Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A Philosopher's Philosopher. (The Bus 5.17)

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The Stop

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) was a Swiss philosopher, political theorist and writer whose treatises and novels inspired the leaders of both the French Revolution and the Romantic generation. Despite being the ‘least academic of modern philosophers,’ in numerous ways he was the ‘most influential.’ His thought is credited with marking the end of the Age of Reason by propelling ‘political and ethical thinking into new channels’ and revolutionising taste in music and the other arts. His philosophy had a ‘profound impact’ on day to day life, specifically by teaching ‘parents to take a new interest in their children and to educate them differently’ and by insisting on the need to express emotion - rather than ‘polite restraint’ - in friendship and love. Most importantly, it was Rousseau who turned the concept of liberty into ‘an object of almost universal aspiration’.¹

‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’/ca.1750/Public Domain

Rousseau was born in the independent Calvinist city-state of Geneva in 1712, the son of Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker, and Suzanne Bernard. As his mother died nine days after his birth, the boy was raised and educated by his father until the age of ten. He received - according to his own accounts - a ‘haphazard education’ based around his father’s belief in ‘republican patriotism’ and reading various historians of ancient republicanism. When his father was forced to leave Geneva to avoid arrest,² Rousseau was placed into the care of a pastor and apprenticed to an engraver. At 16, he left Geneva and came under the influence of Baronne de Warens - a Roman Catholic convert noblewoman who arranged for Rousseau’s conversion to Catholicism in 1728.

After a brief period training to become a Catholic priest, Rousseau started on a career as an ‘itinerant musician, music copyist and teacher’ before returning in 1731 to Mme de Warens, becoming her lover and household manager. He remained with Mme de Warens for the rest of the 1730s before moving to Lyons to become a tutor,³ after which he moved to Paris where - after a series of jobs and posts, including serving as secretary to the French ambassador to Venice - in 1749 Rousseau entered an essay competition organised by the Academy of Dijon based upon the ‘theme of whether the development of the arts and sciences had improved or corrupted public morals’. He would later claim that ‘he then and there experienced an epiphany which included the thought, central to his world view, that humankind is good by nature but is corrupted by society’. His entry was his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, for which he won first prize. Setting out his ‘contrarian thesis’ that social development - including both the arts and sciences - corrodes ‘civic virtue and individual moral character’ and has made the ‘history of human life … a history of decay,’ Rousseau published it as a book in 1751. The book made Rousseau famous, and he began to develop its various themes.

In 1755 he entered the Academy of Dijon’s competition again, responding this time with what would become his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. Though he did not win the prize, this ‘far more accomplished work’ displayed serious maturation of his ‘theories of human social development and moral psychology’, and inaugurated the most productive and important years of Rousseau’s career. In 1761 he published Julie, a novel about a love triangle between Julie, her husband and her tutor. Written as a series of letters, it is considered an important source for understanding his social philosophy as it contains ‘a vision of rural community and the presence of a manipulative genius who achieves the appearance of natural harmony through cunning artifice’. In 1762, he published Émile - a treatise on education - and The Social Contract - a work of political theory centred on how a political community might establish legitimate authority that remains compatible with individual freedom.

Despite marking the ‘high point of Rousseau’s intellectual development’, both of these works led to ‘personal catastrophe’. Émile and The Social Contract were banned in Geneva for their ‘religious heterodoxy’, and Émile was banned and burned in Paris for its alleged anti-religious leanings. Fearing he would be arrested, Rousseau fled to England at the invitation of the Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1766, where his stay was ‘marked by his increasing mental instability’. After fourteen months in Staffordshire, he returned to France in 1767 where he would spend the rest of his life working on autobiographical texts, including his Confessions. One of the first examples of modern autobiography⁴, Rousseau’s Confessions is notable for its exploration into the way his personality and ideas were shaped by his worldly experiences and personal feelings. Rousseau died in 1778, and in 1794 the French Revolutionaries moved his remains from his grave in Ermenonville to the Panthéon in Paris.

The Detour

Today’s Detour is to a short (2:52) video - 17 Small Ideas - which does exactly what it says in its title. A collection of surreal and interesting thoughts on how to approach everything from lighting a candle to watching a film, it’s provocative - and rewards repeated viewings. Let me know your thoughts on it!

17 Small Ideas

The Recommendation

Today’s Recommendation is Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983). I’ve been a King fan for years - The Shining, ‘Salem’s Lot, and It stand on my all-time favourite novels list - but of all of them, this is the one that truly scared me. To this day, remember reading it in bed as a teenager, willing Louis not to do exactly what he was about to do - and loving every minute. Yes, it’s dark and disturbing - but that’s exactly why it’s a brilliant read. Highly recommended.

From the back: The house looked right, felt right, to Dr Louis Creed.

Rambling, old, unsmart and comfortable. A place where the family could settle; the children grow and play and explore. The far-horizoned, rolling hills and meadows of Maine seemed a world away from the city-spawned dangers of Chicago, fume choked and garish.

Only the occasional big truck out on the two-lane highway, grinding up through the gears, hammering down the long gradients, growled out an intrusive interstate note of threat.

But behind the house and away from the road; that was safe. Just a carefully cleared path up into the woods where generations of local children had processed with the solemn innocence of the young, taking with them their dear departed pets for burial. The simple little markers in the clearing told their story: Marta Our Pet Rabit, Hannah the Best Dog That Ever Lived, Smucky The Cat He Was Obediant …

A sad place maybe, but safe. Surely a safe place. Not a place to seep into your dreams, to wake you up, shouting, sweating, slippery with fear and foreboding …

The Sounds

As today is my son’s 14th birthday, I thought I’d create a playlist composed of tracks from the Billboard Hot 100 the week I turned 14 - way back in September 1983:⁵ ‘Burning Down the House’ (Talking Heads, Speaking in Tongues), ‘Heart and Soul’ (Huey Lewis & The News, Sports), ‘Foolin’’ (Def Leppard, Pyromania), ‘Don’t Cry’ (Asia, Alpha) and ‘King of Pain’ (The Police, Synchronicity). Enjoy!

The Thought

Today’s Thought is - of course - from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the opening line from The Social Contract:

‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’

If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:

And that’s the end of this Stop - I hope you enjoyed the diversion!

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Until the next Stop …

1. Rousseau is a very complicated figure about whom no single Stop can do justice. Consequently, today’s Stop is a skim over a few bits of his life and a mention of a couple of his major works. Further Stops will possibly consider him, but in the meantime you could check out today’s sources if you want to know more: Rousseau (Britannica) and Rousseau (Stanford).

2. A watchmaker, Rousseau’s father offended the city’s authorities by wearing a sword symbolic of the class above his own. Or, at least, this is one of the stories. There’s a lot of confusion about what exactly happened when regarding Rousseau.

3. While in Lyons (or possibly Paris - again, it’s confusing), he met the ‘barely literate laundry-maid’ Thérèse Levasseur who became his lover and eventually his wife. Together they had five children - ‘all of whom were deposited at the foundling hospital shortly after birth, an almost certain sentence of death in eighteenth-century France’. His abandonment of his children was later to be used against him by Voltaire (by all accounts, the two hated each other).

4. Previous to Rousseau’s Confessions, the two most famous examples of confessional work were Augustine’s Confessions (ca. 400 CE) and St Teresa of Avila’s Life of Herself (ca. 1563) - both of which outlined their author’s religious and spiritual development.

5. A search of the Billboard Hot 100 quickly revealed a host of songs from this week. These five were culled from those I remembered - which, to be fair, was a good number considering a lot were really forgettable. Discounting any I’ve used before (Peter Gabriel’s ‘Solsbury Hill’ and Robert Plant's ‘Big Log’, for instance), these were the ones that stood out. The Talking Heads track is one of their best, as is the one by The Police. I have a soft (80s) spot in my heart for Def Leppard because Pyromania was one of the first cassette albums I purchased. The Asia track is OK - it’s no ‘Heat of the Moment’ - and as far as Huey Lewis is concerned, I guess he’s probably most memorable because he looked like Harrison Ford. But it’s an OK track.