Rousseau and Romanticism — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — John Shaqi
Rousseau and Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · en
Now what I have myself tried to do is to be thoroughly modern in this
sense. I hold that one should not only welcome the efforts of the
man of science at his best to put the natural law on a positive and
critical basis, but that one should strive to emulate him in one’s
dealings with the human law; and so become a complete positivist. My
main objection to the movement I am studying is that it has failed to
produce complete positivists. Instead of facing honestly the emergency
created by its break with the past the leaders of this movement have
inclined to deny the duality of human nature, and then sought to
dissimulate this mutilation of man under a mass of intellectual and
emotional sophistry. The proper procedure in refuting these incomplete
positivists is not to appeal to some dogma or outer authority but
rather to turn against them their own principles. Thus Diderot, a
notable example of the incomplete positivist and a chief source of
naturalistic tendency, says that “everything is experimental in man.”
Now the word experimental has somewhat narrowed in meaning since the
time of Diderot. If one takes the saying to mean that everything in man
is a matter of experience one should accept it unreservedly and then
plant oneself firmly on the facts of experience that Diderot and other
incomplete positivists have refused to recognize.
The man who plants himself, not on outer authority but on experience,
is an individualist. To be modern in the sense I have defined is not
only to be positive and critical, but also--and this from the time of
Petrarch--to be individualistic. The establishment of a sound type
of individualism is indeed the specifically modern problem. It is
right here that the failure of the incomplete positivist, the man who
is positive only according to the natural law, is most conspicuous.
What prevails in the region of the natural law is endless change and
relativity; therefore the naturalistic positivist attacks all the
traditional creeds and dogmas for the very reason that they aspire to
fixity. Now all the ethical values of civilization have been associated
with these fixed beliefs; and so it has come to pass that with their
undermining by naturalism the ethical values themselves are in danger
of being swept away in the everlasting flux. Because the individual
who views life positively must give up unvarying creeds and dogmas
“anterior, exterior, and superior” to himself, it has been assumed
that he must also give up standards. For standards imply an element of
oneness somewhere, with reference to which it is possible to measure
the mere manifoldness and change. The naturalistic individualist,
however, refuses to recognize any such element of oneness. His own
private and personal self is to be the measure of all things and this
measure itself, he adds, is constantly changing. But to stop at this
stage is to be satisfied with the most dangerous of half-truths.
Thus Bergson’s assertion that “life is a perpetual gushing forth of