 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) |
|
Swiss-born French essayist, novelist, and philosopher, whose historical importance can be compared to that of Marx or Freud. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life was full of contradictions: he defended the rights of little children but consigned his five illegitimate offspring to a foundling institution. Although Rousseau gained fame as an educationist, his formal education ended at about the age of twelve. He also was almost certifiably paranoid, an unsociable and quarrelsome human being, but championed man's innate goodness.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva into a Protestant family of French refugees. At the time, Geneva was a republic, but not a democracy. Rousseau's mother died of puerperal fever shortly after his birth. His father, who was a watchmaker of unstable temperament, fled from Geneva after being involved in a brawl. The young Jean-Jacques was cared for in childhood by an aunt and a maternal uncle. He received very little regular training, and never adopted ideas of rigorous discipline. For a while he attended a school in the country, kept by a retired pastor, and later he was apprenticed to an engraver (1725-28). At the age of 16 Rousseau left Geneva to see the world. The next 20 years he spent traveling, studying, and adventuring. Rousseau's upbringing had been Calvinist, but under the influence of his benefactress and eventually his mistress, the Vaudois Madame de Warens, he became a Roman Catholic. From 1731 until 1740 Rousseau lived with or close to Madame de Warens. At her country home, Les Charmettes, near Chambery in Savoy, Rousseau began his first serious reading and study. After moving to Paris Rousseau earned his living with secretarial work and musical copying. In 1741 he met Thérèse Le Vasseur, a dull and unattractive hotel servant girl, with whom he stayed for the rest of his life, never marrying her. They had five children whom Rousseau allegedly consigned to Enfants-Trouvés, a foundling hospital. This was a quite a common practice of the time, but in The Confessions (1782-89) Rousseau expressed his eternal and bitter regret. The celebrated autobiography is actually not a true account of his life, and also this detail has been under debate. In 1743-44 Rousseau was a secretary to the French Ambassador Comte de Montaignu to Venice, and first came into close contact with political life and institutions. Back in Paris he was introduced through the famous philosopher Denis Diderot to the Encyclopedists. His own contributions to the collective effort were mostly on musical subjects, although he wrote one piece on political economy. Rousseau's new musical notation had been pronounced by the Academy of Sciences "neither useful nor original," and his opera, Les muses galantes, had failed. Until he was 37, Rousseau had written nothing except libretti for his own music. In his later life, Rousseau became one of the dominant thinkers of the 18th century Enlightenment. The French Nobel writer Romain Rolland once said of Rousseau: "He opened into literature the riches of the subconscious, the secret movements of being, hitherto ignored and repressed." Rousseau's life changed on the road to Vincennes when he noticed an announcement in which the Dijon Academy was offering a prize for the best essay on the subject "Has the progress of the arts and sciences contributed to the purification or the corruption of morals?" "All at once," Rousseu said, "I felt myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds of vivid ideas thronged into my head with a force and confusion that threw me into unspeakable agitation; I felt my head whirling in a giddiness like that of intoxication." Rousseau won the prize for his essay Discours sur les sciences et les arts. He was 38 and had mostly failed in achieving recognition. Rousseau argued that the development of the arts and sciences, he wrote, did not improve man in habits and moral. Far from improving human behavior, the development had promoted inequality, idleness, and luxury. "If the sciences really better'd manners, if they taught man to spill his blood for his country, if they heighten'd his courage; the inhabitants of China ought to be wise, free, and invincible. - But if they are tainted with every vice, familiar with every crime; if neither the skill of their magistrates, nor the pretended wisdom of their laws, nor the vast multitude of people inhabiting that great extent of empire, could protect or defend them from the yoke of an ignorant Barbarian Tartar, of what use was all their art, all their skill, all their learning?" (from Discourse on Arts and Sciences) Around 1750 Rousseau began to promulgate the romantic conception of the noble – or innocent – savage. The theme was elaborated in Rousseau's second essay, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégualité parmi les hommes (1755, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality), where he maintained that only the uncorrupted savage is in possession of real virtue. (The most famous adaptation of the idea in literature is Edgar Rice Burroughs's hero of the jungle, Tarzan.) The cultivation of earth and invention of metallurgy led to the birth of work and property. People were divided into poor and rich, and laws solidified the state of affairs permanently. Despotism is the ultimate end of historical development – we are all equal because we are slaves of one ruler. In Rousseau the feeling of "discomfort with culture" became a
target
of serious study for the first time. It also provoked anger and upset
his friends. The cultured man is degenerate,
Rousseau thought, and the whole history of civilization a betrayal.
Rousseau's naturalism was in great contrast to all that his great
contemporary Voltaire
considered the
quintessence of civilization. "No one has employed so much intelligence
to turn us men into beasts," he responded to Rousseau's work. "One
starts wanting to walk on all fours after reading your book." (Rousseau: A Guide for the
Perplexed by Matthew Simpson, 2007, p. 70) Taking seriously his thesis, Rousseau decided to "reform" and live the simple life. He returned in 1754 to Geneva, the city to which he had dedicated the Discourse, reverted to Protestantism, and regained citizenship. In 1756 Rousseau moved to a cottage near the forest of Montmorency. "With Rousseau the wider classes of society, the petty bourgeoisie and the undifferentiated mass of the poor, the oppressed and the outlawed, found expression for the first time in literature. . . . Rousseau is the first to speak as one of the common people, and to speak for himself when he is speaking for the people; the first to induce others to rebellion, because he is a rebel himself." (The Social History of Art by Arnold Hauser, Volume 3, 1962, p. 71) During the next six years Rousseau wrote The New Heloise (1761), Émile (1762), a treatise on education, eventually turning into a Bildungsroman about the ideal education of the innocent child, and The Social Contract (1762), which starts with the famous declaration, "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they." Its catchphrase 'Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité', inspired the French Revolution. Rousseau argues that only by surrendering to the general will, can an individual find his fullest freedom. The general will, essentially directed toward common good, Rousseau believed, is always right. The citizens of a united community exchanges their natural liberty for something better, moral liberty. In this theory political society is seen as involving the total voluntary subjection of every individual to the collective general will; this being both the sole source of legitimate sovereignty and something that cannot but be directed towards common good. Rousseau's Julie; ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) was an 18th-century best-seller. It was born of the aging author's dream of finding a perfect love with a kindred soul. The story depicts the passionate love of the tutor Saint Preux and his pupil Julie, their separation, and Julie's marriage to the Baron Wolmar. The theme of sexual passion is in the end transformed into an account of a social utopia on the Baron's country estate. Èmile paved way for the liberal modern educational experiments. It stated that experience should come not from books but from life. Rousseau's theory of education rests on two assumptions: that man is by nature good and that society and civilization corrupt the native goodness. Only through proper education in youth could the "natural man" come to being. Children should be kept from books until the age of 12 and youth should be taught "natural religion" only. Girls were to be trained solely as wives and mothers. After its publication, Èmile was banned both in France
and
Switzerland. The French parliament ordered the book to be burned, and
in 1762 Rousseau was condemned for religious unorthodoxy. He fled to
Switzerland, first to Neuchâtel (1762-65), then to Bienne (1765). The
German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who admired him as "the Newton of the
moral world," had a bust of Rousseau in his study. Diderot was bitter
after his friendship with Rousseau ended: "This man is false, vain as
Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and vicious. . . . Truly this
man is a monster." (Hypocrisy
and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau: The Jean-Jacques Problem
by Matthew D. Mendham, 2021, p. 4) When
the government of Berne ordered Rousseau out of its territory, he
visited England. Rousseau's misanthropy and growing persecution mania
led to quarrels with his new friends, among them David Hume, and he
went to France, where he lived for a time in disguise. Before his stay in England, Rousseau had failed to live up to his ideals, but then his conduct turned more principled. In 1768 he married Thérèse, and in 1770 he was officially permitted to return to Paris – if he do not write against the government. I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself. (The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, New York: Modern Library, 1963, p. 3) Rousseau's later works include The Confessions, the
first
"romantic" autobiography, which was composed between 1765 and 1770.
Rousseau starts with his of uniqueness. "Myself alone! I know the
feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I
have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those
who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
Whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in
which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read." (Ibid., p. 3) He
speaks openly of his addiction to masturbation, to the point that he
risked his healt. The sister converts at a Roman Catholic hospice in
Turin, where he had fled from Geneva, he portrays as "the greatest set
of sluttish, abandoned whores that had ever contaminated the Lord's
sheepfold." Like Rabelais, Rousseau had an unashamed obsession with
bodily functions. In his advanced age, he found the need to urinate
frequently, but as the center of social events, it was not easy for him
to slip out of sight to relieve himself. "In short, I can usually
urinate in full view of everybody and on some white-stocking leg." The
book was part of his immersion into self-observation, also exemplified
in Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (1776) and the Reveries
(1782). In 1778 Rousseau moved to Ermenonville. He died of apoplexy on
July 2, 1778. Rousseau and Voltaire died within weeks of each other. Because
Rousseau was rumored to have shot himself, he had risked becoming a
vampire by the rules of a folklore. Pope Pius VII placed The
Confessions
on the list of prohibited books of the Roman Index of 1806. In France,
it was also among the works which Etuenne Antoine, bishop of Troyne,
condemned in 1821 as godless and sacrilegious, and under canonical law,
he prohibited the printing or selling the book within the territory of
the diocese. U.S. Customs banned the book from entry in 1929, but
revered the ban the following year. During the French Revolution,
Rousseau's remains were placed with Voltaire's in the Panthéon in
Paris. When the Panthéon served as a church again, it was whispered
that their remains had been dumped in a sewer. The tomb was opened in
December 1897. There was no signs of vampirism. Moreover, Rousseau's
skull showed no signs of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A few hairs
were still visible. It was reported that the "thread of the shroud
enveloped the skeleton; the body had evidently been imperfectly
embalmed." Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Finland. The most
Rousseauesque practice in the Finnish way of life is the mass migration
on holidays and weekends to summer cottages, which usually are located
in the wilderness far from the urban centers. Three of Rousseau's
central works, Émile, Du
contrat social, and an abridged edition of Les Confessions
have been translated into Finnish (1905, 1918, and 1968 respectively ).
As early as in 1775, Fredrik Collin criticized Rousseau's religious
views in his doctoral thesis De juventute in religione Christiana
contra opinionem Rousseauianam instituenda. Collin believed that
religious instruction was especially useful to the young. The influential historian and journalist Henrik Gabriel
Porthan (1739-1804) considered Émile
pedagogically recommendable, although he saw in it some paradoxes. J.V.
Snellman (1806-1881), journalist and
statesman, a hugely influential philosopher in Finland, was against
Rousseau's "nature gospel" of education.
A large part of Snellman's philosophy was based on the thought of the
German
philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Snellman argued
that all education should be
supervised by the state, which leaves little to individual differences.
He emphasized traditions and the Finnish national ideals. Rousseau's
view, that the State is born from a contract, also was criticized by
Snellman. In the 20th-century Rousseau's influence is seen in Erik Ahlman's (1892-1952) writings on education, especially in the concept of man's "true" nature and "pure" individuality. According to Ahlman, the purpose of education is to develop the individual, personal self. In the modern literature the "back to nature" theme constantly repeated in Arto Paasilinna's novels, beginning from Jäniksen vuosi (1975, The Year of the Hare; in French translation Le lièvre de Vatanen). The book gained popularity also in France, where its connection to Rousseau's ideals were immediately recognized. The protagonist, Kaarlo Vatanen, rejects consumer society and restores his peace of mind by escaping to the untouched nature in the north of Finland. In a way, Jäniksen vuosi re-tells the story of Aleksis Kivi's Seven Brothers (1870), who flee from their community to the backwoods. - Rousseau's Tunnustuksia (Les Confessions) was reprinted in 1999, but Émile has been out of print since the 1930s. Nowadays Yhteiskuntasopimuksesta (Du contrat social) is only found in the stockrooms of large libraries. It was not until 2000, when Tutkielma ihmisten välisen eriarvoisuuden alkuperästä ja perusteista (Discours sur l'inegalite) appeared in Finnish.
Selected works:
|
