Jean-Jacques Rousseau - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

See also: Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (homonymy)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (born the June 28th 1712 and deceased the July 2nd 1778) is a writer, philosopher and musician Genevese of expression French E. It was one of the most famous philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, although its philosophical work and its temperament often opposed it to the figureheads and the ideals of the movement. Undoubtedly in spite of him, its work influenced the revolutionary spirit largely French. It is particularly famous for its work on the man, the company like on the education. The political Philosophie of Rousseau is located from the point of view known as '' contractualist '' for the British philosophers for, and its famous Discours on the Inequality is conceived easily like a dialog with the work of Thomas Hobbes. Breaking with the Rationalism dominating of the Lights, this major work and iconoclast also precede the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin.

Biography

Rousseau carried out a life tormented but fertile in literary works.

A difficult childhood

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the son of Isaac Rousseau (1672 Geneva - 1747 Nyon), clock making like her father and her grandfather, and of Suzanne Bernard (1673 Geneva - 1712 Geneva), which died the July 7th 1712 in Geneva, that is to say nine days after the birth of Jean-Jacques, itself was girl of a clock and watch maker named Jacques Bernard. His/her died mother, it high as from nine years, in had died of her father, by her uncle Samuel Bernard, Pasteur Protestant, that Jean-Jacques took for his grandfather. Its family, of origin French E, had exiled itself in Geneva in 1549 because of religious persecution. Given up at 10 years by his father, he knew, delivered to itself, a childhood, an education and beginnings difficult. He spent two years at Pasteur Lambercier to Bossey (with the foot of Salève, in the south of Geneva) (1722 - 1724). His/her uncle placed it like apprentice in a clerk, then in 1725 in a Master engraver. “To give up its freedom, it is to give up its quality of man. ” (Of the social contract)

“Mom”

Jean-Jacques left the Protestant Geneva at sixteen years in 1728. It is the priest of Confignon, Benoît de Pontverre, who addressed it to of Vaud emigrated in Annecy, Madam the baroness of Warens, recently converted with Catholicism. This one sent it to Turin where it converts with the Catholicisme the April 23rd. The following year, it turned over to that which it called “Mom”, in “a small house with leaning of a small valley”, close to Chambéry, that the Confessions made famous: “the Charmettes”.

In 1730, it travelled to foot until Neuchâtel, where it taught the music.
In 1732, it returned to Chambéry, where it works at the administrative services of the duchy of Savoy, then as Master of music near the young girls of the middle-class and nobility chambérienne. He remains nearly ten years in the capital of Savoy.
In 1734 he became the intendant of Mrs. de Warens, which will become later its mistress.
It is at it that he wrote, in 1739, its first book, the orchard of Madam the baroness of Warens . He appreciated the city: “If it is a small town in the world where one tastes the softness of the life in a trade pleasant and sure, it is Chambéry. ”

Philosophical beginnings

With Paris, in 1742 and 1743, it tried to use the invention of a marking system musical by successively publishing the Projet concerning of new signs for the music and the Dissertation on the modern music . It bound with Denis Diderot and M {{me}} of Epinay.

In 1745, it met Therese Levasseur, modest maidservant of inn, with which it was put as a household. The five children whom they had were entrusted to Child-Found, the Public assistance of the time, decision which was reproached to him later (in particular by a lampoon of Voltaire, which he answered by his great work the Confessions), when he was posed as a pedagog in his book Emile .

In 1747, his/her father, Isaac Rousseau dies

In 1749, Jean-Jacques wrote articles on the music for the Encyclopédie .

In 1750, it took part in a contest suggested by the Academy of Dijon: its Speech on sciences and arts (known as First Speech ), which supports that progress is synonymous with corruption, obtains the first price.

the October 18th 1752 was represented in front of the king Louis XV, with Fontainebleau, into full “Querelle with the Buffoons”, the Soothsayer of the village , Intermède in an act, from which Rousseau came to compose and write the music and the booklet.

Celebrity and polemics

In 1755, another contest of the same Academy of Dijon, it answered by its Discours on the origin and the bases of the inequality among the men (also called Second Speech ), which completed to return it celebrates and caused, like the First Speech , a sharp polemic.

Published in 1762, Emile or Of Education was condemned by the Parliament of Paris. The social Contract appeared the same year and knew a similar fate: the two works were prohibited in France, with the Netherlands, Geneva and Bern.

Rousseau went in Suisse, then on the territory of Neuchâtel (Môtiers) which belonged to the king of Prussia. After a stay in the island Saint-Pierre, on the lake of Bienne, it gained the England, in 1765, company of David Hume, attached to the embassy from Great Britain to Paris.

It could return to Paris in 1770, the day before the fall of Choiseul of which it had condemned the policy of annexation of Corsica. He also condemned the Russian policy of dismantling of Poland, whereas the majority of the philosophers supported Catherine II.

the poet Jean-Antoine Roucher publishes in 1779 in the " Mois" four " Letters with Mr. de Malesherbes".

It was at this period that Rousseau, which lived in the obsession of a plot directed against him, began its autobiographical work.

Autobiographical work

Between 1766 and 1769, it wrote the Confessions (it invented there the term of “Cruscantisme”).

In 1772, it started the drafting of the Dialogs of Rousseau judges Jean-Jacques . the Daydreams of the solitary walker were written during the two last years of its life.

Louis Donin de Rosière was pilot, with his/her Myriadec cousin, of the marriage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau with Therese Renou, on August 30th, 1768, in Bourgoin-Jallieu.

In 1778, the marquis of Girardin offered hospitality to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in a house of its field of Ermenonville, close to Paris; it is there that the philosophical writer died suddenly the July 2nd 1778, of what seemed to be a crisis of Apoplexie. Here is the account of died of Rousseau' such as the fact G Lenotre in Hurdy-gurdies houses old man Perrin Papers and Co 1914 fourth series " July 2nd the innkeeper Antoine Maurice saw the philosopher walking, as of five hours of the morning, in spite of the dew; he saw it returning around seven hours, bringing Pimpernel gathered for his birds.

Two hours later, Antoine heard cries coming from the house which Rousseau lived, he ran there. Mrs. Rousseau called the Help!; her husband had fallen on the floor, in the part of the first stage, and had been wounded with the temple. Almost at the same time as the innkeeper, M and Mrs. de Girardin followed few servants and of a surgeon arrived; this one tested of a bleeding but Jean Jacques already, did not give any more signs of life. …. Event, in the village and the surroundings, the most various versions circulated. Mr. Rousseau affirmed the ones, had killed himself out of a blow of gun, Payen the postmaster of Louvres, was used the news for the travellers who relayed at his place. Others ensured that the poor Jean Jacques being warned - well after all the others - relations of Mrs. Rousseau with a servant of the castle wanted to be to leave Ermenonville: she had refused to follow it: then he had sought in the forest of the bad plants which he knew and he had infused them years his coffee of the morning. It is the Adoptée version by Mrs. de Stael by Corencez and Musset Pathay. One supposed worse still " Did Jean Jacques, who with saying of Mrs. de Stael, had learned the morning even the relations from his wife with a man of the domesticity of M of Girardin, commit suicide of despair, a-til assassinated by his wife, or it died of séreuse apoplexy as the statement of autopsy affirms it? ". (" JJ Rousseau Homage national" by Castellant has). As for the Marquis de Girardin he denied the suicide" highly;. What is certain, it is that his wife, Therese Levasseur old then 57 years was to marry shortly after this servant named Antoine Bally then 34 years old and to waste with him the savings in Jean Jacques and her royalties to finish in misery.

the shortly after its death, the sculptor Houdon took the moulding of its death mask. The July 4th, the marquis of Girardin made bury the body in the island of the Poplars, in the property where, in 1780, the monument drawn by Hubert Robert will rise, carried out by J. - P. Lesueur. The philosopher was quickly the object of a worship, and its tomb was assiduously visited. The revolutionists carried it to naked and the Convention required its transfer to the the Pantheon.

the solemn homage of the French nation took place the October 11th 1793: during an imposing ceremony, ashes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were transferred from Ermenonville to the the Pantheon. Jean-Jacques Rousseau became officially one of glories of the French nation.

The “truth” of Jean-Jacques

Rousseau is registered against filiation peerage-book and awakes this unknown factor of the “old” literature: sensitivity, a sensitivity founder of rights and duties. But its influence finds its full expression with the French revolution: the political thinker becomes one of the spiritual fathers about it and all are claimed of him. The revolutionists, from one extreme to another, claim “to walk only the social Contract to the hand”. Paradoxically, the theorists of the counter-revolution (Joseph de Maistre, Louis-Gabriel de Bonald) also claim themselves them of Rousseau. That is enough to give an idea of the diversity of the heritage rousseauist.

The major difference between its work and other “truths” published is perhaps in the party taken posted and, at his place, obvious - its currency vitam impendere vero (borrowed from Juvénal, Satires , IV, 91) or “to devote its life to the truth”, according to its own translation, in fact faith - to regard the concept of truth as object of research higher than any other value and even than its own reputation or its own honor. One can, by certain sides, to also regard the totality of the work of Rousseau as an immense moral letter addressed to his contemporaries initially, but with whole humanity (and if not eternal, at least for a few centuries after him). The actual position of its diffusion in bookstore, the number of the theses which are devoted to him, with him and its work, just like the translations in multiple languages seem to confirm the fundamental character of these “tests of truth” written by one impassioned, a large initiate who went to go down and so far as to work for this emotional world that the men control less. He “spoke people, for the people” before the letter, and this with as much of intelligence than of instinct, i.e. of heart, without being neither powerful orator nor proud, seeming all the same not to be unaware of that with his way he was (and perhaps would remain) one of the large instructors of humanity.

Great principles of philosophy rousseauist

The Natural

Definition

All the philosophers of the XVIII {{E}} century refer to Nature… Often, it is within the meaning of a Physique. At Rousseau, the definition of this “Natural” word is not very obvious: this one can indicate the physical world as well as the innate provisions of the man, the Conscience Morale (the “call of nature”) or, more simply, the green Campagne.

This plurality of direction does not prevent, however, from producing a more precise definition. Nature, it is before all that one opposes to the Culture (the Art, the Technique, the Loi, the Institution, the company, the arbitrary one). Rousseau is perhaps the first to make this distinction a methodological tool (begun again in particular by Claude Lévi-Strauss, enthusiastic rousseauist).

The idea of nature is perhaps that of an original “transparency”: nature, it is what is Vrai, it with what we have an immediate report/ratio (without mediation), and who recalls us at our origin - is in the sense that one can speak, to indicate the moral conscience, of the “call of nature”: “would be right and you will be happy”, “I do not draw these principles from the high philosophy, but I find them at the bottom of my heart written by nature in ineffaceable characters” ( Emile , IV). Nature is a principle of order, simplicity and authenticity. On the other hand, the Vice (disorder, lie, luxury, violence) proceeds of the company and the culture, of the inscription of the individual in artificial reports/ratios: “Let us pose for maxim which the first movements of nature are always right: there is original perversity in the human heart. It is not there only one defect which one cannot say how and by where it entered” ( Emile , II).

The state of nature

Botany

Rousseau discovered botany tardily, then forsook it to copy pages of music or to write its books, before returning there around 65 years, because he preferred to herborize, which slackened it, rather than to reflect, which tired it and saddened it, he in the seventh daydream of the solitary walker writes. However its Lettres on botany enabled him to continue a reflection on the culture, in the broad sense, started in the Emile , its treaty of education, and its novel, the News Héloïse , where he wondered about the art of the garden.

The man, this denatured being, without instinct, can contemplate nature only when it made it livable and thus cultivated, denatured, “circumvented with his fashion” in “laughing countryside” because, in the places or the men can live, it is often only bad country, undergrowth, waste ground. It is in general only in places rare and inaccessible to the man whom it hiding place “ these places if not very known and so worthy to be admired… Nature seems to want to conceal with the eyes of the men its attracted truths to which they are too not very sensitive, and which they disfigure… Those which like it and cannot the outward journey seek so far are reduced to make him violence, to some extent to force it to come to live with them, and all that cannot be done without a little illusion ” continues Rousseau in its novel where it describes how Julie installed at the bottom of her orchard a secret garden, uniting pleasant with the useful one so as to making of it a place of walk which resembles pure nature: “ it is true, says that nature did everything, but under my direction, and there is nothing there which I did not order ”.

Rousseau describes the garden of the man of taste, reconciling at the same time the Humaniste and the Botaniste, like a useful and pleasant place where are gathered without visible artifice, neither with the Frenchwoman, nor with English: water, the greenery, the shade and freshness, as can do it nature, without using of symmetry nor to align the alleys and the edges. The man of taste “ will not worry to bore with far from beautiful prospects: the taste from the points of view and the distances comes from leaning which have the majority of the men to like only where they are not. ”

The work of Clerc's Office and propagation by cutting is not used for revealing nature behind nature, but, before it becomes intolerable, making it livable in good or evil, that whose catastrophic extension of our urban civilization is one of the consequences but not inevitably a destiny. And if the work of the orchard and the fields is a need for the man, the garden of “the man of taste” will have as a function to allow him dépayser, to rest itself moments of effort. For Rousseau, melody the following chapter and garden are about the human one, of perfectibility, imagination and simple passions. It shares with the music a melody temporality, that also of the educational process which makes it possible to the men to hope to become “ all that they can be ” since nature could not there be enough.

Love and hatred

It is undeniable that Rousseau made blow a revolutionary wind on the ideas of love and hatred: this consideration granted to sexuality like a fundamental experiment in the life of an human being, the awakening of the importance of the feelings of love and hatred in the construction industry of the human society and its development, and finally, this opening on the modern debate with the subject in love shared between the marital love and the love passion. One can also add that Rousseau made it possible to establish in its company of the XVIIIe century a new concept, namely the fact that the personality of an individual, that it relates to the report/ratio with the others and sexuality inter alia, is forged as of childhood.

Emile or of Education or the need for educating with the feeling in love

the Emile or of Education is a work with the use of the Masters, tutors or mothers, which explains the nature of the child and education that it is necessary to make rise for good to make it grow, while keeping in mind that it is enough “to include/understand natural” of the child so that it grows the best possible one. Rousseau, in its foreword, takes care to draw aside criticisms which one could make him; to legitimate its work, he says to have followed and have observed nature: its step is readily empirist. What one can already note, it is this importance attached to “nature”, in opposition to the “culture”.

In the child, the love is a certain instinct of self-preservation: one likes those which want our good, and one deviates from those which want our evil. This knowledge of what is good or bad for us comes from the experiment. The Haine is not true, because it is not a question “to want evil” with those which want us, but to deviate some. What is good, in the head of the child, it is what enables him to remain alive, “to survive” if one pushes the feature with his paroxysm. This instinct, it is the “self-love”. One likes, therefore his own good is wanted; by extension, one loves people who want to make us good, and, reciprocally, one seeks to make them good. One can release a certain concept of Self-centredness, but it should be known that there will be no pejoration with the use of this term since, finally, one does not harm the others with such a behavior, since the only relationship with others relates to what they can bring to us, and not what they are. One cannot really speak about love here, since it is here a vulgar instinct of self-preservation.

With adolescence is born the physical love. Occurs puberty, the child becomes adolescent. Since there is physical change, since the voice moults, since the shoulders widen, and that the hairs appear a little everywhere, the newborn can that to differently see itself. To know if it evolved/moved well, it is compared with the others. He does not see any more itself, but he sees himself through the glance of the others. The self-love becomes Amour-propre; the report/ratio with oneself becomes report/ratio with oneself via the idea that one has glance that the others relate to us. Since one does not see oneself directly any more, one really any more does not know which are our truths needs, then one is mistaken in objects and one puts oneself well off many things which would be naturally good for us. Our field of relations extended considerably since, naturally, one seeks to see oneself with the eyes of the greatest possible number of people. There are thus much more contacts, from there are born the Jalousie and the Mensonge because it acts to be made like others. One sees also the needs for the others and one tests them on us, therefore, of a blow, one has much more Besoin S. To like the others, those should be competed with they like who too. From there is born the feeling from hatred. It is indeed a question of drawing aside our rivals. Lastly, since one compares oneself with the others, the Vanité, the Orgueil and the Jalousie are constituent our relations with others.

The love which concerns the individual at this stage of the life is a physical love. It is purely sexual, purely physical. One does not choose somebody, one chooses a body. Nothing is preferred, because the bodies are appreciably all the same ones. “Any woman is good”. Lastly, when many people were tested and that one finally could make comparisons, one makes a choice. But always the difficulty in comes keeping the beloved: not to lose it, it is necessary to compete with the others; to be well liked, it is necessary to like, there is thus a certain form of fight to preserve the love; and finally, the love is so pleasant that one seeks to be liked by other people: from there, jealousy and destruction of the couple.

“Leaning It of the instinct is unspecified, a sex is attracted towards the other, here is the movement of nature”.

One thus feels that a true love is a led love, educated, with a “Tuteur”. Rousseau speaks about the man like plant in its foreword: “One works the plants by the culture, and the men by education”.

Physical love and moral love

There are two kinds of love: physical love and moral love. The physical love does not choose, it does not prefer anything. Maybe that the savage takes the first woman who passes, not having any reason to expect some another because “any woman is good for him”; maybe that the brother takes his sister because it does not have finally any reason to go to further seek, having his sister under the hand. On the contrary, the moral love relates to the individual and proceeds of a choice. If the principles of this choice are more or less obscure, it is because we see less clearly than the love itself, but the consequences are clear: “except the liked object, a sex is nothing for the other”. So that, by the choice, the love becomes the opposite of the leaning one. The love is related to the language in any case, the language is at the origin of the feeling in love. The love needs the company of the men to replace leaning it; in other words, there exists a social speech which circulates on the women and proposes models, ideals in love which draw the love from simple leaning. One thinks of Sophie, the woman of Emile; Emile, grace or because of the company, sought an ideal, a Sophie, a person who is wise.

The company does not produce only the love; she supports also hatred. The least opposition in front of the love becomes a “impetuous fury”: softest of passions can quickly become a blood bath, adds Rousseau.

Sexual dimension is paramount, but it is necessary that it ceases so that the true love can emerge. From where an opposition necessary enters the moral love and the purely physical love.

The love and hatred are thus not really of comparable nature because the love precedes hatred.

Inceste and homosexuality

The inceste: Rousseau supposes that in the first times, there were undoubtedly consanguineous reports/ratios and that, in any event, when the children separated, then when they were found, they did not know inevitably that they were brothers and sisters. Emile, escapes to him with that, since Rousseau does not mention this question. In the News Héloïse , one speaks cousins raised together and, after the first night of love between Saint-Valiant knight and Julie, Saint-Valiant knight calls it “my sister”. The life of Rousseau draws this phantasm of the inceste: Rousseau calls his wife, Therese Levasseur, “my aunt”. He even wrote that he would have liked to be his son, and that she is her mother. Then, the father and the mother of Rousseau were high unit. The inceste at Rousseau is about the phantasm.

Homosexuality: Rousseau does not speak about it expressly, it not referred there. He detests male homosexuality and makes fun of the effeminate men whom he regards all as dressmakers or wig makers. Rousseau evokes even contacts which it underwent, of the advances that made him of the men: “Ugliest of guenons in my eyes an adorable object by the memory of this false African became”. As for female homosexuality, it seems to find a certain esthetism there; one thinks of the scene where it depicts Claire who writes with her Julie cousin and known as “to like perfectly only she”: “Which extase to see two so touching beauties embracing itself tenderly, the face of the one to consider the center of the other… Nothing on the ground is able to excite a so voluptuous tenderizing only your mutual insurance companies caresses, and the spectacle of two lovers had offered in my eyes a less delicious feeling”. It thus should well be understood that homosexuality is not recommended to Emile. Female homosexuality is not approved but is not regarded as esthetics. It is thus seen here that the inceste and homosexuality are not forgotten even if it seems that the love between two men is against nature, or in any case, not advisable. Rousseau is disgusted by male homosexuality. And the dislike is a form of hatred which will make it possible the love to emerge. The preference, the taste is not enough to draw the feeling in love with its instinctive rooting: the preference does not have enough force to replace the instinct. One needs a negative feeling which comes to bury the instinct: it is the dislike, which is a kind of hatred. The love and hatred seem complementary here in the direction where they are plain to push back what is instinctive in the love.

Rousseau, father of the modern conflict

the News Héloïse poses the opposition between the love and the marriage. It is the central theme. One finds it in many works of the time, but what distinguishes Rousseau from its contemporaries, it is its way of covering the subject and the answer which it gives. The opposition between love and marriage, by the opposition enters the free feeling and the framed feeling, the individual need and the social institution, between passion and the law. One finds this set of themes at Shakespeare in his Romeo and Juliette and the fine tragedy, the suicide of the two lovers. Difference between the love and the exaltation of the moment and the marriage which represents the law, the duration and the institutions (the family in the case of Romeo and of Juliette). In the case of Rousseau, there is impossible conciliation between the love passion and the marital love because these two forms of feeling return to two Me: one which aims at the autoconservation, the other which aims at the expression of the desire and the expenditure of self. There is thus one Me which wants to be preserved, which supposes that happiness is in the constancy and the peace of the heart. There is finally the other Me which poses happiness like impossible in the duration; the moment thus should be seized: “Gather the rosebud while we may/Old time' S still flying/And that same flower that spalling hammers today/Tomorrow' L Be dying”, famous worms of the poem “Diem Carpus”. The safeguard of oneself, it is above all the safeguard of the collective and social universe. The expenditure of oneself, it is adhesion with the individual impulses. This choice between love and marriage is impossible to make since to choose one, it is to regret not having chosen the other; the fact that this choice is strictly impossible comes from what the values are incompatible, and which to choose one or the other morally poses of the problems. How to explain to a family of high ranking which one prefers an unworthy love with a marriage which would be a pledge of dignity? How to explain to his/her lover whom one prefers the reason with passion, social recognition with the love? Rousseau thus illustrates pathology in love like impossibility of choosing. Firstly, one cannot choose which love one wants, because the choice will be regretted. One cannot either choose to remain in uncertainty, because this one made suffer. Finally, Julie will prefer the marriage with Wolmar and will have the “nostalgia of the desire”, regretting her choice; nostalgia, i.e. the impression which it should have made the other choice. The assumption of the impossibility of the choice is confirmed. What there is also the remarkable one at Rousseau, it is that while having seen this contradiction, this ambivalence between two Me, it exceeded the set of themes of the courtly love while opening the field with the Romantic ones.

The courtly love regards the marriage as the place of the duty and the law. The institution is incompatible with the love. There is thus in Jean-Jacques Rousseau a true call to the adultery, which would not be blâmable in the direction where that which would mislead its spouse would make it for somebody that it likes. The love is a true virtue, it must be released of the institution, because the emancipation of the love, it is the emancipation of the desire. There is a fidelity with passion rather than with the “crowned bonds of the marriage”. In the courtly love, it is necessary to prefer the vitality of passion to the amorphism which characterizes the matrimonial union. In the News Héloïse , Julie refuses the chaos of passion, and she refuses at the same time the marriage with that which inspires passion to him: because passion would be necessarily lost there. There is rupture with the tradition of the courtly love because Julie WANTS to taste with passion, but she refuses it, because she does not support the fact of being weak in front of passion. She realizes that she cannot anything against the instinctual one then she decides not to poke it. Julie thus chooses the marriage like conservation of oneself: it is the Christian reunion which overrides the Eros . It is the second rupture with the courtly love: the marital one blocks the emotional one: the love passion must leave the place to the love tenderness. The desire is not exceeded, it is driven back. Julie is aware that it cannot overcome passion, then it pushes back it and refuses to fight it, it rather tries to be unaware of it.

The Romanticism, as for him, considers that it is possible to reconcile marital love and love passion. The romantic love, it is fusion between the sensitive one and the spiritual one, it is an aspiration ad infinitum and the possibility of appeasing this aspiration in finitude, thanks to the relation with a real woman. Passion is exceeded here, it is not negative any more and does not lead any more to adultery. There is thus at the romantic ones, a possibility of reconciling desire and passion, by the marriage, but also by death like achievement and eternal union of the lovers, extra-temporal union. There is that at Novalis, Hölderlin or in the Tristan and Isolde of Richard Wagner. For Rousseau, it is impossible to reconcile Eros and reunion . Philosophy rousseauist of the love is thus cleavage, the going beyond of the courtly love and the way open to the romantic ones. One finds this set of themes rousseauist in authors as Proust (passion is the alienation of oneself) and at Sartre where the love is a “happy unit” which marks the end of individuality.

The policy

Sources of the political thought of Rousseau

They are numerous and are built while criticizing and while taking as a starting point Lucrèce, of Hobbes, Locke, the theorists of the natural Right (Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf), of Montesquieu. He was also opposed to the Physiocrates, the first French economists, for whom the creation of richness could come only from the exploitation of the ground ( physiocracy = “to be able of the ground”). One keeps of him some letters exchanged with Mirabeau father, the author of the Ami of the Men . As of the Speech on sciences and arts , Rousseau affirms its originality by refuting the thesis of the natural sociability of the man and by affirming his natural kindness. The first position brings it closer to Hobbes, which saw in the natural man a being isolated and seeking before very satisfying its needs. But by the second, it is detached from the English thinker, since this one affirmed that the “man is a wolf for the man” ( homo homini lupus is ). Considering the natural aggressiveness of the man, Hobbes, deeply shocked by the civil war and the English religious disorders of the 17th century, a absolute royal capacity claimed confiscating individual violence with the profit of the State; filled with enthusiasm by natural kindness, Rousseau, considers to him that the capacity must come from the individuals themselves. According to Hobbes, the man is bad in oneself; according to Rousseau, it is the company, i.e. the desire to have, dominate and appear, which corrupted the man.

Rousseau democrat?

The social Contract was sometimes regarded as the text founder of the French Republic, not without misunderstandings, or as charge on behalf of the opponents with the Republic. One especially stuck to his theory of the Souveraineté: this one belongs to the people and not to a monarch or a particular body. Undoubtedly, it is at Rousseau that it is necessary to seek the sources of the French design of the general Will: contrary to the Anglo-Saxon theories political, Rousseau does not consider the general Will as the sum of the particular wills - i.e. will of all -, but as what proceeds of the shared interest: “remove particular wills more and the least which between-are destroyed, remain for nap of the differences the general Will”.

It is often forgotten that Rousseau intended its social Contract in small States. It took as a starting point two models, one ancient (the Greek city, in particular Sparte then held for democratic), the other modern one (the Republic of Geneva). Rousseau was opposed to the opinion of the major part of the “Philosophers” who often admired the English institutions, models of balance of power rented by Montesquieu and Voltaire. Rousseau was also opposed with force to the principle of the Representative democracy and preferred to him a participative form of democracy, copied on the ancient model. To restrict itself to vote, it was, according to him, to have a Souveraineté which was only intermittent; as for the representation, it supposed the constitution of a class of representatives, necessarily dedicated to defend their interests of body before those of the general Will. On the other hand, he was opposed to the massive diffusion knowledge, as its Discours shows it on sciences and arts which sees the cause of the modern decline there. The model of Rousseau is much more Sparte, city martial, whose model maintained already some relationship with the city the Republic of Plato, that Athens, quoted democratic, talkative and cultivated. Some critical - as the American academic To ballast G. Crocker -, particularly sensitive to the model of autarky and unit main roads of Rousseau, reproached him for having supported modern totalitarianism. This opinion became minority for some time, but she testifies to the polemical force that the writings of the “Citizen of Geneva have still nowadays”.

Music

A minor musician

The music was the opposed vocation of Rousseau; he was a minor musician. Initiated by Mrs De Warens, he lived about it poorly during his stay in Paris. Rousseau was the author and type-setter of an Interlude, the Soothsayer of the village (1752), which was celebrated by the king Louis XV. Consequently, this last proposed to offer a purse to Jean-Jacques, but this one refused it; Diderot insisted that Rousseau accepted it, and this was at the origin of their quarrel.

Actually, in the second Dialog , Rousseau enumerates an act of Daphnis and Chloé , one second music of the Devin of the Village , more than one hundred pieces of various kinds, six thousand pages copied of music of toothing-stone, of harpsichord or solo and concerto of violin, work of copyist over six years, which allowed him to live. Without forgetting either the Dictionary of music published in 1767, and very snuffed European musicians of the time, in which Rousseau included and brought up to date, at the request of Diderot, tens of articles written for the Encyclopédie . Very influenced initially in the harmonic writings of Branch, it had become very critical, since the Querelle of the Buffoons (see his Lettre on the French music in 1752), with regard to the harmony.

During its period chambérienne, he imagined a new system of transcription of the notes of music.

A notorious theorist

One finds all these philosophical problems between harmony and melody developed in the Essai on the origin of the languages (subtitle Where he is spoken about the melody and the musical imitation ). Jean-Jacques Rousseau places the melody before the music, because it allows the humanization of the naturalness in the man, whereas he denies with the harmony any value of emotion. The melody is only the transcription of human passions which by their song the men, specifically definite express by their perfectibility, i.e. their capacity to evolve/move, to acquire and develop all their faculty and their imagination, by improvising their history in a temporality not preestablished by any harmonize pythagorician more or less. It is undoubtedly “the fault with Rousseau” if the music and the popular song continued and renewed a tradition mixing poetry and song which would have been at the origin of the languages in an improvisation which is only one consequence of the development of perfectibility and the imagination suitable for the paradigm of human and of the melody.

See Music, philosophy and literature at Rousseau (followed by a discussion with the Rousseau musician) on Musicologie.org: http://www.musicologie.org/publirem/lambert_rousseau.html

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