Practice question · Multiple choice
For Augustine, the inner life is worth describing because it belongs to God; for Rousseau, it is worth describing simply because it is his own. What does this shift imply for how autobiographical feeling is treated?
Hints
- Why does Rousseau treat his emotional experiences as meaningful rather than incidental?
- How does moving away from a theological purpose change the status of personal emotion?
Show the answer
B. Feeling becomes valid evidence rather than mere decoration
Why
Treating subjective emotion as inherently significant establishes personal experience as authoritative evidence in its own right, anticipating Romanticism rather than Augustine's framework of divine oversight.
Practise Rousseau’s Confessions: the Self as Its Own Justification
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
More questions on Rousseau’s Confessions: the Self as Its Own Justification
- Rousseau addresses his Confessions to a tribunal of readers rather than to God. What does this change about…
- Rousseau’s inclusion of humiliating episodes settles the question of whether he is sincere.
- Arrange the stages of Rousseau’s confessional argument as the book presents them.
- How many books do Rousseau’s Confessions contain in total?
- Complete the comparison of the two Confessions.
- Rousseau’s doctrine that people are naturally good and corrupted by society changes what his confession is…