Explainer: the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is profoundly contemporary
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Monday, September 25, 2023
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No account of the modern era – not just modern thought – could ignore him.
Key Points:
- No account of the modern era – not just modern thought – could ignore him.
- But like any major thinker, there are risks in summaries – some of which give us clues about Rousseau himself.
- Although he is known as a social and political philosopher, Rousseau’s creative output does not resemble that of a contemporary “theorist”.
- These are now conventional tropes, but they were only emerging at the time Rousseau was writing.
Natural or artificial
- Rousseau had shot to fame a decade earlier, after winning an essay competition advertised in the literary magazine Mercure de France.
- Where much philosophical discussion had been centred around the distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural”, Rousseau opposed the natural to the artificial.
- He argued that what we ordinarily think of as civilisational progress creates – and then aims to satisfy – new and artificial vices, serving our vanity and not our natural needs.
- In fact, he proposed there were many good reasons to think they were greater in both.
- Read more:
Guide to the Classics: Voltaire’s Candide — a darkly satirical tale of human folly in times of crisis
Society and inequality
- Developing these ideas, in 1754, Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.
- In it, he attempted a thought experiment which imagined what humans may have been like in a “pre-civilisational” state.
- Rousseau was aware that this act of imagination was speculative and he could not be sure of its results.
- He held that inequality was artificial.
Education and politics
- The first was the institution of a new kind of education; the second was reorienting politics towards a new moral foundation.
- In Émile, or On Education (1862), Rousseau wrote a treatise on education in the form of a bildungsroman – the first and likely the last of its kind.
- He sought to outline the conditions of a good education, which he thought should be based on lived experience and the development of individual character, not rote learning, mechanical memorisation, or even the reading of books.
- As for moral education, young people should learn about the consequences of their actions.
- Rousseau’s terminology has oriented discussions of morality, self-development and politics from the 18th century to the counterculture of the 1960s, the New Age movement of the 1980s, and beyond.
Deism and human nature
- According to Rousseau, we know what we know of God from Nature and Reason alone.
- In Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques (1776), Rousseau addresses this question directly, and in typically Rousseauian fashion:
whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart? - He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself.
- whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart?
- He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself.