"How, in speaking of men whom he calls null, brutish, stupid, imbecile, can he exalt with enthusiasm their antique simplicity, their original goodness, their primitive innocence?"
"Has anyone ever said of an orang-outang that it was naturally good and happy wise and simple? or spoken of its antique simplicity, primitive innocence, and original goodness?"
"No, Jean-Jacques, I shall not treat you as a bad man for having dared to maintain that man is born good. Everyone knows that man comes from his creator good, happy, wise, and perfect; no one disputes this truth. What you are blamed for is your making man come from his creator in a state of stupidity, and yet maintain that in this state men are good, happy, wise, and simple. What you are blamed for is making their goodness depend on their imbecility, their happiness on their stupidity. What you are blamed for is your having been guilty in all your writings of an enormous abuse of language, and having offered us, as the true road to happiness, the ignorance, imbecility, and stupidity that you have not blushed to attribute to our first parents."
Le Gros, Examen des ouvrages de J.-J. Rousseau et de Court de Gobelin (Geneve, 1786), pp 62 -66.
The judgment of history went with Rousseau, baby...not Le Gros.
Now Rousseau's orang-outangs, known now as liberal Americans, are tearing down any monuments that remind them, foggily, as through a glass darkly, of their dim stupid imbecilic and troubled past, while reading learned journals, in places like Boston, a byword for confusion, regarding whether chimps should have human rights.
The judgment of history went with Rousseau, baby...not Le Gros.
Now Rousseau's orang-outangs, known now as liberal Americans, are tearing down any monuments that remind them, foggily, as through a glass darkly, of their dim stupid imbecilic and troubled past, while reading learned journals, in places like Boston, a byword for confusion, regarding whether chimps should have human rights.
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