Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1712-1778

No history of psychology is complete without a look at Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  He

has influenced education to the present day, philosophy (Kant, Schopenhauer...),
political theory (the French Revolution, Karl Marx...), and he inspired the Romantic
Movement in Philosophy, which in turn influenced all these things, and psychology,
once again. 

Plus, he’s one of the most colorful characters we have and, as an

added bonus, he has left a particularly revealing autobiography
in The Confessions.

He was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1712 to  the watchmaker

Isaac Rousseau and his wife Suzanne Bernard Rousseau.  Athough a
Calvinist, Isaac was also a bit unstable, and left his wife and first
son, returned to father Jean-Jacques, then left again.  His mother
died one week after Jean-Jacques was born, and he was raised by an aunt and uncle.

they sent him off to boarding school in the country where, he says, he learned “all the
insignificant trash that has obtained the name of education.”  The experience did,
however, serve as the start of his love-affair with rural life.

At twelve years old, he returned to his aunt and uncle.  There apprenticed to a
watchmaker, he developed two other personal qualities:  The constant beatings from
his master (as well as at school) led him to lying and idleness;  and adolescence led
him to develop a rather bizarre romantic streak.  He would spend much of his life
falling in love.

Rousseau’s Romanticism
This was the first time we see his ideas about the natural goodness of man.  And
although we think of him as an Enlightenment thinker, this thesis was actually anti-
Enlightenment, anti-philosophy, anti-reason, anti-Voltaire, and even anti-printing
press!  The good life, he was saying, is the simple life of the peasants.  This
conception of “back to nature” involved, of course, a romanticized notion of nature,
and stands in stark contrast to the nature of jungles and deserts!

Reason vs. Emotions:

 Reason is a faculty of awareness; its function is to perceive that which exists by organizing
observational data. And reason is a volitional faculty; it has the power to direct its own actions and
check its conclusions, the power to maintain a certain relationship to the facts of reality. Emotion, by
contrast, is a faculty not of perception, but of reaction to one's perceptions. This kind of faculty has
no power of observation and no volition; it has no means of independent access to reality, no means
to guide its own course, and no capacity to monitor its own relationship to facts.

(Kant answers the question in the first sentence of the essay:

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”) 

Rousseau’s Reasons, passions and instinct:

Rousseau opens by distinguishing between two types of inequality: the natural or
physical and the moral or political. There is nothing to be done about the first, but we
are responsible for the second, which depends on our consent (293). To address this
problem, he proposes to reconstruct the "moment when, right taking the place of
violence, nature was subjected to law" (293). He is well aware that he is dealing in
"hypothetical and conditional reasoning’s" (294). The inquiry is normative, not
historical. We are interested in two things: first, how various forms of political inequality
have been accepted by the subordinate members and, second, what sort of political
arrangement might actually be justifiable. (The second topic is treated more fully in "The
Social Compact.")

The state of nature presented in the "Discourse" is of a decidedly Romantic cast.

Rousseau envisions primitive (or "savage") man as individually self-sufficient in a pristine
environment. Natural abundance provides for all bodily needs. We have only come
together now and again to copulate. Furthermore, primitive man, lacking culture, has no
moral knowledge, and, Rousseau contends, doesn't need it: "So much more profitable
to these [primitives] is the ignorance of vice than the knowledge of virtue is to those [in
society]" (299). We see prefigured here Rousseau's deep-seated ambivalence towards
society, which, on the one hand, facilitates new modes of "self-perfection" but which
also, on the other, is the source of inauthenticity, vice, and social inequality.

Primitive man lives according to his "instinct," and, Rousseau claims, it does not lead
him astray. To live in society, however, man must cultivate his reason, and this faculty
can lead to all kinds of trouble (298). Reason, for Rousseau is closely linked with the
ability to resist our immediate impulses and to elect from among competing desires
(296). It is this sort of reflective self-distantiation that enables us to develop and pursue
an ideal of self-perfection (though, as I've indicated, reason may also "turn man against
himself" and engender "egocentrism" (300)).
https://books.google.com.pk/books?
id=WHwJnj0IeksC&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=rousseau+reason+vs+passion&source=bl&ots=BPAD9R2vO
h&sig=cUKFGE005ZcDh3Nl2zzhZM9DD9o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj68pK4of3KAhUH6xoKHbf5ATkQ
6AEITDAJ#v=onepage&q=rousseau%20reason%20vs%20passion&f=false

The state of nature: rousseau:

Rousseau proclaimed the natural goodness of man and believed that one man by nature is just as good
as any other. For Rousseau, a man could be just without virtue and good without effort. According to
Rousseau, man in the state of nature was free, wise, and good and the laws of nature were benevolent. It
follows that it was civilization that enslaved and corrupted man and made him unnatural. Because in the
order of nature all men were equal, it also follows that distinction and differentiation among men are the
products of culture and civilization. Because man is by nature a saint, it must be the corrupting influence
of society that is responsible for the misconduct of the individual.

The state of nature is a concept in moral and political philosophy used in religion, social
contract theories and international law to denote the hypothetical conditions of what the lives of
people might have been like before societies came into existence
 

"Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of

Rousseau's The Social Contract not only summarizes his entire philosophical
system, it also proves how important he still is today.

Rousseau distinguished between various types of freedom. The most basic sort is

the natural liberty that abounds in the state of nature: a man’s “unlimited right to anything
which tempts him and which he is able to attain”.[3] This negative conception of freedom
captures our pre-philosophical intuitions of freedom as mere absence of constraint.Any
political institutions will necessary encroach upon an individual’s freedom in this
sense. Rousseau is quite happy to admit that we give up our natural freedom in joining the
social contract. What we gain by doing so is civil liberty– the security of having our
(remaining) rights defended by the entire community. ‘Natural’ rights, lacking such security,
are practically worthless by comparison. As Hobbes put it, “the effects of this right are the
same, almost, as if there had been no right at all. For although any man may say of every
thing, this is mine, yet he could not enjoy it, by reason of his neighbour, who having equal
right and equal power, would pretend the same thing to be his.”[4]

Rousseau then identifies moral liberty as a form of positive freedom, whereby one’s actions
conform to one’s own true will: “for the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery, and
obedience to the law one prescribes to oneself is freedom”.[5] Moral freedom would thus be
realized if each individual has himself willed the laws of his polity. This might be achieved
through the general will – a central concept of Rousseau’s philosophy. Just as a single
person plays many different roles in life, and has a different set of interests with respect to
each role, he similarly can have a distinct will corresponding to these different roles and
interests. Rousseau identifies our general will as that which we will in our role as a citizen,
according to the common interests of our society.[6] This is both a part of each individual’s
own will, and yet shared by every other member of the society, since the interests in
question are common to them all. Any law enacted according to this general will, will thus
be a law prescribed by (a part of) the will of each individual. So, the argument goes, to
constrain a person to follow the law, can be understood as forcing him to be free.

This sort of justification strikes us as rather implausible, however, for it simply ignores an
individual’s particular willand self-interests – which we expect to greatly outweigh his
interest in the general will. The above argument requires that citizens have such a strong
civic feeling and homogeneity of purpose that their common interests align with, and
perhaps even outweigh, their particular (self) interests. Only then could an individual truly
embrace the general will.[7] Failing that, he does not truly affirm the laws he is forced to
live by, and so does not attain genuine moral freedom.

Rousseau’s self:
Central to Rousseau’s psychological theory is his distinction between two forms of self-
regard – amour de soi, andamour propre:

Love of self [amour de soi] is a natural feeling which leads every animal to look to its
own preservation, and which, guided in man by reason and modified by compassion,
creates humanity and virtue. Amour-propre is a purely relative and factitious feeling,
which arises in the state of society, leads each individual to make more of himself
than of any other, causes all the mutual damage men inflict one on another, and is
the real source of the ‘sense of honour’.[33]

The crucial task of Rousseau’s social contract is thus not to secure us pure independence,
but rather, to find a form of association wherein our mutual interdependence is compatible
with freedom. For Rousseau, the only way to achieve this was to transform our social
dependency from resting on individuals, to instead rest on the community as a whole, “so
that each Citizen should be in a perfect independence of all the others, and in an excessive
dependence on the City… because only the force of the State secures the liberty of its
members”.[41] Neuhouser argues that this is best understood in terms of social institutions
and laws which mediate our irreplaceably personal relations of dependence, in order to
make them “less injurious to freedom”.[42]

Perhaps the most obvious form of dependence in need of relief is the economic dependency
which can arise out of severe wealth inequalities. To overcome this, Rousseau recommends
that “no citizen should be so opulent as to be able to buy another, and none so poor as to
be constrained to sell himself”.[43] Of course, there remains a broad economic
interdependency within society, due to the material division of labour. But the crucial
change is the alleviation of personal dependency. General equality of wealth will help to
prevent situations whereby those less well-off must submit to the will of (richer) others in
order to satisfy their material needs.[44]

http://www.academia.edu/2288702/Freedom_Rationality_and_Emotions_Rousseau_
on_Citizenship_

Rousseau’s challenge to enlightenment: or rousseau

natural man vs enlightenment man :
Contrast this view with the view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) the Enlightenment
philosopher whose book The Social Contract influenced the French Revolution: "Man is born
free, and everywhere he is in chains." In contrast to Hobbes' view that primitive life was
"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," Rousseau declared that humans in early times
were "noble savages." That is, humans are naturally and innately good and it is "civilization"
that turns man into a "beast." Thus, Rousseau argued that modern man should seek to
restore the conditions of our lost Eden and live a more "natural" rather than "technological"
life.

To summarize, we can create a quick schematic summary contrasting Hobbes and

Rousseau:

Hobbes: 
Human Nature = Bad
Civilization = Good

Rousseau:
Human Nature = Good
Civilization = Bad

Citizen or Man?
“Instead of educating a man for himself, he must be educated for others… we must
chuse (sic) either to form the man or the citizen; for to do both at once is
impossible.” Here Rousseau reinforces the value of reason, abhorring distortion and
prejudice, asserting how difficult it is for man to be true to his inner nature and also
accommodate the demands of society, “…held in suspense… without being able to
render ourselves consistent, and without ever being good for anything to ourselves or
others.”
Unnatural Nature and the Woman of Sparta
Rousseau says that feeling is a component of faith, sometimes presenting “nature” in a
way that is positively unnatural, yet calling it “noble”. The woman of Sparta, having lost
her five sons in a battle, cries,“…who asked you of my sons? – But we have gained the
victory.”

Rousseau attempts to present an individual as a whole, therefore, as both true citizen

and heroic mother, stretching credibility to its limits. This is an unlikely account of a
natural, maternal reaction.  She has repressed her natural behaviour – and this is a
problem for Rousseau’s attempt to reconcile citizen and man.  A child must first be a
man, before choosing a profession: “Nature has destined us to the offices of human life,
antecedent to the destination of our parents.”

Rousseau’s preoccupation with reason and enlightenment leads him to similar

conclusions to those of the French philosophes. He argues for what he sees as rational
liberation, making objections to the ways in which babies are unnaturally swaddled so
that they cannot move, or wet-nursed instead of nursed by their natural mothers.

The House in Geneva where Rousseau was born. Image by Bristoleast.

However, he is not averse to encouraging stoical endurance and abhorring
indulgence: “…when she makes an idol of the child… prevents every approach of pain
or distress… This is the rule of nature.” 

Later, he becomes even more extreme in his claims: “Man is born to suffer in every
stage of his existence… Happy are we, who in our infancy, know only physical evils…
We lament the state of infants, whereas it is our own that is most to be lamented.”

This seems to contradict earlier assertions about not swaddling children, and not
keeping them from their mother’s breast, but Rousseau’s point is that the swaddling and
wet-nursing are man-made evils, due to the caprices of women. “…such is the man
made by our own caprices; that of nature is differently constituted.”