چکیده:
Throughout all of Rousseau’s works there is tension between reason and conscience. Reason binds men when they think correctly, but divides them when they place it at the service of self-interest. Conversely, the universality of conscience is immediate and transparent: it transmits the truth of the existence of God and of the universal principles that underlie human action, despite the differences of particular legislations. Mankind possesses an innate and intuitive conscience of the fundamental principles by which its conduct must be inspired. Were we to consider human actions only according to the criterion of physical need, of causality, and of movement, vices and virtues would disappear, and terms like morality and honesty would have no meaning. But each one of us perceives from within that this is not the case. We feel that moral good and evil are more real than anything else, without any need whatsoever to prove it. To obey the conscience one has of good and evil without human mediation means to reject the dogmatic formalism of religions, as well as the vanity of philosophical disputes. Every human being, however, is situated in a national community. What should the state’s attitude be vis-à-vis religion? Rousseau indicates two paths. The first consists in establishing a purely civil religion that admits only those dogmas that are truly useful to society. Rousseau highlights the contradiction of a Christian religion that, although it is the religion of peace par excellence, fuels continuing bloody clashes among men due to a dogmatic theology that is totally alien to the essence of the Gospel and extremely hazardous for the life of the state. The second path consists in allowing Christianity to retain its authentic spirit, its freedom from any material constraint, without any obligations other than those of individual conscience. The Christian religion cannot but benefit the state, as long as one does not make it part of the constitution.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Key words: Rousseau, Voltaire, reason versus conscience, moral evil, physical evil, Lisbon earthquake, unforeseeability of God, Job, free will 1.
Rousseau implicitly argues that if God had forced men to follow His decrees, moral perfection would not have been the result of their effort and commitment; they could not have claimed merit for the virtue they would have given proof of, and therefore they would not have been virtuous either.
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, with its earthquakes, fires, and tsunamis in rapid succession, would have signalled the beginning of the modern philosophy of evil, which implies the clear separation between natural disasters and moral evil: the former conceived as being dominated by a blind coincidence that depends neither on God, nor on men, whereas the latter conceived the only evil that humans have the capacity to avoid being characterized by intentionality (Neiman 2002 and Dupuy 2005, cited in Bauman – Dessal 2015, 83).
Anticipating the theories championed in the last part of the Social Contract, Rousseau admits that governments should limit their sphere of influence to civil duties and have no right to prescribe any positive precepts on how each one must serve God. Laws may impose a sort of profession of faith, but, with the exclusion of the principles of morality and natural law, this profession must be purely negative; it must defend society from religions that attack its foundations and threaten the peace of the state.