HTH 1002 Spring 2018

1. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau
HTH 1002
Kara Heitz

2. Enlightenment Review
• Individualism
• Reason
• Skepticism & Doubt
• Universal?
• Apply reason to the world to
improve it
• Progress

3. Humans in a “State of Nature”?

4. Rousseau, “Inequality in Mankind”
• Natural equality versus
“moral/political” inequality
• Natural: age, health, strength, etc.
• Political: human-constructed
• “Natural”/”savage” humans
• Solitary, inherently good, happy
• Instincts and survival
• “Modern”/”civilized humans
• Civilization makes humans competitive,
greedy, ambitious, and power-hungry
• Modern humans more unequal
because of political inequalities
• Compassion as part of human nature

5. Rousseau,
“Confessions”
While walking the forests of Saint-Germain,
Rousseau contemplates:
“I dared to strip man’s nature naked, to
follow the progress of time, and trace the
things which have distorted it; and by
comparing man as he had made himself
with man as he is by nature I showed him in
his pretended perfection the true source of
his misery. Exalted by these sublime
meditations, my soul soared toward the
Divinity; and from that ehight I looked down
on my fellow man pursuing the blind path of
their prejudices, of their errors, and their
misfortunes and their crime.”

6. I have resolved on an enterprise that
has no precedent and will have no
imitator. I want to set before my fellow
human beings a man in every way true
to nature; and that man will be myself.
Simply myself. I know my own heart
and understand my fellow man. But I
am made unlike anyone I have ever
met; I will even venture to say that I
am like no one in the whole world. I
may be no better, but at least I am
different. Whether nature did well or
ill in breaking the mould in which she
formed me, is a question that can only
be resolved after the reading of my
book.” (Rousseau, Confessions)
Caspar David Friedrich, The wanderer above the sea of fog, 1817.