Amour propre

I don’t know what I find more fascinating, Rousseau’s life or his philosophy.  I’ve recently been listening to the audiobook of “Rousseau in 90 minutes” by Paul Strathern (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rousseau-90-Minutes-Paul-Strathern/dp/1566634369), it’s excellent.  So far I’ve listened to his take on Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and now Rousseau and they’ve all been very good.

Setting aside his life story, the part of Rousseau’s work that interests me the most is his theory of man’s evolving psychology, the movement from self-love “amour de soi” (the basic instinct for self-preservation) to love of self “amour propre” (seeing ourselves through other’s eyes and therefore changing our more “natural” behaviour).

His argument is that our psychology was different in a time when man was free i.e. before people entered into society, but I would argue that man never really existed outside society.  Man was born from man, we were never truly alone.  Where do people get this image of a free man being one alone in the wilderness?  Man has never really been like this, we are born out of another.

However, his theory of “amour propre” (rather than the transition to it but the state itself) I feel is quite a true reflection of how we live our lives. We live in constant judgement of ourselves through the eyes of others (or at least our projections of our own judgements onto them).   We can never be free from judgement, it is everywhere – it is within us.  Psychotherapists say our behaviour or our biased judgement of ourselves (or “faulty thinking”) stems from our “conditions of worth”.  This is the influence of our parents and attitudes of others at the time of our upbringing which influence our values, only they’re not our values, they are theirs.  For example, someone may feel totally unfulfilled because they failed to get into law school because all they ever wanted to do was to become a lawyer just because their parent’s wanted them to become a lawyer.  But their parents’ views and theirs become so intertwined that the person doesn’t actually know what they really want – they can only see what other people think of them – but it’s not even what people think of them, it’s really a projection of what they think of themselves.   I must stop there before I jump into my thoughts on existentialism which we’ll come onto next term.

I’ll finish by disagreeing with Rousseau’s theory of “General Will” which I’ve run out of steam to discuss.

Tune in next time for thoughts on Bentham and Mill.