Jean-Jacques Rousseau (born June 28, 1712 and died July 2, 1778) was a French-speaking writer and philosopher from Geneva. He was one of the most illustrious philosophers of the Enlightenment and greatly influenced the French revolutionary spirit. He is particularly famous for his work on society and the state, as well as on education.
A difficult childhood
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the son of Isaac Rousseau (1672 Geneva - 1747 Nyon), watchmaker like his father and grandfather, and Suzanne Bernard (1673 Geneva - 1712 Geneva), herself the daughter of a watchmaker, Jacques Bernard. His mother was brought up from the age of nine, on the death of his father, by his uncle Samuel Bernard, a Protestant pastor, whom Jean-Jacques took for his grandfather. She died on July 7, 1712 in Geneva, nine days after the birth of Jean-Jacques. His family, of French origin, was exiled to Geneva in 1549 because of religious persecution. Abandoned at the age of 10 by his father, he experienced, left to himself, a difficult childhood, education and beginnings. He spent two years with Pastor Lambercier in Bossey (at the foot of Salève, south of Geneva) (1722 - 1724). His uncle placed him as an apprentice to a clerk, then in 1725 to a master engraver. His father remarried in 1726.
"Mom"
Jean-Jacques left Protestant Geneva at the age of sixteen in 1728. It was the parish priest of Confignon, Benoît de Pontverre, who addressed him to a recently converted Catholic from Annecy, Madame la Baronne de Warens. This sent him to Turin where he converted to Catholicism on April 23. The following year, he returned to the one he called "Maman", in "a small house leaning over a valley", near Chambéry, which Les Confessions made famous:"Les Charmettes".
* In 1730, he traveled on foot to Neuchâtel, where he taught music.
* In 1732, he returned to Chambéry, where he was master of music, and he stayed there for almost ten years.
* In 1734 he became the steward of Madame de Warens, who would later become his mistress.
* It was there that he wrote his first book, Le verger de Madame la baronne de Warens, in 1739. He appreciated the city:“If there is a small town in the world where you can taste the sweetness of life in pleasant and safe commerce, it is Chambéry. »
Philosophical beginnings
* In Paris, in 1742 and 1743, he tried to exploit the invention of a system of musical notation by publishing successively the Project concerning new signs for music and the Dissertation on modern music. He became friends with Denis Diderot and Madame d'Epinay.
* In 1745, he met Thérèse Levasseur, a modest inn servant, with whom he moved in. The five children they had were entrusted to the Foundlings, the Public Assistance of the time, a decision for which he was reproached later (in particular by a pamphlet by Voltaire, to which he replied with his great work Les Confessions), when he posed as a pedagogue in his book Émile.
* In 1747, died his father, Isaac Rousseau.
* In 1749, Jean-Jacques wrote articles on music for the Encyclopédie.
* In 1750, he participated in a competition offered by the Academy of Dijon:his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (known as the Premier Discours), which maintains that progress is synonymous with corruption, obtains the first prize.
* On October 18, 1752 was performed before King Louis XV, at Fontainebleau, in the midst of the "Querelle des Bouffons", Le Devin du village, Interlude in one act, for which Rousseau had just composed and written the music and the libretto.
Celebrity and controversy
* In 1755, to another competition of the same Academy of Dijon, he answered with his Discourse on the origin and the foundations of inequality among men (also called Second Discourse), which completed to make him famous and aroused, like the First Discourse, a lively polemic.
* Published in 1762, Émile ou De l’Éducation was condemned by the Parliament of Paris. The Social Contract appeared the same year and suffered a similar fate:the two works were banned in France, the Netherlands, Geneva and Bern.
* Rousseau went to Switzerland, then to the territory of Neuchâtel (Môtiers) which belonged to the King of Prussia. After a stay on the island of Saint-Pierre, on Lake Biel, he went to England in 1765, accompanied by David Hume, attached to the British Embassy in Paris.
* He was able to return to Paris in 1770, on the eve of the fall of Choiseul, whose policy of annexing Corsica he had condemned. He also condemned the Russian policy of dismantling Poland, while most philosophers supported Catherine II.
* The poet Jean-Antoine ROUCHER publishes in 1779 in the "Mois" the four "Lettres à M. de Maleshebes"
It was during this period that Rousseau, who lived in the fear of a plot directed against him, began his autobiographical work.
The autobiographical work
* Between 1766 and 1769, he wrote the Confessions (he coined the term "Cruscanism").
* In 1772, he began writing the Dialogues of Rousseau judge of Jean-Jacques. The Reveries of the Solitary Walker were written during the last two years of his life.
* Louis Donin de Rosière witnessed, with his cousin Myriadec, the marriage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Thérèse Renou, on August 30, 1768, in Bourgoin-Jallieu.
* In 1778, the Marquis de Girardin offered hospitality to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in a pavilion on his Ermenonville estate, near Paris; it was there that the writer-philosopher died suddenly on July 2, 1778, of what appeared to be a fit of apoplexy.
* The day after his death, the sculptor Houdon took the cast of his death mask. On July 4, the Marquis de Girardin had the body buried on the Île des Peupliers, on the property where, in 1780, the funerary monument designed by Hubert Robert and executed by J.-P. Lesueur would stand. The philosopher was quickly the object of a cult, and his tomb was assiduously visited. The revolutionaries extolled him and the Convention demanded his transfer to the Pantheon.
* The solemn tribute of the French nation took place on October 11, 1793:during a grand ceremony, the ashes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were transferred from Ermenonville to the Panthéon. Jean-Jacques Rousseau officially became one of the glories of the French nation.
The "truth" of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau opposes nobility filiation and awakens this unknown of the "old" literature:sensitivity, a founding sensitivity of rights and duties. But his influence finds its full expression with the French Revolution:the political thinker becomes one of its spiritual fathers and all claim to be from him. The revolutionaries, from one extreme to the other, claim “to march only with the Social Contract in hand”. Paradoxically, the theorists of the counter-revolution (Joseph de Maistre, Louis-Gabriel de Bonald) also claim Rousseau. This is enough to give an idea of the diversity of Rousseau's heritage.
The major difference between his work and other published "truths" is perhaps to be found in the bias displayed and, with him, obvious - his motto vitam impendere vero (borrowed from Juvénal, Satires, IV, 91) or "to consecrate his life to the truth", according to his own translation, attests to this - to consider the notion of truth as an object of research superior to any other value and even to his own reputation or his own honor. We can, in some ways, consider the totality of Rousseau's work as an immense moral letter addressed to his contemporaries first, but also to all humanity (and if not eternal, at least for a few centuries after him). The current state of its distribution in bookstores, the number of theses devoted to him, to him and his work, just as the translations into multiple languages seem to confirm the fundamental nature of these "essays on truth" written by a passionate , a great initiate who ventured to descend and work for this emotional world that men master the least. He “spoke people, for the peoples” before the letter, and this with as much intelligence as instinct, that is to say from the heart, without being neither tribune nor proud, all the same seeming not to ignore that in his own way he was (and perhaps would remain) one of humanity's great teachers.
Nature
Definition
All the philosophers of the 18th century refer to Nature. Often, it is in the sense of a physics. In Rousseau, the definition of this word "Nature" is not very obvious:it can designate the physical world as well as the innate dispositions of man, the moral conscience (the "voice of nature") or, more simply , the green countryside.
This plurality of meanings does not, however, prevent the production of a more precise definition. Nature is above all what we oppose to culture (art, technique, law, institution, society, arbitrariness). Rousseau is perhaps the first to make this distinction a methodological tool (taken up notably by Claude Lévi-Strauss, a fervent Rousseauist).
The idea of nature is perhaps that of an original "transparency":nature is what is true, what we have an immediate relationship with (without mediation), and which reminds us of our origin - it is in this sense that one can speak, to designate moral conscience, of the "voice of nature":"be just and you will be happy", "I do not draw these principles from high philosophy, but I find them in the bottom of my heart written by nature in indelible characters” (Emile, IV). Nature is a principle of order, simplicity and authenticity. Conversely, vice (disorder, lies, luxury, violence) proceeds from society and culture, from the inclusion of the individual in artificial relationships:"Let us posit as a maxim that the first movements of nature are always upright:there is no original perversity in the human heart. There is not a single vice which one cannot say how and where it entered” (Emile, II).
The state of nature according to Rousseau
In addition to the fragments entitled The State of War, two main texts - which sometimes differ somewhat - describe the state of nature as it is conceived by Rousseau:the Essay on the origin of languages and the Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men.
What characterizes the naked man in the state of nature is a perfect balance between his desires and the resources at his disposal. For the natural man is first of all a being of sensations, and of sensations only. “The more we meditate on this subject, the more the distance between pure sensations and the simplest knowledge increases in our view; and it is impossible to conceive how a man could have, by his own strength, bridged so great an interval”.
The natural man desires only what is in his immediate environment. Because he doesn't think. These are the only things he can "represent" to himself. The desires of the natural man coincide perfectly with the desires of his body. "His desires do not exceed his physical needs, the only goods he knows in the universe are food, a female and rest".
Being pure and only sensations, the natural man cannot anticipate the future, nor imagine things beyond the present. In other words, the nature within him perfectly matches that without. In the Essay, Rousseau suggests that the natural man is not even able to distinguish a similar in another human being. Because this distinction requires faculties of abstraction that it lacks. The natural man does not know what there is in common between him and the other human being. For the natural man, humanity stops at the small circle of individuals with whom he is in immediate contact. “They had the idea of a father, a son, a brother, and not of a man. Their hut contained all their fellows... Apart from them and their family, the universe was nothing to them”. (Essay, IX) Pity could only be exercised actively in the small milieu of the horde. But this ignorance would not result in war, for natural men virtually did not meet each other. The men, if you will, attacked each other in their encounters, but they rarely met:"Everywhere reigned a state of war, and the earth was at peace".
In this, Rousseau takes the opposite view of the Hobbesian theory of the state of nature. Rousseau's natural man is not a "wolf" to his fellows. But neither is he inclined to unite himself with them by lasting bonds and to form societies with them. He doesn't feel the desire. His desires are fulfilled by nature. And his intelligence, reduced to sensations alone, cannot even form an idea of what such an association would be. The natural man has only instinct, and this instinct is enough for him. This instinct is individualistic; he in no way induces him to social life. To live in society, the natural man needs reason. Reason, for Rousseau, is the instrument that adapts the naked man to a social, clothed environment. Just as instinct is the instrument of man's adaptation to his natural environment, reason is an instrument of man's adaptation to a social and legal environment. Now, he has this reason only potentially, just as social life is potentially present in natural life:reason, the imagination which allows one to represent another man as my alter-ego (c that is to say as a being at the same time same as me and other than me), language and society, all that constitutes culture, appear together, and are not truly active in the state of nature. But the natural man, insofar as he is perfectible, already possesses virtually all these faculties. He is asocial, but not associable:“He is not refractory to society; but he is not inclined to it. It has in it the germs which, developed, will become the social virtues, the social inclinations; but they are only powers. The perfectibility, the social virtues and the other faculties which the natural man had received in power could never develop of themselves” (Second Discourse, first part). Man is sociable even before he socializes. There is in him a potential for sociality that only contact with certain hostile forces from outside can actualize. “Barren years, long hard winters, scorching summers that consume everything, demanded of them a new industry” (Essay). As long as they do not change, the conditions of the natural man produce a perfect balance between him and his living environment. But things change and so do the conditions of this natural balance...
Botanist Rousseau
Rousseau discovered botany late in life, then abandoned it to copy pages of music or write his books, before returning to it around the age of 65, because he preferred to botanize, which relaxed him, rather than thinking, which tired him and saddened, he writes in the seventh daydreams of the solitary walker. Yet his Letters on Botany allowed him to continue a reflection on culture, in the broad sense, begun in Émile, his treatise on education, and his novel, La Nouvelle Héloïse, where he wondered about the art of garden.
Man, this denatured being, without instinct, can only contemplate nature when he has made it habitable and therefore cultivated, denatured, "circumvented in his fashion" into a "pleasant countryside" because, in places where men can live, she is often only from the bad country, from the undergrowth, from the wasteland. It is generally only in places that are rare and inaccessible to man that she hides "those places so little known and so worthy of being admired... Nature seems to want to hide from the eyes of men its true attractions to which they are too insensitive, and they disfigure... Those who love her and cannot get her so far away are reduced to doing violence to her, to forcing her in some way to come and live with them, and all that cannot be done without a bit of illusion" continues Rousseau in his novel where he describes how Julie has set up a secret garden at the bottom of her orchard, combining the pleasant with the useful so as to make it a place for a walk that looks like pure nature:"it is true, she says that nature has done everything, but under my direction, and there is nothing there that I did not order".
Rousseau describes the garden of the man of taste, reconciling both the humanist and the botanist, as a useful and pleasant place where are gathered without visible artifice, neither French nor English:water, greenery, shade and freshness, as nature knows how to do, without using symmetry or aligning paths and borders. The man of taste "will not worry about discovering beautiful perspectives in the distance:the taste for viewpoints and distances comes from the penchant that most men have of only enjoying themselves where they are not. . »
The work of grafting and cutting does not serve to reveal the nature behind nature, but, before it becomes uninhabitable, to make it habitable for good or ill, of which the catastrophic extension of our urban civilization is a consequences but not necessarily a destiny. And if the work of the orchard and the fields is a necessity for man, the garden of the "man of taste" will have the function of allowing him to get away from it all, to relax from moments of effort. For Rousseau, melody [see next chapter] and garden are human, perfectibility, imagination and simple passions. It shares with music a melodic temporality, that also of the educational process which allows men to hope to become "all that they can be" since nature cannot suffice.
Music
A minor musician
Music was Rousseau's thwarted vocation; he was a minor musician. Initiated by Madame De Warens, he lived poorly during his stay in Paris. Rousseau was the author and composer of an Interlude, Le Devin du village (1752), which was celebrated by King Louis XV. Consequently, the latter offered to offer a scholarship to Jean-Jacques, but the latter refused it; Diderot insisted that Rousseau accept him, and this was the origin of their quarrel.
In reality, in the second Dialogue, Rousseau enumerates an act of Daphnis and Chloe, a second music of the Devin du Village, more than one hundred pieces of various genres, six thousand copied pages of music for harp, harpsichord or solo and violin concerto , work as a copyist over six years, which allowed him to live. Without forgetting either the Dictionnaire de musique published in 1767, and very popular with European musicians of the time, in which Rousseau took up and updated the dozens of articles written for the Encyclopédie. Very influenced at first by the harmonic writings of Rameau, he had become very critical, since the Querelle des Bouffons (see his Letter on French Music in 1752), with regard to harmony.
An essential theorist
We find all this philosophical problematic between harmony and melody developed in the Essay on the origin of languages (subtitled Where it is spoken of melody and musical imitation). Jean-Jacques Rousseau places melody before music, because it allows the humanization of the natural in man, while he denies harmony any emotional value. The melody is only the transcription of the human passions that men express by their song, defined specifically by their perfectibility, that is to say their capacity to evolve, to acquire and develop all their faculties and their imagination, in improvising their story in a temporality not pre-established by any more or less Pythagorean harmony. It is without doubt "the fault of Rousseau" if popular music and song have continued and renewed a tradition mixing poetry and song which would have been at the origin of languages in an improvisation which is only a consequence of the development of the perfectibility and imagination proper to the paradigm of the human and the melody.
Love and hate in Rousseau
It is indisputable that Rousseau caused a revolutionary wind to blow over the ideas of love and hate:this consideration given to sexuality as a fundamental experience in the life of a human being, the awareness of the importance of feelings love and hate in the construction of human society and in its development, and finally, this opening to the modern debate with the subject of love shared between marital love and passionate love.
Émile or Education or The Need to Educate in the Feeling of Love
Emile or Education is a work for the use of teachers, tutors or mothers, which explains the nature of the child and the education that must follow from it to make it grow well, in keeping in mind that it is enough to “understand [the] nature” of the child so that he grows up as well as possible. Rousseau, in his preface, takes care to dismiss the criticisms that could be leveled at him; to legitimize his work, he says he followed and observed nature:his approach is willingly empiricist. What we can already note is this importance given to "nature", as opposed to "culture".
In the child, Love is a certain instinct of self-preservation:we love those who want our good, and we distance ourselves from those who want our bad. This knowledge of what is good or bad for us comes from experience. Hate is not real, because it is not a question of “wishing harm” to those who are against us, but of deviating from it. What is good, in the head of the child, is what allows him to stay alive, to "survive" if we push the line to its climax. This instinct is “self-love”. We love each other, therefore we want our own good; by extension, we like people who want to do us good, and, reciprocally, we seek to do them good. We can identify a certain concept of Egocentrism, but we must know that there will be no pejoration in the use of this term since, ultimately, we do not harm others with such behavior, since the only relationship with other concerns what they can bring us, and not what they are. We can't really talk about love here, since it's a vulgar self-preservation instinct here.
With adolescence comes physical love. Come puberty, the child becomes an adolescent. Since there is a physical change, since the voice changes, since the shoulders widen, and the hair appears everywhere, the child can only see himself differently. To know if he has evolved well, he compares himself to others. He no longer sees himself, but he sees himself through the eyes of others. Self-love becomes self-love; the relationship to oneself becomes a relationship to oneself through the idea that we have of the way others look at us. Since we no longer see each other directly, we no longer really know what our real needs are, so we get the wrong objects and we put ourselves aside from many things that would be naturally good for us. Our field of relationships has expanded considerably since, naturally, we seek to see ourselves in the eyes of as many people as possible. So we have a lot more contact, from there arise jealousy and lies because it is a question of being loved by others. We also see the needs of others and we feel them on us, so suddenly we have a lot more needs. To please others, you have to compete with those who also please them. From this arises the feeling of hatred. It is indeed a question of excluding our rivals. Finally, since we compare ourselves to others, vanity, pride and jealousy are constituents of our relationships with others.
The love that concerns the individual at this stage of life is a physical love. It's purely sexual, purely physical. We don't choose someone, we choose a body. We prefer nothing, because the bodies are substantially all the same. “Every woman is good”. Finally, when we have tried many people and we have finally been able to make comparisons, we make a choice. But always comes the difficulty of keeping the beloved:in order not to lose her, you have to compete with others; to be well loved, one must love well, so there is a certain form of struggle to keep love; and finally, love is so pleasant that one seeks to be loved by other people:hence the jealousy and destruction of the couple.
"The inclination of instinct is indeterminate, one sex is attracted to the other, this is the movement of nature".
We therefore feel that a true love is a driven, educated love, with a “guardian”. Rousseau speaks of man as a plant in his preface:“Plants are shaped by culture, and men by education”.
Society as a means of bringing out moral love at the expense of physical love through language[edit]
There are two kinds of love:physical love and moral love. Physical love does not choose, it prefers nothing. Either the savage takes the first woman who passes by, having no reason to expect another because “every woman is good for him”; or that the brother takes his sister because he ultimately has no reason to look any further, having his sister at hand. On the contrary, moral love is about the individual and proceeds from a choice. If the principles of this choice are more or less obscure, it is because we see less clearly than love itself, but the consequences are clear:"except for the loved object, a sex is nothing for the 'other ". So that, by choice, love becomes the opposite of instinct. Love is linked to language in any case, language is at the origin of the feeling of love. Love needs the society of men to replace instinct; in other words, there is a social discourse that circulates about women and offers models, amorous ideals that derive love from simple instinct. We think of Sophie, Émile's wife; Émile, thanks or because of society, to seek an ideal, a Sophie, a person who is wise.
Society does not only produce love; it also promotes hatred. The slightest opposition to love becomes “impetuous fury”:the sweetest of passions can quickly become a bloodbath, adds Rousseau.
The sexual dimension is primordial, but it must cease so that true love can arise. Hence a necessary opposition between moral love and purely physical love.
Love and hate are therefore not really of the same nature because love precedes hate.
Other types of love
Incest:Rousseau supposes that in the early days, there were probably consanguineous relations and that, in any case, when the children separated, then when they found each other, they did not necessarily know that they were brothers and sisters. Émile escapes this, since Rousseau does not raise this question. In La Nouvelle Héloïse, we talk about cousins brought up together and, after the first night of love between Saint-Preux and Julie, Saint-Preux calls her “my sister”. Rousseau's life draws this fantasy of incest:Rousseau calls his wife, Thérèse Levasseur, "my aunt". He even wrote that he would have liked to be his son, and for her to be his mother. Then, Rousseau's father and mother were brought up together. Incest in Rousseau is of the order of fantasy.
Homosexuality:Rousseau does not speak of it expressly, he alludes to it. He abhors male homosexuality and makes fun of effeminate men whom he considers all to be dressmakers or wigmakers. Rousseau even mentions the touching he suffered, the advances made to him by men:"The ugliest monkey became in my eyes an adorable object by the memory of this false African". As for female homosexuality, he seems to find a certain aestheticism in it; one thinks of the scene where he depicts Claire who writes to her cousin Julie and says "love only her perfectly":"What ecstasy to see two touching beauties kissing tenderly, the face of one leaning on the other's breast... Nothing on earth is capable of arousing such voluptuous tenderness as your mutual caresses, and the spectacle of two lovers would have offered a less delicious sensation to my eyes”. It must therefore be understood that homosexuality is not recommended to Émile. Female homosexuality is not approved but considered aesthetic. So we see here that incest and homosexuality are not forgotten even if it seems that love between two men is against nature, or in any case, not advisable. Rousseau est dégoûté par l’homosexualité masculine. Et le dégoût est une forme de haine qui va permettre à l’amour de surgir. La préférence, le goût ne suffit pas à tirer le sentiment amoureux de son enracinement instinctif :la préférence n’a pas assez de force pour remplacer l’instinct. Il faut un sentiment négatif qui vienne enterrer l’instinct :c’est le dégoût, qui est une sorte de haine. L’amour et la haine semblent ici complémentaires dans le sens où ils sont unis pour repousser ce qui est instinctif dans l’amour.
Rousseau, clivage entre deux conceptions de l’amour et père du conflit moderne
La Nouvelle Héloïse pose l’opposition entre l’amour et le mariage. C’est le thème central. On le retrouve dans beaucoup d’œuvres de l’époque, mais ce qui distingue Rousseau de ses contemporains, c’est sa façon de traiter le sujet et la réponse qu’il donne. L’opposition entre amour et mariage, par l’opposition entre le sentiment libre et le sentiment encadré, le besoin individuel et l’institution sociale, entre la passion et la loi. On retrouve cette thématique chez Shakespeare dans son Roméo et Juliette et la fin tragique, le suicide des deux amants. Différence entre l’amour et l’exaltation de l’instant et le mariage qui représente la loi, la durée et les institutions (la famille dans le cas de Roméo et de Juliette). Dans le cas de Rousseau, il y a impossible conciliation entre l’amour passion et l’amour conjugual car ces deux formes de sentiment renvoient à deux Moi :l’un qui vise l’autoconservation, l’autre qui vise l’expression du désir et la dépense du soi. On a donc un Moi qui veut se conserver, qui suppose que le bonheur est dans la constance et la tranquilité de l’âme. Il y a enfin l’autre Moi qui pose le bonheur comme impossible dans la durée; il faut donc saisir le moment :« Gather the rosebud while we may / Old time’s still flying / And that same flower that smiles today / Tomorrow’ll be dying », célèbres vers du poème « Carpe Diem ». La sauvegarde de soi, c’est avant tout la sauvegarde de l’univers collectif et social. La dépense de soi, c’est l’adhésion aux pulsions individuelles. Ce choix entre amour et mariage est impossible à faire puisque choisir l’un, c’est regretter de ne pas avoir choisi l’autre; le fait que ce choix soit strictement impossible vient de ce que les valeurs sont incompatibles, et que choisir l’un ou l’autre pose moralement des problèmes. Comment expliquer à une famille de haut rang qu’on préfère un amour indigne à un mariage qui serait un gage de dignité ? Comment expliquer à son amant qu’on préfère la raison à la passion, la reconnaissance sociale à l’amour ? Rousseau illustre donc la pathologie amoureuse comme l’impossibilité de choisir. Premièrement, on ne peut pas choisir quel amour on veut, car le choix sera regretté. On ne peut pas non plus choisir de rester dans l’incertitude, car celle-ci fait souffrir. Finalement, Julie préfèrera le mariage avec Wolmar et aura la « nostalgie du désir », regrettant son choix; la nostalgie, c’est-à-dire l’impression qu’elle aurait dû faire l’autre choix. L’hypothèse de l’impossibilité du choix se confirme. Ce qu’il y a aussi de remarquable chez Rousseau, c’est qu’en ayant vu cette contradiction, cette ambivalence entre deux Moi, il a dépassé la thématique de l’amour courtois tout en ouvrant le champ aux Romantiques.
L’amour courtois considère le mariage comme le lieu du devoir et de la loi. L’institution est incompatible avec l’amour. Il y a donc chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau un véritable appel à l’adultère, qui ne serait pas blâmable dans le sens où celui qui tromperait son conjoint le ferait pour quelqu’un qu’il aime. L’amour est une véritable vertu, il doit être libéré de l’institution, car l’émancipation de l’amour, c’est l’émancipation du désir. Il y a une fidélité à la passion plutôt qu’aux « liens sacrés du mariage ». Dans l’amour courtois, il faut préférer la vitalité de la passion à l’amorphisme qui caractérise l’union matrimoniale. Dans La Nouvelle Héloïse, Julie refuse le chaos de la passion, et elle refuse en même temps le mariage avec celui qui lui inspire la passion :car la passion s’y perdrait nécessairement. Il y a rupture avec la tradition de l’amour courtois car Julie VEUT goûter à la passion, mais elle le refuse, car elle ne supporte pas le fait d’être faible devant la passion. Elle réalise qu’elle ne peut rien contre le pulsionnel alors elle décide de ne pas l’attiser. Julie choisit donc le mariage comme conservation de soi :c’est lagapê chrétienne qui l’emporte sur leros. C’est la deuxième rupture avec l’amour courtois :le conjugal bloque l’affectif :l’amour passion doit laisser la place à l’amour tendresse. Le désir n’est pas dépassé , il est refoulé. Julie a conscience qu’elle ne peut pas dompter la passion, alors elle la repousse et se refuse à la combattre, elle tente plutôt de l’ignorer.
Le Romantisme, quant à lui, considère qu’il est possible de concilier amour conjugal et amour passion. L’amour romantique, c’est la fusion entre le sensible et le spirituel, c’est une aspiration à l’infini et la possibilité d’assouvir cette aspiration dans la finitude, grâce à la relation avec une femme réelle. La passion est ici dépassée, elle n’est plus négative et ne mène plus à l’adultère. Il y a donc chez les romantiques, une possibilité de concilier désir et passion, par le mariage, mais aussi par la mort comme accomplissement et union éternelle des amants, union extra-temporelle. On a cela chez Novalis, Hölderlin ou encore dans le Tristan et Isolde de Richard Wagner. Pour Rousseau, il est impossible de concilier eros et agapê. La philosophie rousseauiste de l’amour est donc le clivage, le dépassement de l’amour courtois et la voie ouverte aux romantiques. On retrouve cette thématique rousseauiste chez des auteurs comme Proust (la passion est l’aliénation de soi) et chez Sartre où l’amour est une « unité heureuse » qui marque la fin de l’individualité.
La politique
Les sources de la pensée politique de Rousseau
Elles sont nombreuses et se construisent en critiquant et en s’inspirant de Lucrèce, de Hobbes, de Locke, des théoriciens du droit naturel (Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf), de Montesquieu. Il s’est aussi opposé aux Physiocrates, les premiers économistes français, partisans d’un despotisme éclairé au service d’un libéralisme économique fondé sur la plus-value foncière (physio-cratie =« pouvoir de la terre »). On garde de lui quelques lettres échangées avec Mirabeau père, l’auteur de l’Ami des Hommes. Dès le Discours sur les sciences et les arts, Rousseau affirme son originalité en réfutant la thèse de la sociabilité naturelle de l’homme et en affirmant sa bonté naturelle. La première position le rapproche de Hobbes, qui voyait dans l’homme naturel un être isolé et cherchant avant tout à contenter ses besoins. Mais par la seconde, il se détache du penseur anglais, puisque celui-ci affirmait que l’« homme est un loup pour l’homme » (homo homini lupus est). Considérant l’agressivité naturelle de l’homme, Hobbes, profondément choqué par la guerre civile et les troubles religieux anglais du XVIIe siècle, réclamait un pouvoir royal absolu confisquant la violence individuelle au profit de l’État; enthousiasmé par la bonté naturelle, Rousseau, lui, considère que le pouvoir doit venir des individus eux-mêmes. Selon Hobbes, l’homme est mauvais en soi; selon Rousseau, c’est la société, c’est-à-dire le désir de posséder, de dominer et de paraître, qui a corrompu l’homme.
Rousseau démocrate ?
Le Contrat social a parfois été considéré comme le texte fondateur de la République française, non sans malentendus, ou à titre d’accusation de la part des opposants à la République. On s’est surtout attaché à sa théorie de la souveraineté :celle-ci appartient au peuple et non à un monarque ou à un corps particulier. Assurément, c’est chez Rousseau qu’il faut chercher les sources de la conception française de la volonté générale :contrairement aux théories politiques anglo-saxonnes, Rousseau ne considère pas la volonté générale comme la somme des volontés particulières - c’est-à-dire la volonté de tous -, mais comme ce qui procède de l’intérêt commun :« otez [des volontés particulières] les plus et les moins qui s’entre-détruisent, reste pour somme des différences la volonté générale ».
On oublie souvent que Rousseau destinait son Contrat social à de petits États. Il s’inspirait de deux modèles, l’un antique (la cité grecque, notamment Sparte alors tenue pour démocratique), l’autre moderne (la République de Genève). Rousseau s’opposait à l’opinion de la majeure partie des « Philosophes » qui admiraient souvent les institutions anglaises, modèle d’équilibre des pouvoirs loué par Montesquieu et Voltaire. Rousseau s’opposait également avec force au principe de la démocratie représentative et lui préférait une forme participative de démocratie, calquée sur le modèle antique. Se borner à voter, c’était, selon lui, disposer d’une souveraineté qui n’était qu’intermittente; quant à la représentation, elle supposait la constitution d’une classe de représentants, nécessairement voués à défendre leurs intérêts de corps avant ceux de la volonté générale. En revanche, il s’opposait à la diffusion massive des savoirs, comme le montre son Discours sur les sciences et les arts qui y voit la cause de la décadence moderne. Le modèle de Rousseau est bien plus Sparte, cité martiale, dont le modèle entretenait déjà quelque rapport avec la cité de La République de Platon, qu’Athènes, cité démocratique, bavarde et cultivée. Certains critiques - comme l’universitaire Américain Lester G. Crocker -, particulièrement sensibles au modèle d’autarcie et d’unité nationales de Rousseau, lui ont reproché d’avoir favorisé le totalitarisme moderne. Cette opinion est devenue minoritaire depuis quelque temps, mais elle témoigne de la force polémique qu’ont encore de nos jours les écrits du « Citoyen de Genève ».
Rousseau et la franc-maçonnerie
Dans Morale et dogme, le chef maçonnique Albert Pike dit que Rousseau avait fondé une fameuse loge à Genève, laquelle avait pour devise Foulez aux pieds les lis. Menée par Philippe Égalité, elle aurait réuni les Jacobins et préparait la Révolution dans le but de venger Jacques de Molay.
Works
Page de garde du « Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes » de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fruit d’un concours lancé par l’Académie de Dijon
Page de garde du « Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes » de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
fruit d’un concours lancé par l’Académie de Dijon
Pour toutes les œuvres de Rousseau, l’édition de référence, riche en introductions, notes et variantes, est celle des Œuvres complètes, 5 tomes, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Le tome I (1959) comprend les œuvres autobiographiques; le tome II (1961), la Nouvelle Héloïse, les pièces de théâtre, et les essais littéraires; le tome III (1964), les écrits politiques; le tome IV (1969), les ouvrages relatifs à l’éducation, la morale et la botanique; le tome V (1995) les écrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre, ainsi que les textes historiques et scientifiques.
* Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la musique (1742)
* Dissertation sur la musique moderne (1743)
* Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750)
* Rousseau est l’un des auteurs de l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert, dont il a rédigé la plupart des articles sur la musique, ainsi que l’article « Économie politique » (publié en 1755 dans le tome V de l’Encyclopédie), plus généralement connu aujourd’hui sous le titre de Discours sur l’économie politique.
* Le Devin du village (1752) (Opéra. Représenté à Fontainebleau devant le roi le 18 octobre 1752, c’est un succès. Première représentation à l’Opéra le 1er mars 1753, c’est un désastre.)
* Narcisse ou l’amant de lui-même, Comédie représentée par les comédiens ordinaires du roi, le 18 décembre 1752 (voir aussi la Préface).
* Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755)
* Examen de deux principes avancés par M. Rameau (rédigé vraisemblablement entre 1754 et 1756)
* Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1757)
* Jugement du Projet de paix perpétuelle de Monsieur l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre (automne 1756)
* Lettres morales (1757-1758)
* Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761)
* Du contrat social (1762)
* La Bourgade de Dieu (1762)
* Émile ou De l’éducation (1762)
* Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (1770-1771)
* Essai sur l’origine des langues (posthume)
* Projet de constitution pour la Corse (posthume, probablement rédigé en 1765)
* Dictionnaire de musique (commencé en 1755, il paraît à Paris en 1767)
* Les Confessions (posthume)
* Dialogues de Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques (posthume)
* Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (posthume)
Citations [modifier]
* « Renoncer à sa liberté, c’est renoncer à sa qualité d’homme. » (Du contrat social)
* « L’impulsion du seul appétit est esclavage, et l’obéissance à la loi qu’on s’est prescrite est liberté. » (Du contrat social)
* « Il est vrai qu’Aristote [...] distingue le tyran du roi, en ce que le premier gouverne pour sa propre utilité et le second seulement pour l’utilité de ses sujets; mais [...] il s’ensuivrait de la distinction d’Aristote que depuis le commencement du monde il n’aurait pas encore existé un seul roi. » (Du contrat social)
* « Conscience ! Conscience ! Instinct divin. » (Émile ou De l’éducation)
* « Quoiqu’en disent les moralistes, l’entendement humain doit beaucoup aux passions, qui d’un commun aveu lui doivent beaucoup aussi. » (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes)
* « L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. » (Du contrat social)
* « Le plus fort n’est jamais assez fort pour être toujours le maître, s’il ne transforme sa force en droit, et l’obéissance en devoir. » (Du contrat social)
* « Le premier qui, ayant enclos un terrain, s’avisa de dire :Ceci est à moi, et trouva des gens assez simples pour le croire, fut le vrai fondateur de la société civile. Que de crimes, de guerres, de meurtres, que de misères et d’horreurs n’eût point épargnés au genre humain celui qui, arrachant les pieux ou comblant le fossé, eût crié à ses semblables :Gardez-vous d’écouter cet imposteur; vous êtes perdus, si vous oubliez que les fruits sont à tous, et que la terre n’est à personne. » (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes)
* « J’ai toujours remarqué que les gens faux sont sobres, et la grande réserve de la table annonce assez souvent des mœurs feintes et des âmes troubles. » (Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse)
* « La liberté est un aliment de bon suc, mais de forte digestion. Il faut des estomacs bien sains pour la supporter. » (Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne)
* « Partout où la liberté règne elle est incessamment attaquée et très souvent en péril. Tout Etat libre où les grandes crises n’ont pas été prévues est à chaque orage en danger de périr. » (Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne)
* « [...] la parole étant la première institution sociale ne doit sa forme qu’à des causes naturelles. » (Essai sur l’origine des langues, I)
* « Comme les premiers motifs qui firent parler l’homme furent des passions, ses premières expressions furent des tropes. Le langage figuré fut le premier à naître, le sens propre fut trouvé le dernier [...] D’abord on ne parla qu’en poésie; on ne s’avisa de raisonner que longtemps après. » (Essai sur l’origine des langues, III)
* « Jamais on ne corrompt le peuple, mais souvent on le trompe, et c’est alors seulement qu’il paraît vouloir ce qui est mal. » (Du contrat social, II)
* « J’aurais aimé les hommes en dépit d’eux-mêmes. » (Rêveries du promeneur solitaire)