ABSTRACT
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s understanding of the world is most clearly reflected in the Confessions where a holistic model of the self is put forward in which sameness is in fact always slightly different and difference is never absolute. In the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, otherwise known as the First Discourse, Rousseau offers a sweeping and now infamous condemnation of modern science. Rousseau is critical of those naturalists who are genuinely committed to the development of a wholly “natural” system of classification. For many readers, Rousseau’s Confessions is an attempt to recover and reveal a timeless, natural self that exists independently of history. For other readers, on the contrary, the Confessions demonstrates Rousseau’s understanding of the fundamental historicity of the individual, the notion of human life as an ongoing process of change. Rousseau admired and even championed the taxonomic system and nomenclature of Linnaeus for bringing much needed clarity into the study of plants.
