Rousseau’s Philosophy: Existence, Sensation, and Judgment
Under the easy and simple rule established in the first part, this section will introduce, one by one, the different truths to be established and the different articles of faith according to Rousseau. This label is certainly very telling.
Between paragraphs 19 and 23, he addresses the question of the existence of the subject and the world. He considers it appropriate to ask: “Who am I?” (19). And he answers by establishing what he considers his first truth: “I exist and have senses by which I am affected” (20). Like Descartes, but in his own way, he has just introduced the first truth. However, the evidence, the criterion of truth that accompanies this truth, is not theoretical or intellectual evidence but evidence linked to feeling, the voice of the heart, of conscience: I exist because I feel it. He adds that sensations occur within him (he has feelings, premise 1), but it is not in his power to produce or annihilate them (they do not depend on him, premise 2). Therefore, the cause of those sensations is outside of him, meaning that his feelings are different from the objects that cause them. In other words, the cause of his sensations are objects in the world to which they relate (conclusion) (21). On the other hand, he introduces some references to Hume and the problem of substance-I-thinking, a point that he circumvents (20). According to him, not only does he exist but other things exist as well: the objects of his feelings also exist (22). Thus, the external world exists (second truth): “To everything outside of me that acts on my senses, I call matter, and all portions of matter that are collected in individual beings, I call bodies” (23). Therefore, doubt about the existence of an external world—a dispute between idealists and materialists—seems a spurious task because matter is both what constitutes the objects of the world (materialism) and what affects my sensitivity to produce images or ideas (idealism or phenomenalism) (23).
The thematic content included from paragraph 24 to 32 can be summarized as follows. The Vicar states, as a result of his previous reflection, both the existence of the world and his own. But what is the feature of my existence? I am active and intelligent because I do not just receive sensations separately. That is, I can compare and judge in order to establish their relations, “the difference or similarity.” Rousseau, at this point, introduces a distinction between feeling and judging, in clear reference to Helvetius and the reduction he makes of all powers of human understanding to sensation or sense perception. The human being has powers that transcend the level of the senses, so to judge is not simply to perceive. If I construct the judgment that red is different from yellow, what I do in perceiving reality is that the color ‘red’ affects my eyes differently than the color ‘yellow’. Rousseau rejects this view in paragraphs 24-32 and tells us: We see or feel when we are affected by any stimuli: colors, smells, textures, light intensity, etc. When we perceive or grasp something, we are only seeing images, that is, passively recording the impressions of the senses. This is purely responsive, and we do not put anything of ourselves into it. That is, feeling is something that occurs outside our control, something we cannot choose, something we do not own (31). Feeling is like the soul of a child, and the only thing it is capable of is passively registering sensations without attempting to understand their relationships at all. Having passed this first stage, the child, by comparing sensations, will be able to begin to form relationships, that is, “ideas.” Updated in this way, the intellectual faculties of judgment and reasoning (thinking) will be developed because, at that time, establishing relationships showed no sense. Hence, the reason the judge is active is because we add something to mere sensation, which is passive, and this allows us to move from ‘images,’ which are simply the mental correlates of the objects of the senses, to the realm of ‘ideas.’ These are ‘concepts of objects, identified by their relations.’ Thus, besides being receptive or passive, human beings have a peculiar feature: the ability to judge or discern. For the Vicar, judging is something completely different from feeling, although feeling and judgment occur simultaneously, that is, they are part of the same process. For example, when we say that something is bigger than another, it is very possible that we are being stimulated by both while we set up a judgment about some relationship that we observe between them, in this case, a size ratio. Although the subject matter or content of the judgment may be the feeling, the fact is that the judgment itself is somewhat different from the feeling or condition of the subject. We hear two melodies, for instance; one moves us, and one we dislike. There is a principle of responsiveness that operates when we hear both melodies. In particular, listening to certain wavelengths affects our senses. But when we say that the first was a more beautiful melody than the second, we stop being only receivers of stimuli, passive beings. The issuance of a judgment involves a person who can do more than be affected by the external world, who is an asset.
Arguments in Favor of the Distinction Between Feeling and Judging
(28-31):
- 1- The act of judging can lead us away from the truth (29), to err, and this is objective proof (argument) that feeling and judging are separate operations. If comparing and relating were merely sensitive operations, we would never be wrong; the error would not occur—”because it is false that I ever feel what I feel” (28). Only when we are active can we be wrong, never when we are passive. We are affected by the external world, and our feelings are as they are, not otherwise. I cannot be wrong to feel the condition that a particular object causes in me; I can only do so when I judge this condition, that is, when I say, for example, that X is red or yellow or green. When I make sense of the word ‘is,’ perhaps my view is wrong—I might say that X is red when the truth is that X is green—but the fact remains that I feel what I feel about X. These observations are related to those of Condillac when he considers that error only starts when we judge sensitive acts. Therefore, “I only know that the truth is in things and not in my mind, which judges, and the less I put myself into my judgments to make on them, the safer I am in approaching the truth. So my rule of giving myself more to feeling than to reason is confirmed by reason itself” (32). He gives a value of true, immediate possession of the truth to a pre-experience, which is perfectly passive. Reflection—judgment—can hide the truth of things; it can be a source of error, where it comes from ourselves and not from the known objects (Starobinski 38, 255).
- 2- Other arguments contained in paragraph 30: reason is different from feeling and cannot be reduced to it because if we lacked reason, that is, if we were purely sensory receptors, the following would happen:
- “We could not understand that what we see, touch, and hear is the same thing.”
- “And if we ever felt anything outside of us, we would believe that there are five different substances (one for each sense): light, sound, matter, tastes, and smells.”
- “We could not understand that what we see, touch, and hear is the same thing.”
Methodological Implications of Refusing to Identify Sensitivity and the Ability to Judge
(32):
- The appeal to sentiment in the first place as a source of truth. In summary, we could distinguish three steps in the Vicar’s reasoning:
- 1- The fundamental distinction between active—understood as that which can make judgments or give meaning to the word ‘is’—and passive, receptive, which is affected by the external world.
- 2- The identification of activity and error, so we reach the following conclusion: only when we judge do we err; when we are passive, we are infallible.
- 3- Finally, it follows from this: feeling offers more guarantees than judgment to those who do not want to make mistakes. Hence, the Vicar’s norm of surrendering to it more than to reason. So, to the extent that we can base our belief in feeling and abandon the attempt to compare and analyze beyond this, we will be on the right track to establish certain principles related to praxis and morality as if they were real.
- 1- The fundamental distinction between active—understood as that which can make judgments or give meaning to the word ‘is’—and passive, receptive, which is affected by the external world.
So the worship of the heart that natural religion requires is a cult because it puts us in an internalized, exclusive relationship with our own conscience, so that Rousseau’s statement that acts of consciousness are feelings rather than judgments makes sense.
On the other hand, the appeal to feeling, the sincerity of the heart, ensures the competence of every human being to decide on moral issues (natural religion). Otherwise, it would not be possible to guarantee universality and validity for all human beings in any circumstances, and therefore, natural religion would not be possible.
- The inability to reduce mind to matter and, therefore, a direct criticism of materialism. If the mind cannot be reduced to matter, to mere physical operations, then we must enter into an anthropological dualism, that is, the human being is a composite of body and mind. In saying this, Rousseau aligns himself with Descartes. However, while Descartes reduces the mind to thinking, Rousseau marks freedom as its distinctive feature.