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    Rousseau in 60 Minutes: Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes
    Rousseau in 60 Minutes: Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes
    Rousseau in 60 Minutes: Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    Rousseau in 60 Minutes: Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes

    By Walther Ziegler

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    Rousseau possessed a brilliant mind and one that questioned every accepted value and idea. Whatever most were “for”, Rousseau was always “against”! He was against monarchy, against the church, against the status quo, against inequality, against traditional education, against marriage, and (of course) against technical progress and the destruction of Nature. Today we might call Rousseau a “professional rabble-rouser”. His contrariness was his trademark. He spent most of his life as a quasi-vagrant or a refugee. Sometimes it was the church, other times the government of one country or another that he had to flee from. But all arrest warrants were in vain. Through books like The Social Contract his radical demand for democracy prepared the ground for the French Revolution, and his famous discourses on Man’s loss of contact with, and destruction of, Nature made him a pioneer also of ecological thought. He even founded a revolutionary new philosophy of education which we know today as the “anti-authoritarian” approach to child-rearing. The book Rousseau in 60 Minutes explains the thinker’s core ideas, exemplified by over 70 quotations from his works. The seed for these ideas was planted one day when he was on in his way to see his friend Diderot in prison, reading a copy of the newspaper Mercure de France as he went. It announced a competition for the best essay on whether scientific and artistic progress had made people morally better. All the competitors answered “yes”. Except Rousseau. His answer was that Man is naturally good and became wicked only through being “socialized” and “civilized”. This provocative thesis won him the prize and brought him Europe-wide fame. Because he had hereby become the first philosopher to recognize the key problem of the whole modern world. The “noble savage” ran free through the woods, but we pass our days in cramped offices and forfeit, each day, more of our instincts and our freedom. But above all, Rousseau pointed out, modern Man lives always “in and for the gaze of other people”. That is to say, we tend to dissolve more and more into the “mainstream”. Is Rousseau right here? Have we conformed too far? Have we forfeited our instincts? And above all: What can we do about it? The book forms part of the popular series Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooks on Demand
    Release dateJul 19, 2016
    ISBN9783741230080
    Rousseau in 60 Minutes: Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes
    Author

    Walther Ziegler

    Walther Ziegler est professeur d'université et docteur en philosophie. En tant que correspondant à l'étranger, reporter et directeur de l'information de la chaîne de télévision allemande ProSieben, il a produit des films sur tous les continents. Ses reportages ont été récompensés par plusieurs prix. En 2007, il a prit la direction de la « Medienakademie » à Munich, une Université des Sciences Appliquées et y forme depuis des cinéastes et des journalistes. Il est l'auteur de nombreux ouvrages philosophiques, qui ont été publiés en plusieurs langues dans le monde entier. En sa qualité de journaliste de longue date, il parvient à résumer la pensée complexe des grands philosophes de manière passionnante et accessible à tous.

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      Book preview

      Rousseau in 60 Minutes - Walther Ziegler

      My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

      My special thanks go to my translator

      Dr Alexander Reynolds.

      Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

      Contents

      Rousseau’s Great Discovery

      Rousseau’s Central Idea

      The Noble Savage

      Marriage and Language as Forms of Decadence

      The Curse of Settled Existence

      Living Outside Oneself

      The Lie of Property

      The State as Instrument for Repressing the Propertyless

      Back to Nature?

      The Social Contract as Solution

      The General Will and the Will of All

      Education in the Service of Man’s Natural Freedom

      Of What Use Is Rousseau’s Discovery for Us Today?

      The Virtue of ‘Contrariness’ – Going One’s Own Way

      Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!

      Daring More Democracy

      Mindfulness of Nature – Living Ecologically

      Educating Man to be Free

      Escaping the ‘Matrix’ – Living with Intensity

      Bibliographical References

      Rousseau’s Great Discovery

      Rousseau (1712-1778) was the most contrary of the world’s great thinkers. He spoke and wrote against almost everything that his 18th-Century contemporaries held to be true and right: the divine right of kings, a society led by the aristocracy, the church, authoritarian education, and the state along with all its institutions.

      He was the first really radical social critic. All his life he swam against the current. Even today his work is anathema to many. Although Rousseau earned his living as a philosopher, artist and man of the theatre, he saw no contradiction in criticizing philosophy, art and the theatre as things that distracted from, and blinded to, the truth. He also had much to say on the topic of raising and teaching the young. He opposed to the methods of strict discipline current in the schools of his day an ideal of children’s free selfdevelopment, founding a whole tradition of antiauthoritarian education.

      His critique of all forms of repression and his political demand for democracy and equality prepared the ground for the French Revolution and inspired early socialism, Marxism and such later left-wing movements as Critical Theory. But many other apparently opposed movements of thought – such as the Sturm und Drang and Romantic movements or the philosophy of Nietzsche – were also influenced by Rousseau. This maverick thinker, in short, left no European thinker, of his own or later eras, indifferent. The stimuli he gave to posterity proved as diverse and as turbulent as the life he lived. No other philosopher, indeed, has left us a biography so rich in adventures and misfortunes.

      When his restless life ended at the age of 66 he had practiced some twelve different professions, changed his religion twice, and adopted citizenship of three different nations. He had also set up house in a score of different locations and engaged in love affairs to a number which remains indeterminate but was certainly considerable.

      Rousseau was also, however, a virtuoso of disaster and discord who somehow managed to quarrel with almost everyone who ever befriended or supported him. He made enemies, at one point or another, of Voltaire as well as of Diderot, D’Alembert and the other Encyclopédistes – men who had early on been his friends and allies – and even, finally, of the equa ble English philosopher David Hume who gave him shelter when his writings had forced him to seek refuge in England.

      Rousseau, indeed, spent most of his life as a homeless wanderer or a hunted exile. He was persecuted and pursued sometimes by the church,

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