Eve Grace, “The restlessness of ‘being’ Rousseau's protean sentiment of existence,” History of European Ideas, Vol. 27, Issue 2, 2001.  

Excerpt:

The question of the sentiment of existence is central to Rousseau’s thought. For Rousseau’s apparent promise that salvation is to be found on earth for whomever is able to experience it appears as the heart of his claim that man is naturally good. The general agreement among interpreters regarding the character of the sentiment of existence, based largely upon Rousseau’s most extensive and famous discussion of it in his last work, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, would seem to suggest that if any question has been decisively settled in the study of Rousseau’s philosophy, it is that of the nature of this sentiment and of its status in his thought. The Reveries is often read as a lyrical paean to “existential reverie,” at the heart of which is the experience of the sentiment of existence, of unalloyed communion with being in all its purity and immediacy through our own unmediated presence to ourselves. Rousseau’s philosophy is thus made to adhere naively to what Derrida describes as the “metaphysics of presence”. It seems upon closer inspection, however, that the question of what Rousseau means by the sentiment of existence may have been too summarily decided. His account of this sentiment in The Reveries (and also in the Second Discourse), which stresses passivity and minimal human development as sufficient for its enjoyment, seems to be contradicted by an entirely different account. In this alternative account, the enjoyment of the sentiment of existence and fulfillment are contingent upon full development or “whole being,” requiring that we “make use of our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves,” parts, including reason and the imagination, which have yet to develop in the “state of nature”. This latter account, however, seems to cast doubt upon the coherence of Rousseau’s fundamental principle of the natural goodness of man. Rousseau leaves us, then, not with a doctrine, but a mystery; we are given two apparently irreconcilable accounts of the sentiment of existence which support two mutually exclusive standards or accounts of human fulfillment. To reject one or the other of these accounts as an aberration in Rousseau’s thought is to reject the foundation of his eloquent praise of one or the other of two very different depictions of human fulfillment: the active life of virtue or the quiescent life of the solitary walker. At stake in this problem is not only the ultimate coherence of Rousseau’s thought, but also, in particular, his fundamental understanding of the human self, or of the experience of “existence” which is, in his account, at the core of human passions. This article, then, attempts to clarify some of the difficulties regarding an understanding of Rousseau’s thought on this important matter.

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