Les Confessions - Livres VII à XII

Les Confessions - in 2 volumes #2

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau ne voulait pas qu’un portrait de lui figure en tête de ses Œuvres. Son vrai portrait, le seul qui ne mentirait pas, c’est en lisant ses Confessions qu’on l’aurait sous les yeux : « Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature ; et cet homme, ce sera moi. » Mais quelle identité assigner à ce moi qui déclare : « Je suis autre » ? Autre que tous les autres, et pourtant leur semblable. Perpétuellement autre que soi, et pourtant toujours même. « Bizarre et singulier assemblage » d’identifications multiples où Narcisse et Caton, Alceste et Céladon, Mentor et le petit Jésus, Socrate et la cigale, Orphée et la fourmi, le rat des villes, celui des champs, le berger extravagant, l’agneau immaculé et le bouc émissaire tiennent tour à tour le devant de la scène, sans nuire pour autant à l’unité d’action, « tant tout se tient, tout est un dans mon caractère ».
Au lecteur d’en juger.

644 pages, Kindle Edition

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