The Counter-Illustration of Rousseau

Rousseau is the most significant figure in the Counter-Illustration politics. His moral and political philosophy was inspiring for Immanuel Kant, Johann Herder, Johann Fichte, and G. W. F. Hegel, and from them it was transmitted to the collectivist Right. It was perhaps more inspiring for leftist collectivists: Rousseau's writings were the Bible of the Jacobin leaders of the French Revolution, assimilated by many of the hopeful Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century, and influential on the more agrarian socialists of the twentieth century in China and Cambodia. In the theoretical world of academic socialism, Rousseau's version of collectivism was overshadowed by Marx's version during most of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Yet a large part of the explanation of postmodern thinking is a shift towards Rousseunian positions by thinkers who had originally been inspired by Marx but were now increasingly disillusioned.

The Counter-Illustration of Rousseau

The first major frontal assault against the Enlightenment was undertaken by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Rousseau has a well-deserved reputation for being the bad boy of 18th century French philosophy. In the intellectual context of the Enlightenment culture, Rousseau's was an important dissenting voice. He was an admirer of all Spartan things - Sparta of militaristic and feudal communalism, and he felt contempt for all Athenian things - Classical Athens of commerce, cosmopolitism, and fine arts.

Civilization is totally corrupting, argued Rousseau, not only the feudal oppression system of 18th century France with its decadent and parasitic aristocracy, but also its alternative Enlightenment with its exaltation of reason, property, arts and sciences. Name a dominant feature of the Enlightenment, and Rousseau was against.

In his “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”, Rousseau began by attacking the basis of the Enlightenment project: Reason. Philosophers were totally correct in that reason is the foundation of civilization. The rational progress of civilization, however, is anything but progress, for civilization is achieved at the expense of morality. There is an inverse relationship between cultural and moral development: Culture does generate a lot of learning, luxury and sophistication — but both learning, luxury and sophistication cause moral degradation.

The root of our moral degradation is reason, the original sin of humanity. Before he awakened his reason, humans were simple, mostly solitary beings, who met their needs easily by collecting from their immediate surroundings. That happy state was the ideal: “this author should have said that since the natural state is the state in which the concern for our self-preservation is least detrimental to others, that state is consequently the most suitable for peace and the most appropriate for the human race.”

But by some inexplicable and unfortunate event, reason woke up, and once awakened, she vomited a Pandora Box of trouble upon the world, transforming human nature to the point where we could no longer return to our original happy state. As philosophers were foreshadowing the triumph of reason in the world, Rousseau wanted to show that “all subsequent progress has apparently been so many steps towards the perfection of the individual, and indeed towards the decay of the species”. Once their power of reasoning woke up, humans realized their primitive condition, and this led them to feel dissatisfied. So they began to make improvements, culminating mainly in the agricultural and metallurgical revolution. Undeniably, these revolutions materially improved humanity — but these improvements have indeed destroyed the species: “it is iron and wheat that has civilized men and ruined the human race.”

Ruin took many forms. Economically, agriculture and technology led to surplus wealth. Surplus wealth in turn led to the need for property rights, made human beings competitive and led them to see themselves as enemies of each other.

Physically, as humans became richer, they enjoyed more comforts and more luxuries. But those greater luxuries and comforts caused physical degradation. They began to eat too much food and eat decadent food, and then they became less healthy. They began to use more and more tools and technology, and then became physically less strong. The one that had once been a physically strong species became dependent on doctors and devices.

In social, with luxuries came an awakening of aesthetic patterns of beauty, and those patterns transformed their sexual lives. What had once been a frank act of copulation became something linked to love, and love is confusing, exclusive and preferential. Love, consequently, aroused jealousy, envy and rivalry — more things that put human beings against each other.

Thus reason led to the development of each and every characteristic of civilization — agriculture, technology, property, and aesthetics — and these made humanity soft, lazy, and put it into social and economic conflict with itself.

But the story gets worse, as the ongoing social conflicts generated a few winners at the top of the social ladder and many oppressed losers below them. Inequality became a prominent and condemnable consequence of civilization. Such inequalities are condemnable because all of them, “like being richer, more honest, more powerful” are “privileges enjoyed by one at the expense of another.”

Civilization, according to this, became a zero-sum game in many social dimensions, with the winners benefiting and enjoying more and more while the losers suffered and were left further and further behind.

But the pathologies of civilization became even worse, because the reason, which made possible the inequalities of civilization also made the more affluent indifferent to the suffering of the less fortunate. Reason, according to Rousseau, is contrary to compassion: Reason generates civilization, which is the ultimate cause of the sufferings of the victims of inequality, but reason also creates reasons for ignoring that suffering. “Reason is what engenders egocentrism,” Rousseau wrote.

and reflection strengthens it. The reason is what turns man to himself. Reason is what separates him from everything that worries him and afflicts him. Philosophy is what isolates you and what drives you to say in secret, in the sight of a suffering man, “Perish if you want, I am safe and sound”.

In contemporary civilization, this lack of compassion becomes more than a sin of omission. Rousseau argues that, having succeeded in the competitions of civilized life, the winners now have an interest in preserving the system. Defenders of civilization — especially those who are living on the cusps of social pyramids and therefore isolated from the worst part of the damage — make an extraordinary effort to praise the advances of civilization in technology, art, and science. But these same advances and the praise they are subject only to mask the damage caused by civilization. Foretting Herbert Marcuse and Foucault, Rousseau wrote in the essay that he made him famous. The Discourse on Science and the Arts: “Princes always welcome the diffusion, among their subjects, of the taste for the art of fun and superfluous.” Such tastes acquired within a people “are so many chains that bind it” “Sciences, letters and the arts” — far from liberating and uplifting humanity —,

'they spread wreaths of flowers on the iron chains with which they overwhelm men, to suppress in them the sense of that original freedom for which they seem to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called “civilized persons”' (Rousseau 1749, 3)

So corrupt, according to this, is the entire building of civilization that no reform is possible. Against the shy moderates who want to achieve a good society gradually, Rousseau called for revolution. “People are constantly patching it [to the state], when they should have started by renovating the air and setting aside all the old materials, as Lychurgus did in Sparta, in order to build a good building later.”

Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism , Chapter 4, translation Walter Jerusalem