Rousseau: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern

       Rousseau’s Life and Works

      Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712, at Geneva in Switzerland. He never knew his mother, who died of the effects of childbirth ten days after his arrival. In his own words: “My birth was the first of my misfortunes…. I was born almost dying, they had little hope of saving me. I carried the seed of a disorder that the years have reinforced.” This was how Rousseau viewed his entry into the world: a drama whose potential “disorder” would prove emotional, psychological, and even physical. From the start, his relationship with those around him was unhealthily intense. His father, a watchmaker who had married “above his social class,” was inconsolable at the loss of the woman he had loved since childhood. In Rousseau’s words, “He thought he saw her again in me, but could not forget that I had robbed him of her.” They would both cry when he spoke of her. “He never kissed me without my being aware of his sighs; in his convulsive hugs a bitter grief was mingled with his caresses.” One can all but hear, feel, and smell the closeness and undermining ambivalence.

      There appears to have been a streak of impulsive wildness in the family. Rousseau had a brother who was seven years older than him. His father would occasionally beat the brother, and on one occasion Rousseau flung himself between them to save his brother. Rousseau at first describes his brother as a “rascal” but later reveals, “Finally my brother turned so bad that he ran away and disappeared completely.”

      At this time Geneva was a small Protestant republic surrounded by Catholic states and dependencies. It was geographically isolated from its neighbours by the ice-capped peaks of the Alps and the picturesque waters of Lake Geneva. The city owed its republicanism and independence to the sixteenth-century religious reformer John Calvin, who had made it a bastion of Protestantism. Its citizens were upright and democratic. Rousseau’s father was intensely proud of his native city, describing it to his son in terms of Sparta and ancient Rome. Rousseau’s mother had left them a small library of books, and his father would read them with his son after supper. Soon they both became so absorbed in this activity that they would continue into the night, taking turns to read. “We could never stop before the end of the book. Sometimes when my father heard the larks at daybreak, he would be ashamed and exclaim, ‘Let’s go to bed. I’m more of a child than you.’”

      Young Rousseau found himself the center of attention in an almost exclusively female household, with a nurse, an aunt, and occasional admiring relatives. Sitting at his aunt’s knee as she embroidered, he would listen to her singing her seemingly endless repertoire of traditional songs. Rousseau was fascinated, acquiring a deep interest and understanding of music at an early age. But the element of undermining ambivalence remained. Years later he would describe himself at this stage as having a “heart at once so proud and so tender [with an] effeminate yet indomitable character … vacillating between weakness and courage, self-indulgence and virtue.” He saw himself as a “contradiction with myself.”

      Then, suddenly, everything changed. One day Rousseau’s father became involved in a public argument with a local landowner, whom he challenged to a duel. But the landowner contemptuously refused to duel with him because of his lower social origins. Incensed, Rousseau’s father drew his sword and struck the landowner on the cheek, drawing blood. Rousseau’s father disappeared into exile – in Rousseau’s words, “rather than cede a point on which honour and liberty appeared to him compromised” – in fact to avoid a jail sentence. Rousseau’s circumstances changed overnight, and he was farmed out to poor relations: a pastor and his sister who lived in a nearby village. While living there he would be subjected to humiliations and beatings by the pastor’s sister, which provoked in him a “feeling of violence and injustice.” This would have a lasting effect, so that for the rest of his life he could claim that “my blood boils at the spectacle or recital of an unjust act.” But these beatings by the parson’s sister also induced in him a precocious sexual pleasure which would have an equally lasting effect. “Who could have believed that this punishment received at the age of eight from the hand of a woman of thirty, determined my tastes, my desires, my passions, my very self for the rest of my life.” The experience brought to the surface a latent masochism which would characterise his sexuality throughout his life.

      At the age of thirteen, Rousseau was apprenticed to an engraver in Geneva. The city may have been