After the republic : an analysis of the duality of 'man' in Rousseau

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2020

While scholars have analysed Rousseau's critique of Locke on the one hand and the controversial place of the woman in Emile on the other, this essay argues that Emile's Book V must be enlightened by Rousseau's critical dialogue with Lockean philosophy. Notwithstanding the fact that Rousseau's Emile owes a great deal to Locke's Thoughts on Education, there is an irreducible distance between each of the two authors' art of 'forming a man'. According to Rousseau, Locke fails in making the child truly generous. For lack of forming a citizen in the full sense of the term, Rousseau's governor forms a man: a being who is aware of his place in humanity. Neutralizing man's identification with his social place makes the natural feeling of compassion possible again. However, human self-consciousness cannot easily replace patriotic self-consciousness. Virtue requires a sense of belonging to a community. Therefore, Rousseau blames Locke for abandoning his pupil at the most perilous moment: the age of marriage. In the absence of a political community, the common ego will be that of home. Rousseau's philosophy addresses a challenge to those who wish to form a modern man, both independent and beneficent, even though his own solution remains unsatisfactory inasmuch as it sacrifices women's liberty.

2020

That Rousseau equates humanhood in to the possibility and valuing of freedom, despite negating that humans ordinarily find themselves in the condition of being free, makes it sensible to ask whether and in what sense Rousseau's project implies such possibility. Scholarly and historical reception presents though two pressing issues. First, there is disagreement on the precise type of freedom Rousseau has in mind when claiming humans are everywhere unfree and its relation to natural freedom: some interpret this as the active membership and dependence of non-dominated communities; others, as Rousseau seems to suggest more 2 directly but more contentiously, that humans can be individually free because somehow obeying themselves. 3 Second, there are difficulties with the standard Rousseauvian equation between obeying the general will and obeying oneself-such as in the ambiguous case of 'being forced to be free.' Responding to such 4 considerations, I will argue that a) Arguments on whether and I what way Rousseauvian humans can be free, if we are to avoid squaring the circle, cannot be reduced to the refection on 'restructured dependence' of the type proposed by theorists of republicanism or liberal indictments of 'authoritarianism'-at least if we are to avoid a category error. Rather that arguments must define with care and confront, or eschew at their own peril, the significant and much needed problem of finding a philosophically and textually plausible synthetic Rousseau, 2019a: 47

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One believes himself the others' master, and yet is more a slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can solve this question.

Studia Philosophica. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 2023

Contrary to all expectations, Paul de Man presents a strictly freedom-philosophical approach to reading Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. This approach is exposed in the first Rousseau chapter of Allegories of Reading from 1979. (1) However, de Man only announces this reading, but does not carry it out. Rather, despite his declared intention, he drops the project in favour of a linguistic determinism through which the freedomphilosophical programme is suppressed and negated. (2) Nevertheless, the prospective interpretation can be delivered: in a critical counter and corrective-reading of de Man's text, which gives the freedom-philosophical starting point its right. In proceeding this way, a new, strictly freedom-philosophical interpretation of the second discourse will be developed. (3)

Rousseau's early work on political philosophy, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, seeks to conceptualise the transformation of the savage human of the state of nature into the rational human of the state of civilisation. The overall narrative seems to construct a pessimistic narrative of history, demonstrating the inevitable downfall of humanity from a blissful starting point to a bloodstained, conflict-ridden terminus. In this article, I aim to re-evaluate this negative value of the state of nature in Rousseau. To this end, I emphasise the shift in the role of society as regards freedom in his later political work, On the Social Contract, in which not the egoist savage human but the sociable modern human being is thought to be the ultimate goal. I suggest that, instead of considering the hypothetical period of the state of nature as a bygone era of humanity, it could be re-evaluated as providing us with a goal for the human being of the state of civilisation. The simplicity and compassion of the savage human, who is immune from the destructive sentiment of amour propre, might be seen as equipping the modern human of excessive egoism with a horizon to determine its line of development.

Modern Intellectual History , 2022

Rousseau claims that the lawgiver must “persuade without convincing,” binding this legislative communication to the “first language,” which would, Rousseau writes, “persuade without convincing, and depict without arguing.” Drawing on a wide range of contextual sources, I show that this first language of Rousseau's is figurative, imagistic, and modeled on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which William Warburton claimed were “the uniform voice of nature” in his Divine Legation of Moses. More importantly, I demonstrate that Rousseau was himself using this lost ancient language to provide a figuration of his own: the “illusory image” of natural man. Through the Second Discourse, men could be persuaded that they were by nature free, preparing the way for a social contract in which they could legitimately give themselves law. This is an image that I argue has been effectively persuasive up to the present day—and our politics, like Rousseau's, thus seemingly rests on figurative foundations. Page One in preview as PDF. For full article: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/abs/figurative-foundations-of-rousseaus-politics/130FE81B6DE40E2494C37D5120BF1F1B

Filosofija. Sociologija, 2019

In this study, we will try to show that human nature can be handled with a political determination in Rousseau. Human nature has always been a controversial subject of political philosophy in the historical process. So much so that in these discussions we can see that human nature, especially with Rousseau, is now treated as something that is shaped and changed separately for each of various processes of history. Therefore we will first focus on how human nature is defined in Rousseau in the state of nature to show that human nature has been subjected to political influence in the historical process. Then we will examine how the human nature takes shape with the civilization leading to the end of the state of nature. Finally, through social contracting, we will focus on how human nature is transformed into a political thing by gaining a new dimension.

International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 2015

From Antiquity to the Enlightenment, several biographical writings from Parallel Lives of Plutarch to the Memoirs of Saint-Simon were practiced. However, the eighteenth century saw the first emergence of the autobiography of introspection in the works of Rousseau. This new literary creation, far from being a simple description of memories, contained the analytical study of Rousseau's psychological evolution. Following the tempestuous years of composing the Confessions and the Dialogues, a period of quietude and interior consolation began with the Reveries. In this paper, through examining this final stage of Rousseau's self-analysis, we attempt to procure the answer to the mental problems of modern man; the notions of solitude and falsehood which have been a tragedy for the man of today are herald of «Joie de vivre» in the Reveries. For this end, we examine the analysis carried out by some contemporary authors and critics while having Rousseau's perspective in mind.

Intellectual History Review, 2020