[D66] 'Brede welvaart'

[A.O.]

Erroneous identification of Rousseau with the noble savage

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, like Shaftesbury, also insisted that man was born
with the potential for goodness; and he, too, argued that civilization,
with its envy and self-consciousness, has made men bad. In his Discourse
on the Origins of Inequality Among Men (1754), Rousseau maintained that
man in a State of Nature had been a solitary, ape-like creature, who was
not méchant (bad), as Hobbes had maintained, but (like some other
animals) had an "innate repugnance to see others of his kind suffer"
(and this natural sympathy constituted the Natural Man's one-and-only
natural virtue).[27] It was Rousseau's fellow philosophe, Voltaire,
objecting to Rousseau's egalitarianism, who charged him with primitivism
and accused him of wanting to make people go back and walk on all
fours.[c] Because Rousseau was the preferred philosopher of the radical
Jacobins of the French Revolution, he, above all, became tarred with the
accusation of promoting the notion of the "noble savage", especially
during the polemics about Imperialism and scientific racism in the last
half of the 19th century.[29] Yet the phrase "noble savage" does not
occur in any of Rousseau's writings.[d] In fact, Rousseau arguably
shared Hobbes' pessimistic view of humankind, except that as Rousseau
saw it, Hobbes had made the error of assigning it to too early a stage
in human evolution. According to the historian of ideas, Arthur O. Lovejoy:

The notion that Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality was essentially a
glorification of the State of Nature, and that its influence tended to
wholly or chiefly to promote "Primitivism" is one of the most persistent
historical errors.
— A. O. Lovejoy, The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s Discourse on
Inequality (1923).[31]

In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau, anticipating
the language of Darwin, states that as the animal-like human species
increased there arose a "formidable struggle for existence" between it
and other species for food.[32] It was then, under the pressure of
necessity, that le caractère spécifique de l'espèce humaine—the specific
quality that distinguished man from the beasts—emerged—intelligence, a
power, meager at first but yet capable of an "almost unlimited
development". Rousseau calls this power the faculté de se
perfectionner—perfectibility.[33] Man invented tools, discovered fire,
and in short, began to emerge from the state of nature. Yet at this
stage, men also began to compare himself to others: "It is easy to see.
... that all our labors are directed upon two objects only, namely, for
oneself, the commodities of life, and consideration on the part of
others." Amour propre—the desire for consideration (self regard),
Rousseau calls a "factitious feeling arising, only in society, which
leads a man to think more highly of himself than of any other." This
passion began to show itself with the first moment of human
self-consciousness, which was also that of the first step of human
progress: "It is this desire for reputation, honors, and preferment
which devours us all ... this rage to be distinguished, that we own what
is best and worst in men—our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our
errors, our conquerors and our philosophers—in short, a vast number of
evil things and a small number of good." It is this "which inspires men
to all the evils which they inflict upon one another.".[34] To be sure,
Rousseau praises the newly discovered "savage" tribes (whom Rousseau
does not consider in a "state of nature"), as living a life that is
simpler and more egalitarian than that of the Europeans; and he
sometimes praises this "third stage" it in terms that could be confused
with the romantic primitivism fashionable in his times. He also
identifies ancient primitive communism under a patriarchy, such as he
believes characterized the "youth" of mankind, as perhaps the happiest
state and perhaps also illustrative of how man was intended by God to
live. But these stages are not all good, but rather are mixtures of good
and bad. According to Lovejoy, Rousseau's basic view of human nature
after the emergence of social living is basically identical to that of
Hobbes.[35] Moreover, Rousseau does not believe that it is possible or
desirable to go back to a primitive state. It is only by acting together
in civil society and binding themselves to its laws that men become men;
and only a properly constituted society and reformed system of education
could make men good. According to Lovejoy:

For Rousseau, man's good lay in departing from his "natural" state—but
not too much; "perfectability" up to a certain point was desirable,
though beyond that point an evil. Not its infancy but its jeunesse
[youth] was the best age of the human race. The distinction may seem to
us slight enough; but in the mid-eighteenth century it amounted to an
abandonment of the stronghold of the primitivistic position. Nor was
this the whole of the difference. As compared with the then-conventional
pictures of the savage state, Rousseau's account even of this third
stage is far less idyllic; and it is so because of his fundamentally
unfavorable view of human nature quâ human. ... His savages are quite
unlike Dryden's Indians: "Guiltless men, that danced away their time, /
Fresh as the groves and happy as their clime—" or Mrs. Aphra Behn's
natives of Surinam, who represented an absolute idea of the first state
of innocence, "before men knew how to sin." The men in Rousseau's
"nascent society" already had 'bien des querelles et des combats [many
quarrels and fights]'; l'amour propre was already manifest in them ...
and slights or affronts were consequently visited with vengeances
terribles.[36]

For Rousseau the remedy was not in going back to the primitive but in
reorganizing society on the basis of a properly drawn up social compact,
so as to "draw from the very evil from which we suffer [i.e.,
civilization and progress] the remedy which shall cure it." Lovejoy
concludes that Rousseau's doctrine, as expressed in his Discourse on
Inequality:

declares that there is a dual process going on through history; on the
one hand, an indefinite progress in all those powers and achievements
which express merely the potency of man's intellect; on the other hand,
an increasing estrangement of men from one another, an intensification
of ill-will and mutual fear, culminating in a monstrous epoch of
universal conflict and mutual destruction [i.e., the fourth stage in
which we now find ourselves]. And the chief cause of the latter process
Rousseau, following Hobbes and Mandeville, found, as we have seen, in
that unique passion of the self-conscious animal – pride, self esteem,
le besoin de se mettre au dessus des autres ["the need to put oneself
above others"]. A large survey of history does not belie these
generalizations, and the history of the period since Rousseau wrote
lends them a melancholy verisimilitude. Precisely the two processes,
which he described have ... been going on upon a scale beyond all
precedent: immense progress in man's knowledge and in his powers over
nature, and at the same time a steady increase of rivalries, distrust,
hatred and at last "the most horrible state of war" ... [Moreover
Rousseau] failed to realize fully how strongly amour propre tended to
assume a collective form ... in pride of race, of nationality, of class.[37]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage#Erroneous_identification_of_Rousseau_with_the_noble_savage


On 17-05-18 20:30, A.O. wrote:
> Diep tragisch hoe de NOS probeert met het bericht over de 'brede 
> welvaart' de bevolking positief te stemmen en de brede insolventie 
> probeert te verdoezelen. Kijk es hoe holland 't doet... De 200e 
> verjaardag van Marx werd door de Nederlanders geheel doodgezwegen. 
> Nederland paradijs! Als je de welvaart afzet tegen de abjecte 
> massacultuur en de volstrekt verrotte samenleving qua bedorven 
> menselijke relaties hoe kan men dan nog spreken over 'welvaart'? 
> Jargon van economen die net verder kijken dan de 3%-groeinorm. 't 
> Vaart niet wel. Als het milieu en de ecocide ons niet de das omdoet 
> dan is het wel de extremistische techniek of de volgende oorlog. De 
> hedendaagse uitbuiting biedt geen enkel perspectief op menselijke 
> emancipatie en welzijn. Terug naar Rousseau en de nobele wilde? 
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