<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="1" > character biography</h1>
Jean Jacques Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712 in the Republic of Geneva, the son of Isaac Rousseau, a Protestant and watchmaker, and his mother, Susan Rousseau, whose real name was Susan Bernard, born into a family of priests. His mother died shortly after his birth, after which Rousseau was raised by his aunt.
In 1722, Rousseau's father had a dispute with his people and fled to Lyon for refuge. Rousseau lived in his uncle's house, and then went to Bause with his cousin to stay at the house of Pastor Lambercière, where he studied classical Chinese, drawing, and mathematics.
In 1724, he returned to his uncle's house in Geneva with his cousin. In 1725, he worked as a miscellaneous worker at Mr. Maslon. Apprenticed to the engraver Ducommann, developed the habit of stealing, and read a lot of cluttered books. In 1728, at the age of 16, he escaped from the house of a carver and roamed for several days to meet Madame Warren in Annecy. After a seven- or eight-day trip from Annecy, he reached Turin and converted to Catholicism in Turin. A servant in Mrs. Basile's house. Working as a servant in the house of Countess Verseris, stealing a ribbon and framing a maid.
In 1730, he escorted Le Mertle to Lyon, leaving him while He was ill. Send Miss Melsai to Freiburg. Traveled to Lyon with Monsieur Myrtle to work as a music teacher in Lausanne. Rousseau did not understand musical scores but taught music to people, claiming to be a Parisian. During this period, he made short trips, often going for walks in the woods to serve as an entourage of a Greek bishop, from Freiburg to Soller via Bern, and was funded to go to Paris. An officer's retinue in Paris.
In 1732, he returned to Madame De Chamberlain to do land surveying and teach herself mathematics. Immerse yourself in music, meet music lovers, teach music, and read a lot of academic works. Together with the housekeeper Claude Anai, they become Madame Warren's lover, and the three live in harmony.
In 1734, Claude Anai died of illness. Help Mrs. Warren housekeeper, study plants, medicine. In 1737, he was injured in both eyes due to a chemical experiment and went to the village of Sharmet to recuperate. He enjoyed country life, enjoyed love, and devoted himself to learning, reading the philosophical works of Locke, Descartes, and others.
In 1740, he went to Lyon as a governess at Father Mabouli and became acquainted with Condiac. In 1742, the New Notation method of musical notation was proposed at the Paris Academy of Sciences, which was not accepted. The New Notation of Musical Notation was rewritten into Modern Music Theory and published. Get to know Diderot and some Enlightenment thinkers. Recite the poems of Virgil and Jean Baptiste Rousseau in the Jardin du Luxembourg, traveling back and forth between the theater and the café. Enter Mrs. Doberman's salon and court Mrs. Doberman is rejected. Learn chemistry.
In 1743, he wrote the opera "The Elegant Muse", which made a living teaching music and copying musical scores. Went to the French Embassy in Venice and served as a secretary to the Count of Montage. In 1744, he quarreled with the Count of Montage and left the embassy. Back in Paris, he still made a living copying sheet music. In 1745, he became acquainted with Dalaise and lived with her. He became acquainted with Voltaire (1694-1778) and helped revise his opera The Celebration of Ramil, but his revision of the opera was not recognized. In 1747, he went to Turin to write the comedy "The Promiscuity of a Rash Marriage" and the poetry drama "The Path of Sylvie". In 1748, he became acquainted with Baron Holbach, Duclo, Madame Edpinai and Madame Udeto.
In 1749, he wrote the musical part of the Encyclopedia for Diderot and D'Alembert. Diderot was arrested and imprisoned for publishing The Letters of the Blind. Rousseau managed to rescue Diderot. He wrote "On Science and Art" for the dijon Academy essay, which was appreciated by Diderot.
In 1750, the enlisted thesis "On Science and Art" won the prize of the Académie dijon, and Rousseau rose to fame, but because of the article "On Science and Art" and many literati pen battles. Plagued by illness, he changed his life of luxury, intending to make a living by copying musical scores and live an independent and poor life.
In 1752, the opera "The Country Master" was successfully staged, favored by the king and queen, Louis XV intended to receive Rousseau and give him an annuity, but Rousseau was worried that he would lose his freedom because of the acceptance of the pension, so he deliberately avoided it, and was reprimanded by Puchai. "The Village Teacher" was later staged many times, but Rousseau benefited little from it.
In 1753, he traveled for a short time to Saint-Germain and wrote On the Origin and Basis of Human Inequality for the enlistment of the Academy of Dijon.
In 1754, he went to Geneva with Gofogul and Vasser. Warmly welcomed by people from all walks of life in Geneva, geneva citizenship was restored and Protestantism was re-converted. Drafting of the Treatise on Political Institutions. Later, some of them were selected and published as "The Social Contract Theory". Disgusted by the frequent social life, he often goes for walks in the woods.
In 1756, he and Vasser moved to the Retreat, which was the property of Madame Dei Espiné, and Rousseau was financed by Madame Dei Epinay during her retirement. Rousseau lived in seclusion for nearly two years, and although he could not completely avoid socializing, he enjoyed this lonely and quiet country life.
In 1757, he fell out with Diderot, Grimm, and Epinai because of his love affair with Madame Udeto. Write The New Eloise and immerse yourself in fantasies about the storyline. Preparing to write Emile. At the end of the year, he moved out of the retreat and moved to Montmoranci. Rousseau was sponsored and protected by the Luxembourg couple in Montmorency until the publication of Emile.
In 1761, The New Eloise was published and was well received by female readers. Marshal of Luxembourg dies. In 1762, for the publication of Emile, a French court issued an arrest warrant for Rousseau, banning his book. For some time before emile was published, Rousseau gradually felt that the atmosphere was not right, but he thought that he was upright and innocent, so he did not panic. The Archbishop of Paris, Bimon, issued an injunction against Emile, followed by an injunction by the Paris High Court, ordering the hunt for Rousseau. For the next eight years, Rousseau was on the run. Living under the watchful eye of persecution, condemnation, and even spies, Rousseau became sensitive and suspicious, so much so that he later became suspicious of those around him who were plotting to kill him. Rousseau fled alone from Paris to Geneva, where authorities burned Emile and the Social Contract and ordered their hunt.
In 1763, he fled to Neuchâtel, Prussian territory, where he and Wasser lived in Motier. Get to know Marshal George Guise. Accepted the protection of the King of Prussia, but refused to accept the King's gift. Acquisition of citizenship of Neuchâtel and renunciation of Citizenship of Geneva. Published the Book to Pope Bimong to protest the persecution of him by the ecclesiastical authorities.
In 1764, he published the Book of the Mountains, which rebuked the Geneva authorities. The leader of the Corsican liberation movement, de Bodafoco, invited Rousseau to draft a constitution for Corsica.
In 1765, the Draft Corsican Constitution was published. Refusing the King of Prussia's pension to move to the island of Saint-Pierre in Bern, Vasser moved in with him. After enjoying a quiet retreat for several months, Rousseau was again expelled. Rousseau's Book of the Mountains and Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary were burned together in Paris. Sneak back to Paris.
In 1766 , under the leadership of David Hume , he and Vasser took refuge in the Home of Hume in England , where they clashed. After that, he traveled to Wutong, England. Compilation of the Dictionary of Botanical Languages. Wrote the first volume of the Confessions. Rousseau's purpose in writing the Confessions was not so much to repent as to defend. During his four years on the run, Rousseau experienced persecution, slander and attack, and he felt the need to show what he had done and to clarify the injustices he had been subjected to.
In 1768, he was officially married to Vasser. Went to Grenoble for botanical expeditions and corresponded with botanists. He makes a living by copying musical scores. In 1769, he moved to the city of Bugo to live on a farm. "The Morality Needed by Heroes" was written. Reuse your real name. In 1770, he returned to Paris to transcribe the score and composition, preparing to write the Dialogue. Take part in a specimen collection tour led by botanist Ru Xiye.
In 1771, the Confessions were read aloud in Sweden, but at the request of Madame Epinay, the recitation was forbidden. At the invitation of Count Wilhaowski of Poland, he wrote An Examination of the Polish Government and Its Reform Plan of April 1772. In 1774, he became acquainted with the biologist Lamarck. In 1775, without Rousseau's consent, his opera Pique Ma Liang was successfully performed at the Opéra de France.
In 1767, a friend in England helped him receive an annuity from King George III. Misunderstanding his British friends, he assumed the pseudonym Lennu and sneaked back to Calais, France. The Dictionary of Music is published.
In 1776, he completed the Dialogue and tried to put it on the altar of Notre Dame, but was unsuccessful. Wrote "The Dream of a Lonely Walker", unfinished. Injured by a carriage while walking.
In 1777, his health deteriorated and he stopped copying musical scores. Livelihood difficulties.
In 1778, he moved to the Manor of El-Manonville, near Paris. Robespierre came to visit. He died in the town of Eromeli, was buried in the town of Eromeer, and in 1794 the coffin was moved to the Panthéon in Paris.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="28" > personal life</h1>
Rousseau had an affair with many women in his lifetime, the main of which was two. One is Madame Warren, who played multiple roles in Rousseau's early life as a protector, a friend, a mistress, and a spiritual mother.
After leaving Madame Warren, Rousseau later began to live with Delise. For Delise, Rousseau also had a variety of mixed feelings. Delise accompanied Rousseau through the second half of his life, and Rousseau only held a very simple formal wedding with him in his later years. Delise bore Rousseau five children, all of whom were sent to the Nursery in Paris. Rousseau only looked for his first child who had left a label later.
Rousseau once said in the Confessions: I feel afraid at the thought of handing over my children to such a messy family to raise. If children are entrusted to them to educate, they will inevitably become worse and worse. The education of the nursery is much less harmful to the child than it is to him. That's why I decided to send my child to the nursery.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="32" > major works</h1>
<col>
Chinese name
French name
Year of publication
On Science and Art
Discourse on Science and the Arts
In 1750
On the Origin and Foundation of Human Inequality
Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men
In 1755
The New Eloise
Julie, or the new Héloïse
In 1761
The Social Contract
Of the Social Contract or Principles of Political Law
In 1762
Emile
Émile, or Education
"Mountain Book Jane"
Letters from the Mountain
In 1764
Confessions
Les Confessions
In 1782
"Wandering Reverie"
The Reveries of the Lonely Walker
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="60" > ideas</h1>
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="61" > philosophy and politics</h1>
1, the origin and basis of human inequality
Most modern philosophers before Rousseau believed that human beings had a natural state before entering society, and regarded the transition from the natural state to the social state as a historical progress. Rousseau also divided human history into natural and social states, and took the natural state as the starting point of socio-political doctrine. His theory of the state of nature is not so much a historical fact as a theoretical hypothesis taken to elucidate man's nature and to correctly judge the state in which man now finds himself. He uses the method of abstract analysis to remove man's social nature from the "human nature formed by man", that is, the established fact of human nature, and what remains is the natural nature of man. Through such abstractions, he was able to trace through the ugly reality and the evils of society to the good nature of man in the state of nature.
According to Rousseau's analysis, natural people in the state of nature are lonely, have no interaction and contact with each other, and people are free to drift in the forest, without language, family, shelter, skills, and are free and equal to each other except for physical differences. The only needs of natural man are food, the opposite sex and rest. Natural man has two natural emotions – self-love and compassion. Self-love makes one care for one's own survival, compassion makes one instinctively not harm others, and naturally feels hatred when one's fellow suffers calamities and sufferings. These two emotions in people's hearts are coordinated with each other, making everyone independent and forgetting each other. Humanity has spent many centuries without knowing the concepts of society, private property and the family and thus without "your" and "mine."
The state of nature gives man both freedom and the reason for the loss of freedom. People are biologically unequal, caused by natural causes such as "age, health, physical strength, and differences in the nature of wisdom and mind." Individuals give full play to their different natural abilities, produce de facto inequalities in skill, knowledge, reputation, distribution, etc., and finally reach the end of the natural state - the emergence of private property. Rousseau said that private property arises first of all from the demand for land rights, who is the first to circle a piece of land and think of saying "this is mine", and to find that a man with a very simple mind actually believes his words, who is the true founder of civilized society. His critique of civilization emphasizes that the foundation of civilization is private property.
2, nature and civilization are opposed
Rousseau's doctrine of society contained a reflection on human civilization, and he overcame the blind view of social progress of the Enlightenment scholars. In his first paper, he gave a negative answer to the title of the Dijon Academy of Sciences essay "Whether the revival of science and art contributed to dunhua customs". In his view, civilization and nature, reason and natural instinct, are a kind of transformation, even degeneration. In the state of nature, human beings live in harmony with nature in the struggle for their own survival, and form a good and simple virtue in their mutual relations with nature. And the development of civilization destroys these primitive virtues, and people become more and more intelligent, while private property makes people's hearts and minds worse. Rousseau called the progress of civilization the "greatest misfortune" of mankind, because all human progress constantly runs mankind against its primitive state. Therefore, he believes that the "history of the development of civilization" is nothing more than a "history of human diseases", that rational human beings have lost their primitive and simple sensibility, and have produced a large number of useless needs, that science and art have fostered extravagance and waste, and that freedom has become despotism.
3. The ideal of freedom and equality
The supreme goal pursued by Rousseau's socio-political philosophy was the freedom and equality of man.
The theme of "On Human Inequality" is to explore the origin and basis of inequality, while "Social Contract Theory" puts forward the ideal of achieving social equality. The end of the former is the beginning of the latter: after the violent overthrow of despotism, the problem people face is how to achieve new equality in society. Rousseau said that there are three possible paths: one is to return to the state of nature, the other is to abolish all the root causes of inequality through violent revolution, and the third is to use the social contract to guarantee social equality. The first path is not feasible, and the road back to the state of nature has been forgotten; Nor does the second path work, because violence can only break down, not generate new powers. "Then the rest can only be used as the basis of all legal power in the world." Since the historical contract was at the expense of human freedom and equality, Rousseau wanted to create a truly legitimate contract to replace it.
For Rousseau, the core of the social contract is the transfer of power. Rousseau's answer to key questions such as what to transfer and to whom to transfer is different from that of his predecessors: Hobbes demanded the transfer of all power except the right to life to agents, Locke demanded the transfer of only property agency to agents, and Rousseau believed that the essence of the social contract was that all people transferred all power to all people. Since the conditions of such an assignment are the same for everyone, and therefore each person does not dedicate himself to any one person, but receives from all the contractors as much power as he has transferred to them, everyone remains only obedient to himself after the contract, and remains as free as ever.
The result of the social contract is neither what Hobbes called a "Leviathan" with absolute power, nor a government with limited power, as Locke called a government with limited power, but a "common will" that combines coercive power and free power. The so-called public will, which refers to the public personality of all contractors, is the "moral community" of their human body and will, which is "an inseparable part of each member as a whole".
"Common will" is an abstract concept, not a collective concept; "Public will" is different from "multitude": "multitude" is the sum of individual wills, which cannot be completely consistent; "Public will" is not a conflicting personal interest, it is the same part that remains after deducting the different parts of the "public opinion". "Public will" will always take the public interest as the starting point and destination, always be just, and will not make mistakes. "Public will" is expressed as law in concrete political practice.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="74" > education</h1>
Naturalistic theory of education is the subject of Rousseau's educational thought. Emile, published in 1762, focused on this idea. Goethe called the book a natural benefit of education, Kant forgot the habit of walking regularly for more than a decade because of reading Emile, and Schiller called Rousseau the new Socrates, the person Jesus had made. Rousseau believed that there are three sources of human education. That is, "natural nature", "things" and "man-made", only a good combination of three kinds of education can achieve the expected purpose. The ultimate goal of nature education is "natural man", who is not a degenerate person who has returned to primitive society, but a natural person living in society, that is, a new person who is physically and mentally healthy, who uses both body and brain, who has a strong conscience and strong ability. A necessary prerequisite for Rousseau's natural education was to change children's perceptions. People should not regard children as slaves to be disciplined, nor as reduced adults, but as adults and children as children.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="76" > literature</h1>
Rousseau's contribution to literature is mainly reflected in his epistolary novel "The New Eloise", in which Rousseau describes the beautiful pastoral scenery, customs and customs, free thoughts, romantic love... It greatly promoted the development of romantic novels in later generations.
Epistolary style has several obvious advantages: it is conducive to direct description of feelings and psychology; You can use multiple perspectives (in-house) to observe things and events. As for the plot of the novel, it can be hidden in the heart. This genre is not easy to grasp the proportions, or scattered, or the identity of the characters. This book should be very good in these aspects, of course, there are some problems. Among the main characters, the tone of male and female is very different. Several figures can be used as some kind of symbol, and of course can also be concretely viewed. St. Puluan's letters do not express the heart directly, but the few letters and lateral descriptions make him an actively pursued but tragic figure, and Yu Li's several submissions to "reason" seem to be somewhat unreasonable. But perhaps that's exactly what the author is talking about. Letters and replies can often be understood as two different views on the same issue, so there is a lot of room for choice.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="79" > character controversy</h1>
Rousseau was spurned during his lifetime, but was worshipped after his death. Rousseau was buried at Le Panthéon in Paris. On December 21, 1791, the National Convention voted to erect a statue of Rousseau, the symbol of the Revolution, with the inscription "Founder of Freedom" in gold.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="81" > influences</h1>
Rousseau's teachings had a great influence on later generations. Politically, his anti-feudal and anti-authoritarian spirit influenced the bourgeois liberal democratic tradition, and his literary creation also had a distinct democratic tendency, which also deeply influenced many writers in the future.
Rousseau's ideas of returning to nature, advocating self, and exaggerating emotions directly led to The European Romantic literature of the 19th century. Many poets and writers were influenced by him, and even Goethe, Hugo, Georges San, and Tolstoy invariably claimed to be disciples of Rousseau.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="84" > character evaluation</h1>
The British historian and essayist Thomas Carlisle: "In the face of great difficulties, Rousseau showed neither the courage nor the earth-shattering power, but this is the true embodiment of his extraordinary features." The strong willpower he showed was by no means the strength of the kind of brave warrior, but something else special. For example, a person who is having a spasmodic seizure may not be able to restrain him by six people, but he cannot be called powerful. A person who shoulders a heavy burden but can maintain a steady pace and work hard is the real hero. "
The English poet Byron: "He can portray the mad character as beautiful and dignified, paint his irregular deeds with brilliant colors, and his words are like blinding daylight, making people's eyes shed tears of sympathy."
German philosopher Immanuel Kant: Rousseau first discovered the contradiction between the perceptual impulse and the rational impulse in human nature, and consciously explored ways to resolve this contradiction, proposing the concept of human nature "returning to nature" and the political ideal of establishing a "social contract". Perhaps in a sense we can also say that the exploration of the human emotional world and the concern for the freedom of human nature in Rousseau's thought already contain some spiritual ecological implications.
German writer Goethe: Voltaire ended an old era, while Rousseau ushered in a new era.