- -
In a previous post
I mentioned Christians that I suppose
want to engage
in a conversion
of some 'Noble Savages'
to see their version
of 'reality'.
Reality
is men may have been
corrupted by Civilization
and that includes Religion
in good measure
for sure.
Religion
is one of the greatest corruptors
of man
since in Religion
one can
find excessive certainty
that's quite unjustified certainly.
Science is less certain
than Religion and perhaps is less certainly
corrupting.
The corruption
of Religion
need no longer be mentioned
as I have mentioned
so many examples before
such that I may indeed bore.
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258 ... y_good.htmRousseau moved to Paris in his 30s to become a musician. But there he hung out with many of the key Enlightenment era philosophers (18 years younger than Voltaire, they died in the same year, 1778) and one day, at age 37, while walking to the Bastille to see his imprisoned friend Diderot, he saw an ad for an essay contest, hosted by the Academy of Dijon, asking a simple question: has science made us better or worse? As he tells it, he fell asleep in the park, had a vision, awoke in tears, and started to write his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. He won the contest, instantly rose to fame, and forever changed the way humans see what it means to be human. His basic thesis: man is naturally good, and anything that is not natural has corrupted us from this natural state.
Like Locke's tabula rasa, all Romantic philosophy and sensibility stems from this single, radical idea.
This idea is in turn rooted in the fact that we feel before we think -- that emotion is natural and thinking a product of social conditioning -- suffering is caused by our struggle to reconcile our "true" emotional selves with social expectations.