...some central concepts...

Rousseau's analysis has three or possibly four major elements. Man is in a state of nature dominated by the instinct to preserve his life. How could it be otherwise? Language and technology - the impulse to dominate his surroundings - come only very slowly and are the product of many, many centuries. In his native state he is essentially solitary but thrives in his tough world because he is so perfectly adapted to it and lacks the intellectual means or the images for comparison that society would and later does give him. 


We might add also that Rousseau's man is presented as a solitary creature, though this is not an entirely literal image, for his solitariness is as much an image of his limited nature as of his economic circumstances. He does not compare himself with others, with all the disastrous consequences that can have. (See the last paragraph below).


He is, however, not without all moral qualities. He, like the ancient Scythians, derives more advantage from his ignorance of vice than the Greeks derive from their knowledge of the virtues. (See page 45 of the World's Classics edition). One virtue, however, is fundamental to his nature, according to Rousseau's argument and that is pity, which he defines as  'an innate aversion to the sight of a fellow creature's suffering'. Compassion is fundamental to human nature.


The third component of Rousseau's analysis is what he calls perfectibility. This somewhat odd term is intended to refer to our condition as free agents, able to fashion our future and therefore to some extent to create our own nature in ways that are not open to the beasts. We might, a little fancifully perhaps, see this as Rousseau's version of our fallen nature, as it has been traditionally described by scripture, or we might see this, to take up another cultural strand, as an expression of our drive to constantly seek out what seems good to us. The result is where we are now, needing both as individuals and as societies, analysis and adjustment.

You don't have to be in vanity Fair

These three concepts then are central to Rousseau's analysis - a drive to self-preservation, a fundamental sense of compassion or pity, and perfectibility, in the sense roughed out in the previous paragraph. This third element forms the basis for an important distinction for Rousseau, that between amour de soi and amour-propre. Amour de soi is a simple, natural and rational love of oneself that arises out of the drive to preserve one's own being. Amour-propre is in contrast a perversion of amour de soi that arises as man starts to compare himself with others in society and which can all to easily lead to competition and fear and hence the pleasure at seeing the discomfiture of our enemies. Amour-propre is a product of civilisation. It is a distortion of our natural concern for our own survival. Rousseau comments on this at Note O on page 115. In a state of nature, you would of course find yourself struggling for food in competition with others or for mate, but you would not see this as a moral question, more as a simple natural occurrence. 


Rousseau puts it like this: "This being well understood, i will say that in our primitive state, in the true state of nature, vanity does not exist; for since each individual regards himself as the sole spectator by whom he is observed and the sole creature in the world who takes an interest in him, it follows that a sentiment that originates in comparisons he is incapable of making could not develop in his soul. For the same reason, this man could feel neither hatred nor the desire for vengeance, passions stemming only from a belief that some offence has been received; and because it is the contempt or the intention to hurt, and not the harm itself that constitutes the offence, men who do not know how to appraise one another or compare themselves with one another, can do one another much violence, when it brings them some advantage, without ever giving offence to one another. In short every men, looking upon his fellow men hardly differently from the way he regards animals of another species, can snatch the prey of the weaker, or yield his own to the stronger, without envisagaging those thefts as anything but natural occurrences, without the least stirring of arrogance or spite, and with no other passion but the joy of success or the pain of failure". 


And that's where we'll leave things till we meet next Wednesday...

Competitiveness can have all sorts of consequences...