History of the Origins of World Philosophy, French Enlightenment No. 10: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 2

French Enlightenment No. 10: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 2

2. Rousseau and his own people

　　Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712. But he was not born in France, but in Geneva. His family is descended from Protestants who fled France. His father was a watchmaker and his family was not well off. But his father was cheerful and a keen reader. His mother was very beautiful, but just a week after he was born, she died of postpartum disorders. When Rousseau was 10 years old, his father was almost falsely accused and imprisoned for a dispute with a French officer, so he had to leave his hometown. At this time, Rousseau, in fact, became an orphan and was sent by his uncle to a rural village called Baussai. It can be said that since Rousseau came to life, he has not enjoyed a normal child's life, let alone experienced the life of a happy child.

　　Among the outstanding thinkers of the 18th century in France, except for Voltaire and Montesquieu, who were born at the end of the 17th century, all the others were as old as Rousseau. He is 1 year older than Diderot, 3 years older than Condiac and Al maintenance, 5 years older than Dharambert, 11 years older than Holbach, and 3 years younger than Ramethelli, which is really an era of talent gathering, according to our Ancient Chinese, it should be called "Heroes and Heroes, The Side of the Stars"? But almost every one of these peers lived happier than Rousseau. Although he is intelligent and precocious, when it comes to the situation of life, he is the poorest and the most bitter. Rousseau lived for 66 years, and during the 66 years, his life situation can be said to be bitter, spicy, sour, sweet, salty, and taste all five tastes. In the meantime, there were 5 major turns.

　　The first turning point took place in 1724. Rousseau was 12 years old at the time, and that year he was sent to the notary Masron's house to work as an assistant to the notary. A 12-year-old child, from then on began his long career of earning a living. In April of the same year, he was transferred to a carver's house as an apprentice. The following spring, because he could not stand his master's abuse, he had to flee. At the age of 16, he went to the house of an earl as a servant. During this period, the theft and framing incidents that he focused on in his Confessions took place. As a result, he and his actually had some love for the maid he framed, and both were expelled. In 1730, he went to a theological school for a time. In 1732, he began working as a land surveyor again, and became acquainted with musicians and music lovers, who were very close to each other. At this stage, he lived a difficult life, had no food and clothing, and often walked from one door to another. However, although life was hard, he did not forget to study, and most of his knowledge of Latin, mathematics, rhetoric and music was laid at this time.

　　The second turning point took place in 1733, when he was 21 years old. At this time, he and Mrs. Warren had a warm relationship, so he became a special person in Mrs. Warren's family. He was called a servant and was a lover, and in 1735 he quit his surveying job and began to help Madame Warren's housekeeper. As a result of this transformation, his living conditions underwent a qualitative change, and his enthusiasm for learning increased unabated—in that particular historical epoch, learning and mastering new scientific and humanistic knowledge was indeed a great honor for life and society. He is intelligent and studious, and whenever he has an opportunity, he immediately achieves results. During this period, he not only read and studied a large number of philosophical works, but also had many contacts with the works of Locke, Leibniz, Descartes, Voltaire and Montesquieu, etc., but also made psychological analysis and research on the emotional experience of Mrs. Warren similar to that of modern people, or rather, he made philosophical reflections on Mrs. Warren's emotional experience.

　　Mrs. Warren came from the upper class, originally interesting and elegant, emotionally loyal, but in the end because of people's calculations, and made mistakes again and again. Rousseau thus decided that emotions were often more effective than reason, thus drawing a line between his arguments and the mainstream writers of the French Enlightenment. His relationship with Mrs. Warren was extraordinary, both 12 years older than him and the guarantor of his stable life and study, whom he called "Mom," and who cared deeply about him. There are both opposite-sex feelings and some different emotions in this concern.

　　From Rousseau's side, because he was born unfortunate, he now suddenly received the special feelings of a well-educated noblewoman, which is undoubtedly of great significance to his mind and mood. This stage can be said to be Rousseau's period of academic excellence.

　　The third turning point took place in 1742. That year he discovered that Mrs. Warren had a new lover. In a hurry, I didn't feel angry, but I couldn't help it. So he repented of himself, masochistically, and manifested himself in action, leaving Warren's family in anger and "exiled" himself.

A particularly important thing that happened in Rousseau's life this year was that he met Diderot, one of the main generals of the Enlightenment, and the two soon became good friends. Through Diderot, Rousseau made many new friends who were very promising. It can be said that it was Diderot who brought Rousseau to the heart of the French Enlightenment. From then on Rousseau had extensive and in-depth contact with such elite figures, and, by and large, from the beginning of his engagement with Diderot until the years of 1756, he and these Enlightenment thinkers could be regarded as well-connected fellow travelers. Their knowledge influenced him, and his style and insights infected them. He shared a common language with them and wrote many articles for the Encyclopedia. During this period, his creation also entered a period of exuberance. In 1749, the French Courier newspaper carried a notice for the prize, and he applied for the essay and won the prize in one fell swoop, this year he was 37 years old. In addition, he has written plays such as "Narcisse", "Presumptuous Engagement", and "Country Wizard", which have been very successful.

　　For a time, Rousseau became a celebrity in the new culture. He is like an autumn flower that blooms late, although the timing is later, but it is unique. His plays were especially favored by women, so that the number of visitors was endless, which surprised and annoyed and worried him, and for a time there was no freedom. During this time, he also worked as secretary of the French Embassy in Venice for several days. But although he was brilliant, he was not a suitable secretary. Because of the quarrel with the ambassador, he resigned in anger. In Paris, he became acquainted with the Dubin family and received all kinds of help from Madame Dubin.

The fourth turning point took place in 1756. In that year he sent Voltaire, one of his most important works, On the Basis and Origin of Human Inequality, only to receive Voltaire's cynicism. He has since turned against the mainstream of French Enlightenment thought. His book was originally written as a prize essay, but this time it was not selected. The time of writing is 1754, and the ideas reflected in the work are formed earlier, which shows that his differences with the encyclopedic school have actually been around for a long time, or that there have been qualitative differences in their positions from the beginning. It is only because of various subjective and objective factors that these contradictions have not been highlighted and intensified.

Rousseau's main creative period was also divided into two different stages. Before that, he was one of the leading members of the encyclopedic school, and since then, he has become a unique French thinker of the 18th century, and his relationship with the representatives of the Enlightenment will also be broken one by one.

In 1757 he began to write Emile, in 1758 he published On Political Economy, in March of the same year he published Letters on Viewing with D'Aranbel, and in 1759 he began to write The Social Contract; this was the most difficult year for the Encyclopedia, the publication of the New Eloise in 1761, the Social Contract and Emile in 1762, and the publication of The Citizen of Geneva Rousseau to the Archbishop of Paris, Christopher Lopez, in 1763. morality. Beaumont's Letter, published in 1764 and the Draft Corsican Constitution in 1765.

In the past few years, Rousseau can be described as a thick accumulation and a difficult to stop. These years were the golden age of Rousseau's lifelong creation, the period of independent development after his break with the encyclopedic school, and the period of persecution of him by the French government and church. During this period, his ideas really reached the point of pure fire, and his influence began to go beyond borders, affecting the whole of Europe to varying degrees.

　　The fifth turning point took place in 1766, when he took refuge in England with Hume, the great English philosopher and his friend at the time. In terms of ideological context, Hume was the most important to him, although the good-natured British thinker and the important members of the French Enlightenment almost all had good relations, but it was Rousseau who really had the weight of identity in his heart. However, the friendship between them eventually became history because of Rousseau's paranoia. From Hume's side, it is natural to look at the wrong person and stagger friends. But to objectively appreciate Rousseau's excesses, we should see that this thinker who had a difficult life can no longer withstand the pressure of the outside world. He didn't want to have a few more friends in his heart, and his performance was that he sincerely hoped to compromise with the government. But in terms of his ideology, he and his former friends could not reconcile, and their relations with the government were absolutely difficult to reconcile. Although his paranoia is a physical disease, it also has important psychosocial reasons, and at the same time, it is also related to the squeeze and stimulation of his life experience, especially real life.

　　After 1766, although he also published some works, his ideas seemed to have entered the old world. His former friends were also withering away. His main energies gradually shifted to writing memoirs and studying botany. He did not live in England for a long time, and all kinds of strange deeds were inexplicable. In 1770 he returned to Paris. After that, he seemed to be talking to himself every day. He wrote the first and second volumes of confessions, and he wrote dialogues, or Rousseau's criticism of Jean. Jacques" also wrote "The Consolation of the Suffering of My Life.") Life is really like a dream, unconsciously, the old will be at the end, and the death will be over. Rousseau died on 2 July 1778. It was no fault of Rousseau that his death did not bring much shock to France at the time; 11 years later, his name became the banner of the French Revolution, and it was not rousseau himself.

　　Throughout Rousseau's life, he was a thinker of great wisdom, but not a thinker of systematic training; he was a thinker of great affection, but not a thinker of good psychological qualities; he was a thinker of lofty ideals and ambitions, but not a thinker of corresponding norms; in the end, he was a thinker who had a great influence on human history, but he was also a thinker with all kinds of intolerable shortcomings. All the advantages and disadvantages of Rousseau can be found in human beings themselves, at least from the depths of Modern European History.

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