How did the convict in the lesson 'Caring for Others' become a man with good
nature?
Answers
Answer:
Man is naturally good: Rousseau and Romanticism
If we were to look at the things you and I assume are "true", and we were to make a list of the men who thought of those ideas, Rousseau would probably rank up there with Plato and Aristotle, Newton, Jefferson, and even Paul and Christ. Yet unlike these other seminal figures, Rousseau seems to have invented his world view -- one most of us now accept -- from whole clothe, alone, and against the currents of everyone else around him. He is truly the individual genius who radically alters the way all others think and feel.
And yet he was bonkers. A self taught, independent genius, Rousseau moved to Paris in his thirties to become a musician and teach music. But there he hung out with many of the key Enlightenment era philosophers, including Voltaire (18 years younger than Voltaire, they died in the same year, 1778).
One day in 1749, at age 37, while walking to the Bastille to see his imprisoned friend, the major Enlightenment-era philosopher, Diderot, Rousseau saw an ad for an essay contest, hosted by the Academy of Dijon, asking a simple question: has science made us better or worse, more or less moral? As Rousseau tells it, he fell asleep in the park, had a vision, awoke in tears, and started to write his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts.