NOTES FOR LECTURE PHILOSOPHY 166 ROUSSEAU, DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN OF INEQUALITY, PART I Rousseau has what he takes to be a simple but decisive objection against the social contract tradition in political theory as represented by such authors as Hobbes and Locke. The tradition is anachronistic, asserts Rousseau. The social contract writers characterize men and women in the state of nature by observing the traits people display in political society and making conjectures as to how these traits would manifest themselves in the absence of political society. But Rousseau points out that this procedure incorrectly ignores the possibility that (many of) the important traits that people display in society are the result of living together with others and would not show up in a pre-social existence. For example, Rousseau criticizes Locke for imagining private property arising in a presocial existence in which individuals are assumed to have developed moral ideas and to be capable of regulating their conduct by conceptions of natural law. Why assume this? To correct the anachronisms in the tradition, Rousseau adopts the task of trying to imagine what human life must have been like in a presocial form of existence. Before humans lived and interacted with one another, what sort of lives did they have? For Rousseau, asking about how people lived in the state of nature is asking about how people lived prior to the existence of any human society. Writing in the eighteenth century, Rousseau supposes there is no way we can gather empirical evidence to answer questions about the state of nature. We have to rely on a thought experiment. We try to figure out what traits of humans arise from living and interacting with others, subtract those traits, and imagine what human life would have been like with those traits absent. There is much that is fanciful and even ludicrous in Rousseau's account of the state of nature, but he does bring to bear an intelligent and creative imagination on the problems he addresses. The question arises whether Rousseau respects the limits of what imagination in the absence of evidence can establish with respect to the questions he is trying to answer. Is Rousseau correctly interpreting the social contract authors he criticizes? For our purposes, consider Rousseau versus Locke. Rousseau interprets the social contract writers as regarding the social contract as an historical occurrence, not merely a hypothetical possibility. In the case of Locke, Rousseau's interpretation looks plausible. But Locke does not seem to share Rousseau's aim of discovering what human life was like prior to all social interaction. For Locke, the state of nature consists of people living together peaceably in the absence of any political society or government. The term "state of nature" for Locke does not refer to presocial existence. Given all of this, I do not see that Rousseau's anachronism charge can be made to stick against Locke. This does not gainsay the intrinsic interest of Rousseau's project of imaginative reconstruction.2 Rousseau is writing before Charles Darwin reoriented our thinking about human origins in the nineteenth century and for that matter before Europeans had much anthropological knowledge about hunter-gatherer societies and about our ancestors prior to the emergence of the human species. Our ancestors were social animals and humans have always been disposed to live in groups. The questions that Rousseau investigates by an act of historical imagination in the Discourse on Inequality are hard to construe so that they make sense. What were humans like when we lived as solitary animals, like bears? What is the explanation of the development of these solitary animals into social beings, and what does this explanation tell us about the nature of social inequality? These are Rousseau’s questions. They start from the false presumption that humans were once solitary animals, like bears. According to Rousseau, prior to the beginning of social interaction, human beings were happy savages. We lacked language and were capable of very little forethought. We had no moral notions. The human animal living alone is conscious, has experiences, but is not self-conscious—not aware of itself as one member of a kind of creatures and lacking in second-order desires and other attitudes toward its first-order desires and beliefs. Humans in this state of nature are moved to action by simple desires for food, shelter, warmth, sleep, sexual gratification, safety against predators and other things perceived as menacing, and so on. The male’s role in reproduction is limited to the act of sex, done on a whim and on the impulse to seek generic gratification. The family consists of a woman carrying about with her a young child. Lacking second-order preferences—preferences about one’s preferences—the savage in the state of nature lacks a prerequisite of having a morality. Once one has preferences about one’s preferences, one wants to be a person of a certain sort, who desires some things and not others. With this self-consciousness comes the possibility of affirming an ideal for oneself and of failing to live up to that ideal image of oneself. Being self-conscious, aware of oneself as one among other similar creatures, one can wonder how to relate oneself to these other selves, and morality can grow from these thoughts. Lacking such reflective desires, the savage as described by Rousseau is not fully human, not really a person. Other social contract theorists such as Locke tend to think of political society and government as instruments that we devise to help us to satisfy desires that we antecedently have. Rousseau’s vision is different. He thinks that with the development of society and morality individuals’ wants themselves are fundamentally transformed. Nor is it the case according to Rousseau that governments and society are planned, brought into existence by the actions of people who deliberately act to create institutions and practices to satisfy their3wants., Rousseau pictures forms of society emerging and fading away as humans drift from one social state to another, not comprehending the consequences of these changes, many of which they do not intend. Social change is an effect of humans actions but not the intended effect, rather the unintended by product that results from the ensemble of human actions. (In Part II of the