Friday, August 22, 2008

Fénelon

I'm looking at Fénelon again for my first chapter on Rousseau. This is mainly just getting previous work I had done on Rousseau's intellectual context into neater shape, and pitching this in terms of the Fénelonian currents of intellectual discourse in Rousseau's formative and active years. With Rousseau's reading of Fénelon and other neo-Platonic, and Cartesian philosophers in place probably before he read Plato, the intellectual framework of his particular apprehensions of Platonic views becomes considerably more interesting than has been suggested in current scholarship. And because Rousseau read Locke at about the same time as he read these neo-Platonistsand and because his instincts toward these varied doctrines were immediately syncretic, the fusion I suggest between Lockean ideationalism, Rousseau's account of passions, and neo-Platonic sublimated Eros is made quite plausable indeed.



In the meantime, I thought I might include a picture of the pious Archbishop of Cambrai.



(Image taken from Web Gallery of Art [http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/v/vivien/fenelon.html] for editorial purposes only.)


Also on paintings, I was quite struck by Lucas Cranach's 'Close of the Silver Age' when I visited the National Gallery with Ahreum earlier this week.

(Edit: The link is dead. It is actually far better to look at the painting on the National Gallery's website: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/lucas-cranach-the-elder-the-close-of-the-silver-age. They have a programme which allows very precise viewing. Facial details in the painting are expectional. While one misses the texture of the paints and brush strokes, this web viewer may be than seeing the picture at the gallery, particularly because the lighting there tends to produce a good deal of glare on the painting. August 1, 2009)

If I were writing a book on Rousseau's Second Discourse...



Once more into the breach,

Ben






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