Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The atypical Enlightenment thinker and the dilemmas of modernity

Abstract

Without doubt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an atypical intellectual. Enlightenment thinkers were versatile and often worked in different genres. Voltaire, for example, wrote treatises on history, stories, poetry, as well as plays and dictionaries; while Rousseau gained fame not only for his political essays but also, to a certain extent, as a novelist, teacher and composer of music. He was also passionately interested in botany, and wrote a ground-breaking autobiography. The two threads which run through our modern world converge in his works. Despite the worship of reason so intrinsic to his time, he did not ignore the role of emotions and feelings. Thus, his writings inspired Kant and Romanticism, as well as the influential reading of Cassirer. Robespierre worshiped him, and many considered him the intellectual father of the French Revolution; though he has also been seen as a precursor of Marx, and some see him as the forerunner of totalitarian systems. Rawls’ contractualism, Habermas’ critical theory and authors such as Martha Nussbaum have all found themselves obliged to maintain a dialogue with Rousseau’s writings, despite their contradictions, paradoxes and perplexities. What is most interesting in Rousseau is his ability to discern all the dilemmas that characterize the modern world in his attempts to combine reason with the emotions, and vice versa. What do his viewpoints contribute to the Enlightenment?: a necessary complexity that systematically rejects any simplification.