Rousseau and Romanticism — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — John Shaqi
Rousseau and Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · en
twenty-four centuries, whereas Blake was only a romantic æsthete who
was moving in his imaginative activity towards madness and seems at the
end actually to have reached the goal.
I have been going thus far afield to ancient India and to Buddha, not
that I might, like a recent student of Buddhism, enjoy “the strangeness
of the intellectual landscape,” but on the contrary that I might
suggest that there is a centre of normal human experience and that
Buddhism, at least in its ethical aspects, is nearer to this centre
than æsthetic romanticism. Buddha might perhaps marvel with more
reason at our strangeness than we at his. Buddha’s assertion of man’s
innate moral laziness in particular accords more closely with what
most of us have experienced than Rousseau’s assertion of man’s natural
goodness. This conception of the innate laziness of man seems to me
indeed so central that I am going to put it at the basis of the point
of view I am myself seeking to develop, though this point of view is
not primarily Buddhistic. This conception has the advantage of being
positive rather than dogmatic. It works out in practice very much like
the original sin of the Christian theologian. The advantage of starting
with indolence rather than sin is that many men will admit that they
are morally indolent who will not admit that they are sinful. For
theological implications still cluster thickly about the word sin, and
these persons are still engaged more or less consciously in the great
naturalistic revolt against theology.