The Views Of Jean-Jacques Rousseau On The Corruption Within Society
Jean-Jacques Rousseau claims that human beings are inherently good, but society ultimately corrupts them. However, if society is comprised of inherently good individuals, then how can society become corrupt in the first place? Rousseau answers this question and defends his central claim through his writings within the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and Emile. In doing so, Rousseau conveys to his readers both the origin of the corruption within society and the inescapability of becoming corrupted.
In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins by discussing a multi-stage evolution of the human race, starting from their primitive origins and ending at the complex modern society of his time. In the beginning, human society was not corrupted. Here, Rousseau uses the term amour de soi to represent the inherent drive that all creatures have for survival and self-preservation. According to Rousseau, amour de soi directs us to first attend to our most basic biological necessities such as food, water, and shelter. Humans existed as solitary creatures, but were adequately equipped for their own survival and thus had no reason to interact with other human beings, except for the occasional copulation or reproduction. As such, albeit very slowly, the human race survived and continued to develop. Rousseau states that the human race was naturally good at this time because their inherent goodness was the result of having almost zero interaction present between human beings. However, human beings, during this time, distinguished themselves from all other sentient beings by having and developing two defining characteristics: “freedom” and “perfectibility”. Freedom, in Rousseau’s context, is simply the ability to not have one’s life revolve around finding his next meal, while perfectibility is the capacity to learn and essentially find more efficient ways to survive. Together, these characteristics gave humans the potential to achieve self-consciousness, rationality, and morality. It is this potential that Rousseau conveys, which led human society to eventually conceive corrupt thoughts. As the human race advanced, humans began to cooperate and interact with each other in activities such as settling and hunting. During this time, the basic drive for survival (amour de soi) evolves into all other forms of passion. According to Rousseau, this marked the central transitional moment that humans began to develop their dangerous potential to achieve rational thought. During this transition, human beings changed their psychological relationships with one another, which altered their conception of themselves and how they viewed themselves among others. Rousseau calls this new conception the “sentiment of their existence”, and it is this sentiment that enabled the corruption of society from the inherently good individual. This “sentiment of existence” is the result of the development of humankind’s potential and is the root that ultimately leads human beings to form a society comprised of deception, dependence, and domination.
The “sentiment of existence” defines the culmination of all the self-conscious, rational, and moral changes in nature that human beings began to have in their settled communities. Arguably, the most influential of these changes to the corruption of human nature was the consideration of their own attractiveness and their attractiveness compared to others. In Emile, Rousseau terms this new type of self-interested drive, concerned with comparing themselves to the success of others in society, as amour propre. Rousseau states amour propre as a passion that amour de soi develops within a social environment, which first developed from their once basic drive for survival. Amour de soi, considered by Rousseau to be the origin of all passion, has thus transformed into amour propre. Now, after the transition into a society, amour propre represents the central drive of each human being to have the need to gain recognition and respect from others. In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, for instance, where Rousseau discusses the psychological development of an individual in a modern society, he associates the genesis of amour propre with sexual competition. The moment human beings began to see each other as sexual competitors was when human society began its corruption. For instance, Rousseau expands on the occurrence of puberty, which he suggests is the stage at which men begin to think of themselves as rivalrous sexual beings. Amour propre is the term that encapsulates such thoughts and represents the passion that began to plague human society.
While Rousseau blames amour propre to be the root cause of humanity’s fall, he also credits amour propre to have allowed humans to develop rational thought and their self- consciousness as social creatures, Essentially, although Rousseau believed that amour propre has a much higher tendency to take on a negative and toxic form, he also believed that it is possible for it to take on a more cordial character, by going through the proper ways of organizing social life, personal upbringing, and individual education. Suggesting the possible benefits of this functions to support Rousseau’s argument for amour propre to be able to be responsible for corruption of society. For instance, in Emile, Rousseau argues that an individual must be brought up in isolation, with private education, in order to avoid the corruption from society. This suggests that amour propre can not only cause someone to be evil but also cause someone to become good. While Rousseau goes on to admit that the latter is impossible, this acknowledgement demonstrates that amour propre, our inner passion, leads us to corruption, away from our natural state of goodness.
Although amour propre originates from sexual competition and interaction in small communities, it only evolves into its final toxic form when it is combined with newfound material interest and interdependence. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau follows the growth of agriculture and the first beginnings of private property, which causes the emergence of inequality between landowners and commoners. Rousseau suggests that the establishment of private property was the last straw that transitioned human society into its corrupted form. In the now unequal society, human beings create social relationships that obstruct their sense of self-worth. For instance, with a now established social hierarchy, there exists a system of subordinates and superiors. While everyone needs both the social good of recognition and material goods as food, warmth, etc. , only the superiors are able to get both goods. Yet, subordinates need superiors in order to achieve their basic necessities, and superiors need subordinates to work for them and also give them recognition and respect. Thus, both need each other, while only the superiors get both. In such a system, there is a strong incentive for people to use underhanded methods in order to attain both ends. For example, the subordinate may choose to cheat others in order to get ahead, or the superior may choose to lie about his health in order to gain more respect. Thus, human beings whose amour propre used to merely be about sexual competition, are now corrupted with the existence of material interests and private property. Finally, at this stage, the inherently good human being can now be corrupted to his maximum potential by living in a society.
The presentation of amour propre in Emile is consistent with that in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in that Rousseau sees it as a completely negative passion and the root source of all evil. Additionally, throughout Emile, interpretations of amour propre often focus on the fact that the need for recognition always has a superiority complex, which means that individuals are not just satisfied with being acknowledged, but they have to be acknowledged as superior to others. Rousseau argues that this aspect of human nature creates further conflict, as human beings try to gain such recognition from others but then react with hostility when they are not respected. Coupled with the fact that human beings already begun seeing each other as sexual competitors, the newfound conflict for superiority exacerbates the negative and toxic atmosphere of the developing societies. Essentially, Emile continues Rousseau’s work in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and goes further into the development of the corrupt society.
In Emile, Rousseau argues that the evolution of civilization has not improved human society but has instead further corrupted it. Emile functions to convey a system of a new form of education designed to both shield children from this corruption and to prepare them for their inevitable entry into society. Similar to the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Emile seeks to pinpoint the transitional moment at which human beings, specifically children, are first instructed in the social norms that will regulate their lives. While the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality focused on the change from the inherently good individual to the corrupt society, Emile focuses on the transition of children into society. At the beginning of Emile, Rousseau declares: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of” God, “the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man,” who “wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man must be trained like a school horse”. Here, Rousseau argues that the mind is initially a blank canvas, devoid of any ideas, until impressions are inscribed into it. During this state, the child is in a state of goodness and free from corruption. However, as soon as the child becomes brought up in the “the hands of man”, the child regresses from his state of goodness and falls into line with the rest of the corrupt society. Therefore, Rousseau states that the child must be brought up properly, isolated within nature, in order to protect them from the corrupt society. In Emile, Rousseau states that he is not a simple idealist; he understands that a child born into the modern- day society cannot keep himself in the state of natural goodness. If a child was left to be unobserved and uneducated, he explains, “everything would go even worse. In the present state of things a man abandoned to himself in the midst of other men from birth. ” He goes further to say that, without education, “[the child] would be the most disfigured of all. All the social institutions in which we find ourselves would stifle nature in him and put nothing in its place”. Thus, in order to be protected from such disfigurement, he must be educated, in the “proper” way as Rousseau describes.
With society being as corrupt as it is, Rousseau suggests that the child must be taught in isolation, far from any interaction with society. Then, in this isolated space, the main task for the tutor, is to prepare the child while simultaneously retaining as much of the child’s natural goodness as possible. This allows for the child to become civilized and ready to enter the corrupt society, while still being a “good” individual. In society, he is now able to protect himself from becoming corrupted and is able to lead a good life. In order to demonstrate how such a radical method of teaching might be carried out, Rousseau depicts and imaginary student, Emile, who is taught in this principled way throughout his entire childhood. Until full “maturity”, which Rousseau suggests happens when Emile becomes a sexual partner with Sophie through marriage, the child is shielded from the corruption of society. Throughout Emile, the reader is able to see the lengths any human being, who are all inherently good individuals, must take in order to not be corrupted.
However, Rousseau’s plan of preserving the natural goodness while becoming a civilized member of a corrupt society is inherently paradoxical. Rather than attempting to argue against this problem, Rousseau admits that his plan is unrealistic and cannot succeed. According to Rousseau, such a process of teaching will create an ultimately conflicted individual: “he who in the civil order wants to preserve the primacy of the sentiments of nature does not know what he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either [natural] man or citizen”. “He will be nothing”. Here, Rousseau acknowledges from the start that his scheme to avoid the corruption of society is an impossible goal. With this acknowledgement, Emile is taken as a mere philosophical expansion of the notion of the inherently good individual and the corrupt society. From this, it can be concluded that human beings who become part of society are inevitably going to be corrupted. While human beings may be good initially, there is no possibility of retaining that good, due to the existence of the developed modern society. Only during the period before the aforementioned transitional moment of humans from solitary creatures to small communities, were human beings able to live lives as full and inherently good individuals.
In essence, the individual is inherently good, and it is society that is corrupt. Society became corrupt in the first place through the development of humanity’s passions in amour propre and amour de soi. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau first explores the state of nature in which humans first lived, and then imagines the transitional moment that changed the inherent passions of humans. With the advent of interaction and sexual competition between human beings, these emotions took on toxic and negative forms, which led to the degeneration of the good individuals. Ever since, society has been corrupted, and no individuals can escape the corruption, which Rousseau demonstrates in the writings in Emile. In Emile, Rousseau takes the reader through a scheme devised to prevent human beings from becoming corrupted, yet he ascertains that such a scheme is an impossibility. He admits that the individual, whose natural goodness was protected since his birth, will ultimately become conflicted once entering society and will inevitably fall to corruption. Through these two writings, Rousseau is able to answer the initial question (how can society be corrupted in the first place?), by envisioning the origins of human society and by realizing the inescapability of society’s corruption.
In conclusion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau believes that we are all inherently good individuals, but, by being involved in society, we have become corrupt. Even though he believes we were once good-hearted individuals, this conjecture is a rather pessimistic view, as there are no means to protect ourselves from the corruption. But overall, I think the corruption is not entirely bad as it has not deterred the advancement of our species, and the stage that modern-day society is in has certainly been worth losing our inherent good. And without it, I would say that we are still capable of doing good, while still being members of the corrupt society.
Works Cited
- Gauthier, D. , 2006, Rousseau: The Sentiment of Existence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality; A Discourse on Political Economy ; The Social Contract. The Franklin Library, 1982.
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile. Createspace Independent Publishing, 2015.
