Rousseau’s Second Discourse
ACADEMIC PAPER
In this paper, I attempt to give a comprehensive exposition of Rousseau’s conception of human nature, as to be found in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and argue that, though compelling, it is an ultimately one-sided psychological account of our species.
Introduction
It is a matter of little dispute that Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men is an attempt to locate the origin of man’s[1] vices in the emergence of civil society. Roughly summarised, the Rousseauian narrative goes as follows: in the state of nature, man was originally good. He was unburdened by maddening passions and animated, above all, by benevolent impulses. Since he lived in social structures – if so they can be called – that were free of toxic hierarchical divisions, his relations with his brethren were largely harmonious and characterised by equality. Over time, a confluence of factors – many of them prompted by environmental urgencies and the basic imperative of human subsistence – conspired so that this blissful state of nature would come to an end. Man began to act in bizarre and despicable ways, adopting behaviours toward his fellow human that ran utterly contrary to his true nature. He suddenly claimed, as his own, objects of nature – terrain, livestock, minerals and vegetables – that had previously belonged to no one in particular and therefore to everyone. He began to be overrun by passions that, in the state of nature, had either been dormant or absent altogether. Worst of all, he was seized a nefarious impulse, one that had hitherto never occurred to him but had now insinuated its way irresistibly into his way of functioning: to exploit others to his own economic advantage. Natural liberty had thus “irretrievably destroyed”[2], and a new era in human history was ushered in, an era of brutality, inequality, injustice, corruption and vice. This was the dawn of the era of civil society.
The second Discourse is hence a history of man’s descent into moral decrepitude – a ‘genealogy of vice’, in the words of Joshua Cohen[3]. And this descent takes a specific shape: man’s slow and inexorable wedging into a stratified social structure. But it is, at the same time, an evident attempt to demonstrate man’s original goodness. If, as a precondition to his fall from grace, man ‘required’ the materialisation of a specific set of corrupting circumstances, it must mean that, in the absence of said circumstances, man’s state is inherently graceful. His nature in the state of nature is one marked primarily by an inborn ability to identify with another’s plight, and an equally natural aversion to their suffering. This trait, which we’re nowadays more likely to call ‘empathy’, Rousseau refers to with the term ‘pity’.[4] As we shall see, in the Rousseauian conception of man’s natural psychology, pity plays a central role. It governs our original nature in the all-encompassing way self-preservation does for Hobbes. The psychological picture that emerges from Rousseau’s depiction of man’s original nature is thus one highly idealised, you might even say romanticised: one in which his darker innate impulses are either minimised or discarded altogether. It is my intention, in this paper, to explore Rousseau’s conception of man’s original psychology as it is depicted primarily in Part I of the second Discourse, and then to provide a brief critique of it.
Rousseau’s State of Nature
Rousseau’s state of nature can, with little exaggeration, be described as a garden of Eden, an idyllic paradise in which the relations among men are governed by harmony, freedom and, above all, equality. In the absence of corrupting passions that would only emerge later with the complexification of social relations, man had little need for a state, or for the laws it externally imposes. Man’s primary psychological impulse, here, is ‘pity’, which we shall explore more later. It is most natural of all virtues, preceding all others, which are imparted and acquired through socialisation. These latter can be seen as the artificial relatives of pity, those virtues that need to be imposed institutionally as man becomes de-naturalised, and his socially-induced passions begin to override his natural goodness. In the state of nature, man has no use for these artificial virtues; he has pity. And here, we see one of Rousseau’s main points of contention with Hobbes, who would have us too desperately dependent on these socialised virtues:
Above all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that because man has no idea of goodness he is naturally evil; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue; that he always refuses to perform services for his fellow men he does not believe he owes them.[5]
Man possesses, in other words, his own internal moral compass, one governed primarily by pity, and need not to be able to articulate it with his rational faculties in order to live by it. In fact, far from finetuning his conscience, reason is more likely to corrupt it. Reason is the very thing that, for Rousseau, distinguishes social man from natural man – but not in the flattering way Descartes would have propounded. Rousseau sees reason as something of an evil – or, at least as something that has the very real potential to be. It is that insidious mental faculty that enables us to justify a wrong, even when our basic nature is screaming out for us to denounce it:
…reason is what engenders egocentrism…what turns man upon himself…separates him from all that troubles him and afflicts him. Philosophy is what isolates him and what moves him, at the sight of a suffering man, “Perish if you will; I am safe and sound”[6]
Where Hobbes would assert that, to find the basest forms of selfishness among men, one need look no further than the state of nature, here Rousseau is, arguing the very opposite. In our natural state, we are full of compassion and empathy. Is it philosophy, or the science of attaining knowledge through reason, that leads us astray. Our reason allows us to suspend our natural pity by dint of its logical tricks and misleading rationalisations; it enables us to argue our way out of doing the right thing, and even recognising it where it is manifest.
If the state nature is a garden of Eden, the state of civil society, then, represents the fall. Where the state of nature is characterised by equality, peace, liberty and the nature virtue of ‘pity’, civil society is, in all these aspects, its complete inversion: a state of disparity, injustice and servitude, one in which man’s pity is overridden by egocentrism, vanity, shame and envy[7]. In the state of nature, a certain amount of amour-de-soi had been present, to be sure, but it had been confined “to basic needs”[8]. As long as those needs were met, man was free to exercise his pity freely. Amour-de-soi would only morph into its more evil cousin, amour propre with the advent of civil society, as we shall see later. As communities of humans coalesced, in our prehistory, differing individual levels in knowledge and intelligence that had, in the egalitarian state of nature, been irrelevant, were now exacerbated by discrepancies in education and lifestyle[9]. Natural differences in beauty and talent that had thitherto fallen under the radar, were now being paraded for all to see, instilling vanity in those who possessed them to a higher degree, and shame and envy in those who possessed them to a lower[10].
Here, too, we see an inversion of the Hobbesian vision. Where for Hobbes, the state was necessary and good, a provider of the conditions of happiness and a softener of inequalities, for Rousseau, as we have seen, it is the exact opposite. Hobbesian civil society is one governed by what he rather ironically calls ‘laws of nature’: human principles which are immutable and eternal[11], and yet at the same time reliant on the state to be enforced. For Rousseau, these are precisely the artificial virtues we have spoken of; they are unnatural and superfluous, having emerged only at that point in our history at which nascent social passions made them necessary. Society doesn’t ‘discover’ them, as if they were already there, etched in the human psychological genome, waiting impatiently to come to emerge but reliant on the right social apparatus to be able to do so. Civil society, and more precisely its depredations, its corruptions, compelled them into existence, created the putrid conditions that necessitated their invention and implementation.
Rousseau’s conception of original human nature
In his Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality, Frederick Neuhouser asserts that Rousseau’s intention, in the Second Discourse, is not to provide a factual account of the prehistory of our species, but rather a hypothetical template we can use as a guide to understand “the truth about the basic elements of human nature”[12]. This is, to my mind, undeniably true. Rousseau himself admits that his state of nature “probably never existed” and “probably never will exist”[13], and also elsewhere disclaims that his methods for arriving at its conception are necessarily speculative[14]. Rousseau may not be interested in the real state of affairs of our ancestors, but this should not deter us from taking his observations about man’s original nature literally. To the contrary, if Rousseau is not doing history, he is, without a doubt doing psychology. His conjuring up of a hypothetical state of nature, in fact, is for no other purpose than to allow us to imagine what we would be like “in a world completely untouched by the artificial, a world in which nature, including our own…nature, were completely unmodified by the effects of human agency.”[15] Rousseau’s aim is to capture man as he was originally constituted, “as nature formed him”[16]. Rousseau’s method may be speculative, but his purpose and his observations are concrete.
As we have seen, Rousseau’s bold central thesis, in the Second Discourse, is that man is originally benevolent, and that civil society is entirely responsible for corrupting him. Though at first it may, admittedly, seem an over-simplification to word it thus, one would do well to consider that Rousseau himself stated his views using very similar language: “…with what simplicity I would have demonstrated that man is naturally good, and it is from these institutions alone that he has become wicked”[17]. In Rousseau’s hypothetical state of nature, which we may now define as a thought experiment designed to demonstrate basic truths of humanity’s deep nature, man is completely unencumbered by pride, envy, ego and all other toxic psychological impulses. His actions are largely, one might even say wholly guided by pity. All this we have already covered cursorily. It is now my intention to explore this, and other aspects of Rousseau’s conception of man’s original psychology.
Pity, for Rousseau, is the first of all virtues. In essence, this means two things: first, that it precedes all others chronologically, and secondly, that it is inborn in us in a way than no other moral sentiment is. It perhaps also suggests a third: that it is ‘universal’, or present in all humans, a view Rousseau comes very close to explicitly spelling out[18]. Its presence in the state of nature is undeniable and ubiquitous, so much so that it singlehandedly determines all relations among its inhabitants. It is that virtue by dint of which man can be deemed fundamentally good. It is so deeply entrenched, that it requires no inculcation or enforcement in order to be felt and lived by; in fact, socialised modes of ethical relating quite often serve to dim its efficacy rather than strengthen it. It is present in man long before reason, or even the power of reflection[19]. In the state of nature, it is pity itself that “takes the place of laws, mores and virtues”[20], since, animated as he is by pity, pre-civilised man has no need for their proscriptive force in order to live harmoniously. The lure of its call is irresistible, so much so that “no one is tempted to disobey its sweet voice”[21].
Throughout the second Discourse, Rousseau provides various descriptions of ‘pity’. The most forceful of these is, perhaps, “an innate repugnance to seeing [one’s] fellow human suffer”[22]. Later, he also defines it as a desire that one’s fellow human “not suffer anything but…that he be happy”[23]. To the modern reader, pity may be ‘translated’ as a combination of empathy and compassion, since it implies both the ability to commiserate with another’s plight and to identify sympathetically with their suffering. Pity, for Rousseau, takes on a multitude of different forms, and it can be said, without hyperbole, to be the source that generates most of if not all of man’s nobler qualities. Friendship and benevolence are described by Rousseau as the “products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object”. Generosity, mercy and humanity are likewise but some of its varied manifestations, those having, as their respective objects, “the weak, the guilty and the human species in general”[24].
Now that we’ve adequately defined pity, we shall now turn our attention to its antithesis, that other crucial principle of Rousseauian psychology, amour-de-soi[25]. One could be forgiven, having come thus far, for suspecting Rousseau of one-sidedness (this is, in fact, the crux of my own critique, as we shall see later); man naturally possesses empathy and compassion, this is demonstrable enough. But surely he does not solely possess this. What of Hobbes’ drive to self-preservation, which must characterise our ‘original nature’ to a least an equal degree as its benevolent counterpart, if not to a greater? Rousseau’s reproach to Hobbes, in fact, is that he does not give pity its due[26]. Sadly, having identified this evident error, Rousseau goes on to commit one of an exactly contrary nature; he fails to adequately factor in man’s innate egotism. To be sure, Rousseau is not so naïve as to assert that, in the state of nature, the impulse to self-preservation is absent altogether, but the reasoning he uses to explain its presence while at the same time minimise its significance is the work of a man intent on bending facts to suit his preconceived vision of reality while, at the same time, understanding he can’t deny them altogether.
Amour-de-soi, for Rousseau, is that normal amount of self-love every healthy person possesses. It is manifested chiefly in the desire to meet one’s own basic needs, as well as the inborn instinct to protect one’s own life from imminent danger. Amour-de-soi gives rise to only rudimentary desires, those “for food and drink, for shelter from inclement weather, intermittently for sex”[27]. Roughly speaking, amour-de-soi is Rousseau’s answer to Hobbes’ instinct for self-preservation, with the vital difference that it is far milder and less destructive. Where for Hobbes, self-interest overrides all other psychological impulses so that, in the state of nature, all are living in a perennial war of “every man against every man”[28], the impact of amour-de-soi, for Rousseau, is significantly less far-reaching. Since original man lives in a world as yet unburdened by the rigours of civil society, his amour-de-soi has no reason to extend beyond its limited sphere of influence, or better, it finds no trigger, in its social environment, for its more pathological manifestations. And what’s more, pity is always there, operating on some level, so that, in a given instance where man’s egotism may potentially stir, pity is quick to smother it.
All this changes with the advent of civil society. Here, Rousseau’s response to the problem of man’s undeniable historical vices is a rather peculiar one. While we are still in the state of nature, he argues, amour-de-soi remains sedate, manageable and undamaging. Yet as conditions change, as we claim ownership over land and other resources, a desire to dominate and exploit others suddenly manifests itself in our collective psyche as a near-irresistible impulse, or at the very least as the most evident strategy to respond to evolving socio-environmental circumstances. Exploitation, servitude, disharmony, inequality and practically every other conceivable civil depredation follow on as a consequence. The transition from amour-de-soi to this pathological counterpart, which Rousseau names amour propre, can be traced more or less along these lines. Man, who, in the absence of corrupting social factors, is all good, has now been brought to moral ruination on account of the very same. What was once a perfectly acceptable and non-intrusive from of self-love, limited to the meeting of one’s basic survival needs, has now morphed, beyond recognition, to an all-encompassing, toxic egotism that will stop at nothing to satisfy its depraved ambitions.
The key distinction between the two forms of self-love, the healthy and the toxic, is their positioning of the individual in relation to others. Where amour-de-soi knows no other object than the self, its desires and needs, amour propre is a “sentiment that is relative”[29]. Amour-de-soi is a “natural sentiment that moves every animal”[30], whereas amour propre is “artificial and born in society…[it] moves the individual to value himself more than anyone else”[31]. Amour propre evaluates the self comparatively, positing it as either inferior or superior, more or less wealthy, fortunate, educated, intelligent and attractive than one’s fellow human. It is, for this reason, the cause of most of our amoral impulses, inspiring in men “all the evils they cause one another”[32]. Pride, for instance, is none other than one’s self-evaluation as superior in relation to another, and shame, contrarily, one’s self-evaluation as inferior. Envy is the covetous desire for that which is possessed by others and not by oneself, and can result from no other thought process than from a comparative evaluation of one’s circumstances in relation to another’s. Fear and anger are, respectively, the concern and resentment felt when one perceives another’s power as greater than one’s own. Contempt and arrogance, on the other hand, are their contrary passions: the superiority one feels as a result of perceiving another’s power as less than one’s own[33].
In the transition from amour-de-soi to amour propre, a vital role is played by a third principle of Rousseauian psychology: man’s perfectibility. If man’s original nature is characterised primarily by pity, an impulse so irresistible that “no one is tempted to disobey its sweet voice”, then how can one possibly account for such a quick descent into chaos, into egotism? The answer, for Rousseau, is a trait that sets humans apart from all other creatures. Where an animal, “at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life”[34], humans possess a “faculty of self-perfection, …which, with the aid of circumstances, successively develops all the others”[35]. Humans adapt to changes in our environment by modulating our nature accordingly, here accentuating an aspect of our original nature, there suppressing another. Faculties we possess naturally are enhanced to deal with shifting conditions, so that we operate differently in distinct environments. It’s not that our natures change, they expand. We remain, in essence, the same; we retain our original goodness. We acquire amour propre as an added layer, so that who we end up being is, not artificial exactly, but ‘expanded’. This, at least, is Neuhouser’s reading of Rousseau,[36] his attempt to explain how Rousseau might justifiably see man as, at once, essentially good and infinitely maleable.
Perfectibility is central to Rousseau’s conception, not only of human psychology, but of history. It is that faculty which enables us to move, as a species, through time in one of a number of possible ways, building cumulatively and linearly on our collective experience. As David Gautier points out, “without perfectibility there would be no moral history of humankind for Rousseau to recount”[37]. I would add to this that there would, in fact, be no history to speak of tout court, neither moral, nor political, nor social, nor cultural. Here, we would do well to note that perfectibility is not the same as progress. Rousseau’s faculty for self-perfection does not imply an “innate tendency or drive humans have to improve themselves and their condition over time, to come closer and closer to a state of ‘perfection’”[38]. We are not speaking of moral perfectibility here[39], but rather an all-encompassing adaptability, which includes as much a potential for decline as for melioration. It is our cognitive and emotive faculties themselves that are perfectible, meaning that their scope and influence, as well as the kind and frequency of the their real-time manifestations are “not limited to their original context”[40], but shift in response to changing circumstances. This adaptability applies to our passions and flaws as much as to our virtues. This means that, given the right set of circumstances, man might just as easily descend into corruption as rise out of it to enlightenment. For Rousseau, in fact, perfectibility is the very reason why “man alone [is] subject to becoming an imbecile”[41], why, in a given stretch of time, he may end up in a worse place morally than where he started.
Another way of seeing perfectibility is as Joshua Cohen describes it: cognitive flexibility. Here, the various facets of human psychology we’re examining are presented under both an abstract and a determinate aspect. On the one hand, we have human sentiments as they exist in the abstract, that is, independently of the specific conditions of external reality, as a set of unactualized possibilities. On the other, we have those same potentialities rendered concrete, given a “determinate expression…as a result of social circumstances[42]”. So, while pity, for instance, or amour-de-soi, are a part of our “natural endowment”[43], as are a range of other cognitive powers[44], “the social-institutional environment accounts for the determinate expressions of the intrinsic features of our endowment”, so that, though in one set of circumstances (the state of nature, for instance), they will find one immediate expression, in another (civil society), they may be expressed quite differently. So, though it may at first appear that human nature is a bundle of contradictions, it is in reality perfectly coherent. There is an “underlying structure that helps to explain the variety of human motivations”[45], and this underlying structure is one of original goodness. It is a conception of human psychology not too dissimilar to Noam Chomsky’s idea of universal grammar or Steven Pinker’s notion of the language instinct. Both these conceptions see language as, first and foremost, as a universal abstract potentiality that can find determinate expression in as many linguistic variants as there are in the world.
Critique of Rousseau’s conception of original human nature
My main critique of Rousseau’s conception of man’s original psychology is bound to be neither particularly original nor insightful, but, given how forcefully it impressed itself upon me as I was reading the second Discourse, I felt obliged to dedicate the final section of my paper to an adequate airing of it. Hints at it have already been made, but I shall now state it directly: despite what Rousseau will have us believe, original man can be argued to be all good no more sincerely than he can be argued to be all bad. Where Hobbes will rightly be reprimanded for forgetting our pity, Rousseau may be similarly rebuked for underplaying our natural egotism, self-centredness, short-sightedness, desperate fear of death and penchant for ignorance. The seeds of our evil are just as present in our original nature as are those of our goodness. Man is neither all good nor all bad, but somewhere between these two extremes. If we were to go back to the state of nature – hypothetical or actual – this is the reality we would find. In attempting to correct Hobbes’ wrong, Rousseau has, in effect, over-corrected it, painting an unrealistically optimistic picture of humanity that borders on the fanciful and naïve. That Rousseau is able to put to one side the evident truth of our natures is testament much more to the fierceness of his commitment to a preconceived ideal than to the strength of the available evidence in support of it. That he is able to put forth his arguments so persuasively is likewise a far greater indication of his talent as a writer than of the intrinsic merit of the thesis they are designed to defend.
I believe Rousseau’s central problem is the impossibility of his starting point, which Starobinski has worded thus: ‘‘How does one reconcile the assertion that ’man is naturally good’ with the assertion that ’everything degenerates at the hands of man?”[46] In other words, how can man be, at once, fundamentally benevolent and yet readily and infinitely susceptible to evil? This is the very deep hole which Rousseau has set himself the brave task of digging his way out of. We have already seen his admirable attempt at an explanation: perfectibility. Man is infinitely flexible in all directions. Given the right – or wrong – set of social conditions, he can, though he may start from a place of original goodness, degenerate into irredeemable moral decadence. But this position seems, to me, less than convincing. How man’s cognitive flexibility could suggest he begins from a place of goodness, is, I believe, no more deducible from the facts than the opposite, that he begins from an original state of evil. With the theory of perfectibility, Rousseau introduces an element of chaos into human history that he then fails to fully incorporate into his conception of original human psychology. Man is not corrupt but corruptible, he argues; it is not our original nature that is chaotic and unstable, but the various parts merely that comprise it. To make such an argument is, to my mind, inherently illogical, for it is akin to stating that the only way man can be argued to be corrupt is if all parts that comprise him are found to be thus at all times; or better even, that we are fundamentally good because our parts, which are subject to chaos, can somehow be divorced from the human whole, which is benign. Surely, if we possess traits that make us prone to moral degeneration, this means we are, in fact, creatures who are prone to moral degeneration, not creatures wholly good, in whom a susceptibility to degeneration resides, almost by accident, as a non-essential part. Those parts of our inner selves that are chaotic, unruly, petty, maniacal and egotistical are, surely, just as essential, and therefore natural to us as those that are noble, reasonable, loving and harmonious, not less so simply because they are inconvenient or disagreeable.
Rousseau’s next argument goes as follows: while egocentrism is present in the state of nature, it is mild and never prevails over pity, which is infinitely stronger. My refutation, here, is similar to my previous one. It is scarcely comprehensible to me how it can be forcefully argued from any other place than sheer conjecture that, in the state of nature, we are filled more with pity than we are with egocentrism. Passions exist in the state of nature, Rousseau argues, but they can be said to be irrelevant because they have not yet been activated by the right social circumstances. Again, I fail to see how this could be more applicable to our passions than to pity. That a passion like pride or amour propre can be said to be absent in the state of nature but at the same time latent in man’s psychology, waiting to be activated by certain social conditions, seems a blatant contradiction, as does the apparently arbitrary assertion that this may apply more to passions than to pity itself, which Rousseau believes requires no such social activation. If our egocentrism needs, in order to achieve its most toxic manifestation, the emergence of specific social conditions, why is it that pity is exempt from the influence of the same? Why is pity there, fully formed in us from the very beginning, where egocentrism is at most semi-present, and begins to grow only over time? If we are entirely perfectible, as Rousseau seems to argue, then why isn’t our perfectibility also extendable to pity? In this conception, pity, just as amour-de-soi, would be present only in mild form in the state of nature, where it’s not rendered critical by the prevailing social structures, and achieve its apotheosis only later in our social evolution, where it is. Pity does not seem, to me, any less social a sentiment than amour propre. On the contrary, it would appear every bit as responsive to evolving social circumstances as Rousseau would insist the passions are, and just as reliant on these for its completest expression. According to Cohen, Rousseau’s idea of pity is, in fact, perfectible after all: “Pity is also not a determinate endowment, but changes according to circumstances”[47]. And he would be entirely right, for it could otherwise hardly be as susceptible to social deterioration as Rousseau suggests. And this alone should prove sufficient to demonstrate my point: pity can no more be essential to our original nature, if it is perfectible, amenable to change, than the equally perfectible egocentrism. As we have seen, Rousseau describes the call of pity as so irresistible that “no one is tempted to disobey its sweet voice”, and yet this allegedly irresistible voice is virtually stamped out with the first small change in our social environment. If man is naturally endowed with pity, and this natural endowment is as strong as Rousseau argues, it is hard to see how circumstances alone could change its expression so completely as to bend it beyond its even most reasonably ample definition, so that it becomes the opposite of itself and leads us to directly violate it systematically and in the most unconscionable ways. It is hard to imagine how we can go from a state of total harmony one historical minute, to a state of war, slavery, disharmony and exploitation the next, and how all this could come about only as a direct result of empathy’s distortion or even suspension, if the propensity for egotism did not exist in our natures alongside empathy and lie in direct competition to it, so that, depending on circumstances, empathy would prevail egotism or vice versa.
The state of nature is found within
As we have seen, Rousseau’s state of nature is a hypothetical construct and shouldn’t be taken as a literal historical representation. All the same, the hypothetical nature of Rousseau’s position should not be used as evidence that he didn’t intend it as reflecting some fundamental truth about our original psychology. Had this not been the case, he would very likely not have used it as the foundation for his argumentation. Rousseau’s historical observations are not meant to be taken literally, but his psychological ones are. Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men is one of several noted attempts to define our original psychology by conjuring up a hypothetical state of nature. Since we cannot, for the moment at least, travel back in time, all such essays are bound to be conjectural and, therefore, fruitless. A substitution for this speculative exercise is to attempt to intuit our original nature by delving inside ourselves presently. We can begin to understand our pre-civilisational counterparts by identifying aspects of our contemporary selves that can be assumed, to all intents and purposes, to be static and therefore unchanged across all eras and social conditions. In following this method, we no longer need go back in time to discover man’s original nature; we can find it reflected and refracted through individual and collective temperaments. Speak of war, plague, slavery, famine on the one hand, but also on art, science, education, prosperity and medical advancement on the other, and you will see that the latter are just as much a part of our nature as the former. Our picture of the state of nature should follow from this balanced evaluation of our collective psyche. Both Hobbes and Rousseau attempt, in their work, to trace our inner essence back to an original state that is untainted by society. The former believes in man’s inherent chaos, and therefore assumes a pre-civilisational pandemonium. The latter presupposes an inner equanimity which is reflected in an original state of bliss and harmony. We are partly both of these and yet neither completely. We contain, in us, both poles: chaos and order, love and ego, pity and amour propre. We regularly swing between them, individually and as a collective. Neither is more ‘natural’ than the other; both are equally present in our ‘state of nature’ – real and metaphorical.
Bibliography
Cohen, Joshua. Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals. Oxford. Oxford University Press,
2010
Gautier, David. Rousseau: The Sentiment of Existence. Cambridge. Cambridge University
Press, 2006
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 1998
Neuhouser, Frederick. Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality. Cambridge. Cambridge, 2014
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Rousseau on Philosophy, Morality and Religion. Ed. by Christopher
Kelly. Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth College Press, 2007
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men.
Tr. By Donald A Cres. Indianapolis. Hacket Classics, 1964
[1] Throughout this essay, I will sometimes use the word ‘man’ in the place of the more gender neutral ‘humanity’ (a) because its pithiness allows repetitive use in a way that this latter term does not, and (b) because it is the English word often used in the translation of the Discourse I refer to, and I feel that replicating it will keep the reader closer to Rousseau’s original message.
[2] Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men (Second Discourse), p. 57
[3] Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals, p. 113
[4] Second Discourse, p. 38
[5] Second Discourse, p. 35
[6] Ibid., p. 37
[7] Ibid., p. 49
[8] Gautier, p. 5
[9] P. 41
[10] Second Discourse, p. 49
[11] Leviathan, p. 215
[12] Neuhouser, pp. 33 & 36
[13] Second Discourse, p. 12
[14] Ibid., p. 43: “I admit that, since the events I have to describe could have taken place in several ways, I cannot make a determination among them except on the basis of conjecture”
[15] Neuhouser, p. 32
[16] Ibid., p. 33
[17] Letters to Malesherbes (Rousseau on Philosophy, Morality and Religion), p. 152
[18] Second Discourse, p. 36: “I am referring to pity…a virtue all the more universal and all the more useful to man in that it precedes in him any kind of reflection”
[19] Ibid.
[20] Second Discourse, p. 38
[21] Ibid.
[22] Second Discourse, p. 36
[23] Ibid., 37
[24] Ibid.
[25] Here, I use Rousseau’s original terminology (amour-de-soi and amour propre), rather than the English designations in Donald Cres’ translation (‘love of oneself’ and ‘egocentrism’)
[26] Ibid,. p. 36
[27] Gautier, p. 5
[28] Leviathan, p. 185: “Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power keeping them in awe, they are in that condition which is called warre; and such a warre, as is of every man against every man.”
[29] Second Discourse: Rousseau’s notes to the Discourse, p. 90
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Gautier, p. 10
[34] Second Discourse, p. 25
[35] Ibid.
[36] P. 33: “In Chapter 2 I will contrast this original human nature with another non-normative conception of human nature that can be attributed to Rousseau – consisting essentially of original human nature plus amour propre – which I will call human nature in the expanded sense.”
[37] P. 6
[38] Neuhouser, p. 44
[39]Ibid: “Whatever type of perfection is at issue here, it is manifestly not moral perfection.”
[40] Gautier, p. 8
[41] Second Discourse, p. 25
[42] Cohen, p. 99
[43] Idib., p. 98
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Quoted in Cohen p. 98
[47] P. 104
