Modern life is deeply attracted to the idea of progress in the 18th century as
European societies became ever richer and more technological, the conventional
view was that mankind was firmly set on a positive trajectory from savagery and
ignorance toward prosperity and civilization. But there was at least one
eighteen century philosopher who violently disagreed and who continues to
have very provocative things to say to our own era. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born to an
educated watchmaker in Geneva in 1712. when he was 10 his father got into a
legal dispute and the family was forced to flee Geneva. From that point on
Rousseau's life was marked by deep instability and isolation. As a young man
who went to Paris and there was exposed to the opulence and luxury that was the
order of the day in Austin regime Paris. It was a far cry from his birthplace of
Geneva a city that was sober and deeply opposed to luxury goods. Then one day in
1749 he read a copy of a newspaper, The Mercure de France that contained an advert for
an essay on the subject of whether recent advances in arts and sciences
have contributed to what was called the "purification of morals" in other words
was the world getting better?
Rousseau experienced something of an epiphany. It struck him that civilization
and progress had not in fact improved people. Instead they'd exacted a terrible
destructive influence on the morality of human beings who had once been good.
Rousseau took this insight and turned it into the central thesis of what became
his celebrated discourse on the Arts and Sciences. His argument was simple:
Individuals had once been good and happy but as people had emerged from their pre
social state and join society they had become plagued by vice and sin. In this
work and its twin, The Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality,
Rousseau went on to sketch what it would have been like at the beginning of
history, an idyllic period that he called "the state of nature." A long time
ago
when men and women lived in forests and had never entered a shop or read a
newspa per the philosopher pictured people more easily understanding their own
minds and so being drawn toward essential features of a satisfied life,
a love of a family,
respect for nature, an awe at the beauty of the universe, curiosity about others and
a taste for music and simple entertainments. The "state of nature" was
moral and guided by spontaneous pity, empathy for others and their suffering.
So what was it about civilization that Rousseau thought had corrupted people
and led to moral degeneracy. Rousseau claimed that the march toward
civilization had awakened in people and unhealthy form of self-love, amour-propre,
he called it, something that was artificial and centered around pride,
jealousy, and vanity. Rousseau argued that this destructive form of self love had
emerged as people had moved into cities and there had begun to compare
themselves to others and created their identities solely by reference to their
neighbors. Civilized people had stopped thinking about what they wanted and they
felt and merely imitated other people, entering into ruinous competitions for
status and money and losing sight of their own sensations. Rousseau is forever
associated with a term
"noble savage" because it was his work that describe the innocence and morality
of our ancestors and contrasted it with modern decadence. At the time Rousseau was
writing, European Society was fascinated by the plight the native North American
tribes. Reports of Indian society drawn up in the 16th century had once
described the Indians as materially simple but psychologically very rich and
interesting. Communities with small, close-knit,
egalitariam, religious, playful, and martial. However within a few decades of the
arrival of the Europeans the status system of Indian society have been
revolutionized through contact with a technology and luxury of European
industry. Indians now longed for guns alcohol, beads, and mirrors Rates of
suicide and alcoholism had risen, communities were fracturing, and factions
were squabbling. The modern world had ruined the lives of people who'd once
lived
happily in the "state of nature." Rousseau's interest in natural goodness made him
very interested in the idea, though not quite the reality, of children. In 1762 he
wrote Émile, or On Education, perhaps the most successful book ever written about
how to raise children. Rousseau suggested that children were born naturally good and
that the key to raising them was therefore always to prevent their corruption by
society. This idea was widely influential. Parents who had before this time seen
their children as wicked or at best as blank slates now viewed them as founts
of wisdom and tried to give them a childhood full of play and visits to
forests and lakes. Rousseau became the inventor of child-centered education. He
was also a great proponent of breastfeeding, declaring "Let mothers
deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature's sentiments
will be awakened in every heart and the state will be repeopled." It was, he knew,
a bit of hyperbole but its spurred a wave of breastfeeding even among the
wealthy who had long disdained the practice. Artists rushed to paint and honor the new
vogue for breastfeeding. Because Rousseau so closely valued human beings in their
original state, it followed that in the novels he wrote, Rousseau also constantly
celebrated intense feelings rather than great deeds or social events. In his
novel, Julie, written in 1761, Roussseau depicted the excitement and anguish of an
upper-class women caught in a love triangle between her sensitive tutor and
her boring but socially sanctioned aristocratic match. Rousseau's
contemporaries might have seen Julie as unwise and her feelings as a passing
fancy, but Rousseau painted her love in a higher light. He urged us to see its grandeur,
depth and honor. In his writings about his own life,
Rousseau was similarly romantic or, what one might unkindly call, self-absorbed. In his
famous Confessions, one of the first ever autobiographies, Rousseau spend pages
exploring his inner life: How frustrating he found shopping, the surprising feeling of
tenderness for his ex's new partner, or the joys of gardening.To him,
these weren't trivial or self-absorbed topics, they were part of an important
task: to
show is like on the inside. "I have conceived of a new genre of service to
render to man," he boasted, "to offer them the faithful image of one amongst them
in order for them to learn to know themselves. Rousseau died in 1778 age 66. His
reputation has continued to grow. He was from beyond the grave
one of the heroes of the French Fevolution and he became an icon to a
great many artists and writers of the 19th century. Rousseau can be considered as
one of the founding figures of what we now know as the Romantic Movement, an
ideology responsible for valuing the primitive over the civilized, the child
over the adult< the passionate lover over the calmly loyal spouse. The modern world
despite its addiction to status, machinery, and capitalist values, in many
ways continues to be profoundly romantic in its heart. It's astonishing that so
much of what we take to be common sense, or just natural, can directly be traced
back to the work of one not always wise but always highly intriguing and
provocative thinker.