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Reverie and the Return to Nature: Rousseau's Experience of ConvergenceAuthor(s): Joseph H. Lane, Jr.Source: The Review of Politics, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Summer, 2006), pp. 474-499Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac onbehalf of Review of PoliticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20452803Accessed: 19-03-2017 02:40 UTC

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The Review of Politics 68 (2006), 474-499. Copyright 'C University of Notre Dame DOI: 10.1017/S0034670506000179 Printed in the USA

Reverie and the Return to Nature: Rousseau's Experience of Convergence

Joseph H. Lane, Jr.

Abstract: In this essay, I explore some connections between Rousseau's works and modern environmental works in which the author experiences what Rousseau characterizes as "reverie," the blissful loss of consciousness of the self in the awareness that the self is truly only part of the all-encompassing whole, "Nature."

While others have recognized that Rousseau's writings share much of the form and substance of later nature writing, no one has explored how Rousseau's work helps us understand the character of nature writing as a genre of political thought. Based on a careful reading of some key passages from the Reveries and comparisons to the writings of Thoreau, I argue that Rousseau's peculiar approach to his own self-consciousness provides a key for understanding the character of

writings of this sort and the limits that are always present within them. Environmentalists must reflect on Rousseau's suggestion "that the price paid for experiencing anything is the experience of ourselves as alienated."

Introduction

In this essay, I explore Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker as a guide to understanding a certain genre of modern nature writing. We might charac terize this particular genre as "convergence" writing, and the convergence at issue is the identification of the author with his/her natural surroundings. These writings are distinguished by normative claims that are based in the author's experience of what Rousseau characterizes as "reverie," the blissful loss of consciousness of the self in the awareness that the self is part of the all-encompassing whole, "Nature."' In these writings, authors present their identification of the self with Nature as the basis (albeit an unstable one) for what we might now call a "deep" or "ecological" way of "being in the world."2 I argue that Rousseau's presentation of his own convergence

aI have taken the liberty of capitalizing "Nature" in certain contexts in this essay to draw attention to the normative sense of the word as a standard or template for the good, the authentic, or the uncorrupted. The word "nature" is often used in this way by both environmentalist authors and Rousseau. There are obviously problems with this usage because it assumes a consistency and normative value for the natural that are difficult if not impossible to establish definitively, but it is useful to emphasize those contexts in which "nature" is being used in this normative sense.

2I am deliberately drawing here on the language of Arne Naess and his followers. See Naess's short essays "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology

474


REVERIE AND THE RETURN TO NATURE 475

provides a crucial perspective on the promise and the perils of this approach to returning to Nature. This essay is part of a larger, projected work in which I explore the impli

cations of Rousseau's critical role in identifying the roots of the interrelated crises that we often characterize as the "environmental problem" and the importance of Rousseau's responses to this problem as literary and philoso phical models for subsequent writers.3 In broad terms, the key point that Rousseau makes more incisively than any subsequent thinker is that human ity constitutes a threat to the environment because of a transformation of human nature. In Rousseau's account, our environmental problems are inti mately tied to our denaturalized human character. As long as human desires, inflamed by the restless passion that Rousseau characterizes as amour-propre, remain both comparative and individualistic, they will be infinite. There is no power that human beings can exercise over the matter of the natural world that will satisfy these desires, but in spite of the fruitless character of the quest, human beings who are dominated by amour-propre are inescap ably committed to what Hobbes characterized as "the restless pursuit of power after power ceasing only in death."4 Although Rousseau's primary

Movement" and "Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Living in the World," in introduction to The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology, ed. by Alan Drengson and Yuicho Inoue (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995).

3Although the connection between Rousseau and environmentalist thought has not received the attention it deserves, a number of recent studies have tried to trace Rousseau's influence on this subject. For a general treatment of my understanding of this relationship, see Joe Lane and Rebecca Clark, "The Solitary Walker in the Political World," Political Theory 34 (2006): 62-94. Other broad treatments include Marcel Schneider, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et L'Espoir Ecologisme (Paris: Editions Pygmalion, 1978); Gilbert LaFreniere, "Rousseau and the European Roots of Environmentalism," Environmental History Review 4 (1991): 41-72; and Kenneth Singer, "Rousseau and Modern Environmentalism" (master's thesis, University of British Columbia, 1991). A number of other works, including David Boonin-Vail, "The Vegetarian Savage: Rousseau's Critique of Meat Eating," Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): 75-84; Andrew Biro, Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature' from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Steve Vanderheiden, "Rousseau, Cronon, and the Wilderness Idea," Environmental Ethics 24 (2002): 169-188; and Keith Shaw, "The Shores of Saint-Pierre: Rousseau, Deep Ecology, and the Reconstitution of Humanity" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 2004), have looked to Rousseau's work to explicate particular concepts or issues of concern to environmentalist thinkers.

4See Note 1 of the Second Discourse, p. 193: "It is not without difficulty that we have succeeded in making ourselves so unhappy... ."All subsequent references to the Second Discourse are cited in the text and refer to the Masters edition. Roger D. Masters, ed., and Roger D. and Judith R. Masters, trans., First and Second Discourses (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964).


476 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

concern was not ecological in the contemporary sense of the word, it was he who first explained why this "restless pursuit" inevitably results in the destruction of the ecosystems in which we are embedded.5 We are impelled by acquired passions to make ourselves, as Rousseau puts it in the Second Discourse, "the tyrant of [ourselves] and nature" (SD, 115).

In this regard, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker assumes a central import ance as Rousseau's most sustained exploration of the possibility that a human being can choose to transcend or sublimate the driving force of that expansive and restless self-consciousness once the acquired passion of amour-propre has taken root in his soul. Rousseau conducts an experiment with himself (as both scientist and subject), designed to discover whether or not human beings can (re-)discover and effect a return to something resembling their original nature by embedding themselves in and drawing normative guidance from Nature.6 He recounts in the Reveries those very moments in which the combination of alienation from human society, an openness to the stimuli of the natural world, and a certain relinquishing of the purposes and the conceptual boundaries that separate our self from the natural world allowed him to recover the form that nature intended for him (and all human beings). In short, he offers himself as a model of a return to Nature on a deeper level than the merely physical. While others have recognized that Rousseau's writings share much of the form and substance of later nature writing, no one has explored how Rousseau's work helps us understand the character of nature writing as a genre of political thought.7 However, there are very good reasons for doing so. Rousseau's Reveries is a work that self-consciously explores the limits of itself as a work, and, thus, may shed light on the limits of similar works. It is, as Michael Davis has argued, an autobiographical account of both a philosopher and a certain type of philosophy that explores the insights and limitations of each. The philosophy that is self-consciously examined is the Rousseauian source of environmentalism-his thought on how alienation from Nature has transformed the human animal into the

5See the discussion of this transformation in part 1 of Lane and Clark, "Solitary Walker."

6Michael Davis, The Autobiography of Philosophy: Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999), pp. 104-6.

7See especially LaFreniere. I should emphasize that my intention in this essay differs from those of LaFreniere and Biro because my readings are presented as conceptual, rather than genealogical, guides to the ideas that are found in environ

mentalist writers. For instance, contrast LaFreniere's account of the evidence for "Rousseau's Direct Influence upon Transcendentalism" in "Rousseau and the European Roots of Environmentalism" (pp. 54-66). Among his other interesting insights, it is particularly relevant to note LaFreniere concludes that there is no evidence for a direct textual connection between Rousseau and Thoreau, but my analysis does not rest on the existence of any direct connections (however hard it

might be to imagine that they do not exist).



"tyrant of himself and nature" and how we might recover "the wholeness, freedom, and contentment" (one might add, sustainability) of "man in the state of nature." The philosopher is Rousseau himself.8 Rousseau's example has not gone unheeded. Thoreau, Leopold, Muir, and

Dillard among others have since tried to follow similar paths to a (re-)natur alized experience, and the importance that their writings have been accorded in environmental circles suggests that this approach may offer some hope for human beings who want to understand themselves more fully in order to live more sustainable (and more satisfying) lives. If we are to make sense of the promise and peril of this type of writing in works devoted to political envir onmentalism, we must explore the character and limitations of the genre form. In short, presenting personal reverie as the basis for a prescriptive teaching that is meant to inspire reform on the personal level is a political activity that raises many troubling questions about the authenticity and the agency of those who are changed and those who point the way to the changes.

I argue that Rousseau's peculiar approach to his own self-consciousness provides a key for understanding the character of writings of this sort and the limits that are always present within them. Rousseau's Reveries leads us into the complications that lie at the heart of every attempt to use the personal experience with Nature as the path to a more sustainable form of human life that might preserve the natural whole and provide a more satisfying existence for human individuals. In all his various writings, Rousseau views the possi bility of a return to our prelapsarian unity as both a problem and a promise, an alluring avenue of escape from the ills of modernity that is always on the brink of dangerous self-delusion. The very shape of his narratives constantly reinforces these two, apparently incompatible, perspectives on this quest.

In order to provide evidence that the insights that I offer about Rousseau's work have some salience to more contemporary environmental issues, I will explore a number of points of connection between the Reveries of Rousseau and the writings of Thoreau. I argue that thinking about Thoreau's works through the lens of Rousseau's peculiar self-understanding of his own con vergence project may help us untangle some of the thorniest contemporary debates over what Thoreau's work ought to mean for modern environmen talists. I demonstrate this importance by discussing how an appreciation of Rousseau's self-conscious revelation of the limits of his own writing might help us appreciate the political stakes in recent debates about Thoreau, particularly the debates between two imminent scholars of environmental literature-Leo Marx and Lawrence Buell. I argue that Rousseau's self conscious account of the limits of his own thinking in the Reveries provides a crucial vantage on the politically charged disagreements between Marx and Buell. While the simple recognition that all accounts of our experiences

8Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, pp. 89-92. Also see Tzevetan Todorov, Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 43-47.



in nature are mediated experiences may appear to confirm Marx's critique of Buell's dream of an ecocentric literature that can serve as a model for a more ecocentric politics, I argue that a careful consideration of Rousseau's writ ings reveals deeper problems that plague both commentators' approaches to understanding nature writing as a political genre.

I have chosen to approach this connection through Thoreau (though I might have chosen Dillard, Muir, Leopold, or Snyder) because Thoreau is often ideal ized as the font of this type of thinking. Many modem nature writers in Thoreau's line insist that human beings must return to their proper place in the order of nature, but Rousseau, the first thinker who promulgated this line of thinking in its modem sense, forces us to confront the possibility that we cannot return to our original place within nature. This is not to say that we cannot imagine approaches to restoring human beings to something that resembles a proper place within the natural whole, but the methods required to restore human beings to something resembling their primal unity with nature may be fraught with serious difficulties. I argue that Rousseau's writings reveal why any serious attempt to reintegrate human beings requires a particu larly problematic re-conception of both ourselves and our surroundings. I have not tried to establish the lines of intellectual transmission from

Rousseau to Thoreau and his successors because these connections are, at best, indirect. My purpose is conceptual rather than genealogical. We must think through Rousseau's understanding of reverie in order to clarify our own understanding of the intellectual and political possibilities that writings like these offer. Rousseau writes reveries in a way that draws attention to the limitations, both of his writings in particular and of similar writings. These limits, in turn, have consequences that transcend the discussion of literary genre and impact the possibility of adopting writings of this sort as the basis for a philosophical praxis. We must recognize these limits in the writ ings of environmental icons, including Thoreau and his most distinguished contemporary students, if we hope to understand the possibilities offered by environmental philosophies and politics. Ultimately, a better understanding of Rousseau's work may help us make sense of what is satisfying, illuminat ing, and also missing in contemporary environmental accounts of felt experi ence. In doing so, we should never lose sight of the broad political claims that are advanced when these works are offered as normative guidance for understanding the relationship between human individuals, human societies, and the natural world.

Purposefulness and Writing: Rousseau's First Walk and Thoreau's Walden

The Reveries, at first reading, may appear to be the least political of Rousseau's writings. This collection of Walks, autobiographical recollections in which Rousseau's actions stimulate formless collections of his thoughts,



and in which both action and thought merge into a sense of oneness with the natural whole, appears to be a private work and an unfinished one at that. And yet, everything we know about the textual history of the work under mines the idea that it was not intended for publication.9 The character and purpose of its unique design is the self-conscious and explicit question with which the work begins.

In the First Walk, Rousseau identifies himself as the person who is least involved in the political life of mankind because he alone has been "exiled" from the human race by the "unanimous accord" of the rest of humanity.10 It appears that the Reveries can have no tactical political project because Rousseau claims that he is beyond the hope of the most elemental political aspirations, inclusion in the body politic. As Davis points out, however, this account of Rousseau's resignation to solitude requires us to seek the purpose of the work: "The true solitary-for example, man in the state of nature-would not write."11 However solitary he might be, Rousseau is supremely connected to others by the act of writing: "Not only does he cover thousands of pages with words, but he also knows that he thereby establishes a particularly solid kind of communication which even death will not be able to interrupt."12

Rousseau argues that he is compelled to write because his situation is so unique: only he has been so completely isolated from the society of his fellow human beings. This situation, which we might be tempted to dismiss as simply an expression of the paranoia that appears to inform so much of Rousseau's later writings, is intimately connected to the develop ment of Rousseau's thought. Insofar as Rousseau has himself conducted "a rigorous and sincere self-examination" that has taught him to recognize in himself that which is caused by amour-propre, he has been able to divorce himself from any concern for the opinion of other human beings (1: 32-33).13 Rousseau proclaims that this sense of freedom from the constraints that tie other human beings to concern for their fellows is

9Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, p. 92. 10Ibid., p. 105; Charles Butterworth, "Interpretive Essay on the Rousseau's

Reveries," in The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (New York: New York University Press, 1979), pp. 147-51 and 159. The latter work is referred to as "Interpretive Essay" in subsequent notes.

nDavis, Autobiography of Philosophy, pp. 102-6. 12Todorov, Frail Happiness, pp. 50-51. 13This concern for public appearance, what Rousseau characterizes as amour-propre

(often translated as "vanity") is the key concept in Rousseau's account of the "fall of humanity" in the Second Discourse. The clearest discussion of the distinction in that work is found in note O (SD, 221-22). For a more complete discussion of this complex concept, see Laurence D. Cooper, Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 150-60; and Pierre Force, "Self-Love, Identification, and the Origin of Political Economy," Yale French Studies 92:46-64, especially 46-51. Cooper makes much



"an exceptional situation ... certainly worth examining" (1: 33). Thus, Rousseau lays out his plans for performing an experiment on himself to understand how a human being would function when freed from these ties to others; he suggests that this exceptional situation is worthy of anyone's examination. It would be useful to whoever reads and understands it. Rousseau claims that he will keep a "formless" but "faithful record of my

solitary walks and the reveries that occupy them, when I give free reign to my thoughts and let my ideas follow their natural course" (1: 32). The form lessness is not attributable to a lack of concern for accuracy but is, in fact, a way of guaranteeing that accuracy. If the value of Rousseau's thoughts lies in Rousseau's unique lack of concern for the opinions of others, they are natural in the sense that they lack any reference to the peculiar concerns of the passion that makes some human beings unnatural, i.e., amour-propre. The accurate presentation of those views can only be accomplished when the social expectations of a literary genre do not limit or prescribe the content of what is written: "The language of autobiography aims at transpar ency, at being a pure mediator of the totality of experience, which would, as it were, fill a book."'14 It is only during these reveries, these moments when he is shed of any purposes born in the satisfaction of socially learned pas sions, that "I can truly say that I am what nature meant me to be" (II: 35).15 The Reveries is an attempt to preserve in a socially transmittable form a singular account of a human being who has returned into Nature, thus transcending any regard for the purposes of society or socialized humanity.

Thus, Davis argues that Rousseau "makes himself available to others as a model for their own condition."16 In order to understand ourselves as human beings, we are invited to compare ourselves to the account of Rousseau that he offers here. Insofar as we are not uniquely isolated in either our inner lives or our outer circumstances from the concerns of our fellows (i.e., insofar as we are not like Rousseau), we are poor models for understanding what human beings really are by Nature. To use the image that Rousseau himself employs in the Second Discourse, the Reveries is the key to separating the original image of Glaucus from the wear, tear, and maritime creatures that obscure the shape of the long-submerged statue

more of this distinction than Force, and I share Cooper's more expansive view of the division. I will generally use the French term amour-propre in the text.

14Todorov, Frail Happiness, p. 43. 15Ibid., pp. 45-46. The idea that dreams, reveries, or states of forgetfulness offer the

least mediated and, therefore, most valuable point of connection between humans and their most natural state is common in some radical ecologies. For example, Kelly Buckley, "The Quest for Transformational Experience: Dreams and Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 13(1991): 151-63.

16Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, p. 102.



(SD, 91).17 By studying ourselves alongside the stripped down and bare Rousseau, we can discover what we ought to be. Rousseau's singular pos ition, which we might be tempted to characterize as an absurd aberration, is advanced as the natural standard by which the absurdity of the apparently normal can be brought to light.

Even though Rousseau is often near (and even with) people in the Reveries, Rousseau lives by himself in a very real sense."s In the most crucial sections of his account of this solitary life, Rousseau embeds himself in the natural world in order to understand his natural character. At the same time, Rousseau sets out to record these events and thus pro vides the possibility that others will be able to read his accounts of his explorations of his most unique and natural human soul. Since this account will offer a model or a paradigm of the natural individual against which the unnatural characteristics of most human beings may be recognized, Rousseau suggests a certain limited political project for his apo litical ruminations. Rousseau's exploration of himself and his natural state is a formal model that reveals how we might know ourselves better.19 Although he makes no claims that this model is meant to have socially transformative consequences, his decision to record it at all must be charac terized as a hopeful act.20 This account of the prescriptive purposes of the Reveries is parallel to the

expressed purposes of some of the most influential works of environmental

17See similar discussions of the relationship between the Second Discourse to the Reveries in Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, pp. 89-92; and in Eli Friedlander, /./. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University of Press, 2004), pp. 20-21.

18For discussions of how Rousseau's life can be social and yet solitary, see Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, pp. 94-95; Todorov, Frail Happiness, pp. 39-41; and Butterworth, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, pp. 160-61.

19On the idea that Rousseau offers formal as opposed to substantive models of the natural human being, see Cooper, Problem of the Good Life, pp. 183-85 and also Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 68 and pp. 89-91. Both Cooper and

Melzer explain the formal character of Rousseau's model in terms of the unity of the human creature. Natural man is a unified whole; there is no division or conflict in

his soul. Similarly, Rousseau paints both himself and the citizen of the Social Contract as unified wholes. It is the unity, the form, that is natural. The particular substance of that form is arbitrary. As Melzer puts it, "There is no particular right content to civi lized man's life, no necessary objects of desire, no proper activity, no specific fulfill

ment" (90). Although the full discussion of all of the ramifications of this issue is beyond the scope of this part of my project, it is worth mentioning that Rousseau differs from his environmentalist progeny in that although he wants to restore human ity's natural unity, a return to Nature is only one of several ways to approach this return, and there is no reason to think it is inherently superior to less nature-suffused alternatives.

20Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, pp. 99-100.



thought. Consider the opening invocations of Walden. Thoreau tells us that his experience of living in the woods aroused the curiosity of his neighbors and associates who thought his singular way of life inexplicable. By living only with the "essential facts of life," Thoreau offers his own life as a model stripped of accretions and publicly presented so that others may recognize that which is superfluous, a template for setting aside those pas sions that are not needed to live well (343_34).21 Thus, Thoreau writes, "Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance ... till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake" (350). Laurence Buell, in particular, stresses the importance of Thoreau's work as an account of the "paradigmatic individual" whose striving for "a state of being" more grounded in Nature offers his readers the opportunity to follow him through the transformative process that can lead from alienation to necessary regrounding.22 Thoreau is not convinced that everyone can make sense of the model that he offers but insists that "it may do good service to him whom it fits" (259). Thus, both the Reveries and Walden may be characterized as projects that

present the unique or peculiar life of the isolated author, an author who pre sents the life of alienation from others to the view of others in order to be of use to others. Both offer a glimpse into the life of an author who has accepted exile from the company of his fellow human beings but who writes in order to help those from whom he is separated. They reveal the unique perspective offered by those who have passed through and back out of society and who are now looking over their shoulders, back to a social world left behind. We find this perspective in the works of many others, including Muir, Abbey, and Dillard, whose solitary lives have been reconstructed for public perusal so that they might lead to personal transformations with political consequences.23

21Unless otherwise noted, all citations to Waiden and other works of Thoreau are to

The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1982). 22Laurence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the

Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 386-87.

23Consider the format and presentation of works like John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2003); Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990); Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: McGraw Hill, 2000). Also see Buell's answer to those who dismiss Thoreau's experience as singular, idiosyncratic, and limited, Environmental Imagination, p. 390.



The Limits of Losing Oneself: Scene and the Brevity of Reverie in the Fifth Walk

Yet in both Thoreau and Rousseau, it is not enough to live apart from other human beings. To discover the natural in us, we must live in Nature. Eric Gans notes, "This Rousseauian cogito, unlike the Cartesian, is dependent on an external scene but by the same token it permits the description of this scene to communicate esthetically the self's uniqueness to others."24 The external scenes of wild nature in which Rousseau embeds himself in the Reveries serve two interrelated functions. They invoke the spontaneous character of unsocialized nature as a metaphor for the spontaneous passions that distinguish desocialized Rousseau from most human beings. But they are simultaneously a necessary catalyst in the psychic reactions that trans form him from the partial and alienated individual cast out from a society of partial and alienated relationships and into the fullness of his unique state of oneness with the natural whole.

The clearest account of the connection between natural human happiness and the experience of Nature in the Reveries is Rousseau's stay on the Island of St. Peter in the center of Lake Bienne. "Of all the places where I have lived (and I have lived in some charming ones) none has made me so truly happy or left me such tender regrets" (5: 81). The use of the active voice suggests that it is the island itself that inspires the happiness that Rousseau experiences there, and throughout the Fifth Walk, the central vignette of the Reveries, the island's opportunities for immersion in Nature prove to be particularly instrumental, if not causal, in stimulating the sense of happiness that Rousseau purports to have discovered and explored. Each of the reveries in the Fifth Walk that reveal Rousseau's happiness and contentment are reactions to the natural stimuli that the island and its surrounding lake offer to Rousseau's receptive sensibility to the pleasures of immersing himself in Nature. Rousseau's time at Lake Bienne is notable for three key elements, all of

which contribute to his naturalness and happiness and all of which recur in later nature reveries. First, Rousseau's time on the island is characterized by his solitariness. Even though others (his wife, his hosts, and their ser vants) are physically present on the larger of the two islands, his emotional distance from them is constantly emphasized. In many regards, Rousseau is truly sealed off from others by both his exile and the double security of the lake itself. Second, he is unburdened by those concerns that normally dis tract human beings from the unmediated appreciation of the natural beauty. He arrives without any family, any companions, or any luggage. Even when

24Eric Gans, "The Victim as Subject: The Aesthetico-Ethical System of Rousseau's Reveries," in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), pp. 215-43, 230. For an account of how the experience of nature stimulates Rousseau's understanding of the natural character of human beings, see his description of the composition of the Second Discourse in the Confessions, book 8.



his belongings arrive, he never unpacks any of them, not even his books or writing desk (5: 83). Third, provided the solitary isolation and lack of distrac tion that is a precondition for true interaction with Nature, he devotes himself to the study of the natural character of the place in which he finds himself, most notably to a botanical survey of the islands.

In giving himself over to the appreciation of Nature, Rousseau reports that he would lie in a boat and allow the water's motion to take him where it would over the surface of the lake "plunged in a host of vague yet delightful reveries" (5: 85).25 He would visit the uninhabited smaller island on the lake and wander there on its beaches and hills. In all of these activities, he reports that the motions of Nature provide the basis for an incredible calm and happiness that he feels in that place. It is the one place where he can be absorbed in reverie and, thus, where he most clearly achieves the unique character as the human being that nature meant him to be (2: 35). These reflections culminate in a long and astonishing passage that many commen tators have enshrined as the conceptual center of the work as a whole:

But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it,26 where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of passing of time and no other feelings of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely as long as this state lasts, we call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. Such is the state which I often experienced on the Island of Saint-Pierre in my solitary reveries, which I lay in a boat and drifted where the water carried me, or sat by the shores of the stormy lake, or elsewhere, on the banks of a lovely river or a stream murmuring over the stones. (5: 88-89)27

Thus, Rousseau's model of happiness revealed in the Reveries is that of the human being wholly embedded in Nature,28 for whom the experience of

25In an astonishingly close parallel, Thoreau reports doing the same thing on Waiden in his description of the pond (p. 440).

26Compare Thoreau, Waiden, p. 272. 27For accounts of this passage as the defining moment of the Reveries, albeit in very

different readings, see Gans, "Victim as Subject," p. 230; Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, pp. 183-84, 270; Cooper, Problem of the Good Life, pp. 176-77; and Butterworth, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, pp. 189-200.

28This language of "embedding" is borrowed from and related to John Scott's characterization of Rousseau's natural man in the "pure state of nature" as "a phys ical being unproblematically embedded in physical nature." "The Theodicy of the Second Discourse: The Pure State of Nature and Rousseau's Political Thought,"



existing in the world, aware of the world's rhythms and the beauty and complexity of Nature's order, is sufficient to provide the basis for a stable and happy life. Here we find the very model of the ecological individual that grounds modern nature writing's aspirations to a better relationship between human beings and the natural world.

Similarly, in his essay "Walking," Thoreau opens by explicitly rejecting his ties to others as the precondition for truly experiencing and relating the experience of "man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature" (592-93). In walking to the West, embodied as the image of wilderness, Thoreau reveals that he has an uncommon but desirable connection to the natural roots of our character (602-3), and at the same time, the interaction with the wilderness is the source of the "tonics and the barks" that will reju venate the ability of corrupted human beings to recapture the naturalness that they have lost but must recover in order to live well. In Walden, Thoreau grounds his experience of the part of his life that is most natural and most properly imitated in a particular natural setting; Walden Pond becomes both metaphor and catalyst, thus serving the same functions in both illustrat ing and facilitating Thoreau's expression of his return to Nature that Lake Bienne plays in Rousseau's.29

But in Rousseau's work, the revelation is presented in a way that draws our attention to its problematic character. Rousseau's beautiful and transcendent experiences on Lake Bienne are all bounded, like the islands on which they occur, in both time and place. The key to the entire Fifth Walk is its brevity. It is the shortest of the Walks, and Rousseau continually reemphasizes the shortness of his time on the island and his unfulfilled wishes that he could stay forever.30 All of his activities to induce reverie are interrupted whether by natural happenings like the nightfall that nearly traps him far out in the lake, the arrival of company that interrupts his idyllic fruit-picking, or the

American Political Science Review 86 (September 1992): 696-711. Rousseau of the Reveries is, at least in the ordinary sense, more than a physical being, and as we will see momentarily, he is not "unproblematically embedded" in the natural whole. He is, however, in some crucial respects at some important moments, embedded nonetheless.

29It is deserving of an essay, let alone a footnote, to point to the central character of bodies of water as key images of and catalysts for producing a more natural life for humans in not only Rousseau's Reveries and Julie as well as several chapters of Waiden, but also in the images adopted by many of Thoreau's environmentalist progeny. Consider Annie Dillard's use of Tinker Creek in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Puget Sound in Holy the Firm.

30The first and the last walks are shorter, but neither describes a trip in the same way as the internal chapters. They are set off as frames and counterpoints that situate the discussions of reverie that occupy the center of the work. In regard to "never leaving" or the desire for permanence, contrast Thoreau's account of his



projects of his own lurking human faculties. The dangers that emerge from these repressed faculties are portrayed most notably and most comically in Rousseau's problematic plan to populate the smaller island with rabbits (thus interrupting and forever changing the character of the island's plant life that he had set out to study "in every particular"). In short, Rousseau writes about his "most delicious reveries" in a way that draws our attention to the limits of reverie to hold us in a state of suspended self-consciousness. Another sense of the limited character of the reveries that Rousseau

experiences on Lake Bienne as prescriptive model emerges in the idealiz ation of Nature. Davis discusses how the descriptions of Rousseau's "natural" experiences of the island "slide away" from the reality of both his actions and the natural setting in which they take place.31 We might be tempted to say that if the description of rapturous appreciation of Nature is to serve as the basis for readers to uncover the natural in themselves, it

ought to be possible for the realistic portrayal of the natural to stimulate the reaction. 2Davis, however, draws our attention to the peculiarly self conscious character of Rousseau's embellishments on nature: he alters the shape of Lake Bienne, making it an idealized circle (when it is really a rough triangle), thus allowing him to speak of himself as "circumscribed" in both senses by his exile and the (now, in its literary embodiment) circular surrounding lake. He emphasizes the importance that the sound of streams plays in inducing his relaxing into the natural rhythms although there are no streams on the Isle of St. Peter. That Thoreau's representation of Walden Pond as physical-natural artifact

is more realistic than Rousseau's representation of Lake Bienne might be viewed as an indicator that his is a more naturalistic account of the possi bility of the human reconvergence with Nature, but it also may indicate that Rousseau has a greater sensitivity to the subjective power that he as author wields in constructing his nature-narrative. The self-conscious (and subtly advertised) revisionism of Rousseau's construction of Nature in his writing suggests that the event of experience alone is not sufficient to instruct us in finding the natural in us. After all, Thoreau's supposedly more realistic account of his experiences is entirely (re-)constructed by the very structure of a work that elides the experiences of two years at Walden (not to mention many years before and after living in the vicinity) into the account of a single turning of the seasons (337 and 558). It reminds us, in a way that Thoreau may not explicitly acknowledge, that the author always frames experiences in Nature, if only by deciding what to include and not to include.33 Thus, we are forced to question the mediating influence of the

31Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, p. 183, ff. 32Thus, Buell's focus on Thoreau's work as "an environmentally responsive

vision" (p. 23). 33See Buell, The Portable Thoreau, chapter 3, "Representing the Environment."



author's structure and purposes and their influence over both the represen tation of Nature and the normative value of that representation.

Can We Write Nature? Rousseau, Thoreau, and a Contemporary Debate

Raising the question of the relationship between literary form and author ial purpose and their connection to claims of sensitivity to what Thoreau famously calls "the subtle magnetism of nature" reminds us that for all the transience of Rousseau's moments of convergence, Rousseau's walks, like Thoreau's sojourn at Walden Pond and the true saunters that Rousseau praises in Walking, are activities that are deliberately (if not voluntarily) alienated from other human beings. They are perhaps widely available in small doses and yet difficult for even the most devoted partisan of Nature or critic of humanity to sustain. The common critique that neither Rousseau nor Thoreau (nor any other nature writer, for that matter) escaped the necessity of living socially with other human beings, at least in some attenuated sense, does not resolve the difficulties that nature writing poses as a political teaching. In a practical sense, we might have to live what Thoreau calls "a sort of border life" (625), always on the fringes of the society of others. The ques tion may be less about the necessary limits of our physical returns to Nature and more about the character of the state of mind or soul that we are seeking when we go there.

But in raising this issue, we are brought to one of the most pressing controversies over the purposes and promise of contemporary nature writing, that is the question of whether there is such an activity or such a genre. Leo Marx and others might object to the suggestion that the pas sages that I have cited above are even properly referred to as "nature writing."34 In fact, Marx prefers to discuss works like Walden as "pastor als," and it is precisely because he insists that the recreation of nature in literature always and necessarily is guided by human ideals of beauty, form, and serenity that Marx insists that writings of this sort are always first and foremost about human beings. He claims that these writ ings are always constrained by the formal requirements of an anthropo centric genre; indeed, he insists that there could not be any other kind of genre. Marx has engaged in a very vigorous and long-running debate

34In discussing this debate, I refer predominantly to the published exchange between Marx and Buell following Marx's review of Buell's The Environmental Imagination. Marx's review of Buell's work and others appeared in the June 24, 1999 (60-64) and July 15,1999 (44-48) editions of the New York Review of Books. In sub sequent notes, I refer to the June 24 section as "The Struggle over Thoreau" and the July 15 section as "The Full Thoreau." Buell's answer and Marx's rebuttal appeared in the December 2, 1999, edition of the Review. I cite this as "Exchange on Thoreau."



with Laurence Buell (among others) about the character of Thoreau's writ ings, and their debate centers on this very question. Marx considers Thoreau's work pastoral, and Buell considers it to be the font of true nature writing or environmental nonfiction. Although neither discusses Rousseau in any systematic fashion, we will see that Rousseau's work is deeply cognizant of the issues that separate Marx from Buell and that our reading of the Reveries may illuminate the character of their disagreement. To summarize this debate briefly, Marx insists that Thoreau's writings,

as well as environmental nonfiction more generally, are composed from a humanist perspective. He argues that these works are deliberately and purposefully focused on the relationship between human beings and Nature as human beings would comprehend that relationship. Buell, on the other hand, insists that these writings should be understood as attempts to transcend the boundary between human consciousness and the natural world.35 He argues that they are better understood as accounts of what I have characterized as "convergence," the relinquishment of self that leads readers to a more ecocentric understanding of nature. Indeed, Buell's account of convergence writings is self-consciously referenced to the program of deep ecology. He advocates the promise of a literature that can serve as a conduit to the type of identification that lies at the basis of the deep ecology movement. Thus, in reference to Walden, Buell writes that Thoreau's "paradigmatic

model" is "not one of achieved wisdom or settled doctrine but of striving to achieve a state of being that the author is in the process of defining for himself."36 He suggests that Thoreau was working towards an account of his experience unencumbered by human purposes and human limits, a poetry that will illuminate the way to follow nature unconsciously and a poet (to use Thoreau's words, of which Buell makes much) who can create a "literature which gives expression to Nature," "who derived his words as often as he used them-transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots" (616). Buell characterizes this as "the goal of a poetics that would relinquish the superintending human conscious ness."37 He suggests that Thoreau points the way toward this possibility. He cites approvingly Walden's shifts in narrative voice(s) as evidence of a sincere and ongoing effort to make the work's perspective progressively less defined and, thus, less anthropocentric. Thoreau begins by trying to answer the questions that his neighbors pose about the differences between his way of life and their own but subconsciously transforms h iS

35Buell, The Portable Thoreau, p. 156, ff. 36Ibid., p. 387. 37Ibid., p. 164.



work into an account that is less directed by the need to address the con cerns of the human beings closest to us. Thoreau, in Buell's account, allows Nature to teach us the questions without the humanist prejudices inherent in searching Nature for answers to questions that we have our selves decided are most important. Others, including Marx, argue that insofar as Thoreau did immerse

himself into Nature, attempting to give himself over to Nature's purposes in lieu of his own, he dissipated his political energies and made himself, and his writings, rather useless.38 He insists that the authors of these pas torals want to teach us to live more environmentally sustainable lives by radical appeals that are, nevertheless, grounded in our own desires for happiness and self-fulfillment. Marx proclaims, "The pastoral is an unequivocally anthropocentric mode. To writers and artists who work in it, nonhuman nature is interesting and significant chiefly (or only) so far as it bears on human experience. (Homo Sapiens is trapped, presumably like all species, in the inescapable narcissism of species being.)"39 In other words, we may become one with Nature, but even then we would do so only because we are interested in our own happiness, and we will care for Nature only insofar as we recognize that what is good for Nature is also good for us.

From Marx's perspective, Buell's dream of some convergence of the self with Nature is dangerous utopianism.

But the real problem, at least as Buell and many other contemporary environmental thinkers see it, is that we must learn to live in a way that allows nature to follow its own direction without any direction or intentionality of man intruding on our efforts on its behalf. The under lying theme in so many of the great works of environmental writing is that "there is a subtle magnetism in nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us right."40

In this sense, it is not so much the physical presence of other human beings in our lives or the necessary services that they might perform for us in our day-to-day activities that are the problem.4' It is the fact that our concerns for them, their concerns for us, and even our concerns for ourselves might

38Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, [1964] 2000), p. 42, and "The Full Thoreau," p. 46; also see Bob Pepperman Taylor, America's Bachelor Uncle: Henry David Thoreau and the American Polity (Laurence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), p. 126.

39"Exchange on Thoreau." 40Ibid. The quotation is from Thoreau's "Walking." The first emphasis is added

here; the second emphasis is also added by Marx in the work cited. 41Thus, Thoreau's chapter on "Solitude" opens with the revelation that he often has

visitors (pp. 380-81) and muses on the fact that one can be alone in the midst of many (p. 384): "What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and

makes him solitary?"



impart directions and purposes to us that counter the impulses or instincts of Nature that we ought to be following. In order to be free of human goals that might interfere with the "subtle magnetism" of Nature, we must uncon sciously follow that magnetism, i.e., turn off our consciousness so we can be guided by Nature itself. The heated exchange between Laurence Buell and Leo Marx turns on this very question about the character of nature writing in general and Walden in particular: Is nature writing ultimately about translating the human experience of Nature into enlightening insights about how humans can answer their own questions and better achieve their own ends or is it, in fact, to achieve the more astonishing convergence of giving ourselves over to Nature, thus yielding our prerogative to posit ends for ourselves and other beings as a misbegotten and destructive freedom?

Purposelessness and Writing: Rousseau's Seventh Walk and the Character of Reverie

It is precisely on this question of transcending intentionality that Rousseau's Reveries can help us better understand this anthropocentric/ecocentric divide and why it is both ephemeral and yet hard to transcend. In order to understand this claim, we must return to the Seventh Walk. In the clever and dense opening passages of that walk, Rousseau recounts his return to the study of botany as a way of committing himself to the experi ence of the natural orderliness or harmony of which human beings were once a part.42 Davis argues that Rousseau embraces the study of botany as a method for studying Nature, including the natural human being, that may avoid the self-interested, human motives that normally dictate the agenda of our research projects. In short, he ascribes to Rousseau the very project of "relinquish[ing] the superintending human consciousness" that Buell would impute to Thoreau and other nature writers.43

The complications arising out of Rousseau's attempt to use botany as a preface to the study of human beings as natural phenomena are revealed in the recurrent character of Rousseau's botanizing. He engaged actively in botany at an earlier time in his life, but pressed by the affairs that compli cate human lives, he found that he lacked time for the practice and sold his herbarium and his books. When he returned to the study of botany, he was forced, he tells us, to recopy books that he once owned, recollect plants of which he once had specimens, and relearn things he once knew (7: 105 6). But Rousseau is not really a natural botanizer in this respect. He can

42See also 3: 50; 5: 81, 83-85; 7: 107-8. 43See Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, pp. 223-24; and Buell, The Portable Thoreau,

p. 164. 44Butterworth, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, p. 214.



remember much of what he knew before and does not need to start learning about plants as if a novice. Furthermore, he can, and does, take pleasure in remembering his earlier botanical explorations and discoveries and, thus, partakes of some human fellowship by consorting with his younger self, a peculiarly self-conscious activity that he considered as one of the purposes for producing the Reveries in the first place (1: 34).

In short, Rousseau remembers his earlier studies of botany as an element in his recollections of his own past; it, too, serves as a link in the associations that make it impossible for a human being with a developed sense of amour propre to ever be alone. It carries him back to his younger self, and in himself, he finds an other. Thus, Rousseau's botany is an activity of the mind that is peculiarly divorced from the perspectives of the original natural man. As Rousseau notes in the Second Discourse, man in the pure state of Nature is insensible to the passage of time and the repetition of experience, and it is in this very context that Rousseau explains that he is also indifferent to the natural world that is taking place all around him: "The spectacle of Nature becomes indifferent to him. There is always the same order, there are always the same revolutions; he does not have the mind to wonder at the greatest marvels; and one must not seek in him the philosophy that

man needs in order to know how to observe once what he has seen every day" (SD, 117).

Rousseau's botanical excursions, by contrast, are precisely directed at producing wonder at what he calls "a living, fascinating, and enchanting spectacle" (7: 108). We have seen this in his moments of bliss in the Fifth

Walk and find them echoed with even greater force in the apologia for his botanical activity that opens the Seventh:

The more sensitive the soul of the observer, the greater the ecstasy aroused in him by this harmony [of Nature]. At such times his senses are possessed by a deep and delightful reverie, and in a state of blissful self-abandonment, he loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful order with which he feels himself at one. All individual objects escape him; he sees and feels nothing but the unity of all things. (7: 108)

[A]nd behold, I am as much a botanist as anyone needs to be who only wants to study Nature in order to discover ever new reasons for loving her. (7: 115)

These passages clearly establish Rousseau's apparent kinship with modern nature writers who seek to attract their readers into an appreciation of the natural world that will make human beings more attentive to the needs of that world by providing "ever new reasons for loving her." But it is crucial that we recognize the context in which Rousseau places these expressions of wonder and sympathy for the natural order.

The Seventh Walk is dominated by Rousseau's elaborate justification of his strange choice to return to botany in his old age. He claims that he wants to



understand the choice because "I think that, properly understood, it [the motive for the choice] might add something new to the self-knowledge which I have devoted my last hours of leisure to acquiring" (7: 107). Insofar as he can tell, the choice to pursue botany arose spontaneously, and insofar as he is at this point much closer to "what Nature made him," this spontaneous purpose may be Nature's purpose rather than his own. He is fascinated by the idea that some external force, some "subtle magnet ism of Nature" to use the Thoreauvian phrase, draws him to the study of the details of plants. As he put it in an earlier context, "Lonely meditation, the study of Nature and the contemplation of the universe lead the solitary to aspire continually to the maker of all things and to seek with a pleasing dis quiet for the purpose of all he sees and the cause of all he feels" (3: 50). In studying Nature (particularly the nature of plants), Rousseau is led to wonder why he is drawn to Nature, why he feels the pleasure and wonder at Nature's beauty, what this orientation towards the nature of plants says about himself and, thus perhaps, about the natural character of human beings more generally.

In pursuing botany, Rousseau engages in an activity that advances his pur poses and that simultaneously takes him out of himself because its purpose is not his own: "[H]e loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful order with which he feels himself at one" (VII: 108). Even the choice of pronouns reinforces the idea that Rousseau's attempt to explain himself through the study of botany results in a transcendence of himself. It is this mix of purpo sefulness and purposelessness that makes Rousseau's account of his singu lar position in relation to the natural world so compelling for understanding the contemporary nature writers who figure so prominently in environ mental arguments. Scholars like Buell argue that it is the ability of these writers to "relinquish themselves" and to model such relinquishing for others that makes them so valuable. Marx celebrates their evocative accounts of the goodness in Nature but warns that their unrealistic, apolitical, and utopian insistence on self-relinquishing must undermine their effectiveness since the real goal must be to convince human beings moved by human pur poses to live in a way more conducive to the preservation of the natural world. Rousseau appears to hover in a tension between these two positions, apparently focused simultaneously on his own personalized and purposeful quest for self-understanding and a sympathetic willingness to lose himself in Nature. To lose oneself in order to understand oneself would be, it would appear, a paradoxical victory. He must let go of his purposes to know himself, and yet he must make his self-knowledge available to those who might learn from that knowledge, a project that requires purposefulness.

Rousseau is seeking to understand why he, as a self, wants to be one with Nature, but he never loses sight of the possibility that he himself and his intentions are the source of his direction, that they might be constructing a nature to suit his preconceptions or his desires. And yet, he is confident that he is approaching Nature in a way that is neither delusional nor strictly



instrumental, and he explicitly distinguishes himself from those whose study of plants is most deeply self-interested, particularly those who seize plants and try to transform them into medication. The study of pharma cology is offered as the image of human beings entering into the study of Nature for their own technological purposes, to take what is inchoate but not expressed in Nature, and to use it for human purposes and human self-interest. It is a process of imposing a foreign will upon the natural world that Rousseau, like the environmental thinkers who follow him, casts as misguided and even immoral. However, in presenting this critique of pharmacology as his image, Rousseau reminds his readers that this con nection with Nature may require that we forego much of the good that a con scious human study of Nature may reveal. Rousseau will know plants intimately and yet know not what to do with them, all of which keeps rekindling the question of why Rousseau wants to know the plants at all. Davis suggests that Rousseau's efforts to distinguish his stumbling (back) into the study of botany as an accident that leads to the appreciation of the harmony of Nature is, in Rousseau's presentation, the only real way to find Nature: "[T]o seek Nature's purposes is what prevents one from finding them."45

The Seventh Walk ends with three events that Rousseau recalls from his botanizing walks. All three events are fraught with reminders of the ways that the intentions of human beings are always intruding upon our under standing of the natural world. Consider his account of the unexpected dis covery of "the machine in the garden" when a stocking factory appears in a wild and forlorn ravine high in the Swiss Alps (7: 116-18). The factory reminds Rousseau, as Marx would have it, about the futility of our escape from the modern world's technological presence.46 It also reveals that Rousseau's desire to flee his persecutors is the source of his desire to embed himself in an untouched natural setting. Rousseau uncovers both the physical presence of other human beings and the intentionality behind his "nature-oriented" activity in the emotions that he experiences at the dis covery of this "machine in the garden." He has fled to Nature to escape human beings and, thus, made his relationship to human society the cause and purpose of his new relationship with Nature. The presence of a book seller on the highest, wildest mountains and the ways that humans judge plants (and each other's feelings) on the basis of misleading appearances in the second and the third stories are variants on this theme. Similarly, Thoreau is not unaware of the complications that are always

present in our attempts to think ourselves into the natural whole. In the "Higher Laws" chapter of Walden, he imagines a variety of ways in which the

45Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, p. 216. 46This vignette may be read as a nearly perfect match for the trope of the "inter

rupted idyll" that Marx cites as the basis for the sense of "dislocation, anxiety, and foreboding" that pervades environmental literature. See pp. 373-379.



voice of Nature might guide us out of our conscious end-positing selves if we are "the most sensitive" and, therefore, receptive to hearing the "animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers" (465). In another context, he refers to this as a certain "doubleness" that allows us to "be beside ourselves in a same sense" but that "may easily make us poor neigh bors and friends" (386-87). But Thoreau, unlike Rousseau, at times suggests that this doubleness is easily assumed at will. He confidently proclaims, "I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra looking down on it" (386).

If Thoreau thinks that "dualism," in the sense of transcending the differ ences in purposes between ourselves and Nature, can be easily understood, he is not nearly as sanguine about the unproblematic character of such a transformation as some of his more recent proteges. To cite only two examples from contemporary environmental theory, Michael Zimmerman confidently assumes that a new metaphysics grounded in quantum physics and the promotion of pantheism as a religious faith are likely to "move [us] from atomistic, dualistic ego consciousness toward relational, dualistic consciousness."47 Kelly Buckley suggests that the systematic "exploration of our dream experiences ... is right now providing an effective means for a great number of people to discover the transformative power of dualistic consciousness."48 Neither appears to recognize the problems posed by the fact that their consciousness determines the very character of the transformation they purport to experience in themselves and recommend for others. As environmental philosophy has become more developed, we see salaried thinkers arguing about how human beings do and should experience Nature, and we are understandably suspicious that they may well be guiding themselves to a state of mind that they claim is that chosen for them by Nature but that, in fact, reflects peculiarly human pur poses.49 Rousseau's meditation on why he came to immerse himself in the study of botany as well as what he gained from his awareness of the orderli ness and harmony that he discovered thereby is both more self-conscious than these explorations and yet less so. It is closer to the true transformation of self into natural whole and yet more aware of the limits of such transformations.

47"Quantum Theory, Intrinsic Value Theory, and Pantheism," Environmental Ethics 10 (1998): 3-30, 4-5. 48Buckley, "Quest for Transformational Experience," 162. 49In addition to the example provided by the exchanges between Marx and Buell,

this may be particularly evident in the ways that the founders of particular streams of environmentalist thought deal with their critics. See Peter Reed, "Man Apart: An Alternative to the Self-Realization Approach," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 53-69 and Arne Naess, "Response to Reed," Environmental Ethics 12 (1990). Also Robyn Eckersley, "Divining Evolution: The Ecological Ethics of Murray Bookchin," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 99-116; and Murray Bookchin, "Recovering Evolution: A Reply to Eckersley and Fox," Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 253-74.



Rousseau, like some radical environmental thinkers, does see the possi bility that at least some human beings can overcome their estrangement from Nature through a sublimation of their consciousness that results in a fusion of their sense of self and their perception of the natural world in which they are embedded. This fusion is an image of the unity that marked the soul of the natural man. However, the Reveries, particularly the Fifth Walk, in which this model of happiness is most obviously realized, and the Seventh Walk, in which the paradoxical character of any attempt to choose such a transformation is explored, ought to make us painfully aware of how problematic all of these suggestions are. Rousseau's presentation of his unique position suggests that it is our conscious sense of self, our amour propre, that allows us to conceive of ourselves as both entities and agents/ subjects. It makes our transformation necessary and yet intractably difficult. To engage our agency in an attempt to transform our sense of agency requires a deliberate attempt to act without deliberation. As Rousseau suggests in the opening to the Sixth Walk, with introspection we can almost always find "the cause" of "our automatic impulses," even when we think we are most freely allowing ourselves to be swept along (6: 93). The conscious self-direction of human beings that now obstructs any access we might have in the state of "what nature meant [us] to be" is so deeply seated that its removal requires a most ingenious plan that somehow manages to avoid being planned at all.

Concluding Suggestions

In concluding this essay, I offer some suggestions about the ways that Rousseau's work draws us to both the attractions and limits of reverie that we must keep in mind in evaluating any writing of this type. As we have seen, written accounts of reveries and convergence are always mediated experiences. By the very character of the activity, they are inevitably relivings of experience, not the essence of experience itself, and as such, they must always be treated as works of art that were created purposefully and are not, indeed cannot be, the essence of the experience themselves in a direct sense.50 The author must leave reverie to report it, and thus the author must be, in some sense, an independent directorial voice in the reverie

50See Cooper, Problem of the Good Life, p. 193 n. 7. Cooper tellingly notes, "Thus, it may be that Rousseau means to illustrate the very danger that I am explaining here." In other words, Cooper suggests that Rousseau is drawing attention to the con structed character of his own idealization and thus the unlikelihood of its actual

occurrence and the limits of our human possibilities. Also see Melzer, 92. "One major purpose of Rousseau's voluminous autobiographical writings ... is to describe the character of this most unified and natural of civilized ways of life. They also describe the bizarre and unnatural conditions that were needed to create it" (Emphasis added).



that s/he offers to others.51 While Rousseau appears to insist that the Reveries is both for himself alone and without any structure or organization, all ten were thoroughly revised, and the first seven were laid out in a fine copy, as if prepared for publication, at the time of Rousseau's death.52 To remind us that the composition of his experiences at Lake Bienne-the natural refuge at the heart of the Reveries- must be viewed at some remove, Rousseau tells us he never unpacked his books or writing desk. The written account in which we participate could only be written at some later date.

Similarly, although Thoreau did write a substantial portion of Walden while "living in the woods" during 1845-1847, he revised the work many times over the next seven years, and it includes substantial changes in both structure and content from the original. Works of this sort are neither spontaneous nor uncalculated. If Buell is correct that the focus of Thoreau changed over the trajectory of Walden, we must understand that shift as a self-conscious one. The attention that Rousseau draws in the Reveries to the tensions between the spontaneous revelations that he wants to chronicle and the necessary intentionality that accompanies writing down reveries tends to confirm Marx's insistence that these must be understood as thoroughly humanist works.

But this is not to say that Marx's insistence on their humanism adequately appreciates the possibilities to which works of this type may aspire or all of the promise that they may contain. As evocative and artistic creations, rev eries are designed to "persuade without convincing." In Rousseau's Reveries, the sentiment of experience is the very touchstone of validity that separates the moments of clarity and insight from those of confusion and frustration. Works of this sort appeal to human beings to think of themselves, as both individuals and as a species, in a wholly original way that cannot be grounded entirely in intellectual conviction. This consideration must be felt. Insofar as these works are intended to effect a "change in human nature," authors who write such works (including Rousseau and Thoreau) must be understood as playing a role analogous to the work of the Great Legislator of the Social Contract whose superior understanding can only be communi cated through appeals that engage our emotional responses as well as our rational thought.53 To rationalize these writings in search for a clear and

51Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, pp. 106 and 113-115. 52Ibid., p. 92. 53In one of the major survey works of environmental political thought, Andrew

Dobson, Green Political Thought, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 123, explicitly suggests that the Rousseauian Legislator of the Social Contract is the model on which any plan to realize what he calls "transformative ideologies" must be based. Strangely, Dobson does not mention Rousseau anywhere else in the work or note Rousseau's many significant contributions to environmentalist thought. Furthermore, the passage makes clear that he plays a certain shell game equating



logical argument is to rob them of their power and to miss the point entirely. As Taylor argues in regard to Thoreau, "[his] philosophical tools are literary rather than technical, designed not so much to 'convince' us as to 'wake us up'.... His ambition is philosophical in a broad and old-fashioned sense; he wants to speak directly not only to our reason but to our spirit and desire as well, to the whole of our lives."54 Both Rousseau's and Thoreau's edifying and emotional accounts of transport at the marvelous order of Nature instruct us in a particular way of looking at and feeling about Nature. They are deliberately suggesting an orientation to Nature that may be consistent with "our natural reaction" to Nature's order and yet is now only accessible to us as cultivated human beings whose reactions are schooled by the mediated accounts of the experience that are communicated to us by powerful, and purposeful, writers. Rousseau recognized the utterly constructed character of the most plau

sibly satisfying forms of life open to the self-conscious human beings who have been misshapen by amour-propre. Even in those works in which he is most forceful in persuading his readers to adopt these constructed sol utions, he reminds his readers about the character of the philosophical reor ientation that he is selling. We should appreciate writers, like Rousseau,

who are able to communicate these ideas powerfully and yet self-critically with a sense of their own limits, but we also must acknowledge the very real problems that attend the promulgation of these writings. They remain problems even if we accept Marx's critique of attempts to deny "the superintending human consciousness." While Thoreau, Leopold, and others may know full well that they are appealing to the socially acquired passions by offering their mediated accounts of reverie, they neglect to remind their readers that in doing so they are treading on some very dangerous ground. Consider Thoreau's famous statement from "Civil Disobedience": "Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?" (111, emphasis added). Thoreau either does not recognize or does

the role played by the legislator with the role played by the new decentralized and bioregional political institutions envisioned by certain ecological radicals seeking more sustainable societies. The legislator, however, should not be associated with the institutions but with the creators of human beings capable of living within such institutions, a necessary precondition of this type of political reform. See Rousseau, Social Contract 2: 7. In this context, consider Daniel Mornet's critique of the self-understanding of French nature-lovers: "[I]f they have gone beyond the rustic idyll, if they have brought to nature a soul finally open to solitude, to reverie, and to all the resulting emotions, it is because Rousseau has given them this new soul." Quoted in LaFreniere, "Rousseau and the European Roots of Environmentalism," 55-56 (Emphasis added).

54Taylor, America's Bachelor Uncle, p. 125. Compare Melzer, Natural Goodness of Man, pp. 89-90 and 244-49.



not admit that, through Walden, he insists on having his fellow citizens sur render their conscience to him as a legislator, albeit not in the formal and political sense of that word but in the sense that Rousseau recognized most clearly. If we are to be moved by the experiences of others in Nature, we must submit ourselves in a very real sense to their authority because the experience is always theirs (not ours) in the first instance. Furthermore, it is presented selectively by them to direct us in particular ways. We never receive "a formless record of [the] reveries" (1: 32) from any author, and they are never presented without some elements of the defects that Rousseau identifies in himself (1: 33-34). My point should not be confused with Buell's critique of certain nature

poems (as narrative forms) that may fail to achieve a "rigorous relinquish ment of homocentrism" but that "underscore the heroic difficulty of achiev ing a thoroughgoing redefinition of the self in environmental terms."55 Rather, my point is to show how Rousseau's work reveals the necessary limits of such redefinition. When we understand Rousseau's Reveries as an exploration of the limits of literary forms and human understanding, we can see that Rousseau uses the limits of the form to show his readers that their ability to comprehend experience as experience is exceedingly proble matic. We are no longer simply human beings as "nature made us," and thus, our perception of every experience has been complicated by our fall. In the Second Discourse, Rousseau tells us that the natural man is "indiffer ent" to the spectacle of Nature and that "[t]he more one meditates on this subject, the more the distance from pure sensations to the simplest knowl edge increases in our eyes" (SD, 117). Nature passes before the eyes of natural human beings, but they cannot comprehend its order or even really see (hear, smell, or notice) anything that their immediate physical preservation does not require. On the other hand, as self-conscious human beings with amour-propre, we cannot see, hear, smell, or notice Nature without their awareness of self (in a broader than merely physical sense) directing their seeing, hearing, smelling, and noticing. The new ecological man that Buell and others aspire to create must be a

self who can be enthralled by Nature's beauty, majesty, and order. Rousseau reveals that an individual who can be so enthralled is necessarily limited in his/her ability to relinquish self without also losing the ability to sense and comprehend the experience into which the self must be lost.56 Environmental enthusiasts for nature writing must reflect on how Rousseau shows "that the price paid for experiencing anything is the experi ence of ourselves as alienated."57 We can only see Nature if we are in some sense distinct from it, as Marx insists. But, as Buell insists, we can only live according to Nature if our sentiments are educated to see ourselves as part of

55Buell, The Portable Thoreau, p. 167. 56See discussion in Melzer, Natural Goodness of Man, p. 92. 57Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, p. 270. Emphasis added.



the natural order. When Rousseau says that "[t]he more sensitive the soul of the observer, the greater the ecstasy aroused in him by this harmony" (7: 108), the sensitivity to which he refers is a learned and sophisticated sensi bility that is only available for human beings who have advanced a very long way along the road from the "savage man" in the state of Nature. In short, we are left with the paradoxical problem that to know Nature we must be apart from Nature, and we can only live according to Nature when we are a part of it. No one, so far as I can tell, has illustrated the com plexity of this paradox as elegantly as Rousseau in the Reveries. Rousseau emphasizes the incomplete and transient character of his moments of natur alness by claiming that he is only "what Nature meant me to be" during his solitary walks, thus, implicitly reminding us that when he writes of those walks, he is sitting at some remove from both the experience of being "what nature meant me to be" (2: 35) as well as from the experience of Nature itself.58

But as we recognize the paradox, we must also admit that the power of reverie is decisively limited in its ability to appeal to some human beings. The spectacle of Nature does not necessarily, however beautifully it may be invoked, draw forth the proper feelings in some people. Charles Pepperman Taylor claims that Thoreau did not sufficiently understand this limit on the political effectiveness of his appeals to Nature.59 Taylor's account of Thoreau's less than perfectly self-conscious struggles with these tendencies is one of the most perceptive accounts of these dangers, but Rousseau, more than his successors, appears to see these tendencies in himself and to draw out their problems most profoundly. Thus, the appar ently apolitical or anti-political effort to lose ourselves might well become, and is always in danger of becoming, the most egomaniacal and tyrannical act. Rousseau playfully reminds us of this on several occasions, taking care in each case to cast himself in a somewhat ludicrous light as the would-be tyrant. The image of the planting of a rabbit colony on the island as a rival for the voyage of the Argo comes immediately to mind (5: 85-86). Although this scene is obviously meant to be self-mocking, I think we would be careless not to take careful note of it. In Rousseau, the unresolved tension between his self-forgetting return into Nature and his highly self conscious and synoptic critique of the limits of his own projects results in a uniquely powerful account of both the promise and the limits of nature-writing as a political argument. In this regard, his work is a valuable contribution to our own explorations of a more environmentally sensitive literature and more effective environmental orientations and policies.

58Also see Cooper, Problem of the Good Life, p. 175. 59Taylor, America's Bachelor Uncle, pp. 9-12 and 127-28.


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