jean-jacques rousseau on nature, wholeness and education

He won the lettuce for his "Discours sur les sciences et les cheatworks" and this established him as the First ro humankindticist of the Age of reasonableness, a man looking backward and inner even as everyone else was looking forward and outward. He argued for a philosophical perspective that would dominate much of both art and literature during the 19th century, the Romantic idea that we as public are inherently good and that we have each been debase by the insincerity and inauthenticity of the civilized world:

Before art had new moulded our behaviours, and taught our passions to talk an affected language, our manners were indeed rustic, exclusively sincere and natural; and the difference of our behaviours in an instant imposing our character. -- It is true, that human nature was not then any prudent better in the main than now: but man found a security in the ease with which he could dive into the thoughts of man; and this advantage, on which we seem to set no price, exempted them from many vices (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/courses/europe1/weeks/rou1.htm).

One cannot but suspect that at that place is a certain amount of grandstanding in such claims, as well as a certain amount of in the flesh(predicate) ambition: Rousseau was unlikely to achieve any fame in attempting to fence with Voltaire and the other Encyclopedistes if he were to have simply adopted the post of the rationalist philosophers of his age. He could only establish himself as an measurable philosophical voice by ar

guing against what everyone else was promulgating, which was that science and art would be the downfall of us all. The concomitant that, in the "First Discourse" he finds specific good luck with Voltaire suggests the personal nature (rather than the purely philosophical nature) of his complaints about the Enlightenment celebration of art and science.

But that is not to say that the Romantics, which their find of the inherent nobility of the natural state, were right. Each historical track has its own evils. Science has taken us down perilous roads, but also to the stars, and art remains the most coercive tool for understanding that path that we are taking. The urge to circle backward is always tempting, and we must feel some bounty with Rousseau. But life now, as then, must be lived forward, and must be guided by human intelligence, by the beacons of both science and art.

Tell us, thou celebrated Voltaire, how many sickish energetic sentiments thou hast been forced to sacrifice to our false delicacy, and at what an expense of noble ideas thou hast complied with the present spirit of valiancy so productive of mean ones? It is this that a dissolution in manners, the necessary effect of luxury, causes a corruption of taste. If by outlook any one of those, famous for their talents, happens to have a bearing of mind capable of disdaining to comply with the custom of th
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