I am excited that I will be presenting at the Twentieth Biennial Colloquium of the Rousseau Association in June at UF. Rousseau has been one of my favorite philosophers for a long time, so it will be great to spend a few days with like-minded folks delving into the many (many) facets of Rousseau’s body of work.
My paper is titled, “The Deceptions of Silent Authority: Tutor, Legislator, and the Function of Lies;” find the abstract below the fold.
One of the many tensions in Rousseau’s work is the relationship between truth and lies. Rather than formulating an abstract set of criteria for truth, Rousseau provides us with several different accounts of how truth and lies function within different environments, as well as normative interpretations of those accounts. In this paper I analyze Rousseau’s accounts of truth and lies in terms of the workings of silent authority and deception.
On the one hand we have the parallel roles played by the Tutor and the Legislator in Emile and The Social Contract, respectively. Both play larger than life roles in Rousseau’s stories about the constitution of the perfect man and then citizen in the former text, and the body politic in the latter text. Both figures rely on deception to carry out their indispensible roles in founding the sorts of individuals and societies capable of freedom within the social world. Furthermore, they must remain silent about the necessity of their deceptions regarding constituting a new world in order to make that new world, and its attendant freedom, a reality. Without the foundations provided by the Tutor and the Legislator, is impossible. The deceptive authority found in these two texts, then, is a form of authority whose very force is dependent upon its remaining silent about its machinations.
On the other hand, against any recourse to mythical suspension of disbelief, the Rousseau of the Reveries provides us with a different account of deception. In the “Fourth Walk” Rousseau recounts the story of a lie that has long haunted him. In his response to having blamed the young maid, Marion, for his own transgression of theft, Rousseau seems to be making clear the impermissibility of forsaking the truth and seeking refuge in deception. And yet, his reflections on the truth’s necessity are ambivalent at best. He chastises those who profess a fealty to the truth until such a stance demands real sacrifice. But he also declares that circumstances must be taken into account, and an abstract reliance on the truth is nothing but empty and useless rhetoric. Ultimately, it seems, the Rousseau of the “Fourth Walk” is resigned to the fact that the way of the world does not admit of adequate resources with which to adjudicate the truth of contested moral problems that pit the motivations of individuals against the expectations and necessities of society.
Reading the “Fourth Walk” alongside the conceptual roles of the Tutor and Legislator highlights the ambivalence at the core of his thought: as much as we might hope for a harmonious reconciliation between the individual and society, circumstances have conspired to make such a move impossible. The implication of the silences within Rousseau’s grand plans for education and politics is that certain silences are necessary for social harmony to be achieved. The “Fourth Walk” and its introspection, while admitting the inevitability of deception and lies, retreats from grand social silences toward minor personal ones. Ultimately, it seems, against the hopeful invocations of a silence that bestows normativity and subsequently freedom on both individual and society, we may have no choice by to remain silent in a different and more vexed sense: in the face of intractable moral issues, the best we can do is remain outwardly silent but retreat into solitude, even as Rousseau’s own attempts to do so reveal such a choice as an imperfect solution.