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Journal Article
Bougainville Against the Tide
2019
Overview
[...]modern philosophy championed the humanist idea that human beings can and must reason their way to a better life. \"Let us begin by laying all facts aside, as they do not affect the question,\" begins Rousseau who, if he did not invent this metaphysical a-priorism, turned its characteristic disparagement of reality into a pessimistic dismissal of civilized existence.7 The three volumes of Rousseau that earned him fame, and did most to shape the exotic imagination that concerns us here are the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), which declared knowledge, technology, science, craft, commerce, books and libraries, theaters and cities, material affluence and art to have debased humankind, and made Europeans an especially unhappy, sickly, crabby, devious, and stunted branch of the human family. By Diderot's report, the essay made a sensation \"beyond all imagining\" in Paris.8 Its author upped the antes four years later with the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality (1754) which maintained that man's malevolence and unhappiness wax in tandem with socialization: the more civilized we are, the more wretched we grow. Out of the thesis that knowledge corrupts and innocence dignifies, Rousseau forged a treatise of pedagogy, Émile or On Education (1762), which lays down \"the incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right\" and therefore charges the educator to withdraw the child from society, his family and relatives, and withhold from him the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of civilization for as long as possible.9 What is extraordinary about these theories is not that they were incredible (even Rousseau disavowed them even as, by the time of Émile, he appeared to profess them).
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