vetenskapochupplysning

“From this basic idea it is clear, that women are especially created to delight men.  That also men please women, however, is not directly necessary. His merit lies in his power and strength, man pleases in that he is strong. This is not the law of love, I admit that, but it is the law of nature and that one is older than love itself” Rousseau

In our society of today, based on the idea that men and women are more or less equals, I guess most people find it hard to agree with Rousseau’s point of view when it comes to love. At least I have and in my opinion his way of love is not only boring but also very sad. Not only because women generally were unfairly treated as nothing more than objects for joy and lust. Some of them might have been satisfied with that, and been pleased by the strength their men could provide, but I doubt that they were really happy. Of course, that was all they knew and they probably thought that this was the way it was supposed to be. No matter how it actually was, I feel sorry for them because they weren’t respected for being humans like everyone else. And in the same time, was this really what men in general wanted? Didn’t they need love just as much as men do today?

Even though I strongly disagree with Rousseau I do not find it hard to understand why he thought like this. As a child, he never experienced the tender love of a mother since his mother died when giving birth to him. At the age of only twelve years old he was then virtually abandoned by his father, which I think implies that his father didn’t give him very much of love to talk about either. Rousseau was brought up with the instinct to survive without love and had to find out what else was important in life, and he found that the law of nature was more reliable than the law of love. He learned that in order to survive you don’t need love in the way most people want it today. He was given no love and no affirmation that anybody would care about him. He might never have learnt to love for real. I believe that we are all born with some kind of basic instinct of love, but to be able to actually love we have to work on it, learn how to use it. Maybe Rousseau never had the opportunity to use it.

Only the fact that we’ve gone from a society like Rousseau’s to a society where relationships actually are based on some kind of fondness for each other proves that the law of love actually is stronger than the law of nature. But this could, of course, be further discussed.

And for the record, why should what is the oldest be the better? More than once old knowledge has been proved false, and things in general are seldom developed into the worse. God, or whoever you may believe is responsible for all of this, might have created nature before he created love (if not because of his love for humans, beauty of nature, or something else). But obviously he wasn’t satisfied with nature and therefore he created love. As an addition to his nature he created love because world would not be complete without it.

Even though there are a lot of reasons why Rousseau’s ideas are not the best, they are still up-to-date. I mean even though the gap between men and women in general has decreased, at least in some parts of the world, women still do about 80% of the work at home. And that is just how it is and how it has always been since humans went from living as nomads to settling down. How come that even though these thoughts are ancient, and not really liked, we still live like this today? Do women show love by taking care of their husbands? Then Rousseau maybe has a point anyway? Is that the law of nature and is it impossible to do anything about it?

Victoria Gunnerek