Rousseau in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 63

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Rousseau possessed a brilliant mind and one that questioned every accepted value and idea. Whatever most were “for”, Rousseau was always “against”! He was against monarchy, against the church, against the status quo, against inequality, against traditional education, against marriage, and (of course) against technical progress and the destruction of Nature. Today we might call Rousseau a “professional rabble-rouser”. His contrariness was his trademark. He spent most of his life as a quasi-vagrant or a refugee. Sometimes it was the church, other times the government of one country or another that he had to flee from. But all arrest warrants were in vain. Through books like The Social Contract his radical demand for democracy prepared the ground for the French Revolution, and his famous discourses on Man’s loss of contact with, and destruction of, Nature made him a pioneer also of ecological thought. The book Rousseau in 60 Minutes explains the thinker’s core ideas, exemplified by over 70 quotations from his works. The seed for these ideas was planted one day when he was on in his way to see his friend Diderot in prison, reading a copy of the newspaper Mercure de France as he went. It announced a competition for the best essay on whether scientific and artistic progress had made people morally better. All the competitors answered “yes”. Except Rousseau. His answer was that Man is naturally good and became wicked only through being “socialized” and “civilized”. The “noble savage” ran free through the woods, but we pass our days in cramped offices and forfeit, each day, more of our instincts and our freedom. But above all, Rousseau pointed out, modern Man lives always “in and for the gaze of other people”. That is to say, we tend to dissolve more and more into the “mainstream”. Is Rousseau right here? Have we conformed too far? Have we forfeited our instincts? And above all: What can we do about it? The book forms part of the popular series Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Rousseau’s Great Discovery

Rousseau’s Central Idea

The Noble Savage

Marriage and Language as Forms of Decadence

The Curse of Settled Existence

Living Outside Oneself

The Lie of Property

The State as Instrument for Repressing the Propertyless

Back to Nature?

The Social Contract as Solution

The “General Will” and the “Will of All”

Education in the Service of Man’s Natural Freedom

Of What Use Is Rousseau’s Discovery for Us Today?

The Virtue of ‘Contrariness’ – Going One’s Own Way

Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!

Daring More Democracy

Mindfulness of Nature – Living Ecologically

Educating Man to be Free

Escaping the ‘Matrix’ – Living with Intensity

Bibliographical References

Rousseau’s Great Discovery

Rousseau (1712-1778) was the most “contrary” of the world’s great thinkers. He spoke and wrote against almost everything that his 18th-Century contemporaries held to be true and right: the divine right of kings, a society led by the aristocracy, the church, authoritarian education, and the state along with all its institutions.

He was the first really radical social critic. All his life he “swam against the current”. Even today his work is anathema to many. Although Rousseau earned his living as a philosopher, artist and man of the theatre, he saw no contradiction in criticizing philosophy, art and the theatre as things that distracted from, and blinded to, the truth. He also had much to say on the topic of raising and teaching the young. He opposed to the methods of strict discipline current in the schools of his day an ideal of children’s free selfdevelopment, founding a whole tradition of antiauthoritarian education.

His critique of all forms of repression and his political demand for democracy and equality prepared the ground for the French Revolution and inspired early socialism, Marxism and such later left-wing movements as Critical Theory. But many other apparently opposed movements of thought – such as the Sturm und Drang and Romantic movements or the philosophy of Nietzsche – were also influenced by Rousseau. This maverick thinker, in short, left no European thinker, of his own or later eras, indifferent. The stimuli he gave to posterity proved as diverse and as turbulent as the life he lived. No other philosopher, indeed, has left us a biography so rich in adventures and misfortunes.

When his restless life ended at the age of 66 he had practiced some twelve different professions, changed his religion twice, and adopted citizenship of three different nations. He had also set up house in a score of different locations and engaged in love affairs to a number which remains indeterminate but was certainly considerable.

Rousseau was also, however, a virtuoso of disaster and discord who somehow managed to quarrel with almost everyone who ever befriended or supported him. He made enemies, at one point or another, of Voltaire as well as of Diderot, D’Alembert and the other Encyclopédistes – men who had early on been his friends and allies – and even, finally, of the equa ble English philosopher David Hume who gave him shelter when his writings had forced him to seek refuge in England.

Rousseau, indeed, spent most of his life as a homeless wanderer or a hunted exile. He was persecuted and pursued sometimes by the church, sometimes by the government of one or another nation. At one point, with warrants for his arrest issued by both the republican government of his native Geneva and the parliament of his adopted France, he even took Prussian citizenship, i.e. that of the little Swiss principality of Neuchâtel ruled at the time by that patron of the Enlightenment, Prussia’s Frederick the Great.

During his years of wandering he muddled through as a music teacher, a domestic, a house tutor, a lawyer’s clerk, and a musical copyist, while sometimes pursuing his various actual vocations as novelist, philosopher and man of the theatre and opera, but never earned enough money to set up a household of his own. Still, he proved himself a real jack-of-all-trades. Some of his projects, indeed – such as his proposed new system of numbered musical notation – were failures. But his philosophical books and his novels were, many of them, European sensations and even his operas and theatrical pieces were appreciated and widely performed in his lifetime.

His mother died just a few days after his birth. His father raised him alone, giving him a first acquaintance with literature, but was obliged to leave Geneva after a quarrel with an officer who accused him of having drawn his sword on him, so that, from the age of ten on, Rousseau was cared for rather by his uncle, who apprenticed him to an engraver. At the age of sixteen, however, returning late from a Sunday outing and finding the city gates locked, Rousseau decided, rather than suffer a beating for his tardiness from his master, to leave Geneva forever and to seek his fortune in the world. For several years, he became a homeless wanderer in this corner of Europe where Switzerland borders Italy and France, earning a precarious living by odd jobs. But, being a handsome youth and already an engaging raconteur, he was usually able to find food and shelter on the lands of the region’s various noblemen and -women. One such local noblewoman, Madame de Warens, even took him as a lover, although he continued all his life to refer to this benefactress, who was twelve years his elder, as his ‘Mama’. Indeed, even after becoming a European celebrity, Rousseau continued to find benefactors and supporters among the nobility, such as Madame d’Épinay, who became his lover some years later. He spent, in fact, the greater part of his life as a guest at various courts and stately homes, even though his books preached social equality and the abolition of the aristocracy.

But such contradictions were very much a part of Rousseau’s life. They did not prevent him from sometimes acting on firm principle. King Louis XV of France was so pleased with his opera Le Devin du Village that he was about to offer him a life pension – which Rousseau refused, however, despite his extreme poverty, because, as he wrote, to accept it would have been to say adieu to independence and freedom of speech – even about the king.