Rousseau

Whereas the early discourses dealt mainly with general principles, the publication of d’Alembert’s article “Geneva” in the seventh volume of the Encyclopedié in 1757, with its suggestion that the Genevans would benefit from the establishment of a theater, led Rousseau to deal with a specific aspect of his criticism of society.

Perhaps one of the gravest general aspects of society’s harmful influence on the nature of man is its constant tendency to transform amour de soi (“self-love”) into amour-propre (“pride”). Although this antithesis was not peculiar to Rousseau, who had already noted its existence in Vauvenargues, it does occupy a particularly significant position in his social criticism. Amour de soi is always good and, in its purest state, quite spontaneous because it expresses the real essence of human existence. It is an absolute feeling or passion which serves as the source of all genuinely natural impulses and emotions; already revealing itself at the instinctive level at the desire for self-preservation, it assumes a much nobler expression as soon as it is combined with reason. Being in complete uniformity with the principle of order, it will affect all the main aspects of human existence as it brings the individual into contact with his own inner self, his physical environment, and his fellow men. Unfortunately modern society has changed this natural amour de soi, which makes a man what he truly is, into amour-propre, an artificial reaction originating in an anxious reflection which induces a man to be forever comparing himself with others and even finding his sole pleasure in their Rousseau, page i misfortune or inferiority; through amour-propre he is taken outside himself into the realm of illusion and opinion and so prevented from being a complete person.

Education. Having diagnosed the malady of modern civilization, Rousseau was faced with the task of suggesting a cure, and this led him into the domain of education and politics, activities which are, or should be, rooted in man’s moral nature. Rousseau was convinced that man’s original nature is good, but that it has been corrupted mainly by the historical accident of society. It therefore seemed quite consistent to affirm that men are wicked but that man himself is good. To be good is to exist in accordance with the intrinsic potentialities of one’s nature, and Émile seeks to trace the natural development of a human being brought up in the country away from the nefarious influence of contemporary social life. From this point of view the work is not just a manual of education but, as Rousseau himself points out, a philosophical treatise on the goodness of human nature. It is less concerned with laying down the practical details of a specific pedagogic method than with describing the fundamental principles which underlie the whole of man’s development from infancy to maturity. Rousseau’s ultimate object is to teach the art of living, for man’s first duty, he says, is to be human.

The educator must realize that “vice and error, alien to man’s constitution, are introduced into it from outside”; his first task will be to keep away harmful influences from the young child. This is why Émile is set in a rural environment that allows the child to grow in accordance with his own nature. Early Rousseau, page ii education is therefore largely negative insofar as it mainly concerned with removing obstacles that might hinder this development.

From the first Rousseau stresses the importance of a progressive education: each stage of the process must be carefully adapted to the individual’s developing needs and so follow “the natural progress of the human heart.” In this respect Rousseau uses in his own way the generic method of contemporary thinkers like d’Alembert, Condillac, and Buffon, who, in turn, had taken over the notion of the genealogy of ideas developed by Locke in his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In Émile, however, as in the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, Rousseau does not strive to establish an inductive law based on empirical examination of facts but starts from a fundamental principle (man’s natural goodness) which is derived initially from personal intuition, though he believes it to be subsequently verifiable by observation and psychological analysis. Émile therefore involves certain metaphysical elements, but these are referred back to the concrete aspects of human nature.

Rousseau maintains that a truly progressive education will recognize that the child has his own special needs as a being who exists in his own right. “Nature wants children to be children before being men ... Childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling.” Since the child’s needs are largely physical, negative education “tends to perfect the organs, instruments of our knowledge.” Incapable of dealing with abstractions, the child must be educated through contact with things. To him dependence on things will be natural and Rousseau, page iii inevitable; acknowledging only the “heavy yoke of necessity,” he will escape the tyranny of any human will. Unlike the despotic power of men necessity is quite compatible with properly controlled freedom since it lets the human being exercise his powers within the limits prescribed for him by nature. “The truly free man” wishes to do no more than this. Well-regulated freedom thus provides the only valid basis and aim of sound education.

Early education, being based primarily on the senses, ignores bookish learning for direct contact with the physical world. Learning through a process of trial and error, the child experiments, as it were, through the medium of facts rather than words. (The sole book Rousseau will allow the child is Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and that only because it describes a man’s reliance on his own ingenuity and resourcefulness.) Freed from the tyranny of human opinion, the child identifies himself effortlessly with the requirements of his immediate existence; content to be himself and completely absorbed in this present being, he leads a kind of self-sufficient, timeless existence that knows no anxious concern for the future, none of that tormenting foresight which causes modern man to be so unhappily “outside himself.” The child is happy because he is unaware of artificial needs or of any serious disproportion between capacity and desire, power and will, and in this respect he resembles the happy savage.

Rousseau recognizes that even at the stage of greatest inner harmony, the child must be prepared for the future, for in him there is a reservoir of potential energy which he does not Rousseau, page iv immediately need. The educator’s task is to hold back this energy, this “superfluous aspect of his immediate being,” until it can be effectively used. It is particularly important to avoid any precocious excitement of the imagination which may be the source of future unhappiness. These dangers will largely be averted if, after the lesson of necessity, the child learns that of utility, his developing reason being applied only to what interests and helps him. That is why his early judgment must be formed not through words or abstractions but through sensations and feelings.

A truly positive education begins only when the child becomes aware of his relationships with other people, although these early social lessons will be based on sensibility rather than reason, in particular on the innate feeling of pity, with its later concomitants of love and aversion. There are no good or bad passions, says Rousseau. All are good when they are under our control; all are bad when they control us. Through the force of our passions we are impelled beyond ourselves; through the “superabundance of our strength” we are induced to “extend our being.” With the growth of sensibility, reason, and imagination the child leaves the self-sufficiency of the primitive stage for a fuller life involving relations with the physical realm of nature and the world of human beings. The educational process must therefore be carefully timed and controlled so that the various potentialities of the human being are brought to fulfillment in an orderly and harmonious manner.

It is clear from the last book of Émile that man must be educated for society, though not necessarily for society in its Rousseau, page v present form. Man’s nature is not fully mature until it becomes social. However, the natural man in the state of nature and the natural man in the social state cannot be identical, for whereas the former is predominately an instinctive, primitive creature living on the spontaneous expression of his innate vitality, the latter is a rational, moral being aware of his obligations to other people, a man called upon to subordinate the impulse of “goodness” to the demands of “virtue.” Therefore, only in society can a genuinely human morality become possible. If by “nature” is meant the merely primordial responses of the presocial man, then it is true to say that “good institutions denature man” inasmuch as they raise him up from the absolute self-sufficiency of the isolated primitive state to the level of a moral, relative existence based on an awareness of the common good and the need to live in harmonious relationship with his fellow men. Since morality inevitably involves the problem of man’s life as a social being, it is impossible to separate morality and politics, and Rousseau state most emphatically that “those who want to treat morality and politics separately will never understand anything about either.” This is a most important aspect of his political thinking. If “nature” intended man for a moral existence, then it also intended him for social life; indeed, only through the individual’s participation in the “common unity” can full personal maturity become possible. “Nature” is still the norm, but one that has to be re-created, as it were, at a higher level, conferring on man a new rational unity which replaces the purely instinctive unity of the primitive state.

Political Theory. There appears to be no valid reason for Rousseau, page vi finding, as some critics have done, any fundamental contradiction between Émile and the Contrat Social. Such a difficulty arises only when anachronistic attempts are made to explain Rousseau’s thought in purely individualist or collectivist terms. If at first sight Émile seems to be an isolated individual, this is mainly because Rousseau wanted to stress the importance of the human being’s natural development, and it in no way excludes the idea that all true education must eventually be for society.

In itself the particular form of education, like that of government, must be determined by specific historical and physical conditions, but Rousseau was less concerned with this question than with that of the fundamental principles on which all true education and all true government must be based. In this respect Émile and the Contrat Social are similar since each is a theoretical, normative work. Rousseau points out in his correspondence that the Contrat Social is a philosophical discussion of political right (the work is actually subtitled Principes du Droit Politique) rather than an examination of any existing form of government. As he says in the introduction to his work, he is taking “men as they are” and “the laws as they can be.” He seeks to reconcile “what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility are not divided.” In Rousseau’s eyes, this is what distinguishes his approach to political problems from Montesquieu’s. Whereas Montesquieu is concerned with “the positive right of established governments,” Rousseau, as the theorist of political right, examines the philosophical basis of all legitimate government.

Rousseau, page vii Although the Contrat Social has often been described as the forerunner of totalitarianism, this interpretation is certainly not consistent with Rousseau’s conscious intention, for from the very outset his overriding preoccupation is the same as it was in Émile - the problem of freedom. No doubt, just as the concept of nature undergoes a radical transformation when it is applied to society, so the natural freedom enjoyed by man in the state of nature differs in important respects from the civic freedom of the social state; both, however, are natural to man at different stages of his development. Man living in society faces a problem which does not affect primitive man - namely, the possible tyranny of his fellow men. Now, a true and just society can never be based on sheer force, for right can never be equated with might. Rousseau vigorously repudiates traditional views which seek to justify the right of conquerors to subject the vanquished to permanent enslavement; no society founded on such a principle can ever be legitimate. Man’s participation in society must be consistent with his existence as a free and rational being. Society is therefore unthinkable without a freedom which express’s man most fundamental attribute. “To give up freedom is to give up one’s human quality: to remove freedom from one’s will is to remove all morality from one’s actions.” Moreover, it is with the emergence of society that man comes into the possession of his freedom and thus attains the status of a moral being. The institution of any genuine political society must be the result of a social pact, or free association of intelligent human beings who deliberately choose to form the type of society to which they will owe allegiance; this is the only valid basis for a community that wishes to live in accordance with the requirements of human freedom. Rousseau, page viii However, there still remains the problem of finding a form of association which will continue to respect the freedom that brought it into being. Although man is naturally good, he is constantly threatened by forces which not only alienate him from himself but also transform him into a tyrant or slave. From this point of view the political problem is not dissimilar from the pedagogic one. How is man to be protected from the tyranny of the human will? Just as the child has to be liberated from the dependence upon human caprice in order to confront necessity, so the individual is to be preserved from tyranny by “an excessive dependence” of all citizens on a new kind of necessity, on something that is greater than the citizen himself and yet in one sense a part of his life. Rousseau seeks a form of association in which “each one uniting with all obeys, however, only himself and remains as free as before.” In other words, “each one giving himself to all gives himself to nobody.” The possibility of inequality and injustice will be avoided through the “total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the community”; if such alienation were less than total, it would expose the individual to domination by others. As it is, the citizen does not obey some sectional interest but the general will, which is a “real force, superior to the action of any particular will.” Nor, in Rousseau’s view, need this arouse any apprehension, for unlike the individual will which concerns itself with specific and perhaps selfish interests, the general will is always directed toward the general good. Moreover, total alienation involves equality in another way; the general will is not simply an external authority which the citizen obeys in spite of himself but the objective embodiment of his own moral Rousseau, page ix nature. In accepting the authority of the general will, the citizen not only belongs to a collective, moral body but also achieves true freedom by obeying a law which he has prescribed for himself. Through the law he escapes from the bondage of appetite in order to follow, as an intelligent being, the dictates of reason and conscience. Submission to a will possessing an “inflexibility which no human force could ever overcome” leads to a freedom which “keeps a man exempt from vice” and to “a morality which lifts him up to virtue.” The individual is thereby invested with another kind of goodness, the genuine virtue of the man who is not an isolated being but part of a great whole. Liberated from the narrow confines of his own being, he finds fulfillment in a truly social experience of fraternity and equality with citizens who accept the same ideal.

This conception of political right is essentially democratic insofar as the source of all political authority and, therefore, of all true sovereignty must always lie with the people as a whole. Moreover, such sovereignty is both inalienable and indivisible since, as the basis of freedom itself, it is something that can never be renounced by the people or shared with others. However, Rousseau established an important distinction between sovereignty and government. The sovereign, or subjects (for “sovereign and subjects are simply the same people in different respects”), may delegate the executive function of the state to the prince, or government, which thus becomes the agent, or officer, of the people; this is true whatever the form of any particular government, whether monarchy, aristocracy, or republic. If every legitimate government is democratic in essence, this does not mean that Rousseau, page x democracy, as a definite political institution through which the people themselves carry on the government by assembling as a body, is either possible or desirable in modern conditions. Any specific form of government, as Rousseau was to show very clearly in his Projet de Constitution pour la Corse Pologne (1765) and his Considérations sur la Gouvernement de la Pologne (probably written around 1770-1771), will depend on a variety of historical and geographical factors.

Law, as the act of the general will and the expression of sovereignty, is of vital importance, for the establishment of sound laws can determine the whole destiny of the state. As Rousseau observes, only the gods themselves would be capable of giving good laws to the human race. That is why the legislator has such an important role in the Contrat Social; he is invested with a remarkable, almost divine quality. It is from him that the citizen “receives in some way his life and his being”; through the legislator’s actions he experiences a genuine transformation of his personal life, forsaking the “physical, independent existence he received from nature” for a moral existence as a social being. This new mode of existence is not something imposed upon him from the outside but a possibility elicited from the depths of his inner self. The legislator is in one respect an almost godlike figure, but his purpose is to serve the essential needs of human nature.

At the end of the final version of the Contrat Social (though not in the original draft), Rousseau seems to acknowledge that an even more powerful sanction may be required to ensure complete political stability, for he proposes to introduce into the Rousseau, page xi state a kind of civil religion or civic profession of faith to which every citizen, having once given his free assent, must remain obedient under pain of death. This is an aspect of Rousseau’s political thought which many commentators have found either shocking or inconsistent. However, it will already be clear that Rousseau is no liberal in the classical political sense since he does not believe in the possibility of any rigid separation of the individual and the state; the development of a full moral life is inconceivable without active participation in society, and the unity and permanence of the state depend, in turn, upon the moral integrity and undivided loyalty of its citizens. The civic profession of faith is deliberately restricted to the “few simple dogmas” which, according to Rousseau, every rational, moral being ought to readily accept: belief in a supreme being, the future life, the happiness of the just, and the punishment of the wicked, together with a “single negative dogma, the rejection of intolerance.” Anybody repudiating these principles would presumably be, in Rousseau’s opinion, little more than a criminal who, by forfeiting his right to be considered as a responsible human being, threatens the state with anarchy and dissolution. The practical implications of this view may still sound alarming to the modern liberal, but they are not necessarily inconsistent with Rousseau’s ideas.

Religion. If the chapter “Civil Religion” seems to strike a new note in the Contrat Social, it is certainly not incompatible with the religious emphasis of Rousseau’s thought, for religion had always played an important role in this work, as the “Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard” made clear. Nature itself must be understood in the widest sense, as the whole realm of being Rousseau, page xii originally created by God, who guarantees its goodness, unity, and order. Rousseau offended traditional Christian orthodoxy with his belief that man needs no intermediary between himself and God and is able to attain salvation by his own efforts. (In spite of his great respect for the figure of Jesus and the message of the Gospels, Rousseau could not accept the notion of the Incarnation as a solution to the problem of human sin.) But Rousseau never doubted the importance of accepting God’s existence; man, he believed, is impelled toward God by the evidence of both feeling and reason, for apart from the presence of intelligence in the universe there is also the sensitive man’s deep “feeling for nature” and the inescapable conviction of a real bond uniting his immortal soul with the spiritual order which underlies the outward appearance of the physical world. As is well-known, Rousseau was the eighteenth-century writer who gave particularly eloquent expression to this aspect of the “feeling for nature.” Furthermore, apart from the testimony of reason and sensibility there is also that of the all-powerful conscience, the “divine instinct” or “voice of the soul” which forms the basis of man’s moral existence. In moments of doubt and perplexity, when all else fails man, he can always rely for guidance on the promptings of his conscience. This does not mean that reason is thereby excluded, for reason is to be condemned only when it becomes the instrument of blind passion or selfish reflection - in other words, when it fails to recognize its dependence upon other essential elements of human nature. Conscience, however, is an even more important attribute; it is a fundamental feeling that is strikingly effective when reason may be impotent. Even so, conscience, reason, and freedom are all integral elements of man’s natural endowment, Rousseau, page xiii potentialities that it is his right and duty to develop, for God gave him “conscience to love the good, reason to know it and freedom to choose it.” It is only through the harmonious development of all man’s faculties that he can come to a full understanding of his own nature and the place allotted to him by God in the universal order.

At first sight Rousseau’s philosophy seems to retain many characteristics of the traditional metaphysical outlook, and several critics have stressed his great admiration for Plato and Malebranche. In Rousseau’s eyes the universe still possesses a rationality, order, and unity which reflect the wisdom and intelligence of its creator. Yet this cannot be known by reason alone, for although reason has a function in all reflection about the meaning of the world, the heart may often provide surer insights into the ultimate mystery of creation. Moreover, Rousseau’s system took the form of a series of basic intuitions which he subsequently linked together into a unified whole. His thought, therefore, is imbued with a strongly personal element which excludes any purely abstract or rationalistic speculation about the ultimate meaning of reality. What concerns him is that part of reality which is identified with the nature of man. The nature of man is, of course, inseparable from nature in the wider sense, but sensibility and feeling, rather than mere reason, are probably the most effective means of penetrating this wider objective realm of being. The thinker concerned with fundamental truths will do well, in Rousseau’s view, to concentrate on what is of interest to him, “interest” here being defined not in any narrowly pragmatic or empirical senses but as indicating those matters which appertain to man’s original Rousseau, page xiv nature. This means that Rousseau finally emerges as a moralist rather than as a traditional metaphysician.

Since reflection on the nature of man involves the ability to distinguish between reality and appearance, between the genuinely original and the merely artificial aspects of existence, the thinker’s first task must be to abandon the illusions of opinion for the truths of nature. This explains both the negative, critical aspects of Rousseau’s views of modern society and his more positive, constructive efforts to elaborate a philosophy of man. If his interpretation of nature seemed too optimistic to satisfy the demands of contemporary religious orthodoxy, it was also too religious to please the advocates of philosophical skepticism or materialism. Of one thing Rousseau felt quite certain: to ignore or reject the profound moral aspects of human existence could have only the most disastrous consequences for the welfare of humanity. The discovery of truth requires an active renewal of the whole man and a reawakened moral consciousness which acknowledges the full implications

Like so many of his contemporaries, Rousseau considered happiness to be the legitimate goal of human endeavor, but insisted that “enjoyment” must not be interpreted in a shallow or selfish manner. Happiness consists of being oneself and of existing according to one’s own nature, but a nature that has been purified of all extraneous artificial elements. When truly fulfilled, man man will experience satisfaction with himself and a sense of being identified with the pure “feeling of existence”; this, in turn, presupposes the ability to find a true personal unity and plenitude. No doubt, Rousseau’s efforts to realize this ideal Rousseau, page xv in his own life were not free from ambiguity and contradiction, as an examination of his personal writings well shows, but his didactic works are consistent in their main objective.

In a corrupt society the recovery of a full human existence can never take the form of a mere return to nature, for the nature of man cannot be equated with the primordial state of nature. Although Rousseau was often nostalgically drawn to the innocence and simplicity of early times, he also treated nature as a dynamic, forward-looking concept. Starting from man as he is, the movement toward nature must be constantly sustained by the vision of what man might be. The achievement of this goal requires a radical transformation of human existence, the rediscovery and re-creation of a new nature. At the same time Rousseau did not believe in the need for any kind of supernatural grace to help man carry out this task, since nature represented an innate possibility that could be realized through the wise exercise of human freedom alone.

Rousseau’s powerful influence on later generations was partly due to this vision of regenerated human nature, but unlike merely utopian thinkers he seemed to promise a transfiguration of everyday existence, not the pursuit of a hopeless chimera. Indeed, his philosophy revealed a striking, if often elusive, combination of idealistic and realistic elements which constantly seemed to open up the possibility of a better world. Moreover, this optimistic outlook was transmitted through a particularly eloquent and persuasive style, rich in emotional and musical overtones, giving the impression of intense sincerity and convincing the humblest of men that he need never feel Rousseau, page xvi ashamed to call himself a human being.

Rousseau, page xvii