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The Explanation of Amour-Propre
Abstract
Rousseau's thought is marked by an optimism and a pessimism that each evoke, at least in the right mood, a feeling of recognition difficult to suppress. We have an innate capacity for virtue, and with it freedom and happiness. Yet our present social conditions instill in us a restless craving for superiority, which leads to vice, and with it bondage and misery. Call this the thesis of possible goodness: that while human psychology is such that men become wicked under the conditions in which we now find them, nevertheless men would be, or have been, good under other conditions. It is surprisingly difficult, or at least surprisingly complicated, however, to articulate even a possible psychology that would explain the thesis of possible goodness. Interpretations of Rousseau, even several to which the author of this essay is highly indebted, have not fully engaged, I think, with the complications. This essay tries to reconstruct psychological principles that would explain the thesis and that are at least consistent with what Rousseau otherwise says on the subject. Much of the value of this exercise, however, lies not in the particulars of the resulting psychology but rather in the depth of the tension between Rousseau's optimism and his pessimism that it reveals.
Fundamentals of Cognitive Science draws on research from psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics, evolution, and neuroscience to provide an engaging and student-friendly introduction to this interdisciplinary field. While structured around traditional cognitive psychology topics, from attention, learning theory, and memory to information processing, thinking, and decision making, the book also looks at neural networks, cognitive neuroscience, embodied cognition, and magic to illustrate cognitive science principles. The book is organized around the history of thinking about the mind and its relation to the world. It considers the evolution of cognition and how it demonstrates how our current thinking about cognitive processes is derived from pre-scientific philosophies and common sense, through psychologists' empirical inquiries into mind and behavior as they pursued a science of cognition and the construction of artificial intelligences. The architectures of cognition are also applied throughout, and the book proposes a synthesis of them, from traditional symbol system architectures to recent work in embodied cognition and Bayesian predictive processing. Practical and policy implications are also considered but solutions are left for the readers to determine. Using extended case studies to address the most important themes, ideas, and findings, this book is suitable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and related fields. It is also suitable for general readers interested in an accessible treatment of cognitive science and its practical implications.
In Emile, Rousseau claims that the value of women ought to be determined by the opinion that men have of them. Women, contrary to commodities and men, escape what I call Rousseau's “dual theory of value.” According to the latter, the apparent value of commodities and men is determined by opinion and either unrelated or inverse to “real value,” which is assessed through objective criteria. The dual theory of value is the basis of Rousseau's critique of commercial society. However, women warrant an exception to this theory. As women's apparent worth is their real worth, women are the unique object in the world that ought to be subjected to the rule of opinion, which is the rule of commercial market that Rousseau so violently rejects. This article investigates why this is the case and locates three functions to the unique position of women in Rousseau's theory of value.
Realism, constructivism, and liberal institutionalism share the assumption that states are rational and self-maximizing actors. While these theories disagree as to whether states prioritize military power or economic wealth, they converge around the notion that states pursue these goods rationally and predictably. Complaints against and threats of defection from prominent international security and trade regimes, including NATO and the EU, raise doubts about states’ rationality and predictability. Perhaps these theories’ shared assumption about rational action has become an impediment to understanding state behavior and institutional cooperation. To enrich and to expand the conversation within international political theory, my article turns to Rousseau’s international political thought. Rousseau anticipates central arguments in each of the major traditions of IR theory but locates political self-interest in the sub-rational passion amour propre rather than in reason itself. Rousseau exemplifies a more nuanced way to understand the irrational roots of political motivation and the limits of international order. My paper traces the international implications of amour propre through Rousseau’s key texts on international politics and turns to his “Letter to Philopolis” as a way to re-frame Rousseau’s account of political responsibility.
The self is constantly curated through an image-laden economy from the narcissistic turn to ‘lifecasting’ online. This chapter examines the notion of self-love and how our image-saturated worlds induce new modes of sociality that centre the transaction and curation of the self online. The coalescing of the mirror and screen produce a new-found fascination with a self which is aestheticized and constantly curated for others but most importantly validated through this gaze. This notion explores the concept of glass-house society where the act of watching defines new modes of self-curation and sociality.
To this point in this book, compassion has been presented as being largely other-regarding. When we come into relation with the suffering of others, we are moved to care for them, seek to understand them through empathic responses central to perspective sharing and follow some course of action appropriate to and guided by the situation of the other. For these reasons compassion relates primarily and in important ways to notions of beneficence, altruism, solidarity and care. Yet, at various times in the preceding chapters, notions of the self have been raised. It was argued in Chap. 2, for example, that a condition of compassion is the need to share similar possibilities with those whose suffering we come into contact with.
This article examines Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme (2010) through its references to the fiction of William Faulkner. This article contends that Film Socialisme's distinctive method of allusion serves a poetic function, beckoning our attention to how language, representations, and ideas recirculate, and what this means to us-or should mean to us-in a world pervaded by digital technology and intellectual property regimes. Godard's references to the fiction of William Faulkner serve as a case study, not only because they offer a rich illustration of how Godard reworks his source material, but also because the filmmaker has consistently gestured to the work of Faulkner throughout his career, from his first feature-length film to his most recent. This article finds that the film's circuitous and prolific method of allusion functions both as a means to critique commonly held notions of authorship, and to point out the absurdity of copyright laws, or as they are known in France, droits d'auteur. Further, Film Socialisme's use of Light in August in points to an epistemic anxiety regarding the limits of language and narrative to faithfully represent lived experience, and in turn, the world. Copyright © 2014. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
This book's chapters present a series of lectures which John Plamenatz wrote but was unable to deliver in Cambridge in 1975. The chapters cover the political thought of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau, in each case combining textual analysis and argument and using the texts as a springboard for discussion of issues that remain central to the way in which we think of politics, especially concerning the relationship between morality and politics, the character of natural law, the nature of sovereignty, the place of religion in the state, and the links between the psychological, the social, and the political. These discussions extend and revise Plamenatz's work in his Man and Society and offer a set of challenging readings of three of the major figures in the canon of political thought. An introduction sets the lectures in context and linking them to more recent scholarship. © the estate of John Plamenatz 2012; Introduction and editorial material
In the First Discourse, Rousseau complains that modern morals encourage us to think of ourselves in an impersonal and hygienic manner, and to present ourselves in public space as dimensionless members of society. Submission to modern morals encourages conformism, Rousseau argues, and conformism precludes us from having selves of the sort upon which moral freedom depends. In this paper, I argue that Rousseau’s vision of the redemptive promise of amour-propre should be understood in light of his concern to reverse the existential catastrophe of conformism and to precipitate a social climate more hospitable to self-creation. This concern informs the moral purpose of Rousseau’s austerely republican societies, and it determines the role of amour-propre in animating the best citizens. Recent interpretive trends give too little scope to the indicated concern. In consequence, they obscure one of the richest dimensions of Rousseau’s social theory.
Among his various interventions into the debate between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's most direct and forceful statements expressed a preference for patriotism. As a result, there has long been a sense among his interpreters that Rousseau opposed cosmopolitanism. This interpretation, I argue in this article, is too narrow to accommodate the breadth of Rousseau's writings on patriotism and cosmopolitanism. From the Discourses, to Emile, to the Reveries, Rousseau's reflections on patriotism and cosmopolitanism were ambivalent. Rousseau defended patriotism not on its own merits but on the basis of its relative superiority to abstract cosmopolitanism, which Rousseau dismissed as powerless to motivate moral action. This leaves open the possibility of another kind of cosmopolitanism – an authentic, heartfelt cosmopolitanism – which, if it could be realized, would be preferable even to patriotism. In the Reveries, I argue, Rousseau discovered just such a heartfelt cosmopolitanism, one that points toward an inclusive model of civic affect.
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