Rousseau's God by John T. Scott;

Author:John T. Scott; [Scott, John T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000 PHILOSOPHY / General, PHI019000 PHILOSOPHY / Political, POL010000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory, REL051000 RELIGION / Philosophy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Context of the “Profession of Faith”

The “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” comes as something of a surprise. About one-third the way through book IV, with almost no preparation, Rousseau inserts the “Profession” as an explicitly separate section of the work whose relationship to what comes before and after it within the main text is unclear. This separate section comprises fully a third of book IV. Unlike the other two explicitly separate sections within Emile (“Sophie, or the Woman” and “On Travel”), both in book V—the “Profession” as a whole—that is, the narrative frame and the speech by the Savoyard Vicar—is presented by Rousseau as having been written by another, unidentified author. He even goes so far as to put the entirety in quotation marks and to give the “Profession” proper—that is, the speech itself—a subtitle to set it off from the main text.

The context within Emile in which the “Profession” is inserted provides us with some clues about Rousseau’s intention in including it. Book IV marks a kind of “second birth” of the pupil as the passions are enflamed with the dawning of adolescence. “We are, so to speak, born twice: once to exist and once to live; once for our species and once for our sex” (211). The book is devoted to managing the development of the passions of self-love, pity, and especially the sexual passion, along with the imagination and other faculties related to these passions. The entire strategy might be characterized as prophylactic in nature, we may suspect that the “Profession” has a similar purpose.

Shortly after having spoken of extending amour-propre to other beings in order to transform it into a virtue (252), a passage I quoted in the preceding chapter, Rousseau engages in a dialogue with an imagined reader who finds his project incredible, perhaps because the reader supposes that amour-propre and the other passions are signs of our natural wickedness. He answers: “But consider, in the first place, although I want to form the man of nature, the object is not, for all that, to make him a savage and to relegate him to the depths of the woods. It suffices that, enclosed in the social whirlpool, he not let himself get carried away by either the passions or the opinions of men.” Having written this, he makes an unexpected transition to discussing the limitations of our intellectual faculties and specifically the difficulties in conceiving of the “incomprehensible Being who embraces everything, who gives motion to the world and forms the whole system of beings.” Over the next few pages Rousseau, in his own voice, elaborates this epistemological modesty—for example, warning that the precipitous ascent from material to immaterial substances produces either materialism or superstition. He presents a brief natural history of religion, telling of how primitive humans animated the entire universe with beings whose action they believed they felt, how they slowly came to recognize a single deity by generalizing their ideas and ascending to a first cause of the universe

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