Jean Jacques Rousseau
From Philosopedia.org
Rousseau, Jean Jacques (28 June 1712 - 2 July 1778)
An author, political theorist, and philosopher, Rousseau was a controversial figure in his time. One of his books, Emile (1762), was burned in Paris, and later Rousseau himself was burned in effigy in his native Switzerland by Geneva by ecclesiastics.
Although Voltaire said he resembled a philosopher “as a monkey resembles a man,” the anti-intellectual Rousseau did advocate a better life for humanity and a more democratic organization of society: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in irons!” Humanists, he held, need to include human emotion in their outlooks. Meanwhile, he lamented that “The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force.”
His Social Contract (1762) is a notable document concerning human rights in a society which contains unjustifiable inequalities. Émile made the Vatican’s index of prohibited books in 1762, Du contract social, ou principes du droit politique in 1766, and three other of his works from 1766 to 1806: Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont Archevêque de Paris; Lettres écrites de la montagne; and Julie ou la nouvelle Héloise, lettres de deux amans, habitans d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes.
Pope Clement XVIII fulminated against Emile. That work contained his “Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” in which the supernatural element in Christianity are discarded. In his Confessions (1781), the great romantic described how he enjoyed being spanked by Mlle. Goton, as well as masturbating while fantasizing over the spankings meted out by his foster mother; told of having des ménages à trois; wrote of flashing his buttocks in dark alleys to the horrified delight of a number of spankingly innocent maidens; and philosophized about a malformed nipple on Mlle. Zulietta, one of the prostitutes he employed and whom, up to this conclusive point, he had considered absolutely perfect.
Rationalists everywhere welcomed Rousseau’s statement, “As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.” And he was a favorite of revolutionaries. According to Mallet du Pan, Rousseau was the great fomenter of the Revolution:
- He had a hundred times more readers than Voltaire in the middle and lower classes. . . . No one has more openly attacked the right of property in declaring it a usurpation. . . . It is he alone who has inoculated the French with the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, and with its most extreme consequences.
The critic also gives credit to freethinkers Diderot and Condorcet.
During the French Revolution, Pierre Sylvain Maréchal cited Rousseau as one who seems to be an atheist only from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy. Rousseau believed in life after death and immortality.
Of this, Bertrand Russell has remarked that Rousseau’s hope for an afterlife was based upon “the heart” rather than upon reason:
- In Rousseau’s environment, reason, as represented by Voltaire, was opposed to religion, therefore away with reason! There is no law of nature guaranteeing that mankind should be happy. Everybody can see that this is true of our life here on earth, but by a curious twist, our very sufferings in this life are made into an argument for a better life hereafter. We should not employ such an argument in any other connection. If you had bought ten dozen eggs from a man, and the first dozen were all rotten, you would not infer that the remaining nine dozen must be of surpassing excellence; yet this is the kind of reasoning that ‘the heart’ encourages as a consolation for our sufferings here below.
Russell also observed Pythagoras and Orphic religion had tainted the views of Plato and later the Christian theologians and, “from them, in a new form, to Rousseau and the romantics and the myriad purveyors of nonsense who flourish wherever men and women are tired of the truth.” Russell countered that a powerful antidote to such nonsense, which hardly existed in earlier times, is science.
In 1778, learning that Rousseau was living in poverty in Paris and trying to finish his last book, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, René-Louis de Giradin invited him as well as his companion, Thérèse Le Vasseur, to live on his 2,500-acre estate at Ermenonville, north of Paris. They were given a cottage in exchange for music lessons (Rameau snubbed Rousseau’s musicianship, saying Rousseau was a musician of little talent but great influence), and Rousseau was often seen sitting on a rustic bench, dispensing his wisdom to the children of the unworldly Marquis de Giradin. He also entertained intellectuals who came to pay him honor.
Upon Rousseau’s death, a midnight burial was arranged and a white marble tomb was constructed. Later, the body was transferred to the Panthéon in Paris.
{BDF; CE;CL; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; ER; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TYD}
