Love as Habituation in Rousseau - Masano Yamashita L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2012, pp. 55-67 (Article) Published by Johns ...

Love as Habituation in Rousseau
   Masano Yamashita

   L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2012, pp. 55-67 (Article)

   Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2012.0042

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/492626

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

Love as Habituation in Rousseau
                             Masano Yamashita

D
          OES LOVE GROW INCREMENTALLY and naturally out of habit?
          Are affective habits mindless (“une habitude aveugle”1), automatized
          quotidian behaviour or can they, more meaningfully, stem from a
rational decision-making process? What role do the ethics of habit play in
one’s sentimental life? These questions serve as the unexpected launching pad
for Rousseau’s investigations into the nature of love in its variegated mani-
festations—familial, romantic, and conjugal. The category of habit is pivotal
for Rousseau in that it allows him to challenge dynamically what he perceives
as the conjoined threats of French libertinism and materialist philosophy, and
more specifically what he views as their misleading and morally nefarious
delineation of a human nature marked by a fundamental passivity. Hence
Saint-Preux’s denunciation in Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse of the falsity and
sophistry of contemporary materialist doctrine: “Ils [les matérialistes] com-
mencent par supposer que tout être intelligent est purement passif, et puis ils
déduisent de cette supposition des conséquences pour prouver qu’il n’est pas
actif; la comode méthode qu’ils ont trouvée là” (OC 2:683). Natania Meeker
has recently suggested that such an Epicurean-inflected philosophy is further
gendered in the eighteenth century as “effeminate.”2 A feminizing passivist
doctrine can be perceived as potentially undermining Rousseau’s understand-
ing of the virtues and of active free will, both of which seek to counteract the
moral laissez-aller that ensues when one self-indulgently delectates in the life
of the emotions. Milord Edouard in Julie offers a spirited defense of free will
that thus ennobles man by making him accountable himself for his own
actions and ethical development: “la vie passive de l’homme n’est rien, et ne
regarde qu’un corps dont il sera bientôt délivré; mais sa vie active et morale
qui doit influer sur tout son être, consiste dans l’exercice de sa volonté” (OC
2:388). In Rousseau’s eyes, the passivity of materialist anthropology suggests
that we are tethered to natural and social determinations that make it difficult
for men to monitor and direct their affects. For Diderot, Rousseau’s frère
ennemi, believing in human liberty is on the contrary a “préjugé,” as the natural
sciences (physiology and biology), Lucretius, as well as recent philosophies
of science have decisively proved in his view that men are predetermined by
the physical laws of nature.3 In Diderot’s novel Jacques le fataliste, the Spin-
ozist eponymous hero consequently argues that we have little, if any, freedom
in matters of the heart. One falls involuntarily in love by chance. “Et quand je

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L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

serais devenu amoureux d’elle [the wife of a local peasant], qu’est-ce qu’il y
aurait à dire? Est-ce qu’on est maître de devenir ou de ne pas devenir
amoureux? et quand on l’est, est-on maître d’agir comme si on ne l’était
pas?”4 The Lucretian materialist philosophy presented in the work of Diderot
posits that human desire obeys the fortuitous pattern of the swerve of the
atoms (clinamen). Such an account of the vagaries of love is deeply trouble-
some to Rousseau. The materialist fatalism present in Diderot’s Jacques le
fataliste would have been anathema to Rousseau, who argues throughout his
expositions of the genealogy of love that man progressively develops the ability
to form comparisons and judgments in matters of the heart. Yet his polemical
conceptual engagement with the “philosophes modernes”5 is not a cut and
dried dialogue that statically opposes materialist passivity to a countervalent
understanding of human action.
    Rousseau seeks to interrogate the nature of the relationship between free-
dom and the mechanisms that underlie affective habituation in order to under-
stand better whether determinisms can be reconciled with moral agency in
human emotional life. In mid-eighteenth-century medical discourse, habit was
thought to have an irrevocable impact on bodily fibers in such a way as to
ensure that by old age habits would have become physiologically and there-
fore psychologically impossible to break. The Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet
in Essais de psychologie, for example, analysed the manner in which habits
imprinted material traces on the cerebral structure; he found that through the
repetitive nature of habits, the human subject’s brain becomes modified so
that habitual practices and affects become materially engrained in a person’s
daily life: “Les Mouvemens que les Objets impriment au Cerveau, l’Ame les
reproduit; & plus elle les reproduit, plus elle acquiert de facilité à les repro-
duire,” adding “elle [l’Habitude] est indestructible dans la Vieillesse. L’Habi-
tude tient donc à l’etat des Fibres).”6
    Rousseau himself agrees that environmental conditions powerfully influ-
ence our passions, but he further argues that we can actively shape these deter-
minisms through a moral regimen (this is the rationale behind his announced
project of La Morale sensitive, ou le matérialisme du sage). In the Essai sur
l’origine des langues he writes against the materialist grain by targeting the
prevalent ideas of “ce siécle où l’on s’efforce de matérialiser toutes les opéra-
tions de l’ame et d’ôter toute moralité aux sentimens humains.”7 In the anthro-
pology of the second Discours, human agency, or what he calls the “spiritual”
component of human subjectivity, is argued to play a vital role in the business
of leading a life directed towards the good. The Aristotelian category of habit
(hexis) helps to elucidate Rousseau’s polemical redefinition of love set against

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the background of what he perceived as the rampant development of natural-
ist philosophy and atheistic materialism in the mid-eighteenth century. The
concept of habit dialectically engages the seemingly opposite ideas of passivity
(the “vie machinale”8 or the mechanics of repetition) and human agency.
Habit is passive in that it can form incidentally and by the force of contingent
circumstances. It is active in that it is directed through rational deliberation
and volition. At first blush habits imply automatized, mechanical patterns of
behaviour that are instinctive and irreflective of choice. We shall see that
Rousseau enriches this definition by proposing two further understandings of
the notion and deploying a taxonomical presentation of the term in such a way
as to ultimately valorize Aristotle’s conception of habit, which points to the
control that humans have at their disposal in the self-fashioning of their emo-
tional lives and the use of judgment in the formation of affective habits.9
    In his œuvre, Rousseau postulates that love emerges from unreflective
repetitive behaviour and through affective judgments that are ambiguous in
that they might not register at the level of the individual’s awareness: as
argued in Émile, these are “jugemens [qui] se font sans qu’on s’en apperçoive,
mais ils n’en sont pas moins réels.”10 The singular nature of affective intel-
lection lies in its equivocal, unconscious mode of manifestation. Rousseau’s
reasoning here is analogous to Kant’s understanding of the hidden telos and
design of Nature. For Kant (as well as for the ancient Stoics who were famil-
iar to Rousseau), Nature works covertly through men, who “are unwittingly
guided in their advance along a course intended by nature. They are uncon-
sciously promoting an end which, even if they knew what it was, would
scarcely arouse their interest.”11
    It is important to underscore that choice in Rousseau is also double-edged,
in so far as it admits the complicated and at times tenuous grasp that humans
have of themselves: there are undisclosed decisions that partake of the choices
Nature makes for us on our behalf, as well as human choices that reinstate the
sovereignty of man’s self-mastery. Significance therefore does lie behind the
“vie machinale” for Rousseau. Mechanical, instinctive habits driven by bio-
logical necessity or unconscious will are not to be discarded as solely inci-
dental phenomena. In Kantian terms these partake of “natural laws” or the
“telelogical theory of Nature” which work, unbeknownst to men, to motivate
human behaviour (Kant, Idea 41-42). Even if unwilled, these are habits that
allow men to conform to nature and ultimately emancipate themselves. This
seamless transition from unconscious to deliberate choices is unified under
the aegis of Nature. The sole significant break that occurs between these two
takes place in the shift from the primitive practice of consanguinous relation-

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ships to exogamous marriages, which is figured in the Essai sur l’origine des
langues as the rupture between habit and preference: in nascent collective life,

il y avoit des mariages, mais il n’y avoit point d’amour. Chaque famille se suffisoit à elle-même
et se perpetuait par son seul sang. Les enfans nés des mêmes parens croissoient ensemble et
trouvoient peu à peu des maniéres de s’expliquer entre eux ; les séxes se distinguoient avec l’âge,
le penchant naturel suffisoit pour les unir, l’instinct tenoit lieu de passion, l’habitude tenoit lieu
de préférence, on devenoit maris et femmes sans avoir cessé d’être frére et sœur. (OC 5:406)

    However, once the emotion of love is introduced into history, the uncon-
scious or blind choices humans make are reintegrated into a moral order. The
avowed blindness of love that stems from the idealization of the object of
one’s affection, for instance, is explained by Rousseau as a corrective to nat-
ural desire:

Ce choix qu’on met en opposition avec la raison nous vient d’elle; on a fait l’amour aveugle parce
qu’il a de meilleurs yeux que nous, et qu’il voit des rapports que nous ne pouvons appercevoir.
Pour qui n’auroit nulle idee de mérite ni de beauté, toute femme seroit également bonne, et la
prémiére venüe seroit toujours la plus aimable. Loin que l’amour vienne de la nature, il est la
régle et le frein de ses penchants : c’est par lui qu’excepté l’objet aimé, un séxe n’est plus rien
pour l’autre. (Essai, OC 4:494)

In the educational novel Émile, the adolescent Sophie is the conjugal choice
that nature makes on behalf of Émile. The preceptor in this instance merely
acts as nature’s mediator. “Ce n’est point moi qui fais cette destination c’est
la nature; mon affaire est de trouver le choix qu’elle a fait” (OC 4:765). The
preceptor’s machinations are motivated by the sole obedience to nature.
    In Rousseau’s genealogical tableau of sentiments, there is a processual
movement from utilitarianism and “instinct aveugle” (Émile, OC 4:492) to
deliberate, rationalized moral choices. Romulus’s mechanical, blind attach-
ment to the she-wolf is explained by the motive of self-preservation. “Tout
enfant s’attache à sa nourrice; Romulus devoit s’attacher à la Louve qui
l’avait allaité. D’abord cet attachement est purement machinal” (OC 4:492).
The thread linking unconscious habits to willed habits is Nature—in the first
instance, nature acts on behalf of man’s ends, and, in the second, the human
prise de conscience of Nature’s design allows him to become aware that one
disposes of the right to acquiesce to habits. In Book One of Émile Rousseau
clearly restates the primacy of nature in the correct appreciation of habits. He
takes habits to be a normative ideal of nature which ultimately empower indi-
viduals as free, ethical subjects: “S’il faut borner le nom de nature aux habi-
tudes conformes à la nature, on peut s’épargner ce galimathias” (OC 4:248).

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Habits that are denaturing and non-necessary must be discarded, “et bientot le
desir ne vient plus du besoin mais de l’habitude, ou plustôt, l’habitude ajoûte
un nouveau besoin à celui de la nature: voila ce qu’il faut prevenir” (OC
4:282). Rousseau concurs with contemporary physiological understandings of
habit, but his primary concern is to uncover the habits that will allow us to
conform to nature and to make choices that enable us to lead the good life.
There are echoes here of Pascal’s critique of duplicitous customs that have
taken on the guise of a second nature. “La coutume est une seconde nature qui
détruit la première. Mais qu’est-ce que nature? J’ai grand peur que cette
nature ne soit elle-même qu’une première coutume, comme la coutume est
une seconde nature.”12 This type of habit is insidious in that it inhibits the
exercise of man’s individual will and autonomy. It is for this very same reason
that Kant critiqued second natures in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” as
being linked to states of tutelage.13
    The involvement of both Nature and personal decision-making is key in
Rousseau’s attempts to recuperate an Aristotelian understanding of habit. Let
us recall the centrality of self-accountability in the adoption of non-incidental
habits in the Nicomachean Ethics. In this text Aristotle discusses at length the
importance of discerning the involuntary from the voluntary in the apprehen-
sion of just behaviour: “we deliberate about what lies in our power, that is,
what we can do; this is what remains. For nature, necessity and chance do seem
to be causes, but so also do intellect and everything that occurs through human
agency” (Aristotle 42-43). For the eighteenth-century materialists and their
adversaries, the point of contention lies precisely in the delimitation of the
spheres that can be acted upon: how do we situate sensibility, sexuality, and our
emotional selves in the course of our daily ethical actions and choices?
    Aristotle’s understanding of habit serves as a springboard for Rousseau’s
own taxonomy of affective habits. Aristotle states, “The first principle of
action—its moving cause, not its goal—is rational choice; and that of rational
choice is desire, and goal-directed reason” (Aristotle 104). Rousseau’s Profes-
sion de foi du vicaire savoyard commits to a similar idea of self-responsibility.
Affective habit is consequently understood by Rousseau to be an act of free-
dom, that is, reflective of nature’s design, chosen by the subject through the
exercise of his own will and his virtue. Love, in this instance, is a veritable
moral sense emerging from human agency. Affect and the ethical life are thus
bound together in Rousseau’s moral philosophy. Indeed, Rousseau situates his
thought within the Stoic tradition by arguing that man can govern his responses
to contingencies by monitoring how he responds to passions through a moral
program, which can emanate from within (Rousseau and his self-imposed

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material and moral “réforme” [Rêveries, OC 1:1016]) or be imposed by an
external agent who acts as Nature’s mediator (Émile’s preceptor).
     In Rousseau’s account of initial parental attachments and childhood affec-
tions, emotional habits are set in motion without consent or reflective con-
sciousness; they appear as behavioural automatisms. In the processual emer-
gence of love, childhood affections first appear under the guise of mere habits.
Rousseau’s figurations of the female figures of the wet-nurse and the gov-
erness illustrate the limited nature of Émile’s initial attachment to his care-
takers: “D’abord l’attachement qu’il a pour sa nourrice et sa gouvernante n’est
qu’habitude. […] Il lui faut beaucoup de tems pour comprendre que non
seulement elles lui sont utiles, mais qu’elles veulent l’être, et c’est alors qu’il
commence à les aimer” (OC 4:492). Émile slowly overcomes his natural
indifference towards others as he gains an intellectual understanding of rela-
tionality and ethical intentions. His initial lack of feeling is seen to ressemble
natural man’s proto-stoicism. Despite the importance of natural pity, argued in
the second Discours to be commonly shared by both animals and humans,
Émile is characterized by an apathetic first nature: “comme il n’a point de
raport necessaire à autrui, il est à cet egard naturellement indifférent” (OC
4:322). Let us turn here to the presentation of l’homme sauvage in the Dis-
cours: “Le premier ne respire que le repos et la liberté, il ne veut que vivre et
rester oisif, et l’ataraxie même du Stoïcien n’approche pas de sa profonde
indifférence pour tout autre objet.”14 Martin Rang emphasizes this dispas-
sionate first nature of Émile, evoking the eponymous novel’s “étrange con-
struction d’un enfant […] sans affection, sans pitié, même sans amour.”15
Though Rousseau insists on the foundational importance of the two affects of
pity and self-love as the starting point for all successive developments of
human sentiments, he also makes the hypothetical conjecture, in both the
second Discours and the pedagogical fiction Émile, that men and women,
children and mothers, are naturally self-centered before becoming emotion-
ally attached to other people. The representation of primitive motherhood thus
undermines the myth of a maternal instinct. “La mere allaitoit d’abord ses
Enfans pour son propre besoin; puis l’habitude les lui ayant rendus chers, elle
les nourrissoit ensuite pour le leur” (Discours, OC 3:147). The mother’s ini-
tial bond with her infant is figured as a behavioural automatism. The mother
nurses her child for selfish reasons: namely to alleviate the physical discom-
fort of engorgement. Acting out of self-centered physiological necessity, her
relationship to her infant is devoid of any moral meaning. It is only through
the physical mechanics of repetition that a bond between mother and child is
incrementally created.16 Repeated action is habit forming and helps create

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new emotions: “l’habitude de vivre ensemble fit naître les plus doux senti-
mens qui soient connus des hommes, l’amour conjugal et l’amour Paternel”
(Discours, OC 3:168). The unconscious pull of habits and their causal role in
the development of love are again restated in the Essai sur l’origine des
langues: “On se rassemble autour d’un foyer commun, on y fait des festins,
on y danse; les doux liens de l’habitude y raprochent insensiblement l’homme
de ses semblables, et sur ce foyer rustique brule le feu sacré qui porte au fond
des cœurs le premier sentiment de l’humanité” (OC 5:403).
    In Émile, Rousseau argues that the mechanics of repetition underlying
emotional habits leave material traces on individuals, producing both palpable
physiological and moral changes in men. The close relationship between edu-
cation and habit opens up the possibility of training the passions and of social
engineering.17 Echoing eighteenth-century medical discourse, Rousseau estab-
lishes a correlation between physionomy and affective dispositions:

les traits du visage d’un homme viennent insensiblement à se former et prendre de la physionomie
par l’impression fréquente et habituelle de certaines affections de l’ame. Ces affections se mar-
quent sur le visage, rien n’est plus certain; et quand elles tournent en habitude, elles y doivent
laisser des impressions durables. (Émile, OC 4:516)

Habit is furthermore involved in a dialectics of temporality: on the one hand,
it breeds love through familiarity and repetition, and, on the other, it becomes
the very agent that makes the emotion difficult to sustain through time. Once
it has produced the sentiment, its function reverses to act as a desensitizing
agent. An anxiety regarding the dulling effects on the emotions in the process
of habituation periodically resurfaces in Rousseau’s work, in spite of his belief
in the lasting physiological imprints left by habits. In this second instance, it is
once habit is disrupted and novelty introduced that love irrupts: the epicurean
description of burgeoning romance in the Essai sur l’origine des langues
attests to the back and forth between habit and novelty in a tableau reminiscent
of Marivaux’s state-of-nature play La Dispute. Gathered around a well,

Les jeunes filles venoient chercher de l’eau pour le ménage, les jeunes hommes venoient abruver
leurs troupeaux. Là des yeux accoutumés aux mêmes objets dès l’enfance commencérent d’en
voir de plus doux. Le cœur s’émut à ces nouveaux objets, un attrait inconnu le rendit moins
sauvage, il sentit le plaisir de n’être pas seul. (OC 5:405-06, emphasis added)

The hedonistic emphasis on the pleasure of novelty is a topos that Rousseau
inserts into a dialectical relationship to habit. The faculty of comparison
emerges in Rousseau’s account of love when a habitual pattern is broken; per-
ception sharpens when shifting back and forth from sameness to difference:

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Celui qui ne voit qu’un seul objet n’a point de comparaison à faire. Celui qui n’en voit qu’un petit
nombre et toujours les mêmes dès son enfance ne les compare point encore, parce que l’habitude
de les voir lui ôte l’attention necessaire pour les examiner : mais à mesure qu’un objet nouveau
nous frape nous voulons le connoitre, dans ceux qui nous sont connus nous lui cherchons des
raports; c’est ainsi que nous apprenons à considerer ce qui est sous nos yeux, et que ce qui nous
est étranger nous porte à l’éxamen de ce qui nous touche. (Essai, OC 5:396)

Knowledge grows experientially, through the lived contact with the familiar
and unfamiliar. The dynamic relationship we entertain with habits gives birth
to new modes of ideation. Indeed in the case of romantic love, habits are seen
to create affective needs by awakening the intellectual ability to form com-
parisons and engendering an aesthetic sensibility. The emotions are a mode of
ideation and a by-product of individuation: “On s’accoûtume à considérer dif-
ferens objets, et à faire des comparaisons; on acquiert insensiblement des
idées de mérite et de beauté qui produisent des sentimens de préférence. A
force de se voir, on ne peut plus se passer de se voir encore” (Discours, OC
3:169, emphasis added).
    Love appears at the conjectural moment in human history when men start
to perceive individuals as opposed to indeterminate men and women. Com-
parison, in this instance, is both the source of heightened emotion (the moral-
ized self feels furthered in love) and alienation in inequality since individuals
become from that point onwards relative creatures, defined in terms of their
being-for-others.
    Rousseau persistently presents the argument that romantic love is not
aleatory, despite of its sometimes surprising manifestations and unlikely pair-
ings, theorizing in book five of Émile that love is founded upon merit-based
choices: “le droit de préférence est uniquement fondé sur le mérite” (OC
4:799). The fortuitous is relegated to the primitive condition of humankind,
wherein romantic love is inexistent—“chacun se logeoit au hazard, et souvent
pour une seule nuit; les mâles, et les femelles s’unissoient fortuitement selon
la rencontre, l’occasion, et le desir, sans que la parole fût un interprête fort
nécessaire des choses qu’ils avoient à se dire: Ils se quittoient avec la même
facilité” (Discours, OC 3:147, emphasis added). For Rousseau, fortuitous
actions jar with his anthropological belief in man’s potential for self-actual-
ization. The idea that there are individuals and human singularities worthy of
being selected as love-objects runs counter to the materialists’ conviction that
humans beings, as part of “le grand tout,” are difficult to conceive of as indi-
visible selves or particularized objects of desire.18
    Affection in Rousseau is construed as an occasion for decision-making,
which entails the ability to form reasoned and comparative opinions on mat-

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ters of beauty and merit. In sum, he argues that there is such a thing as affec-
tive intelligence. The life of feelings affords the opportunity for “active sen-
sibility” to exercise itself and for will to shape human destiny:

La sensibilité est le principe de toute action. […] Il y a une sensibilité physique et organique, qui,
purement passive, paroit n’avoir pour fin que la conservation de notre corps et celle de notre
espéce par les directions du plaisir et de la douleur. Il y a une autre sensibilité que j’appelle active
et morale qui n’est autre chose que la faculté d’attacher nos affections à des êtres qui nous sont
étrangers. (Dialogues, OC 1:805)

Rousseau incorporates this conceptualization of love as a decision-making
process into his own self-presentation and selection of romantic partners. The
conduct of private existence is a decisive ideological matter since for him a
true philosopher, in accordance with the classical Stoic and Cynic traditions,
practices and exemplifies his philosophical beliefs throughout the choices he
makes in his personal life.19 The odd couple formed by Rousseau and the
semi-illiterate lingère Thérèse Levasseur, for instance, is off-set in the Con-
fessions by the presentation of their moral compatibility. In spite of their
social and intellectual discrepancies, the twenty-year relationship is described
as a well-informed decision as well as a reasonable habit: “[S]age et saine,”20
Thérèse figures as a deliberate moral choice for Rousseau. “Je n’avois
cherché d’abord qu’à me donner un amusement. Je vis que j’avois plus fait et
que je m’étois donné une compagne. Un peu d’habitude avec cette excellente
fille, un peu de réflexion sur ma situation me firent sentir qu’en ne songeant
qu’à mes plaisirs j’avois beaucoup fait pour mon bonheur” (OC 1:331).
Madame de Warens, Maman, that is, likewise figures in spite of the age dis-
parity with Jean-Jacques as the woman Nature has designed for him—her
heart is “celui pour lequel la nature m’avoit fait” (OC 1:332). By contrast we
can consider the disparaging comment Rousseau makes about Diderot’s own
poor choices in his conjugal history, as if carving out space for the implica-
tion that Diderot’s passivist materialist convictions are accompanied by a
senseless personal life:

 Il [Diderot] avoit une Nanette ainsi que j’avois une Therese; c’étoit entre nous une conformité
de plus. Mais la différence étoit que ma Therese aussi bien de figure que sa Nannette, avoit une
humeur douce et un caractére aimable, fait pour attacher un honnête homme, au lieu que la sienne,
pigriéche et harengére, ne montroit rien aux yeux des autres qui put rachetter la mauvaise éduca-
tion. Il l’épousa toutefois (OC 1:346-47)21

   Bringing “la puissance de vouloir ou plûtôt de choisir” (Discours, OC
3:142) to center-stage, Rousseau elaborates a systematic theory of love that

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rests on self-accountability and moralized will. By developing natural
habit as a core category in the account of love, Rousseau formulates one of
his most lasting retorts to the materialists’ (mis)understanding of affective
determinism. In the Genevan writer’s often adversarial engagement with the
French materialists, who in some cases such as that of Diderot and d’Alem-
bert were formerly his collaborators and personal friends, the possibility of
monitoring and redirecting the life of the emotions via “l’économie animale”
(Confessions, OC 1:409) presents itself as a bone of contention. Let us recall
that Rousseau’s unwritten work on La Morale sensitive was intended as the
explication of his belief that one could regulate and improve upon moral life
by producing constraints on the material conditions of daily life and manipu-
lating environmental elements such as diet, climate, and landscape in the aim
of aligning the otherwise oft unruly passions with the virtuous life.22 One
should aim to “forcer l’économie animale à favoriser l’ordre moral qu’elle
trouble si souvent” (Confessions, OC 1:409). Rousseau sets as a moral duty
the task of refuting the precepts of these thinkers whom he deemed as endan-
gering the moral health of the public collective. His strategy: by familiarizing
himself with and reframing physiological and materialist discourses—that is
to say both medical and philosophical understandings of the emotions—
Rousseau refutes materialist arguments from within. He acknowledges the
material embeddedness of sentiments and stresses their situational nature, yet
he restates his belief in the human ability to regulate these determinisms ulti-
mately via “un régime extérieur qui varié selon les circonstances pouvoit
mettre ou maintenir l’ame dans l’état le plus favorable à la vertu” (Confes-
sions, OC 1:409). By stressing the moderation of natural passions in the
second Discours, Rousseau also paints a tableau of natural humanity as inher-
ently stable, self-regulating, and peaceful, whereas “nos philosophes” offer a
more threatening image of the state of nature by misleadingly attributing
“toutes les passions […] à l’homme Naturel” (Discours, note XI, OC 3:214).
Primitive humanity is characterized in Émile by “la tempérance de ses desirs”
and monogamous practices (“il est destiné par la nature à se contenter d’une
seule femelle”) (OC 4:797). Conversely, jealousy is construed as an unnatural
affect linked to the social development of amour-propre: “la jalousie a son
motif dans les passions sociales plus que dans l’instinct primitif,” “sa forme
est déterminée uniquement par l’éducation” (OC 4:797-98).
    Rousseau amends accepted understandings of the animal economy by
integrating morality in the very mechanics of nature: instead of positing
modesty as an arbitrary social convention, he moralizes human desire through
the inclusion of pudeur within the system of nature. Feminine modesty thus

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safeguards feelings and acts as check on untrammeled desire in Julie ou La
Nouvelle Héloïse:

[C]’est cette réserve attentive et piquante qui, nourrissant à la fois dans les cœurs des hommes et
les desirs et le respect, sert pour ainsi dire de coqueterie à la vertu. […] à l’aide de cette sage et
discrette réserve, sans caprice et sans refus, elles savent au sein de l’union la plus tendre les
maintenir à une certaine distance, et les empêchent de jamais se rassasier d’elles. (OC 2:501)

Early on in Julie, Rousseau introduces the added benefit of the regulative
function of habits in the ars amatoria. In the famous letter from the Valais,
Saint-Preux weaves a fantasmatic scenario in which he imagines the future of
Julie and himself through the lens of benevolent habituation: “Une longue et
douce ivresse nous laisseroit ignorer le cours des ans: et quand enfin l’âge
auroit calmé nos prémiers feux, l’habitude de penser et sentir ensemble feroit
succéder à leurs transports une amitié non moins tendre” (OC 2:83-84). The
affective solaces of habit are envisioned as tempering the initial headiness and
instability of youthful enamoration. The possibility and eventual limitations
of training the emotions are indeed a central subject in the epistolary novel.
Taking on an unforeseen richness and complexity in Julie, habits are experi-
mentally linked to the faculty of memory, subjective actualization, and the
temporality of love. Via her engagement with the ethics of habit, the charac-
ter of Julie constrains and regulates her pleasures in the governance of her
household (where the mot d’ordre is “accoutumer ses passions à l’obéissance”
OC 2:542). She is seen to gain pleasure through repetition—the elective
habits—in her daily life:

Tous les soirs Julie contente de sa journée n’en desire point une différente pour le lendemain, et
tous les matins elle demande au Ciel un jour semblable à celui de la veille: elle fait toujours les
mêmes choses parce qu’elles sont bien, et qu’elle ne connoit rien de mieux à faire. […] Se plaire
dans la durée de son état n’est-ce pas un signe assuré qu’on y vit heureux? (OC 2:553)

Likewise in the account of Rousseau’s own idyllic sojourn at the Charmettes
with Madame de Warens, the iterative mode is emphasized to be the privi-
leged state of affective bliss. Testing the discursive limits of narrativity,
Rousseau deploys anaphoric and paratactic language to describe his time at
the Charmettes in the Confessions:

Je me levois avec le soleil et j’étois heureux; je me promenois et j’étois heureux, je voyois maman
et j’étois heureux, je la quittois et j’étois heureux, je parcourois les bois, les coteaux, j’errois dans
les vallons, je lisois, j’étois oisif, je travaillois au jardin, je cueillois les fruits, j’aidois au ménage,
et le bonheur me suivoit par tout (OC 1:225-26)

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L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR

The diction of happiness is repetitive (hence the use of the imperfect tense)
and plotless. It freezes diegetic time. On a thematic level, in Rousseau’s Julie,
the delights of habit are seen to breed love. Adressing the case of the two
lovers, Julie writes that their frequentation of one another leads to the accrual
of affective capital: “Sûre de ne trouver au fond du mien que des sentimens
honnêtes, je goûtois sans précautions les charmes d’une douce familiarité.
Hélas! je ne voyois pas que le mal s’invétéroit par ma négligence, et que
l’habitude étoit plus dangereuse que l’amour” (OC 2:342). However,
Wolmar’s method of engineering, reprogramming, and even erasing affects
through the manipulation of habits is seen to have its limitations. The use of
the verb “s’accoutumer” is indicative of his attempts to redirect the emotions:
“Ajoûtez qu’il leur importe de s’accoutumer sans risque à la familiarité” (OC
2:511). In spite of Wolmar’s watchful eye, emotion does not abate through the
new familiarity of chaste daily interactions. The memory of the past, as
demonstrated by Charles Bonnet in Essais de psychologie, is seen to be phys-
iologically indestructible for the former lovers. Wolmar’s method is flawed,
for one cannot abolish the affective dimension of time that his project relies
on: “À la place de sa maitresse je le force de voir toujours l’épouse d’un
honnête homme et la mere de mes enfans : j’efface un tableau par un autre, et
couvre le passé du présent” (OC 2:511). Wolmar, the sole character in the
novel who does not experience emotions, fails to grasp fully the complex
dynamics of virtue, love, temporality, and habituation.
    The spectrum of Rousseauvian habits (from natural and unconscious to
elective, from volitive to affective) allows us to appreciate the multifaceted
passages from nature to culture in the Genevan writer’s works, as well as the
polemics between materialist accounts of desire and Rousseau’s singular and
comprehensive take on love.

University of Colorado, Boulder

                                             Notes

 1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, Bernard
    Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 310.
 2. See Natania Meeker, “Sexing Epicurean Materialism in Diderot,” in Epicurus in the
    Enlightenment, Neven Leddy and Avi Lifschitz, eds. (SVEC 2009:12) (Oxford: Voltaire
    Foundation, 2009), 87.
 3. “On est fataliste, et à chaque instant on pense, on parle, on écrit comme si l’on persévérait
    dans le préjugé de la liberté,” Denis Diderot, Réfutation d’Helvétius, Œuvres complètes,
    vol. 24, Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Varloot, eds. (Paris: Hermann, 2004), 636-37. Diderot
    also writes on June 29, 1756, in a letter to Landois, “Regardez-y de près, et vous verrez que
    la liberté est un mot vide de sens; qu’il n’y a point, et qu’il ne peut y avoir d’êtres libres;

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MASANO YAMASHITA

      que nous ne sommes que ce qui convient à l’ordre général, à l’organisation, à l’éducation,
      et à la chaîne des événements.” Denis Diderot, “Lettre à Landois,” Œuvres completes, vol.
      9, Jean Varloot, ed. (Paris: Hermann, 1981), 256-57.
 4.   Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste, Œuvres complètes, vol. 23, Jacques Proust and Jack
      Undank, eds. (Paris: Hermann, 1981), 28.
 5.   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1,
      Bernard Gagnebin et Marcel Raymond, eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 1015.
 6.   Charles Bonnet, “De l’habitude en général,” Essais de psychologie, chap. 61, Œuvres d’his-
      toire naturelle et de philosophie (Paris: Fauche, 1783), 8:205-06.
 7.   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, Œuvres complètes, vol. 5, Bernard
      Gagnebin et Marcel Raymond, eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 419.
 8.   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. Dialogues, Œuvres complètes,
      1:849.
 9.   Aristotle states, “Virtue, then, is a state involving rational choice, consisting in a mean
      relative to us and determined by reason—the reason, that is, by reference to which the prac-
      tically wise person would determine it,” Nicomachean Ethics, Roger Crisp, trans. and ed.
      (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2000), 1106b-1107a, 31.
10.   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou de l’éducation, Œuvres complètes, vol. 4, Bernard
      Gagnebin et Marcel Raymond, eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 493.
11.   On the hidden designs of Nature, see Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a
      Cosmopolitan Purpose, Political Writings, Hans Siegbert Reiss, ed., Hugh Barr Nisbet,
      trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1991), 41.
12.   Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Louis Lafuma, ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1962), 70.
13.   Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” Political Writ-
      ings, 54.
14.   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3,
      Bernard Gagnebin et Marcel Raymond, eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 192.
15.   Martin Rang, cited by John Spink, in “Les Écrits sur l’éducation et la morale,” introduction,
      OC 4:xiv.
16.   See Elisabeth Badinter, L’Amour en plus (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 158-59.
17.   Rousseau in Émile: “L’éducation n’est certainement qu’une habitude” (OC 4:248).
18.   See Denis Diderot, “Dieu et l’Homme, par M. de Valmire,” Miscellanea philosophiques,
      Œuvres complètes, Assézat-Tourneux, eds. (Paris: Garnier Frères), 4:93.
19.   On the classical trope of philosophy understood as a way of life, see Pierre Hadot, Exer-
      cices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000).
20.   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, Œuvres complètes, 1:331.
21.   Rousseau’s life-narratives serve as a sort of litmus test for his theory of emotions. Although
      the theorician of emotions repeatedly makes the claim that love is borne from the under-
      standing of human singularities, the memorialist proves himself to be incapable of particu-
      larizing his own desire in his middle-age infatuation with Sophie d’Houdetot. The moment
      of enamoration is construed as a moment when fiction and lived reality become conflated,
      and difference is collapsed: “Elle vint, je la vis, j’étois ivre d’amour sans objet, cette ivresse
      fascina mes yeux, cet objet se fixa sur elle; je vis ma Julie en Made d’Houdetot, et bientot
      je ne vis plus que Made d’Houdetot, mais revétue de toutes les perfections dont je venois
      d’orner l’idole de mon cœur” (Les Confessions, OC 1:440). Sophie appears before his eyes
      as Julie incarnate; she fails to be apprehended as a singularity.
22.   See Les Confessions, OC 1:409.

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