Abstract

In a letter drafted at age forty-eight, Jean-Jacques Rousseau confessed that he passed his days "vainly looking for solid attachments."1 Two years later, he again lamented that he had wasted much time pursuing attachments that "did not exist."2 At age fifty-eight, he confessed that he had "always felt some void."3 And, at the very end of his life, he still bemoaned that he had been cast "into the whirlwind of the world" only to discover that he "was not made to live in it."4 In response to these persistent disappointments, Rousseau undertook a careful examination of his formative experiences. In so doing, he founded a science of consciousness.I argue that Rousseau's Confessions and epistolary novel, Julie, are a...