Rousseau on Amour propre Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (original) (raw)
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Rousseau and the minimal self: A solution to the problem of amour-propre
European Journal of Political Theory, 2013
Over the past few decades, scholars have reassessed the role of amour-propre in Rousseau's thought. While it was once believed that he had an entirely negative valuation of the emotion, it is now widely held that he finds it useful and employs it to strengthen moral attachments, conjugal love, civic virtue and moral heroism. At the same time, scholars are divided as to whether this positive amour-propre is an antidote to the negative or dangerous form. Some scholars are confident that 'inflamed' amourpropre can be overcome while others adopt a more fatalistic view. While mindful of Rousseau's pessimism in his most famous works, this essay seeks to identify a middle position. By contending Rousseau's discussion of amour-propre is largely concerned with the problems surrounding identity construction in commercial, urban societies, it will be argued that amour-propre can be lessened to manageable levels in more rural societies, that is, agrarian provincial life.
Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love
So many individuals and institutions have helped me to write this book that it is impossible to acknowledge them and their contributions adequately. My largest debt is to the numerous graduate and undergraduate studentsat Barnard College, Columbia University, Cornell University, and the J. W. Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt-who have endured my attempts to work out my thoughts on Rousseau in seminars and lectures and who, in many cases, have decisively improved them. Thanks are also due to my many colleagues at the same institutions who have discussed, criticized, and most of all, supported this project. The secondary work that has most significantly influenced my thinking on Rousseau is N. J. H. Dent's path-breaking Rousseau, which opened my eyes to both the complexity and the philosophical importance of the ideas I discuss here. Two other works that treat amour-propre with unusual clarity and insight and that deserve to be read in conjunction with this book are Andrew Chitty's doctoral dissertation, 'Needs in the Philosophy of History: Rousseau to Marx', and Laurence D. Cooper's Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life. Oran Moked conscientiously checked the book's many footnotes, made helpful suggestions regarding my translations from the French, and, most important, significantly improved the book's philosophical content through his comments on an earlier draft. I am also indebted to the hundreds of individuals throughout the world who have heard various versions of these ideas in colloquia and lectures and responded to them with patience, persistence, and critical insight. I am especially grateful to audiences at
Out of Desire’s Excess, a Lover: Rousseau between Narcissus and Pygmalion
One of the paradoxes of Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue is that the author from whom he so largely borrowed did not really consider himself virtuous. Virtue may mean purity of heart and motive in one’s daily actions, but as Jean-Jacques Rousseau very well knew, it also implied a constant rational struggle against intrinsic passions and appetites. It is for this reason that in several parts of the Dialogues, Rousseau portrays himself paradoxically as a virtuous man who lacks virtue: “But is there some virtue in that sweetness? None. There is only the inclination of a loving and tender nature […] This very reasonable choice isn’t made by either reason or will. It is the work of the pure instinct. It lacks the merit of virtue, doubtless, but neither does it have its instability. One who has surrendered only to the impulses of nature for sixty years is certainly never going to resist them” (RJJ 150). It is not difficult to see why Rousseau would characterize himself as such. If, as Saint-Preux warns Julie, “virtue is a state of war” (J 560), belief in this struggle would mean recognizing our inherent disposition to sin and refuting, as a result, one of Jean-Jacques’s principal tenets: man’s natural inclination for the good. As Rousseau notes in the first pages of the Dialogues, “virtue among us often requires fighting and conquering nature” (RJJ 10–11).
The Explanation of Amour-Propre
Philosophical Review, 2010
Rousseau's thought is marked by an optimism and a pessimism that each evoke, at least in the right mood, a feeling of recognition difficult to suppress. We have an innate capacity for virtue, and with it freedom and happiness. Yet our present social conditions instill in us a restless craving for superiority, which leads to vice, and with it bondage and misery. As Rousseau famously encapsulates the idea: "man is naturally good and . . . it is from these institutions alone that men become wicked" (LM 575/OC 1.1136). 1 However this dictum is understood, it entails at least what we might call the "thesis of possible goodness": that while human psychology is such that men become wicked under the conditions in which we now find them, nevertheless men would be, or have been, good under other conditions.
The Rehabilitation of Amour-Propre
History of Political Thought, 2019
Rousseau's moral psychology has traditionally been understood to rest on a distinction between two kinds of self-love: the good and natural amour de soi and the bad and artificial amour-propre. Over the past three decades, however, this understanding has given way to a novel account, premised on the idea that amour-propre is in essence an ethically neutral desire for recognition. The aim of this article is to defend the classic interpretation of amour-propre against this revisionist reading. It suggests, moreover, that since amour-propre is the source of the predicament that Rousseau seeks to alleviate in his political theory, this rehabilitation of amour-propre -- the claim that amour-propre is not necessarily socially disruptive-- muddles our understanding of Rousseau's political project.
Redeeming Love:Rousseau and Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2000
This essay employs Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) as a vehicle to explore love in eighteenth-century French moral philosophy and theological ethics. The relation between love of self and love of God was understood variously and produced contrasting models of the relation between the public and the private. Rousseau, perhaps more than any other figure in the eighteenth century, wrestled with the complex, competing traditions of love, and in doing so he probed and articulated the tension between and the harmony of life alone and life together. Using as ideal types a set of historical models of private and public vice and virtue, the author describes Rousseau's three contradictory proposals for dealing with the corruption of social institutions and the human heart and discloses their underlying cohesion.
European Journal of Philosophy, 2010
mechanism of LTP is useful and helps the reader to avoid getting lost in the details of contemporary neuroscientific research. Indeed, most arguments can be understood without any significant background in neuroscience. At the same time, it would have been interesting to see Craver's impressive conceptual apparatus at work on other (less mature) research programs, especially in cognitive neuroscience, in which attempts to bridge the gap from 'how-possibly' to 'how-actually' mechanisms are often tentative.
The Aesthetic Dimensions of Esteem in Rousseau: amour-propre, general will, and general taste
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2022
This article reframes the approach to Rousseau in political philosophy and histories of political thought by emphasizing some neglected aesthetic dimensions of amour-propre and the general will. I argue that Rousseau’s account of the origins of amour-propre in aesthetic judgment alerts us to his view that the potentially dangerous effects of amour-propre can be mitigated if its ’extension’ to others is grounded in an aesthetic appreciation of beauty. This pushes back against the predominant ’revisionist’ interpretation of amour-propre in terms of Hegelian ’recognition’ or Rawlsian ’social bases of self-respect’. It also clears the ground for my recovery of Rousseau’s neglected analogy between the general will and what he called the general taste. I argue that reconstructing the general taste and reconsidering the general will in its light yields a significant argument by analogy: like the general taste, the general will is democratically determined by majority vote, not constrained by transcendent standards.
From Amor Sui to Amour de Soi-Même: Rousseau’s Reconfiguration of Augustinian Self-Love
The Political Science Reviewer, 2024
In note XV of his Second Discourse, Rousseau famously distinguishes between two forms of love: amour de soi-même (self-love, understood as self-preservation), and amourpropre (self-love, understood as vanity). Several centuries earlier, another thinker introduced a different set of loves, whose distinction came to anchor the entire worldview of Christendom while it lasted. These, of course, were Augustine's amor Dei and amor sui, understood by Augustine to mean the love of God, carried as far as contempt of self, and love of self, ballooning to the point of contempt for God. i Because of the insidiousness of self-love within this framework, and because of the prominence of Augustinian currents in seventeenth century French thought, Rousseau's erasure of the love of God and his division of self-love into forms good and bad would have stood out immediately to his readers as provocative. It would have read as a radical rejection of Augustine's vision of human nature and the human condition as we know it. Yet, today we might wonder, how familiar was Rousseau with Augustine's conceptual pairing, and how consciously was he offering his own in its place? Thanks to his letter to Christophe de Beaumont, we know that that Rousseau explicitly rejected the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin. Re-reading Rousseau's
In Defence of Pride: Rousseau's Challenge to the Augustinians
History of Political Thought, 2024
Rousseau appears to condemn amour-propre as a whole for producing harmful relations of dependence and psychic division. However, recent interpreters have called this traditional view into question and argued that amour-propre can in fact have several beneficial expressions for Rousseau. This article treats the Emile's account of anger, one neglected expression of amour-propre that displays its potential to uphold moral freedom when educated into autonomous pride. Attention to this passion reveals that Rousseau's treatment of amour-propre poses a challenge to a tradition of Augustinian suspicion towards pride. Rousseau's analysis of self-love is rooted in a fundamental reversal of the Augustinian distinction between harmful and beneficial amour-propre, a reversal which exculpates a form of human pride that the Augustinians condemned.