Rousseau

Introduction

Varun Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy, both for his contributions to political philosophy and moral psychology and for his effect on subsequent thinkers.

Rousseau considered most philosophy and philosophers as post hoc rationalizers of self-interest, apologists for various sorts of dictatorship, and contributing to the modern individual's separation from humanity's innate instinct for compassion. The overarching objective of Rousseau's work is to discover a means to preserve human freedom in a world where people are increasingly reliant on one another to meet their wants.

Early Life

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in 1712 in the independent Calvinist city-state of Geneva. He was the son of watchmaker Isaac Rousseau and Suzanne Bernard. Nine days after Rousseau was born, his mother passed away, and he was raised and educated by his father until he was ten years old.

As a member of the ostensibly independent assembly of Geneva, Isaac Rousseau was one of the few minorities of the city's citizens who held the title of citizen of Geneva. This rank was to be passed down to Jean-Jacques. In his later narratives, he claimed that his father's haphazard education encompassed reading works by ancient republican historians like Plutarch in addition to republican patriotism instillation. Jean-Jacques was left in the care of a clergyman in the neighboring town of Bossey after his father left this city to avoid being arrested, and he was later apprenticed to an engraver.

At sixteen, Rousseau left Geneva and was influenced by Francoise-Louise de la Tour, Baronne de Warens, a noblewoman who had converted to Roman Catholicism. In April 1728, Rousseau became a Roman Catholic after traveling to Turin; he worked for a while as a domestic worker in a noble home in Turin. It was during this period that Rousseau had a humiliating incident where he made up a false accusation against another member of staff for stealing a ribbon. He was profoundly affected by this incident.

After a brief stint preparing to become a Catholic priest, Rousseau went on to pursue a brief career as a traveling musician, music copyist, and educator. He saw Mme de Warens again in 1731 at Chambrry, where he first temporarily fell in love before taking on the role of house manager. He spent the remaining years of the 1730s with Mme de Warens before relocating to Lyon in 1740 to work as an instructor. This employment was his first encounter with prominent members of the French Enlightenment and put him in the sphere of both Condillac and d'Alembert. He left for Paris in 1742, having developed a new system of musical notation based on numbers, which he presented to the Academy of Sciences.

Although the Academy rejected the system, Rousseau met Denis Diderot around this time. After serving for a brief time as the French Ambassador's secretary in Venice, Rousseau relocated to Paris permanently in 1744, where he continued to focus mostly on music and started contributing to Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedia.

Rousseau met Thersese Levasseur, a laundry maid with little literacy, in 1745 and eventually became his wife. In Rousseau's own words, they had five children, all of whom were placed in the foundling hospital soon after they were born, a situation that in eighteenth-century France virtually resulted in death. Voltaire eventually used Rousseau's abandoning of his children against him.

Some Research and Experiment

Rousseau while aimlessly perusing a newspaper in 1749 on his way to Vincennes to see the temporarily incarcerated Diderot, he stumbled upon the notice of an essay competition run by the Academy of Dijon. The Academy invited papers regarding enhancing or deteriorating public morality due to advancements in the arts and sciences. Later in life, Rousseau claimed to have had an insight that featured the idea that humanity is good at heart but perverted by society-a notion that would become crucial to his worldview.

Rousseau's counterintuitive thesis-'social growth,' including that of the arts and sciences, is destructive to civic virtue and individual moral character-won him first prize in his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, also known as the First Discourse. The Discourse, which was released in 1751, is significant primarily because Rousseau introduced themes in it that he would later expand in other works, including the natural virtue of the common person and the moral decay caused by the desire for distinction and greatness. Rousseau became well-known after the First Discourse and responded to several criticisms.

When Rousseau arrived in Paris at 30, he had the good fortune to meet Denis Diderot, a young man from the provinces who was also traveling to the city in search of literary glory. As the focal point of a community of intellectuals, or philosophes, who congregated around the venerable French Encyclopedia, of which Diderot was chosen editor, the two quickly achieved enormous success.

Encyclopedie writers included philosophers and reforming, even contrary, pamphleteers in their contributions, making it a significant vehicle of radical and anti-clerical thinking. Having the most innovative ideas and the most powerful and expressive writing style among all of them, Rousseau quickly rose to prominence.

Rousseau wrote both prose and music, and one of his operas, Le Devin du Village, drew such acclaim from the king (Louis XV) and the court that he could have led a comfortable life as a fashionable composer, but something in his Calvinist blood rejected such worldly glory. Indeed, at the age of 37, Rousseau had an "illumination" while strolling to Vincennes to visit Diderot, who was imprisoned there for his irreligious works. Rousseau writes in his late-life 'Confessions' (1782-89) that it came to him in a "terrible flash" that modern progress had corrupted people rather than helped them.

Rousseau went on to compose his first significant work, Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750; A Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts), a prize essay for the Academy of Dijon in which he argues that the history of human life on Earth has been a history of disintegration.

Due to Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism, Rousseau was no longer eligible for his Genevan citizenship, which was inherited. He was able to reclaim his citizenship in 1754 by returning to Calvinism. His Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, sometimes known as the Second Discourse or just the 'Discourse on Inequality,' was published the next year. Once more, this was a response to the Academy of Dijon's essay competition. Even though the Discourse on Inequality is a significantly more sophisticated work, Rousseau started to explore his ideas of human social growth and moral psychology.

The work, which takes the form of an epistolary, is a valuable additional resource for understanding Rousseau's social philosophy. It includes elements such as a portrayal of a rural community and the existence of a cunning genius who uses cunning artifice to create the appearance of natural harmony, thereby foreshadowing both the legislator of The Social Contract and the tutor in Emile. The publication of these pieces in 1762 represented the pinnacle of Rousseau's intellectual output.

Unfortunately, Rousseau experienced a personal catastrophe as a result of the publishing of some works. Because of their theological heterodoxy, Emile was condemned in Paris, and The Social Contract was condemned in Geneva. Rousseau addressed these condemnations in his Letters from the Mountains. As a result of the unfriendly actions of the Genevan government, Rousseau gave up his citizenship in May of 1763. He was obliged to flee in order to avoid being arrested; he first sought safety in Switzerland before accepting David Hume's invitation to travel to England in January 1766.

Conjectural History and Moral Psychology

According to Rousseau, everything has an innate desire to survive. This is why amour de soi, or self-love, is a drive unique to humans. Prioritizing our most basic biological needs-such as those for food, shelter, and warmth-is what Amour de Soi instructs us to do.

Rousseau believed that as humans are created by a kind creator, just like other creatures, they are naturally endowed with the capacity to meet their basic wants. In addition to this fundamental desire for survival, Rousseau proposes another passion that he names 'pitie' (compassion).

'Pitie' commands us to care for and alleviate the suffering of others, especially animals, wherever it is possible to do so without jeopardizing our survival. 'Pitie' is an original drive that coexists with amour de soi in some of his writings, like the 'Discourse on Inequality,' but it is a development of amour de soi that is thought to be the source of all passions in other writings, like Emile and the Essay on the Origin of Languages.

Rousseau envisions a multi-stage evolution of humanity from the most primitive state to a state akin to a modern complex society in the Discourse on Inequality. Frederick Neuhouser (2014) has suggested that the evolutionary story is simply a philosophical technique designed to divide the natural and the artificial parts of human psychology. Rousseau disputes that this is a reconstruction of history as it truly occurred. Humans alter their physical and psychological relationships with one another at every stage of this hypothetical evolution, which has an impact on how they view themselves-what Rousseau refers to as the "sentiment of their existence."

People live almost exclusively solitary lives in their primordial stage. In this state, the human race barely survives, copulation and reproduction occur when proto-humans happen to meet, and child care is scarce and short-lived. At this point in human evolution, if humans are naturally good, then goodness is only the absence of evil. In this context, the two qualities that set humans apart from the other species that coexist within the primordial world are their freedom and perfectibility.

Here, perfectibility is the ability to learn and discover new and improved ways to satisfy demands; freedom is merely the capability to not be controlled only by appetite. When combined, these traits offer people the ability to become moral, logical, and self-aware. However, it will show that these traits are more likely to doom individuals in a world of social dissimulation, oppression, dominance, and deception.

Rousseau's Philosophy of Life

Humans in the present world derive their entire sense of self and worth from the opinions of others, which Rousseau views as damaging personal authenticity and freedom. The two paths to freedom that Rousseau primarily examines in his mature work are- first, which is political in nature and aims to build institutions that allow and promote the coexistence of free and equal citizens in a community where they exercise their own sovereign power; the second, which is more focused on child development and education, fosters autonomy and steers clear of the most harmful kinds of self-interest.

Rousseau is persistently and overwhelmingly pessimistic that humanity will escape a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom despite his belief that humans can coexist in relationships of equality and freedom. Apart from his philosophical contributions, Rousseau was also involved in the fields of composition and music theory, novel writing, autobiography, and botany.

Rousseau had a significant influence on and forerunner of the romantic movement due to his admiration of the wonders of nature and his emphasis on the value of feeling and emotion. The interests and concerns that characterize Rousseau's philosophical work also permeate these other endeavors to a great degree, and his contributions to supposedly non-philosophical domains frequently shed light on his philosophical arguments and convictions.

Rousseau's Claim to Reconcile Freedom and Authority

The value of liberty or freedom is the core of Rousseau's concerns throughout his work; however, he employs the term in a variety of ways. He considers the ability to choose, and so to act against instinct and inclination, to be one of the characteristics that distinguish humans from other animal species and allow for really moral behavior.

For instance, in the 'Discourse on Inequality,' Rousseau describes people as being free to choose any way of life and as resisting the impulses of instinct, while animals are essentially described in Cartesian terms as machinery programmed to a predetermined pattern of conduct. Because people can choose to reject good impulses, this allows for both the evolution of the human species and its downfall. According to Rousseau, the capacity for volition and free will, as well as the freedom to act in opposition to the "mechanism of the senses," are completely outside the bounds of reality and cannot be explained by science.

Rousseau also holds that every uniquely moral deed originates from this freedom of choice. The relationship between morality and freedom of choice is crucial to Adam Smith's defense of the dictatorial government in The Social Contract, where he claims that giving up one's freedom for the rule of another is against human nature. And that doing so in favor of another person's authority is equivalent to "depriving one's actions of all morality."

Although Rousseau attempts to clarify his assertion that the establishment of the legitimate state does not result in a net loss of freedom in Book I, Chapter 8 of 'The Social Contract,' he makes a somewhat different point. The idea of exchanging one kind of freedom (natural freedom) for another (social freedom) is central to the new claim.

An unrestricted right to everything is a component of natural freedom; this concept is similar to Hobbes's 'right of nature' in Leviathan. Since everyone has the freedom to do anything they want, this liberty may have very little practical value in a world where people are dependent on one another. This is, thus, because a person's ability to obtain what they desire is constrained by both their physical strength and the physical strength of others who oppose them.

In addition, the unavoidable struggle for limited resources set people against one another, resulting in bloodshed and uncertainty from the unrestricted exercise of natural freedom. This situation is changed by the establishment of the state and the enactment of laws that represent the collective will.

Individuals are entitled to an area of equal freedom under the law, security for their personal belongings, and safety for their person when sovereign power is in force. There will be a net gain in freedom over the pre-political state, so long as the law that applies to everyone equally is not invasive or meddlesome-which Rousseau thinks it won't be because no one has an incentive to enact onerous rules.

The Confessions: Rousseau's Autobiography

The detailed life story of Rousseau can be found in his 'Confessions,' which bears the same title as Saint Augustine's autobiography, written more than a millennium earlier. The 'Confessions' was written by Rousseau at the end of his career, but it wasn't released until after his passing. Interestingly, "Reveries of the Solitary Walker" and "Rousseau Judge of Jean Jacques," two of his other later works, are similarly autobiographical.

What stands out most about the 'Confessions' is the tone Rousseau adopts at times, which is almost apologetic, to describe the different public and private events in his life-many of which sparked intense controversy. This book makes it very evident that Rousseau viewed the 'Confessions' as a chance to defend himself against what he believed to be unjustified attacks on his persona and misinterpretations of his philosophical ideas.

Rousseau's life was marked by struggle, beginning with his apprenticeship and continuing in academic circles with other Enlightenment philosophers such as Diderot and Voltaire, as well as with Parisian and Swiss authorities and even David Hume. Although Rousseau analyzes and attempts to explain these difficulties, it is not his sole objective to justify all of his actions.

Rousseau chastises himself and accepts responsibility for many of these occurrences, including his extramarital affairs. At times, his paranoia is obvious as he recalls his severe feuds with friends and peers. And it is here that the 'Confession's' essential tension is revealed. Rousseau is attempting to justify his acts to the public to obtain its acceptance, while also affirming his distinctiveness as a critic of that same public.

Some Interesting Facts

Throughout that time, Rousseau's main area of interest was music, and he made his most significant contributions to the discipline in the years 1752 and 1753. His opera 'Le Devin du Village' was the first of these, and it became popular right away, remaining in the repertory for a century. The second was his involvement in the 'quenelle des bouffons,' a dispute that erupted after an Italian troupe touring Paris performed Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona. It pitted supporters of the French style of music against those of Italian music.

Through his Letter on French Music, Rousseau-who had already grown to enjoy Italian music while living in Venice-joined the debate, and the dispute also influenced his Essay on 'The Origin of Languages.' Rameau placed more emphasis on harmony and the connections between physics, mathematics, and music than Rousseau did on the significance of melody and the expression of emotion as fundamental to the purpose of music. Rousseau went so far as to say that French is fundamentally unmusical, a claim that seems to be at odds with his behavior in Le Devin.

Conclusion

In the end, Rousseau is both a critic and a supporter of social contract theory. Throughout his work, he believes that society has perverted humans, and he, above all, rejects Hobbes' concept of an ultimate Leviathan. Simultaneously, to create his own somewhat different Social Contract, which he sees as the only way to avoid corruption, he employs ideas from the social contract tradition, such as the idea that the people should give up sovereignty to authority to preserve their freedom.