Communicating Solitude
Communicating Solitude
Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker
This chapter delves into Jean Jacques Rousseau's philosophy, and how he addresses the struggle to remain an individual and to express oneself in an increasingly homogenized world. Rousseau struggled to bridge the divide between inner experiences and public image by writing three autobiographies, one of which was Reveries of the Solitary Walker. This was an unfinished work whose literary nature is inseparable from its intimacy, expressiveness, and ability to achieve clarity about itself. In this book, Rousseau employs his solitude as an opportunity to discover who he really is. The doubling of oneself in reading, and/or writing, represents the intimacy of solitary individuals, and becomes a way of communicating solitude. Rousseau is not interested in objective certainty but in knowing how he is detached from everyone else. His method is not doubt but existential isolation—a mental exercise that makes others disappear.
Keywords: Jean Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, solitude, solitary individuals, existential isolation
Columbia Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
