To Move the Heart and Inflame the Passions: Rousseau on Language

• In Event: Thinking with Tocqueville, Rousseau, and Hegel

Abstract

Though the literature on Jean-Jacques Rousseau is vast, comparatively little is dedicated to his thoughts on language. Of the scholarship that does address this topic, much of it either treats language as ancillary to Rousseau’s thoughts on politics or as typical of the broader French and German Enlightenment’s views on language. Part of a larger project, this paper proposes to treat Rousseau’s “Essay on the Origin of Languages” as a highly original meditation on the nature and function of language in order to develop a distinctively Rousseauian philosophy of language.
To this end, the paper achieves three main objectives. The first is the development of a coherent interpretation of the “Essay” itself, which argues that language is fundamentally passionate and creative before it is useful. All the while, Rousseau argues, language is possibly inadequate for fulfilling this main function. This implicates the second goal, which is to introduce Rousseau as a critic of his contemporary theorists of language, who subscribe to a basically Lockean account of language as first and foremost a useful tool. Finally, it will argue for the coherence of the “Essay” and the Discourse on Inequality’s discussion of language. Inasmuch as both works attempt to offer developmental accounts of human language, with the latter famously pronouncing such an account impossible, they appear incompatible. Yet, I will argue, the “Essay” offers an account that circumvents the difficulties raised in the Second Discourse and thereby completes the Discourse’s account.

Author

• William Lombardo, Boston College