Rousseau and the Original Sin

Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia

Rousseau and the Original SinAuthor(s): Jeremiah L. AlbergReviewed work(s):Source: Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, T. 57, Fasc. 4, O Mal e a(s) Teodiceia(s): Novos AspectosSapienciais (Oct. - Dec., 2001), pp. 773-790Published by: Revista Portuguesa de FilosofiaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40337657 .Accessed: 09/05/2012 14:21

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R.P.F. 57-2001

Rousseau and the Original Sin

Jeremiah L. Alberg*

ABSTRACT: It is a commonplace that Rousseau, with his theory of the natural goodness of human beings, rejected the doctrine of original sin. As is often the case with commonplaces, the truth contained therein stands in need of investigation. This paper will seek to show that Rous- seau's dissatisfaction with the dogma stemmed more from its lack of explanatory power, than from any supposed contradiction with the theory of natural goodness. Further, this rejection is part of a larger rejection of the supernatural telos of human beings. Finally, the alternative that Rousseau proposes for the sin of Adam is a "fatal accident. " Rousseau attempts to tell the story of this accident in such a way that the narrative itself will change the course of events that have followed upon the accident.

Key Words: Cassirer, E.; Dualism; Education; Entile; Envy; Evil; Language; Original sin; Rousseau, /.-/.; Society; State of nature.

Re SUMO: Hoje e urn lugar comum afirmar que Rousseau, graqas a sua teoria acerca da bondade natural dos seres humanos, rejeitou a doutrina do pecado original. A verdade contida em lugares-comuns, contudo, necessita de ser investigada. Objectivo do presente artigo e mostrar ate que ponto a insatisfacdo de Rousseau com o dogma acerca do pecado original provinha mais da suafalta de poder explicativo do que de uma suposta contradiqao com a teoria da bondade natural dos seres humanos. Alem disso, mostra tambem ate que ponto essa rejeiqao em Rousseau fazparte de uma rejeigdo muito mais ampla na medida em que alargada a afirmacdo de todo e qualquer telos sobrenatural para os seres humanos. Mostra-se ainda, finalmente, ate que ponto a alternativa proposta por Rousseau transforma o pecado de Addo num. "acidente fatal

" e como Rousseau tenta narrar a historia deste acidente de tal forma que a propria narrativa se revela com a pretensao de por si mesma alterar o percurso dos acontecimentos que se seguiu a esse acidente.

Palavras-Chave: Cassirer, E.; Conflicto; Dualismo; Educacdo; Entile; Inveja; Lingua- gem; Mai; Pecado original; Rousseau, /.-/.; Sociedade.

the ninth of June 1762 the high court, the parlement of Paris, ordered the novel Emile to be publicly burned. In addition, it issued the order for the arrest of its author, Jean- Jacques Rousseau. On the 28th of August the

condemnatory letter of the Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, was published: Mandement de Monseigneur UArcheveque de Paris, portant condam- nation d'un livre qui a pour titre "Emile", ou de V Education, par Jean-Jacques

* Faculty of Humanities, Sophia University (Tokyo, Japan).

© Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 57 (2001), 773-790

774 Jeremiah L. Alb erg

Rousseau, citoyen de Geneve} Later the book was also condemned by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne.2

The primary reason for the condemnation of Rousseau and his book was that he was judged in it to have denied the dogma of original sin. The clearest statement of this denial does not occur, as might be expected, in the "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" nor in the context of a discussion of infancy, but in Book II when the child is already at least two years old. Rousseau writes:

Let us set down as an incontestable maxim that the first movements of nature are always right. There is no original perversity in the human heart. There is not a single vice to be found in it of which it cannot be said how and whence it entered.3

Accordingly the book was viewed as a "harmful teaching" which led to "opposition to the natural law and to the destruction of the Christian religion."

In more recent times Ernst Cassirer also points to this denial as one of the epoch- -making traits of Rousseau's thought. In his The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousse- au Cassirer makes plain that this was not arcane theological debate, but

in fact, an inescapable decision, vital to the history of the world and to cultural history, was involved. What irrevocably separated Rousseau, despite all his genuine and deep religious emotion, from all traditional forms of faith was the decisiveness with which he rejected every thought of the original sin of man.4

This denial and its consequences force us to face three questions. First, why, in fact, did Rousseau feel that it was necessary to turn so decisively from the dogma of origin sin? It would seem that this dogma would be attractive to him in that it is an attempt to explain the depravity of the human race without blaming God and still respecting human freedom. Second, in what precisely did this rejection consist? Is it a simple denial of the dogma or is it more complicated? Third, with what did Rousseau intend to replace the dogma. For it is clear that when the traditional

A printed copy of this document can found appended to Rousseau's response in the following version: Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen de Geneve, a Christophe de Beaumont, Ar- cheveque Paris, Due de S. Cloud, Pair de France, Commandeau de VOrdre de Saint Esprit, Proviseur de Sorbonne &c. Avec sa Lettre au Conseil de Geneve, A Amsterdam, Chez Marc- -Michel Rey, M.DCC.LXIQ. For background on the condemnation of Emile consult A. Ravier, U Education de L'Homme Nouveau: Essai Historique et Critique sur le Livre de V Emile de J.- -J. Rousseau, (Issoudon: Editions Spes, 1941).

For a detailed account, in addition to Ravier, consult Maurice Cranston, The Noble Sav- age: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754-1762 (Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1991) pp. 344-362.

All references to Rousseau will be given with the volume number in Roman numerals and then page number to the Oeuveres Completes, eds. Eb. Gagnebin and M. Raymond, Paris, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, Editions Gallimard, 1959-. Hereafter abreviated OC. Where possible I will use the English translations from Collected Writings of Rousseau, eds. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelley, again with volume and page number preceded by the abbre- viation CW. For Emile or On Education, however, I have used the Allan Bloom translation (Basic Books, 1979). The quotation here is taken from OE IV p. 322, Bloom, p. 92. 4 Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean- Jacques Rousseau translated and edited by Peter Gay (New Haven: Yale UP, 1954) p. 74.

Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 57 (2001), 773-790

Rousseau and Original Sin 775

solution is rejected, the problem remains. How does one explain the depravity of humans without simply blaming God or human nature? In answering these three questions I would like to develop the following three theses. 1) That Rousseau rejected the dogma of original sin, not in the first instance because it contradicted his theory of natural goodness, but rather because he felt that the dogma of original sin did not explain what it set out to explain. In order to explain the origin of evil he was compelled to develop the theory of natural goodness. 2) While Rousseau's rejection might seem at first to leave some room for theological discourse as a kind of 'separate but equal' explanation, in fact his rejection is designed to completely displace the dogma. 3) The alternative explanation that Rousseau proposes is that the origin of inequality and thus evil is an accident. This may strike some as a shallow explanation or as no explanation at all, since accidents are precisely those happenings that we cannot account for logically. In fact it is a brilliant move on the part of Rousseau which allows him to tell the story of the accident in such a way that the story itself becomes an attempt to change the course of events that have followed from the accident. I will show that his analysis of language in the Dis- course on Inequality is essential to his project because language is what makes this story possible, both in the sense that language is what made the original accident possible and that is what the story is about and secondly in the sense that one needs a language to tell the story.

Reasons for the Rejection of Original Sin

Rousseau rejects the dogma of original sin because he saw "another universe" and became "another man" in his experience of illumination on the road to Vincen- nes. This experience opened up a space for a new form of thought. He describes it so:

O Sir, if I had ever been able to write a quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree, how clearly I would have made all the contradictions of the social system seen, with what strength I would have exposed all the abuses of our institutions, with what sim-

plicity I would have demonstrated that man is naturally good and that it is from these institutions alone that men become wicked5.

We see two basic positions explicated here. First, that man is by nature good, and second that society bears responsibility for evil. Both of these were denied, though in different ways, by the contemporary theories of original sin. Rousseau did not simply rely on his "enlightenment", but attempted to prove what he had intuited against any position that held the contrary. This leads him to seek an alternative.

It is not difficult to understand the problems that the Protestant version of original sin, especially in its stronger variants, held for the man whose name has become synonymous with "natural goodness". Original sin was often interpreted to mean that humans were corrupted, that there was no goodness in the heart and therefore humans could not recognize moral goodness. Rousseau argued, most explicitly through the Savoyard Vicar, against this position. The Savoyard priest

5 Lettres a Malesherbes, OC I, pp. 1 135-1 136, CW p. 575.


776 Jeremiah L. Alberg

argues for a rejection of the view that does not allow for goodness in the depth of the human heart.

If moral goodness is in conformity with our nature, man could be healthy of spirit or well constituted only to the extent that he is good. If it is not and man is naturally wicked, he cannot cease to be so without being corrupted, and goodness in him is only a vice contrary to nature. If he were made to do harm to his kind, as a wolf is made to slaughter his prey, a humane man would be an animal as depraved as a pitying wolf, and only virtue would leave us with remorse. ... If there is nothing moral in the heart of man, what is the source of these transports of admiration for heroic actions, these rap- tures of love for great souls?6

Any doctrine that entailed denying that humans could know right from wrong or held that reason was so darkened that it could not lift itself up to the smallest goodness was repugnant to Rousseau. Humans are able to recognize both virtue and depravity and therefore are bound to take responsibility for them, promoting virtue and correcting vice.

The Catholic understanding of original sin was no less problematic but in a different way. Rousseau responded most explicitly to this view in his Lettre a Chris- tophe de Beaumont published in March of 1763.7 We find that Rousseau's arguments are of two types. First, he does not believe that the Augustinian interpretation of Scripture is the only one possible.

First, it is far from being the case, according to me, that this doctrine of original sin, which is subject to such terrible difficulties, is so explicitly and clearly contained in the Scriptures as it has pleased the Rhetorician Augustine and our theologians to erect it there.8

This argument is ultimately not so important for Rousseau since he downplays the special status of revelation anyway. As Cassirer puts it:

No revelation can make reason unnecessary or take its place. For when revelation asks us to subordinate reason to faith, it must give us reasons for this subordination, and thus reinstate reason in its rights.9

So even if the doctrine could be seen as clearly derived from Scripture, it would still have to prove its reasonableness. As regards particular dogmas, Rousseau was always a rationalist. "Les plus grandes idees de la divinite nous viennent par la raison seule." In this light Rousseau then questions its reasonableness, and this is the second more important type of argument. He asks whether it is reasonable to assume

that God created so many pure and innocent souls only to join them with culpable bod- ies through which they take on moral corruption and afterwards are condemned to hell without any other crime than this union which is His work.10

6 Emile, OE IV p. 595-596, Bloom p. 287. Lettre a Beaumont, m: OC IV, pp. 927-1007. Lettre a Beaumont, OC IV, pp. 937-938. Translations are my own, but parts of this letter

are translated in Ann Hartle, The Modern Self in Rousseau* s Confessions, (Notre Dame: U of ND Press, 1983) which I have consulted. Cf. pg. 42. 9 Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant und Goethe, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1945) p. 50.

Revista Portuguesa deFilosofia, 57 (2001), 773-790


Rousseau reacts sharply against any interpretation of original sin that would make God into an unjust tyrant, who condemns humans for being exactly what he made them to be. Rather he believes that God made humans good and the opening sentence of his novel Emile is perhaps the most famous expression of that belief: "Tout est bien, sortant des mains de l'auteur des choses: tout degenere entre des mains de rhomme."11

Rousseau's arguments against the rationality of original sin flow out of his understanding of Christian soteriology. For Rousseau either humans are freed from original sin by baptism or they are not. If they are freed, then original sin is completely erased and they return to the state of Adam before the Fall. Thus, the vices humans have (at least in Christian countries where baptism is widespread) must be given another explanation. They cannot stem from original sin. If, on the other hand, humans are not freed through baptism, then it is as if God, apart from the actual original sin, deliberately made humans weak and then turned around and punished them for this weakness. In the end these are two main grounds upon which Rousseau objects to the dogma of original sin. First, that it makes God into an unfair tyrant, who sets up traps for humans to fall into. Second, and more impor- tantly, the dogma does not actually explain what it sets out to. As Rousseau writes to the Archbishop of Paris:

You say that we are sinners because of the sin of our first father, but then why did our first father sin? Why cannot the same reason, by which you explain his sin, be applied also to the sin of his descendents without original sin and why must we impute to God an injustice, in that he makes us guilty and culpable by our birth while our first father sinned and is punished as we are without this? Original sin explains everything except its principle and it is this principle that needs to be explained.12

I will not repeat here what I have develop in my other writings on this subject, but simply summarize by saying that I think the dogma of original sin got cut loose from its moorings in Christian soteriology during the 16th Century.13 In this way it became the answer to a question it was never intended for. The dogma of original sin developed historically from reflections on what it meant to be saved by Jesus Christ, what the death and resurrection of the God-human meant. The salvation offered in Christ was greater than just personal redemption but had historical and even cosmological dimensions. Original sin was the result of these kinds of reflections. By the 16th Century original sin often functioned as a kind of starting point for reflections on the human condition. Finally, it became a kind of catch-all explanation for what ailed us. No matter what the problem was, the cause was original sin, i.e. our fallen nature, our depravity. Sadly, that which explains everything

10 Lettre a Beaumont, OC IV, p. 938 u£m/fe,OCIV,p.245. 12 Lettre a Beaumont, OC, IV, p. 939.

See my Verlorene Einheit: Die buche nach einer philosophiscnen Alternative zu der Erbsundenlehre von Rousseau bis Schelling, (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996) pp. 31-43.

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explains nothing. Rousseau had only to enunciate a Catholic principle, that humans are made good to have the walls come tumbling down.

Rousseau's theory of natural goodness does not make it easier for Rousseau to deal with the problem of evil. In a certain sense it makes it more difficult. He has to find an explanation for the manifest evil without blaming the individual. He is looking for the principle or origin of evil. He complains to the Bishop:

According to you the cause of evil lies in the depraved human nature and this very depravity is an evil whose cause must be looked for. We agree, I think, the both of us, that humans were created good. You say, however, that he is bad because he was bad; and I show how he became bad. Out of the two of us, who, in your opinion, ascends better to the principle?14

This lack of explanatory power means that for Rousseau the dogma of original sin has become an ideology that legitimates the evil of the present social order. He hints at this when he blames the Jesuits for the fact that his book Emile was condemned. He writes in his Confessions: "I did not doubt at all that this Mandate was of the Jesuits' making, and, even though they were themselves in misfortune at that time, in it I still recognized their old maxim of crushing the unfortunate."15 In other words the condemnation is not an attempt to uphold the truth, but an attempt to defend an oppressive social order.

One of the reasons for going against the Catholic understanding of original sin was because it seemed to imply that the evil to which humans were liable was somehow necessary, the result of concupiscence. And thus the moral as well as the physical evils of the world were to be stoically born, with justice coming in the next life. Rousseau opposes any position that tries to legitimate the present evil of society. In this sense he feels that the doctrine does not pull back the veil and reveal the truth of the situation. As Cassirer states for Rousseau social evil

could not be borne because it ought not to be borne; because it robs man not of his happiness but of his essence and his destiny. At this point no retreat, no pliancy or submissiveness is permitted. What Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, regarded as mere defects of society, as mere mistakes in organization which must be gradually elimi- nated, Rousseau saw rather as the guilt of society, and with flaming words, again and again, he reproached society with this guilt and called for atonement.16

Although he believed with passion that humans were good, entire and whole both in the birth of the species and the birth of each individual, he refused to blind himself to those strange but recurrent events that show that something is drastically wrong. Certainly he acknowledged the progress of the arts and sciences. Science

14 Lettre a Beaumont, OC, IV, p. 940. Les Confessions: Autres texts autobiographiques, OC I, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Pa-

ris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 606. English translation Collected Writings of Rousseau, 5, The Con- fessions and Correspondence, including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Christopher Kelly, ed. Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman, (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1995) p. 507. 10

Cassirer, p. 29.



was means for progress and he benefited from it. Technical arts had reduced the burden of daily living. But even without the benefit of experiencing the 20th Cen- tury Rousseau knew that technology brought as much evil with it as good. There was something wrong. He won the academic prize for answering with a resounding "No", the question of whether the progress in the arts and sciences had improved the morals of humankind. He answered that the arts and sciences are born of vice, but he did not answer in the First Discourse what the source of these vices were. He simply says that arts and science deprave morals, while vice itself leads, in turn, to the arts and sciences. Rousseau does not attempt to escape from this circle.

The Nature of the Rejection

But as Cassirer points out, Rousseau's greatness lies not so much in the rejection itself as in the attempt to face the problem, for which the dogma was one solution, squarely. "How can evil and guilt be attributed to human nature if it is free from both in its original state, if it knows no radical depravity? This is the question around which Rousseau's thought circled ever anew"17. Indeed it is much more ac- curate to speak in the manner of R. Spaemann of Rousseau's "secular metamor- phosis of original sin", rather than simple rejection.18 It was Rousseau's unwilling- ness to accept any of the standard answers in response to the problem of the depravity of humans that made his thinking so creative.

This thinking is founded on the conviction that we need an explanation of the causes of the problem in order to find a proper solution to it. Rousseau's starting point was the concrete human condition. He saw the evil of this situation with a clarity that has seldom been matched. He is no fatuous optimist.

But for man in Society. . .it is first of all a question of providing for the necessary, and then for the superfluous; next come delights, then immense wealth, and then subjects, and then Slaves; he does not have a moment of respite. What is most singular is that the less natural and urgent the needs, the more the passions augment, and, what is worse, the power to satisfy them; so that after long prosperity, after having swallowed

up many treasures and desolated many men, my Hero will end by ruining everything until he is the sole master of the Universe. Such in brief is the moral picture, if not of human life, at least of the secret pretensions of the Heart of every Civilized man.19

No, it was not an optimistic temperament that led Rousseau to reject original sin. Rousseau had experienced human depravity and had the eyes to see it.

Put another way, I think that all of Rousseau's thinking is driven by an attempt to provide a comprehensive alternative to Christianity, given his perception that Christianity not only did not explain the problem, but also did not offer any solu-

17 Cassirer, p. 30. Robert Spaemann, ,,Uber eimge Schwiengkeiten mit der Erbsiindenlehre , in: Zur

Erbsiindenlehre: Stellungnahmen zu einer brennenden Frage, (Freiburg 1991), p. 54. 19 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in OE m, p. 203, CW HI, p. 75-76. All parentheti-

cally inserted numbers refer to this text.



tion. The first systematic attempt at this is his Discours sur L'Origine et les Fon- demens de Ulnequalite Parmi Les Hommes (1755). He says that his goal in this is to "penetrate, through our frivolous demonstrations of good will, what goes on at the bottom of our Hearts" and to "reflect on what the state of things must be where all men are forced to flatter and destroy one another" (p. 75) 'To penetrate" and "to reflect" meant that Rousseau could not be content with the vision he experienced on the road to Vincennes. Rather he was compelled to methodologically work out that vision

We can say that there is evidence that Rousseau saw himself as offering an "alternative account" to the Genesis story. I wish to quote here at length Starobinski since he gives such an excellent expression to what Rousseau is about in the Sec- ond Discourse:

[The Second Discourse] is conceived as a revelation to the human; it is a thoroughly religious work, but of a very particular kind, a substitute for sacred history. Rousseau has rewritten Genesis as a work of philosophy, complete with Garden of Eden, original sin, and the confusion of tongues. This is a secularized, "demystified" version of the origins of mankind, which repeats the Scripture that it replaces with another tongue. . . .Christian theology, though not present explicitly, shapes the structure of Rousseau's argument.20

It is an alternative that does not enjoy the other's revelational status. Rousseau wants to explore the same ground that is explored in the first three chapters of Genesis, but not under the same ground rules. He makes quite explicit his methodological presuppositions when he states that his investigation is not into historical truths.

The Researches which can be undertaken concerning this Subject must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings better suited to clar- ify the Nature of things than to show their genuine origin, like those our Physicists make every day concerning the formation of the World (p. 19)

He compares his activity to that of natural scientists who form hypotheses concerning the formation of the earth. The comparison is important for it clarifies how Rousseau envisioned his task. Just as the natural scientist in the time of Rousseau proposed to explain the formation of the world without reference to creation account of Genesis, so Rousseau wished to explore the origin of evil without reference to original sin. He begins then, not by a simple rejection of the dogma, but by laying aside the whole universe of discourse, by "setting aside all the facts" in which this dogma found its meaning. It is Scripture that makes clear that the situation of Adam was not the same as Rousseau's natural man. It makes clear that the state of nature never existed, that "the first Man, having received enlightenment and precepts directly from God, was not himself in that state;. . ."(p. 19). Therefore, says Rousseau, "Let us begin by setting all the facts aside, for they do not affect the question" (p. 19). It is religion that teaches that God took man out of the state of

20 Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 290.



nature immediately, just as it teaches that he made the world, but it does not forbid philosophers from forming "conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of man and the Beings surrounding him, about what the human Race might have become if it had remained abandoned to itself (p. 19) any more than it forbids physicists from forming hypotheses.

Rousseau repeats and emphasizes this methodological move of his again at the beginning of the First Part of the Second Discourse, and then again at its end. He states that he will begin, "without having recourse to the supernatural knowledge" (p. 20). Instead, he will strip this being "of all the supernatural gifts he could have received" so that he can consider him "as he must have come from the hands of Nature" (p. 20).21 Finally he states as a conclusion to the entire Second Discourse.

I have tried to set forth the origin and progress of inequality, the establishment and abuse of political Societies, insofar as these things can be deduced from the Nature of man by light of reason alone, and independently of the sacred Dogmas which give to Sovereign authority the Sanction of Divine Right (p.67).

Rousseau has set aside the Christian world-view. He hopes to bring philosophy fully into the world of science. It was this way of thinking which led Kant to name Rousseau the Newton of the moral universe.

Newton was the first to see order and regularity joined with great simplicity where before him there was only disorder and badly matched multiplicity. But since Newton the comets travel in geometric paths.

Rousseau was the first to discover under the multiplicity of forms taken on by humans their deeply hidden nature and the concealed laws by which providence would be justified through his observations. Before this the objection of Alphonsus and Manes was valid. After Newton and Rousseau God is justified and from now on

Pope's theorem is true.22

While Rousseau does not directly argue against original sin in the Second Dis- course, and instead claims to be conducting a different kind of investigation, he is in fact seeking to offer a viable substitute.

While he cannot accept the dogma of original sin, Rousseau's starting point is the reality of human evil. "Men are wicked; sad and continual experience spares the need for proof. However, man is naturally good; I believe I have demonstrated it (p. 74). The artificiality, which society induces and makes it profitable for one to appear different from what one actually is, lies at the root of the problem. The causes of depravity are many, they include all the advances made, all the knowledge acquired, all the changes from his primitive constitution that make the human dependent on others (p 74). Still, this many can be reduced by Rousseau to a single linear process. He does not say that there is nothing to be admired in his society, but what he does insist upon is that the price paid for "progress" be reckoned. Soci-

21 One can see here an influence of Bellarmine's and Saurez's natura pura on Rousseau's

thinking about I'homme nature. Both are logical possibilities that are used as a kind of 'thought experiment'. 22 Immanuel Kant, Kant's handschriftlicher Nachlafi, Bd. VH, AA, Bd. XX, S. 58-59.

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782 Jeremiah L. Alb erg

ety "necessarily brings men to hate each other" (p. 74). This upsidedownness - the very thing that should allow people to live together actually makes it impossible - is the phenomenon he investigates. Every reversed reality is laid bare. Humans rejoice in the catastrophes of others because there is money to be made. The wants directed toward mere superfluities becomes the strongest of passions. The less useful the art is for the common good, the more lucrative it becomes. All this is to be explained and through the explanation reversed. Rousseau, then, is a realist about the present situation who could never say: "Tout est bien". On the other hand, he remains an optimist about what can be done.

Rousseau's Alternative: Consistency

When we turn from Rousseau's reasons for rejecting or laying aside the dogma of original sin and ask what his position actually was, we may be surprised at the variety of answers that confront us in his writings. If what we mean by an alternative to original sin is what Rousseau held to be the ultimate source of our present plight, then it could be anything from society to reflection to the lack of breast- -feeding.23

However, if we change the question and ask in what precisely does Rousseau's alternative account consist, we find a unity of thought that stretches from at least the Second Discourse to the Letter an Beaumont, Rousseau himself asserts the existence of this unity in his letter to Beaumont when he writes:

23 Society is the most well-known answer, although becoming sociable would be phrasing

it more correctly. As H. Meier has pointed out in his "Introduction" to the critical edition of the Second Discourse, Rousseau uses the adjective exactly three times in the text. He says that in becoming sociable humans become "slaves" (p. 24), they become "evil" (p. 42) and they begin to live in the opinions of others (p. 60). See his J.-J Rousseau Diskurs uber die Ungleichheit / Discours sur Vinegalite 3rd ed. (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1993) p. LXXI. Rousseau also fa- mously calls the human who reflects "a depraved animal" (p. 138). Perfectibility could also be considered a source of the problem. Rousseau says: "It would be sad for us to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all man's misfortunes; that it is this faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would pass tranquil and innocent days; that it is this faculty which, bringing to flower over the centuries his enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues, in the long run makes him the tyrant of himself and of Nature. It would be horrible to be obliged to praise as a beneficent being the one who first suggested to the inhabitant of the banks of the Orinoco the use of those Pieces of wood which he binds on the temples of his Children, and which assure them at least apart of their imbecility and original happiness." We should not be fooled by the rhetorical "It would be sad.." it is, according to Rousseau, in fact sad and thus he labels his own system as "sad" (cf. Preface to a Second Letter to Bordes, CW p. 183). As regards breast-feeding: "Do you wish to bring everyone back to his first duties? Begin with mothers. You will be surprised by the changes you will produce. Everything follows successively from this first depravity. The whole moral order degenerates;... But let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature's sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled. This first point, this point alone, will bring everything back together" (Entile, p. 46).



These books [Rousseau has just mentioned the Second Discourse, his Letter to M.D'Alembert on the Theatre, and his novel The New Heloise], which you have pre- sumably read, since you judge them, breathe the same principles [as contained in Emile]; the same way of thinking is not any more disguised.24

Rousseau claims to have shown the vices that others have attributed to the human heart, are not natural to man, but have a different source. He has shown the "manner in which they are born, and so to say their written their genealogy".25 It is this genealogy that I wish to describe here. Rousseau's proposal can be sum- marized in the following manner: 1) The human individual is best understood from the viewpoint of dualism. 2) Perfectibility, aided by circumstances, drives this dualistic being through three stages, namely, the state of nature, a golden age and finally into society. 3) The faculty of perfectibility depends in a crucial way upon language.

The Natural Goodness of Man: Dualism

The problem of evil is explained by Rousseau in terms of a dualism. As he suc- cinctly put it in his Lettre a Beaumont: "Besides it appears that the coexistence of two principles better explains the constitution of the universe and to resolve many difficulties, which can be solved only with great difficulty without it, as, for exam- ple, that concerning the origin of evil."26 Two substances make up the human person. These two substances are ultimately rooted in a cosmological dualism that stems from Descartes.

Besides it is certain that we have the idea of two distinct substances, namely spirit and matter, the one which thinks and the other which is extended. And these two ideas can easily be conceived the one without the other.27

In the human person the sensible and the reasonable head in two different directions. The sensible heads toward the good of the body and the reasonable toward the good of the soul. Thus, the dualism that Rousseau proposes is not a dualism of good versus evil. It is not as though there were a principle of light and a principle of darkness. Rather, there are two different goods which conflict with one another. Perhaps we can better understand this if we recall the dramatic form this dualism receives in the novel Julia. For Julie it is not her duty towards her Father which conflicts with her love towards St. Preux. Rather it is having to choose between two loves that rends her heart. In the same way we do not have a good and a bad in this form of dualism, but two goods that lead us in two very different, and often conflicting, directions.

24 Lettre a Beaumont, OC IV, p. 933. 25 Lettre a Beaumont, OC IV, p. 936. 26 Lettre a Beaumont, OC IV, p. 956-957. Ll Lettre a Beaumont, OC IV, p. 955.



First Stage

Rousseau claims that "the Philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of going back to the state of Nature, but none of them has reached it" (p. 18). Rousseau will reach it through an act of abstracting from everything that could possibly be traced back to society or to human sociability. The 'natural' is no longer that towards which a being strives in order to fulfill its 'nature', rather it is "only that which can be developed from the capacities of each individual".28

When Rousseau thinks this thought through he finds in the natural man an unal- ienated being who is also a dumb animal. Rousseau admits that the human as an animal is "less strong than some, less agile than others" but at the same time he has the advantage of "constantly having all of one's strength at one's disposal, of always being ready for any event, and of always carrying oneself, so to speak, en- tirely with one" (p. 21). Humans are good, then, not in the sense that they have a supernatural destiny, but in the sense that all creatures are good in so far as they carry out what they are programmed to do. The use of the word "programmed" is not accidental. Rousseau views all animals, including the human one, as "only an ingenious machine" (p. 25). As such he stands indifferently before moral good and evil. In the first state man knows only himself and therefore does not see his well- -being as either opposed to or conforming with the well-being of others. Accor- dingly he does not hate or love.

A dualistic animal could simply remain in a sort of balanced state, never chang- ing. Rousseau has to account for two things: 1) how the two principles interact and 2) in what way this interaction produces progress. Rousseau accounts for the interaction in the following way. On the one hand, the "understanding owes much to the passions" (p. 27), and on the other hand the passions are very much indebted to the understanding. The passions improve reason for "we seek to know only because we desire to have pleasure (p. 27). Primitive humans desire and fear and that is enough to get them to begin to reason. But the passions themselves "originate in our wants" and their progress depends upon our knowledge, for we cannot desire or fear anything unless we have an idea of it or from "the simple impulsion of nature" (p. 27). Natural man at this point has only the latter kind of impulses, but he has the potential for the former. The passions develop in such a way that they induce humans to look for more. How does this happen?

Rousseau needs to find an element that is, at one and the same time, rooted in the passions and yet develops the intellect to the point that the intellect in turn begins to exercise a (pernicious) influence on the passions. This element cannot be simply inborn or else God would be ultimately responsible and yet it needs to be universal in order to account for the human condition. Rousseau finds this element in language.

28 Robert Spaemann, Burger ohne Vaterland, (Munchen, 1980) p. 67.



For Rousseau language is rooted in the passions. According to his Essay on the Origin of Language that origin is the expression of passions.29 At the same time language plays a crucial role in thought. According to Rousseau "general ideas come into the Mind only with the aid of words, and the understanding grasps them only through propositions" (p. 32). All general ideas are purely intellectual and they depend upon language.

But language too has its history. It cannot explain itself. For this Rousseau has to postulate a faculty of perfectibility which "with the aid of circumstances develops all the others". At the same time this faculty itself is dependent upon the possession of general ideas and thus language. We need not see a contradiction here. We are in the kind of circle characterized by the what is known as 'feed-back', i.e. the results of the process effect the process itself. The faculty of perfection is the ultimate "source of all man's misfortunes" because it draws him out of that "original condition" and in the long run "makes him a tyrant of himself and Nature" (p. 26). But this kind of "perfectibility" would not be possible without the "Logic of Discourse" (p. 33), in which the thing spoken of no longer resembles any existing thing.

Rousseau considers first "the obstacles to the Origin of Languages" (p.) The main obstacle is that one has to assume precisely what Rousseau himself has called into question, "namely, a kind of society already established among the inventors of language" (p. 29). Rousseau cannot imagine how language became necessary. His imagination stops, which is what happens when one does not have the words to help extend it. He says "for since Men had no communication among themselves nor any need of it, one can conceive neither the necessity of this invention nor its possibility were it not indispensable. Rousseau simply supposes "this first difficulty conquered" and then assumes the necessity. Then he asks how languages could be established given that they are necessary. Here the problem is the relation- ship between speech and thought. One would need to know how to speak in order to be able to think well enough or deeply enough to invent language. But if language is not yet invented. . .

At least three times Rousseau makes clear that he is caught in a circle. I think that this is one of the more important aspects of the Second Discourse because it teaches us how to read it. The origin of our situation is never simple or singular. The origin that Rousseau seeks is what lies at the end of the investigation. His investigation will close a circle but it will not simply repeat what has gone before. There will be a difference. We have to presume the origin in order to be able to speak about it. Still, this presumption does not undermine our task or our talk. We do not get involved in a vicious circle because our talk can influence the story.

29 Cf. In particular Chapter II of the Essay on the Origin of Language entitled "That the First Invention of Speech Derives not from Needs but from the Passions". One needs to exercise caution here, for it seems to me that Rousseau is distinguishing between the "invention of

speech" and the origin of language. Both are rooted in the passions, but the latter is no longer rooted in the "first needs" but rather in "other needs".


9


Rousseau emphasizes the role of discourse in allowing humans to conceive ab- stractly, to progress in thinking and even in imagining. This highlights how self- -referential the text is at this point. He could not write the Second Discourse without discourse and yet he wants to explain in the origins of what he has presumed in order to get started. Thus, Rousseau has to begin to tell the story of the origins. In this way, what was accidental becomes meaningful if not logical. Rousseau cannot explain how words and sentences themselves become meaningful. He can presume it. He can encourage others to investigate it. But all this too presumes language.

Second Stage

In the second state humans begin to eye each other. They enter into relation- ships with each other and with things. They learn to cooperate. In the beginning this is still the cooperation of higher primates. They discover cases where it pays to work with others in order to accomplish a common goal and also when to be on guard against others. But "so long as there is less opposition of interests than con- course between interests man is essentially good."30 Rousseau is explicit that these associations do not need a fully developed human language, rather they have an "inarticulate universal language" (p. 45). The dialectic of passion and reason fuels progress. Reason is applied to find solutions to the problems that humans encoun- ter, and this, in turn, develops the humans' capacities. The cloud on the horizon of the race appeared when humans had enough leisure to make "commodities", things that had not been necessary before but were merely convenient. Rousseau calls these commodities, "the first yoke" and says that they are "the first source of evils" (p. 46.). These are such, not because they were evil in and of themselves, but because they lost their power to please in the very possession of them. Thus begins the dialectic of the conveniences, which were meant to free humans, but become instead the 'chains that bind' him since he can no longer do without them.

It is at this point in his analysis that Rousseau again brings language and its development into the discussion. His explanation of its development is fantastic, but the point is that the bridge that he needs from a primitive rural tribe to the society that is evil is full-blown human speech (cf. p. 46-47). With its introduction Rous- seau says: "Everything begins to change its appearance" (p. 47).

With the advent of language and reason, which it makes possible, came comparisons. Primitives could hold in their minds qualities and relations and weigh one against the other.

The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born on the one hand vanity and contempt, on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence (p. 47).

30 Lettre a Beaumont, OC IV, p. 936-937.



Rousseau holds that spiritual movements such as vanity and envy are of great importance but that their beginnings were innocuous. It is this way that he can explain the evil without having to admit to any kind of 'original sin'. These emo- tions are dependent upon language, but language can be used to explain this de- pendence. Even with these problems we are just now entering the Golden Age or the rousseau-ian equivalent of the Garden of Eden. Rousseau summarizes this second state in these words:

Thus although men had come to have less endurance and although natural pity had already undergone some alternation, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a golden mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petu- lant activity of our amour-propre, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch (p. 48).

This Golden Age is important methodologically for Rousseau because it emphasizes the fact that for him progress does not simply mean decline. One can, through a proper balance of the available forces minimize evil and promote the good aspects of a change.31

As long as man was satisfied with a simple life that required only the primitive cooperation of animal-like beings, man was happy. But when it became possible for appearance to be separated from reality, all was lost. Rousseau's biblical allu- sion makes clear that he is giving his version of the Fall.

As long as they applied themselves only to tasks that a single person could do and to arts that did not require the cooperation of several hands, they lived free, healthy, good, and happy insofar as they could be according to their Nature, and they continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independent intercourse. But from the moment one man needed the help of another, as soon as they observed that it was useful for a single person to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, labor became necessary; and vast forests were changed into smiling Fields which had to be watered with the sweat of men, and in which slavery and mis-

ery were soon seen to germinate and grow with the crops (p. 49).

The downfall was not immediate, any more than the Golden Age had been a static state. Humans were not, like Adam and Eve, exiled from the Garden of Eden. Rather, it was a moment of passing balance as the human race moved along its course. Something was lost, but it was very much like human innocence - as long as we enjoyed it, we enjoyed it unaware, and we only became aware of it in its loss.

We lost peace and innocence forever before we had appreciated their delights. Untelt

by the stupid men of earliest times, lost to the enlightened men of later times, the

happy life of the golden age was always a state foreign to the human race, either be-

31 Cf. Steven Johnston, Encountering Tragedy: Rousseau and the Project of Democratic Order, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999). Johnston criticizes Rousseau for this conception, that is, for not accepting fully that trying to bring about public good necessarily entails bringing about evil too. While there are many fine points in this recent study of Rousseau's thought, all too often Roberts analysis depends upon the imputation of ignorance to Rousseau about the deeper implications of his own thought. I remain skeptical about this imputation.



cause it went unrecognized when humans could have enjoyed it or because it had been lost it when humans could have known it.32

We recognize here traits of what has rightly been called Rousseau's romanti- cism. He senses deeply the loss not of what was, but what was not. At the end of the novel Emile he says to the realists:

The golden age is treated as a chimera, and it will always be one for anyone whose heart and taste have been spoiled. It is not even true that people regret the golden age, since those regrets are always hollow. What, then, would be required to give a new birth? One single but impossible thing: to love it.33

Third Stage

What was the downfall? Rousseau says that we can only have departed from the "happiest and most durable epoch", from the "best for man" "by some fatal accident, which. . .ought never to have happened" (p. 48).

Instead of remaining in the golden age, the human race continued to progress. Rousseau does not detail the process. He paints with broad strokes, but crucial to this process is the "progress of languages" (p. 51). This makes it first possible and then necessary for humans at least appear to be building upon "mind, beauty, strength, or skill, upon merit or talents", because these are the things that now "attract consideration". At this point, "it was necessary to appear to be other than what one in fact was" (p. 51). Humans could appear as their ideas, which are sup- ported by language, told them they should appear.

To be and to seem became two altogether different things; and from this distinction came conspicuous ostentation, deceptive cunning and all the vices that follow from them (p. 51).

With this distinction begins a fatal progress toward a state of war. Those who first occupy the land find themselves in perpetual battle with the stronger. I will not enter into the social contract which attempts to resolve this state of affairs. I would like to emphasize that it is effected through a speech and the speech is a lie (cf. 53-54). In this way "natural freedom" is killed (p. 54) without being replaced by civic freedom.

Rousseau is convinced that the problem is the "universal desire for reputation, honors and preferences" (p. 63). This is the driving force of the world.

It excites and multiplies our passions, and, by creating universal competition and ri- valry, or rather enmity, among men, occasions numberless failures, successes, and disturbances of all kinds by making so many aspirants run the same course. I could show that it is to this desire of being talked about, and this unremitting rage of distinguishing ourselves, that we owe the best and the worst things we possess, both our virtues and our vices, our science and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers; that is to say, a great many bad things, and a very few good ones.

" Entile, OE IV, p. 859; Bloom, p. 474.

32 From the Geneva Manuscript, OC m, p. 283, CW IV, p 77.



What this drive leads to is the "last stage of inequality, and the extreme point which closes the Circle and touches the point from which we started" (p. 65). Rousseau's image here is instructive. An extreme point is usually 'the end of the line', but here it marks a return to the starting point. "Here everything is brought back to the sole law of the stronger, and consequently to a new state of Nature, different from the one with which we began in that one was the State of nature in its purity, and this last is the fruit of an excess of corruption" (p. 65). So it is a return with a difference. And yet the difference is small: "there is so little difference between these two states. . .(p. 65).

And yet the difference is vast. It is the difference between sensing one's existence and being nothing. And the difference is in language. For a savage the words 'power' and 'reputation' bear no meaning. They are in effect nothing. The opinions of others are equally without value, nothing. Thus, the savage has his being in himself. The words that point to a difference founded on comparison are nothing to him. But for the social person these comparisons, which are nothing, constitute his very being. The consciousness of the savage is structured in a radically different way from the person of society. It is the difference between integration and alien- ation. Rousseau summarizes the whole problem by saying:

Such is, in fact, the genuine cause of all these differences: the Savage lives within himself; the sociable man always outside of himself, knows how to live only in the

opinion of others; and it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence (p. 66).

The human being of modern society relies on the views of others to tell him who he is, but knows then that he is no longer sovereign. His consciousness of his very existence is reduced to the judgment of others, and ultimately this fails because he can pretend to be what he knows he is not. Patrick Coleman summarizes the contribution which Rousseau has made to our understanding of the way in which language structures reality.

The originality of Rousseau's analysis [in the Second Discourse] lay in the way he demonstrated how inequality functioned, not only in the course of human history, but in the genesis of the conceptual vocabulary that made social communication possible and in turn could justify social inequality.34

Conclusion

According to the traditional teaching of Christianity humans' supernatural destiny, as revealed in the resurrection of Christ simultaneously revealed an 'origin' that was a 'fall' from the original origin. If language preceded this fall, as the scrip- tural account suggests, then this language was the language by which the things of God were named justly. Such naming, done effortlessly in the original origin, was now only possible through the labor of the cross. Rousseau presents an alternative

34 Patrick Coleman, Rousseau's Political Imagination: Rule and Representation in the 'Lettre a d'Alembert (Droz, Geneva, 1984).



account where the original origin is a state of solitude without language. The emer- gence of language and sociability require a thorough destruction and reconstruction of the human. If the scholastics taught that grace and thus salvation does not destroy nature but rather presupposes and perfects it, Rousseau represents the position of destruction and replacement.

Revista Portuguesa de FiLOSOFiAy 57 (2001), 773-790

Rousseau and the Original Sin

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