'It is a characteristic of Rousseau's writing that he maintains a constant tension between the anecdotal recounting of what happens to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and an indefinable sense of anxiety and exaltation that belongs to the human subject as such. This combination of the concrete and the essential, if combination is what it is, seems to me to explain the particular affect that Rousseau's anecdotal style provokes in his fellow philosophers. What I think so infuriates some philosophical readers of Rousseau is the constant reminder he provides of ordinary existence. Perhaps other philosophers, even those who take the biographical project as the heart of their own philosophical thinking, strike too heroic a pose in their battles against monsters and titans (or are these just giants?), too sublime in recounting their lives? They do not themselves attain to the tension in Rousseau of concrete and essential, insofar as they, unlike him, find in incidents of everyday life no abysses of misery, no peaks of ecstatic joy. To such listeners, his recounting of events sounds melodramatic, sentimental, narcissistic, and noisy, a fussing over nothing. Their disapproval of Rousseau comes, I should think, of a sense of shame in kinship, a kind of infantile shame in one's origins or in the origins of one's thinking—the stuff of which family romances in philosophy are made.

The affect generated by Rousseau's writing is, properly speaking, a philosophical affect. It is to be expected that a thinker who makes amour propre the source of all evil be attuned to the ways in which thought, of even the most sensitive kind, is connected to pride or arrogance. And Rousseau exposes the hidden forms of arrogance in thinking that distance the thinker from himself, from his life, and elevate him in an unhealthy way above himself. Rousseau's mirror on this unhealthy heroism provokes reactions of anger and shame that testify to his capacity to observe the terrible and the sublime in the most ordinary features of one's life.'

'… the very atmosphere and medium through which we look…'

'What I am, therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition. It was important when I characterized the concept of a practice to notice that practices always have histories and that at any given moment what a practice is depends on a mode of understanding it which has been transmitted often through many generations. And thus, insofar as the virtues sustain the relationships required for practices, they have to sustain relationships to the past—and to the future—as well as in the present. But the traditions through which particular practices are transmitted and reshaped never exist in isolation for larger social traditions. What constitutes such traditions?

We are apt to be misled here by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characteristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate. For all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradition; this is as true of modern physics as of medieval logic. Moreover when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.

So when an institution—a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital—is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

The individualism of modernity could of course find no use for the notion of tradition within its own conceptual scheme except as an adversary notion; it therefore all too willingly abandoned it to the Burkeans, who, faithful to Burke’s own allegiance, tried to combine adherence in politics to a conception of tradition which would vindicate the oligarchical revolution of property of 1688 and adherence in economics to the doctrine and institutions of the free market. The theoretical incoherence of this mismatch did not deprive it of ideological usefulness. But the outcome has been that modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.

A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition. Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations. Hence the individual’s search for his or her good is generally and characteristically conducted within a context defined by those traditions of which the individual’s life is a part, and this is true both of those goods which are internal to practices and of the goods of a single life. Once again the narrative phenomenon of embedding is crucial: the history of a practice in our time is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer history of the tradition through which the practice in its present form was conveyed to us; the history of each of our own lives is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions. I have to say ‘generally and characteristically’ rather than ‘always’, for traditions decay, disintegrate and disappear. What then sustains and strengthens traditions? What weakens and destroys them?

The answer in key part is: the exercise or the lack of exercise of the relevant virtues. The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those relationships necessary if the variety of goods internal to practices are to be achieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in which that individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her whole life, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context. Lack of justice, lack of truthfulness, lack of courage, lack of the relevant intellectual virtues—these corrupt traditions, just as they do those institutions and practices which derive their life from the traditions of which they are the contemporary embodiments. To recognize this is of course also to recognize the existence of an additional virtue, one whose importance is perhaps most obvious when it is least present, the virtue of having an adequate sense of the traditions to which one belongs or which confront one. This virtue is not to be confused with any form of conservative antiquarianism; I am not praising those who choose the conventional conservative role of laudator temporis acti. It is rather the case that an adequate sense of tradition manifests itself in a grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available to the present. Living traditions, just because they continue a not-yet-completed narrative, confront a future whose determinate and determinable character, so far as it possesses any, derives from the past.'

'technē tēs periagōgēs, "the art of turning around"'

'zébrures, éclats, fêlures et trouvailles dans le quadrillage d’un système'

'un petit rien, un bout de quelque chose, un reste devenu précieux dans la circonstance'

'Bloom will offer his coffee and bun in a revised, gentler version.'

'It is a reality of day-to-day sameness and an absence of variety—like prison—which requires, if one is to endure it, either a deadening of all the senses or a sharpening of them, so that the smallest change of mood or event can be noticed and seized on as representing something novel or meaningful.'

'avoir de la conversation'