Transcript PHILosophy 224

PHILOSOPHY 224
ROUSSEAU’S VISION OF THE HUMAN
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
• Rousseau was a historical
contemporary of Hume’s
(1712-1778).
• Like many of his fellow
moderns, Rousseau was
diversely talented,
making important
contributions to literature,
music and philosophy.
• In philosophy, his primary
contributions are to
political theory (through
the vehicles of Discourse
on Inequality and The
Social Contract).
SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY
• Rousseau is an advocate of an approach to political
theory known as social contract theory.
• He’s part of a discussion taking place across Europe at the time
(a discussion that included Thomas Hobbes and John Locke).
• This discussion had a significant influence on the founding
fathers of the U.S., though Rousseau’s direct influence is more
notable in the context of the French revolution.
• Social contract theory accounts for political forms in
terms of a hypothetical ‘contract’ entered into by the
participants in the polity.
• Common Assumptions:
• State of Nature
• Theory of Human Nature
• Rational Agents (?)
FROM THE “DISCOURSE” TO THE
“CONTRACT”
• In the “Dedication” to the Discourse
Rousseau writes that he wants to live in a
country where “the interest of the sovereign
could not be separated from that of the
subject.”
• What would have to be true for such a situation to
obtain?
• When the subject is the sovereign.
• What political system embodies this principle?
• Democracy, like his hometown Geneva’s, “I feel
happy…always to find in my researches new
reasons for loving that of my own country!”
THE EXISTING CONTRACT
• “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”
(The Social Contract).
• (We get the crisis, before we get the ontology!)
• The basis of this failed project is the power made
possible by the inequalities produced by social
relations.
• All such inequalities produce power. To the extent that
certain inequalities are natural, there will inevitably be
power accumulation and disproportionality.
• Not all such accumulation need be onerous. The
task of The Social Contract is to specify how this
power can be legitimated as authority.
YOU CAN’T GO BACK
• As already noted, there is a sort of
inevitability, based in our perfectibility, to the
development of social relations.
• As Rousseau recounts the development of
ever more complex social forms (family-rule
of the strong-the self-subordination of an
individual in slavery), he makes it clear that
a return to the “state of nature” is
impossible.
• Inevitable development requires a social
contract.
THE PACT
• The challenge is to “Find a form of association which
defends and protects with all common forces the person
and goods of each associate, and by means of which
each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only
himself and remains as free as before.”
• This is possible only by exchanging my natural liberty for
civil liberty: the freedom to do what the laws allow
(freedom limited by law).
• This exchange has to be total: I give up myself and my
rights to the community (becoming equal in this
“alienation” with everyone else).
• This exchange then gives me access to civil rights, which
gain the protection of whole of civil society, which is
nothing other than me (and everyone else) as a
collective social whole.
EMILE, OR ON EDUCATION
• Emile (1762) was thought
by Rousseau to be the
most important of his
works.
• It focuses on the question
of what sort of education
would enable the
‘natural man’ to navigate
the complexities of social
relations.
• It was very controversial
when it was published,
being banned and
burned in Paris and
Geneva.
THE STARTING POINT
• “Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the
Maker of the world but degenerates once it gets into the
hands of man” (110).
• This opening sentence of Emile encapsulates both the
theory of human nature Rousseau assumes and the crisis
to which he is trying to respond.
• Human nature is, on this view, fundamentally good.
• Like as with Mencius, this goodness should be
understood as a capacity rather than as an
accomplished fact.
• This explains why this fundamental goodness can
degenerate (if the capacity is unrealized or even
corrupted).
• This corruption is to be explained by the problems of inequality
and illegitimate power accumulation.
DIAGNOSIS
• As we’ve seen, though it’s possible to articulate the
natural state of human beings, the state is never in
fact one that we occupy.
• Rousseau is much more realistic about this than many other
social contract theorists.
• The state we do occupy is always already
constituted by existing inequalities and power
accumulations, and these require the following
diagnosis:
• “Prejudices, authority, necessity, example, the social
institutions in which we are immersed, would crush out
nature in [humans] without putting anything in its place”
(110).
THE PRESCRIPTION
• “Plants are fashioned by cultivation, men by education”
(110).
• Though existing human relations are the source of the
problem, a special form of this relation is also the cure:
education.
• Rousseau surveys the various ways in which we gain
knowledge and identifies three primary modes:
1.
2.
3.
The Education of Nature consists in the development of our
faculties of knowledge and sensibility.
The Education of Men consists in developing the use of these
faculties for specific purposes.
The Education of Things consists in learning through
experience how the things around us affect us or can be
affected.
HUMAN EDUCATION
• Obviously, the first and the last of these are, at least in
their most fundamental forms, not under human control.
• It’s our conscious self-education that we must consider,
and Rousseau is not particularly optimistic about its
chances.
• It seems obvious to him, that nature’s ends are
addressed only when the three forms of education are
animated towards the same goal: development of our
natural faculties and capacities.
• The problem, when there is one, obviously lies in the
“Education of Men.”
• It’s the only one we have any control over.
COMMUNAL VS. INDIVIDUAL
• In pursuit of educational harmony, we can choose
to be educated in common according to
prevailing social norms, or we can seek a more
individualized educational context.
• For reasons which should be evident, Rousseau is
skeptical about communal education, insisting that
“exceptional” people (those that are both
individuals and citizens) are produced in a more
individualized context.
• What is produced? Not content or training, but
human beings (112-13).
AN IMPORTANT QUALIFICATION
• We’ve been talking somewhat generically about human
nature, but Rousseau, like many others of his time, was
convinced that there were two different human natures:
that of men and that of women.
• On the basis of observed differences between the
behaviors and capacities of men and women, Rousseau
attempts to specify the specific differences of men and
women.
1.
2.
3.
4.
Men are active and strong; women passive and weak.
Men are masterful; women are pleasing.
Men are forceful; women are charming.
Men are bold; women are timid
Etc.
A DIFFERENT EDUCATION
• “Men and women are unequally affected by sex.
The male is only a male at times; the female is a
female all her life and can never forget her sex”
(114).
• This claim conditions the different educational
models Rousseau proposes for men and women.
• The specific differences are less important than the
principle with distinguishes them.
• See p. 115-116.