Rousseau and Romanticism — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — John Shaqi
Rousseau and Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · en
the same temperamentalist has his hard and his soft side. The triumph
of egoism over altruism in the relations between man and man is even
more evident in the relations between nation and nation. The egoism
that results from the inbreeding of temperament on a national scale
runs in the case of the strong nations into imperialism.[124] We have
not reflected sufficiently on the fact that the soft temperamentalist
Rousseau is more than any other one person the father of _Kultur_;[125]
and that the exponents of Kultur in our own day have been revealed as
the hardest of hard temperamentalists.
To understand the particular craving that is met by Rousseauistic
idealism one would need to go with some care into the psychology of
the half-educated man. The half-educated man may be defined as the man
who has acquired a degree of critical self-consciousness sufficient
to detach him from the standards of his time and place, but not
sufficient to acquire the new standards that come with a more thorough
cultivation. It was pointed out long ago that the characteristic of the
half-educated man is that he is incurably restless; that he is filled
with every manner of desire. In contrast with him the uncultivated man,
the peasant, let us say, and the man of high cultivation have few and
simple desires. Thus Socrates had fewer and simpler desires than the
average Athenian. But what is most noteworthy about the half-educated
man is not simply that he harbors many desires and is therefore
incurably restless, but that these desires are so often incompatible.
He craves various good things, but is not willing to pay the price--not
willing to make the necessary renunciations. He pushes to an extreme
what is after all a universal human proclivity--the wish to have one’s
cake and eat it too. Thus, while remaining on the naturalistic level,
he wishes to have blessings that accrue only to those who rise to the
humanistic or religious levels. He wishes to live in “a universe with
the lid off,” to borrow a happy phrase from the pragmatist, and at the
same time to enjoy the peace and brotherhood that are the fruits of
restraint. The moral indolence of the Rousseauist is such that he is
unwilling to adjust himself to the truth of the human law; and though
living naturalistically, he is loath to recognize that what actually
prevails on the naturalistic level is the law of cunning and the law
of force. He thus misses the reality of both the human and the natural
law and in the pursuit of a vague Arcadian longing falls into sheer
unreality. I am indeed overstating the case so far as Rousseau is
concerned. He makes plain in the “Emile” that the true law of nature
is not the law of love but the law of force. Emile is to be released
from the discipline of the human law and given over to the discipline
of nature; and this means in practice that he will have “to bow his
neck beneath the hard yoke of physical necessity.” In so far the
“nature” of Emile is no Arcadian dream.