I am putting out a series of short ideas. It’s Tuesday, but it’s already been a long week.
To the point: it seems difficult to me to overestimate the importance of Rousseau’s sexual masochism. He sought, and found, older women to be his dominatrixes, to tell him what to do, to punish him for wrongs, real and imaginary.
What a short leap it is from the desire to be sexually and psychologically dominated to wanting to bring into existence a rationale for the eradication of personal agency and autonomy, supposedly under the direction of a “General Will”, but of course in reality under the domination of those who arrogated that silly abstraction into concrete positions of power for themselves, as for example Robespierre, Lenin, and Ho Chi Minh did.
When you are dealing with emotionally ill philosophers, you can I think in general dispense with their philosophies without much effort at working through them: they are wrong in their foundations, and as such, wrong in their conclusions, absolutely without regard to the brilliance of exposition and reasoning that might take place in the middle.