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Pablo Muchnik
An essay on the principles of Rousseau’s anthropology
Abstract Against the impression that Rousseau is an eclectic thinker, this paper is an attempt to reconstruct the systematic core of his anthropology. First, I discuss the methodological starting-point. Second, I develop the structural framework required to make the concept of nature operative as an ideal within social contexts. Finally, I interpret Rousseau’s genetic account in terms of this framework. Such a procedure allows me to solve two interpretative problems, the aporia of the origin of wickedness and the question of man’s natural isolation. A twofold notion of logic is introduced to integrate the demands of history and structure, which overlap with those of freedom and necessity in Rousseau’s thought. This organizes my argument in a mirror-like way. I call this undertaking an essay, for it is the endeavor to think what Rousseau must have thought in order to write what he wrote. Key words amour de soi · amour propre · bourgeois · ego sentio · human make-up · human nature · natural as ideal · other-centered · savage · self-centered · totalities of feeling · totalities of needs
Psychological starting-point (I) To hide behind a mask is to live in chains. (II) To live in chains is to betray one’s innermost essence. (III) Only he who already has betrayed himself is capable of betraying others. (IV) Mutual betrayal and deception represent the condition of modern men.1 These four statements, which convey Rousseau’s insights into the character of the individual and his diagnosis of civilization, combine two different explanatory levels. One might call them psychological (statements I–II) and sociological dimensions (III–IV). These terms are intended to designate two opposite methodological points of departure. PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 26 no 2 • pp. 51–77 Copyright © 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) [0191-4537(200003)26:2;51–77;011508]
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52 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) By psychological, I mean the perspective that revolves around the individual’s mental processes and explains social behavior in terms of them; by sociological, I designate the perspective that takes social behavior as somehow given and explains mental processes in terms of it. Since the questions addressed by the Discourses are not merely historical but also causal, without determining the type of relation between these two dimensions, one cannot grasp the kernel of Rousseau’s anthropology either.2 This relation is problematic. Though it is clear that in statement (III) both explanatory levels are already bridged, it is not at all clear whether the source of betrayal comes from within or from outside the individual. That is, whether it can be reduced ultimately to internal processes or is the result of an external input. The question is important for it ultimately decides the tenability of Rousseau’s anthropological picture, whose motto is ‘Men are wicked, man is good’.3 Any given interpretation encounters internal difficulties. If one gives priority to the sociological over the psychological dimension, one falls into the fallacy of projecting as a cause of man’s betrayal a dimension that must be assumed as not existent in the state of nature, where men, according to Rousseau, are in isolation from one another. Thus, one is tempted to dismiss the state of nature as if it were a ‘picturesque frontispiece’ and to consider Rousseau’s political philosophy independently of the validity of his anthropological assumptions.4 Men are and have always been social by nature; to imagine, on behalf of Rousseau, a nonsocial state is simply nonsensical. The trouble with such an interpretation is that it does violence not only to the letter of Rousseau’s text, but more importantly to its spirit. To take the state of nature as a figment of Rousseau’s overheated imagination undermines both its critical and normative functions, i.e. its capacity to provide a criterion by which to gauge the depravity of contemporary society and a paradigm on which to base a sound political order. To deprive Rousseau’s anthropology of its moral basis is to miss the whole point. Men are social, this is undeniable, but only because they became so, and in the process of becoming social they have forfeited their own essence. The opposite alternative, however, appears equally untenable. If the psychological dimension takes precedence, the conceptual difficulty is to account for a predisposition to transform a harmonious self-relation into a disrupted one, a self-estrangement which, in turn, leads to distorted relations with others. That is, one has to confront the paradox of the origin of wickedness. Since Rousseau defines man as being good by nature, and the state of nature presupposes the absence of social relations, it seems clear that man never could have involved himself in wicked social relations if he were not already somehow wicked. Weakness (be it
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53 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology physical or moral) cannot explain the origin of society, for weakness is the aftermath of its institution. The paradox of the origin of wickedness exceeds that which surrounds any other origin. The paradox consists in the fact that what is originated must presuppose itself as its own cause. In the case at hand, wickedness not only presupposes itself, but also contradicts the assumed principle of man’s natural goodness. Two alternatives present themselves. Rousseau must abandon the assumption of natural goodness and embrace an opposite anthropological point of departure (namely, man’s natural wickedness), or he must retain the assumption of goodness but in a modified way. Both ways are questionable. The first one is unacceptable, for it demands that Rousseau sacrifice his basic convictions for the sake of consistency. The second is undesirable, for it puts him in the predicament of accepting the truth of the Hobbesian psychological picture, while denying Hobbes’ anthropological assumption.5 This implies the introduction of a principle of man’s internal variance, yet preserving natural goodness as an essential feature. Let me call this the aporia of wickedness, i.e. the pre-existence of a disruptive mental structure within the state of nature, which contradicts its presumed harmony. Such a structure suggests a feedback mechanism that, once initiated, makes its aggravation inevitable. In sum, any interpretative option offered to the question of where to place the source of betrayal, whether within man or in men, brings along a disturbing collateral effect. If the sociological dimension is adopted, the state of nature is banalized; if the psychological level is preferred, man’s natural goodness is questioned. There are several arguments to substantiate the priority of the psychological dimension. (1) Unlike the sociological perspective that takes society as a given, the psychological starting-point asks for its conditions of possibility. (2) Since, for Rousseau, the social is the space of deception and aggression, to ask how it emerged from prior psychological traits makes the individual wholly accountable for his current misery. (3) The realization of this accountability entreats him to modify such a situation. Moreover, (4) it is in the genealogy of civilization where lies, as if in an inverted image, the guideline for a new kind of political order. That is, the methodological priority of the psychological dimension supports Rousseau’s critique of civilization and points to the conditions for a new social contract. Yet the theoretical necessity of adopting this view must still be measured by its capacity to solve the interpretative problems indicated above, i.e. how to understand man’s natural isolation and his natural goodness. Since both problems contain the concept of nature as a common denominator, let me first analyze Rousseau’s employment of this concept.
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54 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) Nature as ideal If one is to take Rousseau’s rhetoric of a dichotomy between the state of nature and social relations literally, then one loses sight of the intricacies in the development that has led to the present unhappiness of humanity and any hope for its future amelioration. If ‘men are wicked, [and yet] man is naturally good’, once the original goodness is lost, men are doomed to remain on an unbroken path of depravity. If this were the case, Rousseau would never have written the Considerations on the Government of Poland or the Constitutional Project for Corsica. Although the political procedures these texts suggest are improbable, this does not mean that they are impossible.6 Hope for man’s betterment is granted because natural goodness is inextricable. It does not simply vanish once man is socialized, but it is stifled and then becomes a source of anxiety. Hope and anxiety are the psychological effects of the memory of man’s natural goodness. If the natural man were a dim picture of the past, his image would neither mortify us nor make us tremble with expectation. The natural in man, if it is to be at all, must remain operative as an ideal: namely, as an ought en-tangled in an is. Let me state what I understand this ideal to be. The ‘ought’ is tantamount to a self-centered will, a will not controlled or determined by the will of another. ‘Natural’ designates those situations in which one has at one’s disposal the means of satisfying one’s needs. One is able to do so when those needs belong to one’s nature, or when other wills are not involved as a cause in one’s satisfaction, thereby leaving one’s self unaffected by their whims.7 A natural will would not necessarily be a solipsistic one impervious to contact with other human beings, but one which, on account of its lucid self-relation is able to relate to others as it relates to itself, immediately and without distortion. Although this kind of relation does not preclude social bonds, it is undoubtedly marred by the habitual interchanges in a competitive society. Natural comprises diverse situations, such as a primitive man hunting in the meadows, a civilized man acting purely out of commiseration, instances of conjugal love or friendship, and political life when the general will is realized as self-subjection. Unnatural is a primitive man competing for the glory of having killed a deer, a civilized man helping others to gain their gratitude and a government using the general will as a guise for particular interests. There are other examples, but these suffice to make my point clear. The designations of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ do not apply to any intrinsic quality of the human situations – be it isolation, society or political life. Rather, the criterion of naturalness resides in the kind of relation man’s will has towards itself, which also entails a relation towards others
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55 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology (the human and physical environment). When the variable elements of needs and means of satisfaction are in balance, one’s will is self-centered. Even if other people’s wills are involved in one’s action, their involvement is not the cause of one’s volitions, but its occasion. ‘Unnatural’ is the situation where I lose sight of my own will, the balance between needs and means of satisfaction is broken, and other people’s wills not only supplement my impotence, but also dictate the content of my volitions. In such cases, occasions become causes and one’s will is othercentered. Let me outline the meaning of these concepts. I mean by situation the setting of an action, by occasion the relation of one will towards another, and by cause the determination of an action by external stimuli, (either the desires of other men or a mere sensation). By will, I designate man’s faculty of desire and action, susceptible to inner or outer determination. If in an occasion the will acts freely, i.e. expressing an inner determination, I say it has grounds for action. A cause, on the other hand, designates a case of outer determination that necessitates the action. Rousseau himself uses none of these concepts systematically. My claim is that they must be assumed and reconstructed as the necessary framework for his use of the natural as ideal. Some situations conspire against naturalness. For example, if in social life my well-being depends upon my reputation, I must incorporate the other’s opinion as a cause of my action, and, in doing so, I betray my self in the act of obeying a situational rule. However, even in this extreme case, the situation does not determine my action; otherwise, I would not be accountable for it. The efficacy of the natural as ideal depends on its being context-independent. Some situations are necessary conditions of unnaturalness; none is a sufficient condition. This fact captures the normative power of the natural, regardless of the situationality of the action. Naturalness points to something that situations can encourage or thwart, but which lies beyond the mere setting. It is the language of inner feelings, which situations somehow translate but never fully exhaust. Now, if the natural is an ideal operative within social contexts, it is simple-minded to conflate its logical function with its historical antecedence. Consequently, the analysis of the logical constraints with which this ideal is brought about becomes a methodological priority in any understanding of Rousseau’s position, for these constraints pervade the development of the genealogical account as a whole. I call this analysis structural in order to distinguish it from the genetic one – the one Rousseau actually offers in the Discourses. This distinction clears the way for solving the difficulties indicated in the prior section. For the aporia of wickedness and man’s natural isolation result from applying to history determinations that truly belong to structure.
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56 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) The logic of the ideal In the present context, I mean by logic the analysis of the implications of concepts and by concepts the main categories of Rousseau’s anthropological thought. When these implications are examined at their purely conceptual level, i.e. disregarding their genetic correlate, the task of logic is to make explicit Rousseau’s assumptions and their net of relations. Structural designates here the overall anthropological picture presented by the logic of concepts alone.8 Despite the assertion of self-centeredness, structurally speaking, the normative use of the natural yields a picture of man as being intrinsically opened towards the other. The specificity of one’s own will results from its difference with regard to the other’s will and could not be determined without it. The alien is the horizon against which the ego’s will constitutes its own identity. It is not by chance that the ideal of naturalness was couched in a negative definition: ‘a self-centered will, a will not controlled or determined by the will of another’.9 The other’s will is ever present and ever suppressed as the cause of my will. It can accompany my action as part of the situation, but it cannot determine my conduct. The occasion provides a ground and not a cause for action.10 Man is intrinsically open towards the exterior, and yet, if his action is to remain natural, it must come from within. To be natural, the will must reverse the order presented by man’s make-up.11 Although his senses and his will are directed spontaneously to the outside, if such an orientation determines the action, we must speak of unnaturalness rather than of naturalness. There is, so to speak, a natural unnaturalness within man’s situations: the occasion of other wills, which places the action in context, is also what the senses present first as a cause for action. The tension between man’s make-up and the need for inner determination explains why, for Rousseau, self-knowledge is the most necessary, though the most difficult achievement. Provided by Nature with organs destined exclusively for our preservation, we use them only to receive foreign impressions, we seek only to spread outward, and to exist outside ourselves; too busy multiplying the functions of our senses and extending the external scope of our being, we rarely use that internal sense which reduces us to our true dimensions, and separates from us everything that does not belong to it. Yet this is the sense we must use if we wish to know ourselves; it is the only one by which we can judge ourselves.12
The root of the tension in the natural unnaturalness is the result of Rousseau’s elision, within the single concept of nature, of two different meanings. One is descriptive and designates the outward disposition of man’s senses and the spontaneous orientation of his will. The other is
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57 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology prescriptive and designates the ideal of a self-centered will. Both are ‘natural’, but one states how things are, whereas the other shows how things must be if one’s own essential features are to be realized. To avoid any misunderstanding, allow me to designate them by means of two different concepts, human make-up and human nature. The former refers to the descriptive aspect and captures those features in man that are capable of change. The latter designates what I have called nature as ideal, i.e. the normative criterion and the horizon of permanence against which change can be measured. Human nature stands for man’s essence, for what is of utmost value in him; human make-up stands for his appearance, for what is ancillary to him.13 Even if in Rousseau’s genetic account the concept of human nature is endowed with logical, ontological, moral, and historical priority, it is important to note that, in terms of structure, it is not an autonomous concept, but rather depends upon the concept of human make-up. Both notions are logically connected. By positing one, we introduce the other as a matter of course. It is undeniable that the argument in the First Discourse and the Second Discourse assumes an historical shape, and that Rousseau conceived of it genetically. Nonetheless, the rules of its development are structurally determined and belong to the mere logic of concepts. If one looks for such rules in history, one finds a ‘fortuitous concatenation of circumstances’ (SD, I, 139; III, 140). However, if one analyzes the logical determinations, one sees that things could not possibly have been otherwise. This is so because Rousseau presents an anthropological model of self-transformation, in which the logic of human nature is necessarily superseded by the logic of human make-up. Let me describe how the unfolding of concepts turns man in contradiction with his own essence. One’s own will, engaging with others as occasions of action, must gradually transform its self-characteriation, for man’s constitutive openness forces him to interpret the environment. His construction of other wills, whose essences are shown but not stated in their actions, becomes, negatively, part of the determination of his own will. Rejecting their volitions, he negatively incorporates them in the process of self-identification. They are the content that must be suppressed as a cause of action. The way in which man constructs the others’ standing towards him involuntarily reverts to the definition of his standing towards them. The occasion of other wills gradually pervades the dictations of one’s own will, and, after a certain point, becomes a cause of one’s own action. Henceforth, man’s will is alien to him; his self is self-estranged.14 To the extent that Rousseau presents an anthropological model of self-transformation, the process of self-estrangement necessarily involves time. In this respect, the historical description of the genesis of inequality
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58 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) and moral depravity is a methodological requirement. However, insofar as Rousseau’s concept of nature conceals a conceptual opposition between human make-up and human nature, it is the case that the laws of historical development inhere a priori in the structure. The examination of the layout of the Second Discourse offers proof that such is the connection between the genetic and structural aspects. While the Preface complains about the difficulties surrounding selfknowledge, the Second Part concludes by lamenting man’s condition in civilized society. Complaint and lamentation recognize the misfortune of being constituted in a way that impairs one’s happiness. Whereas our make-up ‘seek[s] only to spread outwards’, our nature finds satisfaction only in inwardness. That which veils and distorts the access to one’s self is described in exactly the same terms as Rousseau uses to contrast civilized and savage: the first lives outside himself (hors de lui), the second in himself (en lui-même) (SD, I, 187; III, 193). The history of inequality, which is the narration of the processes that led man to live outside himself, is the history of the reversal of the principles, i.e. the overthrow of the ends of human nature by the orientations of human make-up. The textual circularity of the Second Discourse expresses, by its very form, the logical determinations of its content. The savage and the bourgeois, separated by centuries which made the species grow old and seemed to keep man forever as a child (SD, 157; 160), are historical incarnations of structural positions, which are neither in history nor outside history, but constitute the condition of the possibility of history. The aporia of wickedness, namely, the co-original presence in the human mind of a disruptive structure contradicting the principle of man’s natural goodness, results from Rousseau’s placement of the natural as ideal in the position of an absolute beginning. The origin becomes both normative criterion and historical event. That is, the concept of human nature, structurally dependent upon that of human make-up, represents also the beginning from which all progress is a deviation. The temporal unfolding of the logical relation displaces, as if in a sequence, the contradictory meanings united a priori in the single concept of nature. The genetic procedure makes us seek prospectively that which was – structurally speaking – the hidden source of motion. I concede: the natural man cannot involve himself in wicked social relations without being already wicked. Yet, the paradox disappears if we search for the origin of wickedness not in the unfolding, but in what makes it possible. Namely, the presence in the anthropological model of opposite demands that represent orientations with equal structural standing. The result, wickedness, presupposes itself as its own cause, for it is the fulfillment of that co-original aspect of man’s nature that I called human make-up.
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59 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology ‘Natural’ and ‘unnatural’ sociability The question of man’s natural isolation remains to be interpreted. In the discussion of whether the sociological dimension could receive methodological priority we were led to the vicious circle of having to assume society in order to explain the possibility of its effect, namely, man’s internal betrayal. For, if ‘man is good and society corrupts him’ (LB, IV, 935–6), and ‘only he who already has betrayed himself is capable of betraying others’ (statement III), then the source of such a betrayal must come from the social order. Yet, this order cannot claim to exist in the state of nature, where men are said to live in isolation from one another.15 If we accept (1) that the natural is an ideal operative within social contexts, and (2) that the definition of a self-centered will does not preclude the existence of others, it is clear that the dichotomy between natural and unnatural does not overlap with the distinction between social and asocial. The first proposition must be accepted as an explanation of the individual’s psychological distress in civilization, the second, as an implication of the ideal of a self-centered will. From a structural point of view, the assumption of man’s natural isolation is untenable, for the will of another is co-posited with my will as the negative horizon for self-identification. From a genetic point of view, however, Rousseau is able to identify the consequence (society) as the cause of man’s internal betrayal. For he does not intend to explain the origin of the social bond as such, but only the origin of the bond that necessarily leads to man’s unhappiness. Since reasoning about the origin of society can take place only already within social bonds, Rousseau’s insight comprises the awareness that the concept of man entails the concept of society and that contemporary society is in utter contradiction with man’s concept. If men now tear themselves apart, and yet man has in himself the potential for happiness, the genealogy of his misery is the narration of how man happened to subvert his own essence. The possibility of this genealogy, I argued, resides in Rousseau positing the concept of man’s ‘nature’ into contradiction with itself. Consequently, man’s isolation must be interpreted as a metaphor of the psychological framework which human nature must have if it is taken as an absolute beginning. It projects into the remote past Rousseau’s conception of personal happiness in the here and now.16 The mistake of giving methodological priority to the sociological dimension does not consist in presupposing human sociability (which Rousseau would not dispute), but in overlooking the truth conveyed by the metaphor: our current sociability is unnatural, it renders us necessarily unhappy. Isolation never existed as a historical truth; it always has been a moral necessity. I may seem to contradict myself. For moral accountability disappears if the structural setting of the problem of man’s nature (namely,
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60 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) the conflation of the opposite determinations of human nature and human make-up) introduces as a matter of fact the internal law of the genealogical development. Man’s current self-estrangement would be the result of the a priori constraints operating in the concepts. History could only ratify a sentence reached beforehand by logic. The fatalistic tone of this reasoning is a consequence of Rousseau’s understanding the questions that gave rise to the Discourses as if they were causal, despite their being intended as historical. As he begins the inquiry by recognizing the fact of inequality and the reality of Hobbesianism, he develops a conceptual framework that could account for how such a situation came to be. It is not surprising that the analysis of the implications of his concepts, taken abstractly, reaches the same conclusion as the genetic explication. Yet, this concordance should not be termed fatalism, but rather consistency. It is true: Rousseau’s success in answering the questions of the Dijon Academy conflicts with his own moral intention. To account causally for something, even if it is shown to be unnatural, reconciles our understanding to the inevitability of its existence. Reason and feeling have different demands here and what convinces does not persuade.17 I believe that the notion of deferment, implied in Rousseau’s anthropological model of self-transformation, provides a middle ground between theoretical consistency and moral criticism. For it permits a degree of play between the logical constraints and man’s accountability for his current misery. Human nature is neither social nor asocial, but contains the deferment of the social, precisely because it refers to human make-up as its conceptual correlate. Natural and social intersect, so that the actual effect of the latter depends upon the evolution of the former. This evolution puts the finality of human nature, which Rousseau projects at the beginning of history as a logical necessity, in contradiction with itself. Man is shown as the unintended, yet responsible agent of his own misery, while this misery is presented as dormant in the contradictions of the structure. It is the equivocation of necessary and yet postponed effects that allows Rousseau to exclude a-sociability as a historical truth, while preserving it as a moral truth.
Methodological problems in the uses of the ideal The logical analysis of the concept of nature offered a way to interpret the aporia of wickedness and man’s natural isolation. However, these achievements seem to be self-defeating. For they bracket the most conspicuous feature of Rousseau’s anthropology, namely, the use of history, the explanation of phenomena in terms of processes that involve time as a prerequisite.
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61 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology What right do I have to occupy a position contradictory to Rousseau’s narrative strategy in the Discourses? If their novelty resides in their being genealogical, then I would have deprived Rousseau of his favorite weapon. As Derathé argues, all the other theorists of natural law committed the same methodological error: they disregarded the notion of perfectibility and the profound modifications that social life can incur upon man’s nature.18 I can be accused, then, of having imposed upon Rousseau the same mistake that the other philosophers had imposed upon man. I see only one possible answer to this charge. The structural position I presented is the one Rousseau himself is forced to adopt in order to answer the question about the origin of inequality and moral decadence. The use of the natural as a diagnostic instrument left him no other option. For, Rousseau links the knowledge of man to the knowledge of the source of inequality, but the possibility of acquiring the former stands in inverse proportion to the development of the latter (SD, I, 124; III, 122). The advance of civilization disfigures man’s self-relation to the point of rendering the original unrecognizable. If one has no immediate access to it, the search for the natural is not simply an elusive dream ‘about which it is nevertheless necessary to have exact Notions’ (SD, I, 135; III, 123), but a sheer hallucination. One’s self must be able to be placed, at the same time, both at the beginning and at the end of the process of self-betrayal. The narrative strategy of genealogy comes afterwards. It is the most effective rhetorical device to bring the reader to reject this process. The genetic method, which proceeds synthetically by adding alwaysnew determinations, presupposes a moment of analysis.19 Only by divesting his own/universal self from what it has acquired in the process of socialization, can Rousseau reach the presumed origin. Yet, the progressive movement of the genetic method proceeds as if forgetting the regressive or analytic moment that made it possible. Let me rephrase our methodological problem. The plausibility of Rousseau’s genealogy derives from the underlying conceptual framework, analytic in character, which I presented in the structural approach. Yet, the existence of this framework remains on the level of a presupposition: it must be reconstructed from what Rousseau shows in his genetic account. The logic of the ideal is the statement of what is shown. Yet, such a statement indicates that there must be a bridging element, a deeper sense of logic by means of which the conceptual constraints find expression in the story Rousseau actually tells us. That is, there must be a mechanism by which the implicit set of logical relations is translated into the language Rousseau actually uses to describe the progress of inequality and moral decadence. I designate as logic in a broader sense the mechanism by means of which the purely conceptual determinations
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62 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) of the structure constitute types of human action, i.e. the types of behavior Rousseau actually describes as historical phenomena. I believe that the best way to accommodate the different demands of history and structure is by conceiving the broader sense of logic in a quasitranscendental way.20 Rousseau observes the fact of inequality and asks for its conditions of possibility. This procedure can be termed transcendental because it is occupied not so much by actual inequalities, as with their a priori anthropological conditions. Yet, it is not completely transcendental, for it does not remain within the domain of those conditions, but unfolds them as if they were a posteriori historical determinations, giving rise to the difficulties we encountered in the first part of this work. This quasi-transcendental character is necessary if the natural is to remain operative as an ideal throughout Rousseau’s genetic account. It is the form that the structural demands take on when translated into history: it is the form Rousseau’s moral anthropology must adopt to be convincing; Let us therefore begin by setting aside all the facts [Rousseau refers here to the Christian version of the origin of man and the world, as well as to the philosophers’ descriptions of the state of nature], for they do not affect the question. The inquiries that may be pursued regarding this Subject ought not be taken for historical truths, but only for the hypothetical and conditional reasoning; better suited to elucidate the Nature of things than to show their genuine origin. (SD, I, 132; III, 132–3)
In short, what the state of nature loses in historical reality, it gains in theoretical necessity. The transcendental aspect of Rousseau’s thought overlaps with what I called the structural approach. This was analyzed under the heading of logic in a limited sense. Its non-transcendental part corresponds to Rousseau’s genealogical strategy, which expresses these logical constraints as if they were empirical and a posteriori. Logic in the broader sense illustrates how the logical framework constitutes the types of actions Rousseau describes in the genetic account. Such translatability is required for Rousseau’s moral indictment to be at all tenable. In what follows, I will try to show how the demands of theoretical consistency and moral accountability are made compatible on the basis of this broader sense of logic.21
Ego sentio In the genetic account, man’s natural state is attained through a rational divestment of all that reason and history have added to a conjecturally pristine human structure. It is important to note, however, that the divestment of social imprints cannot disclose a simple tabula rasa waiting for external inscription. Rather, it must yield a structure in which
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63 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology all potentialities will be realized depending on external circumstances, but according to their inner aptitude as well. Since one of these potentialities is precisely man’s accountability, Rousseau must accommodate the model of a tabula rasa so that the causally determined desires and sensations do not intrude on the specific domain of man’s responsible agency. As a creature of sensations, outwardly oriented, man is the plaything of external stimuli, the passive recipient of the environment. This outward aspect of man is what I previously termed human make-up. If this were all there is to his nature, man would not be morally accountable for his actions. True humanity finds expression in self-determination, in the inward aspect I called human nature. Therefore, natural man is a tabula rasa having human make-up and human nature as equally original determinations. The question is now which potentiality Rousseau must first bring to the fore. For this initial move will determine the direction of the story he is going to narrate. If he chooses the orientation of human make-up, the natural as ideal would lose its diagnostic power, for the picture of man as the plaything of the external world coincides with Rousseau’s conception of the bourgeois living ‘outside of himself’. Cultural puppeteering would simply continue the puppeteering of the world of nature. Since such a path is barren, the genealogy cannot but place the structural determinations of human nature in the position of an absolute beginning of history; Hence disregarding all the scientific books that only teach us to see men as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and simplest operations of the human Soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles prior to reason, of which one interests us intensely in our wellbeing and our selfpreservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance at seeing any sentient Being, and especially any Being like ourselves, perish or suffer. It is from the cooperation and from the combination our mind is capable of making between these two Principles, without it being necessary to introduce into it that of sociability, that all the rules of natural right seem to me to flow; rules which reason is subsequently forced to reestablish on other foundations, when by its successive developments it has succeeded in stifling Nature. (SD, Preface, I, 127; III, 125–6)
The priority of these principles with respect to reason is both logical and moral. Logical, because they express the simplest operations of the mind – they furnish the standard in respect to which all subsequent operations are more complex. Moral, because in the pure immediacy of feeling they establish totalities, with respect either to one’s own needs (wellbeing) or to the needs of another creature (pity). In the case of pity, the other’s pain is a ground for one’s care because one’s own sentiency is identified with the sentiency of another. This identification is immediate. Awareness of human make-up renders human nature more receptive. One may object to this reading that the required awareness is too
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64 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) reflective and too rational to be possible at this stage. I can make four replies to this objection. First, for Rousseau these pre-rational ‘operations of the mind’ are common to animals and men (for both have senses), and they are nothing but the expression of sentiency (SD, I, 140–1; III, 141–2). Second, since the determinations of human nature reverse the orientation of human make-up, and since both are equally original potentialities in the tabula rasa, Rousseau is entitled to play with their reflective contrast once he grants human nature genealogical antecedence. Third, the kind of self-awareness presupposed at this stage is reflexive, without being conceptual in character. Rather, it is the awareness of one’s own feelings, an elementary form of self-consciousness that could be expressed in the statement ‘I know that I feel’. Finally, just as the ego cogito was the founding principle of Descartes’ metaphysics, the ego sentio is the cornerstone for Rousseau’s morality. Its most basic intuition seems to be ‘I feel, therefore I am’. The consequences of Rousseau’s intuition are clearly different from those of Descartes. Whereas the process of doubt in the Cartesian cogito entailed the collapse of the world and the imprisonment of the self in the thinking substance, the process of feeling in Rousseau’s sentio facilitates the immediate linkage of the self with the world. The problem of a duality of substance is avoided, for the self is embedded in its own nature, rather than – as in Descartes – nature being the other of one’s self, mere non-thinking matter. Furthermore, in Rousseau’s morality, the ego sentio must be able to accompany all man’s actions. This does not mean that all actions actually express the ego sentio, but that they could ultimately be reduced to it. Only the actions which ensue from human nature fully express the self’s sentiency. The fact that all possible actions can be referred to the ego sentio indicates man’s accountability and its accompanying ideal of self-centeredness. Consequently, although Rousseau argues that self-preservation and pity are the ‘simplest operations of the Soul’, it is nonetheless clear that the intuition of the ego sentio is more fundamental, for it makes those very operations possible. That is, the ego sentio expresses, in the genetic account, the logical relation which human nature and human make-up have in the structure. It is the quasi-transcendental translation of the logic of those concepts. I am not claiming that Rousseau explicitly argues points (2) to (4), but that they must be assumed for his thinking to have adopted the form it has. Even if we must recognize a kind of reflexivity in Rousseau’s prerational principles (particularly evident in pity), this does not mean that those principles are rational in character. Rather, their reflexivity is rooted in the superior form of sentiency moral feeling represents. Admitting such reflexivity does not undermine my argument. On the contrary, it brings to it an additional proof. It corroborates the fact that the structural framework must operate in the background if Rousseau’s genetic strategy is, in the first place, to be rendered possible.
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65 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology Static and dynamic principles The ego sentio is the genetic translation of the co-presence of human nature and human make-up. It is discovered as a necessary assumption underlying the principles of self-preservation and pity. The former points not simply to one’s physical endurance, but to one’s well-being (bienêtre). It is not a mere biological drive to keep on living, but one that aims to live well. Rousseau does not analyze the meaning of ‘well’ here, but it can certainly be linked to the ideal of self-centeredness: namely, a self which is not a heap of conflicting passions but a harmonious system of desires, whose satisfaction, in turn, allows a continent relation with others. Since one’s needs are limited, the other is not implicated as a cause in their satisfaction. Self-preservation enables the establishment of a totality with respect to one’s self, which can be expanded by pity into larger totalities of feeling. For this to happen, the sentiency of fellow creatures is more important than their presumed rationality. Compassion is felt not because the other is a person endowed with rights, but because she is a sentient being. Not harming her implies the recognition of our mutual standing as outwardly oriented creatures.22 That is, Rousseau’s original principles epitomize ideal types of relation, both at the level of the individual (well-being) and at the level of the relation with others (pity). If these principles were the only psychic drives existing in man, his passions would have always remained sluggish and the possibility of moral inequality would have been extirpated before it articulated its first cries; I conceive of two sorts of inequality in the human Species: one, which I call Natural or Physical, because it is established by Nature, and which consists in differences of age, health, strengths of Body, and qualities of Mind or of Soul; the other, which may be called moral, or political inequality, because it depends on a sort of convention, and is established, or at least authorized by Men’s consent. It consists in the different Privileges which some enjoy to the prejudice of the others, such as to be more wealthy, more honored, more powerful than they, or even to get themselves obeyed by them. (SD, I, 138; III, 131)
In contrast to the symmetrical bond established in natural morality, the inherent claim of moral inequality is that of being more. It is based upon antagonistic comparisons between individuals. The assertion of a certain quality (say, wealth or power) entails the negation of that very same quality in another subject. One’s enjoyment brings about the other’s misery. Moral inequality operates as an inequality of the second degree: (1) an objective difference is restated as (2) inter-subjective asymmetry. That is, an objective superiority co-establishes a moral inferiority.23 Physical inequality, on the contrary, remains within the limits of an inequality of the first degree, for the objective difference is not translated
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66 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) into a moral one. This allows the incorporation of other individuals as grounds for one’s action. Even if it presupposes a certain disparity between stronger and weaker, this does not cancel the awareness of their mutual standing as sentient creatures. The maxim upon which natural morality operates can be formulated thus: ‘Do your good with the least possible harm to others’ (SD, I, 154; III, 156). Pity cannot command that one impair one’s well-being in helping others. Rather, it suggests a way to enhance it by the ratification of one’s situational strength in the very act of helping. Self-centeredness is not disinterested, yet it allows the integration of others as grounds for action. By contrast, the maxim of moral inequality can be phrased thus: ‘Harm others if it is good for you’. It is not a command to hurt others for the sake of it, but to use all means in order to pursue one’s interest: hurt, deception, submission, or whatever the different situations may suggest. This institutes the presupposition of a mutual distrust. Even if one does not actually hurt another, one would do so if it were beneficial to oneself. While trust expresses the presupposition that assistance will come if it is not hurtful to the giver, distrust is the presupposition that abuse will come if it is gainful. Rousseau rejects any causal connection between the two types of inequality. Otherwise, those who command could claim to be wiser or stronger than those who obey are (SD, I, 132; III, 131–2). A causal relation would legitimate social injustice on the basis of natural differences. This implies giving up the conventional dimension and the inner transformation of subjects which founds moral inequality. Although inequality seems at first sight to be based on ‘the violence of the powerful men and the oppression of the weak’, this view proves to be deceitful. ‘Nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships that are more often the product of chance than of wisdom, and that are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty’ (SD, I, 128; III, 127). The foundations of society are laid upon a more unshakeable basis – the radical transformation of man’s consciousness. How is this transformation possible at all? How are the symmetrical relations of pity and self-preservation transmuted into the asymmetrical bond of moral inequality? What elements in man’s natural equipment allow his self-estrangement? Rousseau answers these questions by introducing two additional psychological principles, freedom and perfectibility. They account for the instability of man’s nature. I call these principles dynamic in order to distinguish them from their static correlates, pity and self-preservation, which tend towards the conservation of a proper balance both within oneself and in relation with others. The conservative aspect of these static principles does not imply that they are instinctual. Instinct is confined to the biological sphere, whereas the static principles have a
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67 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology moral implication. They express the enduring normative core in human nature. The dynamic principles, on the other hand, indicate how man is diverted away from such a core, how he is put outside of himself, how, in sum, the orientation of human make-up subverts human nature. They can be described as drives within the natural equipment that leap into the unnatural. Even if the dynamic principles could lead to the aggrandizement or the impoverishment of the human, structurally speaking, they are constrained to break the balance of the moral paradigm and dispel the immediacy of man’s happiness. Freedom points to the fact that man’s will continues to speak even when nature falls silent. ‘Nature commands every animal, and the Beast obeys. Man experiences the same impression, but recognizes himself free to acquiesce or to resist’ (SD, I, 141; III, 141–2). If nature is understood here, as Rousseau seems to suggest, only as the realm of causally determined sensations, then the coherence of the argument breaks down. For the moral quality of a feeling such as pity rests precisely on the fact that a situation does not determine one’s action. If the action were outwardly determined, its inner moral value would disappear. Therefore, Rousseau’s argument, if it is to remain coherent, must be exploiting a duplicity in the concept of nature: (1) nature must designate the fixed set of responses that can be reduced ultimately to mechanical laws (sensations); and (2) nature must designate the inward realm of feelings (i.e. human nature). Freedom is conceived as the capacity to negate both meanings. That is, Rousseau introduces the principle of freedom in order to make man accountable for the negation of nature. Yet, since the concept of nature is equivocal, the negation logically spreads over its twofold meaning. Man can negate his human nature, betray his moral core and seek satisfaction in the external (self-estrangement); or man can negate sensations (the outward orientation of human make-up), remain faithful to his moral core and seek satisfaction in the internal (self-centeredness). Since the latter is the implicit condition of the possibility of the static principles, the conceptual function of freedom as a dynamic principle is logically determined to produce the first kind of negation, i.e. self-betrayal. Otherwise, the progress of moral inequality would be inconceivable. Nonetheless, the normative capacity of human nature resides in the fact that occasions posit conditions that are not irreversible, i.e. provide grounds and not causes for action. Consequently, although in the genetic account freedom is determined to be immoral, for it is determined to be the principle of negation of human nature, from a structural point of view it must be assumed to be originally innocent, otherwise the static principles themselves would lack moral import. The second dynamic principle – perfectibility – gives a complementary account of man’s capacity to silence nature. Just as freedom is the
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68 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) capacity for self-betrayal, tailored to produce the reversal of the static principle of self-preservation, perfectibility is a world-shaping force tailored to reverse pity’s capacity to establish larger totalities of feeling. Perfectibility is ‘the faculty of perfecting oneself; a faculty which, with the aid of circumstances, successively develops all the others, and resides in us, in the species as well as in the individual’ (SD, I, 141; III, 142). When confronting an obstacle, man feels his own superiority in overcoming it. He reflects and organizes the means to do so using instrumental reason. Reason dispels the originally immediate relation with the environment. Man’s relative superiority in confronting matter will soon enough claim to be expressed in social relations. Domination of nature reverts into domination of men. Everything becomes a disposable means. Imagination is excited, all passions are awakened and man is forced always to go beyond, to spread outwards. He can linger no longer in one situation; he must transcend it. Instability becomes the principle of life. All of this is well known. Before entering the whirl of dynamic principles, let me remain briefly in the moment prior to their eruption. Man’s natural condition can be imagined, then, as one of certainty with respect to his own self. Since instrumental reason had not yet disrupted the immediate relation between desires and means of satisfaction, the savage desires only what he can reach. His passions respect the limit that his self-preservation imposes, and his knowledge, which could trigger his desires in unexpected directions, is checked by the simplicity of those passions; With the single exception of the Physically necessary, which Nature itself requires, all our needs are needs only by habit, prior to which they were not needs, or by our desires, and one does not desire what one is not in a position to know. Whence it follows that, since Savage man desires only the things he knows, and knows only the things the possession of which is in his power or easy to achieve, nothing must be so calm as his soul and nothing so limited as his mind. (Note XI, SD, I, 212; III, 214)
Artificial needs are not less needful than the natural. But while the former are created by the limitless weave of reason and social caprice, the latter are confined to the finite constellation of the physical needs, whose satisfaction lie within one’s own power (hunger, sexual appetite, etc.). Whereas artificial needs are other-centered, physical needs have a self-referential character – i.e. they are self-centered. For the subject posits them according to his actual needs and the objects of his desire refer immediately back to those needs. The static principles of self-preservation and pity offer a moral paradigm of self-relation and of relation with others that functions within the framework of natural needs. This paradigm is not in opposition to social bonds. On the contrary, it provides an ideal for inter-subjective
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69 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology relations based on harmonious self-relations. Needs are natural because they are integrated into a system tending to man’s well-being. ‘Isolation’ is Rousseau’s metaphor to express the presence of other wills as grounds in one’s own satisfaction, i.e. their exclusion as causes. Self-centeredness does not mean – as it does in Hobbes – an unavoidable conflict between subjects. This kind of antagonism is incompatible with man’s autarchic traits in the state of nature. Only fear and weakness make man cruel, and neither of these passions can become dominant, for they spring from universal dependence – i.e. from the state opposed to autarchy (SD, I, 151; III, 154). While natural strength and general dependence are mutually exclusive, frailty and disquietude are the necessary result for men who have ‘subjected themselves to universal dependence and obligated themselves to receive everything from those who do not obligate themselves to give them anything’ (SD, I, 151; III, 153). By means of freedom and perfectibility, man attempted to dominate all and became the slave of everyone and everything. His slavery actualizes other-centeredness as a psychological framework.
Self and other in society Let me survey, before the argument is advanced, what I have said so far. While the reflexivity of the ego sentio translates into the genetic account the structural tensions within the concept of nature, static and dynamic principles represent the orientations of human nature and human makeup and explain how their reversion is possible. They translate a priori (structural) constraints into empirical (psychological) determinations. Man’s structural variance is thus expressed in the form of psychological drives with a contradictory character. While the static principles convey Rousseau’s moral ideal, the dynamic principles are the genealogical device that explains the diversion from that ideal. The structure thus undergoes movement and unfolds its internal determinations as if it were an historical issue. Rousseau’s picture of men’s situation in civilized society, characterized by universal dependence and aggression, must be understood then in terms of this implicit structural discord; namely, as the displacement of the logic of static principles by the logic of dynamic principles. Logic is meant here in the broader sense, i.e. as the behavioral pattern ensuing from, and constituted by, a priori anthropological conditions. Perfectibility and freedom, actualizing man’s inherent possibility of ignoring the normative urge of the static principles, open the way to the kind of conduct Rousseau attributes to civilized men. Perfectibility overpowers pity and leads to the development of instrumental reason. Domination of nature and cancellation of one’s capacity to establish totalities
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70 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) of feeling ensue as an interminable chain of miseries whose common denominator is violence or aggression. For perfectibility prevents man from seeing others qua sentient beings, and makes him identify them as subjects standing against him, i.e. disposable objects. Freedom, on the other hand, overpowers self-preservation. It breaks the balance between needs and means of satisfaction and negates the determinations of human nature. Freedom produces self-betrayal and thus leads to universal dependence (other-centeredness). The ego sentio is operative still, but in the form of privation. That is, as an insensible relation towards oneself that entails an antagonistic relation towards others but has sentiency as a condition of its possibility. To enrich the description of the process of self-estrangement, Rousseau introduces two additional concepts, amour de soi and amour propre. The former is identified with the kind of morality embedded in the static principles, while the latter ratifies the distortions effected by the dynamic principles. Amour propre [vanity] and Amour de soi-même [self-love], two very different passions in their nature and their effects, must not be confused. Self-love is a natural sentiment which inclines every animal to attend to its self-preservation and which, guided in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue. Amour propre is only a relative sentiment, factitious, and born in society, which inclines every individual to set greater store by himself than by anyone else, inspires men with all the evils they do one another and is the genuine source of honor. (SD, I, 218; III, 219)
Amour de soi, conjoining self-preservation and pity in a single principle, embodies the kernel of Rousseau’s moral ideal – well-being at the individual level and virtue in social intercourse. Thus, it can be considered as the fulfillment of the demands of self-centeredness and human nature. Amour propre, on the other hand, is the passion that designates the Hobbesian mental framework in contemporary society. It epitomizes the logic of the dynamic principles and constitutes the psychological orientation of other-centeredness – thus, it represents the demands of human make-up. Its characteristic feature is the claim of invidious precedence over other men. This claim is based upon comparisons, so that a more entails a less while an equal share is precluded. Amour propre implies a will to the dominion and subordination of others. It is said to be ‘factitious’ not because it is incompatible with certain features of man’s nature (i.e. human make-up), but because it conspires against man’s natural or real good. This indicates that Rousseau is here confronting two kinds of good, one real and the other apparent. For the comparison to be possible there must be a common ground from which their presumed reality (or
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71 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology deceitfulness) can be measured. The criterion lies, I believe, in man’s capacity to establish totalities, primordially with himself and other men, derivatively with the environment. Natural man attains his ‘good’ because he is self-centered. He ‘views himself as the only spectator to observe him, as the only being in the universe to take any interest in him, as the only judge on his own merit’ (SD, I, 218; III, 219). He can be injured by another man, but never offended. An offense implies a hermeneutic of intentions that he simply lacks. His natural passions are the only judge of the other’s actions. They cannot provide a measure to interpret those acts as contemptuous or deferential, for his basic presupposition is that ‘one does the good with the least possible harm of another’. He is his own symbolic paradigm, and since he is good inside, nothing is wicked outside. Civilized men, on the other hand, also seek their good, but their conception of oneness is distorted by their conception of property, that is, by the model of exclusive possession. Instead of one belonging to the totality as a part, one wants the totality to belong to oneself. Instead of cultivating the internal, one has a passion for the external, an insatiable pleasure for the appearance of the good. One has estranged from oneself the center of one’s existence and based one’s symbolic paradigm in othercenteredness. [F]irst necessities have to be provided for, and then superfluities; next come delicacies, and then immense wealth, and then subjects, and then Slaves, he has not a moment’s respite; what is most singular is that the less natural and urgent the needs, the more the passions increase and, worse still, so does the power to satisfy them; so that after long periods of prosperity, after having swallowed up a good many treasures and ruined a good many men, my Hero will end up by cutting every throat until he is the sole master of the Universe. Such, in brief, is the moral picture if not of human life, at least of the secret aspirations of the heart of every Civilized man. (SD, I, 199; III, 203)
The autarchic model of the static principles is still operative in the dynamic ones, but in a perverted form. The certainty of one’s will is not gained by its capacity to unite with others in totalities of feeling, but rather it is obtained by the subordination of other subjects in the establishment of dualities of conflict. While amour de soi implies the enlargement of one’s self into a whole that includes others (pity), amour propre implies the relation between two terms, one of which is necessarily debased. The attempt remains that of the formation of a totality, but one based upon the rejection of the other’s equal moral standing. That the terms of these failed totalities be self-contradictory is a requirement for the reflection (comparison) to be possible. Totalities of feeling express the immediacy with which the union is produced. Since
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72 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) the totality does not belong to oneself, one’s belonging to the totality does not exclude the other’s equal share in the relation. By contrast, the totalities based on the model of exclusive possession can include the other only negatively, given the twofold renunciation of (1) his equal share in the relation and (2) his moral standing as sentient being. If the totalities of feeling are real totalities, the totalities of needs are dualities of conflict – illusive totalities. In the former, I feel the other, in the latter, I have him; in one I unite, in the other I aggregate. The existence of a common psychological pattern by which to compare real and apparent goods is important for two reasons. (1) It explains why, genetically speaking, the static principles are said to be ‘prior to reason’. That is, prior to the separation which perfectibility imposes as situational rule, and yet not prior to the reflexivity of the ego sentio, which is the condition of the possibility of establishing totalities at all. In addition, (2) it explains how the natural can operate as the normative criterion to measure wickedness in civilization. It is precisely man’s psychological capacity to form totalities of feeling that allows Rousseau to describe as unnatural those totalities of need, which are established through the logic of the dynamic principles. The kind of good pursued by amour propre is shown to be selfdefeating for three main reasons. (1) The assurance regarding one’s self expected in the comparisons is unattainable, even when one is in the position of dominance. This is the case because the other’s self, which is negated in the process of asserting one’s superiority, becomes a mere phantom which can no longer bolster any self-image worth having. The other’s subservience annuls all possibility of granting one’s self-respect. (2) Factitious goals (artificial needs), unlike physical needs, are symbolically created and are thereby virtually infinite. No matter how wealthy, powerful or admired one might be, there is always more wealth, power and admiration that elude one. The asymmetry between infinite desires and limited means subsumes man in permanent disquietude and relentlessness. Civilized men live in physical and psychological exhaustion; they squander everything and enjoy still less. (3) In seeking precedence over other men, one relates to oneself as another. This phenomenon adopts a twofold sense. (I) One is severed from one’s proper needs, separated from one’s center and de-centered by a multitude of opinions referring to the view of others, instead of to the immediacy of one’s own feelings. (II) One’s being (essence) and one’s appearance confound each other. In the search for estimation, real and pretended qualities are displayed indiscriminately, for what is at stake is the other’s opinion and not what one really is. The alienated self presents itself as spectacle.24 If natural man lives in the immediacy of feeling and recognizes himself in the other’s likeness, civilized men live in the distance of a
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73 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology calculated look over others, which disguises a submission to their looking. The immediate identification with the other intended by pity is broken by instrumental reason. Separation from oneself allows man’s indifference towards the sentiency of others. This forfeits the ground for an authentic moral relation, based upon feeling and upon the recognition of the other’s ego sentio. Reason, which makes man lose contact with the immediacy of his sentiments, in turn pushes him to embrace false values, false goods and false means of satisfaction. Reason makes man look out when he should look in. Only this transformation of man’s consciousness can explain the perdurability of moral inequalities. Violence does not produce right. ‘The strongest man is never strong enough to be master all the time, unless he transforms force in right and obedience into duty’ (SC II, Bk I, Chap. III, p. 43; III, p. 354). That is, unless he transforms a physical into a moral power. Coercion is sustained by a wasteful economy of constant vigilance. It demands a more efficient way of dominion, whose external exertion is in inverse proportion to its effectiveness in weakening man’s self-centeredness. The rich, in order to institute society, devised a twofold strategy: ‘to instill in [men] other maxims and to give them different institutions, as favorable to himself as natural Right was contrary to him’ (SD, I, 172–3; III, 177). Yet, the efficacy of this strategy depends on a more basic transformation. For ‘men let themselves be oppressed only so far as they are carried away by blind ambition . . . come to hold Domination dearer than independence and consent to bear chains so that they might impose chains on others in turn’ (SD, I, 183; III, 188). Only other-centered individuals can bear chains. Seeking satisfaction for his own desire of dominion, man not only betrays the ideal of his innermost nature, but also undermines the grounds for the attainment of that very desire, because he must submit to others in order to command them. He who seeks to be powerful becomes dependent and weak. Other-centeredness is a form of false consciousness. As we already know, Rousseau summarizes the differences between natural man and civilized men in a single distinction that subsumes all others. While ‘the Savage lives in himself; the sociable man, always outside himself, is capable of living only on the opinion of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment’ (SD, I, 187; III, 193). This overarching difference, the result of a long historical process of self-betrayal, leads us back to the a priori tensions in the structure, which made history possible in the first place. For it is the conflict between man’s human nature and man’s human make-up that finds expression in the archetypes of the savage and the bourgeois, in the paradigms of living inside or outside oneself. In modern life, ‘everything becomes factitious and play-acting . . . [F]orever asking of others what we are, without even daring to ask it of
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74 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) ourselves . . . we have nothing more than a deceiving and frivolous exterior’ (ibid.). The consciousness of this banalization is measured upon the model of plentiful being, of certainty of existence, projected into the past in order to criticize the present. The difference between être and paraître demands a sound ontological structure, which Rousseau finds in human nature assumed as an ideal. Behind the mask that civilized men oblige themselves to wear, Rousseau sees the ageless traits of man’s soul and essentializes them as a reminder of his possibilities. Rousseau still sees, beneath the massive stone statue, deformed by the sea and by the storms, the face of a god. He sees Glaucus, the divine and yet ferocious beast with which Plato describes the ‘state we see the soul reduced to by countless evils’ (cf. Republic, X, 611 d).
Conclusion In this essay, I have presented an interpretation of Rousseau’s anthropology based upon the unfolding of psychological principles. The belief that nature is an ideal operative within social contexts led me to analyze the logical implications of the concept nature. By means of the opposite determinations of human nature and human make-up, I constructed a structural apparatus that allowed me both to solve the aporia of wickedness and to interpret man’s natural isolation. Yet, these achievements were attained at the price of leaving Rousseau’s genetic account aside. To avoid this difficulty, I conceived of Rousseau’s procedure in a quasi-transcendental fashion. Thereby, the purely logical constraints come to be translated into types of actions that evolve in history as a set of empirical determinations. These can be organized into two kinds of psychological principles, static and dynamic, which express – in the genetic account – the structural determinations of human nature and human make-up. Rousseau perceives the passage from one to the other as self-betrayal, for it implies the reversal of the ideal of human nature and the imposition of other-centeredness as the dominant psychological framework. The core of this essay could be summarized in a simple schema that presents Rousseau’s anthropological model as a system of basic oppositions, as shown in Diagram 1. New School for Social Research, Department of Philosophy, New York, NY, USA
PSC
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75 Muchnik: Rousseau’s anthropology Structural Human nature
Human make-up Quasi-transcendental (ego sentio)
Static principles
Dynamic principles Self-preservation (violence) Freedom Pity (universal dependence) Perfectibility Self-centeredness/amour de soi/ Other-centeredness/amour propre/ totalities of feeling totalities of need
Diagram 1 Rousseau’s anthropological model
Notes I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Y. Yovel and Professor D. Nikulin at the New School for Social Research, and to Professor A. Honneth at Frankfurt University, for the many helpful comments they made on this article. 1 I am using Victor Gourevitch’s translations of Rousseau in the two volumes published by Cambridge University Press: Volume I, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, and Volume II, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Citations are keyed first to this edition and then to the French edition, in the Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Éditions Gallimard, 1964). The First Discourse and Second Discourse are referred to as FD and SD, the Essay on the Origin of Languages as E, the Social Contract as SC, the Emile as EM, and the Lettre à C. de Beaumont as LB. 2 The question of the FD is ‘whether the restoration of the Sciences and Arts has contributed to the purification of morals’, and of the SD is ‘what is the origin of inequality among men, and whether it is authorized by the natural law’. 3 Cf. Note IX of the SD (I, 197; III, 202) and the LB, Oeuvres complètes, IV, 935–6. The meanings of ‘wicked’ and ‘good’ are determined in the following sections. In my appropriation of the distinction between ‘man’ and ‘men’, I intend to imply – against the usage in Rousseau’s time – inclusive language. I stick to Rousseau’s terminology, because a different rendering of these terms would have made my usage awkward. 4 This is Vaughan’s position. Cf. C. E. Vaughan, Studies in History of Political Philosophy, Vol. I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), pp. 28–9. 5 Cf. R. Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris: Vrin, 1995), pp. 139–40.
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76 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (2) 6 I contest Shklar’s thesis that Rousseau belongs to the utopian tradition. Cf. J. Shklar, in Men and Citizens: A Study in Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Chaps I and IV. Even if this claim could be granted for the Social Contract, Rousseau means the above works to be applications of his political theory to the demands of a concrete time and place. 7 For a similar picture, N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 38 and 53. ibid., p. 14 ff. 8 I have a broader sense of logic in mind, consisting in the analysis of the implications of concepts as constitutive of certain types of human action. Since those actions are the empirical/historical correlate of conceptual determinations, this second sense of logic must be dealt with in a later stage. 9 Rousseau applies the same negative procedure when, at the end of the First Part of the SD, he defines natural man as opposed to civilized man. Cf. I, 157; III, 159–60. 10 The distinction between a cause and a ground, as I intend it here, is that a cause annuls the possibility of a different action, whereas a ground designates the inner motivation within the occasion of action. This motivation leaves room for another type of action. I say ‘type of action’ and not ‘action’, because the relation which one’s will has within the situation is never fully explicit. Even if actions in a certain situation look alike, their types can be different. This depends on whether one’s will is outwardly determined or responds to inner determination. Natural or unnatural are the situations according to the way an action is determined – by a ground or by a cause. 11 For this usage of ‘make-up’, SD, Preface, I, 124–5; III, 123. This concept replaces what Rousseau terms here ‘human constitution’. I introduce a new concept to avoid any confusion with the philosophical heritage of the word ‘constitution’. 12 This is a quotation from Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, to which Rousseau remits in the Preface as authoritative explanation of the difficulty of achieving self-knowledge. Cf. SD, note II; I, 189–90; III, 195–6. 13 In Rousseau’s anthropological model, the notions of essence and appearance are meant to capture the synchronic normative relation which human nature has with human make-up. This relation does not entail a teleological one. On the contrary, if appearance is viewed diachronically, it is rather counter-purposive. For the historic prevalence of the orientation of human make-up implies the subversion of the natural as ideal. This counter-purposiveness is what allows Rousseau to use human nature as a diagnostic criterion of the pathologies of civilization. 14 Cf. Dent, op. cit., p. 22. 15 This difficulty is analogous to the one surrounding the emergence of the political order through a contract. As Vaughan reasons, to base the genesis of political obligation on a contract is to base it upon a mechanism that requires the existence of political obligation in order to be effective. A contract is a transaction impossible to conceive outside the order established by the state; consequently, one cannot use it to explain the institution of that without which the contract would not exist (cf. C. E. Vaughan,
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Introduction to The Social Contract (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1926), p. iv. That is, the form of the problem of the institution of the political is analogous to the one around the source of wickedness. Both share the same conceptual difficulty: the condition of possibility of a certain phenomenon (the existence of society and keeping one’s promise in order to institute the political order) operates as the consequence of what one wants to explain (man’s self-betrayal and the validity of the contract). My claim, which I cannot substantiate adequately here, is that Rousseau finds a way out of these difficulties in the psychological presuppositions of his anthropological model. Human nature accounts for the source of prepolitical obligation, while its relation with human make-up explains the meaning of natural isolation and provides a way to conceive the passage from civilization to a well-ordered society. Cf. EM, Bk II, p. 81 ff. For the existential side of this issue, cf. J. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), Chap. 3, p. 33 ff. For Rousseau’s distinction between ‘convincing’ and ‘persuading’, cf. Letter of J.J. Rousseau to M. de Voltaire, I, 235 ff.; IV, 1062 ff. Derathé, op. cit., p. 132. Cf. Rousseau’s early writing (1745), Idea of the Method in the Composition of a Book, I, 301; II, 1244. For my use of ‘transcendental’, see I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 57/B 81 (trans. N. Kemp Smith. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965). Although this claim applies to Rousseau’s anthropological writings in general, this essay treats the Second Discourse alone, for I find in it the most systematic expression of Rousseau’s quasi-transcendental procedure. Cf. EM, Bk IV, p. 221. One commiserates if, and only if, one mirrors the other’s vulnerability as one’s own. The other’s strength and happiness become an obstacle to the feeling of compassion. It is this coalescence that makes the concept of property pliable to express moral inequality. The idea of ‘mine and thine’ has an objective basis that conveys a relation between subjects – i.e. a moral relation. Cf. Pierre Burgelin, La philosophie de l’existence de J.-J. Rousseau, Libraire Philosophique (Paris: Vrin, 1973), pp. 251–5.
