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The Psychology of Inequality. Michael Locke McLendon
Читать онлайн.Название The Psychology of Inequality
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812295733
Автор произведения Michael Locke McLendon
Жанр Афоризмы и цитаты
Серия Haney Foundation Series
Издательство Ingram
Rousseau’s Anglo biographers, while intrigued by the story, usually fail to appreciate its significance. Typically, it is read in light of Rousseau’s fraying relationship with the philosophes.177 The content of the dispute is far more revealing, however, and ties in with Rousseau’s arguments at the end of the First Discourse. The poor abbé becomes the object of ridicule for the sole reason that he lacks literary talent. The philosophes in the room affirm themselves based on their superior talent. And, worst of all, the value of the abbé’s personality would invariably decline in his own eyes if he understood and accepted the truth of the situation. If he would accept the truth, he would be led to erroneously conclude that his contributions to the world as a religious leader are meaningless and that his life has value only if he is a writer. For Rousseau, this must have been a cruel case in which life imitated art, and it probably reminded him of his worry that in a culture enamored of the arts and sciences a great clothier would be shamed into quitting his trade to become “a bad versifier or an inferior Geometer”178—or, in this case, an awful literary theorist.
Even if d’Alembert, Diderot, and the other philosophes were genuinely ambivalent about the mechanical arts, their occasional praise did nothing to soften the implications of judging people by their intellectual abilities. Rousseau’s position is that the philosophes could not simultaneously celebrate talent as the true measure of human worth and respect those without it, such as artisans and peasants. Moreover, their confidence that they had unique talents produced in the philosophes a subtle arrogance and contempt for the general mass of humanity. How much compassion can one expect, after all, from those who believe that the fate of the species rests on their shoulders? Rousseau asked the philosophes to repudiate themselves, and that they would not do. They would become who they were. Any concessions made to Rousseau masked their true intent: to double down on their original claims.
In the years right after the publication of the First Discourse, then, Rousseau found himself in a debate not so much about the value of the arts and sciences as about the social value of the artists and scientists themselves. The philosophes, he realized, were promoting themselves as a social class as much as they were promoting the knowledge they sought to catalogue and began to adopt the attitudes of classical aristocrats. Included in this aristocratic glorification of the talented was a healthy, if not always publicly expressed, contempt for average people, who according to the new value system were encouraged to view themselves through the eyes of those who looked down on them. The psychological and existential consequences of this project, Rousseau well understood, were devastating to all but a small sliver of the population. As his dispute with the philosophes developed, the concept of amour-propre would increasingly become one of the most effective arrows in his quiver.
Conclusion
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