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  • Essay / The social order as evil in "Emile" by Jean Jacques Rousseau

    Emile by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762) is made up of a series of stories, and its teaching only comes to light when the each of these stories was captured in its complex artistic detail and in its entirety. The interpretation of this hybrid text, the first 'bildungsroman', requires the union of the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse, a union in which it both characterizes and teaches. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayIn the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1753), Rousseau says that “man is born free but everywhere he is chained.” Man is born equal, autonomous, without prejudice, but we discover at the end of the story that he is chained. With the progress of civilization, man has degenerated socially. He is constantly prey to social inequalities, superstitions and the division between his inclinations and his duties. Nature has made man a brute. History has made man civilized, but unhappy and immoral. History is not a theodicy but a tale of misery and corruption. For Rousseau, Émile is the history of his species rather than a novel. Kant says that it is a work that attempts to reconcile nature and history, the selfish nature of man with the demands of civil society, in other words the inclination with duty. Rousseau attempts to restore man's harmony with the world by reorganizing man's acquisitive spirit and ambition. Emile is the canvas on which Rousseau attempts to paint all the passions and knowledge acquired by the soul in such a way as to be consistent with the natural totality of man. Rousseau says that the causes of evil are rooted in the social order itself. Society is the result of an irreversible historical process. Man is a set of contradictions because of paradoxes, a fallacious social and spiritual order. He says that human sins are contained in religious doctrines. He attributes the decline of society to Christianity, which was responsible for the loss of our heavenly home. Man is not naturally a political being; he has no inclination for justice. By nature, he only cares about his own self-preservation. Rousseau considers all this to be true. It differs only in that it does not believe that the duty to obey the laws of civil society can be derived from self-interest. Rousseau originated the tradition that replaces virtue and vice as the causes of man being too good or too bad. , happy or unhappy and a whole bunch of contradictions. All of this has its source in Rousseau's analysis of self-love (self-interest) and self-love (egoistic interest), a division within man's soul resulting from physical and spiritual dependence of man towards other men who tear apart his original unity or totality. “Self-interest” resides in primitive men; “Self-interest” resides in modern corrupt society. Self-interest goes back to the state of God, to the state of perpetual bliss. When self-interest is subject to debasement, it metamorphoses into selfish interest. Virtue and knowledge are incompatible. To avoid this, we need to tame and control the desires of the body under the guidance of the reason of the soul. In Émile we find that all of Émile's early education is an elaborate attempt to avoid the emergence of the imagination which, according to the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, is the faculty which makes intellectual progress of the man the source of his misery. First of all, the boy does not imagine beings or places that do not exist. He imagines himself in situations and subject to necessities which are partof his experience. Proper education, independent of society, can bring a child into direct contact with nature, without mixture of opinions. His desire for what is pleasant and his avoidance of what is painful are given by nature. The tutor's responsibility is, first of all, to let the senses develop in relation to their own objects; and secondly, to encourage the learning of science as an almost natural result of the use of one's senses. Education comes to us from nature, or from men, or from things. Among these three, education from nature is in no way under our control. The conjunction of these three educations is necessary for their perfection. Each particular society, when it is narrow and unified, is foreign to the encompassing society. The main thing is to be good to the people you live with. He who, in the civil order, wants to preserve the primacy of the feelings of nature, does not know what he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always oscillating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be neither a man nor a citizen. He will be good neither for himself nor for others. It will be nothing. Natural education must make man fit for all human conditions. Rousseau was the first to isolate and invent the base and degraded human species: the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois is opposed in Rousseau, on the one hand to the natural man and on the other to the civil man. Natural man is whole and simply concerned with himself, and the very being of civil man consists in his relationship with his city, which understands its god to be identical with the common god. The division between these two causes causes man's unhappiness. The bourgeois distinguishes his own good from the common good. His good requires society, and he exploits others while depending on them. When Rousseau says that man is good by nature, he means that man, concerned only with his well-being, does not naturally have to compete with other men, nor to enter into competition with others. take care of your opinions. Man's goodness is identical with his natural freedom and equality. From the point of view of imaginary perfection, man's passions are evil; from the point of view of the natural desire for conservation, they are good. We see in Emile that Emile gradually evolves towards social integration and that his starting point is his acute individualism. Rousseau condemns the false values ​​of an inauthentic society. He is opposed to any form of indoctrination. Social Contract (1762) and Emile constitute an exploration of the consequences for modern man of the tensions between civilization, freedom and society, and therefore happiness and progress, which Rousseau proposes in the Discourse on the Arts. and Sciences (1750) and the Discourse on the Origins of Inequalities (1754). The Social Contract concerns civil society and the citizen. The family is the first natural association. In ancient times, people lived in the lap of nature. There was no quarrel or fight between them; their life was simple and happy. But with the increase in population and public ownership, various problems arose. Property is the root of many evils. He had to be protected from others. This led to a rivalry. Individual rivalry led to group rivalry. It was a “state of war”. In the Social Contract, says Rousseau, a kind of contract between the ruler (i.e. the powerful) and the ruled (i.e. the weak) was concluded to get rid of this anarchy. But Rousseau says that this contract is fallacious and bogus. What we find in this type of contract is despotism; so, in a sense, we can say that it is a move from the frying pan of anarchy to the fire of despotism. Despotism is a kind of monster that lives on the ruins of the public. Giving up one's free will.