Link to the Original Essay

In the introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind (The 2nd Discourse), Rousseau clarifies the nature of his premise. In particular, he states that it is not factually based. Rather, it is hypothetically based, in a manner which is meant to make the nature of the origin of humanities’ inequality clear. What this indicates about Rousseau’s method in the 2nd discourse is that it is based on a premise that is a hasty generalization on the nature of homo sapiens, which is that we are naturally good. Indeed, the overarching narrative of both of the discourses is that humans are naturally good and institutions make them bad; the latter, -which is highly questionable- is wholly where Rousseau is deriving the former, which is not at all sufficient evidence to suppose the former. Regardless of the empirical validity of the claims which Rousseau makes about early human nature and the inherent corrupting of it by civil society, Rousseau’s method is quasi-axiomatic & his view on humanity his highly comparable to that of social-constructionist theory.

The account of human nature that Rousseau delineated in the introduction to the 2nd discourse starts with describing the natural state of inequality in humans:

“Religion commands us to believe that since God Himself took men out of the state of nature immediately after the creation, they are unequal because He wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of man and the beings surrounding him, about what the human race might have become if it had remained abandoned to itself.”

The natural state of human inequality -which no doubt exists- is derived in the mind of Rousseau by a questionable source. Nonetheless, if we grant this questionable source, it allows for further investigation, which Rousseau obliges to undergo. However, Rousseau’s investigations are admitted to “put aside the facts”. Thus, the entire edifice of Rousseau’s examination of humankind is hypothetical and thus should be taken with a grain of salt -or for the staunch empiricist/historian, not at all.

Nonetheless, proceeding in the direction of yielding in the face of the implausible axiom regarding the implementation of our natural inequalities, such inequalities do not make humans morally reprehensible; the inequality which made humans bad did not exist in pre-societal human beings. Rousseau describes in great detail the gradual process from early noble humans -who’s only inequalities were benign- to modern civil/immoral humans -who’s inequalities are morally repugnant. Prior to society, humans were purely interested in self-preservation, and the number of humans on Earth at this time had enough resources to fulfill this role interest. Humans also had a natural pity -i.e. A distaste regarding the suffering of a fellow Sapien; this derived experientially, by humans viewing one another and observing that humans act alike and react in similar ways to similar stimuli (for example, suffering in response to physical pain), thus springing the “love of well-being”. Rousseau believed that our natural pity is what constitutes a high percentage of what composes moral goodness in a human.

Population growth, however, made resources more scarce which created competition amongst humans. The competition for resources sprung a need for creating new means of extracting resources and this made language requirements adapt to a complex manner. It also led to the creation of tools such as bows and arrows. This eventually progressed into the advent of settlement building, which was the epoch of private property that sprung the slippery slope which we now know as the djinn: society. The inequalities which Rousseau deemed to make humans bad are inherent in human society and become worse as society expands. Civil society started with the idea of private property, therefore private property is the origin of moral inequality amongst humans.

Civil society diminished human values that Rousseau held to be dear. To put a particular value that he emphasized civil societies’ direct -indeed causal- role in diminishing simply: “[Rousseau was] for Sparta, and against Athens.” This value is akin to that of Nietzsche’s Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy: chaos unmediated by order (Apollo). Such chaos for Rousseau is the valuation of an attitude that is “warlike”. The “softening” of this value began with the invention of homes, which made humans more drawn towards leisure. Climatal circumstances then caused humans to band together and become sluggish en masse.

Once all humans have banded together, the development of mankind occurs in the manner of social-construction. Rousseau does not explicitly endorse the empirical “blank slate” idea, but the way in which humanity forms as described by him, is hardly any different from that; once humans banded together and formed a civil society, civil society became the sole contributor to how a human being behaved. This, of course, was to humankind’s detriment. Values like public esteem, intimacy, and the transformation of ‘wants’ into ‘needs’ has corrupted man and has driven man away from real virtues such as courage, hawkishness, natural pity and ignorance -the latter of the four is recognized ad nauseam as a supreme virtue in the 1st discourse, and is indeed alluded to as being missing in civil man (no thought for the morrow has been replaced with delayed gratification.)

The profoundest solidifier of the moral inequality of mankind for Rousseau was industrialization and agriculture. Private property to such an extent is irreversible and so large that the inherent desire for more wealth and property that comes with private property, is exacerbated to an intolerable level. The moral reprehensibility is illuminated by the phenomenon of individuals seeking to become more wealthy, “not so much through real necessity as to overtop others.”

The context of civil society has also shifted what the terms “weak” and “strong” mean. Prior to civil society, the strong did not feel the need to “overtop others”, as a result of the aforementioned natural pity. Weak and strong were mere physicalities prior to civil society. This changed drastically when the first man said “this is mine” and became widespread as a result of industrialization and agriculture. Now those who are naturally weak could become strong in the lights of society by gathering more resources and social status than their neighbors. Those who were strong and felt the necessity to overtop others, did exactly that and made their neighbors who were already weak by societal standards, even weaker -the societal measure of weakness being how poor you are; as a result of this “[the poor/weak] were obliged to receive or force their subsistence from the rich.” Thus the derivation of slavery: the rich viewing it as a right to use the poor to achieve the means of expanding wealth acquisition and for the sake of being cruel itself. Alas! The rich fight, and when they do they let their slaves — do the work for them, using zealous calls for emancipation in the form of a liberal constitution as incentive -which, people naturally buy into, as human beings are quite susceptible to zealotry (even though what the zealots promise never comes to actual fruition). The promises of the rich is what keeps the poor in poverty: they willingly fight for “protection”; it is being the slave of a familiar master, in fear of being a slave of an unfamiliar master.

Rousseau’s method is quasi-axiomatic. It is axiomatic in the sense that it is completely based upon postulates. This is the central problem of Rousseau’s method. Axiomatic systems do not allow anything within it to be called into question. By the very nature of such a system, the premises cannot be called into question, which for obvious reasons is objectionable. Nietzsche rightly points out that philosophical systems display a failure to question one’s own assumptions , for example, Rousseau starts out by not questioning and leaving no room to question the fallacious move of basing an entire philosophical discourse on a fictitious account of human history. Outside such a system this move is all too questionable; it is a sleight of hand philosophically to make the reader grant such things unquestionably. Both discourses display little to no self-examination of preconceived notions on the part of Rousseau. Rousseau’s thought was imprisoned within his own system -which evidently changed when he wrote The Social Contract. This is applicable to the first discourse as well, in that, (1) The Second Discourse is essentially a justification for the 1st Discourse, so it is a connected system & (2) Rousseau doesn’t seem at all keen to open his mind to the possibility that enlightenment has actually benefited humanity -which we now know is empirically true.

The resolution to the false-idea that civil society is the source of immortality, of a return to nature is based upon the assumption that humans are good by nature. Given that society already exists, the implementation of such an idea -an idea which is questionable, but unquestioned by the nature of Rousseau’s system- would invariably be bloodthirsty revolutionary mobs. In reality, our nature is not good and thus we should not “return to nature, [rather] we must ‘cultivate’ and ‘improve,’ ‘transfigure’ and remake our nature’. In order to do this we cannot grant that we’re entirely naturally good: indeed we cannot even grant that we’ve lost our natural inclinations, as it is consensus in evolutionary psychology that our current social and psychological characteristics were shaped during the pre-agricultural period which Rousseau longs for. So if we’re naturally good, that good is still with us. Given that sapiens were disposed to settling, in-fighting and causing mass extinctions of animals before civil society, these are evidently also with us still as well -they are the product of our nature, not civil society.

Rousseau’s quasi-axiomatic system of philosophy displayed in the 1st & 2nd discourses is flawed threefold: (1) for its historical inaccuracy (2) for its unquestionable nature as a system (3) civil society has not diminished the well-being of mankind. The grounds for questioning in the discourses are endless but questioning is itself unquestionable within the context of philosophical systems. Human nature, is not as black and white as Rousseau makes it out to be: if anything, between Rousseau and Hobbes, the state of human nature is a middle-ground between the two; thus postulating one or the other is absurd.