The Natural Goodness of Man

On the System of Rousseau's Thought

Arthur M. Melzer

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780226519791, 9780226519784
• eBook ISBN: 9780226226002
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The true key to all the perplexities of the human condition, Rousseau boldly claims, is the "natural goodness of man." It is also the key to his own notoriously contradictory writings, which, he insists, are actually the disassembled parts of a rigorous philosophical system rooted in that fundamental principle. What if this problematic claim—so often repeated, but as often dismissed—were resolutely followed and explored?

Arthur M. Melzer adopts this approach in The Natural Goodness of Man. The first two parts of the book restore the original, revolutionary significance of this now time-worn principle and examine the arguments Rousseau offers in proof of it. The final section unfolds and explains Rousseau's programmatic thought, especially the Social Contract, as a precise solution to the human problem as redefined by the principle of natural goodness.

The result is a systematic reconstruction of Rousseau's philosophy that discloses with unparalleled clarity both the complex weave of his argument and the majestic unity of his vision. Melzer persuasively resolves one after another of the famous Rousseauian paradoxes–enlarging, in the process, our understanding of modern philosophy and politics. Engagingly and lucidly written, The Natural Goodness of Man will be of interest to general as well as scholarly readers.

Part One

The Meaning of Rousseau’s Fundamental Principle

1

The Natural Goodness of Man

“The fundamental principle of all morals,” Rousseau proclaims, “on which I have reasoned in all my writings . . . is that man is a being that is naturally good.” The reader who carefully studies his various works will see “everywhere the development of [my] great principle that nature made man happy and good but society depraves him and makes him miserable” (Beaumont, 935–36; Dialogues III: 934). It is curiously difficult, however, to grasp or feel the significance of this “great principle” owing to its deceptive simplicity as well as its numbing familiarity. Worn down through two centuries of use, it has lost all sharpness and specificity, becoming a tiresome platitude more likely to discourage than stimulate reflection. We must begin, then, by extricating Rousseau’s thought from that of his imitators and popularizers and restoring his revolutionary new principle to something of its original meaning and vitality.

Who Is Good and What Is Goodness?

To whom does “the natural goodness of man” attribute goodness? If the very mention of Rousseau’s name often raises an indulgent smile, that is because it is usually assumed that his famous principle is a tender-minded, pollyannish affirmation, indeed the classic statement, of the basic goodness of human beings as we know them. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. “Man is wicked,” Rousseau affirms of those around him, “sad and continual experience spares the need for proof” (SD, 193). Rousseau speaks of civilized humanity with a disgust and contempt that yield nothing to Saint Augustine, and which earned him, during his lifetime, the reputation not of a pollyanna but a misanthrope. Voltaire, for example, attacked the Second Discourse as a “book against the human race.”¹ In truth, Rousseau’s indictment of the human race—his now classic diagnosis of the ills of modern society in terms of the loss of social and psvchic unity—is one of the most important elements of his thought, virtually defining the problem that later generations of thinkers would try to solve, and forming the inaugural event for what has since been a continuous tradition of post-Enlightenment lamentation over the waywardness of modern man. Far from being an affirmation of civilized man’s goodness, then, Rousseau’s principle is a penetrating new account of his extraordinary badness.

Rousseau does, of course, attribute goodness to men, but only to “natural” men who are free of the corrupting effects of artificial society. In the unqualified sense, this means the presocial, arational, subhuman, brutelike “natural man” portrayed in the Second Discourse. However, certain other, less extreme human types also qualify as relatively natural and “good.” The printing savage, denizen of a later epoch where men have developed most of their faculties and live together in loose tribes, is said to be “essentially good” (SD, 151). In civilized times, there Emile eponymous hero of Rousseau’s educational treatise, who is raised on the fringes of contemporary society. Through extraordinary artifice, the development of his faculties and desires is reordered to harmonize with and preserve much of his primitive goodness. In a loose sense, the citizen, the zealous patriot living in the legitimate state described in the Social Contract, reconquers his original goodness, if in an entirely new and unnatural form. Finally, as explained in the autobiographical writings, Rousseau himself, the philosopher or artist, preserves his natural goodness through genius, solitude, and extraordinary strength of soul. These rather disparate human types, the central characters in the large dramatis personae of Rousseau’s writings, are those he calls good

What, then, is meant by “goodness”? Here, Rousseau’s thought tends to be obscured by the contemporary attitude toward this word or concept, which we somehow feel compelled to define in a narrowly moralistic sense, even as we find that sense insipid. Rousseau, who understands the concept in a more capacious, full-bodied way, employs it here in a double, relative sense: man is by nature good for himself and also good for others. Rousseau’s strongest claims concern the first: man is naturally good for himself, meaning well-ordered and self-sufficient, hence happy. None of his natural inclinations are bad, that is, harmful, illusory, impossible, or contradictory. His desires are all proportioned to his needs and his faculties to his desires. And on a still deeper level, prior to all desire, he has within himself a fundamental source of contentment, a joy in mere existence.

Man’s natural goodness for others is more ambiguous. It does not mean rationally “moral,” since natural man is subrational and amoral; nor does it primarily mean that man is moved by a positive inclination to love and help others, nor even that he is always gentle. Natural man is occasionally violent, and tribal man even cruel or vindictive. The primary meaning of this goodness is negative. By nature, man lacks a specific desire to harm others, and, even more important, he lacks all the needs, passions, and prejudices that now put his interests in essential and systematic conflict with others. He is naturally self-sufficient and content, and therefore strife with others is never intrinsically pleasant, it is rarely useful, and it troubles his inner repose.

There is also, however, a positive content to this goodness. By “identifying” with others, natural man experiences rudimentary feelings of compassion which discourage him from engaging in unnecessary violence. In civilized man, these feelings develop into a natural conscience, an inner “voice of nature.” Yet Rousseau argues that this inner voice is weaker than the artificial passions and vices that inevitably develop along with it in society. Thus, most civilized men do hear the inner voice, but only in moments of detachment and recollection; they forget it as soon as they act. If a civilized man were raised like Emile, however, then natural pity or conscience, unopposed by artificial passions yet stimulated by an artificially developed imagination, would lead to a genuine benevolence of feeling and action. Such is the limited (and only partly natural) positive content of man’s goodness for others.²

Taken as a whole, then, the principle of natural goodness may be said to involve three basic elements: an assertion that by nature man is good for himself and others, a “misanthropic” characterization of the evil of civilized man, and, bridging the gap between the two claims, a demonstration that man’s present evil derives wholly from the corrupting effects of society. Through this third element, Rousseau initiates the philosophic tendency, which has dominated almost all subsequent thought, to understand the human problem in terms of historical, social, or environmental causes rather than natural or divine ones.

Rousseau’s Opponents

The meaning of the principle of natural goodness can be sharpened, and some of its momentous consequences brought to light, by identifying the thinkers Rousseau is attacking and the doctrines he is trying to refute. Since he regards this principle as altogether new, there is a sense in which he is attacking simply everyone who preceded him. This sweeping category, however, can be resolved into three primary opponents: Christian thought and especially the doctrine of original sin; early modern political theory, particularly the thought of Thomas Hobbes; and classical political philosophy, especially in its Platonic strain, with its starkly dualistic theory of human nature. That is pretty nearly everyone in the Western tradition.

The Church doctrine of original sin is the most obvious, and no doubt most eagerly targeted, of Rousseau’s opponents. All of his writings, he claims, aim to demonstrate that “there is no original perversity in the human heart, and that the first movements of nature are always right” (Beaumont, 937–38, emphasis added). The history of the species sketched in the Second Discourse, and that of the child in Emile, are obviously meant to confront the biblical account of the Fall, supplying an alternative explanation of the origin of evil that exculpates man by shifting the blame onto society. Similarly, the Confessions, as the very title implies, is intended as an alternative to the work of Saint Augustine, the classic exponent of the original sin doctrine. Through a detailed personal confession, Rousseau tries to demonstrate that his own numerous sins “came to me much more from my situation than from myself” (Mals., 1136).³

Rousseau also attacks the doctrine of original sin on internal and scriptural grounds. To the traditional argument, for example, that only this doctrine can explain the mystery of the origin of human evil, he responds: “We are, you say, sinners because of the sin of our first father, but why did our first father himself sin? Why cannot the same reason which you use to explain his sin be applied to his descendants without original sin?” (Beaumont fragment, 1013). Moreover, the view that contemporary men are guilty for a sin of their most distant ancestor, and that their natures, corrupted by that sin, now force them to sin again, cannot, he argues, be reconciled with God’s justice (ibid.). Finally, Rousseau points out that the “doctrine of original sin, subject to terrible difficulties, is not contained in scripture as clearly or harshly as it has pleased the Rhetor Augustine and our theologians to claim” (Beaumont, 937–38).

In opposing this doctrine, of course, Rousseau may be viewed as following a nearly universal tendency of philosophic thought in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, as Karl Barth wrote of Rousseau: “the Church doctrine of original sin has seldom . . . been denied with such disconcerting candor and force and in so directly personal a way.”⁴

By replacing the doctrine of original sin with the principle of natural goodness, Rousseau is, of course, not merely correcting what he takes to be a false opinion, but also combating a harmful and dangerous one: “How I hate the discouraging doctrine of our hard Theologians!” (Beaumont, 940n). His hatred of it appears to rest on two grounds.

First, it leads to a cruelly repressive morality, one that condemns our spontaneous inclinations as sinful, that curses nature and poisons life. Since human beings can never fully comply with this antinatural morality, it also burdens them with constant feelings of failure, self-hatred, and guilt. By declaring that “the first movements of nature are good and right,” Rousseau clearly seeks to lift this burden of guilt and to restore life to men’s souls by putting them back in touch with their natural impulses and energies (Dialogues I: 668).

Rousseau’s second and greater objection to the doctrine of original sin, however, is that it actually weakens morality. Indeed, as compared with later thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud, Rousseau places surprisingly little emphasis on guilt and the “life-destroying” character of overzealous Christian morality. He believes that men are more often corrupted than repressed by such a morality.

Human beings are fairly skeptical, intractable, and resistant to morality, in Rousseau’s view, and therefore this extreme, antinatural morality most often simply fails to take hold. And in failing, it casts all moral restraint into disrepute.

A young and beautiful girl will never despise her body, she will never in good faith grieve for the great sins her beauty causes to be committed, she will never sincerely shed tears before God for being a coveted object, and she will never be able to believe within herself that the sweetest sentiment of the heart is an invention of Satan. Give her other reasons that she can believe within and for herself, for these will never get through to her. (Emile V: 392; emphasis added)

“By exaggerating all duties,” Rousseau claims, “Christianity makes them impracticable and vain” (Emile V: 374). In aiming too high, asking too much, and opposing the natural sentiments, the morality based on original sin produces not sincerely moral individuals, but only a few guilt-ridden believers and a great many cynics, hypocrites, and libertines.

Rousseau seeks to promote a more realistic and effectual morality by building on certain salutary passions such as patriotism, romantic love, and pity. But once again, such a morality is crippled by the doctrine of original sin because, by cursing the passions, it stunts the full development of these useful moral sentiments.

Furthermore, the doctrine of original sin tends to destroy men’s sense of freedom and moral responsibility, for it teaches that they are all born sinners, that it is not within their power to avoid evil, that they have no free will. It makes them passive, slavish, and resigned to their own sinfulness while they wait for God in His mercy to save them. Consequently, Rousseau believes he accomplishes something “that is both most consoling and most useful” in showing that “all these vices belong not so much to man as to man badly governed” (Narcissus, 106). He seeks to embolden humanity to take control of its own destiny. When people see that evil derives from society rather than from their sinful natures and that it may be cured or ameliorated through human as distinguished from divine action, they will recover a sense of freedom and dignity, a feeling of responsibility for their lives, and a moral determination to improve them.

In one last, obvious way, the doctrine of original sin undermines morality: it encourages men to despise mankind. The Christian priest shows us:

all men as monsters to be stifled, as victims of the Devil whose company can only corrupt the heart and cast us into Hell. And what is most peculiar is that after all of these beautiful declamations, the same man gravely exhorts us to love our neighbors, that is, this whole troop of rascals for whom he has inspired us with such horror. (OC IV: 19)

Christianity may command us to love others but it inspires us to hate them. The doctrine of natural goodness, on the other hand, promotes a genuine love of humanity based on compassion. By replacing the image of man as a born sinner with that of a born victim, it brings secular compassion to the fore as the only reasonable and proper attitude toward mankind.

In sum, Rousseau not only refutes but, as it were, turns the Church doctrine of original sin on its head, charging that, through its overly demanding and misanthropic morality, it itself creates many of the evils it is supposed to combat: guilt, corruption, slavishness, and hatred. By contrast, Rousseau’s own doctrine will genuinely combat these evils by revealing their true cause in this mistaken view of human nature and by fostering a new, more effectual morality based on compassion for a victimized mankind.

The second main target of Rousseau’s principle is Thomas Hobbes. Although I would argue that in some sense all of early modern political thought is an intended opponent, this more complex view is best discussed later. The doctrine of natural goodness is obviously meant to confront and refute Hobbes’s famous doctrine that man’s natural condition is a war of all against all. At times, it can seem that Rousseau wrote the Second Discourse for no other purpose than to refute, point by point, the Leviathan’s argument regarding the state of nature.⁵

Hobbes is, of course, very much in agreement with Rousseau’s objections to Christianity and is no more inclined than he to view man as sinful; but he does see man as naturally selfish in a way that makes him extremely bad for others. We are not born sinners but born enemies. And he concludes, as many had before him, that because of this natural badness, man is not capable of free or democratic gover...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: The Meaning of Rousseau’s Fundamental Principle
• Part Two: Rousseau’s Proof of the Principle of Natural Goodness
• Part Three: The Consequences of Rousseau’s Principle
• Notes
• References
• Index