Rousseau's Romantic Idealism And Contradictions In His Work

Monika Mahmutovic (301180032)

WL 306 Summer 2015

Instructor: Dr. John Whatley

July 08, 2015

Presentation Summary: Rousseau, his Romantic Idealism, and Contradictions in his Works

(Overview)

There are a couple of things that I want to do throughout this presentation, which includes (1) giving a more in depth and detailed overview of Romantic Idealism, as espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau; (2) but then, I am also going to point out some of the conflicting commitments that he see seems to have in some of doctrines and theories, and some of the tensions that then arise between these commitments to the preceding Age of Reason and his new theories; (3) I finally want to suggest how a lot of these theories as well as their contradictoriness inspired

Romanticism in philosophy is a movement within a much larger and incredibly complex tradition in philosophy that was developing during the Modern period—the Age of Enlightenment.

Now, Romanticism is very commonly thought of as being a reaction to various other schools of thought in philosophy that are commonly attributed to the preceding Age of Reason. This extends to branches of metaphysics and epistemology such as rationalism, empiricism, scientific rationalism, etc. (Bristow). Though this is a gross oversimplification, and indeed, many of these traditions did continue into the Enlightenment (and actually play crucial roles in the development of Enlightened thought), we can nevertheless understand Romanticism as being rather unique in this movement.

Importantly, what Romanticism continues to be concerned with is science, but it is important to note that one of the more prominent topics for inquiry here was the “science of man” (Bristow). Thus, cosmology, along with being the science of the origins of the universe, was also thought to largely concern itself with humanity’s place in the

For Rousseau, the only way he thought we ever could have a sense of morality and ethics was through understanding our world via a unified whole and subjectivism (Christopher).

Rousseau quite famously wanted to resist the previous understanding of the world that was sprouted by the scientific movement, whereby the world was merely constituted of a series of atomized entities. Not so for Rousseau (or any other idealist for that matter). One thing that was borrowed here from the empiricists was that the world was relative to the perceiver and therefore subjective. A subjective understanding of the world therefore can actually give us insight and knowledge of the moral.

It is difficult to see on the face of it, but Rousseau begins to justify his positing that subjectivism is the groundwork for our knowledge of morality once he posits his belief that human beings are naturally good (Christopher). With this, Rousseau is essentially refuting the Hobbesian thought that the state of nature is essentially the “war of all against all” (Hobbes XIII.9). Rousseau took this to merely be justified the tyranny (Rousseau, Social Contract 4), and indeed he accused quite a number of philosophers of this in The Social