Reveries of A Solitary Walker Summary;All Walk Analysis. Born in Geneva into a Calvinist family, Jean-Jacques Rousseau , who is motherless, was abandoned by his father at the age of 10 and raised by his uncle. Her education is based on her fugues, her wanderings on foot, and her encounters, in particular Mme de Warens . His mistress and benefactress who will influence his work is committed to perfecting his education. In 1741, Jean-Jacques Rousseau became tutor to the children of Mme de Mably in Lyon. Passionate about music, he developed a musical notation system that did not meet with the hoped-for success in Paris. After a stay in Venice, he returned to Paris and befriended Diderot who asked him to write articles on music for the Encyclopedia.. Jean-Jacques Rousseau lives in a household with Thérèse Levasseur, a modest servant, with whom he has five children. Unable to raise them properly, he entrusts them to the Foundlings, which his enemies later reproach him for.

Reveries of A Solitary Walker Summary;All Walk Analysis.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau acquired fame in 1750 with his “Discours sur les sciences et les arts”. He took as a methodological hypothesis what would become the central theme of his philosophy: man is naturally born good and happy, it is society that corrupts him and makes him unhappy. He thus refutes the notion of original sin. Jean-Jacques Rousseau returned to his homeland in 1754. After a stay with Mme d’Epinay, he was taken in at Montmorency in 1757 by Marshal Luxembourg and spent the most fruitful years of his existence there.

His main work, “Du Contrat Social” , analyzes the founding principles of political law. For Rousseau, only a fundamental convention can legitimize political authority and allow the general will of the people to exercise their sovereignty. He goes further than Montesquieu and Voltaire in the defense of freedom and equality between men, by proposing a natural order which reconciles individual freedom and the demands of life in society. The “Social Contract” inspired the Declaration of Human Rights and the whole philosophy of the Revolution . His influence was also important on German philosophy (Kant, Fichte …

“Emile or Education” , Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues that learning must be done through experience rather than analysis. He also professed there a natural religion, without dogma, as opposed to supernatural revelation, which earned him to be condemned in 1762 by the Parliament of Paris. He then took refuge in Switzerland and then in England where he was lodged by David Hume with whom he quickly quarreled. He returned to France in 1769.

Criticized by philosophers and attacked by Voltaire (who mocks his theory where society distorts Man), Jean-Jacques Rousseau feels persecuted. He tries to defend himself and to explain himself in “The written letters of the mountain” and the “. Fanned by Voltaire, the population even went so far as to stone their house and burn their books. The last years of his life were spent in Ermenonville in illness and isolation.

Main works:

• Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750)
• Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men (1755)
• Discourse on Political Economy (1755)
• Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (novel, 1761)
• Of the social contract (1762)
• Emile or Education (1762)
• Letters written from the mountains (1764)
• The Confessions (1665-1770, published in 1782)
• Pygmalion (1770)
• Rousseau, judge of Jean-Jacques or Dialogues (1772-1776 published in 1780)
• Les Rêveries du promenade solitaire (1776-1778, published in 1782).

Here Is Complete Reveries of A Solitary Walker Summary;All Walk Analysis

Chapters

• General presentation of the text
• First walk
• Fourth walk
• Fifth walk
• Tenth walk
• An introductory text
• Reversal
• Suspense
• Program
• The theme of loneliness
• The accomplished
• A Manichean vision
• The intuition of the fantastic
• The status of “I”
• Conclusion

First Walk

The author begins by noting the extent of his loneliness. He says he no longer has friends or family. There would be a general hostility towards him, which made him detach himself from everything and everyone. This hostility is considered by the author as unjust, it seems to have fallen on him fifteen years ago for no particular reason. Before we turned against him, he loved men, had tenderness and hope for them. But suddenly, when he hadn’t changed his behavior, he was considered “the horror of the human race.” For ten years, this hatred overwhelmed him and he defended himself against it. But every speech, every act of self-defense turned against him and he ended up resigning himself. In resignation he found peace. Besides, his enemies are so virulent that they very quickly reach the height of outrage and from then on nothing can surprise or touch the author.

Even if they came to subject him to physical torture, it would add nothing to his unhappiness; he would experience it, he said, as a salutary diversion from his spiritual pains. In the end, they succeeded in freeing him from fear, a passion that had held him enslaved for a long time. He is now happy to have lost hope in addition to fear – which completes the tranquility of his resignation. On reflection, in fact, he realizes that it is illusory to count on a return from the public not only during his lifetime but also posthumously, insofar as his stubborn enemies will take turns to smear his memory. that would add nothing to his misfortune; he would experience it, he said, as a salutary diversion from his spiritual pains. In the end, they succeeded in freeing him from fear, a passion that had held him enslaved for a long time.

He is now happy to have lost hope in addition to fear – which completes the tranquility of his resignation. On reflection, in fact, he realizes that it is illusory to count on a return from the public not only during his lifetime but also posthumously, insofar as his stubborn enemies will take turns to smear his memory. that would add nothing to his misfortune; he would experience it, he said, as a salutary diversion from his spiritual pains. In the end, they succeeded in freeing him from fear, a passion that had held him enslaved for a long time. He is now happy to have lost hope in addition to fear – which completes the tranquility of his resignation. On reflection, in fact, he realizes that it is illusory to count on a return from the public not only during his lifetime but also posthumously, insofar as his stubborn enemies will take turns to smear his memory.

He is now happy to have lost hope in addition to fear – which completes the tranquility of his resignation. On reflection, in fact, he realizes that it is illusory to count on a return from the public not only during his lifetime but also posthumously, insofar as his stubborn enemies will take turns to smear his memory. He is now happy to have lost hope in addition to fear – which completes the tranquility of his resignation. On reflection, in fact, he realizes that it is illusory to count on a return from the public not only during his lifetime but also posthumously, insofar as his stubborn enemies will take turns to smear his memory.

It is in this context that the author undertakes to continue and complete the task undertaken in Les Confessions, that is, a “severe and sincere” introspective self-examination. But the method here will be different from that employed in his autobiographical work. Rather than recounting and analyzing his past, he wants to transcribe the reflections that come to mind when he walks, without necessarily looking for structure or link. Its goal is to depict the movements of a soul which by dint of persecution has become “null”, that is to say neutral of all affect. He specifies, however, that he writes only for himself, in particular in order to console himself by rereading. Finally, he regrets not having had this attitude earlier: the concern for receiving his texts previously caused him a lot of trouble and increased his labor tenfold.

 

Second Walk

 

The author notes that he took too long to make the register of his meditations while out for a walk: his mind is no longer as sharp as it was, and it is now rare that he manages to create new concepts. . Nevertheless, solitary meditation remains delicious, and he ironically thanks his persecutors for having forced him to take refuge there. He then shows through the story of a few days in October 1776 how he passes, leaving solitude for the commerce of the world, from tranquility to anguish. As he contemplates the autumnal countryside, he notices several signs of the passage into winter and this plunges him into a deep and tasty melancholy, which arouses great surges of piety in his heart. It is when he returns to town that the inconvenience begins. A huge dog runs over him – his face collides with the ground and he is knocked unconscious for a few hours. Upon awakening, as he leaves those who cared for him to resume his journey, he is caught in the urban night with a great feeling of exhilaration, experiencing what Spinoza calls “horizontal eternity”.

Over the next few days, the most absurd rumors circulated around the world about the accident – some believe it was dead. This awakens the author’s paranoia. When an unknown police lieutenant comes to ask for news and to offer his help, the author concludes that the lieutenant has secret bad intentions. Later when he learned that the believer was deceased, people began to have his unpublished manuscripts edited, he imagines that they intend to attribute to him shameful texts written by them, for the simple pleasure of sullying his reputation. He also tells how a certain Madame d’Ormoy, in need of money, tries in this period to force his hand to obtain his literary sponsorship.

As he does not consent to anything despite his gifts, she ends up publishing the book that she wrote with a preface very laudatory to him and notes which – she leaves room for doubt – are perhaps in the hand of Rousseau – which ends up pushing it back very brutally, recalling that with low souls baseness is allowed. This successive accumulation of worries due to others confirms to him that resigned solitude is the way to happiness. He also tells how a certain Madame d’Ormoy, in need of money, tries in this period to force his hand to obtain his literary sponsorship. As he does not consent to anything despite his gifts, she ends up publishing the book that she wrote with a preface very laudatory to him and notes which – she leaves room for doubt – are perhaps in the hand of Rousseau – which ends up pushing it back very brutally, recalling that with low souls baseness is allowed.

This successive accumulation of worries due to others confirms to him that resigned solitude is the way to happiness. He also tells how a certain Madame d’Ormoy, in need of money, tries in this period to force his hand to obtain his literary sponsorship. As he does not consent to anything despite his gifts, she ends up publishing the book that she wrote with a preface very laudatory to him and notes which – she leaves room for doubt – are perhaps in the hand of Rousseau – which ends up pushing it back very brutally, recalling that with low souls baseness is allowed. This successive accumulation of worries due to others confirms to him that resigned solitude is the way to happiness. she ends up publishing the book which she wrote with a preface very laudatory towards her and notes which – she leaves room for doubt – are perhaps of the hand of Rousseau – which ends up rejecting it in a very brutal way, remembering that with low souls baseness is allowed.

This successive accumulation of worries due to others confirms to him that resigned solitude is the way to happiness. she ends up publishing the book which she wrote with a preface very laudatory towards her and notes which – she leaves room for doubt – are perhaps of the hand of Rousseau – which ends up rejecting it in a very brutal way, remembering that with low souls baseness is allowed. This successive accumulation of worries due to others confirms to him that resigned solitude is the way to happiness.

 

Third Walk

 

Rousseau bases this third series of reflections and stories on a verse from old age by the poet Solon: “I am getting old by always learning”. He notices that he could not apply this statement to himself. He first of all invokes his intellectual precocity. For most people, there is a time lag between when wisdom is known theoretically and when it is practiced. At home, he shows, detailing the stages of his education, the gap has been reduced as much as possible. This led him to unique philosophical paths. If thinkers in general – and he counts among them former colleagues like D’Alembert or Diderot – conceive philosophies for others, which implies strategies that could be qualified as political (orientation of doctrines according to interests) , Rousseau only sought a philosophy for himself. When he was tired of procrastinating, of being in the grip of doubt in the face of the formidable rhetoric of his atheist colleagues, he decided to formulate once and for all the principles which from then on and until the end would rule his life – principles formulated in “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar”, extract from Book IV ofÉmile or Education . So there is a precise moment when the author stopped learning, but this to better concentrate on what it is good to improve at home on the verge of death: he now only works to make oneself more virtuous, and not more learned.

Fourth Walk

Rereading Plutarch who learns to “make use of his enemies”, Rousseau takes advantage of a mockery of Abbé Rozier with regard to the motto he has chosen – “Consecrate his life to the truth” – to devote this fourth walk to the notion of lying. The author notes that, in spite of a dreadful lie which he produced as a child and which has always haunted him, he has often taken things as true, throughout his life, that he had invented. From these things invented, moreover, he draws no remorse. He then concludes that there are many ways not to tell the truth, and that some of these ways may not be lying. He proposes to delimit these questions more precisely but without entering into the sterile debates of moral philosophy (he seems to mention here, by opposing the austere morality because abstract of thinkers and the indulgent morality because concrete of the living, the quarrel between Immanuel Kant and Benjamin Constant), he wants once again to shed light on the subject for himself, by using less reason than of what he calls his moral instinct. On the one hand, he affirms that there are occasions when one does not owe the truth to others. It is when the concealed or transformed truth is of no theoretical or practical use to others. On the other hand, it shows that one can innocently not tell the truth. This is in cases where the truth is indifferent: “Whether I believe the sand which is at the bottom of the sea white or red, it matters no more to me than not knowing what color it is.” »A question remains once this is asked: how to judge the usefulness and the importance of a truth? Rousseau proposes to examine the intentions of the one who lies. If it is without intention to deceive and by extension to harm it can hardly be condemned. In fact a lie which neither harms nor benefits anyone is called according to Rousseau a fiction, and he considers that this kind of lie can have, knowingly practiced, many benefits. He rejects the model of “the true man” who in his eyes has a great concern for accuracy in matters of indifference but frees his imagination when he speaks about a subject which concerns him deeply. For Rousseau, the reverse should be done. Having therefore distinguished the true lies from the inconsequential lies, the author examines his practice of lying throughout his life and finds that he has not really lied – or else out of fairness: when, as a child, a loved one accidentally hurt him, he was careful not to give the true reason for his injury, to prevent the loved one from worrying. He sums up his use of lying by again resorting to the concept of moral instinct. In doing so, he places himself, in the quarrel already mentioned, on the side of Constant rather than of Kant.

 

Fifth Walk

 

The author remembers his stay on Île Saint-Pierre, in the middle of Lake Biel. He was able to experience the pleasure of solitude and direct contact with nature. There only he found absolute tranquility, a happiness not based on the fragile pleasures offered by the world, but on the experience of a pure present. It is one of the only places where he lived perfectly happy and during his walks he likes to return there as a souvenir.

 

Sixth Walk

 

The author notes that each time he wants to go for a walk “along the Bièvre on the Gentilly side” he automatically takes the same detour. He then remembers that, taking the most direct route, he systematically crosses a handicapped beggar boy who comes to ask him for alms ceremoniously. At first the number amused him and he gave with pleasure. Then over time it became an obligation – for him, unbearable. This is why as long as possible he no longer passes through this crossing. Thus for any mechanical movement, affirms Rousseau, one can find by carefully reflecting a pragmatic, affective cause, a desire or an embarrassment, which has a deep anchoring in the personality of the individual in question. Indeed, this disgust for obligations is an essential element of the author’s temperament. He feels, when he must obey a duty, reified. Yet, he insists, he has a good heart. He explains in particular that if he had in his possession the famous ring of invisibility of Gyges he would only use it to be able to do the good of all without forming a tacit contract which obliges him to do good. out of duty. In short, he would like everyone to be indifferent to him all the time. He does not understand, at the end of the walk, why his enemies castigate him as if he were a bad being when, if he has done little good, he has never done bad. He explains in particular that if he had in his possession the famous ring of invisibility of Gyges he would only use it to be able to do the good of all without forming a tacit contract which obliges him to do good. out of duty. In short, he would like everyone to be indifferent to him all the time. He does not understand, at the end of the walk, why his enemies castigate him as if he were a bad being when, if he has done little good, he has never done bad. He explains in particular that if he had in his possession the famous ring of invisibility of Gyges he would only use it to be able to do the good of all without forming a tacit contract which obliges him to do good. out of duty. In short, he would like everyone to be indifferent to him all the time. He does not understand, at the end of the walk, why his enemies castigate him as if he were a bad being when, if he has done little good, he has never done bad.

Seventh Walk

The author is already thinking of stopping the writing of Reveries to devote himself to his herbaria. The work of thought costs him and he wants to follow his fantasy of the moment to the end. His fascination with plants is that of an esthete and a devotee. He condemns the purely practical interest – in the medicinal field for example – of common men for plants. He also believes that a scientific approach for him would be futile, it is no longer time at this age to become a scientist. For his part, he considers the herbaria as portable portions of flora. By contemplating them, wherever he is, he immediately rediscovers the serenity he achieves when in nature he devotes himself to the activity of herbising.

 

Eighth Walk

 

Rousseau is surprised that his feelings have never been in harmony with his situation. When the world with him was benevolent, he was always dissatisfied, from appetite to disgust, from disgust to appetite. But since the world became hostile, he has found peace. He deduces that this is because the pleasures of the world are futile, while the joy of retirement is deep. This eighth walk is the opportunity to savor this paradoxical victory over his enemies: they forced him into exile, but this exile is delicious.

 

Ninth Walk

 

A certain MP, giggling, read to Rousseau a text in which D’Alembert violently condemns people who do not like children, to the point of proposing capital punishment for them. Rousseau ends up understanding that this text is indirectly addressed to him: he has, since he left his own offspring to the Foundlings, the reputation of detesting children. The author justifies himself on this decision – he could not bring up his children himself and their mother’s family would have made monsters of them – and affirms on the contrary, with the help of numerous examples, that he has a lot of love for children. He finds in them a natural, pure pleasure, far from the pettiness of his adult fellow citizens. Rousseau adds that he is particularly sensitive to faces and expressions. In children, he explains, we have the happiness to see frank expressions, which do not hide, whether in laughter or in sadness. The walk ends with a reflection on hospitality. He notes that among Europeans it is not uncommon to trade it – the Dutch, as he heard, only give the time and the route if we pay them – while in Asia everything is given for free. . It is invaluable in his eyes to be able to say to oneself: “It is pure humanity that gives me the cover. ” It is invaluable in his eyes to be able to say to oneself: “It is pure humanity that gives me the cover. ” It is invaluable in his eyes to be able to say to oneself: “It is pure humanity that gives me the cover. ”

Tenth Walk

This last walk is a tribute to Madame de Warens, who was Rousseau’s tutor and mistress. The latter regrets the happy time when he was under his tutelage. It was one of the only moments in his life where he lived with intensity – which he deplores. His deep motivation, he finally lets understand, has been throughout his life only to find a way to return to Madame all the virtues she has given him.

Conclusion

By making this solitude imposed by others a subject forreflection and writing, Rousseau manages to reweave with his reader the”links” which had been broken by other men. The paradoxis that, by presenting himself as the passive victim of humanity, Rousseau manifests a particularly active and effective creative force.