Rousseau's reveries: Imaginative recreation of the past

Undergoing an epistemological shift from the structured and rigid reasoning of neo-classicism to a philosophy oriented toward human individuality and the emotional experience of the individual, Rousseau works in new modes in his late text Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire. Complaining of adversity and persecution, he seeks lost happiness through imaginative recreation of the past. Through this recreative faculty he achieves not only recollection but the consequent re-experiencing of past events. The second imaginative experience, he insists, is sometimes superior to the first. In ways critics have overlooked, imaginative re-creation transcends the past.