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Music, the Passions, and Political Freedom in Rousseau

Tracy B. Strong

Tracy B. Strong (2010)

UCSD

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue

from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of

those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation

does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and

hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither

of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting

noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity whereactually I am not. The more peoples standpoints I have present in my mindthe

stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking.1

HANNAH ARENDT

Arendt draws here upon the concept of reflective judgment in Kants Critique of the Power of

Judgment. Reflective judgment is precisely not my taking someone elses point of view, but thinking as

myself(thinking in my own identity) that which others think. Such judgment thus re-presents the

judgments of all those others to whom I make myself present. I will not necessarily agree with them, but I

will have had them present while reflecting. In doing so, Arendt observes, I do not take into account only

my own interests.

Yet, if Arendt is right, it would seem that there is no room for such a politics in Rousseau:

notoriously, he seems opposed to representation as such. Music, however, constitutes an exception to

Rousseaus hostility to representation and the arts in general. I want here to argue that his understanding

of music shows that the problem with most forms of representation is that they make judgment in

Arendts sense unnecessary or undesirable. On the other hand, Rousseaus analysis shows that proper

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""1 H. Arendt, Truth and politics, in P. Baehr (ed.), The Portable Hannah Arendt(New York: Penguin, 2000), p.

556. Thanks to Professor Babette Babich for reminding me of this passage.

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representation requires an ability to represent emotion while making rational argumentssomething for

which the experience of music is the model.

InJulie, or the New Heloise, Julie writes to Saint-Preux that My heart was so corrupted that my

reason could not withstand the discourse of your philosophers.2 Elsewhere, Rousseau suggests that the

human espritmight be able to perceive matter directly, without reflection.3 In fact, if the idea that strikes

the brain does not penetrate to the heart, it is nothing [nulle].4Heart is Rousseaus word for

understanding that is not seated (solely) in rationality. What is the heart? The temptation here is to see in

this expression a sign of Rousseau's premature romanticism, a kind of mushy valorization of feeling over

thought. But heart here is as in Pascal: le cur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point; on le voit

en mille choses [the heart has its reasons of which reason knows not; one sees this in a thousand ways]. 5

For something to penetrate to the heart means, then, for it to become part of the way a person thinks,

reasons, acts, and feels, rather than being entailed by those qualities. It is to become part of the

constitution of a person rather than an acquired predicate. Why, without this, is an idea nulle? Because it

remains unincorporated; it has not been made flesh and given real existence in and through a human

being. Rousseau wants his understandings to penetrate beneath assessment to become a part of the

assessment itself. As such, one would, as he says of the legislator, practically change human nature.

These considerations are central to Rousseau and were already a motivating force in the

Discourse on the Arts and the Sciences. What was wrong with the arts and sciences? Rousseau

entertained a number of responses: they make humans lazy and cowardly; they corrupt the taste; and,

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""2Julie, ou la nouvelle Hlose , uvres compltes [hereafter, OC], vol. II, p. 351. Cf. One did not begin by

reasoning but by feeling. inEssai sur lorigine des langues, OC,vol. V, p. 380. All translations from theoriginal French are the authors.

3Fragment sur Dieu et la rvlation, OC,vol. IV, pp. 104647.

4Dialogues: Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, OC, vol. I, p. 808.

5 B. Pascal,Penses (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 277. See M. Cottret, Les jansnistes jugent de Jean-Jacques, in C.Maire (ed.),Jansnisme et rvolution: actes du colloque de Versailles tenu au Palais des congrs les 13 et14 octobre 1989 (Paris: Chroniques de Port-Royal, 1990), pp. 81-102, especially p. 89.

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most centrally, they introduce inequality between humans by means of the distinction of talents and the

disparagement of the virtues.6

Importantly, Rousseau resists the claims of philosophers. Insofar as the sciences and the arts are

claims to final knowledge, indeed, most generally, insofar asphilosophy, in particular, is a claim to

special knowledge, it will produce only foolishness and contradictions, an attempt to be God-like.

Rousseau mocks the most famous philosophers of his period and the lessons they have produced.7

In

the Confessions, he indicates that when he was reading these writers for the first time (in 1736) he hoped

at first to be able to reconcile their contradictions. Now, however, years later, their contradictions have

become indicative of what is wrong with what is generally called philosophy.8

Philosophers seek to

know, but they do not look and see. Thus they are blinded by illusions about which it has been forgotten

that they are illusions: Will we always be the fool of words? Will we never understand that studies,

knowledge, learning, and Philosophy are but vain simulacra erected by human pride?9

The natural state of man, Rousseau goes on to say, is ignorance. I read this to be a claim to tell

us something not so much about ignorance as about what is humanly natural, as if what we needed in

order to be human did not depend on knowing.10 It is not a matter, Rousseau insists again and again, of

going back to live as savages with the bears, to burn the libraries, and so forth.11

It is not that we have

too much, but that what we have keeps us from being, what Rousseau calls living. It is as if human

virtue were there in front of us, but our knowledge constantly kept us from seeing it. If knowledge is not

virtue, what can make beings like us virtuous? Rousseaus answer is that all we have to do is be human, a

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""6Discours sur les arts et les sciences, OC, vol. III, p. 25.

7OC, vol. III, p. 27. The philosophers mocked are probably Bishop Berkeley, D'Holbach, Mandeville, and Hobbes.

8Confessions, OC, vol. I, p. 237.

9Dernire rponse, OC, vol. III, p. 73.

10This is of course what impressed Kant about Rousseau: that, in his view, we needed no special achievement to be

moral.

11Dernire rponse, OC, vol. III, p. 95.

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quality, he indicates, that generally escapes us. (Thus Locke sought to educate a gentleman, not a

human being; kings, slaves, and bourgeois are not human.)12

How would we recognize the human? What kind of language would Rousseau have for the

human? Rousseau's most extended consideration of language comes in theEssay on the Origin of

Languages.13 Rousseau's description there of an original language sounds very much like what he is

trying to accomplish in his own writing:

This language would have many synonyms,... few adverbs and abstract

words.... It would have many irregularities and anomalies; it would

neglect grammatical analogy in favor of the euphony, variety, harmony,

and beauty of sounds. Instead of arguments, it would have pithy sayings;

it would persuade without convincing and depict without reasoning

[raisonner].14

To persuade without convincingis what Rousseau wishes to accomplish in his writing: to change

his readers rather than coerce them. But how might this happen? Here the concept of reflective

judgmentcharacteristic of aestheticsis revelatory. The fundamental question of aesthetic or

reflective judgment is how to go from the individual to the collectiveand, as Hannah Arendt and others

have pointed out, this is also the fundamental question of politics. To persuade without convincing is

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""12 Seemile, OC, vol. IV, p. 57.

13 In the next few paragraphs I owe a debt of provocation to T. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), especially chapter 3. I do not agree with Kavanagh,

but his work led me to think in ways I might otherwise not have.

Note here that the status of theEssay on the Origin of Languages is in dispute. The Second Discourse passes overlanguage briefly and makes reference to a text to come. Is this the text? See the discussion in Kavanagh. It

is clear that Rousseau worked on this essay repeatedly. R. WoklersRousseau on Society, Politics, Music

and Language (New York: Garland, 1987) is by far the most extended treatment of these issues; he situatestheEssay before the Second Discourse. See the discussion in Y. Naito, La pense musicale de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, unpublished thesis, University of Kansai, Japan (2002), pp. 20ff. See also J. Derrida,De la grammatologie and D. A. Thomas,Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the FrenchEnlightenment(Cambridge University Press, 1995).

14Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC, vol. V, p. 383. Rousseau continues by saying that this language would

resemble Chinese in some aspects, Greek in others, and Arabic in others. See also: By cultivating the art

of convincing one lost that of moving people [mouvoir].Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC, vol. V, p.425.

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thus central to what Rousseau has to say about both aesthetic and political matters and constitutes the link

between the two. It is important to realize that in bringing the subjective to the general as Kant and

Arendt do in the concept of reflective judgment, that Rousseau, who anticipates and even more than

anticipates these aesthetics, does not in either his aesthetic writing or in his political work understand

subjectivity as irrationality but rather as the reflective awareness of the knowing self.15

It is not an accident that Rousseau's conception of an original language and his sense of his own

task resemble one another. The proper model for language appears to be that of music, specifically, that of

melody. Languages, he tells us, which are perfectly fixed and precise, rather than musicalsuch as

ancient Greekare frigid, where the written word bears increasingly less relation to the spoken.16

Music is in fact the most human of the arts, precisely because it brings man closer to man and always

gives us some idea about our own kind.17

Music properly produces moral effectswhen it is doubly the

voice of nature.18

We know from theEssay that Rousseau thought that language and music were

originally related.19

If Rousseau had not written the variousDiscourses and the Social Contract, he might very well

have passed into intellectual history as an aesthetic theorist, especially of music.20

In theDialogues, he

has the character Rousseau say of the subject Jean-Jacques that he was born for music. He

discovered approaches that are easier, simpler, and facilitate composition and performance. I have seen

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""15

See the discussion in Shierry Weber, The Aesthetics of Rousseaus Pygmalion,MLN, Vol. 83, No. 6, (Dec.,1968), pp. 900-918, esp . pp 902-903

16

Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC, vol. V, p. 392.17 Ibid., p. 421.

18Ibid., p. 427.

19For an interesting contemporary discussion, see the book by the British paleo-historian, S. Mithen, The Singing

Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2006).

20 See the material collected in OC, vols. I and V.

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no man who is so passionate about music as he.21

And this strange, dissociated book returns again and

again to the relation of Jean-Jacques to music.22

Rousseaus passion for music, and his conviction that it can reveal what being human consists in,

means that music has for Rousseau a political significance. I should like here to read his writings on

music in counterpoint to his writings on theater. The standard reading of Rousseau on theater is that he

was opposed to it on the grounds that it was destructive of community morals. The source for this

judgment is the letter he addressed to his cosmopolitan friend dAlemberton the title page of which he

lists all the societies to which dAlembert belongs, while labeling himself only citoyen de Genve

(dAlembert had, on the urging of Voltaire, included in hisEncyclopdie article on Geneva some

paragraphs advocating that a theater be opened there so as to bring together the wisdom of Lacedemonia

and the grace [politesse] of Athens.

Rousseau was not primarily concerned with the supposedly corrupting effects of actors and

actresses (D'Alembert had seductively suggested that, with proper regulation, Geneva might have a group

of morally well-behaved actors) but with the experience of theater itself, with what one might call the

theatricalization of life. Hence the letter is about les spectacles. His apparent hostility has two elements:

one moral, the other epistemological. On the moral level, Rousseau's concern is with the status of the

audience. He argues that, in contemporary theater, the emotions the audience experiences are not really

their own.23

Thus one can welcome the feeling of being upset or enjoying pleasure, for in the theater

nothing is required of the audience. By nothing is required Rousseau means that our emotions do not

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""21Dialogues, OC,vol. I, p. 878.

22 The influence of Rousseau on Gluck, Weber, and later German composers is a matter of record. See J. F. Straus,

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: musician,Musical Quarterly, 64 (1978), 47482. The nine year-old Mozart washimself impressed with Rousseau after hearing a performance ofLe devin du village in Paris. See B.Ebisawa,Rousseau and the Mozarts: Their Relation Considered, in C. Watanabe (comp.), Selected Papers(Tokyo: Nihon Art Center, 2001), pp. 6593. See also A. Livermore, Rousseau and Cherubino, Musicand Letters, 43 (1962), pp. 21823; and my Theatricality, Music, and Public Space in Rousseau,SubStance, 80 (1996), pp. 11027.

23 For a good account that situates Rousseau inside a conflict over theater that dated back for more than a century

before him, see M. M. Moffat, Rousseau et la querelle du thtre au xviiie sicle (Geneva: SlatkineReprints, 1970).

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have life consequences. It is, as it were, irresponsible to be an audience membera bit as if one were on

holiday from one's everyday, common, and shared humanity. For Rousseau, this irresponsibility is

associated with the experience of an isolation which keeps one from being at home with one's self, a

home which, he is at pains to show, can only be achieved with others.

This first distress is a constant theme in Rousseaus work. Already in the first twoDiscourses as

well as in theEmile, his concern is with a society where one displays oneself in order to be seen, and

ones senses of self is dependent on the view of others.24

Likewise, he suggests that it is in the nature of

the actor to present himself to be viewed (se donner au spectacle).25

The source of this moral dangerof irresponsibilityderives from a second, more basic, quality

of theater. Theater is, inevitably,26 representation. Here, Rousseau's hostility to theater reflects and is

reflected in his hostility to representative sovereignty.27

Representation on stage requires interpretation by

the audience, whereas a just political society is to be built from that which is so transparent in time and

space that it cannot be other than what it is. No matter what its subject, theater cannot be common. And it

cannot be the everyday: it involves the perfected, immortal, transcendent, particular self, precisely the self

that wants to overlook the common: more like a god than a human being.

Contrary to Diderot28

and the Abb Dubos29

, Rousseau regarded most representation not only as

parasitical on reality and therefore less than real (as had Plato before him), but also as predatory of reality,

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""24 See e.g. Dernire rponse, [to critiques of the First Discourse] OC iii 80; Discours sur lorigine de lgalit 2,

OC iii 111

25 Lettre M. dAlembert OC v 75. See also David Marshall, Rousseau and the State of Theater,

Representations, No. 13 (Winter, 1986), pp. 84-114 for similar considerations.

26I say inevitably because it seems to me that snuff films and gladiator combats are, in the end, not theater. See

the discussion in my The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), chap. 3.

27 One must emphasize here that Rousseau is opposed to representative sovereignty but notto representativegovernment. See Social Contract, book III and the extended discussion in my Jean-Jacques Rousseau andthe Politics of the Ordinary (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), chap. 3.

28 D. Diderot,Paradoxe sur le comdien (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), esp. pp. 6668.

29 J. B. Dubos,Rflexions critiques sur la posie et la peinture (Paris: J. Mariette, 1733), pp. 420, 42930.Starobinski has established the importance of Dubos (cf. his Introduction to Essai sur lorigine des

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insofar as it breaks down the separation between reality and its representation.30

In the preface he wrote in

1752 for his comedyNarcisse (just after the success of hisDiscourse on the Arts and Sciences), Rousseau

in fact suggests that theater is linked to philosophy, and the arts and sciences in general, insofar as it takes

us away from the everyday and common in its desire to shape how we appear to others, to distinguish

ourselves and stand out. From such an approach, society can only be built on a networking of

interdependencies, inequalities, and intersecting personal interests. In such a situation, Rousseau

continues, we must henceforth keep ourselves from being seen as we are.31

It is true that once we are in this situation, philosophy and theatercan give us a simulacrum of

virtue, so as to keep us from the horror of ourselves, were we to see ourselves discovered.32

In these

circumstances, representation can maintain perhaps the appearance of public virtue without that virtue

being found in our hearts. Commonality would be, to paraphrase Thoreau, a phrase on the lips of most

people, but in the hearts of very few. For those who have no humanity, philosophy and theater can give

them the clothing of the human, but they cannot make available the experience of oneself or another as

human. It is thus central to Rousseau that the experience of theater is one of isolation of individuals one

from the other: One thinks that one comes together with others at the performance, but it is there that

each isolates his or her person.33

When we are isolated, we have nothing in common: we share nothing. (Note that having

something in common also requires differentiation, the notion suggested by some, that Rousseau wants us

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

langues, OC, vol. V); see also J. F. Jones, Du Bos and Rousseau: a question of influence, Studies onVoltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 127 (1974), pp. 23141.

30See, on this general theme, F. Ankersmit, Pygmalion: Rousseau and Diderot on the theatre and representation,

Rethinking History, 7 (2003), pp. 31539. See C. N. Dugan and T. B. Strong, Music, politics, theatre, andrepresentation in Rousseau, in P. Riley (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001), pp. 32964.

31Narcisse prface, OC, vol. II, p. 968.

32Ibid., p. 972.

33Lettre dAlembert, OC, vol. V, p. 16. This drew a sharp response from dAlembert: On va, selon vous, sisoler

au spectacle. Le spectacle est au contraire celui de tous nos plaisirs qui nous rappelle le plus aux autreshommes, par limage quil nous prsente de la vie humaine.Lettre M. Rousseau, on line athttp://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Jean_le_Rond_d%E2%80%99Alembert [p. 4, if printed out].

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to be identical is false and indeed nonsense.) The choice, then, is between being a human being and the

theatricality of not being. If being a human being is the result of a constitution, then our only other choice

is nonbeing. The reason for this is that the commonlemoi-communis what humans are as humans. Its

existence is, we might say, our essence.34

The problem with representation, then, both in theater and in politics, is not just that it induces

passivity into an audience, but that some human qualities, perhaps precisely those qualities that mark the

human, cannot be represented and be what they truly are. Just as you cannot promise for me, nor

meaningfully say for me thatIam sorry, and just as Cordelia cannot heave her heart into her throat to

speak truthfully the words her father would require of her, some acts must be my acts and cannot be given

over. You can reportmy promises, but you cannot make them for me. I alone can perform those actions.

Rousseau's political hostility to the idea of the representation of sovereignty, as well as his opposition to

theater, is based on his understanding of the nature of commonality. To adopt a different but cognate

vocabulary, thepoliticallies, at its root, in the realm of the performative, and nothing performative can be

represented.

It is tempting to ascribe this conception to a hostility toward art and a preference for nature. Yet

such a conclusion soon gives the reader of Rousseau some pause. It is clear that his political hopes rested

in an art perfectionn. What kind of art would this be? Whatperfects art? To get some idea, we should

look at the art that Rousseau thought particularly his own. Rousseau was, after all, at least initially, a man

of the theater but, even more importantly, a man of musical drama (opera, or what he calls lespectacle

dramatique et lyrique35) and a musician. In fact, the solution to the questions of theatricality and

commonalty can be found in Rousseau's understanding of music and of the relation of music to language,

thus, in opera.

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""34 See the discussion of the commun or the ordinary in myJean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary,

chap. 23.

35Dictionnaire de musique, OC,vol. V, p. 948.

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The first step here is to realize that Rousseau quietly but firmly separates off contemporary

spectacle from that of the Greeks. Early in the Lettre dAlembert, he notes that the Greeks could tolerate

spectacles such as the incestuous Phaedra, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the matricide of Orestes, because

they had reasons to recall these events repeatedly, as they represented national traditions [des

antiquits nationales]. But, he asks, of what relevance to our times is Phaedra? 36

There is thus a politics built into the question of the effect of spectacle. Rousseaus Letter is

entitledLettre M. DAlembert sur les spectacles, which is precisely not to be translated as does Allan

Bloom , asLetter to DAlembert on the Theatre. Rousseaus concern is withspectacle, with the

theatricalization of life.37

The subject matter of the Greeks recalled and indeed remembered for them

events that were a constant presence to them. It thus called them to themselves. But, according to

Rousseau, when political relevance is not available to our lives, then spectacles become dangerous.

Modern plays have nothing that is politically alive and sensuous for us. In addition, there is a difference

between ancient Greek and modern music. In theEncyclopdie article Musique (as well as the one in

theDictionnaire de musique on the same topic), Rousseau writes: The great defect of our rhythm

[mesure] is perhaps a bit of that of the language, and is to have not enough relation to speech [paroles].

He continues:

What do I wish to conclude from all this?That the music of antiquity

was more perfect than is ours? Not at all. On the contrary, I believe that

ours is without comparison more erudite and more agreeable. But I

believe that the music of the Greeks was more expressive and more

energetic. Ours conforms more to the nature of song; theirs to

declamation. They sought only to stir up the soul, and we wish only to

please the ear. In a word, the very abuse that we make of our music

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""36

Lettre dAlembert, OC,vol. V, pp. 3031; see also OC, vol. II, p. 251. Hence also Rousseaus preference for thepopular themes of Italian opera over the mythic, monumental ones of French opera, such as those of Lully.

37 A point also made by David Marshall in Rousseau and the State of Theater, Representations, No. 13 (Winter,1986), pp. 84-114

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comes precisely from its richness; and, perhaps, without the limitations

inherent to Greek music, it would not have been able to produce all those

wonderful effects of which we are told.38, 39

In what did the excellence of Greek music consist? Rousseau is quite clear about what music can

and should be. Music brings separate elements together into a whole, without us knowing it, For music

to become interesting, for it to carry to the soul those feelings which one was to arouse there, all the parts

must come together to strengthen the expression of the subject in question.40

Such a musical unity is

achieved, writes Rousseau, in opera:

a dramatic and lyric spectacle in which one tries to bring together all the

charms of the fine arts in a representation of a passionate action in order

to excite, by the means of agreeable sensations, both interest and

illusion.41

Contemporary French opera does not, however, achieve this effect.42

That which was taken for

opera in France, however, was not opera. In the French works, the illusion depended only on flashy

magical effects, on the childish din of apparatus, and on the fanciful image of things that no one has ever

seen.43

People began to think, he says, that the masterwork of music was to make itself forgotten.44

In

pursuit of what an opera true to itself would be, Rousseau turns, as would Nietzsche one hundred years

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""38 See D. Diderot and J. Alembert (eds.),Encyclopdie ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences, des arts et des

mtiers, par une Socit de Gens de letters (ARTFL Project, University of Chicago, 2006), vol. X, p. 898on line at www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc/

39In theDictionnaire de musique, Rousseau suggests rather that those who think Greek music less developed are

wrong. OC, vol. V, p. 923. Beatrice Didier inLa musique des Lumires notes that Rousseaus grasp ofancient Greek music was surprisingly advanced.La musique des Lumires: Diderot, lEncyclopdie,Rousseau, (Paris: PUF, 1985), p. 43.

40Lettre sur la musique franaise, OC, vol. , p. 305; cf.mile, OC, vol. V, p. 150.

41Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. V, p. 948.

42 Ibid., pp. 95455. Cf. M. Hobson, The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France(Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 257.

43 DM Opra OC v 954. See Marian Hobson, The Object of Art. The Theory of Illusion in the Eighteenth Century(Cambridge, 1982), 257ff

44 DM Opra OC v 951

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later, to ancient Greek tragedy: Their theater was a form of opera.45

We know this, argues Rousseau,

because we know that their language was so accented that the inflections of speech in sustained

declamation formed between them substantial musical intervals.46

The Greeks thus had no need for a

separate form called opera. But we, he insists, must speak or sing.47 The important word here is the

orthe natural unity of language and music has been ruptured in modern times. Due to the musicality of

the language, Greek opera had no need to distinguish between aria and recitative. We moderns, whose

languages are not so musical, have had to invent special forms, hence lyric verse. Modern opera thus

should have as its purpose the recovery of what was obtained by Greek tragedy.

Greek opera, however was only recitative, with no airs. We moderns, because our languages

are notably less musical, have had to invent particular forms, in particular sung verse. The aim for

modern opera should be to recover what Greek tragedy accomplished naturally in profiting from the

musical nature of the Greek language.48

The advantage of Italian opera over the French comes not so

much from its themes but from the fact that Italian is closer to the musical. One should note, however,

that Rousseau is clear that even Italian opera has enormous faults and only instinct has made possible

what achievements they have managed.49

The Greeks could sing in talking.50

In the article Musique, he writes that the origin of art

is close to the human, and if speech (la parole) did not begin in song [which he has asserted elsewhere]

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""45

Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. V, p. 949

46Dictionnaire de musique, idem. Here Rousseau anticipates in an uncanny manner Nietzsches discussion of Greek

music and specifically of the relation of Greek music drama to the Greek language. Nietzsche had read

some of Rousseau (in particular the Confessions and The New Heloise) but almost certainly not theDictionnaire de musique or theEssai sur lorigine des langues. See Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy and

importantly B. Babich, The science of words or philology: Music in The Birth of Tragedy and the alchemyof love in The Gay Science,Revista di estetica, 28 (2005), pp. 4778, as well as T. B. Strong, The tragicethos and the spirit of music,International Studies in Philosophy, 35 (2003), pp. 79100.

47Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. V, pp. 94950.

48 DM Opra OC v 95149 Fragments dObservations OC v 44550 DM Rcitatif OC v 1008. The theme recurs in e.g.Fragments dObservations sur lAlceste italien de M. Gluck

OC v 445. See also the editors appendix: Notes sur la musique grecque antique OC v 1658-1664.

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it is at least sure that one sings wherever one speaks.51

Such assertions amply confirmed by

contemporary philology52

-- had already been advanced by the Abbs Dubos and Batteux.53

In ancient

Greek, syllables and words in a phrase had a precise tone and length rather than a tonic stress. These

tones were different in different poleis. Speaking was thus a form of song; expression thus actualized the

fact of participation in a particular musico-linguistic community. But modern European languages, for

Rousseau, give rise only to very diminished community, if any at all. Indeed in modern times, the

resolution of a great and wonderful problem would be to determine to what extent one can make speech

sing and music speak.54

Rousseaus interest in Greek lyric drama is to find modern equivalents: he is

quite aware of the changes wrought by developments in music. He seeks to discover or uncover what one

might call the spirit (orGeist) of their musical theater an echo here is to be found in Nietzsche and

gives us some clue (albeit gnomic) as to what Heidegger was after when he said that human beings are

brought into their own by language,55

What then might be the equivalent of Greek for modern times, for times the languages of which

are less musical. In another article of theDictionnaire he tell us that nothing is more affecting, more

ravishing, more energetic in all modern music than the rcitatif oblig -- what I might translate as the

entailed recitative in which the speaker (rcitant) and the orchestra are required to be attentive and

expected to pay attention to each other. At that point, the actor, agitated, carried away by a passion that

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""51 DM musique OC v 916.52 See e.g., the writings of Thrasybulos Georgiades, Greek music, verse, and dance, (New York, Da Capo Press,

1973); M.L.West,Ancient Greek Music (Oxford. Clarendon, 1992); Paul Allen Miller,Lyric Texts andLyric Consciousness (Routledge. London and New York, 1994). See the important discussion of this issueand these and other texts in B. Babich, Mousik techn: The Philosophical Praxis of Music in Plato,Nietzsche, Heidegger in Robert Burch and Massimo Verdicchio, eds., Gesture and Word: ThinkingBetween Philosophy and Poetry London: Continuum, 2002. Pp. 171190 (expanded in herWords in Blood

Like Flowers (Albany, NY. SUNY Press, 2004), as well as my article The Tragic Ethic and the Spirit ofMusic. International Studies in Philosophy (April, 2004)).

53Dubos was the author ofRflexions critiques sur la posie et la peinture (1719) where he argued that les grands

sicles reformulate musical taste. He advanced a hedonistic appreciation of art, admired the ancients, and

emphasized the importance of art for the audience. Batteux defended many of these claims in Les beaux-arts rduits au mme principe (1746). See Jean Starobinski, Introduction lEssai sur lorigine deslangues, OC v pp. CLXV-CCIV

54 Fragments dObservations OC v 44555 Martin Heidegger,Poetry, Language, Thought, (new York. Harper, `1976), p. 208

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does not permit him to say everything, interrupts himself, stops, hesitates, during which times the

orchestra speaks for him, and the silences thus filled affect the listener infinitely more than if the actor

had himself said all that the music gave to understand.56

In theFragments dObservations sur lAlceste

italien de M. Gluck, he says that the spoken phrase is in some way announced and prepared by the

musical phrase.57

It is when words fail the actor that music expresses itself.58

It is when that which

wants to be expressed in words but cannot be that music (as it were) speaks. For the French composer59

in particular, music should be not exactly a supplement but a manner of speaking, of expressing, when

one lacks words. More precisely, music can/should establish a space between that for which one has

words and that for which one would wish to find ones own words, words to which one would have right,

even if, in the end, they are words that will always be insufficient. Rousseau notes that he is the only

French composer who has used the rcitatif oblig technique to confront this question (in a scene of the

Devin du village and a part ofPygmalion.)60 Here is a passage in question the rcitatif oblig is in

boxes; note that the singer does not have a staff to himself:

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""56

While much ink has been spilled, and over a long time, on this topic an informal but convincing entry to the topic

might be Jacques Barzun, Is Music Unspeakable,American Scholar(Spring, 1996), pp. 193-20257

Fragments dObservations sur lAlceste italien de M. Gluck OC v 44858

See the similar remarks in Jean-Francois Perrin, La musique dans les lettres selon Rousseau, in Claude

Dauphin, ed.Musique et langage chez Rousseau, pp 27-2859 One might maintain that Italian would offer more chances for true opera whereas the poor composers who are

condemned to French could only have recourse to the melodrama or the monodrama. Cf Catherine

Kintzler,Potique de lopra de Corneille Rousseau(Paris, Minerve, 1991), p. 500.60 DM Rcitatif oblig OC v 1012-1013 ; It is in particular the sixth scene, Je tremble en moffrant sa vue .

There is no spoken dialogue inLe devin, a departure from standard French practice. See Rita C. Manning, Rousseaus Other Woman : Collette inLe devin du village Hypatia 16.2 (2001) pp 27-42.

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Devin du village, scene 6 (a quinte is a five-string tenor viol)

What is of interest here is also that claim (apparently correct) that such a mutual response of

words and music was at the time new, at least in French music.61

InPygmalion (1762), even more

innovatively than inLe devin, Rousseau (who composed three pieces of the music for the second piece)

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""61

See Rousseau, Supplment lencyclopdie, volume 4, p. 590-1, on line at http://artflx.uchicago.edu/ .Although Rousseau notes in the very late (possibly as late as early 1778)Lettre M. Burney that Gluckuses the rcitatif oblig in hisAlceste (1767, revised in French 1776) and elsewhere (Lettre M. BurneyOC v 451). See Peter Branscombe, Schubert and the Melodrama, in Eva Badura-Skoda and Peter

Branscombe, eds. Schubert Studies, (Cambridge. Cambridge UP, 1982), pp 105-106. See also CynthiaVerba, Music and the Enlightenment, in Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf, eds. TheEnlightenment World(London. Routledge, 2004), pp 302-322, esp. 315. For an overview of eighteenthcentury French understandings of the different forms ofrcitatif(the author does not contradict Rousseausclaim) see Charles Dill, Eighteenth Century Models of Recitative,Journal of the Royal MusicalAssociation, 120 (1995) , pp 232-250, esp. 237.

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and Horace Coignet, (who composed the rest) tried to further link words and music in a new fashion.62

There all the words are spoken; the music makes sense in itself only in interaction or dialogue with the

words. The continuity of the piece of changed by this interaction. InPygmalion, the actor (and eventually

the statue when it comes to life) speak. Instrumental music replaces vocal music and especially sung

recitative. One might thus think of the music as song (but without words). Rousseau gave very precise

directions as to the place and length of each musical number and to the emotion that each musical

segment should convey.63

Whether or not Rousseau was the first to use rcitatif oblig in French opera, it

soon became widely spread for it plays an increasingly large role in other composers starting from shortly

after Rousseaus compositions. One might mention in particular Gluck (for example in his

Alceste(1767)64) and in Mozart (for instance inDon Giovanni(1787)).65

Rousseaus musical and critical exploration of the relations between what can be expressed in

music and what can be expressed in words leads to the following conclusions. First, in the development of

the relation of music to the word, we find here that the interplay of music and the word can give the

listener access to the emotions of the character without those having to be directly represented. Secondly

that this can only be achieved by the development of an integrated and continuous art form. The door is

open here (and the Germans in particular were influenced by this work66

) to what Wagner will later claim

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""62 See Julia Simon, Rousseau and Aesthetic Modernity : Musics Power of Redemption, Eighteenth-Century

Music 2/1, 4156 (2005) and Shierry Weber, The Aesthetics of RousseausPygmalion, inJean-JacquesRousseau, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 6581.

63Edgar Istel, La Partition originale de Pygmalion,Annales de la socit Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, 1905)

volume 1, pp 149ff. For the complete set of instructions see OC ii, pp 1929-1930. See Van der Veen, 8-1364

As Rousseau himself notes: Fragments OC v 455.65 As in Donna Annas Crudele! Ah no . . . Non mi dir (#23). See Laurel Elizabeth Zeiss, Permeable boundaries

in MozartsDon Giovanni, Cambridge Opera Journal13, 2, 115139, in particular pp 122-125. SeeJulian Rushton, Mozart(Oxford University Press, 2005), 33. See again Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,MusicaFicta. Figures de Wagner(Christian Bourgeois. Paris, 2007). I also note that in 1765, at the age of 9,Mozart had attended (and much liked) a performance ofDevin du village in Paris. One sees the influence inhisBastien et Bastienne (1768). The influence of Rousseau on Mozart has been established by the Japanesecomposer Bin Ebisawa. See Bin Ebisawa Rousseau and the Mozarts. Their Relation Considered, in Bin

Ebisawa,Mozart and Japan. Selected Papers. (Tokyo. Nihon Art Center (2001), 65-93.66J. Van der Veen, Le mlodrame musical de Rousseau au romantisme (Nijhoff. La Haye, 1955), passim

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for his work: In my opera there is no difference between what is called declamation and song,67

that is

to a unity rather than a subordination of music to word.68

But, in order for this representation to be comprehensible, its signification must be clear and

singular. Rousseau repeatedly argues against the danger of double representation in music. This phrase

is used, in particular, to describe the contemporary situation in opera, where the sense communicated by

the visual spectacle of staging and characters is distinct from the sense of the accompanying music.69

The

dissonance between content and music was the key point of attack in the quarrel between the partisans of

Italian and French music of the time.70

But this problem also manifests itself in several different forms

throughout Rousseaus writings on music. The most frequently assailed obstacle to clean musical

communication, he maintains, is harmony.71 Beyond the potential doubleness arising from the contrast of

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""67 Richard Wagner, On the Performing of Tannhuser,Richard Wagner's Prose Works Translated by William

Ashton Ellis (New York, Broude Brothers, 1966), vol. 3, p. 17468

See on this matter the interesting if short comparison of Rousseaus Pygmalion with the operetta of the same nameby Rameau in Daniel Chua,Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning(Cambridge. Cambridge UP,1996)., pp 101-102.

69 Painting, in the manner which it is used in Theater, is not as subject as Poetry to make with Music a double

representation of the same object. it is a great error to think that the regulation of Theater has nothing in

common with that of Music, if it is not general propriety that they draw from the Poem. It belongs to the

imagination of the two Artists [the musical composer and the stage designer] to determine between them

what the imagination of the Poet left to their disposition, and to accord themselves so well with this that the

Spectator always senses the perfect accord between that which he sees and that which he hears.

Dictionnaire de musique, OC,vol. V, pp. 95758.

70 Regarding the accusation of contresens: see M. ODea, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Music, Illusion, and Desire(New York: St. Martins, 1995), p. 24. Cf. De par son origine commune avec le langage, la musique nepeut avoir que la dclamation comme modle, elle doit en exacerber les ferments expressifs. Le travail dumusicien est de souligner les inflexions dun texte, de mettre les mots en valeur et non de les cacher sousles sons. M. G. Pinsart, Musiquetextepassion dans les uvres thoriques et musicales de J- J.

Rousseau,Annales de linstitut de philosophie et sciences sociales, Brussels (1988), p. 23. The relevanttexts of this quarrel have been gathered in D. Launay (ed.), La querelle des bouffons, 3 vols. (Geneva:Minkoff Reprint, 1973).

71On the failure of harmony to stimulate emotions or achieve imitation, see Fragments dobservations sur lAlceste

italien de M. le Chevalier Gluck, OC, vol. V, p. 449: harmony by itself, being only able to speak to theear and imitating nothing, can only have very weak effects. . . . It is by the accents of the melody, it is by

the cadence of the rhythm that music, imitating the inflections which give the passions to the human voice,

can penetrate all the way to the heart and move it by sentiments. See A. Rehding, Rameau, Rousseau, and

enharmonic Furies in the French Enlightenment, Journal of Music Theory, 49 (2008), pp. 14180.

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melody and harmony, dance and poetry might also come into conflictor perhaps appear redundant.72

In

essence, in all these conflicts, what is missing is unity. Rousseau finds this ideal in all of the arts:

All of the fine Arts have some Unity of object. There is, in Music, a

successive Unity which relates to the subject, and by which all the Parts,

well connected, compose a single whole, by which one perceives the

ensemble and all the relationships. But there is anotherUnity of object,

finer and more simultaneous, from which is born, without one thinking

of it, the energy of Music and the force of its expressions.73

While the former kind of unity operates on the level of sensual pleasure, the second, more potent

unity is achieved through communication with the audience. This unity is a pleasure of interest and of

sentiment which speaks to the heart.74

This singular representation of emotion communicates to the

auditor by giving him or her a stake in listening (appealing to the interest) and by offering emotions for

which one is not wholly responsible (the pleasure of sentiment).

For Rousseau, music can only represent and communicate when it strives for this singularity of

expression.75

Since modern languages are no longer capable of sustaining the appropriate passionate

force, composers come to rely on harmony to provide musical pleasure. But this development further

cripples music, by separating

song and speech to such an extent that the two languages combat each

other, oppose each other, mutually deny each other all character of truth,

and cannot reunite themselves without absurdity in an emotional

subject.76

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""72Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. V, p. 961.

73Dictionnaire de musique, OC,vol. V, p. 1143.

74 Ibid., p. 1144.

75Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC, vol. V, p. 426.

76 Ibid., p. 416.

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With these two complementary languages kept wholly distinct, the expressivity and range of

representation of each was lessened: music could do no more than conjure emotions, without

communicating a moral; and language could only make statements, without the possibility of

persuasion.77 Since these two modes of expression are both limited, judgment of music and speech is

similarly limited: reason has no place in the former, and passion has none in the latter. That said, the

matter is not without hope. Rousseau is also clear that, whatever the distance may be between music and

language in the contemporary world, the original unity between them persists sufficiently to be at the

source of musics continued possibility of speaking even to the modern world.78

As soon as vocal signs

[signes] strike your ear, they herald [annoncent] a being similar to yourself; they are, so to speak, the

organs of the soul, and if they depict solitude they tell you that you are not alone. 79 If, in theater, chacun

sisole, in experiencing music, we are united: The actuality of the experience of music is testimony to the

existence, or the possibility of the existence of a truly human social bond.

How does the musical model persuade without having to convince? While Rousseau

differentiates contemporary spectacle from that of the Greeks, he also distances himself from what had

become (and remains to some degree today) the dominant understanding of Greek drama. Rousseau

explicitly rejects the Aristotelian idea that the achievement of theater is the purgation of the passions

katharsis, a term derived from medical practice in ancient Greece. He writes,

I know that the Poetics of the Theater [Aristotle] claimed to purge the

passions by arousing them: but I have difficulty grasping this rule.

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

77 Ibid., pp.42829.Some hope of productive expression is held out: The quantities of Language are almost lostunder those of our Notes; and Music, instead of speaking with speech, borrows, in some part from Measure,

a separate language. The force ofExpression consists, in this way, in reuniting these two languages asmuch as possible, and in ensuring that, if Measure and Rhythm dont speak in the same manner, at least

they say the same things.

78Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC, vol. V, pp. 41017, esp. 416: lempire des chants sur les curs sensibles.

79 Ibid., p. 421. This entire chapter is filled with claims of the superiority of music to all other forms of

representation.

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Would it be that to become temperate and wise one has to start out by

being furious and crazy?80

Contemporary French theater thus purges those passions that one does not have and foments those that

one has. Is this not a well-administered medicine?81

In the Letter to Mr. Burney, Rousseau confronts the question of the relation of the harmonic

accompaniment to a melody:

The accompaniment of the bass [the tonal structure] is necessary in the

simple recitative, not only to underpin and guide the performer, but also

to determine the kind of intervals, and to mark with precision the

intertwining of modulations that have such a fine effect in a beautiful

recitative; but, far from needing to make this accompaniment brilliant

and obvious, I would rather that it went unnoticed and that it produced its

effect without anyone paying any attention to it.82

Rousseau thus rejects one common explanation of musics potency. He does not refer to its

natural ability to give pleasure or to point toward a sort of mystical reverence based on its alleged

imitation of the transcendental. Instead, he argues that music is first and foremost a human and social

practice.83

Music was born in the same instant as speech, for the first words spoken by humans were

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""80Lettre dAlembert, OC, vol. V, p. 19.

81 Ibid., p. 20. DAlembert somewhat lamely insists that theater gives us good passions by which to combat the bad

ones (Lettre M. Rousseau, p. 4. It should be noted that Rousseau is not the first to have calledAristotles understanding of catharsis into questionCorneille, Bossuet, and even Voltaire had; Nietzsche

a hundred years later does the same: hisBirth of Tragedy is a rejection of AristotlesPoetics, in particular,

the doctrines ofkatharsis and anagnorisis. See Strong, The tragic ethos and the spirit of music, International Studies in Philosophy, 35 (2003), pp. 79100.

82Lettre M. Burney, OC, vol. V, pp. 44647.

83On the one hand, he battles against Rameaus theory of natural harmony, which is universally appealing. On the

other hand, he scorns the vague and general definitions that the Ancients gave to music (Dictionnaire demusique, OC,vol. V, p. 915). Regarding the connection between music and the divine muses, he writes,whatever the etymology of the name, the origin of the Art is certainly closer to man. Dictionnaire demusique, OC, vol. V, p. 916.

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song.84

But, as languages became less and less bound to the force of the musical pitch that gave words

their passionate force, music itself became less effective in representing passion. Music has come to need

the supplement of pleasure to bolster its moral force.85

With this separation of language and music, words

have become the vehicle of rational communication, while music the means of representing the

passions.86

Indeed, whereas dAlembert placed music in the last place in the order of imitation,

Rousseau places it highest.87

DAlembert thought that all music that depicts nothing is only noise.88

For Rousseau, in

contrast, music makes the passions available in three related ways. These three facets clearly emerge

when Rousseau argues that

sounds in a melody do not act on us solely as sounds, but as signs of our

affections, of our sentiments; it is in this way that they excite in us the

movements which they express and in which we recognize the

[represented] image.89

First of all, music acts as a signifier for a set of objects or actions not currently present. Instead of using

characters (as in theater and novels) or images of objects (as in painting and sculpture), music signifies

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""84Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC,vol. V, p. 410; Origine de la mlodie, OC, vol. V, p. 333. However, cf.

Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. V, p. 695, where Rousseau claims that song does not seem natural toman. Melodious and appreciable song is only a peaceful and artificial imitation of the accents of the

speaking or passionate Voice. Speech may be natural to humans, but music separated from its original

connection with spoken words is artificial imitation.

85 From this is born the necessity of bringing physical pleasure to the aid of the moral, and of substituting the

attraction of Harmony for the energy of expression. Dictionnaire de musique, OC,vol. V, p. 951. Theimpossibility of inventing agreeable songs obliged Composers to turn all of their concern to the side of

harmony, and lacking real beauties, they introduced beauties of convention, which have almost no other

merit than vanquished difficulty; instead of a good Music, they imagined a learned Music.Lettre sur lamusique franaise, OC, vol. V, p.293.

86 It seems that, as speech is the art of transmitting ideas, melody would be the art of transmitting sentiments.

Origine de la mlodie, OC, vol. V, p. 337.

87J. DAlembert, Discours prliminaire de lEncyclopdie , in D. Diderot and J. DAlembert (eds.),Encyclopdie,

ou, Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences, des arts, et des mtiers (1751-1772) on line at.http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Jean_le_Rond_d%E2%80%99Alembert

88 Ibid.

89Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC,vol. V, p. 417.

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through memory. Music can act to re-member: Music does not act precisely like Music, but like a

reminding sign [signe mmoratif]. 90 The sounds operate through hearing to evoke responses that were

once experienced by other senses, and uses the individual auditors imagination as the backdrop for

representation.91 Music is thus mine and our own, in a way that painting is not.

In the second place, music creates depictions in the imagination of the audience by evoking

passions within each individual. Melody, the heart of music, takes its potency

from the moral effects of which it is an image; knowing the cry of nature,

the accent, number, measure, and emotional and passionate tone which

the agitation of the soul gives to the human voice.92

The third part of this imitation is the recognition of the represented object because it imitates

passions known to the audience. (Thus, we remember, Greek tragedy dealt with that which was known to

its audience.) Music in effect makes the audience hear things that the senses associate with particular

actions, objects, and passions. These are, for Rousseau, part of what it means to understand what

something is. Melody is akin to the passions insofar as in imitating the inflections of the voice

expressing complaints, cries of sadness or of joy, threats, groans; all the vocal signs of the passions are in

its jurisdiction.93

The audience does not just recognize the passions being represented (as one might

discern the passions represented on stage without actually feelingthem), it becomes implicated and

submerged within the experience of those passions. Rousseau writes:

the chef-duvre of music is to make itself forgotten, so that by throwing

disorder and trouble into the soul of the spectator it prevents him or her

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""90

Especially with certain familiar songs and melodies. (Dictionnaire de musique, OC, vol. V, p. 924).

91 Music acts more intimately on us in exciting by one sense affections similar to those which could be excited by

another.Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC,vol. V, p. 421.

92Origine de la mlodie, OC,vol. V, p. 342.

93Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC,vol. V, p.416.

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from distinguishing the tender and emotional songs of a moaning heroine

from the true accents of sadness.94

Music is thus, for Rousseau, the model for how we acknowledge the presence in our lives of other

humans as humans. 95

One feels that music concerns us more than painting precisely because it

makes one person closer to another [rapproche plus lhomme de

lhomme] and always gives us some idea of those who are as we are [nos

semblables].96

If humans were not capable of musicif it were not natural to them in the same way that language is

the acknowledgment of others that is a prerequisite for a truly human, just society, such as that Rousseau

depicts in the Social Contract, would not be possible.

Most importantly, for Rousseau (and contra dAlembert) music does not represent anything. It

thus provides a model of human association in which diversity is made into unity without any required

sacrifice of diversity or a submission to one controlling structure. Rousseaus theory of music looks

forward to one like that of Schopenhauer, who described music as a copy of the will itself and thus as

distant from representation as one could be.97

Thus there is no disjuncture between the world and what

one makes of it. In antiquity, writes Rousseau, a harmony of words and music was most evident in ancient

Greece:

Eloquence preceded reasoning, and men were orators and poets long

before they were philosophers.... In the ancient festivals, all was heroic

and grand. The laws and songs carried the same designation in these

happy times; they sounded in unison in all voices, passed through all"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""94

Dictionnaire de musique, OC,vol. V, p. 954.

95 Ibid., p. 924.

96Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC, vol. V, p. 421

97 See A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover,1966), vol. II, pp. 44760.

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hearts with the same pleasure; everything adored the first images of

virtue; and innocence itself gave a gentler accent to the voice of

pleasure.98

However, even in Greece, with the development of rationality, forms became fixed; language became

colder and artificial. The study of philosophy plays a central role in this linguistic transformation. By

cultivating the art of convincing, that of moving people emotionally was lost. Plato himself,... jealous of

Homer and Euripides, condemned one and could not imitate the other. With the conquest by Rome and

the arrival of servitude, all was lost:

Greece in chains lost this celestial fire that burns only for free souls and

could no longer praise tyrants in the sublime tones with which it had

erstwhile celebrated its heroes.99

Latin is a deaf and less musical language than Greek.

A society that has a language for political life will value eloquence over the use of public force.

But the only form of speech appropriate to a people to whom it can be said such is my pleasure is a

sermon, and such people are taxed rather than assembled. The acknowledgment of others that arises

naturally from a language that retains its connections to music is absent in a society that knows politics

only through the language of decree. In a society with no musical language for politics, no one can hear.

In fact, their language will have degenerated to the point that no one will be able to be heard in public:

Herodotus read his history to the people of Greece assembled out of

doors, and he met with universal applause. Nowadays, an academician

who reads a paper in public session can hardly be heard at the back of the

hall.100

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""98Du principe de la mlodie, OC,vol. V, pp. 45051. InLaws 799e, Plato writes: Let us affirm the paradox that

strains of music are our laws [nomoi], and this latter being the name which the ancients gave to lyric songs,they probably would not have very much objected to our proposed application of the word.

99Du principe de la mlodie, OC, vol. V, pp. 45657.

100Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC,vol. V, p. 429.

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This extraordinary analysis of Greece, complete with its quasi-Nietzschean condemnation of

Plato, reveals a central quality that free society must have for Rousseau. There is to be no disjuncture

between emotion and expression, between weeping and words, between meaning and saying. When the

two are available to each other, there is no possibility of taking the speaker as other than he or she is.

Furthermore, this experience of availability only happens in a manner that makes it available in the same

manner to any other person. The conditions ofmy freedom, as presented here musically, are the same as

the conditions ofyours. Thus the formula of the social contract is: Find the form of association in

which each, in joining with all, still only obeys himself and remains as free as before.101

For Rousseau, the problem with representation in the theater as well as in the political realm is

that it removes human judgment from arenas to which it is necessary. So long as the audience is merely

given situations to swallow, or, in politics, decrees to obey, there can be no individual autonomy. More

importantly, without the possibility of recognizing others in ones own practice of judgment, ones human

potential as a social creature remains unfulfilled. The import of Rousseaus ubiquitous attention to the

relation between music and language is to show that to the degree that a language has lost its musicality

its ability to represent emotional intelligence as concinnous with rational argument it will be unable to

persuade or to create real social bonds.

The question of representation can be viewed as an issue about creativity in politics, and about

the possibility of political theory, more generally. Representation in politics, both in the sense of the

presumption to speak for others and in the sense of generalizing about different political contexts,

appeared problematic because it denied the presence that Rousseau insisted was essential for sovereignty.

What I found, however, was that Rousseau provides us with models of a legitimate sort of political

representation. The political theorist can remain a spectator, and political theory can be abstract, but only

if the language used does not remove the means by which the theory itself can be judged. A theory that

works only in logical terms is insufficient, not only because it is notpersuasivea characteristic

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""101Du contrat social, OC, vol. III, p. 360

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necessary to a democratic theorybut also because, in neglecting passion, it fails to make itself available

to us as our own. Music holds our attention because it is part of who we are; similarly, political theory

must find a language that makes its audience know its assertions as the audiences own. Otherwise,

democratic freedom remains an elusive impossibility:

all language with which one cannot make oneself heard by the assembled

people is a servile language; it is impossible that a people should remain

free and speak this language.102

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""102Essai sur lorigine des langues, OC,vol. V, p. 429.