the inhabitant of the pure state of nature was indeed a human being.) Because of his limited cognitive development, the savage was not able to conceive or (therefore) desire more than he needed, and what he needed was normally available to him—hence the contentment. With the appearance of incipient self-consciousness, however, he became capable of conceiving new objects of desire and began to be aware of his finitude and vulnerability. That is to say, he began to feel, however inarticulately, both that his existence could be extended and that, if he was to be happy, his existence needed to be extended. Self-consciousness is what triggered the desire to extend one's being.
This logic, though nowhere simply stated by Rousseau, is borne out by his depictions of the various human types. While the savage is depicted as uninterested in, because not able to conceive, things that would extend his being, all sufficiently energetic self-conscious or civilized human beings are depicted as desiring extended existence. Those who are dominated by unruly amour-propre—think here of “the secret pretensions of the heart of every civilized man”—are depicted as insatiable in their desire to outstrip others, to dominate everyone, to be everything. Those governed by an orderly amour-propre—citizens of a well constituted republic, for example—while well disposed toward fellow citizens, still seek preeminence both for themselves and for the nation. Finally, those in whom amour-propre is not predominant, such as the young Emile and the older Rousseau, also evince a desire to extend their being. Emile's case has already been discussed: His education in compassion is explicitly said to consist in the channeling of an overflowing or expansive strength, and it is in connection with Emile's scientific education that Rousseau (1979) speaks of “the desire to extend our being” (167–68). But can one really maintain that the dreamy-contemplative and self-describedly idle Rousseau exemplifies a desire to extend his being? (Rousseau 1992, 64; 1995, 537). Yes, in fact. And with this we come to the next part of our discussion.
HOW, AND HOW NOT, TO “EXTEND OUR BEING”
No one but a philosopher would speak of “the desire to extend our being,” and most philosophers have preferred to speak of some other goal—power, or pleasure, or preservation, for example—when postulating the ruling desire of human beings.17
The examples are too numerous to analyze, but the mention of such names as Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Epicurus, Hobbes, and Spinoza should make the point. Plato immediately comes to mind as one who does seem to say that human beings desire more, or a more real, being. Their shared emphasis on being constitutes an important affinity and perhaps an instance of influence between Plato and Rousseau.
Even Rousseau agrees that extended being is not the immediate object but rather the ultimate object—or, to use a psychoanalytic distinction, the aim—of many other desires. (Undoubtedly this is one reason for the infrequency of the language of “being” in his work: One who wishes to reform judgment, as Rousseau clearly does, needs to speak to people's desires in more familiar terms.) These other desires are many indeed, their foci ranging from material possessions, prestige, and mastery over others and over oneself to compassion (the desire that others not suffer), friendship, patriotism, familial and romantic love, and knowledge and understanding.
18 This list is incomplete, and the explanations that follow will be more so (with the important exception of my treatment of the last item). I am permitting myself this incompleteness partly because of space constraints; partly because some of the points are obvious enough to require minimal explanation; and partly because some of them, especially those belonging to the category of moral phenomena, have been treated well by other scholars; but also because the full meaning of the desire for extended being will be illuminated less by a necessarily superficial survey of its many manifestations or subsidiary desires than by a detailed examination of that activity that best succeeds at attaining extended existence—hence the more extended treatment of the last item on the list. Finally, let me stress that I am not proposing that the “mechanisms” whereby extended being is sought or found are the same in each case, or that Rousseau thinks they are. Indeed, quite the contrary: While positing existence as the comprehensive good for human beings, Rousseau, it seems, allows for as many modes of existence and thus of extending existence as there are faculties.
In many, probably most, of these cases, it is intuitively plausible that the desired object is desired for the sake of extended being (this is especially true where and to the extent that
amour-propre is seen to be at work), though to say that things are pursued for the sake of extended being is not to say that they necessarily bring extended being when they are attained. Possessions, for example, are typically experienced as extensions of oneself, even if many would follow Hobbes and Locke in holding that this extension is sought as a fence of our preservation and not as an end in itself. The desire for prestige, though again thought by many to serve some other end, can also rather easily be interpreted as an expression or manifestation of the desire to extend one's being, for one who is recognized and admired by others sees himself reflected in them and knows himself to exist somehow in and through their consciousness. Perhaps mastery over others is the clearest case of those cited. Mastery over others consists in the extension of the effective range of one's will, an extension believed by the lover of such power to constitute an extension of his existence, since he views his will as the essential part of himself or the thing he most
is.
The desire for self-mastery can be interpreted in this vein as well. The most remarked-upon kind of self-mastery in Rousseau, and certainly the most important, is virtue. Virtue, which by definition entails a kind of self-overcoming, is pursued for the sake of satisfaction with oneself, a satisfaction born of the very fact of overcoming, i.e., born of the exercise of strength by one part of oneself—presumably the truer part of oneself, the part one considers the core of one's identity—against another part. This mastery of one part of oneself by another part can be seen as rule by, and therefore as the extension of the being of, the active, rational, moral part of the self, the part one considers one's true self. (How else to explain why, when the will successfully governs appetite, we say that we have won a victory over ourselves? Why not say that we have been defeated by ourselves or that, as always, we have both won and lost?)19
Cf. Plato 1968, 430e–431b. For more on the satisfactions of virtue, see Melzer 1990, 100–104.
Not only virtue, but the other key element of the moral life, compassion, can also (and more easily) be seen to entail the extension of one's being. Compassion, according to Rousseau, consists in the extension of our being to, and consequently our suffering in, others (1979, 221, 223; 1986c, 261).20
Not only virtue and compassion but a whole range of moral phenomena can be seen as expressions of expansive self-love, including benevolence, generosity, gratitude, and promise-keeping; see Grace 2000.
And if compassion entails extension, so must that whose source is compassion—friendship, most notably (Rousseau
1964, 131–32). Patriotism, too, can be interpreted along these lines. Citizens who identify with one another are in some sense extending their being to one another, and of course the imperialism that is frequently born of this collectivization of
amour-propre is self-evidently a case of attempting to extend being. If citizens identify with one another, so do members of a family, which in fact serves as both the prototype and the training ground of civic identification and devotion (Rousseau
1979, 363). Thus family love too qualifies as a manifestation of the desire for extended being. The next item on our list is romantic love, which, with its intense mixture of (a) the desire to possess the beloved and (b) sympathetic devotion to him or her, seems to me to qualify on two grounds, the former exemplifying the desire for extended being as expressed through
amour-propre, the latter through
amour de soi. Finally, the desire for extended being can often be discerned as the source of the desire for knowledge and understanding. After all, it is in connection with the young Emile's new education in science that Rousseau actually uses the phrase, “the desire to extend our being” (168), and it is easy enough to see that knowledge of the way the world works grants some power, some extension of oneself, over and in the world.
Now science as Emile learns it is not the science (the botany) of the older Rousseau, and it is certainly not the same as Rousseau's philosophizing and reverie. Emile's study, at least in its origin, is undertaken in the service of his immediate and palpable interest, that is, for the sake of some end beyond itself. Yet I wish to suggest that not only his but also Rousseau's intellectual activity is pursued for the sake of extended being. Indeed, I would suggest that Rousseau's activity is a more direct means of extending being than that of Emile—and not only more direct, but truer: I propose that the intellectual activity recounted in and exemplified by Rousseau's autobiographical writings, and especially the Reveries, is the truest manifestation of the desire for extended being of all those that appear in Rousseau's work in that it seeks—and therefore gains—maximized existence where it is most amply available. It—or, rather, Rousseau himself, Rousseau the dreamer/thinker/artist—recognizes what would best satisfy the desire for extended being, just as the Platonic philosopher recognizes what alone would satisfy the deepest human longing. Rousseau's intellectual activity thus demands our attention, if only because a desire cannot be truly understood without some grasp of the thing that would best satisfy it.
In taking up the case of Rousseau himself I must begin by responding to an obvious objection. Like the savage, Rousseau leads an idle life (1992, 64 et passim; 1995, 537). How, then, can he be seen as pursuing and gaining extended existence? Would it not be more accurate to see him as having shed the desire for extended being along with, or as a part of, his having (for the most part) shed amour-propre (Rousseau 1992, 117–18)?
The force of this objection dissipates when we take note of the peculiar character of Rousseau's idleness. Idleness, as Rousseau conceives of it, is not all of a piece. Some varieties are active and even involve much thinking: “The idleness I love is not that of a do-nothing who stays there with his arms crossed in total inactivity and thinks no more than he acts. It is both that of a child who is ceaselessly in motion while doing nothing and, at the same time, that of a dotard who strays when his arms are at rest” (Rousseau 1995, 537) The reference to thinking is not insignificant. In the very next paragraph Rousseau recounts his forays into botany, which he describes as “precisely an idle study,” yet one that consists in “analysis” and eventuates in written documents of considerable sophistication (537; also see the “Seventh Walk” of the Reveries).21
For more on the character of Rousseau's botanizing, see Cantor 1985. Also see Davis 1999 for a provocative discussion of the philosophic significance of botany in Rousseau's work. Rousseau's botanical writings include Dictionnaire des termes d'usage en botanique and Lettres Elementaires sur la botanique à Madame de Lessert; each of these appears in Rousseau 1959–69b.
“Idleness,” it would seem, means nothing more than that the activity is pursued for its own sake, or for the sake of immediate enjoyment.
Yet, as even so empirically oriented a thinker as Aristotle (1962, 1097a–b) teaches, things that we choose for their own sake or for the sake of our immediate enjoyment are also chosen for the sake of that one thing that we seek only for its own sake: for him, eudaimonia; for Rousseau, the maximization of being. Indeed, Rousseau seems to teach that we want everything we want exclusively for the sake of this one, ultimate good. However that may be, it seems to me quite clear that Rousseau's intellectual activity as recounted in and exemplified by his autobiographical writings, however “idle,” is pursued precisely and even consciously for the sake of extended being, and that its success indicates that it is propelled by the most enlightened version of the desire for extended being.22
The reader will have observed that my initial references to the desire for knowledge and understanding have given way to the more vague term, “intellectual activity,” as the discussion has moved from the “ordinary” or interested pursuit of science (e.g., that of the young Emile) to the extraordinary practice of Rousseau himself. Precisely what constitutes the latter is not easy to say, for Rousseau not only departs from ordinary science, but departs, or at least seems to depart, from the traditional modes of philosophy as well. For now I would simply point out that what I have been calling “Rousseau's intellectual activity as described and exemplified in the autobiographical writings” consists in at least four distinct activities—namely, botany, reverie, philosophic meditation on the reveries (and on other things besides), and the artistic rendering of the preceding three. The interrelations of the four are far too complex to be addressed in this paper, except for a brief comment below.
At their peaks, the
Reveries and even the
Confessions recount episodes in which Rousseau overcomes “civilized self-consciousness” and thereby enlarges or extends his existence to extraordinary proportions.
23 “Civilized self-consciousness” is Christopher Kelly's (1987, 243) term.
(For the sake of economy I am passing over Rousseau's botanizing and will focus instead on the reveries. Not that botany is unimportant—indeed, its accessibility to persons of ordinary intelligence makes it particularly important from a practical standpoint—but as a lesser peak than the reveries, botanizing reveals less about the desire for and possibility of extended being and is thus less theoretically significant than the reveries.) That his being is enlarged or extended is not an interpretation I have imposed but Rousseau's own explicit claim. It is presented as the immediate source of the pleasure and therefore (I would argue) the deliberate goal of the activities he describes.
Rousseau depicts at least two types of extraordinary existence-enlarging reveries. Sometimes the enlargement of existence occurs through the identification of the self with the whole of nature in its beautiful harmony of diverse parts: “I never meditate, I never dream more deliciously than when I forget myself. I feel ecstasies and inexpressible raptures in blending, so to speak, into the system of beings and in making myself one with the whole of nature” (Rousseau 1992, 95). Although the raptures of which Rousseau speaks are not rational experiences, his use of the word “system” suggests that they may somehow include or otherwise entail rational awareness. Yet if they include rationality, they also supersede it, thus rendering them supra-rather than irrational;24
“Supersession … is at once a negating and a preserving” (Hegel 1977, 68).
and the result is something beyond discursive knowledge: “The more sensitive soul a contemplator has, the more he gives himself up to the ecstasies this harmony arouses in him. A sweet and deep reverie takes possession of his senses then, and through a delicious intoxication he loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful system with which he feels himself one. Then, all particular objects elude him; he sees and feels nothing except in the whole” (92). From the standpoint of ordinary or civilized consciousness, there is a paradoxical quality to these experiences. On the one hand, the self seems to expand, to incorporate something far greater than its original content. This is reflected in Rousseau's continued use of personal pronouns to describe the experience: It is always “I” or “he” who feels himself one with nature. On the other hand, though, he refers in both passages to a forgetting or submergence of the self (“I forget myself,” “he loses himself”).
The second kind of existence-enlarging experience described in the Reveries seems on its face to contain neither side of this paradox. Rather than expand its boundaries, the self seems to narrow: It identifies itself not with nature but only with its own innermost core. And far from being forgotten or submerged in something larger, the self, even in its now narrow form, occupies the whole of consciousness:
If there is a state in which the soul finds a solid enough base to rest itself on entirely and to gather its whole being into, without needing to recall the past or encroach upon the future; in which time is nothing for it; in which the present lasts forever without, however, making its duration noticed and without any trace of time's passage; without any other sentiment of deprivation or of enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear, except that alone of our existence, and having this sentiment alone fill it completely; as long as this state lasts, he who finds himself in it can call himself happy, not with an imperfect, poor, and relative happiness such as one finds in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, perfect and full happiness which leaves in the soul no emptiness it might feel a need to fill. Such is the state in which I often found myself during my solitary reveries on the île de Saint-Pierre, either lying in my boat as I let it drift with the water or seated on the banks of the tossing lake; or elsewhere, at the edge of a beautiful river or of a brook murmuring over pebbles.
What do we enjoy in such a situation? Nothing external to ourselves, nothing if not ourselves and our own existence. As long as this state lasts, we are sufficient unto ourselves, like God. (Rousseau 1992, 68–69; emphases added)
Yet if this second experience does not partake of the paradox of the first experience, it nevertheless shares much with it: In each of the experiences civilized self-consciousness and the separate-self sense have given way to a kind of thoughtless but not unconscious feeling of existence.
25 Far from unconsciousness or regression, these experiences are presented as being above and beyond ordinary consciousness. Although they partake of the savage's inner balance and harmony, Rousseau all the while retains and employs a level of awareness, an aesthetic sensibility, and a scientific expertise that outstrip those belonging to the typical civilized person, let alone the savage.
In fact, the two experiences even share the greater paradox of which the
other paradox, the one found only in the first experience, is an effect. Namely, in each of the two experiences we find both an enhancement of the self (“we are sufficient unto ourselves, like God”) and a simultaneous letting-go of or disinvestment from all that belongs to the self in its separateness. In fact, though, this will seem a paradox only to those who believe that the road to enlarged existence is through the enhancement or aggrandizement of the separate self. To Rousseau, in contrast, it is no paradox at all, for he teaches through the
Reveries (and other texts) that the transcendence of the separate self along with its possessions and encumbrances is a legitimate way, probably the
best way, to enlarge one's being.
26 By “transcendence of the separate self” I mean that the self ceases to be conscious or mindful of its separateness. Objectively speaking, of course, the existence the self enjoys is still its own.
(What I described as the narrowing of the self in the second experience is a narrowing only with respect to space and time. The self narrows until it includes nothing but the sentiment of its own existence, yet this sentiment (as experienced by the cultivated Rousseau), with its perfect and conscious satisfaction, seems to me to constitute a great enlargement of existence.) Whereas
amour-propre, at least in its typical form, inevitably fails to win the satisfaction it seeks (it is not easy to achieve preeminence, much less to “be everything”), the desire for extended being that arises from
amour de soi can win greater existence for the self by liberating it from identification with the ego.
27 As the comparison to God may indicate, Rousseau thinks that this means of enlarging one's being lies beyond the power of most people. It would seem to require a highly improbable combination of natural genius and a difficult-to-choose solitude. Here, as elsewhere, though, some may doubt Rousseau's pessimism while embracing his basic theoretical insight. An interesting and very important question is whether amour-propre can in any way serve the cause of its own reform or overcoming: One can imagine people reading Rousseau (or someone else), coming to the conclusion that the greatest happiness entails a transcendence of amour-propre, and then seeking that happiness … for reasons of amour-propre (“Why shouldn't I have what he has?”). The question is whether such a project (an egoistically propelled attempt to overcome egoism) could ever succeed. There are perhaps some grounds for thinking that it might.
That, it seems to me, is the lesson of the reveries.
28 The lesson of the Reveries (the book, not just the activity recounted therein) is far more complex and multifaceted than this one part. As noted above, the book recounts and/or exemplifies at least four distinct activities. Aside from the reveries themselves (and botany), we also encounter Rousseau's meditation on them and his artistic (re)presentation of both the reveries and the meditation. It is beyond the purview of the current paper to pursue this further, other than to say that it may well be that all four activities contribute to the enlargement of being, and even that the latter two—the reporting, as it were—are more important than the experiences reported. Why else would Rousseau “waste” his time in meditation and writing? This suggestion has important implications for the status of philosophy in Rousseau's thought. We have already seen Rousseau teach that reflection diminishes existence by deflecting passion (1990, 112), and we may recall his famous near-suggestion (“I almost dare affirm”) “that the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal” (1964, 110). These statements seem to make philosophy at best a necessary evil—necessary, that is, for those who are guided by the philosopher (Rousseau 1979, 219), but an evil for the one chosen by fate and a sense of responsibility to do the guiding. Yet the Reveries, with its philosophic portrait and analysis of Rousseau's happiness (and unhappiness), may well point to the pleasure, the enlarged existence, of a certain kind of philosopher.
Have we then arrived at the decisive distinction between good and bad versions of the desire to extend our being? Shall we simply conclude that, in Rousseau's view, the desire for extended existence is good, because successful, when born of amour de soi, and bad, because unsuccessful (and destructive of others), when born of amour-propre? Not quite—which is good news, given the overwhelming and inevitable predominance of amour-propre in the souls of civilized men and women. It does seem to be true that the most perfect expansion of existence comes from a state of mind born of amour de soi and that the most ill-fated and tyrannical attempts at extended existence arise from amour-propre. More broadly, Rousseau undoubtedly sees a strong correlation between amour de soi and good desire for extended existence on the one hand and amour-propre and bad desire for extended existence on the other hand, a correlation that makes sense in light of the respective origins of these desires: Recall that the expansiveness of amour de soi arises from overflowing strength, while that of amour-propre arises from weakness and aversion. Recall too the passage from the Dialogues quoted above (Rousseau 1990, 112), in which “all the loving and gentle passions” are said to arise from the “positive sensitivity” born of amour de soi, and “all the hateful and cruel passions” are attributed to the “negative sensitivity” produced by amour-propre. Nevertheless the correlation is not perfect. Amour de soi, though “a good and absolute feeling,” can lead people into conflict.29
At its peak, however, i.e., as it appears in the highly cultivated Rousseau, amour de soi seeks extended being through the kind of inward or spiritual activity discussed above and so does not risk conflict with others.
Conversely,
amour-propre, though rivalrous and irascible, is educable and can be made to serve both civic well-being and one's own happiness (one's own enlarged existence). All the hateful and cruel passions come from
amour-propre, but
amour-propre does not produce
only hateful and cruel passions: One need only recall my earlier list of phenomena that arise from the longing for extended being and then notice the involvement of
amour-propre in some of the best among them, including virtue, compassion, romantic love, and patriotism.
30 I have addressed the role of amour-propre in these and other human goods in Cooper 1999, 122–30.
Certainly the relative proportions of amour de soi and amour-propre in one's soul will deeply influence the way one pursues extended existence: The person governed by amour de soi lives within him- or herself and will therefore presumably seek extension differently from, more inwardly and/or directly than, the person governed by amour-propre, who, already “liv[ing] only in the opinion of others,” will likely seek extension through rule or recognition (Rousseau 1964, 179). To determine how Rousseau thinks one should or might best extend one's existence, however—to determine the criteria of good and bad versions of the desire to extend our being—one needs to look beyond the crisp distinction between the two kinds of self-love to Rousseau's many particular judgments of specific instances of the desire. Such a survey yields the following results.
We begin with two qualifications. First, with the possible exception of the sort of reverie discussed above, no particular activity aimed at extended existence can be called good in an unqualified sense: Social or political considerations might well argue against this or that activity at this or that time. Even Rousseau's kind of reveries might prove inconsistent with social well-being if too many people were drawn to them. Second, how one might best pursue extended existence surely depends on who one is—on one's station in life as well as one's abilities and inclinations. That having been said, it is possible to discern in Rousseau's thought some general themes regarding good and bad, or better and worse, ways of pursuing extended existence. The most prominent of these, perhaps, involves the distinction between having and doing. By “having” I mean to refer (more or less) to the pursuit of what Aristotle (1962, 1098b, 1099a–b) calls “external goods”; by “doing,” I mean activity undertaken for its own sake or for the sake of the experience itself. Being, Rousseau (1979) teaches, is attained or realized through doing: “To live is not to breathe, it is to act; it is to make use of all our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of existence” (42). This dictum effectively suggests that, in general, the best way to pursue maximized existence is to develop and exercise our faculties to the maximum possible extent. Of course this advice is hardly without peril. The development of the various faculties, both in the species at large and in innumerable individuals, has more often than not resulted in a diminishment of existence and happiness, for the growth of one's faculties has typically stimulated even greater growth of one's desires (Rousseau 1964, 147; 1979, 80–81). Yet let us consider wherein this peril consists. The danger is that the pursuit of more capacity for doing will lead (for reasons that are complex but familiar to Rousseau's readers) to an even greater pursuit of having. Having—or, rather, excessive desire for having—is the problem. It would be simplistic but not altogether wrong to ascribe to Rousseau the Marxian view that having is the enemy of being.
When is the desire to possess excessive? One could say that it becomes excessive simply when it outstrips our power to satisfy it, which is true enough. This, however, occurs when we lose control over it—when it gains control over us (Rousseau 1979, 445).31
“All passions are good when one remains their master; all are bad when one lets oneself be subjected to them.”
And
that happens, I would argue, precisely when and to the extent that these things become the primary vessels through which we seek extended existence. Wanting external goods—wanting wealth, or prestige, or rule, or any other possession—is not inherently problematic, either for ourselves or for others. Making these things one's primary route to extended being, however—pursuing the soul's deepest longing through having rather than through doing—
is problematic, for it invests these desires with more weight than they can bear. The consequences of this ill-fated investment include the incitement of ever new and unfulfillable desire; ever greater vulnerability, anxiety, and dependence as one's possessions expand (the rich fear losing their wealth, the powerful are dependent on those they rule [83–84]); and, in consequence of this vulnerability, anxiety, and need, an increasing inability to live in the here and now, which is a kind of vacating of the self, and an inability to act with a whole heart. Each of these consequences significantly diminishes existence.
A comparison of (a) the doomed enterprise of seeking extension through possessions with (b) the successful attempt at extension recounted in the Reveries suggests an even more fundamental distinction than the one between having and doing: In Rousseau's view, the attempt to extend our being is doomed when it consists in the attempt to aggrandize or empower the self as it already is, i.e., to dress up or equip the current self, the social self so famously depicted at the conclusion of the Second Discourse, with more things. In contrast, the attempt to extend one's being stands some chance of success when it involves certain kinds of inner transformation, whether the further cultivation of existing faculties or the development of new abilities, provided that such cultivation or development does not incite excessive new desires. It is in this proviso that the difficulty and the enormity of the challenge come to light. Typically, the cultivation of our faculties does incite excessive desire; indeed, it typically leads to all the unfortunate consequences outlined above (excessive desire; vulnerability, anxiety, and dependence; and an emptying of the self). It does so because the self, governed predominantly by an unruly amour-propre, sees itself as an embattled entity whose very substance consists in its external goods or possessions.
I pointed out above that the pursuit of being through doing often fails because it degenerates into the pursuit of being through having. We see now that the source of this degeneration lies in the way one experiences and conceives the essence or ground of the self. The self whose desire for extension manifests in the futile pursuit of being through having is the self that believes itself or its being to be constituted by external goods; this is the fearful self, the self governed by disorderly amour-propre—in a word, the Hobbesian self; in another word, one that helps illuminate Rousseau's political program, the bourgeois self. Thus a healthful desire for extended being would seem to require either that amour-propre be transcended (à la Rousseau himself) or that it be educated in such a way that one looks to a larger community as the source of one's identity and ground of one's being. The latter course, which would lead the individual to seek extended existence in a context of devotion to others, is available through participation in a well-constructed polity. In such a polity law and education would reform amour-propre by generalizing or collectivizing it: Much of its self-seeking character would manifest itself on behalf of the community, and the personal ambition of citizens would lead them to pursue honor through civic service. Such a polity, Rousseau believes, is difficult to the point of implausibility in the modern age. Nevertheless, some degree of reform does seem to be possible and worth attempting, as witness his efforts in Poland and Corsica (Rousseau 1986a, 1986b).
A third course is available as well, a kind of middle course between the rare transcendence of amour-propre and its radical reform through politics. That course is the life of devoted domesticity of the sort for which Emile is educated and which, to varying degrees, we find elsewhere in Rousseau's work (e.g., the idyllic life at Clarens in Julie and the rustic life of the free peasantry referred to in various writings). This life would be characterized by a moderation of amour-propre, both quantitatively and qualitatively: Amour-propre would become less “large” and powerful a force in the soul, and would be generalized or extended to the family as a whole, so that relations within the family would be free of fractious self-seeking. In the best of circumstances, wherein the individual feels him- or herself relatively well off, amour-propre would be “humane and gentle” (Rousseau 1979, 235). Like the political solution (though to a lesser extent), this course has the weight of modern sensibilities against it, in Rousseau's view. It is still attainable for those so inclined, however, and it can be encouraged, or at least protected where it already exists, through political means.32
My sketch of Rousseau's three “solutions” must for reasons of space remain just that. But one further point is too important to go unmentioned: Each of three specified routes to a new self-understanding entails, at its core, a new stance toward death, i.e., an overcoming of the desperate desire to resist the inevitable, this desire being the chief incitement if not the animating nerve of amour-propre. As Christopher Kelly has noted, Rousseau seems to present three different ways of dealing with the problem of death: an acceptance of necessity, à la the savage; a forgetting of death, such as we see in Rousseau's reveries; and an equanimous acceptance of death arising from so great a fulfillment of our being that we ask nothing more from life and are ready to die. Perhaps the list is even longer than this, for the citizen arguably “escapes” death by imagining that the nation will live forever.
BETWEEN EROS AND WILL TO POWER
On the basis of the analysis I have presented, it is possible to offer a few reflections on Rousseau's thought from a broader, comparative perspective. Early in this paper I suggested that, in positing the existence of a single, comprehensive good and a multiply expressed desire for that good, Rousseau is similar to Plato. We have now encountered an additional affinity between the two philosophers, for in holding that there are good and bad and better and worse ways of trying to extend our being, Rousseau effectively attests to something like a natural hierarchy of ends and desires. In neither thinker's case is the hierarchy easily known or simply expressed, yet each appeals to nature as the ground of judgment regarding the human good. Plato teaches nothing if not the difficulty of apprehending human nature, a difficulty that stems from the fact that, as part of the whole, the human being cannot be fully known without knowledge of the whole. Nevertheless, Plato points to nature as the appropriate standard for a sound philosophic anthropology.33
Plato's presumption of the existence and (in principle) the knowability of nature is implied by the entirety of his corpus, which would be rendered incoherent without the presumed possibility of apprehending nature. For instances in which nature is overtly appealed to in ways that speak both to its necessity and to its opacity, or at least to the misuses to which the concept is put, see Republic (1968, 369c–72b, 451c–66d) and Gorgias (1998, 499e–500a).
Rousseau's appeal to nature is even more complex. How can I suggest that Rousseau appeals to nature at all when he endorses several different and even opposing versions of the good life, one of which in fact is characterized by its being denatured (1979, 39–40)—and when, consequently, we can specify the features or requirements of the good life as Rousseau sees it (i.e., the good life as such, including all versions) only in the most formal language? (Those features or requirements, we recall, are psychic unity and absence of inner conflict, which together constitute what I have called the “negative” side of the project of the good life, along with the development and employment of the various faculties of body and soul, so long as these do not come at the cost of the first two features.) Substantively, the various versions of the good life entail the development and employment of different faculties in pursuit of different ends. These differences, however, are not the whole of the story, and they should not blind us to the common elements. There is in fact a substantive common ground between these lives, consisting, for example, in wholesome sociability.34
See Marks 1998 for a very fine elaboration of this point.
Moreover, and more important for the present argument, the formal requirements themselves have definite and unalterable substantive implications. Even if one must speak largely in formal terms when speaking generically of Rousseau's multiple versions of the good life, the requirements of living well, of enlarging one's being, whether for the citizen or for the person trying to lead a more natural life, are definite and substantive, so that a Rousseauan therapist, as it were, taking account of one's aspirations and current condition, could in principle advise each of us in a nonarbitrary way regarding the best way to live. True, the therapist's advice would vary according to which type of good life one is attempting to approximate, and would in effect appeal to a few (though only a few) different hierarchies of ends; but these ends are subsidiary to and derive from universal and nonnegotiable requirements of human well-being.
35 Compare to Aristotle's (1984, 118) likening of the legislative art to that of the sports trainer.
What should one call this if not a normatively prescriptive human nature, however indirect the prescribing?
36 That nature's prescriptions are indirect does not prove that nature is incoherent or only a fiction, but only that philosophy is necessary. I have elsewhere (Cooper 1999, 37–65) offered an extended argument contending that each of Rousseau's versions of the good life is grounded in nature and that his conception of nature is not merely formal. For an even stronger version of such an argument, see Marks 1998.
Nevertheless, Rousseau still seems to differ from Plato—from the “standard” reading of Plato, at any rate—in two decisive regards, one concerning (a) the character or content of the good and its “location” vis-à-vis the self, the other concerning (b) the consequent character or phenomenology of the desire for the good. With respect to both of these considerations, Rousseau seems to occupy a position somewhere between Plato and Nietzsche, who too suggests that human activity is driven by a single, comprehensive and multiply expressed desire or will (Nietzsche 1954, 226; 1966, sec. 13, 36) but who depicts both the character of the desired object and the character of the will itself in terms that he understands to be radically opposed to Plato's public teaching.
(a) Rousseau's “existence,” attainable as it is through numerous means and signifying a feature of experience rather than something independent of the self, is more subjective a thing than what Plato's good is typically understood to mean. (Few readers claim with confidence, let alone with credibility, to have understood the nature of the good as treated by Plato; but most would agree that, as the source of both being and intelligibility [Plato 1968, 504d–08b], Plato's good has a power and relation to human life, and thus a claim to human regard, that Rousseau's “existence” does not have.) By the same token, the fact that existence can be enlarged only through a finite range of lives or ways of being, such that some of the most popular means through which it is sought only serve to diminish it, renders it in some ways less subjective, or more beholden to the stubborn demands of a prescriptive nature, than Nietzschean power is typically understood to be.
(b) Precisely because it is a feature of experience rather than an objective (even if mysterious) thing that lies beyond ourselves, enlarged existence cannot be thought to pull or attract us. In this, too, Rousseau seems decisively different from Plato. Whereas Plato seems to suggest that the Good exerts an erotic attraction, a pull, Rousseau seems to portray the desire for extended being and the self-love of which it is an expression as an intrinsically directionless, nonteleological push, a kind of inchoate expansiveness or overflowing. Rousseau may well hold with Plato's suggestion that the good is that for which we do all that we do, but the subjective way in which he conceives the good necessarily results in—or perhaps follows from, but in any case “goes with”—a very different understanding of the phenomenology of the desire for the good. Platonic eros admits of innumerable forms, but common to all of them is the experience of attraction to something beautiful outside the self. Indeed, the experience of intense eros is marked by self-forgetting. The lover loses him- or herself in the beloved. Rousseau, in contrast, while he does acknowledge that the desire for extended existence manifests itself in various kinds of attraction and even employs the metaphor of magnetism (see the extended quote from the Dialogues above), nevertheless does not portray the desire for extended being as essentially a self-forgetting attraction to a beautiful object. The magnet metaphor, with its absence of beauty and with its essentially “horizontal” character—there is no sense of uplift or transcendence—is instructive in this regard. Here too, as he distinguishes himself from Plato, Rousseau seems to land somewhere on the way to Nietzsche, whose account of will to power and of the origin of human action emphasizes the psychophysics of the actor, i.e., his need to discharge energy, over and against the particular attraction or meaning of any given object (Nietzsche 1974, 315–16).37
Nietzsche's will to power is characterized precisely as an eruption rather than a drawing-out or -up. The eruption always takes some direction or other and can even be sublimated or spiritualized, but nature does not direct our inclinations toward any such end, let alone toward the Good.
Then again, if we put aside the passage from the Dialogues—a passage that, as an attempt to divide the whole of human motivation into a few categories, is necessarily highly abstract—and consider instead Rousseau's accounts of the experience of healthy souls, we remember that Rousseau does allow both for the attraction of beauty and for self-forgetting. Emile's love for Sophie comes immediately to mind: Explicable in terms of the desire for extended being, it is even more easily explicable in terms of eros. Rousseau's asocial reveries, with their sweet self-forgetting, also come to mind, even if the self-forgetting was not the result of attraction to a beautiful beloved; and the self-forgetting may have been the result of absorption in the beauty of nature or the whole, in which case it seems not so very different from the purportedly erotic experience of philosophy as Plato (1968, 484a–90b; 2001, 210a–12a) presents it. This is not to say that the distance between Rousseau and Plato disappears. There is still the sticking point of the status or “location” of the good, i.e., whether it lies beyond the self or somehow within it. It does seem to suggest, though, that the distance is smaller than has so far seemed to be the case.
The distance is perhaps even smaller yet: for if Rousseau emerges from close scrutiny as somewhat more of a Platonist than he had appeared, Plato arguably closes some of the distance from the other side. Here I cannot even sketch what would need to be an elaborate case. I will suggest, though, that a reading of the phenomenology of eros as depicted by Plato, i.e., an investigation of what, on Plato's treatment, eros actually seeks, reveals something not so different from Rousseau's desire for extended being. For that matter, the same may well be true of Nietzsche and will to power if one considers that, despite ostensibly eschewing Nature or any other source of value or valuation beyond the human will, he somehow lands at the side of Plato—and Rousseau—both in his ranking of the philosophic life and, at least somewhat, in his explanation of the goodness of that best of lives. The nature of a desire is most clearly revealed in that which would most satisfy it. If what would most deeply satisfy eros (Plato), the desire to extend our being (Rousseau), and will to power (Nietzsche) is the activity of the philosopher, then, however differently one might understand that activity, an important similarity would seem to be indicated.38
I would consider these suggestions regarding the similarity among Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche too little developed to merit mention here but for three facts. First, to develop them adequately would require as much analysis and exegesis of Plato and Nietzsche as this paper has provided regarding Rousseau. Second, it is my intent to undertake just that: The present paper is to be a part of a series of studies addressing Platonic and post-Platonic conceptions of eros and its successors. Finally, even without further evidence, I do think that the reader who is reasonably well acquainted with these three philosophers will be able to appreciate the family relation that I have pointed out. Whether this is a happy family, however, is not so easy to see.
CONCLUSION: ROUSSEAUAN DESIRE AND ROUSSEAUAN RHETORIC
Before ending this investigation let us take note of one other general distinction between Rousseau's “good” and “bad” ways of pursuing extended existence—a distinction so sharp that it might seem to challenge my premise that for Rousseau there is such a thing as a good (meaning healthful and prosocial) desire for extended existence. I have suggested throughout this paper that Rousseau imputes “the desire to extend our being” to all sufficiently strong or energetic human beings, not only to those who pursue property or power or reputation but also to those (such as himself) who have detached themselves from these passions. There can be no question about the former. In his heart of hearts, as we have seen, the pursuer of property or power or reputation—the “civilized man”—wants to be “the sole master of the universe”; he resents “everything that by being something prevents [him] from being everything” (Rousseau 1964, 195; 1990, 112). Yet we see no such avidity and agitation in Rousseau. He never, to my knowledge, voices a felt need to be more than he is; and neither, for that matter, does Emile. On the contrary, Rousseau demonstrates contentment and equanimity (at least during the three quarters of the time that he is not overtaken by amour-propre), and of himself and Emile he states, “No one knows better than we do how to keep in our place, and no one has less desire to leave it” (1979, 467). Might it not be the case that Rousseau's extraordinary expansion of his being occurs without being preceded by—even because it is not preceded by—a desire for expansion? And might that be another reason for the overwhelmingly negative thrust of his rhetoric on the subject of wanting to be more than we are?
The answer to both questions, it seems to me, is no, albeit a qualified no. That Rousseau chooses to cultivate certain experiences, that he devotes himself to botany and reverie, is sufficient to establish that he desires the content of those experiences, and there can be no denying that that content consists, in the ways in which we have seen, in an expansion of being. That he undertakes this activity without avid desire or agitation does not prove that no desire is operative. What it suggests, simply, is that the desire for an experience that is gotten by doing something that is within one's power has a different character, a calmer and more assured character, than the desire to acquire something external to the self. Nevertheless, the questions have a real basis, and they point to an important truth. For while it may be true that, like everyone else, Rousseau is moved exclusively by passion or desire, his success is as much a result of what he does not desire as of what he does desire. Declining to pursue extended being through the acquisition of external goods is perhaps the crucial step in the progress toward expanding one's being, more crucial even than the positive step of conceiving one's identity in more healthful terms. This is so not because the positive step is less important but because it may well follow the negative step as a natural consequence. If self-love and human being really are by nature expansive, then closing down the external route may well force the self's expansive energies inward (using that term loosely, to refer to the cultivation and exercise of one's faculties for their own sake), where they could succeed in enlarging one's being. This, arguably, is the shared source of both Rousseau's and Emile's happiness.
Thus the first question points to a truth: It would be incorrect to say that Rousseau's extraordinary expansion occurs because it is not preceded by a desire for expansion (it is preceded by a desire for expansion), but it is fair to say that the expansion occurs because it is not preceded by a certain kind, the most common kind, of desire for expansion. And (to take up the matter of the second question) that would be reason for the harsh rhetoric Rousseau aims against the desire to be more than we are. Rousseau's teaching about the good is not always good to hear. Most of us, “always outside of [ourselves]” and believing our being to consist in external goods, would probably respond to a promise of extended being only by intensifying our ill-directed pursuits. More needful than the truth about being—and the proper preparation for the safe use of that truth—would be a program of moral reform that reshapes people's self-understanding and aspirations. Such a program is precisely the legislative agenda of Rousseau's political philosophy.
My thanks go to Christopher Kelly for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. My work on this paper has been generously supported by Carleton College.
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