Gene Slater - On Rousseau
1. WHAT THE CONFESSIONS IS AND WHAT IT ISN'T
Rousseau's Confessions are remarkable for providing a pretty full record of the conscious thoughts and emotions and actions which Rousseau recalls from his life, eg what went on in his mind as he was aware of it.
In that sense, it is an 'honest' portrait of how he saw things, of what he calls his 'secret dispositions.'.
What it does not do, but that we might think of as part of such a confession, is:
a) explore or even consider his motivations, why he did what he did or thought what he did.
there is no examination of why he was attracted to older women such as Mmde Lambercier and then Mme. Warens and others, why he so much needed virtually every worman to fall in love with him, why he needed to pilfer, why he needed to blame Marion for stealing the ribbon, how his father's abruptly leaving Geneva and abandoning him affected him.
In that sense, there is no 'psychologizing'.
His justifications at the time are treated at face value: his insisting on giving away all 5 babies to the foundling hospitals.
b) take responsibility for his actions and their impacts
while he describes at length how what he did made him remorseful or guilty later (eg what happened to Marion), he's only concerned with his own feelings. He never tries to find out what happened to those he affected or to do anything to make amends. It's as if all that matters in the world is how what he did makes him feel.
c) try to even consider how others might have felt or thought, except insofar as they loved him or by not fully loving him, betrayed him. It's as if others exist in the world solely to affect his feelings, and their own needs, trajectories, plans are of no value. eg the impact of his actions on Mme Houdetot or almost any of the women he sought to get to fall in love with him. He never considers why his setting himself up as an example of how to live in accordance with his teachings might have troubled those around him, who could see the contradictions in his life and the costs he was seeking to impose on them while avoiding/explaining away for himself.
By not doing any of these three things, Rousseau is able to maintain what is most important to him, his image of his own 'innocence', regardless of any thought or action. Others, his enemies, are always calculating, but he is always innocent. The book is thus a total confession that is also a total plea of innocence. It explains why he wrote it, and the remarkable framing of the project: which is whatever odious things he may say about himself, they are only a measure of his own innocence and honesty, and thus further underscore the idea that no man dare say he was better than Rousseau.
The more he reveals, therefore, the more innocent he becomes and portrays himself as, the greater the proof of his innocence.
Since as a philosopher, he had enormous impact on the idea of human innocence in the state of nature, the Confessions becomes a critical defense of that philosophy in the form of his own life.
2. WHAT HIS PURPOSE WAS AND HOW IT RELATES TO THE SELF
If the primary purpose of the book were to defend himself, to disarm critics or convince those who had heard criticisms of him or berate his enemies (all of which seems evident when I read it), it is certainly effective, but he wouldn't have had to write 600 pages to do so, nor to reveal so much of his negative traits, nor delay its publication until years after his death. So while it is artful propaganda, its purpose must be deeper and greater than pure defense of his reputation.
The book is, as Rousseau described it, the first attempt to fully describe a man's inner thoughts, his inner self, that no one else could know and that Rousseau believed no one could even know of himself without having a comparable knowledge of another (which his book would provide). ("in order to know even one's own [heart]... begin by studying other people's" which until now was impossible).
In this sense it's the first description of an inner self (and the outer events are intended as contexts and triggers for this secret history). And although he says it's by seeing the differences between himself and this exposed Rousseau you can see your true inner self, I expect he believes that (if the reader is honest) he will recognize the similarities and so know himself.
But that still begs the question. If its length and depth is not necessary to defend Rousseau; if while manifesting his extraordinary vanity, his vanity alone can't explain such a level of effort; if he doesn't probe beneath the surface out of a compulsion to truly understand himself and why he had to become who he did; and even though he might (like Jeremy Bentham leaving his body permanently to be viewed) love the idea of his own inner self be the one that dominates the images of future men as what a man is like; then what does explain it?
Here is one possibility:
Rousseau is certain that what's true of himself -- that no one outside him can know Rousseau's inner self, that supporter and critic alike mistakes Rousseau's true motives and thoughts -- is true of everyone else, then we live in a world of masks and roles (like Rameau's nephew's description of society) where we don't know anyone else and (although we of course experience an inner self of thoughts and feelings) our thoughts are all concerned with how to fit in, how well or poorly one is wearing the mask, where one has to readjust it. Thus, he is showing what one man, himself, is with the mask removed; he is creating the model, the inspiration, the very idea of a world without masks. He argues that he's specially suited to being this since he moved between classes, which each impose a particular mask on its members. In this way, he uses the exploration of his own inner mental history to distinguish for himself who he was when not acting a part and to inspire in the whole future world that he sees as his potential legacy, the possibility, the virtue of living without masks. He thus creates, as he thinks for the first time, he makes visible an innocent inner reality to counter the artificial construct of society. His remarkable removal of his own masks, as he sees it, his admissions of his ugly and selfish thoughts and feelings, is an invitation, an incitement for a world in which we remove these masks, in which we are closer to our own nature and society reflects that rather than hides and distorts it.