Prof. Bruce Harvey

Rousseau Discussion Summary Sheet

--Rousseau's text is written about 100 years before anthropology became a field of study

--at times it seems anthropological, as if Rousseau really admired some hypothetical "cave man" pre-historical lifestyle, but in fact he is only using this speculatively relatively happy "state of nature" to critique a fall into civilization or what he calls the social state:

--relying on tools we become less robust physically

--out tastes become corrupted and we become so other directed (envy/prestige) that we lose any sense of natural, instinctive, authentic/immediate desires and goals

--we no longer live in the moment (what I referred to as all the gears in the head turning anxiously about the future, etc); and are no longer self-contained (rather than grabbing the apple from the tree, we must buy it, diced and packaged, etc., from Publix, requiring money, in turn requiring a job and all the other complexities and dependencies of our modern existence)

--it would be easy to call Rousseau a discontent whiner, and of course his speculative musings about pre-social humankind are often farfetched

--but it is important to ponder his reflections on how our identities (out of the "state of nature") are hopelessly mediated by envy, prestige needs, and so on.  To put it crudely, Rousseau in essence says we are not ourselves once we enter into "civil" society.  I quote the last line from our handout: the "savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself."  That may be trite... or it may not be.  Rousseau is the first of those great thinkers--Marx and Freud are two others--who find very little to like about bourgeois life