PREVIEW-Episode 23: Rousseau: Human Nature vs. Culture

0:00 Speaker: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.

0:25 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 23 is what is the relationship between culture and nature? And we read Jean Jacques Rousseau's discourse on inequality from 1754 and also we'll touch on his book one of the social contract from 1762. For links to online versions of these works as well as discussion and other information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linson Meyer broadcasting to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

1:01 Seth: And this is Seth Paskin hanging with you from Austin, Texas.

1:06 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

1:10 Mark: I like that. So we sounded like increasingly stoned where I was very straight and then Seth was hanging and then you were just

1:17 Wes: barely present, trying to remember what city I lived in.

1:21 Seth: Probably a fair representation of our states of mind, I would guess.

1:26 Mark: So we chose the Discourse on Equality as our main work, which is not Jean Jacques most well known work.

1:32 Seth: Right, correct.

1:33 Mark: On Wes's recommendation. And I was kind of happy about that because when I finally did get into a little of the Social Contract, it was a lot harder and less fun. So this is a good one.

1:42 Wes: It's much more boring. Yeah. Who wants to talk about the general Will? I want to talk about how civilization sucks.

1:49 Mark: Yes. He's very pissy and negative in this whole thing. That's fun.

1:53 Seth: Well, I think the first thing is we ought to talk a little bit about him. I mean, he's got this reputation for being a little bit of a lunatic, a genius, a polymath, being rural like a nostalgia go back to nature, but also simultaneously advocating for the civil society. He was accused by Hannah Arendt and others of being basically the progenitor of fascism. I mean, it's very. He's a. He's a very controversial and interesting character at points in time in his life, was exiled from France and went and lived in a house near David Hume. And Hume was like kind of a defender of his, even though he was at that point going insane and started to abuse Hume because he was paranoid. But Hume was out to get him

2:40 Wes: and they were lovers now.

2:42 Seth: You throwing that in or.

2:44 Wes: Yeah, I'm bullshitting. That's right. I remember that from our Hume episode where they were friends and then, yeah, Rousse became paranoid.

2:52 Seth: Anyway, he's a fascinating character, absolutely fascinating. So at first when I first started reading this and I was like, oh, why didn't we do this right after Hobbes? Why are we just getting back to this now?

3:03 Mark: Yeah, I guess we should say the readers. We'll probably talk enough about Hobbes here that you don't have to go back and listen to the Hobbs episode. But eh, you might.

3:10 Seth: He's touching on the same problem in the discourse on inequality in the Social Contract that Hobbes touches on in Leviathan. And he refers to Hobbes, although he also refers to other people. Anyway, he's a fascinating guy and deservedly so. And you might be reading his fourth most famous book. This isn't even the one he's most famous for. It's like hardly even makes the list.

3:32 Wes: No, no, it does. No, I think it's read as, almost as frequently as Social Contract.

3:37 Seth: What about Emile?

3:38 Wes: Well, I mean, who can get through that?

3:40 Seth: I'm just saying it's famous.

3:42 Wes: Emile is like Ulysses. It's, it's famous, but it, I don't know how often it's assigned.

3:48 Mark: That's a work of fiction, but here there's some philosophical content.

3:51 Wes: It's half fiction, half philosophy. I think it's divided into two parts. One's fiction, one's philosophical.

3:58 Mark: I've never read it.

3:59 Wes: Yeah, neither have I. My mom wants me to read it, whatever that means. Education of a Child and this work.

4:08 Mark: I have a little note here from wikipedia, written in 1754 in response to a prize competition of the Academy of Dijon, answering the prompt, what is the origin of inequality among men and is it authorized by natural law? So he had won a similar. He had been recognized by the prize committee for another one of these earlier, his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. But they didn't like this one as much. This one did not.

4:34 Wes: This also exceeded the word length requirements.

4:38 Mark: So they just probably didn't even read it. I always, I just stop. I had a philosophy paper one of my undergrad TAs did that with. It was on Descartes, Meditations. And I, I wrote a big long thing and she's like, I only wanted five pages. So I just stopped there.

4:55 Seth: I had a teacher in elementary school who, if you had to write a book report or whatever that was like seven pages long, you do it. And on the day that they were due, he would just walk by, everybody's desk and count the number of pages that had writing on them.

5:08 Mark: Well, that's nice. So you Learned to blow V8 early?

5:12 Seth: No, no, I was. I was too much of a good kid. And when I didn't actually do the work, I got bad grades because I tried to be true to the spirit and not the letter of the law.

5:23 Mark: What age was this? Around what grade?

5:26 Seth: This would have been like, fourth or fifth grade. Okay, so whatever that is.

5:29 Mark: I distinctly remember in third grade, they had, like, a caterpillar going around the wall, posted toward the ceiling, which every time somebody read a book, then they would get to put a new circle on the caterpillar with the name of the book, and, you know, that it was them and stuff. And I thought that was the shit. I really wanted some more circles. So I, in fact, invented at least one book just out of nothing and filled out the form that constituted a book report. I remember it was called Bananas, Bananas, Bananas, and I made up the author's name so I could get my extra caterpillar.

6:02 Wes: Precisely.

6:03 Mark: Thorax.

6:04 Wes: That's precisely Rousseau's point, that the desire for recognition leads to deception.

6:08 Mark: Thank you so much for linking that up with something relevant. I appreciate it.

6:13 Seth: And look at. Look at how early that desire is inculcated in today's youth. Yesterday's youth, I guess we count as. Or not even today's youth. By the way, I would just say to anybody who goes out and looks on the Wikipedia page at the Rousseau entry that whoever wrote the section on this particular part, the theory of natural man, is definitely like a Rousseau ologist.

6:35 Wes: And you might be better off looking at the Internet encyclopedia. Philosophy. Stanford's poor cousin. Okay, fewer entries, but they're good. They're. They're quality and more basic, but better than Wikipedia.

6:48 Mark: So we need a quick synopsis. What is this about?

6:52 Wes: All right, I've try to condense this down into, like, the most synopsis ever. So I'll try. How about I try and do that, and if someone else wants to give one after I fail to do that, then that's. That's cool.

7:03 Seth: Do you want me to put the timer on you?

7:06 Wes: All right, yeah, but maybe that. That would be. And then just stop listening after.

7:16 Mark: You're preempting our jokes. Dude.

7:20 Wes: Rousseau is worried about the origins of inequality in society and wealth and social status and so on, and he's thinking of things in terms of natural right and states of nature. And specifically, we talked about Hobbes before, where the idea is that the state of nature is nasty. Brutish. And short. And it's basically the strong rule of weak. And then societies come about as a way to remedy this. Well, Rousseau is going to turn that on its head and say that in fact the state of nature, meaning human beings before they've been socialized, or what he calls savages, like the people of

8:01 Mark: the Caribbean, as he often refers to

8:05 Seth: racist bastards, oh my God.

8:06 Wes: He's going to say that they're happy and healthy and in fact doing very well until the advent of social relations. And that's where once society comes about, once civilization comes about, that's where we start to get inequality and vices and everything else that we lament. Where does society come from? In the second part of the essay, he sort of give it try and trace how we get from this state of nature and happiness to the evil civilization as we know it. I think the basic way to describe all of that is that it comes about with our reflectiveness and self awareness, which while it leads to all our improvements and advancements in technology, also leads to this kind of sense of pride and basically the awareness of relative strength and weakness.

So it's one thing to have natural abilities in a state of nature, it's another to be aware of them and then to become aware that others are aware of them and that you can sort of use them for mutual assistance, or that others may be harmful to you. And that concept of mutual assistance leads to social structures and to property and to tighter social relations between people, familial relations and to the valuation of public esteem and recognition circles around caterpillars, all that stuff. And then to taking offense at disrespects. And once you start to value the recognition of others, then you can take offense when that recognition provided.

And then on the other side of things you get division of labor and a sort of amplification of the inequality and natural abilities, which don't mean that much in a state of nature, but they mean a lot when there's a division of labor, because some people gain a lot more by doing the same work. And so you get inequalities and wealth. And then the final step is because of all those divisions, as they rise up socially, there's a sort of zero sum game going on between the more powerful and the less powerful. The rich are worried about being overthrown by revolution and the weak are kind of miserable.

So the rich sort of invent this ideology which essentially enslaves everyone, which is that we'll come up with a concept of law and justice which will protect everyone. And that's where we'll put the power so that no particular person or class has it. But for Rousseau, of course, that just institutionalizes the whole scheme which subjects everyone to the slavery of society.

10:41 Mark: So yeah, that's pretty good. He took Hobbes picture of people in the state of nature having a terrible time and they make this compact. He actually uses that. He still has a compact in there. He still acknowledges the nasty state that's pre full scale civilization. But he says that that's much later. He traced a few steps before that. He just says Hobbes picture is not complicated enough.

11:06 Wes: His state of nature already assumes social relations, already assumes a socialized being.

11:12 Seth: Right, yeah. That's his criticism of all philosophers to this point who've talked about the state of nature, have transferred their own ideas of society onto their conceptions of what the state of nature is and then sort of snuck them in and brought them back. Because he doesn't fundamentally disagree with Hobbes that the individual's sense of self preservation or desire for self preservation is kind of the one constant. He just thinks that the environment in which the individual is trying to self preserve is very, very different. And that people in general are more or less indifferent to others insofar as they don't intrude upon them. As opposed to being constantly in a state of war and living in fear of having their shit taken. Which he says is something that only comes about once you have injustice.

11:59 Wes: Right. And then there is the one added element there is that desire for self preservation. But there's also the principle of empathy at work. That's pre social.

12:07 Mark: Yeah.

12:08 Wes: Pre reflective. It doesn't require reason. So those two principles. But I think, you know, he thinks, yeah, the instinct of self preservation isn't going to lead to that many ills anyway.

12:19 Mark: Which I think, I think it was good that we read this rather than the Social Contract, because I remember looking at the beginning of the Social Contract and he starts by saying something like serving your self interest being primary and sort of building on that. He's not talking anymore there about the state of nature. He's talking about sort of in society when we're just trying to figure out what government we're going to have given that we're already in society, how to

12:43 Wes: make the best of a bad situation. Which yes, it's not all clear that he thinks it's that bad in the Social Contract.

12:50 Mark: And then he thinks even for primitive people, pursuing your own survival is still the primary thing. But that's different than egoism. He Wants to distinguish between what self respect and self love. It was different in different translations. Of course, we do what we need to do to survive. But like, Hobbes thinks that the only way to make sure you survive is to just grind everybody else down so low that they have no chance of taking your stuff. And he just thinks that that's completely foreign to this savage nature, to human nature itself. But, you know, if you see somebody else get hurt, that's terrible. And that's something that Hobbes or all the folks that just say, oh, nobody's ever altruistic, everybody just does is selfish. They don't seem to have recognition of.

13:33 Wes: I love the way he describes the fact that, you know, not only do what he calls the brutes have empathy. Do animals have empathy? But even like the most depraved human beings and, you know, he gives examples of, say, some Roman emperor who's indifferent to the slaughter of thousands of people, but can go into a theater and see some sad story and cry at it. So even in these sort of depraved human beings who seem like they are completely lacking in empathy, in fact the empathy is still there. And it's a certain social condition which deadens it in some situation.

14:08 Mark: Yeah, which I thought about that, like watching Schindler's List or something. And you ask like, oh, how could people treat people as horribly as the concentration camp guards treated their prisoners? Well, that's because it was. They didn't see them as human anymore. They, you know, really got themselves mind fucked so that they put these people in a certain category so that they weren't people and they didn't have to empathize with them. And that's like something that they had to be conditioned into.

14:34 Wes: Yeah.

14:34 Seth: Is that as much time as it took to bring up a Nazi example?

14:41 Mark: It was a movie example. That's okay. It's okay to bring up Nazis as long as it's Nazi movies.

14:50 Seth: No, it's just I think it's okay

14:52 Wes: to bring up Nazis in general.

14:53 Seth: You know how I feel about using that as a limit case example. All right, so a couple of things I kind of want to point out, just to lay some groundwork here. When we talked about Hobbes in our previous episode, which our faithful listeners will know about. And for those of you who are listening to this for the first time, you can go back and listen to. Hobbes proposed this idea of the state of nature, which is prior to civilization. What is it like for people to live outside of civil society? And one of the things that's kind of unclear in his analysis, or at least to us it was, is whether he was actually saying that this is the way it was or is this just a thought experiment to try and hypothesize about the nature of natural law and natural rights and how societies get formed and how societal or conventional rights can come on top of natural rights.

One of the things that Rousseau does, which I think is very good, is that he says I'm not going to let the facts actually intrude. I think he uses that fraternal phrase I will not let the facts intrude upon what I'm saying. He basically says this is purely hypothetical and speculative and that I'm just sort of theorizing about what things are like. And it's a thought experiment in that respect. Now two things about that. One is, is that he was much more aware apparently than Hobbes was about the behaviors of these so called indigenous societies that obviously influenced his, let's just call it naive views of people like the Caribs, right?

We can call his racist views about them, but he was doing this as a thought experiment.

16:32 Mark: Is it racist if they're favorable views? Still racist. But he's like these, they have good love lives, they relax there.

16:42 Seth: No, exactly. And it's a, it's naive and very sort of like you're good resorts. Eurocentric. But at least he acknowledges that. Because I had a hard time when I was reading this, I was like really? Are you really going to go there? You're really going to say that? You're really going to defend that? But I'm trying to put it in context to understand that. So the other thing is that he romanticizes these so called pre civil society cultures. He says it early, early, early on in part one of the discourse. The savage man is strong and not subject to illness, whereas civilized man is, you know, weak and effeminate.

Primitive man, the Aborigines of Australia, they don't have these problems, right, because they're tough and strong and they don't get sick, they don't have the flu and they don't worry about bird flu and mad cow disease and all these other sorts of things. And I think that obviously contributed to this view of him as the pastoral romanticist. It's kind of also laying the foundation for what he's going to try to build off of because he is going to try to build this story about how culturalization and the entering into civil society creates all these ills, including inequality.

So it's important As a context, I

17:52 Mark: think if I would just walk outside now and try to walk the dog for more than a minute and a half, then I feel like his whole picture of the savage as being happy with his lot is a load of crap. Unless the savage does not live in an area with a lot of mosquitoes.

18:10 Wes: The savages naturally repelled mosquitoes.

18:14 Seth: It's because they're. It's because their diet.

18:16 Wes: That's right, because of their diet. The. Their sweat was naturally anti.

18:23 Seth: That having been said, Rousseau agrees with Hobbes and the other. Some of the other state of nature guys that the one fundamental principle, what you might call the one fundamental natural right that exists in the state of nature is that of self preservation. That's what I read out of that. Do you guys agree that that's what he's saying?

18:43 Wes: Well, he says two principles at some point, right? And then he says self preservation and empathy.

18:49 Mark: He says we are born free as soon as we are old enough to care for ourselves. And this is sort of toward the end of the essay and in Social Contract that we have the right and indeed the obligation. And this is very Kantian and Kant was very influenced by him, that it is the essence of our humanity to be free, to be self reliant in a certain way. You cannot abrogate yourself of that right.

19:13 Seth: Self reliance or self preservation.

19:15 Mark: I think at different parts he's talking about different things. I didn't notice early on him actually referring to self preservation as a right. Certainly it's one of the tendencies that we have.

19:25 Wes: You're right.

19:25 Mark: And Hobbes uses the word right about that. Hobbes used it in a really strange way. And we weren't really even sure what he was talking about because he also says, and this is the way Rousseau interprets him, that Hobbes says that we have the right to everything right. We have to do whatever we think is necessary to preserve ourselves. Which again, he thinks that the savage man, Hobbes thinks will have to essentially kill everybody else to really secure that.

19:51 Wes: This part where he talks about empathy or compassion, you know, he says there's another principle which is escape. Hobbes which having been bestowed on mankind to moderate on certain occasions, the impetuosity of egoism or before its birth, the desire for self preservation is the repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer. You know, I'm speaking of compassion. He talks about Hobbesian self preservation and he adds this principle of empathy.

20:18 Seth: I wanted to get around to that point about compassion, Wes. But I think there's a distinction here about this concept of preservation. He's not disagreeing with Hobbes that self preservation is the principal activity of the individual in the state of nature. Self preservation is kind of the principal goal of human activity in the state of nature. Whereas Hobbes said it's your right, Hobbes said self preservation is a natural right, your natural right. And of course, since self preservation includes protection from being impinged upon by all these other influences, you have a right to basically establish your dominion aggressively and violently as you see fit.

Rousseau is saying there really is no such thing as right, you know, or virtue and vice and those sorts of things. That it's simply the case that self preservation is what people do in the state of nature and that self preservation is not a particularly aggressive activity in the state of nature. It's pretty easy for people to just kind of do their own thing and get along, and they have no inclination to enforce their will upon others in order to preemptively secure their self preservation as if it were a right, where in fact the opposite. As Wes pointed out, that it's impossible not to feel compassion for others.

Even though your primary interest is self preservation, you also have this inclination to compassions. More importantly, there are no rights, so to speak, in the sense that there's such a thing as a natural right and that there's a natural right for you to self preserve. It's just simply an instinct that right doesn't exist in the state.

21:48 Mark: Yeah, I think Rousseau and Hobbes are both inconsistent about this idea of are there moral truths or the normative claims before society comes into the picture? Because Hobbes on the one hand uses the word right in the way you're saying, but then he also says once the state is formed, the social compact is what grounds all further right and in fact grounds the definition of right. So that the sovereign is the one who decides from then on what is right and wrong right. He believes whatever the sovereign defines. Morality essentially is at least one interpretation of Hobbes.

Whereas Rousseau has a similar kind of thing, that most of our moral considerations and what we consider virtues and vices and things, all that comes up with society, of course those are socially created. But then in other places he talks in the same way. You know, we are born free. We are born with this right or duty of freedom, of duty to act out our humanity as free agents or something like that. So I'm not sure ultimately what. When you can use the word right.

22:48 Seth: That's true, that's ambiguous what's not ambiguous is where it comes down about the concept of inequality. But yeah, I can agree with that.

22:57 Mark: Let's talk about that. So he does believe that there are natural inequalities. Some people run faster than others, some people hunt better than others, whatever. But he thinks that once you get in society, not only do people notice those and start taking offense about those or whatever, but it also exacerbates them. So that if one person, if one savage is a little smarter than another, it's not that big a deal. They're not going to have that big an advantage. But then if you put them both in a public school system and one of them is not getting the hand holding that he needs to excel and the other one is bright enough that he can figure it out and work through it, then the intellectual difference between them magnifies greatly.

23:37 Seth: Or more importantly, if one of them is a much better public speaker and gains honor and recognition or the other one doesn't.

23:43 Mark: Right. There are more opportunities for these natural things to play out into concrete power differentials. And sometimes he does sound like a social Darwinist about that. Like, oh, well, at a certain stage, then the people who are the better, who are the more industrious, then they're able to take advantage of that situation and put themselves on top.

24:03 Wes: But there is no on top in a state of nature though, right?

24:05 Mark: No, I'm talking once you get into. When society is solidifying.

24:09 Seth: He does give his own little sort of account of how we get from complete state of nature into society. It might be worth just spending a little bit of time on that so that we don't lose the distinction.

24:21 Wes: That's the whole second part.

24:22 Seth: Right? Yeah. Because he does have a very interesting idea where he thinks in the state of nature, human beings are very much like animals in the sense that males and females come together only to copulate and raise young. And when the young are old enough to move on, they lose all interest, you know, in each other and move on to the next thing, which is kind of. I thought that it was amusing.

24:46 Mark: Yeah. Not, not probably based on the best science.

24:50 Seth: Well, yeah, you know that like wolves

24:52 Mark: mate for life and you know, there are plenty of instances in nature that

24:55 Seth: yes, it was clearly, clearly, clearly not even inform by, I'm sure what science and zoology was available even in the day. But I still thought it was kind of interesting. But it's important to him because he thinks that if you're talking about the state of nature related to an individual, where an individual is only doing what they can accomplish and confine themselves only to what they do themselves and is only concerned with their own self preservation. This idea of the family unit is the first association of individuals into a collective. It is the basis ultimately for civil society because it's the first and only real natural association of individuals into a collective. Again, you can disagree with whether or not that's the case, but that's his view.

25:41 Mark: He really doesn't give a lot of room in his view for psychological dependence, does he? It all just comes down to yeah, of course kids that can't take care of themselves are going to be dependent on their parents, but even them, it's a matter of getting what they need to survive, not a matter of being personally attached to each other.

25:59 Wes: Well, you know, he talks about the development of personal attachment. The development initially it's survival and then you get this, he calls it, quote unquote, the expansion of the human heart where you get conjugal love and you get parental affection and, and that, that comes about as a result of proximity, where you're living in the same dwelling together.

26:20 Mark: Well, it's just interesting that in the state of nature, he doesn't think that slavery is possible as opposed to, I guess I normally see Hegel's view, you know, the master in slave view as the subsequent historical development that improved on all these social contract guys. But yet it seems like Rousseau is saying something that might be an advance upon oversimplifying. Hegel's view is that society starts when one guy bashes another guy over the head and sort of makes him his slave. That, that you get these tribes that are sort of strict tyrannies. Yeah, I don't know if he says this could be.

26:52 Wes: You say Rousseau is saying that?

26:53 Mark: No, that's the Hegel's view, whereas Rousseau is saying that's not possible. In fact, if one person tries to take another a slave, I mean the slaver is going to have to go to sleep at some point and then the slave just runs away. Whereas it seems like pack dogs, they're not all necessarily related, they're not all necessarily from the same litter, but some can dominate others and it creates these social relations, non linguistic social relations, you know, where some are just perpetually cowed by others and seem to accept the subservient role.

27:23 Wes: You know, I was reminded of Hegel too in the sense that especially when I tried to boil it all down, you know, this sort of critical point of self awareness, right. He calls it reflection at some point, self awareness and self love and then the Awareness of that in others. So that that's where you get the sort of Hegelian mutual recognition and the building up of the social. So at the same time that you get these social relations that are necessary to self consciousness and essential to, you know, who we are as human beings, you get this, I think, something corresponding to the life, death struggle between Hegel's master and slave.

It's naturally adversarial because you're trying to win recognition from the other and you're engaged in this game. And that's where all the ills come from. The thing which seems to be most distinctively human reason and the source of all our virtues for say, someone like Aristotle, I think for Rousseau, is the source of all our vices and all our problems.

28:22 Seth: I didn't read it quite the same way. I'm going to take leave of this little evolutionary act that he takes, which I thought was kind of interesting and probably in a lot of ways more realistic than what we saw in Hobbes, for example. But if, as Marx says, for Hegel, the beginning of society is when one guy bashes another guy over the head and makes him a slave, then for Rousseau, the beginning of society is when somebody stands on a piece of land and says, this is mine property. And the declaration of ownership of property is the foundation of civil society.

You know, really what happens is when somebody figures out that you can mine or and turn it into metal, or you can take a plot of land and cultivate it. So in other words, anything that you do labor that you do now, which has no immediate gain, but is for future gain. So it's not hunting and gathering or fishing or whatever that it's something different. Like that activity is the beginning of civil society because you have to be able to have the freedom and the space to do it. You have to have the time and the leisure and the protection of your own work, you put in, you have specialized labor, particularly in mining, for example, metallurgy and agriculture.

29:38 Mark: Right, right.

29:39 Wes: But Seth, that actually in the second part, property, even though he begins by saying the famous line where the first person to enclose a piece of ground is the real founder of civil society, he then goes back and gives that whole tracing of going from the state of nature to civil society and property actually comes about a little later. And so you do get the whole self awareness thing before property. Because the first instances of property are the hut for enclosing your family and then the land for tilling and cattle. Those don't come about until people are actually in little proto societies.

Because one of the reasons why agriculture comes about, for instance, is because if you have some people working on metallurgy, which is necessary to other arts, not everyone is going to be able to contribute to the subsistence within this little hunter gatherer group. So you already have a proto social group, but for that to even begin, for there even to be property, you have to have what he calls reflection or self awareness.

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