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The Morality of Musical Imitation in Jean-Jacques Rousseau Abstract THE MORALITY OF MUSICAL IMITATION IN JEAN‐JACQUES ROUSSEAU GUY DAMMANN Ph.D. THESIS KING’S COLLEGE, LONDON THE MORALITY OF MUSICAL IMITATION IN JEAN‐JACQUES ROUSSEAU ABSTRACT The thesis analyses the relation between Rousseau’s musical writings and elements of his moral, social and linguistic philosophy. In particular, I am concerned to demonstrate: (i.) how the core of Rousseau’s theory of musical imitation is grounded in the same analysis of the nature of man which governs his moral and social philosophy; (ii.) how this grounding does not extend to the stylistic prescriptions the justification of which Rousseau intended his musical writings to offer. The central argument draws on Rousseau’s analysis of the origin of man as distinctively human. This origin extends to the awareness of moral and aesthetic value, and to communication in speech and song. Rousseau’s moral analyses of social and political life usually take the form of relating contemporary practice to the original structure in which man’s awareness of his own good is commensurate with that of the good of others. The analysis of music follows a similar model: music is to be considered good in so far as it replicates, or faithfully reflects, the original model of communication. The value of music is thereby understood to extend to moral as well as aesthetic goodness. Given the subtlety of Rousseau’s understanding of the ‘origin’, I argue that this analysis of music’s aesthetic value is powerful and far‐ reaching in its relevance for contemporary musical aesthetics. However, I also argue that while the analysis in general is good in this way, it does not entail the specific kind of musical‐stylistic preferences which Rousseau sought to use it to advance. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 WRITING BETWEEN MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY I. Implicit and Explicit Philosophical Commitments in Rousseau’s Musical Writings 17 II. Artistic Imitation and Moral Presence 31 III. Imitating the Good and the True 45 IV. Musical and Moral Awakening in the Autobiographical Writing 63 MUSIC AND IMITATION I. Imitation in the Lettre sur la Musique Françoise 86 II. Musical Imitation and Moral Effect in the Dictionnaire de Musique 101 III. Necessary and Arbitrary Signs: Wittgenstein, Condillac and d’Alembert 123 IV. Mimicry and Mimesis: Diderot’s Moral Challenge To Rousseau 137 THE ETHICS AND AESTHETICS OF PRESENCE I. The Morality of Musical Imitation 158 II. Pygmalion and the Uncovering of Art 202 Conclusion 240 Bibliography 244 To my mother and the memory of my father, for giving me life, music and love. Là, où il n’y a point d’amour, de quoi servira la beauté. (Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, OC III, p. 161.) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first thanks must go to my supervisor, Michael Fend, the strength and value of whose thoughtful advice and careful guidance have only been outweighed by his great kindness and understanding. I should also like to express my particular gratitude to John Deathridge, Martin Hall, Derek Matravers, and Rickie Dammann for their judicious comments and generous encouragement; to Sophie Dammann, Jasper Smith and Margaret Dammann for their kind and loving support; and to Harper Smith for waiting. To Elisabeth Schellekens I can only say that my debts to her – incurred by measureless encouragement administered with a degree of patience most remarkable in one professing so little acquaintance with that particular virtue – are ones the repayment of which I shall be only too delighted to spend the rest of my life undertaking. The research for this thesis was made possible by a doctoral studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. INTRODUCTION Le prémier de mes besoins, le plus grand, le plus fort, le plus inextinguible, était tout entier dans mon cœur : c’étoit le besoin d’une société intime et aussi intime qu’elle pouvait l’être … Ce besoin singulier étoit tel que la plus étroite union des corps ne pouvait encore y suffire : il m’aurait fallu deux ames dans le même corps ; sans cela je sentois toujours le vide.1 The confession of a search for intimacy is one of Rousseau’s most familiar gestures. The almost impossible conception he held of such intimacy – be it construed in psychological, social, or more abstract metaphysical terms – underpins his work as both its muse and its measure. From the fading star of the Jean‐Jacques of the autobiographical writings to the basic coinage of mutual trust on which the system of government developed in the Contrat Social is built, and whether deployed as a complex moral norm in the fictional landscape of two lovers in La nouvelle Héloïse or as kind of epistemological and moral measure in the Essai sur l’origine des langues, the idea of minds united in a common desire exercises considerable gravitational force across the disparate spheres in which Rousseau found himself working. Finding the looked‐for ‘société intime’ absent from both his personal life and the life of the society in which he lived, Rousseau’s oeuvre may be characterised as the attempt to write such a state of being into existence. What does this state of being, introduced here under the guise of intimacy, amount to? In one sense, we receive a different answer depending on which area of Rousseau’s work is consulted. In another sense, however, and despite the enormous variety of its form and function in Rousseau’s oeuvre, the notion looks surprisingly uniform. Thus in the second Discours, we would find it manifest in the concept of the state of 1 Confessions, OC I, p. 414. The Pléiade edition of Rousseau’s works follows the original orthography. This has been kept in my quotations throughout. The Morality of Musical Imitation – 6 – Introduction nature; an arrangement in which the economy of need and desire is balanced so that the self‐interest of individual beings is subsumed in the interest of the community. The psychological concept of intimacy is thus translated into a metaphysical, almost Leibnizian ideal, where Rousseau’s ‘deux ames dans le même corps’ becomes almost literally the case, so attuned is the individual being to its corporate identity. In the Contrat Social, we would find a system of social organisation entirely geared toward producing a civic replication of the natural economy of the second Discours. Nor does anything dissimilar, on this structural level at least, obtain in the educational programme of Emile. Merely, it is the application that differs; where individuality is sacrificed for a reconciled society in the Contrat Social, in Emile individual consciousness is not so much diminished as its power enhanced for the purpose of reconciling itself to its natural environment and protecting itself from its social surroundings. In Rousseau’s epistolary novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, the terms and psychological language in which the state of being with which we are concerned is expressed is even more clearly related to the notion of ‘société intime’ with which we began. For here the guiding notion, manifestly one of being together, of love, is nonetheless bound up with the reconciliation of this desire to the world which nourishes it. Love’s first kiss results not in defiant bliss but in an apparent catastrophe – born of the impropriety and mistaken spirit of the act – which results in the physical separation of the lovers.2 It is here, in the familiar tale of the ‘star‐crossed lovers’, that the utopian flavour of the ‘société intime’ is at its clearest, for the union is never achieved; the story differs from the trope mainly because the separation and renunciation is self‐imposed. It is here, too, that the epistolary form of the work comes into its own, for it is in the intimate space of the letter that the genuine spiritual proximity of Saint‐Preux and Julie is forged, written into being at the expense of physical presence. 2 For the letter in which the catastrophe is narrated, see Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, I, XIV, OC II, pp. 63‐5. The Morality of Musical Imitation – 7 – Introduction For Rousseau, the art of writing comes into its own as this utopian project. Although there are many occasions where the idea of writing is castigated,3 held responsible for the sapping of some kind of primal expressive force from language as a breeding ground of artifice, it is also characterised as a refuge and the sole recourse to repairing the utopian dream. Just as Julie and Saint‐Preux retreat from the physical to the literary in order to live out their love story, so too does Rousseau retreat from the spoken commerce of society in the hope of repairing it with writing.4 It is in this way that writing, so long as it is conceived in the service of goodness, remains true to the more general origin of communication that Rousseau narrates. For the work on music and language, Rousseau’s primal communicative media, is no less concerned with the ‘société intime’ than the fictional, autobiographical and political works cited above. Indeed, in Rousseau’s understanding, music and language are born together in an act of love; both are a function of a state of being referred to here as the ‘société intime’, just the function of both is also to restore it, to reinvigorate it, to work it back into life. * * * A central feature of the state of being I have been discussing is its connection with goodness. Indeed, perhaps it is best to say that Rousseau’s conception of goodness consists, more or less, in what I have been describing in terms of the ‘société intime’ and its various extensions and translations.
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