Practice question · True or false
Rousseau’s doctrine that people are naturally good and corrupted by society changes what his confession is trying to establish.
Hints
- If the damage came from outside, what does an account of one’s worst actions become?
- A social diagnosis rather than a plea for grace.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. If the self is fallen, the worst actions call for grace; if it is naturally good and society did the damage, the same actions become evidence in a social diagnosis. The doctrine converts autobiography into argument.
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?
- For Augustine, the inner life is worth describing because it belongs to God; for Rousseau, it is worth…
- Complete the comparison of the two Confessions.