Genealogies of Morals

Lecture Notes for 9/17/01

(Rousseau's Second Discourse)

Here is a link to a version of the Confessions on the web.

Born into a good family, both parents citizens of Geneva (only 1500 of 20000 residents were actually citizens, so this was really good.) Geneva was a Protestant Republic, with law shaped by Calvin. Italy (independent Sardinia) to the south was Catholic. Rousseau's mom died giving birth to him, his dad could not raise him alone, so he grew up with his aunt and uncle and various tutors. Eventually his uncle decided on engraving as a career for him (his dad was a watchmaker). Rousseau spent his teenage years as an apprentice for an engraver, where he says he first really learned vice since his work drove him to find pleasures in other things and his living conditions taught him envy and wickedness. He started stealing, etc. At the age of 16, he got in the habit of going out of the city on Sundays with some raucous buddies, and twice was locked out, at which point his master threatened to beat him to a pulp if he was locked out a third time. So, when he was locked out for a third time, he decided to just run away rather than go back to slavery under an angry master.
(This selection is taken from the Dartmouth Press edition of Rousseau's Confessions.)
In the first outbreak of my sorrow I threw myself upon the bank, and bit the ground., laughing at their misfortune, my comrades instantly made their choice. I also mad mine, but it was in a different manner. On the very spot I swore never to return to my master; and the next day, when they returned to the city at the opening of the gates, I said farewell to them forever, asking them only to inform my cousin Bernard in secret of the resolution I had made, and of the place here he could see me one more time . . ..
Before abandoning myself to the fatality of my destiny, permit me to turn my eyes for a moment onto the one that naturally awaited me, if I had fallen into the hands of a better master. Nothing was more suited to my disposition nor more fit to make me happy, than the tranquil and obscure condition of a good artisan, above all in undisputed classes, such as the engraver's is at Geneva. This condition, lucrative enough to give an easy subsistence, and not enough to lead to wealth, would have limited my ambition for the rest of my days, and leaving me a decent leisure for cultivating moderate tastes, it would have kept me in my sphere without offering me any means for leaving it. Having an imagination rich enough to adorn all conditions with its chimeras, powerful enough to transport me, so to speak, at my will from one to another, it mattered little to me in which I was in fact,. It could not have been so far from where I was to the first castle in Spain that I could not have easily settled there. From this alone it followed that the simplest conditions, the one that gave the least worry and fewest cares, the one that left the mind the most free, was the one that suited me best, and that was precisely my own. In the bosom of my religion, my fatherland, my family, and my friends, I would have passes a peaceful and sweet life, such as my character needed, in the uniformity of a labor to my taste, and of a society in harmony with my heart. I would have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good friend, good worker, good man in everything. I would have loved my station; perhaps I would have honored it, and after having passed a simple and obscure, but even and sweet life, I would have died peacefully in the bosom of my own people. Doubtless soon forgotten, at least I would have been missed for as long as I might be remembered.
Instead of that . . . what picture am I going to draw? Ah! Let us not anticipate the miseries of my life . . .. (pp. 35-37, Pl. I.42-44)

Rousseau went to Sardinia, where he ended up in a school for catechumens as a way to get food and lodging. As a condition of this benefit, Rousseau had to be baptized a Catholic, which caused him to lose his citizenship in Geneva -- so it's not as legitimate a conversion as I had originally thought. He came out a Catholic and dirt poor, but managed to eek out a living as chance drove him towards France. He found a variety of lady patronesses who partially supported him. He also found a mistress, with whom he has five children, who he sends to the state orphanage. (He has a long defense that this is the best thing he can do for his children.) He worked as a cashier before being resolved to life a life of solitude and poverty, then worked transcribing music. He wrote a very successful opera, that earned him fame from strangers and jealousy from friends, neither of which pleased him. (After that, he stopped writing operas.) He became close friends with the most important members of the French intelligensia, including Diderot.

His friendship with Diderot, and in particular the long walks that he took from Paris to Vincennes, led to his first major foray into philosophy.

That year 1749 the Summer was excessively hot. From Paris to Vincennes adds up to two leagues. Hardly in a condition to pay for cabs, at two o'clock in the afternoon I went on foot when I was alone, and I went quickly so as to arrive earlier. The trees on the road, always pruned in the fashion of the country, gave almost no shade, and often exhausted from the heat and fatigue, I spread out on the ground when I was not able to go any farther. I took it into my head to take some book along to moderate my pace. One day I took the Mercury of France and while walking and glancing over it I fell upon this question proposed by the Academy of Dijon for the prize for the following year: "Has the progress of the sciences and arts tended to corrupt or purify morals?"
At the moment of that reading I saw another universe and I became another man. Although I have a lively remembrance of the impression I received from it, its details have escaped me since I stet them down in one of my four letter to M. de Malesherbes. This is one of the peculiarities of my memory that deserves to be told. If it serves me, it does so only as long as I have relied on it, as soon as I entrust the deposit to paper it abandons me . . ..
What I do recall very distinctly on this occasion is that, when I arrived at Vincennes, I was in an agitation that bordered on delirium. Diderot noticed it; I told him its cause, and . . . he exhorted me to give vent to my ideas and to compete for the prize. I did so, and from that instant I was lost. All the rest of my life and misfortunes was the inevitable effect of that instant of aberration . . ..
When this Discourse was done I showed it to Diderot who was satisfied with it, and who indicated some corrections for me. Nevertheless this work, full of warmth and strength, is absolutely lacking in logic and order; of all the ones that have come from my pen it is the weakest . . .. (pp. 294-95, see too the letter to Malesherbes)

The essay argues that progress in arts and sciences actually leads to vice rather than virtue. It defends this primarily on historical grounds, with a philosophical explanation for the naturalness of this progression. The seeds of the essay you read for today are clearly already present here, but only the seeds.
The essay won the prize that year, and Diderot arranged to have it published.

The following year 1750, when I was no longer thinking about my discourse, I learned that it had won the prize at Dijon. This news reawoke all the ideas that had dictated it to me, animated them with a new strength, and finished stetting into fermentation in my heart that first leaven of heroism and virtue which my Father and my fatherland and Plutarch had put there in my childhood. I no longer found anything great and beautiful but to be free and virtuous, above fortune and opinion, and to suffice to oneself.
The essay also won Rousseau instant literary fame . . . and infamy. He was attacked by the defenders of arts and sciences, who were many and prolific. His defenses distracted him, which he regrets.
Hardly had my Discourse appeared when the defenders of letters pounced on me as if by agreement . . .. I took up the pen [to defend myself] . . .. All these polemics occupied me very much, with much loss of time my copying, little progress for the truth, and little profit for my purse.
The second discourse, which we read, was written a few years later. Rousseau describes this opportunity as follows:
I soon had an occasion to develop them [my principles] completely in a work of the greatest importance; for it was, I think, in that year 1753 that the Program of the Academy of Dijon appeared on the origin of inequality among men. Struck by this great question, I was surprised that this Academy had dared to propose it; but since it had had this courage, I could certainly have the courage to tackle it, and I undertook to do so . . ..
From these meditations resulted the Discourse on Inequality, a work that was more to Diderot's taste than all my other writings, and for which his advice was most useful to me, but which found few readers who understood it in all of Europe, and none of these wanted to talk about it. It had been written to compete for the prize, thus I sent it, but I was certain in advance that it would not get it, knowing well that the prizes of Academies are not established for pieces of that stuff.

This essay did not win the prize, nor did R expect it to. After writing this essay, R went back to Geneva, where he reconverts to Protestantism and is made a citizen.
Rousseau eventually moves back to a "Hermitage" outside of Paris, built for him by one of his lady friends from Paris. There he goes on to write several more works, including a novel that rocked the continent, Julie, as well as his Social Contract, which had an important influence on both the American and French Revolutions, and Emile, a book on moral education. In the letter, this is the third work that forms a unity with the two discourses. These works are condemned in both France and Geneva, leading Rousseau to be banished from France and to renounce his citizenship in Geneva, and to flee to other city-states in Switzerland, to England, and eventually to return at the end of his life to Paris. Next week I will lecture on these works and their relationship to the second Discourse. Rousseau's life and work well deserves a course all its own, and I will do the best I can to give you a sense of his overall life's project without swamping you with hundreds of pages of reading. For now, though, let's turn to look more closely at the second Discourse in particular.

II. Context of this Discourse

A. In R's life, see I.

B. 1. Scientific discoveries. Buffon and Lineaus were the great biologists of the day. Linneaus had begun classifying huge numbers of animals, while Buffon -- the more important of the two at the time -- published a multivolume work just documenting the structures of various animals and giving an account of how animals developed in various parts of the world. He offered a "devolutionary" account. What is most important for the purposes of reading Rousseau is that biology and comparative biology were taking off at the time, and there was lots of data available about wild animals that would not have been as prominent a century earlier. Hence we find constant reference to animals and animal behavior, and Rousseau's account of savage man reads as a scientific account of an animal.
(See too Discourse p. 24, man as machine . . . )

2. Discoveries of new peoples. See the footnotes for the importance of these in Rousseau's discourse.

3. Philosophical predecessors and contemporaries: Locke, Voltaire, Diderot, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, etc... were all important.
Hobbes is perhaps the most important philosopher to have in the background. Hobbes's account of the emergence of man from the state of nature provides an important contrast to Rousseau's. Briefly, Hobbes's account was the following.

Man was initially solitary and motivated by three basic passions: greed, fear, and pride. Because goods were scarce, and people were always in danger of having their livelihood stolen and their lives taken away by others, people were in a constant state of war with each other. Hobbes calls this "the war of all against all." Even if people were not actually fighting at some particular time, everyone was always wary of others and looking for an opportunity to get the better of them. As Hobbes describes it, life in the state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Human beings, realizing that their best chance for survival depended on ending the war of all against all, band together and submit to a soveriegn. They turn over absolute power to that sovereign, who rules over all of them, using the strength of his subjects to subdue any who would threaten them. Thus, with the loss of their liberty, the slaves of the king at least have peace. And, to complete this and introduce you to yet another genealogy, Hobbes claims that morality is just the will of the sovereign. Moral right and wrong are embodied in the laws of the land, which all must submit to because they turned over all their rights to the sovereign who wrote the laws.
There's a lot more to the story, but that's the basic idea.

Others (Grotius, Pufendorf) accepted Hobbes's basic model (Grotius may have been the model for Hobbes) but insisted that man is not purely selfish but rather has a basic instinct for social life itself.

You can see Rousseau responding to both the egoism of Hobbes (in his stuff on pity) and the social nature ascribed to man by Pufendorf. And he responds to both at once in his suggestions that man is not proud, fearful of others, or rational in the SN.

III. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.

- unlike mandeville, rousseau does not write a tidy short essay on the origin of our ideas of morality in particular. Instead (because he had to answer the question to win the contest), he writes on the origin of inequality. The inequality that Rousseau is explaining is the generally accepted inequality between kings, nobility, priests, and commoners, and all the various ranks within each of those categories. And Rousseau does discuss this inequality, with more explicit attention than he gives to morality at least.
But the real emphasis of the essay is the nature of man and the development of society, reason, laws, even mores (= customs, morals, manners, etc.), but especially amour propre (egocentrism).

Let's compare hobbes, mandeville, and rousseau. So far, we don't have rousseau's whole story, but what do we learn about the state of nature?

In particular, how is man in the SN different from "civilized" man?

Ideas to be sure to touch on:
Freedom/Liberty in State of nature, perfectibility. (25)
Reason and the birth of reason in society. Savages as irrational.
Amour de soi-meme vs. Amour propre.
Natural goodness of the savage: Pity, no disrespect for others, limited violence, no amour propre.
Contrast natural goodness of savage with the kind of moral virtue possible (but rare) in civil society. Note that savage has no notions of virtue . . . (see 17, 25, 28, 34-35, 38, fn 9)

What happened? How did humans "evolve" from mere animals to the civil condition with all its vice and inequality?

Rousseau discusses this in terms of several stages:

1. First Revolution: Families, homes, beginnings of luxury. "Some crude idea of mutual commitments" (46), new sentiments (parental love, etc, 48).
1b. Beginnings of comparisons (49) à "duties of civility" (49). Desire for esteem à Cruelty (49-50), pity is beginning to change/erode (50).

2. Metallurgy and Agriculture introduce the loss of independence. "the first rules of justice" (52). Social inequality (53), hypocrisy and ambition (54).
2b. Inequality of wealth (due to natural inequality) à crimes and slavery (54-55)

3. Instability of riches (for rich) and basic needs (for poor) gives rise to "rules of justice and peace to which all will be obliged to conform" (56). à loss of liberty "they all ran to chain themselves" (56)

4. à Governments (57).

5. Stages of government (65) finally end in a "second state of nature" - Tyranny! (68)

Food for thought: Could humans have evolved into a civil condition without all the bad effects? What exactly went wrong? Could we evolve further and end up somewhere better than the end of part II?

IV. The Response to Rousseau's second Discourse
A. Attacks from every angle. (Recall Conf. 326)

B. Revolutions!! Rousseau had a significant impact on both French and American Revolutions. The founders read Rousseau and incorporated some of his ideas into the Declaration and (to a much lesser extent) the constitution. Rousseau was not as significant as others (Locke, Hutcheson) on U.S., but he had an impact. And he was perhaps the most significant philosophical influence on the French Revolution (which, among other things, eliminated much of the inequality -- at least briefly -- that Rousseau rails against here. "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" . . . at least two these ideas are central in this very essay!).

V. What are the implications of this genealogy? Should we go back to living the savage state? Would it be better if we never emerged? (SEE FOOTNOTE 9)

For now, focus on this footnote as well as the rest of this essay. Next Tuesday -- once I've had a chance to read through a lot more Rousseau, I will lecture about Rousseau's positive program. Rousseau did not just stop with this rather pessimistic genealogy. He went on to work out in detail what was to be done in the light of it. We could easily spend a whole semester, if not more, working out all the details of this positive program. Instead of having all of us read all that Rousseau wrote on the matter, one of us (and unless someone volunteers, that's going to be me) will read everything and just fill you all in on it. I hope to send something out (like a leading comment) soon. We'll see.

There are a couple passages from the period of the Discourses that are relevant. In a preface to a failed attempt at writing a play, Rousseau works out many of the ideas that eventually emerge in his second Discourse. There, among other things, he writes:

But once a people is to a certain extent corrupted, should the sciences - regardless of whether they did or did not contribute to the corruption - be banished, or the people be shielded from them, either in order to be improved, or to be kept from becoming worse? This is another question about which I positively declared for the negative. For in the first place, since a vicious people never returns to virtue, the problem is not how to make good those who are no longer so, but how to keep good those who are fortunate enough to be so. In the second place, the same causes that have corrupted peoples sometimes help prevent a greater corruption; thus, a man who has ruined his temperament by an injudicious use of medicine is forced to continue to rely on doctors in order to stay alive; and that is how the arts and sciences, having fostered the vices, become necessary to keep them from turning into crimes; at least they coat them with a varnish that prevents the poison from being exuded quite so freely. They destroy virtue, but preserve its public semblance, and this at least is a fine thing to do. (in The Discourses and other early political writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 103)

In a letter to Voltaire after the second Discourse, R says,

In my Epistle dedicatory I congratulated my Fatherland for having one of the best governments that can be: in the body of the Discourse I showe dt aht there could be very few good Governments: I do not see the contradiction you find in this. But how tdo you know, Sir, that if my healt permitted I would go and live in the woods rather than among my Fellow-Citizens for whom you know my affection? So far weas I from saying anything of the sort in my work, that you must, rather, have found in it very powerful reasons for not choosing that kind of life . . .. If one can, one ought to settle in one's fatherland in order to love and to serve it . . .. (ibid, p. 227)

VI. Religion.

See pp. 15, 17, (33), 43, 71 in second discourse. Rousseau sometimes seems to say that all of this is "just hypothetical," similar to Mandeville's claim that his account is for non-Christians and non-Jews. In Mandeville, the only hint that he was not serious about that was that his account seemed to work really well for Britian at the time, for a nation of Christians. Any hints in Rousseau? (See especially page 43, but see p. 33)

Rousseau's account of his own conversion and subsequent exposure to religious folks makes it clear that he had very little respect for formal religion and especially little for hypocritical priests, but a great deal of love and admiration for genuine piety and devotion to God, whether Catholic or Protestant.
His defense of reconverting to Protestantism gives a clearer picture of the place of formal religious affilliation in his thought.

Having arrived in that city [Geneva] I abandoned myself to the republican enthusiasm which had brought me there. This enthusiasm increases as a result of the welcome I received. Feted, fawned upon by all stations, I abandoned myself entirely to patriotic zeal, and ashamed at being excluded from my rights as a citizen by the profession of a worship other than that of my forefathers, I resolved to take this latter back openly. I though that since the gospel was the same fro all Christians, and the basis of dogma was different only the things one got mixed up in explaining that one did not understand, in each country it was up to the sovereign alone to settle both the worship and this unintelligible dogma, and that consequently it was part of the citizen's duty to accept the dogma and to follow the worship prescribed by the law . . .

See end of his letter to Voltaire for an even clearer description of his religious views. If someone wants to do a paper on Rousseau and religion, that would be pretty cool. (in Discourses and other writings, pp. 241-45). If any of you want a copy, let me know.