Sam, I'm no expert on Rousseau--and am not sure, for perhaps the first time with your prolific and eloquent essays, what your argument posited here really is. I would say at my age that I don't feel at all "stuck" with some identity, changeable as I am. I was more rebellious when I turned fifty than any other year in my life, perhaps: Quit a high paying corporate job at age 49 for art's sake and no income, some minimal savings--to the alarm of my dear father who saw my high executive position as "success". So what do you make of that? Or am I totally missing your point?
"Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." I'm certainly guilty of a Rousseauian gloss on rural Montana, even though I know that the noble yeoman is a myth. Maybe Rousseau was a more influential Bernie Sanders?
Yet his notion of natural rights is a bit more than adolescent rebellion. I wrote one of my mentors a while back that I'd made peace with my Romantic tendencies. He wrote back, "You have made peace with what is good." I am now 49. So perhaps I'll be a Rousseauian until I die.
Sam, I'm no expert on Rousseau--and am not sure, for perhaps the first time with your prolific and eloquent essays, what your argument posited here really is. I would say at my age that I don't feel at all "stuck" with some identity, changeable as I am. I was more rebellious when I turned fifty than any other year in my life, perhaps: Quit a high paying corporate job at age 49 for art's sake and no income, some minimal savings--to the alarm of my dear father who saw my high executive position as "success". So what do you make of that? Or am I totally missing your point?
"Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." I'm certainly guilty of a Rousseauian gloss on rural Montana, even though I know that the noble yeoman is a myth. Maybe Rousseau was a more influential Bernie Sanders?
Yet his notion of natural rights is a bit more than adolescent rebellion. I wrote one of my mentors a while back that I'd made peace with my Romantic tendencies. He wrote back, "You have made peace with what is good." I am now 49. So perhaps I'll be a Rousseauian until I die.