Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies

"This is a collection of essays by Robert Wokler, who was one of the foremost Rousseau scholars of the 20th century. It was edited posthumously by Brian Garston, and has an introduction by Christopher Brooke, which puts Wokler’s life and work in context. I thought it important that if we were going to look at five books to do with Rousseau, Wokler was represented. It’s frustrating, in a way, that Wokler never really published a big book on Rousseau. Rather, he published many essays, and a short book for OUP in their ‘Past Masters’ series. But, over the course of a career during which most people thought of him as the person who knew most about Rousseau, he published many discrete essays on particular topics. One essay in the book that I’d particularly like to mention came out in 1978, in a special edition of Daedalus for the 200th anniversary of Rousseau’s death. It’s called “Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau’s Anthropology Revisited.” In the piece, Wokler looks at one passage in particular in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality . In it, Rousseau has some fascinating speculations about primatology, and whether or not we are of the same species as orang utans. Rousseau points out that there’s only one way to find out and that it would be immoral to try it. “The insight was that man is good by nature and is made wicked by society.” There’s lots of fascinating history of ideas detail in the essay. There’s also a paradoxical aspect to what Rousseau says. When he describes the behaviour of really primitive humans in the Inequality , he describes them as wandering solitary through the woods, occasionally meeting up to mate and so on. In doing that, he describes a set of behaviours that actually correspond to the behaviours of just one major ape species, namely the orang utan. So when he talks about whether we’re related to orang utan—whether we’re members of the same species as them—he discusses their behaviour, and our original behaviour, and it looks like what he’s saying might be scientifically accurate. In fact, the creatures that he, or rather French scientists of the time, would have had access to, and which he is probably describing and giving the name ‘orang utan’ to, were chimpanzees or possibly bonobos, which are very social as a species. I don’t think he observed live specimens. Wokler tells us how people brought back the corpses of ape species from Africa. Rousseau must have relied on explorers’ tales, and on what learned people in Paris, who had dissected apes, wrote about them. These were his sources. It is, of course, controversial whether Rousseau was giving a semi-scientific view of human evolution in the Discourse on Inequality , or whether he was doing something that doesn’t purport to offer a true account of the origins of the human species, but rather is investigating the origins of certain concepts—concepts of equality and inequality—not telling us a true story, but giving us a kind of conceptual reconstruction. That’s right. Philosophers have been doing this for a long time. You get it in Hobbes, you get in Locke, you get in Plato , even. Yes. He claimed that all his mature writings were knitted together by a single insight, an insight that sounds simple, but is actually quite complicated and obscure. The insight—which he says came to him in an epiphany as he was walking to the Chateau Vincennes where his friend, Diderot, was imprisoned—is that man is good by nature and is made wicked by society. It allegedly came to him when he read the newspaper containing the competition that led to the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts . And he claimed that this insight united his contributions across a range of different disciplines. Certainly, it is central to his main works. It certainly does sound like that, but Rousseau doesn’t think we can go backwards. He does suggest, in some writings, that there were earlier periods of existence where various impulses were in better balance than they are now. But even those earlier phases of existence—and we’re past the period of people wandering in solitary ways through the forest now—are already stages where people have a certain degree of self-consciousness, where they’ve become conscious of how they appear in the eyes of other people, where notions of vanity and pride already exist in the human species and where there is a certain amount of conflict. That’s right. Rousseau thinks that there is a certain amount of natural inequality between people, but this natural inequality is pretty small. It’s true that some people are smarter than other people, and some people are stronger than other people. But those natural differences among people don’t underpin or explain the kinds of inequalities and hierarchies that we find in human society. Rather, he thinks that those inequalities have been generated by convention, by agreement. When I say ‘generated by agreement,’ that already suggests a kind of social contract. But some of those agreements are made without people being fully conscious of what they are agreeing to. “Natural differences among people don’t underpin or explain the kinds of inequalities and hierarchies that we find in human society.” The inequalities we find in modern societies are inequalities that rest upon our beliefs, our expectations, our agreements, what we’re prepared to put up with in other people. Rousseau wasn’t necessarily hostile to all of those inequalities, but he thought that inequalities by convention ought to work to the benefit of everyone. The inequalities that we actually find in society—the difference between the one per cent and the many—are not inequalities of convention that can be justified by appealing to everyone’s benefit. Manifestly there are many people who are at the bottom of those hierarchies, who lose self-respect, who lack adequate means to feed themselves, clothe themselves and so on."