Examined Lives by James Miller

Author:James Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ROUSSEAU

Bust of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, terra-cotta, by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828). The most renowned sculptor of his day, Houdon was allowed to make a death mask as the basis for this posthumous portrait of a profound moral philosopher: “His piercing gaze seems to penetrate the most hidden twists and turns of the human heart,” marveled one admirer of the bust. (Musée Lambinet, Versailles, France/Lauros/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library International)

On an unseasonably warm fall day in 1749, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a struggling thirty-seven-year-old musician, went on a long walk to visit a prison where his friend Denis Diderot was under arrest, charged with subverting the teachings of the Catholic Church through his writings. Unlike Rousseau, the thirty-six-year-old Diderot was already well-known for his unorthodox views on morality and religion. While walking along the road from Paris toward Vincennes, Rousseau was leafing through a copy of Mercure de France, one of the most prominent journals of the French cultural elite. He was stopped in his tracks, he later recalled, when he came to the announcement that a prize was being offered for the best essay on the topic “Whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has tended to purify morals.”

“If anything ever resembled a sudden inspiration,” he later wrote, “it was the motion that was made in me as I read that.” He felt dizzy, faint, overcome. “At the moment of that reading, I saw another universe and I became another man.”

Gasping for breath, he collapsed under a tree, weeping in agitation. “Suddenly I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights; crowds of lively ideas presented themselves at once, with a force and confusion that threw me into inexpressible turmoil … Oh, Sir, if ever I could have written a quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree, with what clarity would I have revealed all the contradictions of the social system, with what force would I have exposed all the abuses of our institutions, with what simplicity would I have demonstrated that man is naturally good and it is through these institutions alone that men become bad.”

Rousseau’s epiphany led him to change his outward conduct immediately, and in ways that friends like Diderot could not help but notice. “I gave up gilt and white gloves, I put on a round wig, I took off my sword, I sold my watch, saying to myself with unbelievable joy, ‘Thank Heaven, I will no longer need to know what time it is.’ ” Temporarily setting aside his musical ambitions, he began to write like a man possessed, submitting a response to the question posed by the Academy of Dijon. His response won the jury’s prize, and when Rousseau’s first Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts was published the next year, it turned him overnight from an obscure composer into a public figure of commanding stature.

But in the years that followed, as gaps began to appear between Rousseau’s actual conduct and his stirring philosophical ideals, critics began to question his integrity. As an erstwhile

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