God is love

"Conscience does make cowards of us all" reproaches Hamlet (Act III, scene 1) in the eponymous play of Shakespeare who hesitates to avenge his father, who hesitates live. It thus appears as a force in us that opposes some of our desires.

Thus Rousseau was able to write in his work, Émile or De l'éducation:

"How often the inner voice tells us that by doing our good at the expense of others we hurt. We believe we follow the impulse of nature, and we resist it: by listening to what it says to our senses, we despise what it says to our hearts. The active being obeys, the passive being commands. Consciousness is the voice of the soul; The passions are the voice of the body. "

The citizen of Geneva means that the moral conscience, which we hear in ourselves, often indicates to us that we choose our interest against others, and that is wrong in the moral sense. We are then the victim of an error, or even of a fault, that which consists in believing that by following our interest we follow nature when we resist it, in other words, nature is rather in the voice of consciousness. But this nature is also in that it says to our senses and yet, if we hear this voice of nature, we despise the voice that speaks to the heart, understood as the source of moral feeling. Rousseau deduces an inversion of order or hierarchy in us since it is the active being that obeys and the passive being that commands. He then deduces that consciousness refers to the soul when the passions relate to the body. It is nature as a consciousness that expresses the soul, which amounts to saying that the soul is nothing but nature in us as the body also.

However, Rousseau himself considers that nature draws us in two senses. What nature to follow? It is, moreover, quite possible to be torn by various passions, so that the opposition between consciousness and passions is perhaps only illusory.

Is the opposition between consciousness and passions fundamental or is it derived? Is it legitimate?

Based on the tragedy of Racine, Andromaque, on Cousine Bette, a novel by Balzac, and on the Essay on the Passions of David Hume, we shall see what is the basis of the opposition between consciousness and passions, Can be regarded as simply apparent before highlighting the role of social life in this opposition.

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