The good man is an Athlete who delights in fighting naked: He despises all those vile ornaments which would hinder his use of his strength, and most of which were invited only to conceal some deformity.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
Despite his influence on the generations that followed him, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had little interest in battling his contemporaries who disagreed with his ideas. Whether it was the Frenchman Voltaire or the Scotsman David Hume, few contemporary readers sympathized with Rousseau’s ideas. Immanuel Kant, whose sole painting in his spartan home was one of Rousseau, was almost unique in that regard. Rousseau, though, didn’t much care for that lack of appreciation.
“The majority of my Readers,” he wrote in The Preface of a Second Letter to Bordes “must often have found my discourses poorly structured and almost entirely disjointed, for want of perceiving the trunk of which I showed them only the branches” (OC III: 106). Unlike the vast majority of writers who decry commentators not getting the main thrust of their words, Rousseau has a point. A brilliant rhetorician, Rousseau is, all too often able to rouse the sentiments towards whatever end he wants—it was the singular compliment paid to him by Adam Smith in the pages of the Edinburgh Review—yet the end result of such elocution is all too often the precise line of the argument getting away from Rousseau. But the arguments are certainly there and, for those who care about Rousseau’s influence, worth piecing together.
One of the main trunks of Rousseau’s thought that is manifest from the very beginning, in The Discourse on the Sciences, is the notion that society does genuine damage to our human nature by fettering our free will. That man is free is close to a tautology for Rousseau. Insofar, as someone is not free to choose, Rousseau would argue, he is less of a human being.
The natural state of man was suited to “that original freedom for which he seems to be born” (OC III: 7), but such a state cannot last long with the cultivation of society and the demands of social existence:
Need raised up Thrones; the Sciences and Arts have made them strong. Earthly powers, love talents and protect those who cultivate them! Civilized peoples, cultivate them: Happy slaves, you owe them the delicate and refined taste on which you pride yourselves; the sweet character and urbane morals which make for such engaging and easy relations among you; in a word, the appearances of all the virtues without having a single one. (Ibid)
Once civilized, Rousseau argued, man cannot be entirely who he really is; rather, he shall always be a puppet to forces beyond his will, be they market forces or monarchical edicts. In a natural state, “men found their security in how easily they saw through one another” (OC III: 8), but that is not so in a refined society. Virtue is therefore foreign to civilized man because he never lives his life by his own free will. Civilized man will always have to appear to be different things to different people. It wouldn’t be until The Social Contract that Rousseau would proclaim that man was born free, but everywhere in chains; nevertheless, the idea that civilized society puts man in such a state of serviitude is clearly present to his thought as early as The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.
In that discourse, Rousseau tackles the question: “Has the restoration of the Sciences and Arts contributed to the purification of Morals, or to their corruption?” (OC III: 5). For Rousseau, that there has been a decay in the virtue of the human race is obvious and he sees the cause as being in the advancement of the arts and sciences: “Where there is no effect, no cause need be sought: but here the effect is certain, the depravation real, and our souls have become corrupted in proportion as our Sciences and our Arts have advanced toward perfection” (OC III: 9). Amour-propre, that part of our esteem which depends on the approval of others, is principally to blame for the corruption of human souls. “Every Artist wants to be applauded. His contemporaries’ praise is the most precious portion of his reward” (OC III: 21).
With the refinement of society, people are ever more vulnerable to the arousal of their amour-propre. Life becomes ever less about our own self-love—our amour de soi as Rousseau calls it—as it becomes about people appeasing their vain appetite for praise. No longer do people look to themselves and their own virtue and for their meaning. Now they look to the approval of their fellow herd:
Before Art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak in ready-made terms, our morals were rustic but natural; and differences in conduct conveyed differences of character at first glance. Human nature was, at bottom, no better; but men found their security in how easily they saw through one another, and this advantage, to the value of which we are no longer sensible spared them a good many vices. (OC III: 8)
When we consider that this theme will motivate Rousseau’s writing through The Discourse on Inequality to The Social Contract, just how well-developed the theme that civilization dehumanizes its constituents by supplying them with ready-made roles, whether those roles be as senators, fathers, farmers, merchants, men, priests, women et cetera, is so early in the The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences is shocking.
Once society, along with the arts and sciences, has advanced, that civilized man has to deal with the demands put on him by social existence. “One no longer dares to appear what one is; and under this perpetual constraint, the men who make up the hard that is called society will, when placed in similar circumstances, all act in similar ways unless more powerful motives incline them differently” (OC III: 8). In a very real way, then, amour-proper binds us to society and to becoming one with the herd. If it weren’t for the society around us, then we would free to pursue virtue and would be free to fully be ourselves.
Rousseau therefore argues that, outside of man’s natural state, people are not free to choose. Amour-propre enslaves us. Rousseau makes a none too subtle reference to the arts and sciences as the fetters of men in the first part of The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences: “While the Government and the Laws see to the safety and the well-being of men assembled, the Sciences, Letters, and Arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are laden…” (OC III: 6-7; italics added). Here we see the corruption of the notion of corruption that has affected modern academia, but I get ahead of myself here.
Society corrupts the human soul because it reduces its scope of free will. In the context of society, people are free to be themselves; rather, they have to be what they need to be to get by. They become cogs in a greater machine; rather than seeing Jacques the free agent, we see Jacques the accountant. To the eyes of someone else in a refined society Jacques is less an end in and of himself as he is a means towards their own ends. The demands of social cooperation can therefore be seen in the light of The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences as dehumanizing. As Rousseau laments: “The ancient politicians forever spoke of morals and of virtue; ours speak only of commerce and of money” (OC III: 19)
Rousseau’s celebration of natural man makes sense in the context of his views on amour-propre. Natural man knows little of amour-propre. He knows not the applause of the a greater society; instead, only knows of himself as the sole spectator to his behavior. He is mainly motivated by self-love, by amour de soi, which inclines him towards both to self-preservation and, when augmented by reason, to virtue. For natural man, since each man follows the beat of his own drum, “differences in conduct conveyed differences of character at first glance” (OC III: 8).
The theme that amour de soi is identified with natural man and with the development of virtue will be made more apparent in Rousseau’s later, more political, works, yet it’s still manifest in The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. Natural man in his natural society, people get their just deserts. But in a refined society, “Rewards are lavished upon wits, and virtue remains without honors” (OC III: 25), which leads to Rousseau becoming one of the leading critics of the refined society. Back to nature! Exorcise amour-propre and return to rustic virtue, which doesn’t rely on the approbation of those around us.
In the end, amour-propre is one of the main trunks of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thought that unites his entire corpus into an intelligible whole. Once human beings started to congregate in society, amour-propre fettered people to predetermined roles and thereby alienated people from their humanity, “that original freedom for which they seemed born” (OC III: 7). Insofar as the sciences provided opportunities for amour-proper to be our primary motivation, the sciences corrupt our humanity for that man is a free agent is pretty much a tautology for Rousseau. Amour-propre chains us to the opinions of others. It puts us in positions where we are not free to choose.
Turning to contemporary politics, a lot of radical left’s curious positions, especially among college radicals, about society can be understood as them taking the view that amour-propre is coercive. Insofar as we don’t give somebody the respect they think they deserve, whether they’re a member of the LGBT community or a Muslim, then we are coercing them to follow another path in life. It doesn’t take much of an intellectual lead to go from here to the talk of micro-aggressions polluting campuses today. The pursuit of virtue in Rousseau’s thought can be identified as the pursuit of self-expression mindlessly praised in college campuses across the nation.
The idea that amour-propre drives us to abandon our own self-expression and to adopt a false courtesy to others is a trunk of Rousseau’s thought that deserves attention, if only for the damage it has done to a proper understanding of coercion. In The Fatal Conceit, Friedrich Hayek targeted Rousseau in particular for corrupting the notion of coercion:
It was Rousseau who—declaring in the opening statement of The Social Contract that `man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains', and wanting to free men from all `artificial' restraints—made what had been called the savage the virtual hero of progressive intellectuals, urged people to shake off the very restraints to which they owed their productivity and numbers, and produced a conception of liberty that became the greatest obstacle to its attainment.
When a lefty shrill decries the patriarchy’s coercion, she is apart of an illiberal tradition with roots in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences in identifying the demands of living socially with coercion. Rousseau isn’t an advocate of a free and open society where one can do as one pleases within the rule of law; rather, he is an advocate of a society where one can never be exactly free to make one’s own identity.
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