The Free Animal: Rousseau on Free Will and Human Nature
Lee MacLean
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 1442644958
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Free will is a key but contested concept in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: while the famed philosopher is known to have asserted that free will distinguishes human beings from animals, several interpreters have argued that he merely pretends to have this belief for the sake of healthy politics and to avoid persecution by religious authorities. Through careful readings of key texts and letters, The Free Animal offers a new and original exploration of Rousseau’s views on free will.
Lee MacLean shows that Rousseau needs and uses the idea of human consciousness of free will to explain the development of morality, convention, and vice. MacLean bases her argument on a broad range of texts, from canonical works to Rousseau’s untranslated letters and drafts. Featuring careful analyses and an extensive engagement with the secondary literature, The Free Animal offers a novel interpretation of the changing nature and complexity of Rousseau’s intention.
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Himself from the doctrine of original sin. In his Lettre à Beaumont, he complains that ‘original sin explains everything except its principle, and it is this principle that it is a question of explaining.’17 But he also wants to rebut Hobbes’s assertion that men are so naturally selfish and warlike that they should relinquish the anarchy of the state of nature for the security provided by an absolute monarch. ‘Above all,’ he writes in the Second Discourse, ‘let us not conclude with Hobbes that.
Society among savages from a previous, more primitive stage. But what does Rousseau mean by the term ‘pure state of nature’? From the way he uses the term, it is clear that by ‘pure state of nature,’ he means a state without artifice or convention.65 Now, in light of what he says about the absence of amour propre before the savage state of nascent society, can we say that amour propre, conditioned by the consciousness of undeterministic free will, divides the pure state of nature – a state without.
Prevented from admiring the work. ‘I do not know,’ he would say, ‘what the whole is good for, but I do see that each piece is made for the others; I admire the workman in the details of his work; and I am quite sure that all these wheels are moving in harmony only for a common end which it is impossible for me to perceive.’ (OC 4:578; trans. Bloom, 275) Here the vicar adopts a radically open view of the whole. Some end may exist in nature but he cannot know or perceive it. He is agnostic, so to.
(the religion of the citizen) and universal religious principles (see especially Emile, OC 4:607–9; trans. Bloom, 295–6).40 It is to feature core religious truths available to all national religions. In the Lettre à Beaumont defending Emile and the Profession, Rousseau gives an example of a speech that ‘men of sense’ among the Christians, the Jews, and the Turks would use to address an assembly of the human race established in order to find ‘a Religion common to all peoples.’ The speech explores.
Rousseau’s approach to negative liberty. This is a position known in the contemporary philosophical literature as incompatibilism. For an especially clear overview, see ‘Dualism,’ in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Cf. J.S. Mill, ‘The Freedom of the Will,’ excerpted in Free Will and Determinism, ed. Bernard Berofsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1985), ch. 34, 435. Ibid., ch.