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Les Confessions de Rousseau

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metaphysics
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20 Dec 2011, 9:55 pm

I would like to read autobiographies, although there are actually not many autobiographies to read.

Has anybody here ever read Les Confessions before? Have you ever feel there are some surprising similarities between Rousseau and yourself?

Which type of psychosis could J-J Rousseau have?

Did you enjoy the book?

I have just started to read this again,"I conceived nothing, but known anything" Rousseau was so when he was five.



peebo
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21 Dec 2011, 1:58 am

i have not read this, but did read the social contract a number of years ago. i generally felt this book is founded upon a contradiction. the following text very lucidly puts forward a criticism that reflects my own thinking better than i could attempt...



http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_ar ... sseau.html



[quote=bakunin"]The state is in no wise an immediate product of nature. Unlike society, it does not precede the awakening of reason in men. The liberals say that the first state was created by the free and rational will of men; the men of the right consider it the work of God. In either case it dominates society and tends to absorb it completely...[/quote]

bakunin wrote:
...Since the birth of the State, the world of politics has always been and continues to be the stage for unlimited rascality and brigandage, brigandage and rascality which, by the way, are held in high esteem, since they are sanctified by patriotism, by the transcendent morality and the supreme interest of the State. This explains why the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of revolting crimes; why kings and ministers, past and present, of all times and all countries -- statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and warriors -- if judged from the standpoint of simple morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to hard labour or to the gallows. There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: "for reasons of state."

These are truly terrible words, for they have corrupted and dishonoured, within official ranks and in society's ruling classes, more men than has even Christianity itself. No sooner are these words uttered than all grows silent, and everything ceases; honesty, honour, justice, right, compassion itself ceases, and with it logic and good sense. Black turns white, and white turns black. The lowest human acts, the basest felonies, the most atrocious crimes become meritorious acts...


_________________
?Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.?

Adam Smith