THE CONFESSIONS

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

Life and significance:
 Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer.
His political philosophy influenced the progress of
the Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the
French Revolution and the development of modern political,
economic, and educational thought.

 He ushered the late 18th century movement ‘Age of Sensibility’,

focusing on subjectivity and introspection exceedingly.

 He desired that morality is a construct or creation of society but

considered it as ‘natural’ in the sense of ‘innate’, an outgrowth of
man’s instinctive dislike of suffering and wickedness.

 Some concepts of Rousseau:

1. “….you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth
belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
 Age of Enlightenment in Europe:
 Enlightenment, French siècle des Lumières (literally “century of the
Enlightened”), German Aufklärung, was a European intellectual
movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God,
reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that
gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary
developments in art and philosophy, and politics.

 Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of  reason,
the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their
own condition. The goals of rational humanity were considered to be
knowledge, freedom, and happiness.

The Enlightenment produced the first modern secularized theories
of psychology and ethics. 

 John Locke conceived of the human mind as being at birth a ’tabula rasa’, a

blank slate on which experience wrote freely and boldly, creating the
individual character according to the individual experience of the world.
Supposed innate qualities, such as goodness or original sin, had no reality.
Enlightenment contd.
 Rene Descartes proclaimed : Cogito ergo sum “I think therefore I
am”.

 In a darker vein, Thomas Hobbes portrayed humans as moved

solely by considerations of their own pleasure and pain. The
notion of humans as neither good nor bad but interested
principally in survival (Amor de soi) and the maximization of
their own pleasure led to radical political theories.

 Where the state had once been viewed as an earthly

approximation of an eternal order, with the City of Man modeled
on the City of God, now it came to be seen as a
mutually beneficial arrangement among humans aimed at
protecting the natural rights and self-interest of each.

 For Martin Luther, as for Bacon or Descartes, the way to truth lay

in the application of human reason.
 Age of Sensibility
 The period in British literature between roughly 1740 and 1800 is sometimes called
“the Age of Sensibility,” in recognition of the high value that many Britons came to
place on explorations of feeling and emotion in literature and the other arts.

 Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness towards something,

such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century
Britain, and was closely associated with studies of  sense perception as the means
through which knowledge is gathered.

 Originating in philosophical and scientific writings, sensibility became an English-

language literary movement, particularly in the then-new genre of the novel. Such
works, called sentimental novels, featured individuals who were prone to
sensibility, often weeping, fainting, feeling weak, or having fits in reaction to an
emotionally moving experience. 

 Theorists of the a priori (knowledge independent from current experience)

distrusted sensibility because of its over-reliance on experience for knowledge.
Also, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, anti-sensibility thinkers often
associated the emotional volatility of sensibility with the exuberant violence of the
French Revolution.(a posteriori knowledge depends on empirical evidence-
sensiblity)
2. Amor de soi: self-love/ self-preservation instinct that humans
share with animals, and Pitié or empathy for the rest of one’s
species.

3. Humans who are morally deprived would care only about their
relative status to others, leading to amour pro.pre, or vanity.

4. Ability of perfectability, which allows humans to choose in a way

which improves their condition.

5. "...Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when

placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes
and the fatal enlightenment of civil man“- attribution of the idea
of “Noble savage”.

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think

themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves
than they."
— Rousseau, The Social Contract
Emile or On Education
A hypothetical boy, Émile, is to be raised in the countryside, which, Rousseau
believes, is a more natural and healthy environment than the city, under the
guardianship of a tutor who will guide him through various learning
experiences arranged by the tutor.

Rousseau felt that children learn right and wrong through experiencing the
consequences of their acts rather than through physical punishment. The
tutor will make sure that no harm results to Émile through his learning
experiences.

He also repudiated the doctrine of Original Sin, which plays a large part in
Calvinism. In his "Letter to Beaumont", Rousseau wrote, "there is no original
perversity in the human heart.

In his "Letter to the Archbishop of Paris", "in which he insists that freedom of
discussion in religious matters is essentially more religious than the attempt
to impose belief by force.
TheConfessions-12books

 Cover first 53 years of his life from 1712-78.

He begins claiming that he is about to embark on an enterprise never

before attempted, to present a self-portrait that hides nothing:
 “ I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which
once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my
kind a portrait in every way true to nature , and the man I shall
portray will be myself.”

 Leo Damrosch argues that the impossibility of imitation of this book

/work refers to the uniqueness of Rousseau as an individual.

 Begins by describing his family, rumintes on his earliest memories,

dawning of his consciousness with his learning to read.

 Speaks at length about his relations with women. Concludes at 65,

when he is 53
Few notable autobiographies/ confessions before Rousseau
1. St. Augustine’s Confessions (AD 397), religious in nature (dealt with
in Herbert’s ‘The Pulley”.

2. St. Teresa’s Life of Herself .

 Teresa of Ávila also called Saint Teresa of Jesus, was a Spanish
noblewoman who was called to convent life in the Catholic Church.
A Carmelite nun, prominent Spanish mystic, religious reformer,
author, theologian of the contemplative life and of mental prayer.

 Her written contributions include her autobiography, The Life of Teresa of

Jesus and her seminal work The Interior Castle, are today an integral part of
Spanish Renaissance Literature. Together with The Way of Perfection.

 Both these are examples of religious literature, but Rousseau’s was

secular. To grasp the genesis of autobiography with Rousseau, we
have first to understand his notion of philosophy as an act of self-
realization and self-elaboration.
Rousseau took the title from this, but his was secular detailing all his
imperfections, virtues, individual neuroses and formative childhood
experiences shaping his adulthood.

Dates and events, historical verity and exactitude not important for him,
memory fails him but feelings for him are of vital significance.

In opposition to conventional History as dated and chronological Rousseau

seems to be emphasising on emotional history, that prioritises emotion over
specifics of time.

He prioritises emotion in his philosophy and in The Confessions.

He lays bare his own self and seems to say that he was basically good inspite of
all his weakness.
“How could I become wicked, when I had nothing but examples of
gentleness before my eyes, and none around me but the best people in the
world.”

-His theory of inherent good as opposed to Original sin.

Why less secular autobiographies before Rousseau
 Has to do with the view SOCIETY as more important then INDIVIDUAL.

 Since as members of social unit, not individuals, the very concept of

autobiography was not important and each person was thought to be much
like the other.

 Hence Rousseau’s The Confessions can be considered to be an embodiment

of emerging individualism and subjectivity, that which Rousseau
highlighted in his philosophy.
 “ Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men, I am not
made like anyone of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not
made like anyone of those who are in existence. If I am not better, atleast
I am different.”

Individualism encompasses a value system, a theory of human nature and

according to the individualist, all values are human-centred, the
individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally
equal.

Romanticism is the cult of the individual

Rousseau’s Romantic indulgence and inclination:
Rousseau 's Romanticism was apparent in his visions of a regenerated
human nature. He found man to be ultimately good in nature, and that
society 's influence and pretentiousness are what spoiled man 's essential
goodness.

Rousseau believed that emotion which was derived from nature and
physicality, was the core of his being and the source of his inspiration:
“My passions have made me live and my passions have killed me”.
This is related to his notion of primitive life in nature as a “gentle state” of
man.

Romantic writers gave special prominence to memory through their natural

inclination for nostalgia, a reverence for childhood as the pristine, edenic
state, and their tendency toward daydreaming, solitary walking, musing,
reverie and meditation.

Rousseau’s memory is vivid and visual, as he describes it:

“Not only do I recall times and places and persons, but all objects
surrounding them, the temperature of the air, the smells and the
colors, and a certain local impression only to be felt there, the sharp
recollection of which carries me back there again .”
Romanticism and Rousseau:
Rousseau is considered to be the Father of Romanticism and in this
movement we find a reflection and influence of Rousseau’s
philosophy.

Objectless yearning for the imagined is the very essence of

Romanticism, rather then objects or persons really present.

The Romantic world view proposed:

Emotion and not reason as important.
Individual and not general humanity or society as significant.
Emotion as the key to knowledge and comprehension of the
world.
Imagination and personal experience to provide poetic vision.
Relation between human nature and surrounding landscape/
ecology/environment viz. Nature.