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  • Essay / The philosophical views of Rousseau and Plato on the passions

    There is a debate between Rousseau, Plato and the philosophers of the Encyclopedia on the experience of the passions. While Plato and the philosophers choose to debate philosophically about the reasons for love and sexuality, Rousseau, who insists that "the imagination wreaks so much havoc", detaches philosophy from the passions and maintains that it are independent ideas that do not need to be interconnected. We could approach this dispute from two angles; one being that love is a difficult concept whose reasons require high levels of investigation to achieve understanding, or that passions are simple and do not require in-depth exploration. These two opposing camps not only fight for and against the segregation of thought and reason, they also disagree over the very definition of love. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay In Rousseau’s “The Fundamental Political Writings,” he states that “the more violent the passions, the more laws are necessary to contain them." Noting that the passions are "violent" already gives them a negative connotation, which is only reinforced by Rousseau's insistence that "even if [the laws] were capable of repressing [the passions] , the least we could expect from them would be that they would put an end to an evil which would not exist without them” (Rousseau, p. 56) It seems that Rousseau fears going further into this. idea of ​​love; that which is supposed to cause the existence of evil by being active So, according to him, what exactly is “repressed” love, and why should love be withheld? Rousseau writes about love as if it were a kind of animal that should not be allowed to run wild; perhaps he sees it as an unnatural distraction, reserved for almost wild beings. Besides the fact that Rousseau seems to believe that the passions must be separated from the activities of thought or internal investigation, it seems that he also views the exaggeration of love as an interference with the natural order of things. Rousseau gives the example of the Caribbean, an ancient people who "of all existing peoples, are the people who have strayed the least from the state of nature... the least subject to jealousy, even if they lived in a warm climate which always seems to occasion greater activity in these passions. (Rousseau, p. 56) Therefore, from this statement, it is possible to sense that Rousseau views the emotion of jealousy as a departure from the “state of nature”. The Caribs act righteously, in Rousseau's view, because of their distance from temptation, that is, from love, etc. (especially considering the climatic conditions). From this evidence, we can say that Rousseau views jealousy as an abstract idea (while love should not be) and as a reaction to submission to passions. Furthermore, stating that although seduction was present among the Caribs and they were able to repress their "vulgar" emotions, man also has the ability to resist desire. Rousseau seems to function in a different way than he admits. It seems that all of his justifications for why love is an unnecessary evil and should not be left to the imagination actually defeat their original purpose. Philosophy is the attribution of a set of beliefs to ideas; it is in a way a way of thinking and an attitude that one possesses towards life. It seems that Rousseau is trying to separate passions from philosophy, but instead ends up connecting the two by proposing ideas. Another possible idea involving Rousseau is ?.