Dreaming With Rousseau

Set against the backdrop of well-known works by the artist Henri Rousseau, rhyming text reveals a dream of the jungle and its inhabitants.

A child's biography of French artist Henri Rousseau, who spent his life as a toll collector, but created unheralded masterpieces in his spare time.

"Rousseau's series of jungle paintings was and still continues to be the subject of controversy. This book answers many of the questions surrounding Rousseau's importance as an artist and examines his paintings in a wider art-historical context. As a self-taught artist who started painting at the age of 40 and worked in an unorthodox, naive style, Rousseau had to struggle to overcome the derision of his contemporaries. That Rousseau succeeded in silencing his critics, winning wide admiration, including that of Picasso, the Surrealists and Wasily Kandinsky, owes much to the jungle paintings."--Amazon.

The Life of Wisdom in Rousseau's "Reveries of the Solitary Walker" is the first complete exegesis and interpretation of Rousseau's final and culminating work, showing its full philosophic and moral teaching. The Reveries has been celebrated as a work of literature that is an acknowledged acme of French prose writing. Thomas L. Pangle argues that this aesthetic appreciation necessitates an in-depth interpretation of the writing's complex and multileveled intended teaching about the normatively best way of life—and how essential this is for a work that was initially bewildering. Rousseau stands out among modern political philosophers in that he restored, to political philosophy, what Socrates and his students (from Plato and Xenophon through Aristotle and the Stoics and Cicero) had made central—and that the previous modern, Enlightenment philosophers had eclipsed: the study of the life and soul of the exemplary, independent sage, as possessor of "human wisdom." Rousseau made this again the supreme theme and source of norms for political philosophy and for humanity's moral as well as civic existence. In his analysis of The Reveries, Pangle uncovers Rousseau's most profound exploration and articulation of his own life, personality, soul, and thought as "the man of nature enlightened by reason." He describes, in Rousseau's final work, the fullest embodiment of the experiential wisdom from which flows and to which points Rousseau's political and moral philosophy, his theology, and his musical and literary art.

Reproduction of the original: Rousseau and Romanticism by Irving Babbitt

Rousseau is known as the forerunner of the French Revolution. He called for a "return to nature" which included a society demonstrating true equality. Rousseau's main philosophical works, which outline his social and political ideals, include: The New Eloise; Emile, or On Education; and The Social Contract. Rousseau was the first political philosopher who, while exploring the origins of the state, attempted to explain the causes of social inequality and its forms. He believed that the state existed through a social contract with the people. Rousseau's writings rebuke modern society for inequalities, while providing ethical instruction and encouraging the science of compassion. DISCOURSE ON THE ARTS AND SCIENCES DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND BASIS OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN DISCOURSE ON POLITICAL ECONOMY ÉMILE, OR ON EDUCATION THE SOCIAL CONTRACT OR PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL RIGHT CONSTITUTIONAL PROJECT FOR CORSICA CONSIDERATIONS ON THE GOVERNMENT OF POLAND REVERIES OF A SOLITARY WALKER THE CONFESSIONS OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Henri Rousseau was a singular figure in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde, a self-taught painter who turned to art full-time after retiring as a toll collector at the age of forty-nine. Although he never left Paris, Rousseau painted many jungle scenes, drawing on images of the exotic as presented to the urban dweller through popular literature, colonial expositions, and the Paris zoo. The Dream (1910), one of the artist's last works, is a surreal juxtaposition of the exotic and the domestic that typifies his uncanny exactitude. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, curator Ann Temkin's essay guides readers in deciphering this mysterious painting.

Few thinkers have enjoyed so pervasive an influence as Rousseau, who originated dissatisfaction with modernity. By exploring polarities articulated by Rousseau—nature versus society, self versus other, community versus individual, and compassion versus competitiveness—these fourteen original essays show how his thought continues to shape our ways of talking, feeling, thinking, and complaining. The volume begins by taking up a central theme noted by the late Allan Bloom—Rousseau's critique of the bourgeois as the dominant modern human type and as a being fundamentally in contradiction, caught between the sentiments of nature and the demands of society. It then turns to Rousseau's crucial polarity of nature and society and to the later conceptions of history and culture it gave rise to. The third part surveys Rousseau's legacy in both domestic and international politics. Finally, the book examines Rousseau's contributions to the virtues that have become central to the current sensibility: community, sincerity, and compassion. Contributors include Allan Bloom, François Furet, Pierre Hassner, Christopher Kelly, Roger Masters, and Arthur Melzer.