Samantha Ann Schwartz

University of Central Florida

Course: Ways of Living

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile (Self-Exploration)

Self-love is a natural occurrence that ensures “the preservation of our own life is socially entrusted to each one of us, and our first care is, and must be, to watch over our own life” (Guignon 207). According to Rousseau, it is true justice for us to know this before society places moral guidelines on living. Rousseau argues it’s within our nature to lead us to good and away from bad. Because of this, “there is no original sin in the human heart” (Guignon 206). I’m fond of this idea as it raises the age old nature versus nurture debate. It is from society (or nurture) that context is attributed to our natural feelings. To Rousseau it is likely that children (those most unexposed to society) are essentially taught their feelings maybe before even having felt them. He calls this an injustice as it’s placing a moral guideline or conscience on someone uneducated of their “true justice”.

According to Einstein, there’s no such thing as cold, just the absence of heat. To Rousseau, “feeling precedes knowledge” (Guignon 209). Feeling is supposed to be an “innate” reaction in living itself. Rousseau states “to know good is not to love it; this knowledge is not innate in man; but as soon as his reason leads him to perceive it, his conscience impels him to love it; it is this feeling which is innate” (Guignon 210). I thought of the Einstein quote after reading this part of Emile. My question is, is conscience just the absence of feeling and reason? If this is so, are we really feeling when we “feel” our conscience?

Challenging the Idea of a Life Plan by Charles Larmore

Larmore invites one to invest in a more liberal way of living. He argues that contrary to popular philosophical thought, one should live a life of both design and circumstance. Larmore argues that there is a happy medium between a structured life and an uncontrolled life. Larmore states “the happy life spans, not just the good we plan for, but also the unlooked-for good which befalls us” (Williams 40).

Perhaps the reason I liked Larmore’s writing the most is because it sort of justifies one of my favorite yet tired, old sayings-everything happens for a reason. He states “for the unexpected can turn out to be, not just the mishap that defeats our plans, but also the revelation that discloses new vistas of meaning, new forms of happiness and understanding which we least suspected or never imagined and which may change our lives and who we are in the deepest way” (Williams 42). In Larmore’s view, a stray of course isn’t seen as detrimental. Rather it is seen as a welcoming of new ideas and prospects. “A life lived in the light of this more complex ideal can accommodate, it can even welcome, the way in which an unexpected good may challenge our existing projects” (Williams 43).

Larmore’s writing reminded me of how one is not suppose to make grand expectations because reality can tend to fall short of those idealized expectations. This can be applied to how plans tend to not accommodate life’s “unruliness”. To what extent can one’s life be planned? To Larmore, in order to lead a planned life there must be some sort of preexisting ordinances that help us achieve pivotal and peak life happiness; which isn’t that the very definition of an unobtainable utopian society? No one can plan a life while excusing the possibility of whim. It’s essentially an inadaptable way of living. Adaptation is a basic need for survival as only the strongest survive.

The Dehumanized World

Berger and Luckmann suggest humans have adopted essentially a form of blindness or reification. This reification “is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products-such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will” (Berger & Luckmann 36). It appears the postmodern truth is that humans are living in an almost “bystander effect” way. By this I mean because humans have now diffused the responsibility or ownership of their own “products” because they are “out of their grasp”. Berger and Luckmann write “the individual may disclaim responsibility… [because of] the reification of [social] roles narrows the subjective distance that the individual may establish between himself and his role-playing…he is apprehended as nothing but that type” (Berger & Luckmann 38). It seems as though people have committed to their “type” and cannot see past what is already present. Although it is hard to fully commit to this reification as a skeptical postmodernist view, it does have its similarities in that “post-modernists of this orientation adopt a blasé attitude, as if ‘they have seen it all’ and concluded that nothing really new is possible” (Rosenau 108).

Perhaps the reasoning for this chosen blindness is because humans feel a degree of guilt. As Eco explains, “the post modern reply to the modern consists of recognizing the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited” (Eco 32). In other words, because so many human “products” have been developed, there’s a sense of “out of our hands” and indebtedness to those who previously developed said products. It is the responsibility of the postmodern people to look upon the products with postmodern eyes, “[accept] the challenge of the past” (Eco 32), and create a new authorship of the products. Now, despite knowing that something new is being created from what was as ownership, humans are instead thinking, it was already done therefore it’s not really mine; it’s the universe’s doing.

Rorty may reply to this as saying these postmodern people are ironists because “they are aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves” (Rorty 101). This means that humans accept their reification because they’re aware of someone else in the future recreating authorship over their previous authorship. It’s a never ending, redundant process that leads to the bystander effect. Perhaps this sense of deserted responsibility or acceptance of incompletion is because we are aware of people in the future expanding on our work which makes it seem out of hands and in the hands of the universe. Perhaps postmodern humans are not only bystanders within the postmodern era, but also to all future eras to come. We presume the future eras will assume our incomplete responsibilities. Granted this assumption of responsibilities is inevitable as it is how mankind has continued in development, but with the blasé attitude as spoken of earlier, it’s an unfortunate attitude to possess in the present.