by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
Introduction
We have seen Thomas Hobbes construct a coherent account of human nature and society from a materialist metaphysics. According to his view, because all that exists is material, so human beings are purely material and their actions and motivations can be accounted for and predicted according to physical laws. Moreover, the pure materiality of human beings entails that we can only reasonably be selfishly and greedily intent on our own physical survival and pleasure, thus we are bound to be anti-social, violent and domineering. Our condition in the state of nature, therefore, must be one of constant war, and life for all of us is bound to be “solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short.”
This leads Hobbes to deduce a prescription for social order designed to accomplish all that one could wish for given the materialist assumptions from which it is derived. According to this view, a social order that is violent and unequal is inevitable given the material basis of human nature, and it is only if we are willing to accept the absolute rule of a central power, by way of Hobbes’s version of “the social contract” ruled by the absolute power of a king, that we can hope for any measure of material security, comfort and pleasure since the only effective restraints on our violent and domineering natural instincts will be the force and fear that such an absolute power can exert. Though we may be inclined to view the resulting inequality of economic or political conditions as somehow “unfair,” Hobbes would remind us that there is no such thing as natural “goodness” or “justice,” and therefore that our complaint of “unfairness” is essentially meaningless. Things are as they are because of the fundamental laws of physics, and we should be grateful, Hobbes might say, for whatever material comfort we can enjoy and for whatever prolongation of life and creature comforts society affords us, however meager. Hobbes would remind us, of course, that we “voluntarily” accept the conditions of his king-centered “social contract” by which we surrender our natural “right to everything” in exchange for our physical security; but he would also remind us that such a surrender is the most rational decision we can make given the realities of our existence.
Rousseau’s Response to Hobbes
At the outset it is important to note that Rousseau is also widely associated with the idea of the “social contract,” but it is vital to know that Rousseau rejects the king-centered “social contract” of Hobbes because, argues Rousseau, Hobbes’s king-centered version can never be free and voluntary. Rousseau’s social contract theory calls for direct democratic decision-making, though I will not be dealing with it here; however, in what follows it should become clear how Rousseau directly responds to and refutes Hobbes’s views of human nature, humans in the state of nature, human society and human freedom.
Thus, in Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) takes modern economic and political inequality―which he refers to as “moral or political inequality”―as his point of departure; in other words, Rousseau begins his inquiry with the conditions of society as he finds them and with which we all are familiar to consider how they have occurred and to ask whether it all really makes sense. Rousseau does not concern himself with “natural or physical inequality” because the reason for that is simply nature itself; indeed, Rousseau in fact agrees with Hobbes that the inequality among human beings, mental and physical, is negligible compared to the radical difference that exists between all human beings and animals, although, as we shall see, the nature of this difference is, for Rousseau, not simply a matter of degree but of kind: for Rousseau, human beings are different from animals not primarily because, as for Hobbes, we have a greater degree of physical complexity but because humans have a spiritual dimension to our nature, in addition to the merely physical, that is altogether lacking in animals. In other words, as we shall see, Rousseau has a fundamentally different view of metaphysics than Hobbes, and this leads to Rousseau’s conviction, in stark contrast to Hobbes, that humans have genuine free will.
As we have seen, Hobbes essentially insists that modern social inequality is something we are bound to accept as the condition of material security, however violent, unfair and even depraved it may at times appear; in other words, Hobbes effectively urges upon us the notion that such conditions of inequality are “natural” in accordance with what he refers to as the “Laws of Nature” according to which we agree to give up our natural liberty as the inevitable condition of escaping from the state of nature and its “war of all against all” and the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” conditions of life that it entails. In other words, we should be grateful for the king and nobility, the politically connected wealthy and powerful elite, for it is precisely their wealth and power to which we are indebted for our prosperity and security. Rousseau, however, has nothing but scorn for the notion that those in power are in any way deserving or superior. It is needless even to consider whether political inequality is a result of natural superiority, says Rousseau, “for that would amount to asking whether those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and whether strength of body or mind, wisdom or virtue, are always found in the same individuals in proportion to power or wealth. Perhaps this is a good question for slaves to discuss within earshot of their masters, but it is not suitable for reasonable and free men who seek the truth.” In other words, when slaves are around their masters they may naturally pretend inferiority and subservience, for their own protection, but this has nothing to do with reality; thus, suggests Rousseau, there must be some altogether different and obscure reason why masters are masters and slaves are slaves since it cannot have anything to do with nature. Indeed, as Rousseau goes on to preview “the subject of this discourse,” he makes it clear at the beginning that he considers contemporary human society to be in a fundamentally unnatural condition according to which “the strong” serve “the weak” and the people have purchased a condition of “imaginary repose at the price of real felicity.” In other words, Rousseau’s description of modern society is utterly disdainful: it features a patently irrational state of affairs in which the great majority of people (“the strong”) have effectively been duped into sacrificing their natural condition of by and large peaceful freedom (“real felicity”) in favor of subservience to an unworthy few rich and powerful rulers (“the weak”) for what they have been convinced to believe is a meager condition of tenuous security (“an imagined repose”).
Thus Rousseau is essentially accusing thinkers like Hobbes, among others, of formulating a specious defense of the present order of economic and political power, based, as is the philosophy of Hobbes, on a purported description of the original state of nature and the human condition in that state. However, asserts Rousseau, “The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of returning to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it.” They cannot “reach it,” argues Rousseau, because the state of nature is lost to the distant past so that the only examples we have of human beings and their behavior consist of those we take from civilized humans. Thus, argues Rousseau, we must “begin by putting aside all the facts,” because we have no facts or observations to rely on when it comes to the state of nature. Instead, we are left to rely on “hypothetical and conditional reasonings,” which is precisely what philosophers do when it comes to the deepest and most important questions about nature and humanity, and sometimes scientists too, since such reasons are what “our physicists make every day with regard to the formation of the world.” In other words, Rousseau’s arguments will be substantially speculative, but that does not mean that they will be mere “guesswork;” on the contrary, as a philosopher Rousseau will give us reasons for his ideas, which we will then be free to consider for ourselves.
As he concludes the preface to his Discourse, Rousseau writes, “Religion commands us to believe that since God himself drew man out of the state of nature, they are unequal because he wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of man and the beings that surround him, concerning what the human race could have become, if it had been left to itself.” Statements like this made many religious authorities of Rousseau’s time very angry; indeed, here he seems rather slyly to imply that religion itself is responsible for the injustices manifest in modern political and economic inequality. In any event, he claims the right to challenge what he sees as the unnatural and unjust inequalities of our society by considering how humans, without the conditioning of modern society, might live. In other words, Rousseau seeks to open the way to an inquiry concerning the natural conditions of justice and freedom rather than the artificial ones imposed upon us by the powers that stand to gain from them, including those of religion.
Let me sum up, in a nutshell, the essence of Rousseau’s refutation of Hobbes. Hobbes claims that our purely material nature determines us to be greedy and violent, etc., and that thus in the state of nature we would have been at war, which we can only avoid by giving up all our natural liberty to the absolute power of a king: in short, our unequal society, dominated by powerful corporate forces (instead of a king), is caused by nature and we can do nothing about it. Rousseau, however, turns Hobbes on his head to point out that Hobbes’s claims about human greed and violence are a result not of nature but of society—that social, economic and political inequality cause violence and greed. Hobbes can point to no evidence to support the idea that the state of nature was violent since the only evidence we have concerning human behavior is based on humans in society, and we shall see that Rousseau will argue persuasively that it makes much more sense to think of the state of nature—that is, before society—as mostly peaceful. So Hobbes claims that nature causes greed, violence and inequality, whereas Rousseau asserts that Hobbes has it backwards—that inequality causes greed and violence. There will be more on this as we proceed.
Rousseau on Human Nature
We do indeed see many examples of human behavior through history, and all around us today, conforming to Hobbes’s view of human beings as materialistic, greedy, selfish, violent, domineering and anti-social; but Rousseau insists that there is little reason to believe that the examples of the civilized humans we see give us any significant indication of how human beings are by nature and in nature. Indeed, Rousseau argues that there is little reason to believe that human nature is remotely as Hobbes describes it; rather, human nature, and thus human beings in a state of nature, are more reasonably thought of as relatively peaceful, living free and carefree and at one with nature rather than pitted against it and against each other, as we are today. Moreover, Rousseau will argue, it is civilization that has conditioned us to adopt the litany of nasty characteristics that Hobbes ascribes to us as natural.
Thus, according to Rousseau, in nature—that is, prior to civilization—humans were likely to have been strong and independent. Though physically weaker than many animals, clearly humans are also much more crafty than other animals and thus learn to avoid or even master them. Many of the human weaknesses and infirmities that we take for granted today, as intrinsic to the human condition, are in fact, argues Rousseau, the result of civilization and its tendency to soften us and habituate us to indolence and poor food: “In becoming habituated to the ways of society and a slave, he becomes weak, fearful and servile; his soft and effeminate [pardon Rousseau’s implied sexism!] lifestyle completes the enervation of both his strength and his courage.” These are all, says Rousseau, “fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we could have avoided nearly all of them by preserving the simple, regular and solitary lifestyle prescribed to us by nature.” In nature, suggests Rousseau, we were strong and free, but society has made us weak and subservient.
The Spiritual Side of Human Nature
Having reviewed what he sees as the likely physical stature of human beings in nature, Rousseau turns to “a metaphysical and moral point of view.” We see here that Rousseau radically parts ways with Hobbes’s materialism, which of course treats human beings, along with all of reality, as purely physical. For Rousseau, however, though most things of nature, including animals, are bound by physical laws, human beings in addition have a spiritual dimension that gives them the power to be free from strict adherence to natural laws. Thus an animal “is nothing but an ingenious machine,” and the same can be said of the bodily constitution of humans; however, writes Rousseau, “nature alone does everything in the operations of an animal, whereas man contributes, as a free agent, to his own operations. The former chooses or rejects by instinct, the latter by an act of freedom. Hence an animal cannot deviate from the rule that is prescribed to it, even when it would be advantageous to do so, while man deviates from it, often to his own detriment.” Nature alone does everything for the animal, meaning that the animal is bound by natural, physical laws. Humans experience all the same natural impulses as do animals―as described by Hobbes, for example, as desires and aversions and the endeavors that follow them―but we, unlike animals, have a choice either to react by instinct or rather to choose our own course through the activity of freedom: “Nature commands every animal, and beasts obey. Man feels the same impetus, but he knows he is free to go along or to resist.” Hobbes would insist that the laws of physical mechanics must explain everything in the universe, since the universe is entirely material; but Rousseau insists that human beings are not the slaves of pre-determined, mechanical laws, but can act, with free will, in a way that is entirely outside the physical determinations that govern purely material things. Thus for Rousseau, the actions of freedom are “purely spiritual acts, about which the laws of mechanics explain nothing.”
“The Creed of the Savoyard Vicar”
Rousseau sets forth the fullest account of his views on knowledge and reality (his epistemology and metaphysics) in “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard” (“The Creed of the Savoyard Vicar”) from his book Emile; so we shall set aside Rousseau’s Discourse, which we shall return to shortly, to consider them (I resume discussion of the Discourse in the section entitled “Rousseau Responds to Hobbes on the ‘State of Nature.’”). These views are set forth in the voice of a parish priest, who, not unlike Rousseau himself perhaps, has endured serious shame and vilification; but the philosophical views are clearly Rousseau’s own.
He begins by setting forth his epistemological approach, that is, his approach to what will count as “knowledge.” The priest recounts how he began his metaphysical speculations at a low point, when he was “in the state of uncertainty and doubt that Descartes considers essential to the search for truth”; however, he rejects Descartes’s method, suggesting even that “only a lazy mind or the interest of vice can keep us in” such a state: “How can anyone be a systematic and sincere skeptic?” Thus he rejects the rigor of Descartes’s method of radical doubt, first by determining “to limit my inquiries to what concerned me directly,” and then by adopting a rule for knowledge akin to Descartes’s “moral certainty,” as opposed to the “metaphysical certitude” that only the method of radical doubt, according to Descartes, could enable. Thus, says Rousseau, “I resolved to accept as self-evident all propositions that I could not sincerely refuse to believe, to regard as true all those that seemed to follow necessarily from them, and to leave all others in uncertainty.” In short, though Rousseau’s metaphysical speculations will be rigorously reasoned, he does not join Descartes in putting his absolute and exclusive faith in reason; rather, Rousseau’s epistemological principle, in relying on what he “could not sincerely refuse to believe,” means that he will rely on what he refers to as “feeling,” which he associates with the faculty of the “conscience.” This is an “inner light,” an intuitive form of knowing, which lacks the certitude of mathematical or “metaphysical” reasoning, perhaps, but it also avoids the presumption of reason and affords us reliance on the basic truths that nature is wont to permit us. Rousseau clearly insists that Descartes’s quest for perfect, purely rational certainty is doomed to failure since nature will always withhold certain “impenetrable mysteries;” moreover, if we insist on limiting ourselves to reliance on pure reason alone, we will be doomed to the plight of “the philosophers,” who “agree only in wrangling with each other.” We shall see, however, that Rousseau is himself every bit the philosopher in the sense that his own views are carefully and persuasively argued, though, as he emphasizes repeatedly, it is for us to exercise our own reasoning in judging them for ourselves.
Though he rejects the strict, skeptical method of Descartes, he hardly escapes its influence, as his first, self-evident truth―“I exist”―is the same as Descartes’s; however, Rousseau immediately accepts the separate existence of the bodily senses, which Descartes begins by rejecting: “I exist, and I have senses by which I am affected.” Descartes, of course, does not deny being affected by sensation, but he does deny being able to determine whether the objects we assume to cause sensation are physically real or not, a denial Rousseau does not share. Still, Rousseau is not at all clear about what these sensations are or their relation to his own existence: “Do I have an independent feeling of my existence, or do I feel it only by means of my sensations?,” he wonders. But, unlike Descartes, he promptly dispenses with any doubt about the independent reality of the material world, since “I clearly understand that a sensation, which is inside me, and its cause or object, which are outside of me, are not the same thing.” Thus he can conclude, “not only do I exist, but other entities exist also,… and even if those objects are only ideas, it is still true that they are distinct from me.” He goes on to distance himself from what he clearly feels to be arcane and insoluble metaphysical disputes between Materialism and Idealism, as he writes, “Everything which I feel to be outside of me, and which acts on my senses, I call matter; and all particles of matter which I perceive as being combined into separate entities, I call bodies. Thus all disputes between idealists and materialists mean nothing to me: their distinctions between the appearance and the reality of bodies are idle fancies.” In other words, Rousseau is simply unconcerned with the idea that all material reality may be an illusion or the concoction of an “evil genius” or, as for George Berkeley, the spiritual creation of God: it is enough for him, in other words, that he can sense physical bodies as being separate from himself, from his own thought; thus he is substantially in agreement with Descartes here, since Descartes himself would agree that he, as a “thinking thing,” is separate from the things that he thinks. The difference between them, then, is essentially epistemological and not metaphysical: Descartes seeks metaphysical certainty, thus feels compelled to seek an ironclad proof that the outside world constitutes a separate domain of material substance, whereas Rousseau is content to bypass the doubt occasioned by the evil genius to accept the separateness of the physical world; whether we think of it as “material” or “ideal” is not to the point, since clearly it does exist: “I am now already as sure of the existence of the universe as I am of my own.”
Rousseau’s Metaphysics
Rousseau now proceeds further to “consider the objects of my sensations,” and he discovers that “I am endowed with an active force which I previously did not know I possess.” He makes this discovery by observing, “To perceive is to feel; to compare is to judge; judging and feeling are not the same.” In other words, he observes that there are two distinct things going on in his perception―that perception itself has two utterly distinct components. First is simple sensation: he senses things automatically, with no effort, no choice, whether he wills it or not; but he also compares the various objects of his sensation to one another, making the judgment, for example, that one stick is longer than another. This “longer than” is not in either of the sticks: it is a judgment he separately attributes to them. He directly “feels,” that is senses, first one stick, then another, and “each object is felt, both are felt, but their relation is nevertheless not felt.” This “relation” constitutes a judgment that he adds to the sticks; therefore, a human being is not a “purely sentient being,” that is, one that merely and passively feels the immediate sensation of the moment, since humans also possesses the active ability to judge or compare. Thus, “In purely sentient beings,” Rousseau says, “I fail to find that intelligent force which superposes and then judges”: in an animal or plant, which interacts with nature in a purely passive, sensible way, without reflection or reason, the faculty of judgment is absent; human beings, however, clearly have this active faculty, which gives us “the ability to give meaning to the word ‘is.’” In other words, I can say, “the stick is large,” by which I attribute to the stick the quality of largeness, a quality that the stick itself does not know.
Rousseau adds an observation about the connection between the various senses. “If we were purely passive in the use of our senses, there would be no communication among them; it would be impossible for us to know that the object we touch and the object we see are the same.” This seems to confirm that there is a “power of my mind” which can be called “attention” which “is in me, and not in things”; and although “I have no power over whether I feel or not, I do control the extent to which I examine what I feel.” Thus I can conclude, says Rousseau, that “I am not merely a passive sentient being, but an active and intelligent being, and… I dare to claim the honor of thinking. I know that truth is in things, not in the mind that judges them, and that the less of myself I put into the judgments of them, the surer I am to approach the truth; thus my rule of relying more on feeling than on reason is confirmed by reason itself.” In other words, Rousseau can conclude, merely through the direct intuition of “feeling,” that he must be “thinking,” and his reasoned analysis of the relation of reason and feeling leads him to be able to conclude that feeling offers a reliable foundation for knowledge. Specifically, the truth is not a function of reason itself but of the things we reason about; for this reason, argues Rousseau, we must base our inquiries on them lest we be trapped, as Descartes may well be, within the confines of a reason that so withdraws from the world as to have no intercourse with anything but itself. This does not mean that Rousseau denies the value, power and efficacy of reason, for, indeed, his own speculations are very carefully and sophisticatedly reasoned; it means only that reason alone, as a purely isolated faculty, though necessary to knowledge, is not alone sufficient. In other words, I am not merely “a thinking thing,” as Descartes would insist, but a sensing and intuiting thing as well.
Matter and Motion: Rousseau’s First “Article of Faith”
“Everything I perceive through my senses is matter,” says Rousseau. He has now established the existence of matter by having confirmed the active power of thought, which does not belong to matter as such, within himself. There are things, in other words, and there is “I.” In this, Rousseau is not far from asserting Descartes’s “thinking thing,” but as we have seen, he has arrived at it not by a pure act of rational thought but by distinguishing his own activity of thinking from the passivity of the things he is thinking about. Actually, even Descartes approaches his own “thinking thing” by way of speculation as to the essence of “bodies,” concluding that, since the “I” that necessarily exists has nothing in common with bodies, and that only thinking essentially pertains to this “I,” that, therefore, “I am nothing but a thinking thing.” But Rousseau does not accept that he is nothing but a “thinking thing” because he has approached the matter from the direction of the senses, only discovering the active reality of thought in distinction to the passive reality of matter. Indeed, “when nothing acts on matter it does not move”; “its natural state is the state of rest.” More specifically, “neither rest nor motion is essential to it”; therefore, motion and matter are utterly separate things. In the language of Aristotle, matter is potentially subject to motion; however, the actuality of motion must come from a reality separate from the matter itself. This is precisely what Rousseau himself concludes.
Rousseau says further, “I perceive in bodies two kinds of motion: imparted motion and voluntary or spontaneous motion. In the first, the cause of motion is external to the body that moves, and in the second it is in the body itself.” By “imparted” motion he refers to a force that is external to the thing moved; “voluntary or spontaneous” motion, by contrast, is that of living things for which the origin of motion is evidently intrinsic to the body itself. But because, as we have seen above, matter “has no power to move of itself,” there must be some force of nature, separate from the material bodies of nature, that provides the movement; moreover, this is no less true of living things than of the physical universe itself. As Rousseau observes, we can detect and catalogue certain laws of motion, but the laws themselves simply record the regular patterns of the physical universe; they do not cause it: “From experiment and observation we have learned the laws of motion. These laws determine effects without showing causes; they are inadequate to explain the structure and workings of the universe.”
Thus, concludes Rousseau, “The first causes of motion are not in matter; it receives motion and transmits it, but does not produce it.” And as we look for the actual cause of the motion of matter, “we must always arrive at a will as some first cause, for to suppose an infinite regression of causes is to suppose none at all.” Otherwise stated, “to conceive matter producing motion is clearly to conceive an effect without a cause: it is to conceive absolutely nothing.” Thus, “I believe that a will moves the universe and animates nature. This is my first dogma, or first article of faith.” Thus the will is an utterly spiritual, that is, immaterial force, and how it is possible for the immaterial will to interact with material bodies is a mystery for which Rousseau can offer no explanation: “It is no more possible for me to conceive how my will moves my body than how my sensations affect my soul”; moreover, “either when I am passive or when I am active, the means of uniting the two substances seems completely incomprehensible to me.”
Thus Rousseau arrives, by his own means, at the substance Dualism of Descartes. He argues that, however unsatisfactory it may be that there is no clear solution to the means of interaction of body and mind, matter and spirit, his dogma on the existence of an immaterial will “does have some meaning and there is nothing in it contrary to reason or observation.” By contrast, he suggests that Materialism can make no such claim to reasonableness. Specifically, he repudiates the notion that motion is somehow “essential” to matter: “if motion were essential to matter, it would be inseparable from it, always in it to the same degree, always the same in each particle of matter; it would be incommunicable,… and we could not even conceive of matter at rest.” Furthermore, he asks, “Does all the matter in a body have uniform motion, or does each atom have its own? According to the first idea, the whole universe must form a solid and indivisible mass; according to the second, it must form only a diffuse and incohesive fluid in which no two atoms can ever unite.” In other words, if motion were really intrinsic to matter as such―if motion were an essential characteristic of matter, always contained within and inseparable from it―then all matter would simply move together as one great mass, or each particle of matter would move randomly on its own without order and without regular interaction with other particles.
Rousseau likens the materialist philosopher to a deaf man who denies the existence of sound simply because he cannot hear it. Even when the deaf man is shown a string that vibrates when exposed to a loud sound, without being touched by anyone, he nonetheless persists in this denial of sound, claiming that the vibration must be intrinsic to, or emanate from, the string itself. Materialists make essentially the same claim of motion―that it is simply an intrinsic characteristic of matter just as the deaf man claims that vibration is an intrinsic characteristic of string. But clearly, just because we cannot see the immaterial will, because it is not a body, any more than the deaf man can hear sound, does not mean that sound, and the immaterial will, do not exist.
Motion and Law: Rousseau’s Second “Article of Faith”
In short, ultimately there must be some cause, some source and origin of motion, behind all that is. Not only that, argues Rousseau, but whatever it is that is causing the motion of matter clearly evidences a profound degree of regularity and order, and it is hardly conceivable that such regularity and order arose out of a will or wills operating purely at random; indeed, “a chaotic universe is less conceivable to me than a harmonious one.” But whence the harmony that we so evidently observe―in the motions of the heavenly bodies, for example, or the intricate interactions of living organisms? These reflections bring Rousseau to his second article of faith: Rousseau writes, “If moving matter shows me a will, matter moving in accordance with certain laws shows me an intelligence; that is my second article of faith,” and he explains,
I do not know how the universe exists, but that does not prevent me from seeing how it is modified, or from perceiving the close interconnections by which the entities that compose it aid one another. I am like a man who, seeing an open watch for the first time, admires its mechanism even though he does not know its function and does not see its dial. “I do not know what the whole machine is designed to do,” he might say, “but I admire the maker in the details of his work….”
Thus goes Rousseau’s version of a teleological argument for the existence of God, or the philosophical “argument from design,” which we find also in Aquinas’s Fifth Way [see the chapter on Thomas Aquinas and my exposition of such an argument in the Epilogue on evolution and religion].
Rousseau goes on to argue that it seems utterly implausible that this universe, the only one we know, should have been the effect of random causes: however much time there might have been, in the whole course of universal history, the one universe we witness is one of evident purposefulness, even if the precise purpose is itself impenetrable for us. As in the case of the watch, we can see that there is evidence of some sort of “design” in the orderly laws of nature―the perfect reliability of mathematics, the Pythagorean Theorem, the perfect uniformity of the relation between the circumference and diameter of circles, the speed of light. Evidently, why it all is the way it is, is a question utterly beyond our comprehension; but that it is this way we see for ourselves every day. Our inability directly to perceive the cause of it all, in other words, need not prevent us from being able to conclude that there must be one; again, we can hardly fail to detect clear evidence of purposefulness, even if we cannot identify the purpose toward which it tends.
It is a vital aspect of Rousseau’s thought that, unlike Descartes, for example, he does not claim unerring, metaphysical certainty for his views. That he is personally persuaded by them we can have no doubt; thus he writes, “it is impossible for me to conceive such an immutably ordered system of entities without also conceiving an intelligence that orders it. It is not in my power to believe that passive, lifeless matter could have produced living, feeling beings, that anything which does not think could have produced thinking beings.” As personal as Rousseau’s presentation of his views often is, however, we ourselves can hardly be unmoved by their persuasiveness; but Rousseau reminds us, “I am not urging you to accept my views: I am simply presenting them to you.” So it is up to us, in the best spirit of philosophy itself, to consult our own reason, as well as, Rousseau would urge, our own innermost intuition or “inner light.” But however important a part such personal intuition may play, let us recall that we must also be able to make rational sense of it and to be able to convey such sense to others whose own intuition may be far different from our own; and this, I suggest, is precisely what Rousseau endeavors to do.
So Rousseau can now conclude, “The being who has both will and power, who is active of himself, who moves the universe and orders all things―that being, whatever it may be, I call God.” However, Rousseau is quick to concede, this God “remains beyond the reach of both my senses and my understanding. The more I think about him, the more perplexed I am…. I perceive God everywhere in his works,… but as soon as I try to contemplate him in himself,… he eludes me, and my troubled mind no longer perceives anything.” Like Anselm and Aquinas before him, Rousseau can go no farther than to claim that God exists while conceding that what God is must remain an impenetrable mystery to him.
The Immaterial Will and Human Freedom: Rousseau’s Third “Article of Faith”
Having so established the existence of immaterial substance alongside matter, and the existence of God, Rousseau returns to consider his own place in the cosmos. Though he has thus far remained uncommitted about the place of animals, since they too seem to exhibit spontaneous movements, he now asserts that human beings possess a unique relation to the rest of nature: he writes,
man is lord of the earth on which he lives, for not only does he subdue all animals, not only does he control the elements by his skills and industry, but… in contemplation he even takes possession of the heavenly bodies that are beyond his physical grasp. Show me another animal on earth that can make use of fire and admire the sun. What!... I can comprehend the meaning of order, beauty and virtue; I can contemplate the universe and raise myself toward the hand that governs it; I can love good and do it―and yet I should compare myself to an animal? Abject soul, it is your wretched philosophy that makes you resemble an animal; or rather, you try in vain to degrade yourself, but your spirit testifies against your principles, your charitable heart belies your doctrine, and your very misuse of your faculties proves their excellence in spite of you.
Though clearly and self-professedly lacking the force of logical necessity, hardly could one fashion a more penetrating argument for the superiority and uniqueness of humankind. We “take possession” of the universe, says Rousseau, in our contemplation, as if to say that we embrace the very stars. Is it not so? And while animals, for all their charms, are stuck in the instinctual pursuit of survival, we human beings are capable of stepping beyond the mere utility of the earth and its fruits to ponder, wonder at and admire their simple mystery and beauty, regardless of whatever utility they might have. It is thus that Rousseau can confidently conclude, “If I had to choose my place in the order of existence, what more could I choose than to be a man?”
And yet, “I see evil on earth,” says Rousseau, and moreover, “The animals are happy, and their lord is miserable!” The very virtues of human being that render us capable of acting apart from the physical determinations of rude nature also render us susceptible to evil and vice. Our senses do not deceive us, as Rousseau has argued above; however, we are evidently capable of boundless falsity and deception in the exercise of our power of judgment and will. “As I meditated on the nature of man, I seemed to discover two distinct principles in him. The first elevated him to the study of eternal truths, to love of justice and moral beauty…. The second drew him downward into himself, subjected him to the power of the senses and the passions….” Thus Rousseau confirms the dualism in human nature that he has previously observed in nature as a whole: “man is not one: I both exert my will and fail to exert it; I feel both enslaved and free; I see what is good, I love it, and I do evil; I am active when I listen to my reason and passive when I am carried away by my passions….” In short I am, says Rousseau, “a compound being,” a composite of two distinct “substances,” a substance being defined as “a being endowed with some primary quality, apart from all particular or secondary modifications”; and clearly, argues Rousseau, the extended, divisible quality of matter, on the one hand, and the indivisible, immaterial quality of thought, on the other, can only be mutually exclusive and thus must be utterly separate. My bodily being is purely material while my reason and will are immaterial; moreover, my body is purely passive, lacking all intrinsic capacity for motion, while my will is active and is as such the instigator of my movements.
As another reminder of his reliance on feeling rather than on reason alone, Rousseau says, “No material entity is active of itself, and I am active in that way. It is futile to present me with arguments against this: I feel it, and that feeling which speaks to me is stronger than the reason that opposes it.” Thus “I know will only through the feeling of my own will, and intelligence is no better known to me.” Rousseau argues that “I am not free not to will my own good, I am not free to will to harm myself; but my freedom lies in the very fact that I can only will what is good for me, or what I regard as such, without being determined by anything external to me.” The point here is that “the determining cause” of my actions is within me and determined only by me. Naturally I will only my own good, but my will is derived from my judgment, and as we have seen, judgment can err. But the judgment is mine, it is I who am solely responsible for it. Thus a person “chooses good as he chooses truth; if his judgment is false, his choice is wrong.” It is thus that Rousseau can say, “I am a slave in my vices, and a free man in my remorse”; in other words, when I am doing wrong, the only reason can be a mistake in judgment derived from a failure to recognize truth, by which I make myself a slave of my own ignorance. Moreover, in vice I submit to the passions, that is, I am passive, whereas the experience of remorse is a function of the active power of judgment; and it is in such activity that I assert my freedom and define, and assume responsibility for, myself. This power of freedom constitutes my very essence, says Rousseau, and though I may not be free not to be free, “Does it follow that I am not my own master because I am unable to be anything other than myself?”
“To suppose an act, an effect that does not derive from an active origin is truly to suppose an effect without a cause.” With this, Rousseau carries forward his argument for the existence of an active will as the foundation for all motion, of the cosmos and of individual human beings. “The source of every act is the will of a free being; we cannot go beyond that. It is not the word ‘freedom’ that is meaningless, but the word ‘necessity.’” In other words, the materialists, who insist on the necessity of physical causes as determining all the movements of the universe, would essentially be asserting acts without activity, an action without an actor. Thus Rousseau can conclude, “Man is therefore free in his acts, and as such, animated by an immaterial substance. That is my third article of faith.”
It may make us miserable, it might incline us to harm ourselves and others, it might leave us heartbroken, anxious and depressed, for these are inevitable burdens of freedom; but would we choose any other lot, could we reasonably choose not to be free? Surely indeed the answer must be no, because freedom at least leaves us the opportunity for carving meaning out of our lives, for finding some point to it all, for discovering something worth living for.
What is “Good”?
Rousseau has thus established his basic metaphysical views: there must be a will behind the motions of matter; the order and law intrinsic to that motion evidences intelligence, thus some ultimate power, “God,” must exist to motivate and order the motions of the cosmos; moreover, by attention to my own inner motions, I cannot fail to recognize an independent principle of will within myself, directed by reason and judgment, thus human beings are free, and such freedom is a function of independent activity within myself and thus, like the activity that motivates the universe, it represents a separate and immaterial substance.
At this point in his “Creed,” Rousseau turns to issues of ethics and theology, a brief consideration of which will take us back to the Discourse on Inequality. We have already considered Rousseau’s reliance on intuitive feeling, or “conscience,” as a crucial faculty for the achievement of knowledge; indeed, Rousseau demonstrates a profound distrust of reason, saying, for example, that “the worthiest use that I can make of my reason is to renounce it before [God].” Unlike reason, however, “conscience never deceives us.” Conscience is “an innate principle of justice and virtue,” it is “the voice of nature,” it represents “the image of God” within us, it is “an immortal and celestial voice.” We should be careful to note, however, that though reason may be the source of great trouble, like freedom itself, nonetheless it is a vital and indispensable aspect of freedom; thus “Has [God] not given me conscience to love the good, reason to know it and freedom to choose it?”
The deep questions of theology, Rousseau says, are utterly beyond his comprehension. Is there a hell of eternal torment for the wicked, for example? Rousseau professes utter ignorance of such questions. But he can observe, “What need is there of hell in another life? It is here, in this life, in the hearts of the wicked.” But what indeed is meant by “wicked” or “evil” or “good”? Rousseau denies that a direct, rational answer is either possible or required: we know good, says Rousseau, it is undeniable and inescapable, and no one acts or can reasonably and sincerely―in good conscience―assert otherwise. Evidently, Rousseau’s “argument” here is not of a traditional, “logical” nature; but it is arguably none the less compelling for it. “Let us look into our heart,” he urges. In our relations with other human beings, “What sight pleases us more, their suffering or their happiness? Which is more enjoyable for us to do, and leaves us with a more pleasant feeling afterward: a kind act, or a malicious one?” He continues, “If there is nothing moral in a man’s heart, what is the source of his transports of admiration for heroic deeds and his enraptured love of great souls? What connection is there between self-interest and that enthusiasm for virtue?” Finally, he says, “If you take away from our hearts that love of what is noble, you will take away all the charm of life.”
Rousseau’s vision is, to be sure, a classically romantic one; but, I suggest, it is not necessarily the less philosophically rigorous for that. It is simply the case that we must, to evaluate Rousseau’s arguments, consult the testimony of our own intuition, for if Romanticism stands for anything it stands for the proposition that all of us, as human beings, share some common, if inarticulable, sense or principle of goodness that serves to unify us on some deep, primordial level. Would anyone deny this? Or rather, can anyone who rationally contemplates the matter fail to observe that his or her own sentiments and behavior are in substantial accord, in practice, with precisely such a principle?
Rousseau Responds to Hobbes on “the State of Nature”: Back to the Discourse on Inequality
The intuition or feeling that we have for goodness, which, as we have just seen, Rousseau asserts in the “Creed,” is very different from Plato’s assertion of a purely rational, eternal Idea of The Good; in the case of Rousseau, our intuition of goodness arises from our experience of the world, and it is a function not of an eternal mind or soul but of “conscience.” Thus, as we continue our consideration of his Discourse, we see that Rousseau guardedly agrees with Hobbes that there is no eternal principle of “The Good” as Plato, for example, would assert. Rousseau in fact substantially agrees with Hobbes, to a point, on the natural inclination of human beings to be selfish, materialistic and self-sufficient, if not downright anti-social, and lacking any concern for or consideration of what might be referred to as “good.” But this apparent agreement with Hobbes is extremely superficial, for Rousseau takes explicit care to distinguish himself from and indeed denounce the views of Hobbes: “Above all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that because man has no idea of goodness he is naturally evil.” As we have seen, Hobbes’s materialist metaphysics leads to a strictly materialist view of human nature, which leads him in turn to conclude that, in the state of nature, human beings must have been utterly selfish, greedy, materialistic, violent, domineering and anti-social. Rousseau categorically denies this, arguing that “the state of nature is the state in which the concern for our self-preservation is the least prejudicial to that of others,” and therefore “the most appropriate for peace and the best suited for the human race.” With Hobbes in mind, Rousseau observes that “we are repeatedly told… that nothing would have been so miserable as man in that state [of nature].” But, he asks, “what kind of misery can there be for a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is in good health?” In our “civilized” world, “we see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence.” But if we turn to nature, says Rousseau, “I ask if anyone has ever heard tell of a savage who was living in liberty ever complaining about his life or killing himself.”
Again, Rousseau agrees with Hobbes that we are concerned for our personal, material well-being, that first and foremost, in fact; however, there is no good reason to believe, argues Rousseau, that this concern should lead us into a condition of enmity for our fellow humans and a state of “war of all against all.” If only for the sake of our own wellbeing, we would be little inclined to fight with others for a tree or a plot of ground or a bunch of berries since, in the state of nature, we could nearly always find our own food and shelter that would not require a fight. We would of course quite reasonably resort to violence in the relatively rare event of a personal threat to our own safety, but the only reasonable assumption must be that, for our own good, we would avoid all fighting in any other case. In short, says Rousseau,
Let us conclude that, wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without dwelling, without war, without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and correspondingly with no desire to do them harm, perhaps never even recognizing any of them individually, savage man, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, had only the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to that state; he felt only his true needs, took notice of only what he believed he had an interest in seeing; and that his intelligence made no more progress than his vanity.
Rousseau continues,
I always hear it repeated that the stronger will oppress the weaker...; but I do not see how this could be said of savage men, to whom it would be difficult to explain even what servitude and domination are. A man could well lay hold of the fruit another has gathered, the game he has killed, the cave that served as his shelter. But how will he ever succeed in making himself obeyed? And what can be the chains of dependence among men who possess nothing?
Indeed, argues Rousseau, “the bonds of servitude are formed merely from the mutual dependence of men and the reciprocal needs that unite them,” but the self-sufficiency that characterizes humans in the state of nature renders such “mutual dependence” inconceivable and “renders pointless the law of the strongest.” Thus, says Rousseau, “inequality is hardly observable in the state of nature.”
Rousseau argues that Hobbes asserts that the state of nature must have been one of war “because he had wrongly injected into the savage [i.e. “wild,” “untamed,” “natural”] man’s concern for self-preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions which are the product of society.” In other words, when we consider human beings in history and around the world today, we do indeed see people groveling for all sorts of possessions and luxuries―cars, shoes, brand-name sneakers and clothes and handbags, the latest electronic gadgets, “bling bling” etc. etc.; indeed, some people’s sense of self-worth seems to be a function substantially of what stuff they own and how much it cost and who else has it (or best yet, doesn’t have it). But our passion for these things and our valuation of them, seemingly at times to the exclusion of all else, is anything but natural; it is, rather, a function primarily of a multi-billion-dollar advertising and marketing industry, targeting us with ruthless effectiveness from the cradle onward, and an entire cultural attitude that champions economic growth and consumer consumption and waste and materialistic values over all else. And indeed, what will we not do to advance ourselves accordingly? What was it that the President of the United States urged upon us as our patriotic duty, in the face of the 9/11 terrorist attack that seemed to threaten our nation’s values, but to shop!
And consider briefly the war in Iraq, which followed close upon that attack. Those who favored it claimed that its purpose was a noble one; they claimed that it was a necessary act of self-defense against an imminent threat of “weapons of mass destruction,” and that its ultimate purpose was to advance the causes of freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people and to preserve our own. Why else were these our stated goals, we might ask, but the fact that we believe in the spiritual principles espoused by Rousseau (rather than shopping)? But many of us suspected then, and it is widely taken for granted today, that the war was at least substantially motivated by our desire for oil―a purely selfish, greedy and materialistic concern, to be sure, and one evidently that Hobbes, but not Rousseau, would embrace.
Thus, if our hearts tell us that spiritual values like freedom and democracy are of primary importance to us, but the demands of “real politick” seem to require an invasion for oil, what else can we conclude but that society has urged upon us, and we have grown to accept, values and institutions that violate our fundamental nature and our noblest aspirations? It seems that we all believe in the values of Rousseau, but that we have all permitted ourselves to be corrupted by the single-minded Hobbesian desire for material wealth and domination, which Hobbes insists is the natural result of our “perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death.” For Hobbes, it cannot be rational to risk one’s life for some spiritual value, much less on behalf of someone other than oneself, since for Hobbes “life itself is but motion” and when we die we are simply done―there is nothing worth living for but our own physical existence; however, why then is it that we persist in honoring fallen heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, heroic soldiers―who, in risking their lives for a noble and spiritual principle like freedom for all, do precisely what Hobbes insists makes no sense?
In short, it is a central thesis of Rousseau’s that if human beings are materialistic and greedy and selfish and violent and domineering and anti-social, it is not because we are made that way by nature, but because we are made that way be society. Rather than be concerned to dominate others, a person’s natural attitude includes “an innate repugnance to seeing his fellow men suffer.” We are naturally endowed with “a principle that Hobbes failed to notice,” namely the quality of pity for and commiseration with our fellow creatures. Indeed, Rousseau will assert, in Part II of the Discourse, “nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state.”
We must now ask, how did humanity leave this nature behind? What were the reasons for this regression, or we might say, how did natural evolution turn to civilized devolution?
From Nature to Private Property: Discourse Part II
This transition from nature to society is the subject of Part II of Rousseau’s Discourse. Before speculating on the likely steps of this transition, Rousseau notes what he considers to be at the root of the corruption of human nature, namely private property: “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” But he notes that “this idea of property was not formed at once in the human mind.” We of course take private property for granted today, and even celebrate it as fundamental to, and even coextensive with, freedom itself; as noted in the previous section, in fact, it may in today’s world seem sometimes like the only freedom. In this regard, it is interesting to compare the words of Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence with certain strikingly similar words in “The Bill of Rights.” In the Declaration, Jefferson famously wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Thirteen years later, at the adoption of the Constitution, its Fifth Amendment guarantees citizens the protection against the government that we may not be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” From the spirit of Rousseau, who clearly exerted a strong influence on Jefferson, we move strikingly toward the materialistic values of Hobbes as we see the promise of happiness replaced by the legal guarantee of property. Moreover, we see no social protections in the Bill of Rights―no rights to the necessities of life, to education or to health care, for example. We might of course consider who wrote this document, and for whom; recall, specifically, that the Constitution included a guarantee of the right to possess human property (i.e. slaves).
Suffice it to say, for present purposes, that there is nothing natural about private property. It may indeed serve substantial goals of security, reliability and economic efficiency, and it may even be a key component of human freedom as well. But we should note that it is in the nature of private property to permit, foster and entrench a substantial degree of economic inequality and, if history past and present is any indication, to increase the degree of that inequality over time, in proportion to the degree of a particular society’s devotion to private property as a value, thus the unprecedented and rapidly increasing degree of separation between the very wealthiest, and everyone else, in the United States today. But the question Rousseau ponders is how private property, and the inequality that inevitably followed, originated, and whether it makes any sense in terms of the most important of human values, notably freedom itself.
So Rousseau begins with his best guess as to the state of humans before civilization, the “primitive” state of “savage” man; and Rousseau follows the course of the progress from this state to society with a series of “firsts.” “Man’s first sentiment was that of his own existence; his first concern was that of his preservation.” We see that this mirrors Rousseau’s exposition of his metaphysical views in his “Creed.” Human beings, suggests Rousseau, must from the beginning have compared themselves to other animals and found themselves superior, and this occasions in humans “the first stirring of pride.” Concerned as we must have been for our own preservation, we must have been in general little concerned about our fellowmen, suggests Rousseau, except on rare occasions. “Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole motive of human actions, he found himself in a position to distinguish the rare occasions when common interest should make him count on the assistance of his fellowmen, and those even rarer occasions when competition ought to make him distrust them.” This of course is clearly contrary to Hobbes’s assertion that we are naturally greedy and violent and domineering.
As time passes, suggests Rousseau, we must have progressed, however slowly, in the development of rudimentary tools and perhaps fashioned for ourselves simple huts. “This,” says Rousseau, “was the period of a first revolution which formed the establishment of the distinction among families and which introduced a kind of property, whence perhaps there already arose many quarrels and fights.” But such fights would not likely have led to any prolonged conflict, suggests Rousseau, for it would be easier to make a hut of your own since to try to dislodge someone else would quickly be seen to be more trouble than it was worth.
Further developments are likely to have come with this one. “The first developments of the heart were the effect of a new situation that united husbands and wives, fathers and children in one common habitation.” This was the beginning, perhaps, of a more sedentary and stable lifestyle, which, while advantageous in some respects that we today would probably consider obvious, also were the start of certain hidden perils.
In this new state, with a simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the tools they had provided to provide for them, since men enjoyed a great deal of leisure time, they used it to procure for themselves many types of conveniences unknown to their fathers. And that was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without realizing it, and the first source of evils they prepared for their descendants. For in addition to their continuing thus to soften body and mind (those conveniences through habit having lost almost all their pleasure, and being at the same time degenerated into true needs), being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet; and they were unhappy about losing them without being happy about possessing them.
It would be hard to articulate better our own contemporary relationship with the unending litany of toys and gadgets we all churn through today and yearn after and work so hard to attain. Like children with their new toys, we run after each fancy new gadget as soon as our neighbor has it, and no sooner do we find ourselves unable to live without it than it loses all its charm and positively annoys us in its being “so yesterday” that we find ourselves incapable of living without its replacement. What has happened to us, whither nature, whither our nature?
In any event, it is natural to assume that society gradually became more developed and interconnected. “Eventually a permanent proximity cannot fail to engender some intercourse among different families.” As time went on, “People became accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons. Imperceptibly they acquire the ideas of merit and beauty which produce feelings of preference…. Jealousy awakens with love,” says Rousseau, “discord triumphs, and the sweetest passion receives sacrifices of human blood.” Over time it develops that “public esteem had a value,” and “this was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt, on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other.” Once we got a taste for the esteem of others, suggests Rousseau, “each one claimed to have a right to it,” and thus arose “the first duties of civility, even among savages; and from this every voluntary wrong became an outrage,” and “acts of revenge became terrible, and men became bloodthirsty and cruel.” From modern observation of such behavior, people like Hobbes, as we have seen, “have hastened to conclude that man is naturally cruel, and that he needs civilization in order to soften him.” But Rousseau claims,
On the contrary, nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when, placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man, and limited equally by instinct and reason to protecting himself from the harm that threatens him, he is restrained by natural pity from needlessly harming anyone himself, even if he has been harmed. For according to the axiom of the wise Locke, where there is no property, there is no injury.
Thus Rousseau famously asserts that humans achieved at one point, and then lost, “a middle position,” a “golden age,” we might say, midway between nature and civilization, when we still retained the best of the fruits of natural freedom combined with the rudimentary comforts of a loose association with others.
This condition, however, was doomed with the transition from a state in which we could engage voluntarily with our fellow humans, to one in which we came to depend upon them:
as long as they applied themselves exclusively to tasks that a single individual could do and to the arts that did not require the cooperation of several hands, they lived as free, healthy, good and happy as they could in accordance with their nature; and they continued to enjoy among themselves the sweet rewards of independent intercourse. But as soon as one man needed the help of another,… equality disappeared, property came into existence, labor became necessary.
Specifically, suggests Rousseau, it was the development of metallurgy and agriculture that “produced this great revolution.” With these technologies, cooperation becomes no longer merely possible but mandatory, along with division of labor and specialization; moreover, the idea of private property can for the first time arise since some people would control metals and tools, others cultivation of land, and from such divisions and specializations naturally arose division of the land itself. Moreover, as Locke famously asserted, it is only one’s manual labor that can form the basis for a right to private property since the only natural “right” to personal possession a human being can assert is to his own body (notwithstanding Hobbes’s contrary view), whereas the land is common to all; but with the private cultivation of land, a person mixes his body, literally and figuratively, with the land, and thus might reasonably assert a “right” to the private possession of it, as an extension of his right to his body. For his part, Rousseau seems to refer to this reasoning as he asserts that “it is impossible to conceive of the idea of property as arising from anything but manual labor, for it is not clear what man can add, beyond his own labor, in order to appropriate things he has not made.”
From Private Property to Society
With the interdependence among humans occasioned by these new technologies, “natural inequality imperceptibly manifests itself together with inequality occasioned by the socialization process.” Now that different people suddenly find themselves doing different things from others, and finding themselves thus forced to cooperate and trade, whatever slight, and otherwise insignificant physical and mental inequalities might have existed in nature now become both more important and more noticeable; from there, moreover, society itself is bound to lend to their further establishment and increase. “Thus it is that the differences among men, developed by those of circumstances, make themselves more noticeable, more permanent in their effects, and begin to influence the fate of private individuals in the same proportion.” Moreover, suggests Rousseau, with greater socialization comes greater need and desire to impress those around us; indeed, we can all appreciate how important it is “to look good,” “to dress for success,” and this concern for appearances, as opposed to one’s actual being, is purely a function of society, where how we look can be more important than what we actually do or the kind of people we actually are. In order to succeed in society today, a person must precisely put on an appearance, and this attitude is so ingrained in us today that we might not even notice that we are doing it. Instagram and social media generally have of course today accelerated this tremendously. Thus it is now “necessary, for his advantage, to show himself to be other than what he in fact was.” It is only in society that, we might say, “the color of our skin” can be more important than “the content of our character.” We observe the primacy of appearance in our society today in an advertising slogan such as “Image is Everything,” which rolls over us without our even noticing what it implies or how truly it might reflect the values our society has spawned.
In such circumstances, says Rousseau, “although man had previously been free and independent, we find him, so to speak, subject, by virtue of a multitude of fresh needs, to all of nature and particularly to his fellowmen, whose slave in a sense he becomes even in becoming their master; rich, he needs their services; poor, he needs their help.” Rousseau’s analysis of what humans become, under these circumstances, may seem harsh, but it is impossible to dismiss:
This makes him two-faced and crooked with some, imperious and harsh with others, and puts him in the position of having to abuse everyone he needs when he cannot make them fear him and does not find it in his interests to be of useful service to them. Finally, consuming ambition, the zeal for raising the relative level of his fortune, less out of real need than in order to put himself above others, inspires in all men a wicked desire to harm one another, a secret jealousy all the more dangerous because, in order to strike its blow in greater safety, it often wears the mask of benevolence.
Impossible to dismiss, I call this, because surely in the dog-eat-dog world of today we see all around us, and indeed often even champion and celebrate, precisely those of “consuming ambition” who have raised their fortunes above the common herd. And we cannot easily overlook the value we place on certain marks of status, such as cars and clothes and even sneakers, which is based not on their intrinsic value but on the fact that few can possess them: in other words, we so yearn for the classy car because our neighbor does not have one, or because he does, in any event measuring our own value not by who we are but how we appear. Our own sense of self-worth, even, increasingly becomes a function of raising ourselves to a position of dominance over others, where our luxury goods become merely the badge of that domination. And the popularity of knock-off brand name products surely attests to the fact that these same values are shared equally by the poor, for whom, it would seem, the route out of poverty, or at least out of “psychic” poverty perhaps, becomes the appearance that they do not suffer it.
With the further institutionalization of the gap between rich and poor occasioned by generations of inherited wealth, the poor basically discover that they “became poor without having lost anything, because while everything changed around them, they alone had not changed at all.” In other words, all who live in society are effectively born into a condition of inequality, and the poor find themselves “forced to receive or steal their subsistence from the hands of the rich. And from that,” continues Rousseau, “there began to arise, according to the diverse characters of the rich and the poor, domination and servitude, or violence and thefts.” This is all the direct effect of the establishment of private property and an economy based on its possession and agglomeration. And what we are tracing here, which we may need to remind ourselves of, is a profound alteration in human beings, from the gentleness of their nature to the characters of the needy poor or the grasping rich. But these characters of rich and poor are really not essentially different, for whichever side of the tracks you grow up on, your values―for wealth, for status, for luxury, for domination―are the same. Thus the poor will be tempted to steal or cheat to get hold of what they do not have, becoming increasingly desperate and angry or in a state of dazed hopelessness, in proportion to their destitution, while the rich will become increasingly greedy and righteous and covetous and even violent in proportion as they acquire more and more wealth and so more and more fear of losing of it. In particular, suggests Rousseau, “the pleasure of domination” will become for the wealthy an end in itself; just as for primitive humans, as we gain more and more toys of technology, they lose their intrinsic charm and their value is increasingly a function of how exclusive we are in their possession. We become, in short, like “a dog in the manger,” intent to own and ostentatiously display the latest gadget or fashion largely because no one else has it. “If one sees,” says Rousseau, “a handful of powerful and rich men at the height of greatness and fortune while the mob grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former prize the things they enjoy only to the extent that the others are deprived of them; and because, without changing their position, they would cease to be happy if the people ceased to be miserable.”
From Society to “the Most Horrible State of War”
We have seen Hobbes claim that the state of nature is naturally one of “war of all against all,” which can be traced, reasonably perhaps, to Hobbes’s materialist view of reality. For Rousseau, by contrast, we only achieve a state of universal war as a result of the altogether unnatural institution of private property and the increasing economic inequality that has resulted from it. Whether such inequality is an inevitable result of private property is not clear; what is clear to Rousseau, however, is that, at a fairly early stage of this inequality, “the rich, pressed by necessity, finally conceived the most thought-out project that had ever entered the human mind.” Rousseau refers here essentially to Hobbes’s social contract according to which the masses surrender their natural freedom to the wealthy and powerful landowners in order to achieve at least a minimal level of physical security and thus a chance to avoid what Hobbes insists would otherwise be a life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Clearly, however, Rousseau insists, as we have seen, that there is no good reason to believe that the state of total war is at all natural, nor that life in a state of nature would be anything but largely peaceful and prosperous. In short, it is the artificial inequality of circumstance, occasioned originally by the unequal distribution of wealth and power, that occasions all those characteristics―greed, materialism, selfishness, violence, domination and anti-sociability―that Hobbes insists are natural, and on the naturalness of which Hobbes’s entire justification for the social contract depends. More specifically, Hobbes’s defense of the divine right of kings, according to which wealth and power are reserved naturally to the few, is justifiable only on the basis of Hobbes’s materialist nightmare scenario of universal war and natural misery.
It is thus that Rousseau sees the social contract as essentially a great con, but, directed as it was to “crude, easily seduced men,… they all ran to chain themselves,” says Rousseau, “in the belief that they secured their liberty, for although they had enough sense to realize the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers.” This was “the origin of society and laws,” argues Rousseau, “which gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established forever the law of property and of inequality, changed adroit usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the entire human race to labor, servitude and misery.” And the development of one such social organization inevitably leads to the spread of this method of organization, suggests Rousseau: “the establishment of a single society rendered indispensable that of all the others,” since “to stand head to head against the united forces, it was necessary to unite in turn.” This in turn leads to a condition in which the various nations themselves become participants in “the law of nature” according to which “might makes right,” and it is thus that the war of individuals against each other, and the domination of the mass of individuals by the wealthy few, is replaced by the same scenario on the level of nations and on a global basis. “Remaining thus among themselves in a state of nature,” says Rousseau,
the bodies politic soon experienced the inconveniences that had forced private individuals to leave it; and that state became even more deadly among these great bodies than that state had been among the private individuals of whom they were composed. Whence came the national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals that make nature tremble and offend reason, and all those horrible prejudices that rank the honor of shedding human blood among the virtues. The most decent people learned to consider it one of their duties to kill their fellow men. Finally, men were seen massacring one another by the thousands without knowing why. More murders were committed in a single day of combat and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during entire centuries over the entire face of the earth. Such are the first effects one glimpses of the division of mankind into different societies.
We might ask, is there anything natural about the horrifying dismemberment of the weapons of the American Civil War, fought just over a century after Rousseau wrote these words, or the increasing level of mind-numbingly arbitrary death and destruction of the trench warfare of WWI, or the even greater horror of the fire-bombing by all sides in the air wars of WWII, culminating in the unspeakable destruction of two nuclear bombs detonated over Japan? The pattern of these conflicts is unmistakably one of an ever-increasing level of violence as the world becomes increasingly unequal, while at the same time more and more interconnected and interdependent; it is, in short, precisely the pattern observed, and prophesied, by Rousseau.
The Surrender of Freedom
To repeat, Rousseau insists that there is nothing remotely natural about these events, nor about their increasingly dire trajectory. We have already observed that it is inconceivable that “savage man” entertain thoughts of suicide; yet today, the legacy of the Cold War has led us to accept, without even a hint of irony, the logic of “mutual assured destruction,” otherwise known as “MAD,” according to which national security depends on having a stockpile of nuclear weapons sufficient to assure the destruction of everyone in the event of attack. And these stockpiles, we might note, are turning, like Frankenstein, into an uncontrollable terrorist threat as they continually and inexorably proliferate.
Quite apart from these horrible “ills of our own making,” both root and result of these events is the universal loss of natural freedom. The poor, obviously, have no choice but to work for the wealthy and to face the constant threat of insecurity for their jobs, life and health; but the powerful themselves become the slaves of their dependence on the poor and on their own physical as well as psychic dependence on the maintenance of their unnatural and irrational addiction to luxury and domination. In short, we all seem powerless in the face of the modern technology of weapons of mass destruction as well as of the handy toys of surveillance and control which we willingly carry around with us, and pay a great deal to maintain, even as their computer wizardry is increasingly effective in essentially telling us what to wear, what to eat, what to do and even how to feel. The “political theorists,” says Rousseau,
produce the same sophisms about the love of liberty that philosophers have made about the state of nature. By the things they see they render judgments about very different things they have not seen; and they attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude owing to the patience with which those who are before their eyes endure their servitude, without giving a thought that it is the same for liberty as it is for innocence and virtue: their value is felt only as long as one has them oneself, and the taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them.
In other words, people like Hobbes, as we have seen, attribute to natural man the qualities that they observe in civilized man; but these theorists and philosophers of course “have not seen” natural man, and, moreover, the natural liberty and gentle natures reasonably attributable to humans in the state of nature have been so obscured by social conditioning and twisted by modern technological, political and economic institutions that today we all “patiently endure our servitude” simply because we can no longer recognize or even imagine our true nature. “Barbarous man,” insists Rousseau, “does not bow his head for the yoke that civilized man wears without a murmur, and he prefers the most stormy liberty to tranquil subjection.”
That the Surrender of Freedom is Contrary to Nature
Is it reasonable that we should thus surrender our natural freedom to the insecurities and appearances and threats and surveillance and control of the modern world―might we not claim that we like it this way, that life is better by computer control and love is better by text-message? For Rousseau, human freedom is neither so simple a matter as that, nor one to be idly traded away. Responding to a position taken by the political philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694), Rousseau suggests that human freedom constitutes the very essence of human nature. “Pufendorf says that just as one transfers his goods to another by conventions and contracts, one can divest himself of his liberty in favor of someone”; according to this view, human freedom is simply a commodity to be bartered away if the price is right. Rousseau condemns this view with three distinct objections. First, he says, “the goods I give away become something utterly foreign to me, and it is a matter of indifference to me whether these goods are abused; but it is important to me that my liberty is not abused, and I cannot expose myself to becoming the instrument of crime without making myself guilty of the evil I will be forced to commit.” In other words, human freedom is always of vital interest to me, unlike a “good,” such as a car I might sell, the disposition of which obviously has no bearing on my nature or life. That much should, indeed, be obvious enough; but Rousseau makes a further, and more trenchant point here, suggesting that natural liberty also implies an inalienable responsibility―that is, I am responsible for my actions, on a deep, moral level even if I have so indentured myself to an employer or national leader as to have become the tool of that employer or leader. Rousseau thus clearly rejects the notion that it is a defense to say, “I was only doing my job,” or “I was just following orders,” if my actions cause harm; and this is so because my freedom is part of me even if it is my stated desire to surrender it. Foreshadowing Jean-Paul Sartre, Rousseau thus essentially asserts, in Sartre’s challenging words, “I am condemned to be free.”
Rousseau’s second rejoinder to Pufendorf’s assertion is that, “since the right of property is merely the result of convention and human institution, every man can dispose of what he possesses as he sees fit. But it is not the same for the essential gifts of nature such as life and liberty, which everyone is allowed to enjoy, and of which it is at least doubtful that one has the right to divest himself.” In other words, since humans invented the notion of private property, humans are free to invent the laws that govern it; by contrast, life and liberty are not human inventions but gifts of nature, granted us in trust, we might say, and it is thus nature itself, and not human institutions, that properly dictate their terms. Thus, for reasons intimated above, it is by no means clear that we have even a natural right to “divest” ourselves of, that is, to give up, our lives and our freedom. “In giving up [liberty] he degrades his being,” says Rousseau, “in giving up [life] he annihilates his being insofar as he can.” Therefore, “because no temporal goods can compensate for the one or the other, it would offend at the same time both nature and reason to renounce them, regardless of the price.” Thus no matter the stakes, to give up liberty is so to “degrade our being” as to make giving it up fundamentally contrary both to reason and to nature. Our car has nothing to do with our “being,” but freedom, Rousseau implies, is essential to who and what nature has made us and intended us to be.
Finally, Rousseau offers a third argument why it is not legitimate to surrender our freedom: he writes, “even if one could give away his liberty as he does his goods, the difference would be very great for the children who enjoy the father’s goods only by virtue of a transmission of his right; whereas, since liberty is a virtue they received from nature in virtue of being men, their parents had no right in divesting them of it.” Thus my own freedom, apart from being part of my very being, and not mine to trifle with, does not even belong to me alone, strictly speaking, but is also at least implicitly the birthright of my children. This is because what I do with my life and liberty inevitably affects them, and if I sell myself into slavery, or participate in the erection of political or economic institutions that effectively create a condition of master and slave, I am also effectively foisting those conditions on future generations. Because the freedom of succeeding generations is properly their birthright, it is contrary to nature, and a violation of their natures, to leave a world, we might say, less free than the one we inherited. “Thus,” continues Rousseau, “just as violence had to be done to nature to establish slavery, nature had to be changed in order to perpetuate this right. And the jurists, who have gravely pronounced that the child of a slave woman is born a slave, have decided, in other words, that a man is not born a man.” Hardly could Rousseau make his devotion to the ideal of human freedom more clear: to enslave a person is to take away her very being. Thus slavery is a violation of nature itself, and to allow it to continue is a continual violation. The “jurists,” of course, pronounce upon and create the law of humans and not of nature; and to condone or propagate a law that establishes or perpetuates slavery represents, to Rousseau, the profoundest violence to nature.
Descent to Tyranny
As if it weren’t bad enough that human society, at a very early stage, thus served effectively to violate the very nature of humanity, in the final pages of his Discourse Rousseau argues that things get progressively worse from there. Having established the right to private property, thus cementing the gains of the rich over against the poor, society devolves, says Rousseau, through a stage of “magistracy” that effectively cements the maintenance of power in the hands of the few, and society finally descends to a condition of strictly arbitrary power, where the leaders “call themselves equals of the gods and kings of kings.” In such a state, raw power becomes the only virtue: those with it want ever more, and those without are willing to submit on the hope that they too might live to dominate in their turn: “citizens allow themselves to be oppressed only insofar as they are driven by blind ambition; and looking more below than above them, domination becomes more dear to them than independence, and they consent to wear chains in order to be able to give them in turn to others.” Such thirst for dominance leads ultimately to delusion, says Rousseau, when the powerful few can lead the many along with the mere hint of power, holding a lottery ticket, as it were, like a carrot in front of hungry eyes: “leaders merely had to say to the humblest of men, ‘Be great, you and all your progeny,’ and he immediately appeared great to everyone as well as in his own eyes.” It is thus that American voters today, perhaps, have such a thirst for the myth of “American exceptionalism,” the notion that somehow we Americans are naturally better than everyone else, as reflected by Ronald Reagan’s winning assurances during his first presidential campaign that “We are the chosen people, America is the shining city on the hill.” Poverty and desperation thus become tolerable and even acceptable for one who feels himself to be superior to others.
The “final stage of corruption” has been reached, says Rousseau, when status and power are reduced to wealth. Ultimately, such an extreme stage of inequality in wealth and power will return us to “a new state of nature different from the one with which we began, in that the one was the state of nature in its purity, and this last is the fruit of an excess of corruption.” All vestiges of natural man are lost, says Rousseau: “with original man gradually disappearing, society no longer offers to the eyes of the wise man anything but an assemblage of artificial men and factitious passions which are the work of all these new relations and have no foundation in nature.” Here the images and appearance of social and marketing artifice have completely replaced being and moral character, and our “passions” are not those of nature but those of the corporate factory. Thus, “savage man and civilized man differ so greatly in the depths of their hearts and in their inclinations, that what characterizes the supreme happiness of the one would reduce the other to despair.”
Civilized man, says Rousseau, “pays court to the great whom he hates and the rich whom he scorns. He stops at nothing to obtain the honor of serving them… and proud of his slavery, he speaks with disdain of those who do not have the honor of taking part in it.” So mesmerized by appearance and power are civilized men that they “know how to be happy and content with themselves on the testimony of others rather than on their own.” Whereas “the savage man lives in himself, the man accustomed to the ways of society is always outside himself and knows how to live only in the opinion of others.” Thus civilized men “have merely a deceitful and frivolous exterior: honor without virtue, reason without wisdom and pleasure without happiness.”
In short, concludes Rousseau, “the sort of inequality that reigns among all civilized people… is obviously contrary to the law of nature,” permitting as it does “a handful of people to gorge themselves on superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities.” Could one more accurately and succinctly describe the contemporary state of human civilization?
Conclusion
So we have traced Rousseau’s thought in distinction to that of Hobbes, differing as it does at every turn, from his metaphysical views, to his view of human nature, to his reasoned speculations on the condition of humanity in the state of nature, to the development and progress of society. On certain superficial particulars, as we have seen, there is some convergence between Hobbes and Rousseau: thus both see humans as naturally concerned primarily with their selfish, material interests; however, Hobbes’s materialism makes us anti-social, greedy, domineering and violent, whereas Rousseau argues that it is only the artificial and extreme inequalities of advanced society, established by fraud, maintained by fear and perpetuated by force, that effectively train us into behaving this way.
Hobbes may be admired by some for what they see as his “realism,” and Rousseau despised for his “idealism,” but are such judgments deserved? One may well wonder, given the general run of humankind, as opposed to the few extraordinary examples of bloodthirsty conquerors whose stories make good reading in our history books and good copy on the television news, whether humans really are by nature so violent and domineering as Hobbes would have us believe: don’t most people most likely prefer to live a contented life, with family and friends and the basic comforts of a simple life? And as for Rousseau, note that his approach to human nature is by far the more balanced one: he does not say that, simply because Hobbes has it wrong about us, that we are therefore all little “sunbeams of Jesus” or “Mother Theresas”; on the contrary, Rousseau’s judgment of human nature puts us somewhere between the selfish materialism of our animal natures and the natural pity and compassion we might show for one another (as long as we ourselves are not overly inconvenienced by it). In other words, I suggest, whereas the view of Hobbes is radically one-sided in his cynical and narrow view of humankind, that it is Rousseau, for his balanced and nuanced view of human beings according to which we are a blend of both virtues and vices, that is the true “realist.”
Indeed, I suggest that most of us today would prefer at least to aspire to the mixed vision of humanity Rousseau proposes, for no one would wish to live in a Hobbesian world, not even, I presume to say, Hobbes himself.
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