ELFV - "Rousseau"

JEAN-JACQUES RUSSO 

1) EMOTION ("romantic") 

2) LOGIC ("rhetorician") 

3) PHYSICS ("the underdog") 

4) WILL ("serf") 

Admittedly, I have long been puzzled by the question of what order of functions one must possess in order to have a tendency toward masochism. There were no difficulties with the sadistic order of functions (see "Dumas," "Aristippus"). But masochism, no matter how much I shifted functions, was still not given. This went on until Rousseau opened my eyes to the problem with his "Confessions. 

To begin with, to be fair, masochism should be renamed "Rousseauism," since it was Rousseau who described the phenomenon just as fully, but much earlier than SacherMasoch. This is how the awakening of masochism looks like under the pen of JeanJacques: "...Mademoiselle Lambertzier loved us as a mother, she used her maternal power as well, extending it to the point of subjecting us at times, when we deserved it, to the punishment customary for children. For a long time she confined herself to threatening us, and this threat of punishment, new to me, seemed very frightening, but when it was carried out I found that the punishment itself was not so terrible as the expectation of it, and the strange thing was that it made me love the one who had subjected me to it all the more. It took all my sincere affection, all my gentleness, to prevent me from seeking the opportunity of experiencing the same treatment again, having earned it; for I found in the pain and even in the shame itself an admixture of sensuality that aroused in me more desire than the fear of experiencing it again from the same hand. True, there was undoubtedly a certain amount of premature sexual instinct mixed in with this, and the same punishment I received from her brother did not seem pleasant at all... 

Who would have thought that this punishment, inflicted on an eight-year-old child by a girl of thirty, would define my tastes, my desires, my passions, myself for the rest of my life. 

Rousseau's story is repeated almost verbatim by Sacher-Masoch: "My parents were often visited by Countess Sobol, who came to me as a third cousin. A woman stately, beautiful and with a captivating smile, but hated me, as had a reputation in the family of Messalina. And I treated her to the last degree clumsily, impolitely and spitefully. 

One day my parents went out of town for a while. My aunt decided to take advantage of their absence to give me a sample punishment. Suddenly she came into the room in her fur-lined katsaweika, accompanied by the cook, the barmaid, and the little cat, whom I had neglected.

They grabbed me and, despite my desperate resistance, tied me up hand and foot; then my aunt rolled up her sleeves with an evil grin and began to whip me with a thick birch so hard that blood spurted, and I finally, despite all my heroic spirit, screamed and cried and just started begging for mercy. 

Then she told me to untie me, but before leaving me alone altogether, she made me kneel down to thank her for the punishment and kiss my hand. 

Imagine this supersensible fool! Under the lash of that gorgeous beauty, who seemed to me in her fur coat as an angry queen, I first awoke a man's feeling for a woman, and my aunt began to seem to me from that time on the most enchanting woman in all God's world. 

There is no doubt that one of the basic components of masochism is the hypersexuality of the 3rd Physicist. This is evidently indicated by a reverent, enthusiastic attitude to physical contact between the sexes, a phenomenon rather trivial and commonplace for other Physicists. Another clue - a typical for the "prude" split attitude to the intimate side of life, where contrived sanctimonious rejection is combined with hidden greedy sexuality. About this very frankly wrote Mazoch himself: "Even in the cradle, as I was told later by my mother, I showed" oversensitivity ": I could not stand a healthy breast nursing and had to be fed with goat milk. As a little boy I discovered a mysterious shyness before women, which lurked, in fact, an abnormal attraction to them... 

Apparently, all my catholic sternness and all my timidity before women was nothing but a refined sense of beauty. Since that time sensuality has grown in my imagination to the point of a cult of sorts... 

Woman was my true cult. 

I saw sensuality as something sacred-even solely sacred. 

At the same time, the 3rd Physics itself does not make its owner a masochist; it stimulates sexuality, but it does not determine forms into which this supersensuality is clothed. In case of masochism, this hypersensitivity is exactly that, because the 3rd Physics is combined with the 4th Will. That is, along with the sexual-physical element, there is also a volitional-hierarchical element in it. 

Moreover, if Dostoyevsky is to be believed, masochism can dispense with the first sexual half at all and simply take pleasure in the 4th Will from the sexless manifestation of its servility. Recall that in The Idiot, Rogozhin threatens to whip one sticky official, to which the latter happily replies: "And if you whip him, then you won't reject him! Seki! I have flogged him and thereby sealed him..." 

In fact, masochism is one of the manifestations of an understated, infantile self-esteem of the 4th Will, sometimes colored, sometimes uncolored by the hypersexuality of the 3rd Phys. 

That this is the case, and not otherwise, is evidenced by two of the greatest experts on this subject: Rousseau and Sacher-Masoch. The latter explicitly explained his unusual predilection by the fact that he had a "soft, compliant, sensual nature," i.e. he combined a weak character and heightened sexuality. Moreover, his love confessions were undividedly dominated by the first element - the promise of sincere servility. He said: "...if I had the right to choose - to rule or to be controlled - it would seem to me much more attractive the role of a slave of a beautiful woman. But where would I find such a woman, who would not achieve influence by petty grumpiness, but manage to rule in a calm consciousness of her power?" In tone with Masoch wrote Rousseau: "To be loved by all my loved ones was my deepest desire. I was meek... 

All my life I have lusted and been speechless before the women I loved most...To be at the feet of a haughty lover, to obey her commands, to have cause to ask her forgivenessall this gave me very tender pleasures; and the more my lively imagination inflamed my blood, the more I resembled a lover seized with passion. It is clear that this method of courtship does not lead to particularly rapid success and is not too dangerous to the virtue of those who are their subjects. 

It has already been said that the 4th Will has a hierarchical perception of the world, in which, just as in the view of the 1st Will, everything is divided on two levels: the upper and the lower. The specifics of the philosophy of the 4th Will lies in the fact that it always places itself on the lower level, the level of dependence, secondary importance and subordination. There the "serf" is more comfortable, more natural, more convenient. That is why the pleasure of the flogging received by the "russo" and his fellow inferior function "Augustine" (see) is physiologically connected only with the fact that the hand holding the lash belongs to a creature of the other sex. The spiritual joys of violence against himself are experienced by him when he receives more than tangible proof of being on his own lower plane ("you have whipped me, so I am yours"). 

* * * 

The particular difficulty in capturing the image of "Rousseau" lies in the unsteadiness of his mental image. Like any "serf," he is an involuntary Proteus, living in that world and in that system of values, which was easily imposed on him by the person who happened to be nearby. Therefore, there is no certainty that tomorrow he will be the same as yesterday. The capacity for sincere chameleonism was recognized by Rousseau himself as a certain inherent property of his nature and did not even arouse internal protest or anything resembling a lynch mob. What to do - he was born that way... 

Telling how, from a boarding house claiming to be an enlightened and refined institution, he at once found himself in the workshop of an artisan, Rousseau recounted the metamorphosis that had occurred to him as follows: "My master Ducommen was a young man, rude and harsh; and in a very short time he succeeded in marring my joyful childhood, in coarsening my gentle, lively character, and in reducing me intellectually, as I was already reduced in my very position, to the level of a true journeyman. Latin, the ancient world, history-all were forgotten for a long time; I did not even remember that there were Romans in the world... The lowest inclinations, the vilest mischief took the place of the sweetest amusements, leaving not even a memory of them. Apparently, despite the most favorable upbringing, I had a great tendency to moral decline, as it was committed very quickly, without the slightest difficulty ... " 

And so Rousseau passed from hand to hand, constantly mimicking, until he fell into the steel claws of his mother-in-law, Madame Levasseur. A sweet, simple-hearted masochist before marriage, Rousseau under the heel of his mother-in-law's 3rd Will became "mansplainingly" vindictive, envious and fearful, so the philosopher's post-marital mental appearance appeared to the world not in his own, but in his mother-in-law's makeup. Although the memory of himself, in his natural form, continued to live in Rousseau, and the following excerpt from the Confessions shows how the self-owned "Rousseau" looks in those brief moments when he is not held by the scruff of his neck. Rousseau confessed: "...a mediocre existence was largely the result of my character, ardent but weak, more inclined to despondency than to enterprise.... A character alien to great virtues and even more alien to great vices, which constantly returned me to the carefree and quiet life for which I felt myself born, and which never allowed me to strive for something great, both in good and in evil." The whole order of the functions of "Rousseau" is reproduced here in full:1st Emotion, 2nd Logic, 3rd Physics, 4th Will. 

* * * 

"Rousseau" is thin, not to say handsome or shy. Her eyes are big and sparkling. His facial expressions and gestures are sweeping, his speech is hot, passionate, but it lacks the energy to be convincing. Dressed casually, hair long and poorly groomed. Particularly affectionate and accommodating to creatures of the opposite sex.