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Rousseau’s Confessions is in a significant sense his answer to Augustine on the question of what it means to be human and have a human nature.
the act was driven not by some inward impulse that was intrinsically sinful but by a good desire that led him to perform a sinful act. He stole the asparagus to help Verrat.
human corruption as something that is created and fostered by social conditions and not something to be considered innate.
not some internal tendency to depravity—in this
social conditions
Society, or at least the society in which he found himself, is to blame for the young Rousseau’s delinquency.
The incident with the asparagus bears obvious comparison with the precedent in Augustine’s Confessions, the famous theft of pears in book 2, which serves as the literary representation of Augustine’s fall into sin.
For Augustine, the theft is not the result of a good desire misdirected (as it is for Rousseau) but rather of the sheer sinful delight to be had in breaking the law.
For Augustine, the moral flaw is ultimately intrinsic to him.
he is answerable to an external law—indeed, a law grounded in the being of God—which his sinful will takes a strange, perverse delight in breaking.
For Rousseau, by way of contrast, his natural humanity is fundamentally sound, and the sinful act comes from social pressures and conditioning. He becomes depraved by the pressures society places on him.
Augustine blames himself for his sin because he is basically wicked from birth; Rousseau blames society for his sin because he is basically good at bi...
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this realization was what set Rousseau on his path to demonstrate that it is social institutions that breed corruption and wickedness,
what he imagined it must have been like for humans to live in the state of nature, before the advent of social institutions. In such a time human beings had simple desires connected to simple needs that were simply satisfied.
what you see is what you get
while education in the arts and sciences might be expected to enhance humanity and improve life, Rousseau sees a real danger of exactly the opposite:
it will in reality foster hypocrisy and wickedness because it creates a society where the need to belong and to conform requires individuals to be false to who they really are.
Sittlichkeit is the term used to refer to the ethical structure of society at large,
embodying the code of behavior to which one must conform in order to belong and to be accepted.
To be a member of such society, one must therefore suppress these personal, natural desires and instincts and conform to socially normative canons of behavior. And in the process, one becomes inauthentic, untrue to one’s inner (real) self. To use the modern phrase, one ends up living a lie.
first, self-love,
This is basically the desire for self-preservation.
Amour propre, however, is the result of the rivalries and interpersonal competitions and conflicts that society generates.
he regards self-love in the natural state as coordinated with pity as an intrinsic part of natural human virtue.
roots his understanding of ethics in personal sentiment. It is empathy that shapes self-love in a manner that makes human beings moral.
empathy and pity
It is the fact that we are naturally empathetic that makes us moral.
Rousseau uses as an example of that most basic of ethical principles the maxim that you should do unto others as you would wish them to do to you.
Problems emerge only when one person tries to dominate another.
he sees aesthetics as key to morality.
No law can make men or women moral if their sentiments are not properly ordered.
For Rousseau, ethical discourse is about personal sentiments—which amounts to the same thing, although he would reject moral relativism as a necessary implication.
There is now no consensus about what it is that should evoke our empathy and sympathy: the baby in the womb or the pregnant teenager whose life will be utterly disrupted by having a child? The transgender teen who wants to become a woman or his parents who fear he is making a terrible mistake?
There is in the depths of souls, then, an innate principle of justice and virtue
I give the name conscience.
Rousseau does not regard human beings as innately perverted.
individuals are intrinsically good, with sentiments that are properly ordered and attuned to ethical ends, until they are corrupted by the forces of society.
The one who is truly free is the one who is free to be himself.
His Confessions is predicated on such an idea and provides not only an early example of the literary genre of psychological autobiography but also a rationale for seeing the inner life of each person as the most important or distinctive thing about him or her.
the notion that it is society or culture that is the problem.
That society, or nurture, is to blame for the problems individuals have in this world,
Rousseau lays the foundation for expressive individualism through his notion that the individual is most authentic when acting out in public those desires and feelings that characterize his inner psychological life.
the modern transgender movement.
the inner voice, freed from any and all external influences—even from chromosomes and the primary sexual characteristics of the physical body—that shapes identity for the transgender person is a position consistent with Rousseau’s idea that personal authenticity
this egalitarian impulse we note here in Rousseau
innate innocence
the Western world of today generally credits youth with wisdom and sees old age as corrupt, myopic, or behind the times.
But that has not stopped serious newspapers and pundits taking the voice of youth seriously. Why? In part, it is surely because Rousseau’s basic point about nature, society, and the authenticity of youthful innocence has become one of the unacknowledged assumptions of this present age. It is part of the social imaginary.
a certain antihistorical tendency.
If the state of nature is the ideal, and if society corrupts, then the history of society becomes the history of the corruption and oppression of human nature.
