Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I
- 1 Freeing man from sin: Rousseau on the natural condition of mankind
- 2 Making history natural in Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality
- 3 Rousseau's Second Discourse: between Epicureanism and Stoicism
- 4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the late 1740s: satire, friendship, and freedom
- 5 If you please! Theater, verisimilitude, and freedom in the Letter to d'Alembert
- 6 Music, the passions, and political freedom in Rousseau
- PART II
- PART III
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Rousseau's Second Discourse: between Epicureanism and Stoicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I
- 1 Freeing man from sin: Rousseau on the natural condition of mankind
- 2 Making history natural in Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality
- 3 Rousseau's Second Discourse: between Epicureanism and Stoicism
- 4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot in the late 1740s: satire, friendship, and freedom
- 5 If you please! Theater, verisimilitude, and freedom in the Letter to d'Alembert
- 6 Music, the passions, and political freedom in Rousseau
- PART II
- PART III
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In my contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, I argued that we can usefully read Rousseau, especially in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (hereafter, the Second Discourse), as responding to and attempting to transcend the opposition between Stoic and Augustinian moral psychologies in the ways in which they had been articulated, especially by the Augustinians, in seventeenth-century France. In particular, I argued that Rousseau's distinctive “splitting” of the notion of self-love into two parts, amour de soi-même and amour propre, could be viewed, on the one hand, as an attempt to recuperate the ancient Stoics' concept of oikeiosis and to keep it in a foundational role for ethics while, on the other hand, enabling him to signal a great deal of agreement with the Augustinians about the iniquities of self-love. These iniquities, however, were placed firmly on the amour propre side of this new binary, in a place where they were insulated from amour de soi-même, and therefore unable to call this benign kind of self-love radically into question – as, for example, Blaise Pascal had done in the haunting fragment, “Thus we are born unjust, for each inclines towards himself.” I now think that my earlier analysis was incomplete, in some places muddled, and that there are three specific problems with the story I told there.
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- Rousseau and Freedom , pp. 44 - 57Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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