Rousseau: Philosophy in an Hour

The initial aim of education should be to replace the child’s dependence upon adults with a healthy sense of its own independence. Instead of simply conforming to the wishes and ambitions imposed upon it by adults, the child should be allowed to cultivate its own faculties in accordance with its own development. As Rousseau puts it, “Nature wants children to pass through childhood before becoming men.” (As can be seen from the preceding quote, Rousseau’s children are male. This was not for the most part his intention in Émile.

Mandeville pointed out that the virtues required by public life were precisely the opposite of the private behaviour required by Christianity. What Christianity condemned as vices were the very virtues that drove civil life: greed, self-interest, ambition, and vanity. As Mandeville put it: “private Vices are public Benefits.” While Rousseau didn’t go quite as far as this, he still saw the need for a civil religion.

Amidst the vast spaces of the mountains, he would lose himself in reverie. “I do not think, I do not reason. I feel myself, with a kind of voluptuousness, possessed of the substance of the universe.”

“Social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him.” Humanity became set adrift, cut off from its original inner certainty. “Everything is reduced to appearance. Even honour, friendship, virtue, and often vice too, become nothing more than acting and artifice. We are reduced to asking others what we are; we never dare to ask ourselves…. All we have to show for ourselves is a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour devoid of virtue, reason devoid of wisdom, pleasure devoid of happiness.”

Rousseau was the man who put “liberty” on the social agenda – and all future revolutions would proclaim this as their goal.

When at last he found himself alone with the Zulietta, he exclaimed to himself, “Never was such sweet pleasure offered to the heart and senses of a mortal man.” But when he found himself unable to rise to the occasion, his eye alighted on her “malformed nipple,” whereupon she became transformed in his eyes into “some kind of monster.” Zulietta took this in her stride and causally advised him, “Jacko, give up the ladies and study mathematics.”