Jean-Jacques Rousseau as an emblematic figure of French-speaking philosophy

Abstract

The article is devoted to the interpretation of the philosophical heritage of J.-J. Rousseau is primarily in French philosophy and culture. The key and most famous ideas of J.-J. Rousseau are considered from the point of view of modern philosophy and the formulation of vital questions peculiar to modern culture — about education, about freedom, about human rights, about the relationship between men and women, about languages, about music, about theater and about culture in general. Without claiming to be a complete reconstruction of the philosophical ideas of J.-J. Rousseau, the article suggests to focus on the complexity and ambivalence of these ideas, which allow the modern Western intellectual to turn to J.-J. Rousseau with the most pressing issues of our time. The date of birth — June 28, 1712 — even not in the “jubilee” year becomes an occasion for an active and creative return to the ideas of J.-J. Rousseau, offering an interesting interpretation of certain aspects of the philosophy of J.-J. Rousseau, reactualizing them. J.-J. Rousseau appears not as part of a collective project of the French Enlightenment, but as an independent and original thinker who anticipated many topical lines of discussion of the key topics of philosophy for modernity. So, for example, the philosophy of language J.-J. Rousseau “discovered” the fundamental factor of the emergence of language — its acoustic component, musical in essence. Rousseau undoubtedly, in our opinion, supports the traditional French-speaking thought, reframed by the Cartesian “Reasoning about Method”, a detailed philosophical reasoning conditioned culturally and, as a rule, politically. In general, for the presented historical and philosophical portrait of J.-J. Rousseau is characterized by the features of national philosophy: political engagement, a claim to universality, attention to the process of persuasion and the unfolding of thought. This is what is demanded by the latest philosophy and turns J.-J. Rousseau became a kind of ambassador of French-speaking thought.