Les Confessions, livres VII à XII

Les Confessions - in 2 volumes #2

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, François Raviez (Editor)

Solitaire désormais détaché du monde, le Rousseau de ces six derniers livres est toujours en quête de son Moi, mais un autre combat le mobilise aussi : comme les éditions pirates de ses livres ont forgé à ses yeux une fausse idée de sa personne, c’est à se réhabiliter qu’il vise ici, dans une tentative désespérée pour dessiner et imposer sa vraie figure. Face à ses ennemis tapis dans l’ombre, il se met à nu pour ne pas jouer leur jeu, et, pour leur échapper, se montre tel qu’il est. Alors que, dans la première partie des Confessions, il s’attachait à mieux se comprendre et se donner à comprendre par une série de scènes emblématiques, ce qui se découvre ici, c’est l’écrivain qui se croit persécuté, l’homme traqué qui ne trouve la paix que parmi les fleurs des champs, l’éternel expulsé qui s’ouvre à la légende. Et s’il va vers la mort, c’est dans la recherche de l’harmonie qui se puisse établir entre une image de soi constamment haute et les misères de son destin.

552 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1789

About the author

Genevan philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau held that society usually corrupts the essentially good individual; his works include The Social Contract and Émile (both 1762).

This important figure in the history contributed to political and moral psychology and influenced later thinkers. Own firmly negative view saw the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, apologists for various forms of tyranny, as playing a role in the modern alienation from natural impulse of humanity to compassion. The concern to find a way of preserving human freedom in a world of increasingly dependence for the satisfaction of their needs dominates work. This concerns a material dimension and a more important psychological dimensions. Rousseau a fact that in the modern world, humans come to derive their very sense of self from the opinions as corrosive of freedom and destructive of authenticity. In maturity, he principally explores the first political route, aimed at constructing institutions that allow for the co-existence of equal sovereign citizens in a community; the second route to achieving and protecting freedom, a project for child development and education, fosters autonomy and avoids the development of the most destructive forms of self-interest. Rousseau thinks or the possible co-existence of humans in relations of equality and freedom despite his consistent and overwhelming pessimism that humanity will escape from a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom. In addition to contributions, Rousseau acted as a composer, a music theorist, the pioneer of modern autobiography, a novelist, and a botanist. Appreciation of the wonders of nature and his stress on the importance of emotion made Rousseau an influence on and anticipator of the romantic movement. To a very large extent, the interests and concerns that mark his work also inform these other activities, and contributions of Rousseau in ostensibly other fields often serve to illuminate his commitments and arguments.

Reviews

[Mike Clinton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started to read the two volumes of Rousseau's Confessions thirty years ago as an appropriate choice for my first trip to Geneva. I didn't finish reading them in full, however, and they've been sitting idle on various shelves in various homes where I've lived since that time. For some reason, this summer was the time I decided to get the job done--doing so in full by starting with what I had read before. The first volume of the set that I have ends halfway through Book VII, or up to 1747, when Rousseau was in his mid-30s. He had not acquired the fame--or notoriety--that earned him a place not only among the luminaries of the Enlightenment but also as a prophet of the Romantic. Instead, Jean-Jacques' life follows along a picaresque path of adventures and encounters that seems an unlikely preparation for his rise to prominence as a philosophe, even though the reader familiar with Rousseau's work can detect consistencies between his reflections about those experiences and his way of interpreting the world. I found this first half of the Confessions more enjoyable than the second, which becomes increasingly dominated by Rousseau's self-pity over the vagaries that made the circumstances of his living conditions unsettled, the purported fruit of murky conspiracies against him by everyone from Diderot, d'Alembert, and Grimm to the French royal court to petty functionaries in Swiss towns. The Confessions break off in 1765, thirteen years before Rousseau's death, but it's just as well, since the quality of his reflections foreshadow more of the same that made the second volume a less pleasant read than the first.

[laila · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's a good book, i'm reading it in french which is the first language of writer, it has a good writing n nice contente