To avoid this, we need the taming and controlling of body’s desires under the guidance of the soul’s reason. When self-interest is subject to debasement, it gets metamorphosed into selfish-interest. Self-interest retrace back to the state of God, the state of perpetual bliss. ‘Self-interest’ lies in primitive men ‘selfish-interest’ lies in modern corrupt society. All these have their source in Rousseau’s analysis of amour de soi (self-interest) and amour propre (selfish-interest), a division within man’s soul resulting from man’s bodily and spiritual dependence on other men which tears apart his original unity or wholeness. Rousseau is at the source of the tradition which replaces virtue and vice as the causes of man’s being too good or bad, happy or miserable and a whole lot of contradictions. He differs only in that he does not believe that the duty to obey the laws of civil society can be derived from self-interest. By nature he cares only for his own preservation. Man is not naturally a political being he has no inclination towards justice. He attributes the decay of society to Christianity that is responsible for the loss of our heavenly abode. He says that human sins are contained in religious doctrines. Man is a bundle of contradictions because of the paradoxes, spurious social and spiritual order. Society is the outcome of irreversible historical process. Rousseau says that the causes of evil are embedded in the social order itself. Emile is the canvas on which Rousseau tries to paint all of the soul’s acquired passions and learning in such a way as to cohere with man’s natural wholeness. Rousseau tries to restore the harmony of man with the world by re-ordering man’s acquisitiveness and ambition. Kant says that it is a work which attempts to reconcile nature and with history, man’s selfish nature with the demands of the civil society, in other way, inclination with duty. History is not a theodicy but a tale of misery and corruption.įor Rousseau, Emile is the history of his species rather than a novel. History has made man civilized, but unhappy and immoral. He is constantly plagued by the social inequality, superstitions and the division between his inclinations and his duties.

With the progress of civilization man has socially degenerated. In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1753) Rousseau says that “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” Man is born equal, self-sufficient, unprejudiced, but we find at the end of history that he is in fetters.

The emile of jean jacques rousseau