Jean-Jacques Rousseau [antikvár]

PrefaceThis book is not a biography, although in overall outline it tries to follow the chronological development of Rousseau's atdtudes and ideas. Neither is it a systematic exposition of the philosophy of the citizen of Geneva, although crucial aspects of that philosophy do come in for detailed examination.Rightly or wrongly, Rousseau was unwilling to separate his thought from his person, his theories from his personal destiny. We must take him as he offers himself to us, in this fusion, and confusion, of existence and idea. This leads us to analyze Jean-Jacques's literary creation as if it represented a kind of imaginary action and to analyze his behavior as if it constituted a lived fiction.Adventurer, dreamer, philosopher, antiphilosopher, political theorist, musician, and vicdm of persecution: Jean-Jacques was all of these. As diverse as his work is, it can, I think, be read and comprehended as a unified whole: it is rich enough to suggest themes and modfs useful for grasping both the variety of its tendencies and the unity of its intentions. By attending naively to the work and refraining from hasty condemnation or absolution, we can hope to discover the images, obsessions, and nostalgic desires that more or less constantly governed Jean-Jacques's conduct and work.I have limited myself as much as I could to observing and describing the structure of Rousseau's world. Rather than impose external patterns and values, I have chosen to read the texts in such a way as to reveal their internal coherence or incoherence and to highlight the symbols and ideas that structured Rousseau's thought.Yet this study is something more than a "close textual analysis." For it is obvious that one cannot interpret Rousseau's work without taking into account the world that its author opposed. If intimate personal experience enjoys a special place in that work, it acquires that place as the result of Rousseau's conflict with a society he