Discourse on the Sciences and ArtsJean-Jacques Rousseau
About Discourse on the Sciences and Arts
Rousseau's (the First Discourse) answered a prize question set by the Academy of Dijon: whether the restoration of the sciences and arts had purified morals. He wrote the essay in 1749, won the prize in 1750, and with it his first public fame. His answer is no. The revival of letters, he argues, has polished manners while rotting virtue. Arts and sciences spring from vices (astronomy from superstition, eloquence from ambition, geometry from avarice), and they feed luxury, which softens citizens and empties republics of the martial and civic strength that once made Sparta and early Rome formidable.
The Discourse is short and divided into two parts. The first surveys history and finds that peoples grow corrupt as they grow learned and refined. The second turns on the sciences themselves: they breed idle curiosity, inequality of esteem, and a culture of appearance in which one learns to seem rather than to be. The full anthropology of the comes later; its seed is already here. Civilization corrupts a nature that was simpler and stronger. The essay forces a question the Enlightenment preferred not to ask: whether progress in knowledge is progress in goodness. Later debates about culture, technology, and moral decline still answer Rousseau's challenge, whether they accept his verdict or not.