418
MARSHALL BERMAN
and he was inexhaustibly brilliant in imagining idyllic ways out. But
he saw that though idyllic rural society, untouched by modern life,
could indeed generate an "equality of soul," a "perfect tranquility"
that modernization would shatter forever, there was something barren
here.
If
mankind remained fixed at this point, turned off to
his
de–
sires and impulses, unaware of the freedom (and hence not pos–
sessed of any genuine freedom) to choose, "there would be no good–
ness in our hearts, no morality in our actions." And, "our under–
standing would not ... develop itself; we would have lived without
feeling anything, and we would have
died without having lived;
all
our happiness would have consisted in not knowing how miserable
we really were."
If
the great thing
is
to be fully and intensely alive,
then we must affirm the life-giving force of modernity - even if
it
makes us too alive for comfort. Thus the impulses and ideas that led
Rousseau away from modernity, when they are pursued most avidly,
must lead him back, and back into his own life as a modern man.
For despite its decadence, the metropolis develops in its men
and women "that exquisite
sensibility
which moves the heart when
friendship, love and virtue are manifest, and makes us cherish in
others those pure, tender and honest feelings which we no longer
have ourselves." The presence of this sensibility among the Parisians
was no accident; it was integral to the -character of modern men–
indeed, it was a survival skill which they could not do without. The
very moral imagination which enabled modem men to use ideals as
screens, behind which to manipulate and exploit each other, pre–
served for them an inner sense of what these ideals might really
mean. The insight which empowered them to see through one an–
other today might drive them tomorrow to see through themselves.
What did Rousseau want them to see? Above all, the contradic–
tion between the fullness of their powers and potentialities and the
bourgeois imperatives which had brought these powers and poten–
tialities into being. The necessities of the social struggle had put a
premium on reason, imagination, spirit, beauty, strength - insofar
as they could be used as competitive assets; beyond this one use,
however, everything was excess baggage. This process had infused
men and women with a newly intense sense of themselves, devotion
to their personal interests, love of their individuality. But insofar as
modern men defined themselves in competitive terms, they were
