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Presentation: Topic: Rousseau's Romanticist Challenges To Enlightenment

Rousseau was an influential Enlightenment thinker who challenged some core ideas of the Enlightenment in important ways. He argued that humans in their natural state were good, not corrupt, and that civilization and society corrupted human nature rather than improving it. He also believed that people should seek a more natural way of living over a technological one. Rousseau saw people as willing to give up freedom to a government in order to better protect their rights and property, as outlined in his work The Social Contract. However, he felt that balancing reason with emotions was important to avoid the excesses of either.

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Muhammad Mubeen Ul Haq
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86 views11 pages

Presentation: Topic: Rousseau's Romanticist Challenges To Enlightenment

Rousseau was an influential Enlightenment thinker who challenged some core ideas of the Enlightenment in important ways. He argued that humans in their natural state were good, not corrupt, and that civilization and society corrupted human nature rather than improving it. He also believed that people should seek a more natural way of living over a technological one. Rousseau saw people as willing to give up freedom to a government in order to better protect their rights and property, as outlined in his work The Social Contract. However, he felt that balancing reason with emotions was important to avoid the excesses of either.

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Muhammad Mubeen Ul Haq
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Presentation

Topic: Rousseau’s Romanticist Challenges to


Enlightenment.
1) Muhammad Waleed Moon
2) Muhammad Mubeen ul Haq
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers
during the Enlightenment in eighteenth century Europe. His first
major philosophical work, A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, was
the winning response to an essay contest conducted by the Academy
of Dijon in 1750.
Summary
■ French Philosopher
■ 1762 – published Social Contract
■ Gov’t should be based on a Social Contract
■ Everyone must agree to be governed by the general will , what's good
for the people (foundation for totalitarian gov’t)
■ Humans being were naturally good but corrupted by society
■ Importance on Education and Civic Virtue – train people how to be
good citizens.
■ People should pay more attention to emotions & feelings instead of
new ideas –seek a balance –
Enlightenment According to Kantt.
• Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed
immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s
understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity
is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding,
but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance
from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] “Have courage to
use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of
enlightenment.
• According to Rousseau the
• ‘only reason human beings were willing to give up individual
freedom and be ruled by others was that they saw that their rights,
happiness, and property would be better protected under a formal
government rather than an every-person-for-themselves type of
society’. 
• 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, and even anti-
printing press!  The good life, he was saying, is the simple life of the
peasants (farmer).  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!
Freedom:
• Rousseau distinguished between two types of freedom:

• Natural Liberty
• It abounds in the state of nature.
• State of Nature:
• “A man’s “unlimited right to anything which tempts him and which he is able to attain”.

• 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

• Moral freedom:
• a form of positive freedom, whereby one’s actions conform to one’s own true will
• 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.
• 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.
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-proper: 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’
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.
• 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.”

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