Topic > The social order as evil in Jean Jacques Rousseau's "Emile"

Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762) is made up of a series of stories, and its teaching comes to light only when it is understood each of these stories in its complex artistic details and in its entirety. The interpretation of this hybrid text, the first 'bildungsroman', requires a union between the spirit de geometrie and the spirit de finesse, a union in which it characterizes and teaches. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1753) Rousseau states that "Man is born free but everywhere finds himself in chains." Man is born equal, self-sufficient, without prejudice, but at the end of the story we discover that he is in chains. With the progress of civilization, man has socially degenerated. He is constantly tormented by social inequality, superstitions and the division between his inclinations and his duties. Nature has made man a brute. History has made man civilized, but unhappy and immoral. The story is not a theodicy but a tale of misery and corruption. For Rousseau, Emile is the history of his species rather than a novel. Kant says that it is a work that attempts to reconcile nature and history, man's selfishness with the needs of civil society, otherwise inclination with duty. Rousseau seeks to restore man's harmony with the world by rearranging man's greed and ambition. Emile is the canvas on which Rousseau tries to paint all the passions and knowledge acquired by the soul in such a way as to be consistent with the natural wholeness of man. Rousseau says that the causes of evil are rooted in the social order itself. Society is the result of an irreversible historical process. Man is a bundle of contradictions due to paradoxes, spurious social and spiritual order. He says that human sins are contained in religious doctrines. He attributes to Christianity the decay of society which is responsible for the loss of our heavenly home. Man is not naturally a political being; he has no inclination towards justice. By nature it is only concerned with its own preservation. All this, according to Rousseau, is true. It differs only in that it does not believe that the duty to obey the laws of civil society can arise from personal interest. Rousseau is at the origin of the tradition that replaces virtue and vice as the causes of man being too good or bad. , happy or unhappy and a lot of contradictions. This has its origins in Rousseau's analysis of amour de soi (self-interest) and amour propre (selfish interest), a division within man's soul resulting from man's bodily and spiritual dependence by other men that tears apart his original unity or completeness. “Self-interest” resides in primitive men; “Self-interest” lies in modern corrupt society. Self-interest leads back to the state of God, the state of perpetual bliss. When personal interest is subjected to debasement, it turns into selfish interest. Virtue and knowledge are incompatible. To avoid this, we need to tame and control the desires of the body under the guidance of the reason of the soul. In Emile, we find that Emile's entire early education is an elaborate attempt to avoid the emergence of the imagination which, according to the Discourse on the Soul, The Origins of Inequality is the faculty that transforms man's intellectual progress into the source of his misery. First of all, the boy does not imagine beings or places that do not exist. He imagines himself in situations and subject to needs that are part of his experience. A right education, independent of society, can put a child in touchdirect with nature without mixing opinions. His desire for the pleasant and the avoidance of the painful are given by nature. The tutor's task is, first of all, to let the senses develop in relation to their own objects; and secondly, encourage the learning of science as an almost natural outcome of the use of the senses. Education comes to us from nature or from men or from things. Of these three, nurture from nature is in no way under our control. The conjunction of these three formations is necessary for their improvement. Each particular society, when narrow and unified, is alien to the all-embracing society. The essential thing is to be good to the people you live with. He, who wants to preserve the primacy of the feelings of nature in the civil order, does not know what he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always poised between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either a man or a citizen. He will not be good either for himself or for others. It will be nothing. Natural education should make man suitable for all human conditions. Rousseau was the first to isolate and coin the low and degraded human species: the bourgeoisie. Rousseau contrasts the bourgeois on the one hand with the natural man (homme naturel) and on the other with the civilized man (homme civil). Natural man is whole and simply concerned with himself, and the very being of civilized man consists in his relationship to his city, which understands its god as identical with the common god. The division between these two causes man's unhappiness. The bourgeois distinguishes his own good from the common good. His good requires society, and he exploits others by depending on them. When Rousseau says that man is by nature good, he means that man, concerned only with his own well-being, must not naturally compete with other men, nor care about their opinions. Man's goodness is identical to his natural freedom and equality. From the point of view of imaginary perfection, man's passions are evil; from that of the natural desire for self-preservation they are good. We see in Emile that Emile is gradually moving towards social integration and his starting point is his keen individualism. Rousseau condemns the false values ​​of an inauthentic society. He is against any kind of indoctrination. The Social Contract (1762) constitutes, together with Emile, an exploration of the consequences for modern man of the tensions between civilization, freedom and society, and therefore happiness and progress, which Rousseau proposes in the Discourse on the Arts. and sciences (1750) and the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754). The Social Contract deals with civil society and the citizen. Family is the first natural association. In ancient times, humans lived in the lap of nature. There were no feuds or fights between them; their life was simple and happy. But with the increase in population and public property, several problems arose. Property was the source of many evils. He had to be safeguarded from others. It led to rivalry. Individual rivalry led to group rivalry. This was a "state of war". In the Social Contract, says Rousseau, a kind of contract between the ruler (i.e. powerful) and the governed (i.e. weak) was formed to get rid of this anarchy. But Rousseau says this contract is spurious and bogus. What we find in this type of contract is despotism; so in a certain sense we can say that it is a passage from the frying pan of anarchy to the fire of despotism. Despotism is a kind of monster that lives on the ruins of the public. Surrendering one's free will to despotism is against natural law. Rousseau says that, to put things right, people formed a "social contract" with each other. Rousseau gives a lot.