Romanticism and Rousseau: Books 1-6 Essay

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He shifts from the instinctual world of the emotions to a cerebral existence, and loses a sense of what is truly meaningful in life. In Romantic thinking, which also idealized a pastoral, earthy lifestyle, being separated from the world of the emotions was seen as negative. Rousseau describes his feelings for books as a child as a kind of romance, and he felt equally as intensely about Ovid's Metamorphosis and the characters in Moliere's plays as he did about aspects of his real existence. But his imitation of Greeks and Romans, which some people might admire as precocious, Rousseau sees as false, much like the false dogmatism of many Catholics, which he chronicles in Book 2, regarding his theological education. Anything that takes a person away from nature was negative, according to the Romantics: Rousseau describes a rustic feast as better than fine Parisian fare, and sees the beauty and uncomplicated sexuality of peasant girls in Book 4 as just as lovely as that of sophisticated women.

Some religious and 'civilized' people in the Confessions, like the Savoyard abbe, M. Gaime, are seen as positive, as they enforce a kind of moderation in Rousseau's view of himself -- Rousseau says he tended to see things, including his own abilities, in extremes, and the abbe counseled him to look the world and his own character in a more realistic fashion.

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The abbe also imposed upon Rousseau a sense of practicality, which Rousseau valued -- Rousseau viewed hands-on and technical arts as just as important and valuable, if not more so, than theory. This is also keeping with the Romantic idea that truth is more important than artifice and complexity in civilization. In the Confessions, Rousseau's philosophical and political ideas about what makes a 'natural man' and a good education are shown to be taking shape, as he crafts the narrative of his youth to conform his ideas about the importance of good health, the open air, and putting books and abstract ideas of religion, philosophy, and the classical world in their appropriate (secondary) place to real….....

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