PHIL 2027Philosophy of Rousseau

Introduction

Who was Jean-Jacques Rousseau? (1712-1778)

Born Geneva 1712Son of a watchmakerNo formal education; read Plutarch with his father;Apprenticed to an engraver, but escaped

(theme of freedom)Led a wandering life

(more freedom!)until he arrived in Paris in 1741

to search for an occupation.

Paris—1740’sWorked as a diplomat, a tutor, secretary and all-round in-house intellectual for the rich and famous (e.g. tax farmers)Music:

system of musical notation, in use to this day; Dissertation sur la musique moderne (1743);

Chemistry: Institutions chymiques, set up lab with Dupin de Francueil, son of his patron, M. Dupin;

Café life—Diderot, d’Alembert (eds. of Encyclopédie) and other Enlightenment figures;

Aceppted major Enlightenment ideas: progress through science, utility, Lockean sensationalism, and materialism.

D’Alembert (l.) & Diderot (r.)

Enlightenment IdeasNature as standard or guide for morals, law and society,

but what is nature? A machine, a nurturing mother, or a set of impersonal physical forces apprehensible through mathematical laws? Philosophers differed.Revival of ancient atomist idea that there is only matter in motion (Democritus, Lucretius) Watchmaker God or no God at all (any political implications in absolute monarchy?)

Truth: reason tears away the veil from truth—see frontispiece to Encyclopédie);

Rousseau’s motto: ‘to submit one’s life to the truth’

How to find truth? Via Descartes (innate ideas)—increasingly rejected, via Locke (senses) and Francis Bacon’s empiricism?

Reason tears away the veil of Truth (Encyclopédie, frontispiece)

The spirit of system—systems of knowledge

Rousseau’s works Title Date Subject

Disc. Sci & Arts* 1750 Sci/arts correlate w/ moral decay

Village Soothsayer 1752 Opera in simple Italian style

Disc…Inequality* 1755 The origins of inequality in society

Julie, or the New Heloise

1761 Novel extolling family values

Emile* 1762 Pedagogical system

Social Contract 1762 Political reform

Confessions 1782 Autobiography

Rousseau’s view of his works

* = referred to in the 2nd letter to Malesherbes;

‘Everything that I was able to retain of these crowds of great truths…has been weakly scattered about in my three principal writings, namely that first discourse, the one on inequality, and the treatise on education, which three works are inseparable and together form the same whole’ (575).

HighlightsRousseau saw ALL his works as forming one system, that could only be grasped by reading all of them, more than once (Dialogues, O.C. I, 932);He saw his Confessions as a philosophical work;Political organization is fundamental:

‘…everything is rooted in politics and…no people would be other than…their government made them’ (Confs. Bk 9, 377).

Rousseau places freedom and equality at the center of his political teaching (SC, II.11),

differs from Hobbes, and Locke.

Highlights, cont.Rousseau took a political view of music;

he chose the Italian style of opera over the French he considered Italian a language most conducive to expressing feelings, and therefore a language of freedom.

He considered botany a democratic science, permitting free movement, requiring few instruments and almost no money, versus chemistry, practiced by rich tax farmers (e.g. Lavoisier) who could afford expensive lab equipment. Anyone could botanize, while only the rich could do chemistry.

Italian was to music, what botany was to science.

Pedagogical ideas: Emile

Teach the child about things, not signs (words) for things; teach him a trade—manual labor is closest to nature;Create situations in which the child seeks new knowledge about nature;Don’t teach him things he is not old enough to grasp, such as history or foreign languages;

he needs only one book: Robinson Crusoe;“Since the more men know, the more they are deceived, the only means of avoiding error is ignorance.”

Moral knowledge is for the man, not the child.

Emile: Religious aspect

‘Confession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’ (Bk 4)Espouses natural religion: argument from design;Seems to reject both Protestant and Catholic teachings, as well as atheism:

“to which unprejudiced eyes does the sensible order not proclaim a supreme intelligence…?”

Later yearsRousseau’s works brought condemnations in Paris and Geneva as politically and theologically subversive;1762 fled to Switzerland, where he starts studying nature seriously, but is compelled to depart from Motiers by a mob, and from St. Peter’s Island by the canton of Berne;1765 flees to England at invitation of David Hume, with whom he subsequently quarrels;1767 returns quietly to France under an assumed name; writes his 3 autobiographical works—Confs., Dialogues, Reveries, copies music and studies botany;Spends last weeks botanizing; dies 4 July 1778 at the estate of the marquis de Girardin at Ermenonville, Ile de France;.During the French Revolution he is re-interred with Voltaire in Paris in the Pantheyon.

Famous portrait of Rousseau

Island of Poplars, Ermenonville