Man is naturally good: Rousseau and Romanticism

Confessions (1782) (memoir)

"I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedence, and which will never find and imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man himself.  Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart...I am not made like any of those I have ever seen.  ... If I am not better, at least I am different.  ... I have told the good and bad with equal frankness. I have never omitted anything bad, nor interpolated anything good" (433).

-- Subjectivity and Individualism:

-- The subjective nature of knowledge: knowledge as personal, emotional, individual experience
-- Each man is an individual, unlike any other; truth is subjective
-- True knowledge is emotional
-- The self is a subject worthy of study and representation
-- The confessional as an art-form: revealing one's dirt in public
-- The sexual, including the perverse, as an art form
-- Consider role of confession in Catholicism; Rousseau secularizes that ritual

-- Justice:
    -- Authorities tend to punish the inherently innocent and good
    -- Physical punishment does not lead to rehabilitation (or education)

“At last I emerged from this cruel trial, utterly broken, but triumphant. ... ...I declare in the sight of heaven that I was innocent of the offense, that I neither broke nor touched the comb.... Imagine a child, shy and obedient in ordinary life… a child who has always been led by the voice of reason and always treated with gentleness…. Carnifex, carnifex, carnifex!” (443)

"So true it that, in every condition of life, the strong man who is guilty saves himself at the expense of the innocent who is weak.  In this manner I learned that stealing was not so terrible a thing as I had imagined, and I soon knew how to make such good use of my discovery, that nothing I desired, if it was within my reach, was safe from me" (453).

-- Education:
    -- All behavior (as well as Locke's  "Human Understanding" or knowledge) is learned: sexual perversion, criminal mind and criminal behavior
    -- Children and inherently innocent. Man is inherently innocent (note relationship to tabula rasa): "My new master, M. Ducommun, was a rough and violent young man, who in a short time succeeded in tarnishing all the brightness of my childhood, stupefying my loving and lively nature.... ... My master's tyranny at length made the work, of which I should have been very fond, altogether unbearable, and filled me with vices which I should otherwise have hated, such as idleness, lying and thieving" (451).
(Rousseau's educational philosophy more explicitly spelled out in Emile)

Crime and the criminal mind:
    -- See above re: M. Ducommun; "I considered that, if I were beaten like a rogue, I was entitled to behave as one" (454)
    -- Is created by social injustice
    -- Is created by material inequality and injustice (distribution of property): "...in short, everything I saw became for my heart an object of longing, simply because I was deprived of it all. ... This explains why all servants are rogues, and why all apprentices ought to be; but the latter, in a peaceful state of equality, where all they see is within their reach, lose, as they grow up, this disgraceful propensity" (452).

Bohemian Culture:
    -- "...none of my prevailing tastes center in things that can be bought. I want nothing but unadulterated pleasures, and money poisons all" (455).

Emile (1762) (educational method/theory, novel, essay, memoir)

-- Attempt to protect, nurture and foster a child's inherent goodness
(compare to his own five children)
-- Invention of systematic progressive education
-- Consider relationship to Genesis story of Adam and Eve and how knowledge is the source of sin and evil:  Opening of Emile:
"God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another's fruit. [...] He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces lie a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden.
    Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot be made by halves. Under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest [see Shelley's Frankenstein].  [...]
    This education comes to us from nature, from men, or from things. [...] Thus we are taught by three masters. If their teaching conflicts, the scholar is ill-educated and will never be at peace with himself; if their teaching agrees, he goes straight to his goal, he lives at peace with himself, he is well educated." (6-7)

The New Heloise (1761) (novel)

-- Emphasis on romantic love and naturalism, natural goodness of man
-- Sentimentality and excessive emotion

Social Contract (1762) (political/social philosophy)

“Man is born free and yet everywhere he lives in chains.” (Social Contract 1:1)

-- Freedom is man's true condition and nature. Society itself inflicts tyranny and injustice
-- Man, however, must rely on man; we must form a "social contract" to protect our own freedoms
-- Necessity of true democracy: all individuals must vote on all issues
-- Society must protect the freedoms of those who don't want them protected (shades of totalitarian dictatorship)

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) (political/social philosophy)

(Written as a response to Hobbes' Leviathan and the general Enlightenment view that education and progress had improved the human condition)

There is another principle which has escaped Hobbes; which, having been bestowed on mankind, to moderate, on certain occasions, the impetuosity of egoism, or, before its birth, the desire of self-preservation, tempers the ardour with which he pursues his own welfare, by an innate repugnance at seeing a fellow-creature suffer.³ I think I need not fear contradiction in holding man to be possessed of the only natural virtue, which could not be denied him by the most violent detractor of human virtue. I am speaking of compassion, which is a disposition suitable to creatures so weak and subject to so many evils as we certainly are: by so much the more universal and useful to mankind, as it comes before any kind of reflection; and at the same time so natural, that the very brutes themselves sometimes give evident proofs of it. Not to mention the tenderness of mothers for their offspring and the perils they encounter to save them from danger, it is well known that horses show a reluctance to trample on living bodies.

...

"I conceive that there are two kinds of inequality among the human species; one, which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature, and consists in a difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or of the soul: and another, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorised by the consent of men. This latter consists of the different privileges, which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others; such as that of being more rich, more honoured, more powerful or even in a position to exact obedience."

"THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

"Equally confined by instinct and reason to the sole care of guarding himself against the mischiefs which threaten him, he is restrained by natural compassion from doing any injury to others, and is not led to do such a thing even in return for injuries received. For, according to the axiom of the wise Locke, There can be no injury, where there is no property."

"Behold then all human faculties developed, memory and imagination in full play, egoism interested, reason active, and the mind almost at the highest point of its perfection. Behold all the natural qualities in action, the rank and condition of every man assigned him; not merely his share of property and his power to serve or injure others, but also his wit, beauty, strength or skill, merit or talents: and these being the only qualities capable of commanding respect, it soon became necessary to possess or to affect them.

It now became the interest of men to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different things; and from this distinction sprang insolent pomp and cheating trickery, with all the numerous vices that go in their train. On the other hand, free and independent as men were before, they were now, in consequence of a multiplicity of new wants, brought into subjection, as it were, to all nature, and particularly to one another; and each became in some degree a slave even in becoming the master of other men: if rich, they stood in need of the services of others; if poor, of their assistance; and even a middle condition did not enable them to do without one another. Man must now, therefore, have been perpetually employed in getting others to interest themselves in his lot, and in making them, apparently at least, if not really, find their advantage in promoting his own. Thus he must have been sly and artful in his behaviour to some, and imperious and cruel to others; being under a kind of necessity to ill-use all the persons of whom he stood in need, when he could not frighten them into compliance, and did not judge it his interest to be useful to them. Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of others. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality.

Before the invention of signs to represent riches, wealth could hardly consist in anything but lands and cattle, the only real possessions men can have. But, when inheritances so increased in number and extent as to occupy the whole of the land, and to border on one another, one man could aggrandise himself only at the expense of another; at the same time the supernumeraries, who had been too weak or too indolent to make such acquisitions, and had grown poor without sustaining any loss, because, while they saw everything change around them, they remained still the same, were obliged to receive their subsistence, or steal it, from the rich; and this soon bred, according to their different characters, dominion and slavery, or violence and rapine. The wealthy, on their part, had no sooner begun to taste the pleasure of command, than they disdained all others, and, using their old slaves to acquire new, thought of nothing but subduing and enslaving their neighbours; like ravenous wolves, which, having once tasted human flesh, despise every other food and thenceforth seek only men to devour.

...

It is manifestly against the Law of Nature . . . that a handful of men wallow in luxury, while the famished multitudes lack the necessities of life."

"Noble Savage": pre-civilization, man was fat and happy
-- Property and means of production (human labor) is the source social inequality and, in turn, of all mankind's social ills
-- The less civilized man is the happier, nobler, more peaceful man
-- Thus, closer relationships to natural world may offer route back toward original goodness

-- Consider relationship to Genesis story of Adam and Eve and how coveting what another has leads to disharmony.