It was our first lecture of the new semester this week and our main focus was Rousseau and the Romantic movement which he inspired. We were told what to expect from this latest module of HCJ with the focus moving from the Enlightenment and Empiricists of last semester, i.e Locke and Hume, to Romanticism, Rousseau and Revolution.
The Romantic movement was a gradual change to more subjectivity, emotion and intuition in philosophy in almost direct contrast to the Enlightenment's resistance to the idea of only divine intervention, held throughout the middle ages. The vacuum formed by this idea was filled by the belief in a divinity of nature which Rousseau endorsed. The Romantic movement is often remembered for its art and literature, Gabriel Rossetti, William Wordsworth and William Blake were all exponents of the Romantic school. The enlightenment gave us such rational thinkers as Locke and Hume and taught us to aspire to know everything; it taught us that with experience and testing you could. This really should be the end of History and Context but I'm still typing, and that means we've got a whole lot more to cover
Rousseau was an early exponent of Romantic philosophy and could be seen as the original romantic, at least in terms of the movement. In the pre-Enlightenment period the creative force was Christianity. Paintings, poems and books all based on the teachings and stories of the Christian church. After the waves caused by the Enlightenment, the divinity of nature became the driving creative force. It was a political time bomb and created a kind of cult of sensibility which all came from one personal experience for Rousseau. He had an intense experience whilst listening to the waves where all worries and painful memories about the past and anxieties for the future melted away, leaving only the sense of being. He decided that nothing true had come before, citing nature as the only real truth. This belief in the beauty and innocence of nature extended to man as natural man was virtuous, i.e. the idea of 'the noble savage'. He saw the people of Tahiti, still living primitively as a kind of paradise, untouched by the corruption of the 18th Century. This is in complete contrast to Hobbes whom we studied last semester who acknowledged the state of nature, but thought it horrible rather than beautiful. Rousseau's philosophy was similar in part to Locke who believed that people were generally pretty good but that a limited government is needed for problems with things like property.
Rousseau's main philosophical idea was his belief in the supremacy of emotion. He said that "man is born free, but everywhere is in chains." His philosophy asks us to make a move back to nature by "taking men as they are, and laws as they might be" so we can get out of the trap of self esteem. Rousseau's problem: "Find a form of association which defends and protects with all the common force, the person and goods of each associate and by means of which each one while uniting with all obeys only himself and remains as free as before." Rousseau developed the idea of The General Will which states that there are certain laws that we can agree on but as long as we all agree on them, there is no loss of freedom; we are just obeying ourselves. This contrasts with a liberal philosophy as public and private are the same and does contain the danger of becoming a new type of dictatorship. By this I mean that Rousseau explicitly states that anyone refusing to follow the general will, will be "forced to be free" in a way. Freedom exists in Rousseau's world only in service.
These ideas lead to one of the most important events in world history, the French Revolution. When the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, Zhou Enlai (1949-76) was asked about the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, he replied, "It is too soon to say." I'll go into more detail of the revolution in a later blog perhaps, but for this blog and its focus of Rousseau it is important to note the Declaration of the rights of man which says we should be born free, remain free and be equal in rights with the law being the expression of general will. All this, the Tennis Court oath and the National Assembly was attractive to rebels in England who followed Rousseau's philosophy carefully, the poet William Wordsworth was quoted as saying, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." Behind all that malarkey though, Wordsworth was expressing the feelings of many young revolutionaries who were seeing the Romantic movement and Rousseau's idea of natural man in reality. In the revolution, a new world was seemingly created, with nothing having come before it. The King and other royals were executed through the new 'egalitarian' method of the guillotine, one of the enduring images of the revolution and paranoia spread, leaving them in almost a worse place than before. Revolutions rarely go smoothly and often do not end as planned.
I'm going to finish this blog by talking briefly about Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist writer whose ideas were in places very much a reaction to Rousseau's; a kind of love/hate relationship between their ideals. Education at the time was at the time quite superficial for women and they were taught mainly to focus on their appearance but Wollstonecraft looked at education from a similar perspective as Locke's Tabula Rasa, reasoning that if you educate people properly, you can make them into rational and responsible citizens. Rousseau's influence on her work was that she also called for a more egalitarian society, where a hatred of sophistication was the norm. She wasn't asking for a return to nature but asked purely that Men and Women be treated just as human beings; asexual or non-sexual until they are in love, when they assume a gendered identity. This last point is the one most often criticised as it contrasts her otherwise staunchly feminist views.
Thanks for reading my first blog of this new semester, please visit as often as you like, there will always be something interesting to read. Tell your friends.
Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.
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