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BETWEEN ARISTOTLE AND LUCRETIUS: DISCOURSES OF NATURE AND ROUSSEAU’S DISCOURS SUR L’INEGALITE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2015

BRANDON KONOVAL
BRANDON KONOVAL*
Affiliation:
Arts One Program and the School of Music, the University of British Columbia E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau presents himself as declaiming in “the Lyceum of Athens” but in the presence of Plato and Xenocrates. Why should Rousseau's arguments be heard in such precincts, and why, moreover, is Aristotle missing from them? Rousseau's response to the topic proposed by the Dijon Academy, on which the Discourse was based, may be correspondingly interpreted as a response to Aristotle's philosophy of nature and of the ways in which that philosophy informs the Politics in particular. The critique Rousseau thereby offers of an Aristotelian discourse of nature and society invokes a similar challenge once presented by ancient Epicureanism, and reflects the extraordinary revival of interest in Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, a poem that became the focus of intense critical scrutiny during the Enlightenment. We may therefore understand why the Discourse on Inequality was read as an “Epicurean” text by certain contemporaries, and recognize particular critical objectives served by Epicurean philosophical resources that were further deployed in works like the Social Contract and Letters Written from the Mountain, reflecting Rousseau's engagement with Genevan reform politics of the 1750s and 1760s.

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , April 2017 , pp. 1 - 33
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Professors Sophia Rosenfeld and Alan Charles Kors for their encouragement and their recommendations for improving the manuscript, and to the anonymous reviewers of Modern Intellectual History for stimulating and productive commentary. Furthermore, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to students and colleagues in the UBC Arts One Program, with whom I have been privileged to discuss these authors and to explore these texts and issues.

References

1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les homes (Amsterdam, 1755)Google Scholar.

2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men (Amsterdam, 1755)Google Scholar, in Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Gourevitch, Victor (Cambridge, 1997), 112–222, at 220–21 n. 14Google Scholar; Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris, 1959–95), 3: 109–223, at 221. All future references to the Discourse on Inequality will be identified as DI and assume the Gourevitch translation, with corresponding pagination.

3 On eighteenth-century debates over “nature” and the “natural” see the classic studies by Ehrard, Jean, L’idée de la nature en France dans la première moitié de xviiie siècle (Paris, 1963)Google Scholar; and Charlton, D. G., New Images of the Natural in France: A Study in European Cultural History, 1750–1800 (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar.

4 de Castillon, Jean, Discours sur l’origine de l’inegalité parmi les hommes. Pour servir de réponse au Discours que M. Rousseau, Citoyen de Géneve, a publié sur le même sujet. Par M. Jean de Castillon, Professeur en Philosophie et Mathématique à Utrecht, et Membre des Acadèmies Royales de Londres, Berlin, et Gottingue, etc. etc. etc. (Amsterdam, 1756)Google Scholar. Translations of this source are my own.

5 Ibid., 135–6.

6 Ibid., 17–18.

7 Ibid., Preface, vi.

8 Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, par une Societé de Gens de Lettres, vol. 5 (Paris, 1755), 779–85.

9 Cf. n. 99 v.i.

10 See also the Jesuit author Castel, Louis-Bertrand's L’Homme Moral opposé à L’Homme Physique de M. R***. Lettres Philosophiques, Ou l’on refute le Déisme du jour (Toulouse, 1756), Letters 34 through 36 (205–21)Google Scholar.

11 Rousseau's Epicurean or Lucretian inclinations have provided a consistent, if not quite commonplace, avenue for scholarly inquiry over the past century. For older sources see Morel, Jean, “Recherches sur les sources du Discours de l’inégalité,” in Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 (1909), 119–98, at 163–4Google Scholar; Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken and Boas, George, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935), 222–42Google Scholar; Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), 271 n. 37Google Scholar; Robin, L., La pensée hellénique (Paris, 1967), 550 ff. n. 1Google Scholar; Goldschmidt, V., Anthropologie et politique: Les principes du système de Rousseau (Paris, 1974), 305 Google Scholar, 436 ff., 479; Nichols, J. H. Jr, Epicurean Political Philosophy (Ithaca, 1976)Google Scholar, esp. 198–207; and Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Diskurs über die Ungleichheit/Discours sur l’inégalité, ed. Meier, H. (Paderborn, 1984)Google Scholar, s.v. “Lukrez.” For more recent scholarship see Gourevitch, Victor, “The Religious Thought,” in Riley, Partick, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (Cambridge, 2001), 193–246 Google Scholar, esp. 211–15 on Rousseau's Epicureanism; Baker, Eric, “Lucretius in the European Enlightenment,” in Gillespie, Stuart and Hardie, Philip, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar, 274–88; Lifschitz, Avi S., “The Enlightenment Revival of the Epicurean History of Language and Civilisation,” in Leddy, Neven and Lifschitz, Avi S., eds., Epicurus in the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2009), 207–26Google Scholar; Christopher Brooke, “Rousseau's Second Discourse: Between Epicureanism and Stoicism,” in Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffmann, eds., Rousseau and Freedom (Cambridge, 2010), 44–57; Kavanagh, Thomas M., “Rousseau's Eudemony of Liberty,” in Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (New Haven and London, 2010)Google Scholar, 103–27; and for a review essay of Kavanagh see Holley, Jared, “Eighteenth-Century Epicureanism and Rousseau on Liberty,” History of European Ideas, 37/1 (2011), 81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar–4.

12 Cf. Castel, L’Homme Moral, Lettre XXXIV, 209: “You say your man is the Man of Nature. But he is plainly contrary to nature” (my translation).

13 DI Exordium, 133; OC, 3: 133.

14 DI Preface, 124; OC, 3: 122.

15 DI, 130; OC, 3: 129.

16 DI Preface, 124; OC, 3: 122.

17 Serendipitous experiments provided by European wild children will nonetheless be entered into his notes. DI Preface, 125; OC, 3: 123–4.

18 Lucretius, De rerum natura/On the Nature of Things (hereafter DRN), trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 5.1446–7: “our age cannot look back upon what happened before, unless in any respect reasoning shows the way.”

19 DI Exordium, 132; OC, 3: 132.

20 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (hereafter Pol.), in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, 1984), 1990. All subsequent references will be drawn from this edition, with pagination following the Bekker numbers.

21 On the original title page this is misidentified as Book II, presumably a printing error given the significance of the context, to be discussed below; Rousseau's first name is also misspelled on the title page (“Jean-Jaques”).

22 Pol. I.1, 1252a; 1986.

23 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Geneva, 1750)Google Scholar.

24 The source is Rousseau, “Lettre à Lecat”: “Prometheus's torch is the torch of the Sciences made to quicken great geniuses . . . the Satyr who, seeing fire for the first time, runs toward it, and wants to embrace it, represents the vulgar . . . the Prometheus who cries out and warns them of the danger is the Citizen of Geneva.” “Letter by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Geneva: About a New Refutation of his Discourse by a Member of the Academy of Dijon”, in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 90.

25 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse which won the prize of the Academy of Dijon in the year 1750, on this question proposed by the Academy: Whether the restoration of the Sciences and Arts has contributed to the purification of morals, in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 1–28, at 6; OC, 3: 1–30, at 6.

26 Rousseau, “Letter to Lecat,” 90; OC, 3: 101–2.

27 Cf. n. 24 v.s.

28 James Tully, Introduction, to Pufendorf, Samuel, On the Duty of Man and Citizen (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar, xvi–xvii.

29 Hochstrasser, T. J., Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1991), 2 Google Scholar. On Rousseau's exposure to natural law theory through the Huguenot context see Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge, 1997).

30 Masters, Roger, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, 1968), 113 Google Scholar.

31 Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas, 242.

32 For a comparably succinct modern survey of Lucretian positions adopted by Rousseau see Gourevitch, “The Religious Thought,” 211–15. A key scholarly component of Castillon's 1756 critique of the Second Discourse was a lengthy note (“a,” 255–66) for page 20 of the text, in which Castillon lays out a number of passages from DRN that he finds strongly suggestive of parallels with Rousseau's argument. Holley, “Eighteenth-Century Epicureanism and Rousseau on Liberty,” 83 n. 41, citing an English translation from 1749, has observed that “the one-hundred sixty-six lines from Lucretius that Castillon marshalled as evidence of Rousseau's Epicureanism correspond exactly to the quotations in two of the most important books” of Pufendorf's De jure naturae et gentium (Amsterdam, 1688): this reflects the prominence of DRN's portrait of the state of nature for modern natural law theorists, as well as their concern with principles of self-interest that were often associated with an “Epicurean” moral perspective. Nonetheless, Castillon, Discours sur l’origine de l’inegalité parmi les hommes, 265, observes what he considers a notable distinction from Rousseau, arguing that Lucretius promotes a much more favorable view of civilized humanity in its embrace of justice.

33 Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 345.

34 The other ancient philosophers whom Rousseau castigates in such terms are Leucippus, Diogenes, Pyrrho, and Protagoras; among the moderns, “the Hobbeses, the Mandevilles and a thousand others”—all of whom promote their systems above all as a means of self-promotion in juxtaposition to received philosophical “commonplaces.” See the Preface to Narcissus, in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 92–106, at 98; OC, 2: 957–74, at 965–6.

35 Cook, Alexandra, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Terminator’ and Telos in Nature,” in Grant, R. and Stewart, P., eds., Rousseau and the Ancients/Rousseau et les Anciens, Pensées libres, 8 (2001), 310 Google Scholar–25.

36 Cook, Alexandra, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Botany: The Salutary Science (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar, esp. 16–21, “A metaphysics of botany: paradise regained?”

37 See, in particular, OC, 4: 574–8.

38 Rousseau refers to Denis Diderot's Pensées philosophiques (1746): “what struck me most forcibly . . . about the fortuitous arrangement of the universe, is the twenty-first philosophical thought, in which it is shown by the laws of probability that when the number of throws is infinite, the unlikelihood of an outcome is more than made up for by the frequency of the throws.” “Letter to Voltaire,” in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 232–46, at 243; OC, 4: 1057–78, at 1071. For the extent to which the Pensées philosophiques, among many other works, bears witness to Diderot's close reading of Lucretius see Gregory, Mary Efrosini, Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species (New York and London, 2007)Google Scholar.

39 This providential aspect of the Discourse on Inequality was not readily observed by contemporaries; indeed, Castel, L’Homme Moral, critiques Rousseau for denying Providence by virtue of his Epicurean or Spinozist account.

40 DI, Part I, 159; OC, 3: 162.

41 Castel, L’Homme Moral, Lettre XXXIV, 205 (my translation).

42 DRN, 5.982–7, 990–3.

43 Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism in Antiquity, 239.

44 DI, Part II, 167; OC, 3: 171: “this state was . . . the best for man, and . . . he must have left it only by some fatal accident which, for the sake of the common utility, should never have occurred.”

45 Such natural catastrophism further reflects the influence of Charles Buffon to a certain extent, with five volumes of his Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière having appeared by 1755—“I confidently rely on one of those authorities [Buffon] that are respectable to Philosophers.” DI, 195 n. 2; OC, 3: 195.

46 For recent scholarly attention to the broader teleological framework of Aristotle's philosophy see Monte Ransome Johnson, Aristotle on Teleology (Oxford, 2005). For Lucretius’ determined opposition to teleological accounts in general see Sedley, David, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 On the ready availability of DRN both in Latin and in French translations see Philip Ford, “Lucretius in Early Modern France,” in Gillespie and Hardie, The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, 227–41, at 227. Montaigne's use of DRN in his extraordinarly influential Essais—in which he cites Lucretius second only to Horace—is indicative of the popular currency of DRN in French thought and letters already by the end of the sixteenth century.

48 Pol. I.1, 1252b; 1987.

49 Rousseau also points to our omnivorous diet as peculiarly serving our capacity to be both satiated and satisfied in the state of nature (DI, Part I, 134–5; OC, 3: 135).

50 DI, Part I, 142–3; OC, 3: 143.

51 Where Aristotle sees a role for the display of luxury by the patrician class—“great expenditure is becoming to those who have suitable means to start with . . . and to people of high birth or reputation . . . For all these things being with them greatness and prestige” (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, rev. J. O. Urmson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, IV.1, 1122b; 1772)—Rousseau's nostalgia in his dedicatory letter for Genevan sumptuary laws highlights the pernicious character of artificial needs that threaten social harmony. Rousseau's critique of commerce and luxury is one of the prominent concerns linking the First and Second Discourses: see Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, esp. chaps. 1 and 2.

52 There is a distinct echo of this psychological goal in the dialogue that precedes the Savoyard vicar's profession de foi: “peace of mind lies in the contempt for everything that can disturb it.” OC, 3: 564, my translation.

53 In particular, Lucretius characterizes romantic love as a form of enslavement, perpetuated by a deceptive appearance of beauty promoted by luxury goods (DRN 4.1122–9). Correspondingly, in the dedicatory letter—as part of his critique of the Genevan economy—Rousseau addresses the women of Geneva: “What man . . . would not despise vain luxury upon seeing your simple and modest attire which, by the radiance it owes to you, seems to complement beauty most?” (DI Epistle Dedicatory, 122; OC, 3: 119–20).

54 DRN 5.1007–10.

55 DI, Part I, 137–8; OC, 3: 138.

56 DI, Part I, 138; OC, 3: 139.

57 Pol. I.3, 1253a; 1988.

58 DI, Part I, 149; OC, 3: 151. Further discussion will address the problematic natural origins of language.

59 DI, 167; OC, 3: 171. Note that the conventional English “fatal” for Rousseau's funeste in no way reflects a Stoic fatalism in the source text, which would otherwise present an absurd contradiction to Rousseau's use of hazard.

60 Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, II.8, 199b; 341.

61 Pol. I.2, 1253a; 1988.

62 Ibid.

63 Pol. I.5, 1254a – b.

64 DI, Part I, 153; OC, 3: 156.

65 See Delon, Michel, “Naufrages vus de loin: Les développements narratifs d’un theme lucretien,” Rivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate, 41 (1988), 91–119 Google Scholar.

66 DRN 2.1–5. This passage has often become conflated in both poetic imagination and commentators’ accounts with an echo found much later in the text (DRN 5.222–7), in which Lucretius compares the newborn child—and, correspondingly, the idea of human birth or entry to the world itself—to the helpless survivor of a shipwreck, cast upon the shore.

67 DRN 2.6–13.

68 Here Rousseau conflates the Stoic apatheia or “freedom from passions” with the Epicurean ataraxia or “freedom from disturbance” that characterizes of peace of mind. This is consistent with doxographical tradition: in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus (third century CE) lumps Epicureanism and Stoicism together as offering false prospects for ataraxia to their disciples.

69 DI, Part II, 186–7; OC, 3: 192–3.

70 Given its pronounced etymological association with flesh, chair, Montaigne's use of décharnez to characterize the poor—“décharnez de faim et de pauvreté”—is central to the irony of the essai (“defleshed by hunger and poverty” would make the association transparent in an English rendition, however pedantically): see de Montaigne, Michel, “Des cannibales,” in Oeuvres Complètes de Michel de Montaigne: Les Essais II, ed. Armaingaud, A., texte du manuscript de Bordeaux (Paris, 1924)Google Scholar, 233–66, at 265.

71 Cf. n. 68 v.s.

72 “Let us institute rules of Justice and peace to which all are obliged to conform, which favor no one, and which . . . make up for the vagaries of fortune by subjecting the powerful and the weak alike to mutual duties” (DI, Part II, 173; OC, 3: 177).

73 Rep. 359c–361d.

74 Pol. I.2, 1253a; 1988.

75 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Histoire du Gouvernement de Genève, OC, 5: 497–531, Livre I, at 499–500.

76 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Of the Social Contract , III.5, in Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and transl. Gourevitch, Victor (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar, 39–152, at 93; OC, 3: 347–470, at 406. The Social Contract will be cited hereafter as SC, referring to this translation.

77 SC III.5, 94; OC, 3: 408.

78 Pol. I.2, 1253a; 1988.

79 DI, Part I, 145–6; OC, 3: 146–7.

80 DI, Part I, 145; OC, 3: 147.

81 DRN 5.1041–51. On the importance of Lucretius’ account for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists of the origins of language see Avi S. Lifschitz, “The Enlightenment Revival of the Epicurean History of Language and Civilisation,” in Leddy and Lifschitz, Epicurus in the Enlightenment, 207–26, at 218–25 for Rousseau in particular.

82 DI, Part I, 147; OC, 3: 148–9.

83 See the Essai sur des langues, chaps. 2 to 4.

84 DI, Part I, 148; OC, 3: 149.

85 DI, Part I, 141; OC, 3: 142.

86 Pol. I.5, 1254a–b; 1990: “But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature? . . . [F]rom the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule . . . The lower sort [of human being] are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.”

87 DRN, 5.1019–20, 1024–6.

88 Cf. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (London, 1651)Google Scholar, xiii: “Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well.” Thus the authority of any sovereign institution is not vested in any power “natural” to the human agents who may constitute that institution. Furthermore, such contractual rather than natural sovereign authority will be necessary, as “from this equality of ability ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends.”

89 SC I.2, 43; OC, 3: 353.

90 DI, Part II, 179; OC, 3: 184. Note Rousseau's explicit return to this concern in the Social Contract: “To decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man” (SC 123; OC, 3: 440).

91 DI, Part II, 183; OC, 3: 188.

92 For Rousseau's conflicted relationship with the Genevan reform movement see Whatmore's, Richard Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven and London, 2012)Google Scholar, especially chap. 3, “Rousseau and Geneva.”

93 “Pure” and “tempered”—a terminology popular amongst Genevan commentators, literally associated with tuning methods involving consonant musical intervals—figuratively refer to the attunement of social or political harmonie, a convention ultimately derived from Plato's Republic.

94 Whatmore, Against War and Empire, 66.

95 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettres Ecrites de la Montagne (hereafter LEM), “Sixième lettre,” OC, 3: 683–897, at 809 (my translation).

96 LEM, “Huitième lettre,” OC, 3: 842.

97 Ibid.

98 Whatmore, Against War and Empire, 77.

99 Cf. Encyclopédie, vol. 5, s.v. “Droit de la Nature, ou Droit Naturel”: “among other dangerous opinions, he [Hobbes] tries to establish, in accordance with the morality of Epicurus, that the founding principle of societies is self-preservation and private interest” (132–3, my translation). On German perspectives see Thomas Ahnert, “Epicureanism and the Transformation of Natural Law in the Early German Enlightenment,” in Leddy and Lifschitz, Epicurus in the Enlightenment, 53–68.

100 DI, Part II, 174; OC, 3: 178–9.

101 DRN 5.999–1000.

102 DI, Part II, 171; OC, 3: 175.