Rousseau, Second Discourse IX

Finding human nature

Moving on to the first part of the Second Discourse, we get Rousseau’s hypothetical portrait of natural man based on the assumption of individualism: what we see is that it leads nowhere. If individualism were true, then man would have remained in the state of nature like the other animals. Were it not for the intervention of the chance causes (these fortuitous or unfortunate events), man would have remained a being in the wilderness albeit a being with great potential.

Let us conclude that wandering in the forests without labor, without speech, without a home, without war, and without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and similarly with no desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognizing any of them individually, savage man, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, would have had only the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to this state. He would have felt nothing but his true needs and looked only at what he believed he had an interest in seeing. His intelligence would have progressed no further than his vanity. If by chance he made some discovery, he could no more have communicated it than he could have recognized even his own children. Art died with the inventor. There was neither education nor progress. The generations multiplied aimlessly, and, since each one always set out from the same point, the centuries flowed past in all the coarseness of the first ages. The species was already old, and man remained a child.

We want to see why natural man was moderate, pacifistic, and simple; why the potential would have remained merely potential; why the first part of the book is a dead end.