PHIL 2027 Philosophy of Rousseau

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PHIL 2027Philosophy of Rousseau

• Introduction

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

• Born Geneva 1712
• Son of a watchmaker
• No 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.

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Paris1740s

• Worked 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, dAlembert (eds. of Encyclopédie) and
  other Enlightenment figures
• Aceppted major Enlightenment ideas
• progress through science, utility, Lockean
  sensationalism, and materialism.

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DAlembert (l.) Diderot (r.)
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Enlightenment Ideas

• Nature 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 truthsee
  frontispiece to Encyclopédie)
• Rousseaus motto to submit ones life to the
  truth
• How to find truth?
• Via Descartes (innate ideas)increasingly
  rejected,
• via Locke (senses) and Francis Bacons
  empiricism?

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Reason tears away the veil of Truth
(Encyclopédie, frontispiece)
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The spirit of systemsystems of knowledge
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Rousseaus works
Title Date Subject
Disc. Sci Arts 1750 Sci/arts correlate w/ moral decay
Village Soothsayer 1752 Opera in simple Italian style
DiscInequality 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
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Rousseaus view of his works

• referred to in the 2nd letter to Malesherbes
• Everything that I was able to retain of these
  crowds of great truthshas 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).

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Highlights

• Rousseau 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 andno people
  would be other thantheir 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.

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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.

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Pedagogical ideas Emile

• Teach the child about things, not signs (words)
  for things
• teach him a trademanual labor is closest to
  nature
• Create situations in which the child seeks new
  knowledge about nature
• Dont 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.

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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?

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Later years

• Rousseaus 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.
  Peters 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 worksConfs.,
  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.

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Famous portrait of Rousseau
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Island of Poplars, Ermenonville