Essay on Rousseaus Critique of Moliere - 647 Words

In Rousseau’s critique of Moliere, he sees Moliere as being a perfect author. Moliere incorporates betrayal and distortion to stir the emotions and gain our interest, as well as sympathy. Rousseau feels that Moliere doesn’t help society, instead, he harms it. The reason is because Moliere is bringing down the value of society by using politics and comedy together. People are starting to see their flaws as being acceptable due to the content they see in Moliere’s work. If the first thing that one learns about Rousseau is that he was a supporter of community, the second is almost always that that he was moralistically opposed to theater as destructive of community morals. The source for this judgment is the Letter to D’Alembert, a text†¦show more content†¦By quot;nothing is requiredquot; Rousseau means that our emotions have not life-consequences. It is, as it were, irresponsible to be an audience member, a bit as if one were on holiday from one’s everyday, common humanity. For Rousseau, this irresponsibility is associated with the experience of an isolation which keeps one from being at home with one’s self, a home which, he is at pains to show, can only be achieved with others. The source of this moral danger -- the danger of irresponsibility -- derives from a second more basic quality of theater. Theater is, inevitably almost, representation. Here Rousseau’s hostility to theater reflects and is reflecting in his hostility to representative sovereignty. Representation (on stage) requires interpretation of its audience, whereas a just political society was to be built from that which was so transparent in time and space that it could not be other that what it was. No matter what its subject theater cannot be common. And it cannot be the everyday -- it is the perfected, immortal, transcendent particular self, precisely that self that wants to overlook the common, more like a god than a human being. Rousseaus â€Å"Letter to dAlembert† reaches two apparently contradictory conclusions: that theater does, and does not affect a societys culture. These divergent results can be explained by Rousseaus argumentative