Confessions (Abridged Color Illustration Edition)

Author: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: A human defendant about his own life and inner thoughts a fearless statement "Without him, French literature would have taken a different direction." He is Rousseau. His Confessions is as classic as Augustine of Hippo's Confessions. Rousseau's Confessions reveals the entire inner truth of a person's life, a new and absolutely true spiritual autobiography. As France's bravest commoner thinker, he was passionate and extremely sensitive, unafraid of great joys and sorrows, lacking self-control. He was wise but lived a mediocre life, proud but humble, honest but also concealing. In his autobiography, Rousseau confessed the incident of stealing a ribbon in his youth, which made him feel a lifelong heavy sense of guilt; abandoning his children in adulthood without fulfilling his fatherly duties; being indifferent to the former benefactor, Madame de Waren, who was in poverty and illness in his old age; and developing an untimely love for Madame D'Udeotte. In Rousseau's view, his candidness and suffering were themselves atonement, washing away sins, and he could look at the person who had turned back with a clear conscience. Due to Rousseau's "self-revelation of privacy," some later philosophers, including Russell, believed that Rousseau was not a philosopher at all. But Rousseau touched upon the essence of philosophy—he first used himself as an anatomical specimen to conduct an in-depth exploration of human nature. Rousseau inspires us to "understand how to enjoy one's existence openly and honestly, which is absolute, even sacred perfection."