Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778)
Man is innately good.
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If we were to look at the things you and I assume
are "true", and we were to make a list of the men
who thought of those ideas, Rousseau would rank
up there with Plato and Aristotle, Newton,
Jefferson, and even Paul and Christ. Yet unlike
these other seminal figures, Rousseau seems to
have invented his world view -- the one most of us
now accept -- from whole clothe, alone, and
against the currents of everyone else around
him. He is truly the individual genius who
radically alters the way all others think and feel.
His basic thesis: man is naturally good, and anything that is
not natural has corrupted us from this natural state.
Like Locke's tabula rasa, all Romantic philosophy and sensibility
stems from this single, radical idea.
The Noble Savage
This idea is in turn rooted in the fact that
we feel before we think -- that emotion is
natural and thinking a product of social
conditioning -- suffering is caused by our
struggle to reconcile our "true" emotional
selves with social expectations.
"God makes all things good; man meddles
with them and they become evil. He forces
one soil to yield the products of another,
one tree to bear another's fruit. [...] He
destroys and defaces all things; he loves all
that is deformed and monstrous; he will
have nothing as nature made it, not even
man himself, who must learn his paces lie
a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his
master's taste like the trees in his garden.” - Emile
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In stark contrast to Enlightenment rationality,
Rousseau emphasis the primacy of emotion as
a means of attending the Truth. Emotion
is natural and precedes Locke's Experience and
Reflection, and what is natural is Godly and
therefore good.
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This is perhaps his biggest contribution to
modern thinking.
Emotion
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Authorities tend to punish the inherently
innocent and good
Physical punishment does not lead to
rehabilitation (or education)
Justice
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All behavior (as well as Locke's "Human
Understanding" or knowledge) is learned.
This includes sexual perversion, criminal mind
and criminal behavior
Education
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Is created by social injustice.
Generally, the criminal is the inherently good
individual who has been corrupted by the
forces of an unjust or selfish authority,
including other, more powerful individuals, or
the church or government or other institutions.
Crime
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a) "amour de soi" or self love. We share this trait with
all animals and it's what we now would call the
instinct of self preservation
b) "amour propre" is a contaminated version of "self
love": This is selfish love in which we privilege our
own desires over the needs of others. He believes
it's not natural but caused by social forces (see
below)
c) "pité" or compassion or empathy: This is
Rousseau's radical step: love -- love of others,
compassion -- must have been natural or we would
never have survived as a species. It
exists before Locke's "reflection", that is: thinking or
reason.
Three Types of Love
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Rousseau offers our final step in constructing
our modern conception of love – they way most
of us see it today.
Essentially he secularizes the Hebrew and
Christian concept dictating that we a) love God
with all our hearts and b) that we love one
another as God loves us.
Rousseau argued that love could save any of us
now, here, in this world. Or, as John Lennon
put it, “Love is all you need.”
Love And Happiness
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Rousseau’s philosophy is generally called
“Romanticism”, but it’s important to realize he was more
interested in compassion for others than in what we now
call “romantic” or sexual love.
This raises the important question: does Mary Shelley
confuse the two kinds of love, or does the Creature?
Romantic Love
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Rousseau believed that it was “property” – the private
ownership of things – that had caused mankind’s original
fall from grace: the love of stuff corrupts our inherent love
for one another.
He believed that the closer we are to nature, the closer we
are to God; this idea reversed the way Westerners had
always envisioned our relationship to the natural world.
His Social Contract concepts are fundamental to our
conception of democracy and encoded in our
Constitution.
All five of his own children, born out of marriage, were
sent to the orphanage, and he descended into mental
illness in his later years.
Last, Less Relevant Points