Summary
Rousseau prefaces his inquiry by distinguishing between two kinds of inequality. The first consists of physical inequality, the power of the strong over the weak, the fast over the slow, the young over the old, and so on. The second consists of what Rousseau calls “moral” inequality—the kind that comes from “mores,” or social conventions. Natural inequality comes, as the term suggests, from nature. Rousseau observes that it is a matter of self-evidence that there is no connection between the two, since it is rare that the most powerful and wealthy are also the same as the most deserving, and clarifies that that is not his question.
The question that Rousseau identifies instead is how nature became subject to law and convention, and natural inequalities were replaced by moral ones. How is it that the strong serve the weak?
Rousseau observes that the philosophers of his time have speculated what the first, “natural” men were like, as to whether they were just, and have spoken about the “natural” rights of man—to property, say—without figuring out how notions of justice and property could have come about in nature. By describing natural man as greedy or violent, philosophers often simply project an image of man as he is now in society back into an earlier era.
Rousseau asserts that the “facts” of man as he was in nature, that is, before society, are beside the point, since they are unknowable. What will follow, he asserts, is a kind of thought experiment. Rousseau intends to imagine man as he must naturally be, before he has been “corrupted” by education—the age at which he would have wanted to stop.
Rousseau begins by stating that he will not describe man’s development out of the animal kingdom, or describe man’s literal origins, as, say, Aristotle has. For the sake of his experiment, Rousseau will assume that man, such as we are interested in him, ahs always physically existed as he has. In Rousseau’s view, man is the advantageous animal, physically capable of satisfying his hunger, his thirst, and finding rest. In nature, there was food and shelter everywhere.
By having to survive, find food, and rest, men had no chance to become unhappy. Men were physically strong, and adapted to their environment. Strong children survived, and became stronger, while the weak perished. By cultivating his body, he became self-sufficient, and had no need of technology.
Hobbes argues that natural man is violent and aggressive. The 17th-century German thinker Pufendorf had argued that natural man is cowardly. Rousseau agrees that man would have been frightened of anything unfamiliar to him, but he argues that natural man would quickly have recognized his superiority over the animals, and would not have feared them. Man has the advantage of being both strong and agile. Since women can carry their children, they have an advantage over animals that have to leave them behind to fend for them. As for old age, natural man faced it without fear, since the brutality of savage life shortened old age. Rousseau argues that modern man is probably more prone to illness than savage man, because of the idleness and rich food of the rich, and the over-work and starvation of the poor. In general, “natural” men do not notice themselves as lacking everything that we, as civilized people, find indispensable.
Man slept little, and his thoughts were only of his own self-preservation. He had a crude sense of touch and taste, since those are sharpened by “sensuality,”—enjoyment for its own sake—while, at the same time, his hearing, sight and smell were quite acute.
That is man as he existed physically. What about morally? Rousseau argues that animals are simply machines that nature has given the ability to protect themselves. Man is like an animal in that self-preservation is his goal, but unlike animals in that he acts freely, rather than automatically, to preserve himself. That is the source of man’s problems, because he is free to ignore the prescriptions of nature. Nature commands both men and animals, but men are free not to obey.
But with the will, man possesses another faculty that animals lack—that of self-perfection. This is the faculty that leads to the development of all the others, and, paradoxically and tragically, also leads man to become more unhappy. Savage man has not yet used this faculty; he only perceives and feels. He had neither desires nor fears and so he didn’t seek to know anything. His state of existence demands no foresight, since all of his material needs are satisfied by what is at hand, and there is nothing around him to arouse his curiosity. He lives in a perpetual present.
This self-perpetuating state now opens the question of how man was able to get from this state of nature to the current state, of knowledge and civilization. How could, say, agriculture—which requires planning, technology, and know-how—have come about? And, still more, why would such a man have ever agreed to till a field for someone else? Or learn to spend his days working, instead of following his instincts? Even if he suddenly discovered philosophy, why would he ever want to use it? And, more to the point, how and why would human beings enlighten each other? They would never encounter each other, and, what was more, they would be unable to communicate.
Rousseau now turns to the origin of language. How could language have existed if these original, natural human beings were solitary? One possibility is that it was needed so that parents could speak to children. But here we have to be careful not to project the familial home, which Rousseau claims is a social invention, onto the state of nature, in which property did not exist. Men and women came together by chance, slept together, and parted. Mothers nursed their children, who then left when they were strong enough.
The first and most universal language, according to Rousseau, is the cry of pain, or the cry for help. That was used rarely, since it only came about in extreme situations. When human beings came into closer connection and needed to communicate, they used gestures and imitative sounds, to point to and imitate things that were present. Since such a language could only be used in close quarters, they soon started using audible sounds, which since they weren’t limited to what was present, helped make language into a universal system. Now we run into the same problem—men had to agree to do this, but they could only agree by means of language. There must have been some necessity for the change.
The first words must have had a much broader use than words today. Subjects were distinguished from verbs, substance (like tree) from attribute (like green). Substantives (nouns) were initially proper names. One tree was called A, the other called B, and only eventually were abstract concepts (trees in general) formed, since it takes time to notice the similarities between objects.
Rousseau argues that abstraction requires imagination, recollecting past encounters with objects and predicting future ones. It is only with the use of words and sentences that we can arrive at a general idea of something, since gathering individual examples of it only yields us those individual examples. General concepts could therefore only have come later. Natural man, Rousseau believes, lived in a world of endless singularity, while we tend to group things together and lose their particularities. Given the Herculean effort even to make such a language work, the possibility of eventually developing philosophy and mathematics seems nearly impossible. This leads Rousseau and his reader to the crucial question: was society needed to form language, or was language needed to form society?
This is a difficult question to answer because, considering man’s state as one of complete and immediate satisfaction, it is difficult to imagine what need he would have had of other people, since he only stood to lose by what society had to offer, i.e. subjugation to the will of others. Rousseau argues that morally, society is certainly worse than nature, since all of the benefits that it offers are more than offset by its ills.
Rousseau disagrees with Hobbes that, because natural man was not instinctively good, that he must have been evil. Rousseau observes that since, in the state of nature, it was easiest for man to look out for himself without hurting others, that state was probably the most peaceful. Hobbes’ error was to ascribe desires that society places in our minds—greed, for example—to primitive man. Hobbes describes man in his natural state as a robust child. Rousseau points out that this is a contradiction in terms, since to be robust means to be independent, and so free of the desires that come from others. Natural man isn’t good, but neither is he evil. He has no knowledge of virtue or vice—he just does what he feels inclined to do. His circumstances give him no cause to do evil.
Rousseau nonetheless acknowledges one natural virtue, a repugnance at seeing fellow human beings suffer. He calls this pity. It is natural because, being weak, human beings imagine themselves suffering when they see another human being suffer. Rousseau observes this phenomenon in animals, but he points out that it comes out of man’s natural instinct for self-preservation.
He contrasts this with our emotions in civilization, where we will weep at tragic plays, but not for the suffering of fellow human beings. All social virtues flow from this natural feeling, and all social ills from its suppression by reason. In fact, it is reason that lets man separate himself from his fellow human beings by convincing himself that if something bad is happening to someone else, he himself is safe.
Rousseau identifies a second passion in man besides pity: sexual desire. He considers the possibility that sexual desire could have caused violence in the state of nature. He concludes that it is the laws put in place to curb these desires that actually create this violence. He distinguishes the physical feeling of love from its moral dimension, which causes it to fix on one single person. This latter aspect is borne of social custom. Violence is caused by attachment to a single person, and competition for them; natural man would not have had this preference, and so would not have had cause to become violent over the choice of partner. It is marriage that creates adulterers.
Given these suppositions about the state of nature, we see that natural inequality cannot be the cause of social inequality, since the state of nature kept men separate enough from one another, and gave them no cause for competition, so that that their relative inequalities mattered little.
Analysis
Many philosophers have commented on the strange proposition of the Discourse, which describes a state of nature that Rousseau admits from the outset is imagined, and as having no likely basis in historical fact. Karl Marx observed that Rousseau, and other thinkers of his time, like Adam Smith, began in their thinking with the fallacy that human beings were initially isolated individuals who joined together to form a society. In fact, Marx argues, human life has always been collective; it is only in society that human beings become individuals possessed of rights, property, etc. These thinkers simply take a contemporary state of affairs and project it back into the past. The twentieth-century Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser goes so far as to call the second Discourse a work of fiction. Indeed, at this time Rousseau was a published novelist, and we can see that he draws on his literary powers to make his description of man living in a kind of Garden of Eden as vivid as possible.
Why, then, does Rousseau begin with this image of nature? As Rousseau suggests, by imagining what life was like before human civilization existed, we can gain better insight into what civilization actually is, and what it means to belong to it. Since the whole point of civilization is to use our capacities to design and imagine to improve society, we can use this capacity to imagine a free state (the state of nature), and then compare that with the society we currently have. If we imagine a state in which we were free, in which our desires were satisfied, we will see that to belong to civilization is a state of constant subjugation, in which our wants and our happiness are at odds.
As members of society, the police protect us from harm, but only against other human beings with whom we would have no contact were we not members of society. We have access to technology that performs tasks for us, but we would have no need of these tasks if it were not for demands on us created by living in a technological society. Reason lets us control violent impulses; but these are, in turn, caused by society—desiring our neighbor’s property, for example. Culture teaches us to cry at the suffering of imaginary people in plays and novels, while we ignore the suffering of our neighbors.
Most of the thinkers of Rousseau’s time, like Voltaire and Denis Diderot, assumed that he was joking. Why would anyone take the time to write a philosophical tract against philosophy? Reason, as they saw it, was the way out of the superstition of religion and the key to a better, happier society. What Rousseau’s longing picture of a lost state of nature reveals is that these cultural, scientific and technological advancements come at the cost of personal authenticity, of having access to our feelings and our instincts, which are, Rousseau argues, the true sources of our happiness.
Though Rousseau does not explicitly say so, this view of nature has an obvious political corollary. If human beings were equal in this state of nature, it also follows that no existing social institutions are truly legitimate—not the Church, whose authority rests on the assertion that it administrates God’s will on earth, and not the King, whose power, together with that of the aristocracy, was believed in Rousseau’s time to rest in their natural superiority over their fellow countrymen. It is no accident that Rousseau’s philosophy would deeply influence the architects of the French Revolution.
Other aspects of the Discourse would become central ideas of the Enlightenment. That man has a natural capacity to perfect himself flew directly in the face of the religious belief that man is naturally sinful, and would give rise to the modern notion of education. The notion that human beings have a natural capacity for pity would, despite Rousseau’s skepticism about the arts, prove to be a central aspect of the theater in Germany, where playwrights like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing believed that seeing the plights of people on stage could improve a person’s capacity to feel empathy.
