History and Human Nature
An Essay on the Political Philosophy of Rousseau and Kant
by Jaren Feeley
“Know thyself”—this legendary maxim was carved into the stone wall of the Temple of Delphi over 2,000 years ago. Those two words conjoined have held remarkable weight through the ages, demonstrating how durable wisdom can be.
Notably absent from our Delphic walls is a political maxim. The shifting social relations of political life may, from time to time, produce a crystallized norm of governance. But the ebb of time is apt to wash away the political truths of an age. And when this occurs, and society undergoes a sea change, can we at least count on individual human nature to hold steady? If we could count on this—a human nature independent of the vicissitudes of time—then we could use these constants to help solve other variables in the political equation. For this reason, political philosophers hoping to point the way to an ultimately stable and just society have often had recourse to a “human nature” as a conceptual foundation of a political system.
In this paper, I am going to demonstrate that such appeals to human nature require questionable assumptions that undermine attempts to legitimize a political system. In particular, I will use the work of two philosophers—Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant—and their attempts to blend immutable human attributes with a macroscopic view of political history, to problematize anthropological assumptions and concepts of “nature” in political philosophy. The essay will conclude with thoughts on the value of a flexible understanding of humans.
It has often been taken for granted, since the writings of Plato, that humans naturally live in societies, and must be organized into formal associations of governance called states. At the height of the Enlightenment, in 18th century France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau undertook a project to understand the inequality and injustice of his age, and asked a series of very powerful questions. Rousseau wondered: has the intellectual and economic progress of the Enlightenment benefitted human morality? Could humans have once lived a good life, completely free from the modern oppression of society and governance? In asking and answering these questions, Rousseau framed society as a corrupting influence that increasingly degraded the purity and natural goodness of humans. The foundation of Rousseau’s arguments is a philosophical device introduced in the work of Thomas Hobbes a century earlier. This foundational device is the state of nature.
Briefly: Hobbes, in his seminal work Leviathin, asks the reader to consider what human life would be like without any government, in which the general populace is without a common authority to create and enforce laws. Hobbes reasons that horrifically violent circumstances would result from this lack of governance, this “state of nature”. For Hobbes, the state of nature is not a historical concept, but is merely a thought experiment. This thought experiment is used to demonstrate that humans, simple by nature and highly dependent on social circumstances, would react violently to a situation in which there was a scarcity of goods and lack of an overwhelming authority to enforce laws. From this premise, Hobbes was moved to the conclusion that an absolute monarchy was a legitimate and desirable form of governance.
Rousseau appropriates the state of nature, and in a brilliant move, uses this conceptual tool to explore much further into the limits of political and social imagination. In his foundational Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau asks us to imagine a radical state of nature in which there is no government—nor society. This state of nature entails a life without community, friends, lasting family, or social bonds of any sort. Without economic cooperation there is consequently an utter lack of material goods. In this state of absolute cultural deprivation, the human being is a tabula rasa. In the opening passages of the Discourse, Rousseau outlines the methodology and implications of this enterprise:
For how shall we know the source of inequality between men, if we do not begin by knowing mankind? And how shall man hope to see himself as nature made him, across all the changes which the succession of place and time must have produced in his original constitution? How can he distinguish what is fundamental in his nature from the changes and additions which his circumstances and the advances he has made have introduced to modify his primitive condition? …Instead of a being, acting constantly from fixed and invariable principles, instead of that celestial and majestic simplicity, impressed on it by its divine Author, we find it only the frightful contrast of passion mistaking itself for reason, and of understanding grown delirious. (p. 43)
For it is by no means a light undertaking to distinguish properly between what is original and what is artificial in the actual nature of man, or to form a true idea of a state which no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist; and of which it is, nevertheless, necessary to have true ideas, in order to form a proper judgment of our present state. (p. 44)
These investigations, which are so difficult to make, and have been hitherto so little thought of, are, nevertheless, the only means that remain of obviating a multitude of difficulties which deprive us of the knowledge of the real foundations of human society.” (p. 45)
The framework of Rousseau’s endeavor is laid bare in these passages. The basic assumption is that there was an original state of man (made by nature), and after temporal and human advancements, there is an artificial state of man (corrupted by humans themselves). The original state of man operates “constantly from fixed and invariable principles”, of which we must have “true ideas” in order to understand “the true foundations of society.” Rousseau is seeking a holy grail of political philosophy: a timeless and principled human nature.
What role does history play in this supposed narrative? Rousseau does not aim to merely provide this timeless and principled human nature in a temporal vacuum—he intends to place it on a historical spectrum, beginning in a beautiful and pure state of nature and gradually being corrupted as it moves towards present day society. And yet, the principles of human nature are discovered not through history but through “contemplating”:
Throwing aside, therefore, all those scientific books, which teach us only to see men such as they have made themselves, and contemplating the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I think I can perceive in it two principles prior to reason, one of them deeply interesting us in our own welfare and preservation, and the other exciting a natural repugnance at seeing any other sensible being, and particularly any of our species, suffer pain or death. It is from the agreement and combination which the understanding is in a position to establish between these two principles, without its being necessary to introduce that of sociability, that all the rules of natural right appear to me to be derived… His duties towards others are not dictated to him only by the later lessons of wisdom; and, so long as he does not resist the internal impulse of compassion, he will never hurt any other man, nor even any sentient being, except on those lawful occasions on which his own preservation is concerned… (p. 46-47)
Rousseau utilizes the state of nature framework to “perceive” these foundational principles—the interest in self-preservation, and the quality of pity/compassion—which in synthesis can derive “all the rules of natural right,” and is closely related to natural law. The quality of pity/compassion is an essential quality for Rousseau, almost proto-moral in nature. Indeed: “I think I need not fear contradiction in holding man to be possessed of the only natural virtue … I am speaking of compassion… universal and useful to mankind, as it comes before any kind of reflection; and at the same time so natural, that the very brutes themselves sometimes give evident proofs of it” (p. 73). Rousseau is careful to note that this universal “natural virtue” does not require sociability nor reason, thus being available to every form of society, and being essential to his later claim that “I have shown that man is naturally good” (p. 118).
Rousseau has just begun introducing principles of human nature, but let us pause and observe the methodology he just utilized to get here: he has oriented himself facing backwards in the span of history to find these pre-social and pre-rational elements, they are discovered through “contemplation” and not a study of past events. He is unabashed: “Let us begin then by laying all facts aside, as they do not affect the question. The investigations we may enter into, in treating this subject, must not be considered as historical truths, but only as mere conditional and hypothetical reasonings, rather calculated to explain the nature of things, than to ascertain their actual origin” (p. 50). We are searching for fixed and invariable principles of man, to gain true ideas about the foundation of society—thus we are searching for “man as nature made him,” which ostensibly we will find in the past before the “changes and additions which his circumstances and the advances… have introduced to modify his primitive condition.” And yet the passage above asks us to consider the forthcoming investigations not as historical truths, but as mere reasonings. Yet, how is it that Rousseau is able to deduce a course of human action from two principles prior to reason, through “mere conditional and hypothetical reasonings”? How can Rousseau form judgments through the use of reason, on the implications of two principles that do not follow reason? It would seem that to follow the course of unreasonable behavior, one would require a history of empirical observation.
Let us follow Rousseau, as he continues to invoke aspects of human nature. Though he does not explicitly state it, this next property of man must also be prior to reason due to its supernatural aspect:
“Nature lays her commands on every animal, and the brute obeys her voice. Man receives the same impulsion, but at the same time knows himself at liberty to acquiesce or resist: and it is particularly in consciousness of this liberty that the spirituality of his soul is displayed. For physics may explains, in some measure, the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing or rather of choosing, and in the feeling of this power, nothing is to be found but acts which are purely spiritual and wholly inexplicable by the laws of mechanism. (p. 60)
Rousseau here establishes a duality, between the mechanical realm and the “purely spiritual” willful human soul, which is “wholly inexplicable” by the laws of mechanism. If there is no correspondence between the spiritual and physical realm, then it follows that by no mechanical motion was a spiritual realm created. The spiritual is thus supernatural, and cannot have developed during the evolutionary trajectory of humankind that Rousseau is expounding. Our tally is up to three principles before reason: self-preservation, pity/compassion, and free will—the last of which makes establishing a causal chain even more daunting.
What Rousseau next introduces, I will argue, is pivotal to understanding his whole enterprise of placing a naturally good human nature at the beginning of a morally degenerating history:
There is another very specific quality which distinguishes [men and brutes]… This is the faculty of self-improvement, which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual… It would be melancholy, were we forced to admit that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty [of perfectibility] is the source of all human misfortunes; that it is this which, in time, draws man out of his original state, in which in which he would have spent his days insensibly in peace and innocence; that it is this faculty, which, successively producing in different ages his discoveries and his errors, his vices and his virtues, makes him at length a tyrant both over himself and over nature.” (p. 60)
Note that this quality, unlike the others, “is inherent in the species as in the individual.” What began as a quest to discover human nature has led to the discovery of a species nature. We should consider it curious that Rousseau asserts this perfectibility operates “by the help of circumstances,” and not simply through the human will which he introduces earlier on the same page. I argue that this is no small detail, but is the dichotomy that drives Rousseau’s socio-political history: an eternal and transcendent individual will vs. “the source of all human misfortunes,” a coercive force that controls the humans on the species/social level. This conflict of individual freedom against macroscopic power resonates remarkably with the political concerns that will concern later writings of Rousseau.
Rousseau cannot maintain that man in the state of nature has “celestial and majestic simplicity, impressed on it by its divine Author” and “is naturally good,” if he would voluntarily degenerate into the bourgeois man of his day. Here is a brief glimpse into the dystopian end of Rousseau’s narrative:
[For] man in the state of society… necessaries have to be provided, and then superfluities; delicacies follow next, then immense wealth, then subjects, and then slaves… the less natural and pressing his wants, the more headstrong are his passions, and, still worse, the more he has it in his power to gratify them; so that after a long course of prosperity, after having swallowed up treasures and ruined multitudes, ther hero ends up by cutting every throat till he finds himself, at last, sole master of the world. Such is in miniature the moral picture, if not of human life, at least of the secret pretension of the heart of civilized man. (p. 120)
Here is revealed a fundamental contradiction in Rousseau’s fusion of a history of moral degeneration with a starting point of essentially good human nature. Rousseau, deeply troubled by the state of governance and society contemporary to his writings, aimed to establish that the injustices and inequalities of his era were not based on “natural law” or any other sort of appeal to human nature. He aimed to show that human nature was, on the contrary, radically free, egalitarian, and essentially compassionate and good. Further, he enacted a separation between nature and society. Nature was enshrined as an unchanging state of divine simplicity that made humankind and then lifted her hands off of them. If nature were a constantly acting and directing force, then it would be responsible for the current state of social and political affairs, and all appeals to an “original” as opposed to “artificial” human nature would be rendered mute, and Rousseau would have to concede that his era was indeed in step with natural law. But, like the rational/physical dualism of Kant, Rousseau had sunk a time capsule of goodness under the ground, safe from the surface activity of history, ready to be brought out into the light of day and placed as an essential support for his construction of a new political system. “Such is the pure emotion of nature, prior to all kinds of reflection! Such is the force of natural compassion, which the greatest depravity of morals has as yet hardly been able to destroy!” (p. 74).
This comparison to Kant is illuminating, for he also took a macroscopic view of history, and there are some striking similarities between the two (and some illuminating differences). Recall that Rousseau enacted a schism between the self-improvement of the individual and the degeneration of the species: “all subsequent advances [from the state of nature] have been apparently so many steps towards the perfection of the individual, but in reality towards the decrepitude of the species” (p. 91). Now compare this attitude to the one held by Kant in his work Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective:
History further lets us hope that, in this way, that which seems confused and irregular when considering particular individuals can nonetheless be recognized as a steadily progressing, albeit slow development of the original capacities of the entire species… individual human beings and even entire peoples give little thought to the fact that they, by pursuing their own ends, each in his own way and often in opposition to others, unwittingly, as if guided along, work to promote the intent of nature. (p. 3)
Far from being defined by perfectibility, Kant suggests that individual development “seems confused and irregular,” and can only be understand in terms of the development of the species, which is motivated to promote the intent of nature:
The only option for the philosopher here, since he cannot presuppose that human beings pursue any rational end of their own in their endeavors, is that he attempt to discover and end of nature behind this absurd course of human activity, an end on the basis of which history could be given of beings that proceed without a plan of their own, but nevertheless according to a definite plan of nature. (p. 4)
These two views place the full realization of nature on entirely different ends of history—Rousseau argues that the consummation of human beings and nature lies deep in the past, whereas Kant suggests that we are moving towards this goal. Interestingly, both thinkers agree that the closer one is to this ideal of natural, the better the status of the species as a whole.
What is nature, for these thinkers? Does it endow humans with immutable characteristics that help ground a political system? Consider this passage by Kant:
Nature has willed that human beings produce everything that extends beyond the mechanical organization of their animal existence completely on their own, and that they shall not partake in any happiness or perfection other than that which they attain free of instinct and by means of their own reason… The mere fact that it gave human beings the faculty of reason and the freedom of will based on this faculty is a clear indication of its intent with regard to their endowments. They were intended neither to be led by instinct, nor to be supplied and instructed with innate knowledge; they were intended to produce everything themselves. (p. 5)
Unlike Rousseau, Kant explicitly denies that humans should allow themselves to be guided by the instincts of nature. In another work, Kant goes as far to label human nature “radically evil,” writing that “The depravity of human nature, then, is not so much to be called badness, if this word is taken in its strict sense, namely, as a disposition (subjective principle of maxims) to adopt the bad.” For Kant, it is “the faculty of reason and the freedom of the will” that are essential for guiding humans through the world, and Kant is clear in his efforts to build a political order upon these crucial endowments. Most crucially for his political thought is the ability of humans to recognize morality through their transcendent reason. Kant derives from his morality the conclusion that humans ought to live in republican governments, between which there are codified international relations.
When we look at the writings of Rousseau, we find that the relation of morality to governance—similar to the temporal distinction between individual good and species good—runs in the opposite order as that provided by Kant. In a pivotal passage in the Social Contract, Rousseau writes:
The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his behavior and endowing his actions with the morality they previously lacked… to the gains of the civil state might be added moral liberty, which alone makes man truly master of himself; for the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery, while obedience to the law you have set yourself is liberty. (p. 23-24)
Kant believed that morality could only come from reason, but Rousseau maintained that “the human race would long since have ceased to be, had its preservation depended only on the reasonings of the individuals composing it” (p. 76). It was that natural capacity for compassion that was the wellspring for much of morality, and as compassion was an attribute shared by many animals, there was by consequence a sort of innate goodness to nature in general:
[For] what is generosity, clemency, or humanity but compassion applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to mankind in general? …Were it even true that pity is no more than a feeling… this truth would have no other consequence than to confirm my argument. Compassion must, in fact, be the stronger, the more the animal beholding any kind of distress identifies himself with the animal that suffers. Now, it is plain that such identification must have been much more perfect in a state of nature than it is in a state of reason. (p. 75)
Despite the seemingly intractable differences between these two thinkers, and their conception of what could underlie a legitimate state, I argue that their differences are merely superficial and belie an essential similarity. This relates to a fundamental dichotomy held by both thinkers: the distinction between the material world ruled by causality, and the immaterial individual human will—and how this mirrors the temporally contingent world of politics and social relations, and its foil: the immutable aspects of humanity.
It is only at the individual level that both thinkers grant unchanging principles of behavior and a free will unaffected by the material laws of causality. At the species level, these unchanging principles of behavior among the human population interact in overwhelmingly complex ways, necessitating a basic teleology (or reverse teleology, in the case of Rousseau) to construct a coherent narrative. The sum of individual free wills do not result in a macroscopic free will of the species, but chaos. It is, for Rousseau and Kant, a fundamental goal to overcome this psudo-metaphysical distinction between individual nature and the nature of human populations dispersed through time—the solution being a legitimate government. In the words of Kant: “Nature’s highest intent for humankind, that is, the development of all of the latter’s natural predispositions, can be realized only in society… that is, a perfectly just civil constitution, must be the highest goal of nature for the human species” (p. 8). Rousseau too admits that the state of nature can “no longer subsist, and mankind would perish if it did not change its way of being” (p. 19).
Whereas Kant was guided towards his view of the just state by a morality that is derived from the transcendent will, Rousseau was guided by a state of nature that exposed principles of human behavior, and natural virtue that can be recovered despite superficial corruptions to human nature caused by society. As we have seen, Rousseau’s efforts have caused numerous contradictions—the tension between discovering a historical attribute through contemplation, using principles that exist before reason to deduct a chain of events, and especially the need to appeal to forces that act on the level of species in order to preserve the sanctity the natural virtue of human kind and its spiritual will. It is in this last attribute—the division of the physical and the transcendent, that allows Kant to escape many of these minor inconsistences and move forward with a more cohesive basis to his political philosophy, that being morality based on the transcendent reason. Rousseau, in relying upon the physical nature of nature, necessarily came to contradictions when combining the immutable with the temporal—and we cannot ignore the fact that Kant may be escaping many small inconsistences by creating one giant, cohesive fiction.
In light of these troubles, it is clear that anthropological assumptions provide significant problems for those trying to lay a foundation for a political system. For when one takes a long view of history, as do Rousseau and Kant, it only further exposes the fact that the many social, economic, and technological relationships established by humans necessitate a flexible understanding of ourselves and our political potentials. Kant did, on a certain level, grasp this radical responsibility for invention, and that a “perfect [political] solution is impossible: nothing entirely straight can be fashioned from the crooked wood of which humankind is made.” It does indeed make it easier to have some consistency in the notion of what humans are, but if we accept that we live in an entirely natural world defined by change, it would be naïve to hope for the immutable in humans. This does not mean that we must abandon everything and start anew on a daily basis—for in flexibility we have found many things to rely on. For a simple example of this, one doesn’t have to look any further than the beginning of this inquiry, to words carved into a wall, the stone of which has long since yielded to the forces of nature and human history.
Works Cited
Kant, Immanuel. Towards Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. Print.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G. D. H. Cole. London: Everyman, 1993. Print.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings. Ed. Quintin Hoare. Trans. Christopher Bertram. London: Penguin, 2012. Print.