Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Emile

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Emile

• Unit 3 - Day 8

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
• Born in Geneva, Switzerland
• Mother dies in childbirth, Father abandons JJR
• Trains as an apprentice notary and engraver
• Becomes involved with French Catholic Baroness
  who takes him to France as her secretary
• Pays for his education, inspires conversion to
  Catholicism
• 1742 Invents a system of musical notation
• Serves as secretary to French ambassador in
  Venice lives with a French seamstress, with
  whom he claims to have five children
• All five given up for adoption at birth
• 1749 while visiting Diderot in prison, sees a
  flier for an essay competition asking the
  question has the development of the arts and
  sciences been morally beneficial? His answer
  NO, won and brought him to public attention.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
• Went on to write a successful opera, as well as
  the worlds first bestselling novel Julie, or
  the New Heloise
• 1754 reconverts to Calvinism and returns to
  Geneva
• Begins writing philosophical treatises
• Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
• The Social Contract
• Emile
• Criticisms of religion get him exiled from both
  Geneva and France takes refuge in Switzerland
  under protection of Frederick the Great
• 1765 attacked by townspeople and flees to England
  where he lives for a time with David Hume
• While in England becomes paranoid about plots
  against him including those involving Hume
• 1767 Returns to France where he completes the
  first modern autobiography
• 1778 dies of a hemorrhage while out walking

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The End of Optimism? Voltaire and Rousseau

• As the Enlightenment progressed philosophes
  became gradually less confident in the ability of
  reason to bring about real social change
• To many, in fact, society itself seemed to be the
  problem
• For Voltaire, civil society could not exist
  without inequality someone needs to till the
  fields, make the shoes, bake the bread and do all
  the other things that no one wants to do
• Rousseau went even further

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The End of Optimism? Voltaire and Rousseau

• The first man who, having fenced in a piece of
  land, said "This is mine," and found people naive
  enough to believe him, that man was the true
  founder of civil society. From how many crimes,
  wars, and murders, from how many horrors and
  misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind,
  by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the
  ditch, and crying to his fellows Beware of
  listening to this imposter you are undone if you
  once forget that the fruits of the earth belong
  to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. -
  Rousseau, Discourse on Origin of Inequality

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Romanticism and the Noble Savage

• Rousseau straddles the intellectual movements of
  the Enlightenment and Romanticism
• Romanticism is skeptical of the claims of reason
  to solve social problems and to realize the full
  potential of human beings
• Society seems to be moving away from the basic
  goodness of human nature
• In its place Rousseau and others introduce the
  concept of the Noble Savage

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Emile, or On Education (1762)

• First sentence Everything is good in leaving
  the hands of the Creator of Things everything
  degenerates in the hands of man.
• Rousseau doesnt entirely give up on society
• Through proper education, careful organization of
  government, the hurtful effects of civil society
  can be remedied
• Emile is the semi-fictional account of his
  attempts to educate a young boy in a more natural
  way to draw on his natural nobility