Bright-eyed and bushy tailed, we emerge from our festering Christmas pits ready to glory in the renewed magnificence of HCJ. After a brief fistfight with a script writing lecturer, we put down our flag and were ready to get cracking. This year we kicked off with a sortie into the Romantic. And no, I'm not talking about Stephanie Meyer's sparkly, angsty, vampire novels (Team Edward FTW).
Perhaps a little background is needed.
We're in France, it is the end the 18th century, the Church's creative force has diminished, and a man named Jean Jacques Rousseau has taken a sabbatical to wander the mountains of Switzerland and the beaches of Vienna. Following an intense experience listening to the sounds of nature, and finding all his cares slipping away, he decides that the void of creative force left by the Church should be filled by the divinity of nature. He felt that all that had been written and proposed before were lies, that there was honesty in nature. That the empiricists were wrong, and it is feeling, not reason, that drives us. Reason did nought but stand in the way of innocence and beauty, and what it was to be truly human.
Rousseau calls to mind a state of nature, quite different to that of Hobbes, who would have us believe that before society was formed, we were all psychotic savages living in an anarchical world and that we cannot be trusted to live without a sword of Damocles threatening to drop at the slightest provocation. Rousseau claims that natural man was virtuous and was the perfect example of humanity. Indeed, he glorified what he called the 'Noble Savage' as being pure and beautiful.
While I'm sure he salivated over the idea of stripping down to a loincloth and running around the countryside, he was intelligent enough to realise that this would not be possible, what with all the trappings of society cemented about us. He claims that the origin of civil society and all of it's incumbent inequalities was found in property.
"The first man [he wrote] who, having enclosed a piece of land, bethought himself of saying "this is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of society." One wonders what he would have said to Locke on the subject if they had ever met, Locke being a great lover of property and basing near all his philosophy on the stuff. But I digress.
Rousseau's Romanticism was built upon the supremacy of emotions and was essentially a reaction to the enlightenment, which he perceived to be passionless. He despised the situation that man had gotten himself into, saying: "Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are." As far as his view is concerned, the world was is rotten, and civilisation corrupt. Man is engulfed in an endless competition of self esteem, which can never truly be conquered, 'am I doing as well as I could be?', 'why is my horse a poorer model than my neighbours?', 'why is the other man's joopleberry shrub always a more mauvy shade of pinky-russet?' etc.
Rousseau wished for a different type of social contract than had been proposed before. The problem was finding a government that would protect you, yet leave you free to do what you wished. And also create laws which everyone agrees with, allowing everyone to keep their freedom.
Now, Rousseau's idea of 'everyone' needs a little explanation. He came up with the concept of 'general will' which decides the best way doing anything e.g. "we shall all eat Crunchy Nut for breakfast." Every citizen has a share in the general will, allowing everyone to be free, yet it is a conglomerate, and if an individual was to differ from the mass, then they would be "forced to be free." think of it as a tyrannical form of peer pressure, à la 1984.
This 'cult of sensibility', while initially, not particularly popular,was a political time bomb that would throw all of France into chaos. All it would take was a country that was completely out of pocket, and a king willing to let the paysans help sort it out. Quel surprise! Just such an event occurred. The commoners were brought in to discuss the country's financial problems and they decided this would be a perfect time to write their own constitution, which happened to be in the image of Mr Rousseau. Men being free and equal, and laws being an expression of "general will". This eventually led to the French Revolution.
As revolutions go, this one began somewhat, bureaucratically. Until the Bastille was stormed, a symbolic act that apparently irritated the six or seven prisoners residing there, as they had probably been having a kip. Whilst all this unruliness was going on in France, radicals in England, were becoming more and more intrigued. Indeed, many went over to France to see Rousseau's natural man becoming a reality for themselves. Wordsworth wrote that "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven."
But of course, this could not last. The power vacuum that resulted from the idea of general will, meant that no one had any idea who was supposed to be in charge, leaving everyone running around like the proverbial chicken. France's neighbouring countries, were not looking too happily at the chaos beginning to engulf France. The Prussians (being renowned for their sense of liberty and their happy-go-lucky attitude) were looking to invade France and banish this unseemly attitude once and for all. And the French, becoming more and more paranoid, began handing out weapons willy-nilly to allow the citizens to defend themselves and their country (the two being virtually synonymous). And this, coupled with their paranoia, made the French begin to massacre each other in search of counter revolutionaries. Tens of thousands died before it was brought to an end, along with much of the revolution, though it changed France forever. A legacy of the Romantics. Take that Robert Pattinson!
During the lecture, we also discussed Mary Wollstonecraft, and her writing, including her Vindications of the Rights of Women. But as she will be the subject of our seminar next week, I will discuss her in more detail then. Cheerio!
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