The Discontents of Modernity: Thinking with Rousseau
The world of modernity is a perplexing, contradictory, and challenging one. From excessive individualism to obscene inequality, the challenges of contemporary politics, technology, and, broadly speaking, society necessitate sincere reflection.
One of the most notable and fascinating critics of modernity was 18th-century French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, he shockingly suggests that man is by nature good, yet is corrupted by society. In the essay, Rousseau traces a hypothetical anthropological history of man from his state of nature to his contemporary era, highlighting the developments that brought about the unique conditions of modernity.
But what is so bad about society? And how can thinking with Rousseau help us understand the problems we confront in 2022?
Savage Man
Whereas Aristotle held that man is by nature a rational, political animal, Rousseau depicts his ‘savage man’ as maximally free and independent, beholden to two fundamental instincts:
“I perceive in it two principles preceding reason, one of which interests us ardently in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other of which inspires in us a natural repugnance to see any sensitive being, principally our fellow humans, perish or suffer.”
Avoiding moralistic language, Rousseau paints both self-preservation and pity as evolutionary mechanisms. He writes, “pity is a natural feeling which… contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire species.” Savage man is deeply content, ignorant to vice and pride. Rousseau articulates that savage man’s “modest needs are so easily found at hand, and he is so far from the degree of knowledge necessary for desiring to acquire greater knowledge, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity.” Moreover, “His soul, which nothing agitates, gives itself over to the sole feeling of its present existence.” The soul’s orientation within the state of nature — a view to necessities, such as “food, a female, and rest” — lacks both knowledge and desire of the excesses of virtue and the deficiencies of vice. His neutral state of independence, both social and physical, is the cause of his contentment.
Can we return to this state of nature? We read with a resigned, wistful imagination of a moment in human history lost to us. Whether or not Rousseau was accurate in his anthropological claims, we are sympathetic and intrigued — where does it all go wrong?
Anti-philosophical Philosophy
While great thinkers tend to champion the activity of philosophy (need it be said?), Rousseau radically challenges philosophy in and of itself.
“While it may belong to Socrates and minds of his stamp to acquire virtue through reason, the human race would have ceased to exist long ago if its preservation depended only on the reasoning of those who make it up”
Particularly, reason works at odds with our natural inclination to feel pity.
“It is reason that separates [man] from everything that bothers and afflicts him. It is philosophy that isolates him; it is by means of it that he secretly says at the sight of a suffering man: perish if you will, I am safe… His fellow human being can have his throat slit with impunity beneath his window; he only has to put his hands over his ears and argue with himself a bit to keep nature, which rebels within him, from making him identify with the person being assassinated.”
The visceral reaction Rousseau evokes cements his thought. Reason pulls us away from pity towards a perverted self-love: pride.
When we walk by a homeless person, look away, and internally justify our actions, are we not philosophizing out of pity? The intuitive feeling that gross inequality, animal cruelty, or punitive brutality is unjust is often met with studied, persuasive talking points. Within the philosophical tradition, something about the ‘rational’ discourse of Aristotelian natural slavery or Lockean private property sidelines the basic human feeling that others shouldn’t suffer. Perhaps we ought to realize that our natural propensity to feel pity is worth listening to.
Pride and Misery
The birth of social misery begins with pride, according to Rousseau. As humans formed customs, they “imperceptibly acquire ideas of merit and beauty that produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again.” While man at his most free was alone and self-reliant, man becomes slave to social capital:
“Each began to look at the others and want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the most beautiful, the strongest, the most clever, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered — and this, then, was the first step toward inequality and at the same time toward vice. From these first preferences arose vanity and contempt, on the one hand, and shame and envy, on the other. And the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.”
Whether we have just bought a new ride or gained 500 followers on a social media platform, our desires to be perceived, to have our ego validated, and to supplement our pride carry with them discontentedness and frustration.
The Yoke of Leisure and Convenience
Increased leisure brought about a greater capacity to acquire conveniences, which, Rousseau details, was “the first source of the evils they prepared for their descendants.” He goes on to write:
“For, aside from the fact that they thereby continued to soften both body and mind, since these conveniences lose almost all of their charm through habit, and since they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than their possession was sweet, and they were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.”
Rousseau would not have even been able to conceive of the type of consumerism that prevails in our contemporary global society. Nonetheless, he prophetically condemns the utter meaninglessness of ‘things.’ We think we want them — we need them; then, they’re normalized to us, yet we can’t lose them. Think about this passage the next time the wifi goes out.
Born Free
“It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however it may be defined, that a child command an old man, that an imbecile lead a wise man, and that a handful of people be glutted with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities.”
His words need be felt and understood, neither reconstructed nor rationalized. The world as it looks is wrong. But it is not just the work of oppressors and oppressed. Rousseau’s most famous words ring true: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. He who believes himself the master of others fails not to be a greater slave than they.” We are all slave to the passions of pride, to the expectations of others, and to the social and physical dependency of domination and servitude.
Where To?
We cannot return to a pre-philosophical, pre-political state of being. Rather, Rousseau prescribes that political communities consist of individuals committing themselves wholly to an original concept known as the ‘general will,’ a notion of the common good (particularly distinct from the ‘will of all,’ or the sum of individual wills and desires). Rousseau highlights that “since each gives himself entirely, the condition is equal for all, and since the condition is equal for all, no one has an interest in making it burdensome for the others.” The theory is conceptual and abstract, but allows us to think of the specific conditions which might activate the general will within a political community.
The problem of modernity remains unsolved. Regardless, engaging with Rousseau’s work provides ample space for reflection on the life well-lived.
