Michael Dirda: "The thinkers who matter are those whom the world can't agree about, and usually the more a writer, philosopher or artist polarizes opinion, the better for all of us. In modern times probably no genius of the Western world still ignites such passionate controversy as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Only Marx, Nietzsche and Freud -- in many ways, his successors -- come even close.
Why is this? Because Rousseau blew up the edifice of 2,500 years of classical and Christian thought about the fundamental nature of the soul and society. Until Rousseau, nearly everyone agreed that humanity was by nature sinful and vicious, and that the state, religion and other social structures imposed a needed order on our conduct. Without higher authority to moderate passions, men and women would spend their short, nasty and brutish lives like jungle beasts. From religion and education, we learn self-control and the ways of righteousness; from the laws and customs of society, we are shaped into good and useful citizens.
Not so, said this political visionary: 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' Our natural impulses are healthy and good; it is society that makes us wicked. Where once we lived in harmony with ourselves and with the world around us, now we dwell in a snake pit of appearance and inauthenticity, of competitiveness and conspicuous consumption, of inequality, prejudice and pervasive baseness. Our institutions and governments disfigure and corrupt everything they touch. We long for happiness, without recognizing that it is the system we live under that taints our souls and leaves us alienated, despairing and hungry for something we cannot even name.
How did we go so wrong? In the myth or thought experiment that Rousseau offers in his discourse On the Origin of Inequality (1755), he concludes that the serpent in the garden was nothing less than Reason. When people lived unmediated existences in accord with Nature and themselves, when they dwelt like Peter Pan in a perpetual present, they found life simple, fulfilling and harmonious. But on some evil day, one man began to compare himself with another. This led to reflection, self-awareness and eventually competitiveness, then to specialization and a division of labor to maximize individual strengths and weaknesses, and before long the floodgates were opened to envy, accumulation and excess. The clever soon exploited their fellows, stockpiled provisions and gained superfluous wealth -- and these inevitably needed to be protected by guards, by armies, by laws and statutes. And so paradise was lost."...
We still argue about the answer to that question. Whether you agree or disagree with Rousseau's view of man's natural goodness and the evils inherent in civilization, his is nonetheless a voice that simply won't go away. Why are we not happy? Why? Why? Damrosch's biography provides an ideal introduction to both this complex man and his troubling ideas. It is an important book, but also a provocative and exceptionally entertaining one.
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