In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Love as Habituation in Rousseau
  • Masano Yamashita

Does love grow incrementally and naturally out of habit? Are affective habits mindless ("une habitude aveugle"1), automatized quotidian behaviour or can they, more meaningfully, stem from a rational decision-making process? What role do the ethics of habit play in one's sentimental life? These questions serve as the unexpected launching pad for Rousseau's investigations into the nature of love in its variegated manifestations—familial, romantic, and conjugal. The category of habit is pivotal for Rousseau in that it allows him to challenge dynamically what he perceives as the conjoined threats of French libertinism and materialist philosophy, and more specifically what he views as their misleading and morally nefarious delineation of a human nature marked by a fundamental passivity. Hence Saint-Preux's denunciation in Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse of the falsity and sophistry of contemporary materialist doctrine: "Ils [les matérialistes] commencent par supposer que tout être intelligent est purement passif, et puis ils déduisent de cette supposition des conséquences pour prouver qu'il n'est pas actif; la comode méthode qu'ils ont trouvée là" (OC 2:683). Natania Meeker has recently suggested that such an Epicurean-inflected philosophy is further gendered in the eighteenth century as "effeminate."2 A feminizing passivist doctrine can be perceived as potentially undermining Rousseau's understanding of the virtues and of active free will, both of which seek to counteract the moral laissez-aller that ensues when one self-indulgently delectates in the life of the emotions. Milord Edouard in Julie offers a spirited defense of free will that thus ennobles man by making him accountable himself for his own actions and ethical development: "la vie passive de l'homme n'est rien, et ne regarde qu'un corps dont il sera bientôt délivré; mais sa vie active et morale qui doit influer sur tout son être, consiste dans l'exercice de sa volonté" (OC 2:388). In Rousseau's eyes, the passivity of materialist anthropology suggests that we are tethered to natural and social determinations that make it difficult for men to monitor and direct their affects. For Diderot, Rousseau's frère ennemi, believing in human liberty is on the contrary a "préjugé," as the natural sciences (physiology and biology), Lucretius, as well as recent philosophies of science have decisively proved in his view that men are predetermined by the physical laws of nature.3 In Diderot's novel Jacques le fataliste, the Spinozist eponymous hero consequently argues that we have little, if any, freedom in matters of the heart. One falls involuntarily in love by chance. "Et quand je [End Page 55] serais devenu amoureux d'elle [the wife of a local peasant], qu'est-ce qu'il y aurait à dire? Est-ce qu'on est maître de devenir ou de ne pas devenir amoureux? et quand on l'est, est-on maître d'agir comme si on ne l'était pas?"4 The Lucretian materialist philosophy presented in the work of Diderot posits that human desire obeys the fortuitous pattern of the swerve of the atoms (clinamen). Such an account of the vagaries of love is deeply troublesome to Rousseau. The materialist fatalism present in Diderot's Jacques le fataliste would have been anathema to Rousseau, who argues throughout his expositions of the genealogy of love that man progressively develops the ability to form comparisons and judgments in matters of the heart. Yet his polemical conceptual engagement with the "philosophes modernes"5 is not a cut and dried dialogue that statically opposes materialist passivity to a countervalent understanding of human action.

Rousseau seeks to interrogate the nature of the relationship between freedom and the mechanisms that underlie affective habituation in order to understand better whether determinisms can be reconciled with moral agency in human emotional life. In mid-eighteenth-century medical discourse, habit was thought to have an irrevocable impact on bodily fibers in such a way as to ensure that by old age habits would have become physiologically and therefore psychologically impossible to break. The Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet in Essais de psychologie, for example, analysed...

pdf

Share