Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher, essayist, and novelist, was born at Geneva. His mother having died a few days after his birth, he was brought up by an aunt and an erratic father who taught him to read through the medium of sentimental novels and Plutarch's Lives.

He had little formal education. After staying for about two years with a country minister at Bossey, he returned to Geneva and lived with an uncle. He was then apprenticed in turn to a notary and an engraver, the latter of whom treated him so brutally that in 1728 he left Geneva to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Rousseau was protected and befriended by Mme. de Warens, a convert to Roman Catholicism, who had left her native canton of Vaud to live at Annecy in Savoy, with financial support from the king of Sardinia and the ecclesiastical authorities. Rousseau's subsequent attachment to her was a decisive factor in his conversion to Roman Catholicism as well as in his emotional development.

Mme. de Warens

He made a formal abjuration of Protestantism at the hospice for catechumens at Turin. He then served for a time as a lackey, finally returning to Mme. de Warens in 1729. Thereafter, he led an unsettled life, restless travel alternating with a more stable existence at Chambéry, where Mme. de Warens had established herself.

Intellectually, the most important event of this phase of his life was a protracted spell of enthusiastic study under his own direction. A brief experience as a private tutor at Lyons in 1740 helped to create a lifelong interest in education and at the same time convinced Rousseau that he had no aptitude for this profession.

As he had acquired some musical competence at Annecy, he set out hopefully for Paris in 1742 with a new system of musical notation. Although this did not bring him the success he hoped for, he was introduced to a number of influential people, including the wealthy Mme. Dupin and her stepson M. de Francueil.

musical notation

In 1743, Rousseau was appointed secretary to the French ambassador at Venice, M. de Montaigu, but he lost this post the following year because of a quarrel with him. On his return to Paris, Rousseau increased his difficulties by an irregular union with an ignorant servant girl, Thérèse Le Vasseur, in 1745; by her he probably had five illegitimate children, who were all sent to a foundlings' home. He also met Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, and other philosophes and was invited to contribute musical articles to the Encyclopédie.

Rousseau's literary career began in 1750 with the publication of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, which had previously won a prize at the Academy of Dijon. However, his first real success came with the performance of his opera Le devin du village before Louis XV at Fontainebleau, but his refusal to allow himself to be presented to the king lost him any chance of securing a royal pension. A journey to Geneva in 1754 led to a reconciliation with the republic and a formal return to Protestantism.

After the publication in 1755 of his Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité, Rousseau felt increasingly unhappy in Paris, and in 1756 he installed himself in a small country house, called the Hermitage, which belonged to a rich friend, Mme. d'Épinay.

Contrat social

There followed a comparatively short but intense period of literary activity that saw the publication of the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Émile (1762), and the Contrat social (1762).

During this time Rousseau's relations with the Encyclopedists became increasingly strained, with intellectual differences, especially on the subject of religion, being aggravated by personal quarrels with former friends such as Diderot and the Baron von Grimm.

In 1762 the condemnation of Émile by the Paris Parlement forced him to flee from France and settle in Neuchâtel under the protection of the king of Prussia. In the Lettre à M. de Beaumont (1763) Rousseau vigorously defended the "Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard," which had been included in the fourth book of Émile, against its condemnation by the archbishop of Paris; this was followed in 1764 by another polemical work, the Lettres écrites de la montagne, provoked by increasing opposition from the Genevan authorities to his political and religious views.

local hostility

Alarmed by local hostility, Rousseau decided to leave the Neuchâtel region in 1765, and he accepted an invitation from the philosopher David Hume to make his home in England. His arrival in that country in 1766 and his subsequent residence in Derbyshire were disturbed by the appearance of abnormal emotional and mental reactions, culminating in the irrational conviction that Hume's invitation had been a mere pretext for Rousseau's defamation.

After quarreling violently with Hume (who riposted by publishing an account of the affair), Rousseau fled panic-stricken to France in 1767. For the next few years he moved from place to place, oppressed by the thought of universal persecution. He eventually settled in Paris in 1770 and died suddenly on July 2, 1778, less than two months after he had gone to live on the estate of the marquis de Girardin at Ermenonville.

The chief literary activity of Rousseau's last years was the composition of a remarkable series of personal works, the Confessions, on which he had worked intensively during his stay in England; the dialogues known as Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, a curiously pathological document illuminated by some pages of remarkable brilliance and insight; and the beautiful but unfinished Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. These writings are remarkable for their lyrical power and sustained efforts at self-analysis.
thought

personal emphasis

From the very first Rousseau's work betrayed the strongly personal emphasis of a writer who felt that he did not truly belong to his immediate environment. Being of Genevan origin, largely self-taught, and endowed with a particularly sensitive temperament, he could never bring himself fully to accept the social and moral implications of French culture, even though he never ceased to admire French taste.

In 1749, as he was on his way to Vincennes to visit his imprisoned friend Diderot, he saw in a copy of the Mercure de France the subject of the prize essay set by the Academy of Dijon: whether the restoration of the arts and sciences has contributed to the purification of manners.

In the Confessions he writes that at that moment he experienced a sudden "illumination" and "inspiration," the dazzling vision of a "new universe," which impelled him to answer the academicians' question with an emphatic "No!" Although this viewpoint was already familiar to a certain type of traditional Christian moralist, Rousseau struck a new personal note remarkable for its deeply felt sincerity; he always refused to consider himself as a professional man of letters and stressed his role as an independent writer with a message for humanity.

message for humanity

NATURE AND SOCIETY. Rousseau's early works (the two discourses and the Lettre à d'Alembert) developed the fundamental antithesis that he deemed to exist between contemporary society and the nature of man. European civilization was indicted for having sacrificed the moral demands of human nature to the superficial allure of a purely intellectual culture and thus for having replaced natural by artificial needs.

The artificial uniformity of behavior that society imposes on people causes them to ignore "the duties of man and the needs of nature," so that appearance and reality are constantly at variance in modern social life, as for example in the case of an excessive regard for politeness and convention concealing the most ruthless and calculating egoism.

Likewise, insisted Rousseau, the sciences and the arts, in spite of their brilliance, are not the genuine expression of fundamental human needs but the result of pride and vanity. The rapid growth of luxury and idleness serves merely to increase the corruption of the contemporary situation. Consequently, as culture appears to attain an ever increasing splendor, genuine human relationships become steadily weaker.

original nature

Man is alienated from his original nature and prevented from being his real self; a perpetual prey to inner contradictions, he vainly grasps at objects outside himself as he neglects the true lessons of nature in order to pursue the illusions of opinion.

To "society" Rousseau opposed "virtue"—a constant theme of his early works. Virtue confers stability and unity upon human existence because it subordinates idle speculation to the active needs of the moral life. Unlike mere reflection, it induces "strength and vigor of soul," allowing full expression to man's genius and conferring on his existence a solidity and permanence that are quite unlike the ephemeral brilliance of contemporary culture.

Whereas society forces man to assume the mask of hypocrisy and deceit as a means of satisfying his selfish interests, virtue, "the sublime science of simple souls," gives him an authentic openness and innocence that allow him to reveal himself to others as he truly is.

primitive state

A particularly serious feature of modern society is the prevalence of an unnatural inequality based on power and wealth. In the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité Rousseau examines this phenomenon in the light of man's evolution from the primitive state to his present existence as a political being and concludes that modern conditions represent a fall from happiness into misery.

In spite of its historical form, this discourse, as the author himself admits, is a purely hypothetical and imaginative reconstruction that deliberately ignores facts, whether historical or theological, in order to concentrate on the nature of man as it is revealed to Rousseau's intuitive perception.

If the state of nature can never be known as a historical fact, it at least serves as a useful concept that enables him to distinguish man's original qualities from fortuitous historical accretions.

without difficulty

Limited and instinctive though the life of primitive man may have been, it was at least a happy one inasmuch as the savage knew how to live in accordance with his own innate needs. Leading an isolated existence in the forests, satisfying his basic appetite for food and sex without difficulty, untouched by modern man's anxiety before illness and death, he was largely self-sufficient; the primordial urge toward self-preservation was effectively counterbalanced by an innate feeling of natural pity that prevented him from inflicting needless pain upon his fellow men.

Man was from the outset endowed with free will and perfectibility, but these became active only when the first rudimentary social communities, based mainly on the family, were established, a period that Rousseau treats as the golden age of humanity since it lay halfway between the brutishness of primitive existence and the corruption of political societies.

The discovery of agriculture and metallurgy and the distinction between "mine" and "thine" meant that people had to work together, and this inevitably led to the establishment of property.

rich and poor

Men then became divided into rich and poor and, later, into powerful and weak, so that the inequality of the social system was at last made permanent through the institution of laws and political organization. In Rousseau's opinion the historical process will culminate in the triumph of despotism, which makes all men once again equal because all have become slaves of one master.

Whereas the early discourses dealt mainly with general principles, the publication of d'Alembert's article "Geneva" in the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie in 1757, with its suggestion that the Genevans would benefit from the establishment of a theater, led Rousseau to deal with a specific aspect of his criticism of society.

In his various replies to early critics he had already insisted that man, having once left the primitive state, could never return to it; he also maintained that it was the large states, especially the monarchies of Europe, which had traveled furthest on the road to perdition.

close to nature

However, small republics like Geneva, though no longer close to nature, still retained a relative simplicity and innocence and could be protected against further corruption. To introduce the theater into Geneva was, in Rousseau's eyes, to bring an evil product of society into a comparatively unspoiled community.

The Lettre à d'Alembert also provided him with an opportunity of examining not only the general characteristics of the theater but also the whole question of what amusements are best suited to man's true nature.

Starting from the assumption that all valid entertainment must "derive from man's work, relationships and needs," Rousseau insists that it must be an integral part of man's daily life, different from his work and yet inspired by the same spirit.

artificial entertainment

The theater, however, is primarily an artificial entertainment, the product of idleness and vanity and the fomenter of dangerous passions and emotions; it is always subservient to the impulses that create it and remains incapable of directing people toward moral activity. The theater is typical of a large city like Paris, with its reversal of natural values.

Whereas for Rousseau woman is naturally modest and self-effacing, the theater makes her a shameless figure who transforms love into a public spectacle; the very existence of actresses also sets the example of a completely unfeminine way of life that is characteristic of a society in which women set the tone and rule the salons, reducing men to a condition of abject and effeminate dependence.

By contrast, Rousseau extols the simplicity of the Montagnons, the simple, industrious mountain dwellers whom he remembered from his youth and recalls with heartfelt enthusiasm. Unlike modern men such people relied upon their own creative resources for their work and entertainment.

remarkable evocation

The Genevans, too, through their "societies" and "circles," wisely allowed men and women to indulge in their own separate pastimes. The Lettre ends with a remarkable evocation of the kind of national entertainment that, in Rousseau's opinion, would be suitable for a small homogeneous community like Geneva.

The Genevans should actively participate in a joyous public entertainment that takes place "beneath the sky" and in the presence of their fellow citizens; in this way the whole community would be inspired by feelings that are both social and human.

Perhaps one of the gravest general aspects of society's harmful influence on the nature of man is its constant tendency to transform amour de soi (self-love) into amour-propre (pride). Although this antithesis was not peculiar to Rousseau, who had already noted its existence in Vauvenargues, it does, occupy a particularly significant position in his social criticism.

significant position

Amour de soi is always good and, in its purest state, quite spontaneous because it expresses the real essence of human existence. It is an absolute feeling or passion that serves as the source of all genuinely natural impulses and emotions; already revealing itself at the instinctive level as the desire for selfpreservation, it assumes a much nobler expression as soon as it is combined with reason.

Being in complete uniformity with the principle of order, it will affect all the main aspects of human existence as it brings the individual into contact with his own inner self, his physical environment, and his fellow men.

Unfortunately modern society has changed this natural amour de soi, which makes a man what he truly is, into amour-propre, an artificial reaction originating in an anxious reflection that induces a man to be forever comparing himself with others and even finding his sole pleasure in their misfortune or inferiority; through amour-propre he is taken outside himself into the realm of illusion and opinion and so prevented from being a complete person.

modern civilization

EDUCATION. Having diagnosed the malady of modern civilization, Rousseau was faced with the task of suggesting a cure, and this led him into the domain of education and politics, activities that are, or should be, rooted in man's moral nature.

Rousseau was convinced that man's original nature is good, but that it has been corrupted mainly by the historical accident of society. It therefore seemed quite consistent to affirm that men are wicked but that man himself is good. To be good is to exist in accordance with the intrinsic potentialities of one's nature, and Émile seeks to trace the natural development of a human being brought up in the country away from the nefarious influence of contemporary social life.

From this point of view the work is not just a manual of education but, as Rousseau himself points out, a philosophical treatise on the goodness of human nature. It is less concerned with laying down the practical details of a specific pedagogic method than with describing the fundamental principles that underlie the whole of man's development from infancy to maturity. Rousseau's ultimate object is to teach the art of living, for man's first duty, he says, is to be human.

grow in accordance

The educator must realize that "vice and error, alien to man's constitution, are introduced into it from outside"; his first task will be to keep away harmful influences from the young child. This is why Émile is set in a rural environment that allows the child to grow in accordance with his own nature. Early education is therefore largely negative insofar as it is mainly concerned with removing obstacles that might hinder this development.

From the first Rousseau stresses the importance of a progressive education: Each stage of the process must be carefully adapted to the individual's developing needs and so follow "the natural progress of the human heart."

In this respect Rousseau uses in his own way the genetic method of contemporary thinkers like d'Alembert, Condillac, and Comte de Buffon, who, in turn, had taken over the notion of the genealogy of ideas developed by John Locke in his famous Essay concerning Human Understanding.

psychological analysis

In Émile, however, as in the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité, Rousseau does not strive to establish an inductive law based on the empirical examination of facts but starts from a fundamental principle (man's natural goodness) that is derived initially from personal intuition, though he believes it to be subsequently verifiable by observation and psychological analysis. Émile therefore involves certain metaphysical elements, but these are referred back to the concrete aspects of human nature.

Rousseau maintains that a truly progressive education will recognize that the child has his own special needs as a being who exists in his own right. "Nature wants children to be children before being men.... Childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking and feeling."

Since the child's needs are largely physical, negative education "tends to perfect the organs, instruments of our knowledge." Incapable of dealing with abstractions, the child must be educated through contact with things. To him dependence on things will be natural and inevitable; acknowledging only the "heavy yoke of necessity," he will escape the tyranny of any human will.

quite compatible

Unlike the despotic power of men necessity is quite compatible with properly controlled freedom since it lets the human being exercise his powers within the limits prescribed for him by nature. "The truly free man" wishes to do no more than this. Well-regulated freedom thus provides the only valid basis and aim of sound education.

Rousseau recognizes that even at the stage of greatest inner harmony, the child must be prepared for the future, for in him there is a reservoir of potential energy that he does not immediately need. The educator's task is to hold back this energy, this "superfluous aspect of his immediate being," until it can be effectively used.

It is particularly important to avoid any precocious excitement of the imagination that may be the source of future unhappiness. These dangers will be largely averted if, after the lesson of necessity, the child learns that of utility, his developing reason being applied only to what interests and helps him. That is why his early judgment must be formed not through words or abstractions but through sensations and feelings.

positive education

A truly positive education begins only when the child becomes aware of his relationships with other people, although these early social lessons will be based on sensibility rather than reason, in particular on the innate feeling of pity, with its later concomitants of love and aversion. There are no good or bad passions, says Rousseau.

All are good when they are under our control; all are bad when they control us. Through the force of our passions we are impelled beyond ourselves; through the "superabundance of our strength" we are induced to "extend our being."

With the growth of sensibility, reason, and imagination the child leaves the self-sufficiency of the primitive stage for a fuller life involving relations with the physical realm of nature and the world of human beings. The educational process must therefore be carefully timed and controlled so that the various potentialities of the human being are brought to fulfillment in an orderly and harmonious manner.

educated for society

It is clear from the last book of Émile that man must be educated for society, though not necessarily for society in its present form. Man's nature is not fully mature until it becomes social.

However, the natural man in the state of nature and the natural man in the social state cannot be identical, for whereas the former is predominantly an instinctive, primitive creature living on the spontaneous expression of his innate vitality, the latter is a rational, moral being aware of his obligations to other people, a man called upon to subordinate the impulse of "goodness" to the demands of "virtue." Therefore, only in society can a genuinely human morality become possible.

If by "nature" is meant the merely primordial responses of the presocial man, then it is true to say that "good institutions denature man" inasmuch as they raise him up from the absolute self-sufficiency of the isolated primitive state to the level of a moral, relative existence based on an awareness of the common good and the need to live in harmonious relationship with his fellow men.

morality and politics

Since morality inevitably involves the problem of man's life as a social being, it is impossible to separate morality and politics, and Rousseau states most emphatically that "those who want to treat morality and politics separately will never understand anything about either." This is a most important aspect of his political thinking.

If "nature" intended man for a moral existence, then it also intended him for social life; indeed, only through the individual's participation in the "common unity" can full personal maturity become possible. "Nature" is still the norm, but one that has to be re-created, as it were, at a higher level, conferring on man a new rational unity that replaces the purely instinctive unity of the primitive state.

POLITICAL THEORY. There appears to be no valid reason for finding, as some critics have done, any fundamental contradiction between Émile and the Contra social. Such a difficulty arises only when anachronistic attempts are made to explain Rousseau's thought in purely individualist or collectivist terms.

isolated individual

If at first sight Émile seems to be an isolated individual, this is mainly because Rousseau wanted to stress the importance of the human being's natural development, and it in no way excludes the idea that all true education must eventually be for society.

In itself the particular form of education, like that of government, must be determined by specific historical and physical conditions, but Rousseau was less concerned with this question than with that of the fundamental principles on which all true education and all true government must be based. In this respect Émile and the Contrat social are similar since each is a theoretical, normative work.

Rousseau points out in his correspondence that the Contrat social is a philosophical discussion of political right (the work is actually subtitled Principes du droit politique) rather than an examination of any existing form of government. As he says in the introduction to his work, he is taking "men as they are" and "the laws as they can be."

Baron de Montesquieu

He seeks to reconcile "what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility are not divided." In Rousseau's eyes this is what distinguishes his approach to political problems from Baron de Montesquieu's. Whereas Montesquieu is concerned with "the positive right of established governments," Rousseau, as the theorist of political right, examines the philosophical basis of all legitimate government.

Although the Contrat social has often been described as the forerunner of totalitarianism, this interpretation is certainly not consistent with Rousseau's conscious intention, for from the very outset his overriding preoccupation is the same as it was in Émile—the problem of freedom.

No doubt, just as the concept of nature undergoes a radical transformation when it is applied to society, so the natural freedom enjoyed by man in the state of nature differs in important respects from the civic freedom of the social state; both, however, are natural to man at different stages of his development.

primitive man

Man living in society faces a problem that does not affect primitive man— namely, the possible tyranny of his fellow men. Now, a true and just society can never be based on sheer force, for right can never be equated with might.

Rousseau vigorously repudiates traditional views that seek to justify the right of conquerors to subject the vanquished to permanent enslavement; no society founded on such a principle can ever be legitimate. Man's participation in society must be consistent with his existence as a free and rational being. Society is therefore unthinkable without a freedom that expresses man's most fundamental attribute.

"To give up freedom is to give up one's human quality: to remove freedom from one's will is to remove all morality from one's actions." Moreover, it is with the emergence of society that man comes into possession of his freedom and thus attains the status of a moral being.

political society

The institution of any genuine political society must be the result of a social pact, or free association of intelligent human beings who deliberately choose to form the type of society to which they will owe allegiance; this is the only valid basis for a community that wishes to live in accordance with the requirements of human freedom.

However, there still remains the problem of finding a form of association that will continue to respect the freedom that brought it into being. Although man is naturally good, he is constantly threatened by forces that not only alienate him from himself but also transform him into a tyrant or a slave. From this point of view the political problem is not dissimilar from the pedagogic one.

How is man to be protected from the tyranny of the human will? Just as the child has to be liberated from dependence upon human caprice in order to confront necessity, so the individual is to be preserved from tyranny by "an excessive dependence" of all citizens on a new kind of necessity, on something that is greater than the citizen himself and yet in one sense a part of his life.

political problem

Rousseau seeks a form of association in which "each one uniting with all obeys, however, only himself and remains as free as before." In other words, "each one giving himself to all gives himself to nobody." The possibility of inequality and injustice will be avoided through the "total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the community"; if such alienation were less than total, it would expose the individual to domination by others.

As it is, the citizen does not obey some sectional interest but the general will, which is a "real force, superior to the action of any particular will." Nor, in Rousseau's view, need this arouse any apprehension, for unlike the individual will which concerns itself with specific and perhaps selfish interests, the general will is always directed toward the general good.