“Discontented with your present condition for reasons which presage for your unfortunate posterity even greater discontent, you will wish perhaps you could go backwards in time – and this feeling must utter the eulogy of your first ancestors, the indictment of your contemporaries, and the terror of those who have the misfortune to live after you” (P.79). In Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality, he not only argues the inequalities between men, but also the inequality of happiness between the pre-civilized and post-civilized human. Rousseau believes that as savages, humanity lives a simple and oblivious lifestyle, unaware of their own existence with “self preservation being [their] only concern” (P.86). Rousseau defines this monotonous existence as happiness, yet with a constant, unchanging lifestyle, comfort and indifference appear to be surpassing characterizations. Modern living, which Rousseau views as an oppressive pit of misery, contrasts savagery with its diversity and thus possibility of happiness. Though Rousseau successfully depicts the adequate lifestyle of the “savage people”, he fails to convince readers of a pre-civilized greater happiness.
Rousseau initiates his discourse with the introduction of the savage man and his seemingly preferable lifestyle. He sees man as “satisfying his hunger under an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed under the same tree which provided his meal; and, behold, his needs are furnished” (P.81). Whatsoever be man’s desires, confined to those pertaining to self-preservation, he may easily and effortlessly acquire them. Being an undeniably smooth and simplistic way of life, Rousseau idealizes savage living as one that surpasses civilized living for its greater happi...
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...eaders of a dominant happiness in the civilized state. In the savage state, men are like machines performing the actions necessary for self-preservation, but civility offers the chance to loosen the grip on their comfortable nature and delve into the unknown, providing them with genuine happiness. The introduction of desires, inequality and government strip man of his oblivion and cast him down an irreversible, yet promising path. Despite the innumerable changes man has undergone, one statement applies to both the savage and civilized man; “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change” (Darwin).
Works Cited
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Discourse on Inequality. Trans. Maurice Cranston. London: Penguin Books, 1984. Print.
Darwin, Charles Robert. The Origin of Species. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909. Print.
Zhao, Buyun. "Charles Darwin & Evolution." Charles Darwin & Evolution. Christ's College, 2009. Web. 04 May 2014.
The struggle between happiness and society shows a society where true happiness has been forfeited to form a perfect order.
Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. London: University of California Press, 1989.
Thinkers and philosophers have been pondering misery since the dawn of civilization. At the dawn of humanity, humans existed to survive and reproduce; every day was a struggle. However, with the advent of civilization, humanity has moved further and further away from its original evolutionary drives, and it can be argued by secular thinkers that humans exist now to find happiness. Therefore, misery can be seen as the biggest obstacle to human happiness, yet misery itself is a mystery to many. Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents put forth the authors’ opinions on the origins of mortal misery, and suggest methods to solve the problem of misery. Although the two have differing views, both see
Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been referred to as the father of the romanticism movement due to his philosophical writings challenging the status quo at the time. To help set the cultural scene surrounding him, he lived in Paris just prior to the French Revolution where turmoil was in the atmosphere. During this time in France’s history monarchs reigned, the Catholic Church was the leading religion, and those who were considered commoners were viewed as less than human. I believe Rousseau’s environment led him to ponder and write about assumptions regarding human nature, the government’s role in relation to humans, types of will people have, and educational methods. His works had some comparative and contrasting features
...s and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifically and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?(William James)
...eing mandated for protection. Rousseau’s conception of liberty is more dynamic. Starting from all humans being free, Rousseau conceives of the transition to civil society as the thorough enslavement of humans, with society acting as a corrupting force on Rousseau’s strong and independent natural man. Subsequently, Rousseau tries to reacquaint the individual with its lost freedom. The trajectory of Rousseau’s freedom is more compelling in that it challenges the static notion of freedom as a fixed concept. It perceives that inadvertently freedom can be transformed from perfectly available to largely unnoticeably deprived, and as something that changes and requires active attention to preserve. In this, Rousseau’s conception of liberty emerges as more compelling and interesting than Locke’s despite the Lockean interpretation dominating contemporary civil society.
Many people value the tangible over the complex. However, viewing the world solely through this definite lens is an oversimplification. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We explores this flaw in a society founded solely upon its government’s definition of the “ultimate happiness.” To reach utopia, it eliminates inefficiency, crime, and despondency, by promoting state-led happiness. Despite these admirable goals, the One State’s methods sacrifice freedom, individualism, and, ironically, happiness itself, ultimately failing its mission. Zamyatin explores the emotionless routine within the One State to assert that happiness cannot exist when controlled and rationalized.
In his “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind,” Jean-Jacque Rousseau attributes the foundation of moral inequalities, as a separate entity from the “natural” physical inequalities, which exist between only between men in a civilised society. Rousseau argues that the need to strive for excellence is one of man’s principle features and is responsible for the ills of society. This paper will argue that Rousseau is justified in his argument that the characteristic of perfectibility, as per his own definition, is the cause of the detriments in his civilised society.
Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” was published in 1762 and caused much controversy in France during the French Revolution. Rousseau was a famous philosophical thinker during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Due to his time period it is said the Rousseau is an Enlightenment Thinker; however, some of his ideas do not align with that of an Enlightenment Thinker. Rousseau was the kind of philosopher who applied philosophical reasoning to ethics and politics, and one approach to that was describing human beings when they are in a natural state. Rousseau was influenced by the modern natural law tradition which wanted to answer the challenge of skepticism, but through a systematic approach to human nature. The main purpose
In his Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau hypothesizes the natural state of man to understand where inequality commenced. To analyze the nature of man, Rousseau “strip[ped] that being, thus constituted, of all the supernatural gifts he could have received, and of all the artificial faculties he could have acquired only through a lengthy process,” so that all that was left was man without any knowledge or understanding of society or the precursors that led to it (Rousseau 47). In doing so, Rousseau saw that man was not cunning and devious as he is in society today, but rather an “animal less strong than some, less agile than others, but all in all, the most advantageously organized of all” (47). Rousseau finds that man leads a simple life in the sense that “the only goods he knows in the un...
Darwin, Charles. From The Origin of Species. New York: P.F. Collier and Son Corporation, 1937. 71-86; 497-506.
The charge of sexism on Rousseau and the badge of feminism on Wollstonecraft render their arguments elusive, as if Rousseau wrote because he was a sexist and Wollstonecraft because she was a feminist, which is certainly not true. Their work evinced here by the authors questioned the state of man and woman in relation to their conception of what it should be, what its purpose, and what its true species. With an answer to these questions, one concludes the inhumanity of mankind in society, and the other the inhumanity of mankind in their natural, barbarous state. The one runs from society, to the comforts and direction of nature; the other away from nature, to the reason and virtue of society. The argument presented may be still elusive, and the work in vain, but the point not missed, perhaps.
While Rousseau praises the purity and freedom of humans in the state of nature, he favors civilization’s stage of development into the “hut society” stage and views contemporary society as a corruption of human virtue. Hut society significant inequality as people remained independent without the division of labor. Rousseau describes hut society as “A golden mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our vanity” (150-151). He sees hut society as having the best of both worlds; limited in its vanity, but also enough so that people enjoy the company of others and are at least somewhat productive.
For years, authors and philosophers have satirized the “perfect” society to incite change. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes a so-called utopian society in which everyone is happy. This society is a “controlled environment where technology has essentially [expunged] suffering” (“Brave New World”). A member of this society never needs to be inconvenienced by emotion, “And if anything should go wrong, there's soma” (Huxley 220). Citizens spend their lives sleeping with as many people as they please, taking soma to dull any unpleasant thoughts that arise, and happily working in the jobs they were conditioned to want. They are genetically altered and conditioned to be averse to socially destructive things, like nature and families. They are trained to enjoy things that are socially beneficial: “'That is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny'” (Huxley 16). Citizens operate more like machinery, and less like humans. Humanity is defined as “the quality of being human” (“Humanity”). To some, humanity refers to the aspects that define a human: love, compassion and emotions. Huxley satirizes humanity by dehumanizing the citizens in the Brave New World society.