Ping Pong 21: The Infantile and the Historian
Rousseau was very much a man of two big ideas. The one, the idea of the General Will was dealt with last week; the other, the state of nature, and what follows on from that state, will be examined this week. However before this second idea is developed, a brief general theme in Rousseau’s world needs to be identified. What unites both the General Will and the state of nature for Rousseau is the conjecture that, if there is no God to guarantee the sanctity of a soul, then how my mind is formed becomes a deeply complex phenomena. On the one hand there are very likely to be elements within my mind that are somehow related to my body or at least an aspect of it (eg. for us, genetics or for Rousseau, nature). On the other hand, there are other elements of my mind that are clearly defined in my relationships with others. The General Will is of course the paradigm case of such an element. It is the collective ingredient through which a mind is contrived, in my relationships to others.
This double headed origin of human nature demands, Rousseau suggests, three axes of thought, to comprehend it. Firstly one needs to very carefully identify what it is in each shared element that defines the mind. That is, what it is about this element that I share, and how that sharing aids me to be what I am (or might become). The discussion of what forms the mind is for Rousseau ultimately a discussion into the nature of essences. The question of origin becomes a question of finding the right ‘defining element’ of the mind, be it genes or nature or history: The faith is thereby born that there is an element that defines what I am if only I look hard enough for it. The second axis centres on the history of the relationship between different origins. This history is always part conjectural, as it reaches back beyond the human and into the geological past. Our mind becomes the product of a history, and all humanity may be judged according to how far down the path to civilisation (by which Rousseau meant ‘how French’) the rest of the world were. The third axis looks at the relevance which this difference of origin might have in contemporary politics; The drama that can be traced back through history to a misty eyed story of origin, is thereby jolted into the very real world of how humans in the here and now relate to each other. A move that can of course be understood in two contrasting ways: either we thereby for good or for ill become an adjunct in a far greater drama; or alternatively we dissolve the real politics of the every day into a myth of origins of misty eyed nothings.
These three axes are at play in the idea of the General Will, which is at once a story of origins, a history of peoples, and a very real politics, and yet they are all the more evident in the concept of the State of Nature. Rousseau at this point is very explicit. His quibble with the previous states of nature of Hobbes and Locke was that they did not go far enough back. That is, they never got to the point of the origin of humanity, but rather rested somewhere in the second axis, that is, in the history of the development of the mind. Rousseau therefore suggests that the question of what was in the State of Nature cannot be separated from that other question, of what a mind looked like without society. That is, what would the mind be, if humanity were isolated from one another, and either unable or unwilling to use one another to form a bedrock for thought. Rousseau’s argument is then that the mind in such a condition is very different. Not only in what it can think (for humans are always the most powerful tools for thought that other humans have) but also in what it can feel. His model for primitive societies becomes then not the savages of Hobbes, locked in violent war, or the innocent children of capitalism of Locke, but rather the violent and scary world of the baby. From which it follows, that the path that led one out of the State of Nature was analogous to the development of a child into an adult. To learn about the past in general, became also to learn about one’s own very individual past. This transmutation was then added to the earlier one noted above, which saw the politics of the everyday transmuted into a far greater historical drama and debate.
Rousseau’s State of Nature involves a potent and complex synthesis of elements of the individual, the personal, the political, the historical, and the natural. By it all human action is translated into conflicting and contrasting meta-narratives, narratives that then interfere with individual behaviour or beliefs. The world becomes about ‘big ideas and blue sky thinking’ and the practical world of the everyday is devalued in the face of these ‘profundities’.
The promise of this heady brew, have far outlasted the details which Rousseau argues, must pertain in any State of Nature, or even the value of the idea itself. In this regard, there are perhaps five key leftovers from Rousseau’s argument that matter to us today. In the rest of this Rant, these five theses will be developed in turn.
The first of these, concerns exactly what a human was like in a State of Nature. Rousseau’s conjecture was that humans in this state only had two emotions, self love and pity. This slightly odd pairing needs to be understood in two different ways. On the one hand, in making this move, Rousseau augurs in that deep belief of modernity, that other people not only think differently to us, but also feel differently. Or perhaps more accurately, other people feel as we do, but at a different pitch, and according to a slightly different economy of passions. Humanity is thereby caught up in the strangest of paradigms, where one has to allow others their difference, and yet to allow that difference is to also excuse oneself from ever understanding those other’s natures. This ‘toleration’ from marginalization was the dominant paradigm for coping not just with other peoples, but also women or the poor, all the way up to the middle of last century. On the other hand Rousseau is very cunning in his pairing of self-love and pity. He chooses this pair because he knows that these two rather complex passions can comprehend a whole galaxy of different feelings, which can be pulled out from their auspices. Development becomes then not merely about changing into something else, but also the refinement of what one already is. Origins then become not something lost in the past, but rather relate to a spinning disc in the present from which all kinds of consequences might yet be unpeeled.
Secondly how one moves beyond any one state became for Rousseau a matter of circumstance or event. Rousseau is therefore very careful to ensure that each of his stages in human development is complete in itself. It contains all its own elements. There is no integral instability in the State of Nature or in any of the succeeding states for that matter. Change falls on the world and therefore on minds from outside, and changes everything because of its shock value. That is, at the same moment, Rousseau constructs a narrative about origins; he builds into that narrative random events, which shake up everything, and make everything different. The world’s history, and the history of the mind, and even politics, becomes therefore geological as it is historical. Long periods of time passed like layers of sandstone laid down in the Jurassic Ocean. Layers that then suddenly come to an end as conditions on the globe rapidly change under the influence of some random event, and new rocks emerge.
The advantage of this analogy is that it operates on so many differing levels and in so many ways. The same metaphor can easily be used to understand for example Politics. Moreover this understanding can be in terms of a meta-narrative (the replacement of the Whig-Tory levels with the Conservative-Labour levels). But also it can be used in the language of the everyday: We look then for a politics of sudden change, associated with partially symbolic events or periods of Time. The Bush administration was damned by the fate of post-war Iraq, and Brown by the events of last October.
Thirdly the status of history clearly changes. History is no more a narrative of events between individuals who are pretty much as we are (as Hume argued that it ought to be). It becomes rather the tail of how our mind endlessly evolved and changed across time. Moreover this change in time is explicitly linked by Rousseau to changes in the physical shape and form of human’s bodies and even more importantly, brains. Rousseau, who was a contemporary of the progenitors of Evolution - Buffon and Lamarck, creates a theory for the evolution of humanity which it at once a physical and moral. and also a technical phenomena. History therefore matters because it contains not just our origins but also the path that took us beyond that origin to where and how we are today.
Fourthly and building on the last point, Rousseau explicitly links each stage in human development to a certain economy of tools and practice. To be a human, was therefore no longer a matter of having a soul, but rather a state of behaving within the world. Different humans tackled their natural surroundings differently and therefore thought and felt differently. To be Stone Age man then or now became qualitively different from working metal or engaging in agriculture. Thence humans at other times or in other places, became the ‘other’ animals, a move which of course opened up the possibility that other peoples could legitimately be destroyed in the name of technology and progress (a sentiment which would no doubt have revolted Rousseau and yet lies implicit within his works).
Finally, Rousseau unpeels as a paradigm for thinking, a development which takes one from infant to adult. This move was radical in two respects. Not only was Rousseau pivotal in the defining of childhood as a special and distinct zone or strata of life. But also and even more critically this strata encompassed all of human development and all of human history. Personal and human history were then the same tale. Other peoples were then to be treated as if they were mere children. From which it of course followed, that an ethic of development and patriarchal care sprang forth. One might build an empire or interfere in other countries in the name of the higher destiny of humanity. One might interfere for the other peoples’ own good. One might interfere to allow freedom to blossom. One might interfere to impose adulthood upon the world.
Moreover there was a second aspect to Rousseau’s argument. If the stories of personal and human evolutions are one and the same story, it must follow that we have all passed through the State of Nature as children. From which it follows that it might be possible to define a sense in which the State of Nature, like the child we once were, has not left the mind but rather is contemporary to us. We might then in a very real sense, still be at one with the State of Nature or the succeeding states, at some level. This level or layer, which is pre-individual or at least enjoys another personality to that of our own, could, it might be reasonably argued, communicate with other such states in other minds. Each conversation we have, would then develop into various strata of communication and relation, each associated with a different strata of the mind. To become human, as it becomes historical, is to become utterly complex and intricate. Theses that might not have interested Rousseau, and yet have of course obsessed much of history since him.
Rousseau changes the entire direction of the debate about Justice and what makes a human. To be human becomes an accident of history, an accident whose elements bequeathed to us a highly complex mind, replete with different layers or levels of organization. Justice amongst other peoples, might then be very different from justice amongst ourselves, in the same way that the justice which a parent has for their child is different from the justice between individuals. Justice is thereby dragged into history. A move which would have the most profound of consequences. However before these consequences can be assessed, one first needs to consider the alternative hypothesis. Namely that Rousseau is wrong, and that there do exist, eternal imperatives capable of straddling all epochs and times, irrespective of human development. It is to these Categorical Imperatives the next week’s Rant will turn.
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