Political philosopher, educationist, and essayist, born in Geneva, SW Switzerland. Largely self-taught, he carried on a variety of menial occupations, until after he moved to Paris in 1741, where he came to know Diderot and the encyclopédistes. In 1754 he wrote Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité et les fondements parmi les hommes (1755, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Amongst Men), emphasizing the natural goodness of human beings, and the corrupting influences of institutionalized life. He later moved to Luxembourg (1757), where he wrote his masterpiece, Du contrat social (1762, The Social Contract), a great influence on French revolutionary thought, introducing the slogan Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The same year he published his major work on education, Emile, in novel form, but its views on monarchy and governmental institutions forced him to flee to Switzerland, and then England, at the invitation of David Hume. There he wrote most of his Confessions (published posthumously, 1782). He returned to Paris in 1767, where he continued to write, but gradually became insane. He died in Ermenonville.
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Western Philosophers 18th-century philosophy (Modern Philosophy) |
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|---|---|
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | |
| Name: | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
| Birth: | June 28, 1712 (Geneva, Switzerland) |
| Death: | July 2, 1778 (Ermenonville, France) |
| School/tradition: | Social contract theory |
| Main interests: | Political philosophy,music, education, literature, autobiography |
| Notable ideas: | General will, amour-propre |
| Influences: | Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Denis Diderot |
| Influenced: | Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the Romantic movement |
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778) was a Genevan philosopher of the Enlightenment whose political ideas influenced the French Revolution, the development of socialist theory, and the growth of nationalism. Rousseau also made important contributions to music both as a theorist and as a composer.
Biography
Rousseau was born in Geneva (then an independent republic, today part of Switzerland) and throughout his life described himself as a citizen of Geneva. His mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, died nine days after his birth due to complications from childbirth, and his father Isaac, a failed watchmaker, abandoned him in 1722 to avoid imprisonment for fighting a duel. After his father's departure, Rousseau was placed in the care of a pastor at Bossey, near Geneva. According to Rousseau's own account in Book I of the Confessions, his experience of corporal punishment at the hands of the pastor's sister was important in the formation of his sexuality.
Rousseau left Geneva on March 14, 1728, after several years of apprenticeship to a notary and then an engraver.
In 1742 Rousseau moved to Paris in order to present the Académie des Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation he had invented, based on a single line displaying numbers that represented intervals between notes and dots and commas that indicated rhythmic values.
From 1743 to 1744, he was secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, whose republican government Rousseau would refer to often in his later political work. After this, he returned to Paris, where he befriended and lived with Thérèse Levasseur, a semi-literate seamstress who, according to Rousseau, bore him five children, though this number may not be accurate. Rousseau's abandonment of his children became a source of embarrassment once he became known as a theorist of education and child-rearing, and was used by enemies including Voltaire to attack him. In his defense, Rousseau explained that he would have been a poor father, and, implausibly, that the children would have a better life at the foundling home.
In 1749, as Rousseau walked to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison, he read in the Mercure de France of an essay competition sponsored by the Académie de Dijon, asking whether the development of the arts and sciences had been morally beneficial. Rousseau claimed that this question caused him to have a moment of sudden inspiration by the roadside, during which he perceived the principle of the natural goodness of humanity on which all his later philosophical works were based. Rousseau was an enthusiastic supporter of the Italians against Jean-Philippe Rameau and others, making an important contribution with his Letter on French Music.
In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva where he reconverted to Calvinism and regained his official Genevan citizenship. In 1755 Rousseau completed his second major work, the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. This began a troubled period in Rousseau's personal relationships in which he gradually became estranged from his former friends such as Diderot and Grimm and from benefactors such as Madame d'Epinay.
Rousseau, in 1761 published the successful romantic novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (The New Heloise). Rousseau was forced to flee arrest and made stops in both Bern and Môtiers in Switzerland, where he enjoyed the protection of Frederick the Great of Prussia and his local representative, Lord Keith. While in Motiers, Rousseau wrote the Constitutional Project for Corsica (Projet de Constitution pour la Corse). Isolated at Wootton on the borders of Derbyshire and Staffordshire, Rousseau suffered a serious decline in his mental health and began to experience paranoid fantasies about plots against him involving Hume and others. As a condition of his return, he was not allowed to publish any books, but after completing his Confessions, Rousseau began private readings in 1771.
Rousseau continued to write until his death. In 1776 he completed Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques and began work on the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. While taking a morning walk on the estate of the Marquis de Giradin at Ermenonville (28 miles northeast of Paris), Rousseau suffered a hemorrhage and died on July 2, 1778.
Rousseau was initially buried on the Ile des Peupliers. The tomb was designed to resemble a rustic temple, to recall Rousseau's theories of nature. In 1834, the Genevan government reluctantly erected a statue in his honor on the tiny Ile Rousseau in Lake Geneva. In 2002, the Espace Rousseau was established at 40 Grand-Rue, Geneva, Rousseau's birthplace. society
Rousseau saw a fundamental divide between society and human nature. Rousseau contended that man was good by nature, a "noble savage" when in the state of nature (the state of all the "other animals", and the condition humankind was in before the creation of civilization and society), but is corrupted by society. in fact, speaking in terms of 'just' or 'wicked' is impossible in Rousseau's pre-political society. (It should be noted that Rousseau himself never used the phrase "noble savage".)
Society's negative influence on otherwise virtuous men centers, in Rousseau's philosophy, on its transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, into amour-propre, or pride. Rousseau was not the first to make this distinction;
In "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" Rousseau argued that the arts and sciences had not been beneficial to humankind because they were not human needs, but rather a result of pride and vanity.
His subsequent Discourse on Inequality tracked the progress and degeneration of mankind from a primitive state of nature to modern society. Rousseau associated this new self-awareness with a golden age of human flourishing. The resulting state of conflict led Rousseau to suggest that the first state was invented as a kind of social contract made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful. Rousseau's own conception of the social contract can be understood as an alternative to this fraudulent form of association. At the end of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in the eyes of others, which originated in the golden age, comes to undermine personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, hierarchy, and inequality.
Political theory
The Social Contract
Perhaps Rousseau's most important work is The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order. Rousseau claimed that the state of nature eventually degenerates into a brutish condition without law or morality, at which point the human race must adopt institutions of law or perish. According to Rousseau, by joining together through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free.
While Rousseau argues that sovereignty should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between sovereign and government. Rousseau was bitterly opposed to the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly. It has been argued that this would prevent Rousseau's ideal state being realized in a large society, though in modern times, communication may have advanced to the point where this is no longer the case. Much of the subsequent controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free.
Education
Rousseau set out his views on education in Émile, a semi-fictitious work detailing the growth of a young boy of that name, presided over by Rousseau himself. The aim of education, Rousseau says, is to learn how to live, and this is accomplished by following a guardian who can point the way to good living.
The growth of a child is divided into three sections, first to the age of about 12, when calculating and complex thinking is not possible, and children, according to his deepest conviction, live like animals.
The book is based on Rousseau's ideals of healthy living.
Rousseau's account of the education of Emile is, however, not an account of education of a gender-neutral "child." This is not an accidental feature of Rousseau's educational and political philosophy, it is essential to his account of the distinction between private, personal relations and the public world of political relations. The private sphere as Rousseau imagines it depends on the (naturalized) subordination of women in order for both it and the public political sphere (upon which it depends) to function as Rousseau imagines it could and should.
The education proposed in Émile has been criticized for being impractical, and the topic itself (the education of children) has led the text to be ignored by many studying Rousseau’s more “political” works. In the letter, Rousseau answers the criticism of impracticability: “You say quite correctly that it is impossible to produce an Emile.
Religion
Rousseau was most controversial in his own time for his views on religion. Rousseau attempted to defend himself against critics of his religious views in his Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris.
Legacy
Rousseau's ideas were influential at the time of the French Revolution although since popular sovereignty was exercised through representatives rather than directly, it cannot be said that the Revolution was in any sense an implementation of Rousseau's ideas. Subsequently, writers such as Benjamin Constant and Hegel sought to blame the excesses of the Revolution and especially the Reign of Terror on Rousseau, but the justice of their claims is a matter of controversy.
Rousseau was one of the first modern writers to seriously attack the institution of private property, and therefore is sometimes considered a forebear of modern socialism and communism (see Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, though Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings). Rousseau also questioned the assumption that majority will is always correct.
One of the primary principles of Rousseau's political philosophy is that politics and morality should not be separated.
Rousseau's ideas about education have profoundly influenced modern educational theory. John Darling's 1994 book Child-Centered Education and its Critics argues that the history of modern educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau.
In his main writings Rousseau identifies nature with the primitive state of savage man.
Hence, to go back to nature means to restore to man the forces of this natural process, to place him outside every oppressing bond of society and the prejudices of civilization. It is this idea that made his thought particularly important in Romanticism, though Rousseau himself is sometimes regarded as a figure of The Enlightenment.
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