Ouder worden met Rousseau

Ageing with Rousseau

This contribution considers ageing from the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and it chooses as its starting point Émile ou de l’éducation and appeals to Rousseau’s last text Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire. For Rousseau, ageing is not an afterthought in human life, but the starting point par excellence for understanding the human subject. Rousseau’s strict division between nature and culture, with the latter always seen as corrupting the former, gives reason to consider ageing and old age. Often, we see only negative aspects of ageing and regard death as a tragic detriment to a human life, destined only to grow and flourish. In Rousseau’s thinking, old age and deterioration are perfectly natural and prepare us for death. That, then, is the task of philosophy: to learn to die. Old age is faithful to what nature gives us and therefore, it is good. However, we as cultural beings have the greatest difficulty in recognizing this.