Exemplars/Rousseau
Study page: Rousseau (1712-1778)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, self-made originality
Painted by Allan Ramsay in 1766 for David Hume
National Galleries Scotland.
Formal education provides those whom it serves well with terrific advantages — confidence, skills, discipline, and a stock of shared knowledge. It develops bad habits too, subtle ones we easily ignore. Instruction privileges received opinion as successful pupils early learn the benefit of thinking and knowing what their teachers think and know. Didactic simplifications, which help teachers communicate and students learn, often engender a knowing superficiality in those who best benefit from their instructional opportunities. Those who manage consistently to have been deemed correct may have let their independent judgment go flaccid by rarely risking its use. And when originality in well-schooled times transgresses boundaries, the broken limits leapfrog out, co-opting the novelties into the encompassing order as memes of celebrity and dissent pluck dowager products up.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau lacked the formal advantages of his time and slowly formed himself into a remarkably original thinker. He slowly turned haphazard opportunities for self-formation into the skills and sensibility with which he could shape the culture of his time in ways that still endure within our own. A nobody for nearly 40 years, he parted the curtain of obscurity with an unexpected essay that provoked response by the leading voices of the time. For 10 years, he preserved a distinctive presence through scattered achievements as a musical composer, provoking some changes in prevailing operatic tastes and as an essayist, arousing some controversy about inequality, language, and theatrical art. Yet he withheld himself, trying to work independent of coterie and patrons at a growing cost: evoking enmity from friends.
In the 1760's, Rousseau's long course of self-formation came to a troubled fulfillment. ** To be continued.**