Jean Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that while Enlightenment philosophers saw reason as a tool for liberation, it actually corrupted human nature, fostered egoism and inequality, and alienated individuals from their natural feelings of compassion. For Rousseau, reason tends to isolate people, turning them inward and away from their innate empathy (pitié) for others, which instead is the source of authentic virtue and morality. He contrasted the isolated, rational individual with the more naturally benevolent “savage” who responded directly to their feelings, suggesting true well-being and morality stem from the heart rather than detached intellect.

Reason’s negative effects on humanity

Breeds selfishness and egoism: Reason leads to pride and reflection, which turn a person inward, causing them to prioritize their own interests over those of others.

Fosters isolation: Philosophy and reason isolate people, making them indifferent to the suffering of others, a phenomenon Rousseau illustrates with the philosopher who can ignore a murder at their window.

Corrupts natural feelings: Instead of liberating humans, reason corrupts their natural goodness by rationalizing self-interest and justifying injustice.

Alienates from nature: The development of civilization and reason takes individuals further from their inner nature, which is characterized by emotions and instinct.

Reason’s opposition to morality and virtue

Virtue arises from passion, not reason: True virtues like compassion depend on “gut-feeling” and the promptings of feeling (pitié), not on abstract rational arguments.

Reason can make people immoral: Reason allows individuals to justify morally questionable actions, such as following orders or harming others, by prioritizing self-preservation or group interests.

Pity connects us to others: The natural capacity for pity allows humans to identify with those who suffer, fostering a connection that reason erodes.

Rousseau’s alternative

A return to natural feelings: Rousseau argued for the importance of passions, emotions, and harmony with nature as fundamental to human well-being.

Humanity is divine, not reason: He believed that humanity itself possesses an inherent divinity, which is more essential and trustworthy than human reason.

A critique of Enlightenment reason: His philosophy serves as a critique of the Enlightenment’s absolutization of reason, emphasizing that reason alone is insufficient for organizing human life.

• “I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different. Whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.” ― Jean Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
• “It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Confessions
• “What wisdom can you find greater than kindness.” ― Jean Jacques Rousseau
• “Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses
• “To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.” ― Jean Jacques Rosseau
• “Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it. ” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• “Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.” ― Rousseau
• “Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
• “I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.” ― Rousseau Jean - Jacques
• “There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
• “Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people’s thoughts.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• “It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
• “The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go without altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us. ” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
• “If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• “It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
• “All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education
• “I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted…without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed….The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
• “The indolence I love is not that of a lazy fellow who sits with his arms across in total inaction, and thinks no more than he acts, but that of a child which is incessantly in motion doing nothing, and that of a dotard who wanders from his subject. I love to amuse myself with trifles, by beginning a hundred things and never finishing one of them, by going or coming as I take either into my head, by changing my project at every instant, by following a fly through all its windings, in wishing to overturn a rock to see what is under it, by undertaking with ardor the work of ten years, and abandoning it without regret at the end of ten minutes; finally, in musing from morning until night without order or coherence, and in following in everything the caprice of a moment.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confession
• “I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• “I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education
• “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
• “It is reason which breeds pride and reflection which fortifies it; reason which turns man inward into himself; reason which separates him from everything which troubles or affects him. It is philosophy which isolates a man, and prompts him to say in secret at the sight of another suffering: ‘Perish if you will; I am safe.’ No longer can anything but dangers to society in general disturb the tranquil sleep of the philosopher or drag him from his bed. A fellow-man may with impunity be murdered under his window, for the philosopher has only to put his hands over his ears and argue a little with himself to prevent nature, which rebels inside him, from making him identify himself with the victim of the murder. The savage man entirely lacks this admirable talent, and for want of wisdom and reason he always responds recklessly to the first promptings of human feeling.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality