Reading questions: Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (the first part)
- What's the import of the Letter to the Republic of Geneva? How does it relate to the issues concerned in the Discourse proper?
- Why is it difficult to grasp the original of human nature? Is it even possible?
- Why do we need to know what the human being was in the state of nature in order to grasp "natural right" (40)?
- Is Rousseau's question after the original of human nature a problem for us, given our dramatic advances in scientific and technical knowledge?
- Why are natural and moral inequality not the same for Rousseau? What would it mean for a concept of right if they were?
- What are the four main characteristics of human being in the state of nature?
- How are perfectibility and freedom related to one another?
- Does human being in the state of nature have reason?
- Why does human being in the state of nature not need language?
- One of the issues that we discussed in class last week concerned love? Can human being in the state of nature love others?
Discussion on #6
ReplyDeleteThe human in the natural state is, as a Rosseau puts it, "a sentient being" not a "rational being"(Rosseau 14). They-- I use they because his definition of human nature puts human in the natural state as a different species from humans as we consider them in the modern state--are thinking things but are not reasoning things; they have emotions and yet their emotions are limited only to that which does not require reason. This seems to go against are notion of reason and emotions. Your decisions are ruled by either emotion or by logic, or some combination of both. As we talked about in class briefly last week, women are generally ruled by their emotions and men by reason. If this is so, women are closer to their natural state then men are. Except the initial human was only capable only of willing, not willing, desiring, and fearing (Rosseau 26). Rosseau calls these "operations of the soul" which as I would think of the modern human are love for humans and also goals, passions, motivations, and self-purpose. And yet the soul of a natural human is distinctly different,with a purpose of reproducing and motivations of self-preservation and an objection to seeing other humans suffer (Rosseau 14). They are "sentient beings" and yet they lack the range of emotions that are known to us today: happiness, sadness, love,anxiety, serenity, the list goes on. But it is like Counting Crows said, "You don't know what you got 'til its gone." A human in his or her most natural form doesn't even know what it is has and therefore it can't know it's gone. It doesn't know it is missing the spectrum of emotions that develop divergently from the state of nature in company with language, society, and reason. With the beginnings of family life, the family begins to become used to seeing their companions and eventually they grow a desire to see their family everyday and therefore develop a new emotion of love as well as a small civil society.