Similarities Between Rousseau And The Enlightenment

Rousseau believed pity is a kind of natural disgust when we saw rational beings, especially human ourselves were suffering. Also, he stated that this kind of feeling “obscure yet lively in a savage, developed yet feeble in civilized man.” However, meditating on the past made Rousseau can’t follow his coevals –David Hume and Adam Smith to study pity as an empiricist or utilitarian. So Rousseau took the risk of being abandon by the academic and tried to avoid using the rational analysis on the historical facts but using his great imagination to discuss the origin of the pity among human, expecting an “experiment to understand the real nature of man.” Although he was not the only person who emphasized the importance of the pity in the Enlightenment,

In this society, people set up social contrasts which are not destroy the natural equality, but use morality and the equality from laws to replace the physical inequality. The rules of morality and laws come from the limitation of the self-respect and self-esteem that are derived from the self-love, and this limitation is from the pity. Pity makes people experience the others suffering, and put people’s mind and soul to an equal place, which enforce the greatest equality. Then, the foundation of building an equal society is the general wills. Based on that, all the member in the society will be willing to protect their mutual life, property and freedom. In other words, people in this society began to consider the rights and benefits of other member, and this consensus is also derived from the pity. General wills is the origin of the altruism. Thus, we can say that the definition of the general will from Rousseau is not only the objectified pity, but also the present of the regularization of the pity. However, this kind of law is only a moral laws that are derived from pity but the pity isn’t limited by the laws. Clearly, Rousseau didn’t expect to limit the specific pity on moral standard, but he didn’t realize that chaos will be brought to the society when there isn’t a rational limitation on the pity. Finally, when pity make people focus on others benefit, that will make it become an appeal for justice, that why pity can become a general term of the political morality. However, Rousseau warn that the pity for other is not scarify, otherwise that means people loss the rational mind and become crazy (The Social Contract). Rousseau admitted that justice is not come from the pure imagination as a metaphysical term, it is enlighten by rationality. Pity as the source of all the social virtues, it make people to study the