Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith: Differing Conceptions
of Nature during the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith shows himself to be a member in good standing of the mechanistic school of philosophy.

Evidence (with connecting reasoning):

Again and again, Smith turns to the image or metaphor of the machine to make his points:

1. Like the natural philosophers who embraced the mechanistic ideas of Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes, Smith conceived of society as a machine. It was a system whose parts and interacting relations could be known and even controlled by humans using their rational faculties, as when "the great system of government, and the wheels of the political machine seem to move with more harmony and ease" through the efforts of lawmakers. (p. 300)

2. Beauty, he argued, lay in the knowledge of the social machine, of the underlying principles and regularities of social life; this knowledge was useful because it provided a way to bring "the machine" into a more perfect order. Another, more concrete example of this thought comes in his discussion of the watch and the owner whose interest lay less in knowing the exact time than in appreciating "the perfection of the machine" that keeps accurate time. (p. 296)

3. To ensure that the point is fully supported, I should back up my suggestion that Bacon, et al. embraced the machine. I note this in the connections, but would want to put something directly in any argument set down in an essay.

Connections:

1. Link with the mechanistic tradition of viewing "nature"-- broadly conceived--as a machine that constitutes the physical and social order of human life, a machine open to rational investigation, comprehension, and control.

2. Contrast with Rousseau and Wordsworth who found Beauty in nature through experiencing and re-experiencing the emotional contentment it induced and inspired.

Claim:

In the Fifth Walk of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau expresses his ideal of the solitary human being finding incomparable solace and contentment through an emotional connection with nature.

Evidence:

1. Rousseau needed "solace" because he had be driven out of his house in Môtiers [Switzerland] by angry inhabitants, upset by his Letters from the Mountains [this work attacked the oligarchy at Geneva, and advocated democratic reform]. Indeed, he sought solitude and isolation from the outside world on the Saint Peter's Island in the middle of Lake Bienne. (p. 63, 3^rd parag. And note 20).

2. Rousseau presents himself as the misunderstood man who, mournful from being declared an outcast, seeks a comforting refuge.

3. St. Peter's was appealing because it was "wilder and more romantic" than Lake Geneva: a place for calming solitude with fewer towns, fewer fields and vineyards, and more "natural greenery," more open meadows, and delightfully "grove-shaded retreats," which seems to have created attractive contrasts between sunshine and long shadows. (page 62).

4. Solitude enabled Rousseau to feel he was in harmony with his natural surroundings, an emotional state that tranquil and delightful. Perhaps the best example was his floating for hours in a boat in the middle of the lake, with his "eyes turned to heaven;" the result was cascade of thoughts and reveries that were more pleasant than the so-called as pleasure of life in the settings more removed from "nature."

1. A contrast with Smith: Rousseau characterizes the cascade of reveries as very pleasing. Smith views this condition as troubling agitation which needs to be calmed by rational thought, by philosophy.

2. William Wordsworth was to give poetic expression to Rousseau's ideal; Dorothy Wordsworth shared Rousseau's enthusiasm for the close observation of nature and for "being in it."

3. Rousseau's enthusiasm for botany and for the work of the naturalist Linnaeus (see notes 6-8) suggests a clear link with a significant theme in Thomas' Man and the Natural World: the importance of the "new" sciences of geology, biology, botany as bringing about a recasting of the relationship between humans and nature, namely the retreat from anthropocentricism [mechanism] and the restoration of a more "organic" conception, in which humans are seen as one part of the larger system of nature and "ought" to be in harmony with it as opposed to being dominant over it.

Promptings:

Rousseau's ideal foreshadows some essential tendencies in the "romantic movement" of the late 18^th and early 19^th century, especially in the English poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron. One could recast the claim to argue this; the evidence required would have to move beyond Rousseau's text alone to material on the Romantics and evidence from the poems or writings of one or more of the poets.

This process of setting out a claim, identifying evidence for it, and searching for connections usually leads to new insights into additional complexity and the "connectedness" of the past. The result is a deeper and more interesting claim, argument, and essay. My new, improved claim might be:

In the Fifth Walk of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau expresses the ideal of the solitary human being finding incomparable solace and contentment through an emotional connection with nature, an ideal that was enthusiastically embraced and developed further by the English Romantic poets, beginning with William Wordsworth.