You Can't Get Here from There

In the Second Discourse, Rousseau proposes to revisit the state of nature to truly ascertain the difference between what is “natural” in human beings and what is constructed, or the result of human history. He is convinced, among other things, that the social contract thinkers before him have mistaken “acquired” traits for natural ones, and in remedying this mistake, he aims to uncover the true causes of inequality, which are constructed and conventional and therefore subject to intervention. Thus, ascertaining the distinction between “original” and manufactured characteristics would seem to be central to his enterprise. However, locating this distinction with any precision turns out to be a difficult and puzzling task for the interpreter (and perhaps for Rousseau himself as well), because even the “original” traits of humans in the state of nature, pitié, amour de soi, and independence, never seem to be present in all their immanence and immediacy. Instead, it seems that perfectibility, particularly the capacity to compare, reflect, and imagine, is active from the start.

Rousseau begins the First Part of the Second Discourse by presenting a picture of what human beings, stripped bare of all their acquired characteristics, must have been like in the state of nature. The creature he describes sounds something like a cross between a Cro-Magnon and a wide-eyed fawn; heFootnote ¹⁴ is happy and free because “his imagination suggests nothing to him; his heart asks nothing of him. His modest needs are so easily found at hand, and he is so far from the degree of knowledge necessary for desiring to acquire greater knowledge, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity.”Footnote ¹⁵ Nothing prompts these creatures of pure existence to change, he says, but necessity, which causes humans to develop their innate capacities in order to fulfill their needs, at which point perfectibility is engaged, the immediacy of “nature” is lost, and the downward spiral of human “progress” is set in motion: “I almost dare affirm that the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal” (SD, 110). But how can something “unnatural” come out of something “natural”? The answer would seem to lie in human perfectibility, but, as I will demonstrate below, Rousseau's insistence that perfectibility is activated only in response to necessity is belied by the savages' ability to reflect, compare, and imagine, abilities that can be present only in individuated (or differentiated) beings for whom mediation is already in play.

Individuation refers to the process whereby a person becomes conscious of him- or herself as a person, a process which requires conditions of mediation. A being living purely in immediacy would have no sense of its boundedness, no sense that it is a distinct creature among other distinct creatures. In contrast, a person is made conscious of his or her differentiation through comparison and reflection. Mira Morgenstern puts it this way: “The consciousness of Self and Other is a simultaneous occurrence: the differentiation of each presupposes awareness of the other. The Consciousness of Self and Other separates Savage Man from Natural Man. Henceforth, Natural Man's existence is no longer undifferentiated: he cannot claim, as Savage Man once did, to be entirely at one with himself.”Footnote ¹⁶ Here, individuation requires a mediating distance between self and self, allowing one to view oneself from the “outside” as a being both like and unlike other beings. But how is this to be accomplished while preserving immediacy? In the Emile the tutor thus faces a vexing chronological dilemma: “Emile must be an ‘I,’ that is, he must become aware of himself as an individual before he can encounter another as an individual—and yet, consciousness of one's identity requires an experience of an other, or at least of oneself as other.”Footnote ¹⁷ For Morgenstern the moment of individuation, which requires an Other (even if the “other” is within the self), marks the point at which the innocent savage begins to develop into the more complex being shaped by perfectibility, introducing the problems of civilization in the process. But this raises the question: How could Rousseau's humans ever have been able to individuate if they had not already acquired the capacity to reflect and compare, which in Rousseau's telling would imply that perfectibility (and hence mediation) had already been set in motion?Footnote ¹⁸

The impossibility of this chronology can be seen first of all in Rousseau's claim that human beings, unlike animals, have choice: “nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but he realizes that he is free to acquiesce or resist” (SD, 114–15). Choice, he says, is the element separating even proto-humans from animals. But what kinds of choices could humans make if they lacked even the most rudimentary forms of reason which purportedly develop later? Rousseau himself indicates that self-awareness implicates the more developed faculties. “The consciousness of every sensation is a proposition, a judgment. Therefore, as soon as one compares one sensation with another, one reasons. The art of judging and the art of reasoning are exactly the same.”Footnote ¹⁹ Making a choice requires consciousness of choices, not just an instinctual reaction to stimuli; this self-awareness would in turn require the ability to reflect and compare, suggesting that the noble savage had already been thrust out of the immediacy of the state of nature.

The assumption that mediation can develop out of immediacy is further undermined by Rousseau's insistence that in the state of nature, human beings lack “instincts.” He writes:

Here, Rousseau depicts human “instincts” as manufactured through the observation of animals. Imagining how this mimicking might work, however, makes it clear that the savage would already have to have access to the capacities of imagination and reflection, and especially comparison, that Rousseau intimates are developed later. First, the savage would have to observe the actions of an animal. Why would he do this, and which animals would he make the objects of his gaze? Actively observing an animal would mean nothing, at the very least would result in no mimicking, if the observer did not recognize the animal as similar to himself in some way; this kind of recognition would require a sense of self, or view of the self from without (note that his savages are not observing and mimicking rocks or trees). Comparison and reflection are thus implicit in mimicking as well: he would have to take note of the similarities and differences in anatomy, strength, speed, and the like, as well as be able to imagine how he might appropriate the techniques observed.Footnote ²⁰ In short, because the successful mimic must be able to view himself from the outside, temporarily taking up the position of the other but returning to himself, he must be at least minimally differentiated, and this differentiation requires the use of faculties Rousseau attributes to the development of perfectibility.

Furthermore, Rousseau indicates that his savages tend to populate their surroundings with beings like themselves, that is, beings capable of sensing, willing, and acting, suggesting that their imagination is actually quite active: “The sentiment of our action on other bodies must at first have made us believe that when they acted on us they did so in a manner similar to the way we acted on them. Thus man began by animating all the beings whose actions he felt. … During the first ages men were frightened of everything and saw nothing dead in nature” (E, 256). The ability to imagine that the world is populated with wills like their own seems to require prior individuation, while paradoxically individuation seems to require imagination. Rousseau's savages imagine that other things, even “dead nature,” are like them; they project their own sensibility onto the world at large and “fill the universe with gods which could be sensed” (ibid.).Footnote ²¹ Like reflection and comparison, imagination inevitably thrusts us outside of ourselves, disrupting the alleged immediacy of the “original” condition.Footnote ²²

But more than this, the faculties implicated in differentiation draw our attention to a second layer of the problem of mediation: the instability of the external world. First, we have seen that the “I” is always already relative (E, 243), assuring that human beings will always experience the world—as well as themselves—indirectly, or through various mediating devices (this brings amour-propre into play from the start as well, which I will discuss at greater length below). Such intervention, many have noted, produces obscurity, confusion, and even alienation for Rousseau's characters.Footnote ²³ But further, if the process of individuation entails going “outside” the self and returning to the self again, and not just once but continuously, what do individuated beings bring back with them upon that return and what complications are created thereby? In the next section I will develop more fully what here I will only suggest: because individuation entails the negotiation of the external world, Rousseau's individuals are inevitably attached to things which are unstable and unreliable, making the negotiation of human life that much more complex. He writes in the Reveries:

Humanity's necessarily mediated state turns out to be doubly problematic, then, in that it entails the ambiguity of indirect experience and the unsteadiness of the external world. In the Second Discourse he continually contrasts agitation, disorder, inconstancy, continual change, and multiplication with the timelessness, order, uniformity, and familiarity of the state of nature; and if the state of nature never was for Rousseau, human beings would seem to be fated continually to navigate the unsteadiness of life. This unsteadiness includes as well a slippery temporality, or the inevitability of experiencing the world through past, present, and future:

Not merely are Rousseau's humans fated to live with unstable things between, but nature has provided them nothing temporally stable, and certainly nothing that is immediately accessible, to which they might “anchor” their sense of self or attach their sentiments; however, it seems they must attempt to do so nonetheless—that is, if they are to have a sense of existence at all.Footnote ²⁵

In sum, the process of individuation that marks the development of Rousseau's savage as he “leaves” the state of nature cannot be characterized as the transformation of the experience of immediacy into the experience of living with things between, or mediation. Instead, individuation is an ambiguous process within Rousseau's development stories: it has always begun but it is never really finished. Comparison, reflection, and imagination, which are present for Rousseau's savages from the earliest moments, make it impossible for his earliest beings to occupy the amoral space of the nonindividuated self; comparison unhinges them at once from the stability of timelessness, immediacy, and immanence that characterize Rousseau's fictive state of nature.

In the next two sections, then, I argue that although “immediacy” cannot be reached or even replicated, this does not mean that immediacy is conceptually meaningless for Rousseau, or that the only other alternative is to ground morality and freedom in the elimination of mediation's ambiguity. Instead, as I indicate below, for Rousseau morality and freedom are negotiated in the spaces “between,” that is, between purity and degradation, past and future, birth and death, stasis and change: on one hand, they are built upon sentiment, but of the decidedly mediated sort, while on the other they are built upon “will,” but of an external sort which is deeply implicated in the complexity of mediation as well. More specifically, the educators of conscience and founders of freedom must manage—through rhetoric, illusion, or the control of external conditions—the ambiguity and instability inherent in living in relationship with things outside the self which are constantly on the move, providing relative stability, inflexibility, and boundedness in the process. First I take up this discussion by examining the relationship between self-love, pity, and the construction of conscience and then the ambiguity of dependence and its relationship to freedom.

To Stop the World from Spinning I: Pitié, Self-Love, and Conscience

As is often noted, in the Second Discourse Rousseau identifies two sentiments as natural and immediate: pity and self-love (130, 133; 222). He first tells us that pitié is “useful to man because it precedes in him the use of all reflection; and so natural that even beasts sometimes give perceptible signs of it” (SD, 130, emphasis added). And again:

However, although Rousseau clearly states that pity is an immediate experience of natural man before the onset of perfectibility, the preceding discussion seems designed to invite doubt: he introduces pity after discussing the savages' use of comparison, man's free agency, the faculty of perfectibility, the development of language, and the establishment of society. Furthermore, he approaches the topic of pity in a decidedly nonlinear and often circular way, moving back and forth and back again across large expanses of time and leaving the reader feeling disoriented in the process, while at this point in the narrative he has already declared the unlikelihood that the state of nature ever existed; the “hypothetical and conditional” character of the “history” he is narrating; the “impossibility” of imagining why and how development could have taken place out of the beginning he has described; and the unbridgeable gap between “before” and “after” leaving the state of nature (SD, 93, 103, 117, 126–27).

Moving forward, Rousseau also immediately complicates his claim that pity precedes reflection by illustrating his point with the example of an imprisoned man who sees a wild beast attacking a child: “What horrible agitation must be felt by this witness of an event in which he takes no personal interest! What anguish must he suffer at this sight, unable to bring help to the fainting mother or the dying child? … Such is the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection” (SD, 131). Granted, “reflection” in these passages seems to mean ratiocination, or conscious reasoning, and not the mere “mechanical prudence” he mentions elsewhere (SD, 144), and it seems intuitively correct that experiencing pity should not require “reflection” in this sense. However, if we return to our previous discussion of individuation and mediation, it becomes clear that pity cannot be an automatic or immediate sentiment.

What makes us feel discomfort at seeing another suffer? First, as Rousseau's example suggests, taking pity requires that one experience an event as an individuated being with an active faculty of imagination; like the captive witness, one must be able to identify another as like oneself but distinct from oneself, take up a position “outside” oneself, and then return to that position again.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, Rousseau makes this case himself in the Essay on the Origin of Languages, where he tells us that pity works by

Pity cannot be an immediate sentiment that exists “prior to all reflection,” then, but requires several intervening steps between seeing another suffer and identifying with that pain (much less acting to give aid). Furthermore, for Rousseau pity is not coterminous with empathy; the witness does not actually feel the pain of the ones who suffer but feels discomfort at seeing this event. The witness does not want to see another suffer because he would not want to suffer himself, and he may even experience gladness for his own relatively good position, made suddenly palpable through imagination and comparison.Footnote ²⁸ Experiencing pity, “the first relative sentiment” (E, 222), is thus a manifestation of amour-propre, with all that this entails;Footnote ²⁹ indeed, “being able to access our natural sensitivity presumes that we have already become moral beings, possessing souls, free will, moral agency, and presumably some elementary faculty of reason.”Footnote ³⁰ Pity cannot at once be immediate and the source of morality.

One might object at this point, however, that there is a meaningful distinction to be made between pity in its active and passive guises, much like the distinction Rousseau seems to make between amour de soi and amour-propre. On the surface, amour de soi is a passive and inherent sentiment that inclines us toward our own self-preservation, but which acts as the source of “humanity and virtue” only once “directed in man by reason and modified by pity” (SD, 222). In contrast, Rousseau describes amour-propre as self-love that is informed by the human tendency to reflect and compare oneself with others, or as Rousseau says, a “relative sentiment, artificial and born in society” (SD, 222). However, if Rousseau's savages are always already individuated beings for whom mediation, including amour-propre, is in play, and if pity is an extension of amour-propre, pity would seem to be rooted in mediation as well. Likewise, it is unclear how a purportedly immediate amour de soi could be the basis of morality—that is, until reason directs it and pity modifies it, so that all the relativity of amour-propre becomes instantaneously implicated in self-love. In other words, it would seem that the propensity to compare, or to see the world in relational terms, is a more fundamental element of the human condition than “natural sensitivity”; or, at the very least, self-love and comparison can only exist together if individuation has always already begun.Footnote ³¹

We should not assume, however, that the mediated character of these sentiments renders them necessarily pernicious; on the contrary, Rousseau shows how the relativity of pity and self-love can (and must) be harnessed in order to develop morality, as in his discussion of conscience.Footnote ³² Rather than deriving morality from its root in the “goodness” of the human condition prior to the onset of perfectibility, we see in the Emile that the tutor must carefully manipulate Emile's passions, and particularly his amour-propre, in order to turn his self-love into gratitude toward others and finally into a sense of moral duty, or conscience.Footnote ³³ Rousseau reminds us that “as soon as amour-propre has developed, the relative I is constantly in play, and the young man never observes others without returning to himself and comparing himself with them” (E, 243). The solution, though, is not to squelch amour-propre, which in any case would be impossible, but to “extend amour-propre to other beings. We shall transform it into a virtue” (E, 252). The tutor sets out to redirect Emile's amour-propre, so that being virtuous feeds Emile's craving to put himself above others: it brings him recognition, either from external sources or from within, and it enhances his self-esteem.Footnote ³⁴ In this way, the development of Emile's morality depends on the mediating effects of reflection and comparison.

Furthermore, it is only through the careful ministrations of the tutor, the absolute way in which the tutor has control over the (potentially quite chaotic) external circumstances that make up Emile's experiences, that Emile is able to transform his self-love into morality. Rousseau's Emile will develop an attitude toward the world rooted in what he sees as the world's attitude toward him: if he “thinks [the universe is] fearsome and arbitrary, or worse, actively unjust and hostile, he can be expected to be unhappy and, at least at heart, immoral.”Footnote ³⁵ Thus the tutor ensures that Emile sees the world as unfailingly benevolent toward him only by going to great (even impossible) lengths to completely, though invisibly, shape the world he will encounter; he even gets the gardener to cooperate in one of his schemes (E, 98–99). And although the reliably munificent universe created by the tutor is illusory, the events of the Emile make it clear that this illusion serves as a necessary foundation for the development of Emile's morality.

The connection between the development of conscience and the need to stabilize our experience of the external world can also be seen clearly in the words of the Savoyard Vicar. At first, however, it seems that the “Profession of Faith” should confirm the interpretation of conscience as an immediate sentiment that grounds morality and gives evidence of the “natural goodness of man,”Footnote ³⁶ and indeed, the priest tells the tutor that “conscience persists in following the order of nature” and that it is an innate sentiment, an “immediate principle,” or the “innate principle of justice” (E, 267, 289, 290). But if read in light of the instability of mediation, another interpretation of the “Profession” suggests itself: conscience plays a crucial role in providing a sense of stability, but since it must be experienced as certainty, the mediation necessary to produce it must be kept hidden from view. Thus I argue that it is not incorrect to associate conscience with “the love of order”Footnote ³⁷ or the sincerity of belief,Footnote ³⁸ though for reasons different from those often provided.

The Vicar's story begins with a young priest tormented by doubt and seeking the truth about religious matters; it ends with the confirmation of divine order and renewed faith. In some ways, this narrative follows the same path as the Second Discourse, but in reverse order, moving from ambiguity, disorder, unruliness, and agitation to simplicity, order, reliability, and tranquility. And as in the Discourse, the bulk of the speech concerns the former theme: “I have never led a life so constantly disagreeable as during those times of perplexity and anxiety, when I ceaselessly wandered from doubt to doubt and brought back from my long meditations only uncertainty, obscurity, and contradictions about the cause of my being and the principle of my duties” (E, 268). The Vicar, “not simply a sensitive and passive being but an active and intelligent one” (E, 272), experiences the world as full of confusion and chaos (E, 278); man's “body” and “soul” are at odds and his “machine is out of order” (E, 281). He turns away from philosophy to answer his questions, he says, because there is no certainty in philosophy and he needs to settle this matter once and for all. Ostensibly by way of following his inner sentiment, the Vicar arrives at his three “articles of faith,” puts his doubt to rest, and lives in contentment from that point on.

But as with the “transformation” in the Second Discourse, we find the Vicar's movement from doubt to faith to be anything but unambiguous. He uses reasoning that looks very much like philosophy (and invokes philosophers) to reach his three “articles of faith” or “principles,” but when he finds it impossible to believe something with unpleasant or disconcerting implications, such as a world operating without the guidance of orderly laws or the possibility that virtue will not be rewarded in an afterlife, he adopts the contrary conclusion and attributes it to conscience. Thus he seems to arrive at his principles by rejecting those things he cannot live with, not by adopting what he thinks is “true”: “Doubt about the things it is important for us to know is too violent a state for the human mind, which does not hold out in this state for long. It decides in spite of itself one way or the other and prefers to be deceived rather than believe nothing” (E, 268). It seems he simply cannot endure doubt and chooses to believe something that may very well be untrue rather than continue to be agitated by unpredictability.

In fact the Vicar suggests throughout his speech that his particular beliefs, though necessary and salutary, are on some level the result of self-imposed “wishful thinking.”Footnote ³⁹ He tells the tutor three times that it is best to stay with the religion in which one was born, while the basic principles he arrives at through his “years of meditation” fail to conflict with those of the church he was “born in” and “which decides everything and permits no doubt” (E 268, 310–11). Furthermore, he identifies the “insufficiency of the human mind” and “pride” as what lies at the root of our errors and the philosophers' “mad disputes” (E, 268); but these turn out to be the source of his “sincere belief” as well: ultimately he cannot abide “an understanding without rule and a reason without principle” (E, 290). Indeed, he arrives at his first principle only by glossing over a flaw in his own logic. First he notes that “rest” is really a “degree” of motion, implying that all matter is in motion; but then, “sensing” himself to be “so persuaded that the natural state of matter is to be at rest,” he “rejects all acquiescence to the idea of unorganized matter moving itself or producing some action” and concludes that “there is no true action without will” (E, 272–73). In the end he gives in to his pride and “decide[s] what this whole is in itself and what we are in relation to it” (E, 268, 290); he makes his decision and sticks to it (E, 311) because, it seems, the uncertainty of his own place in the universe is too much to bear.Footnote ⁴⁰

This seems to suggest that for Rousseau the transformation of self-love into conscience, through ambiguous layers of mediation, may be more of a strategy for combating the limits of the human condition than evidence of humanity's natural goodness. The Vicar engages in willful denial so that he can experience the world as orderly and reliable and to satisfy his pride, while the tutor deals in dirty tricks, manipulation, contrivances, and illusions in order to manage and stabilize a world that is necessarily experienced indirectly by Emile—and indeed, by us all. In the next section, by discussing the ambiguity of dependence and its relationship to freedom, I continue to develop the argument that for Rousseau, morality cannot develop out of the immediate experience of pitié or any pure self-love untouched by amour-propre but instead depends upon the negotiation of various aspects of mediation which have always already been introduced, with all the impurity and complexity this implies.

To Stop the World from Spinning II: Dependence, Independence, and Freedom

In this final section I argue that like compassion and self-love, independence is much more ambiguous than Rousseau sometimes suggests, and again, this ambiguity is directly tied to the instability of the external world. As in the case of the production of conscience, when Rousseau turns to the project of “founding” freedom we hear him speaking in the language of oppositional ideals but find him actually dealing with the complexity and instability of mediation once again. Here, we see that freedom cannot be built upon the purity of independence, where independence is understood as devoid of the problems inherent in experiencing life through ongoing processes of mediation. Instead, we see that Rousseau often aligns freedom with a certain kind of externally managed dependence, a dependence through which individuals come to feel the rightness of the laws that bind them from without.

To begin, there are (at least) three, interrelated kinds of dependence in Rousseau's thought that result from three different ways in which need is produced in human life.Footnote ⁴¹ First, there is physical or economic dependence on things such as food, shelter, and clothing; absent interference from others, says Rousseau, these needs are fairly easily satisfied, so that in itself “dependence on things” seems to pose little threat to one's freedom. Second, dependence on things is transformed into a dependence on others through cooperation. “As long as they applied themselves only to tasks that a single person could do and to arts that did not require the cooperation of several hands, they lived free. … But from the moment one man needed the help of another… equality disappeared…[and] slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow with the crops” (SD, 151–52). Here, Rousseau implies that it is not amour-propre as such that creates this dependence, but rather engaging in the cooperation made possible by living in close quarters. “Since the bonds of servitude are formed only from the mutual dependence of men and the reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to enslave a man without first putting him in the position of being unable to do without the other” (SD, 140). Cooperation, therefore, absent some legitimating mediating device, leaves the participants open to the ill effects of subjection on one hand or domination on the other.

This leads us, then, to the third type of dependence: the dependence on others to fulfill psychological needs arising from our developing amour-propre. In the Second Discourse, the savages begin to care about what other people think of them: “each one began to look at the others to want to be looked at himself; and public esteem had a value” (SD, 149). This new psychological dependence on others for recognition not only leaves us vulnerable to all sorts of vices, which in turn prevent us from living according to our own best wills, but practically assures that we will favor ourselves over all others. As we strive to appease our vanity and greed, we use our mutual dependence to exploit others for our own good. In this way, the inflammation of amour-propre, along with new possibilities emerging from the invention of technology and social cooperation, changes what we perceive our needs to be: while we used to be satisfied with hamburger, now we are not happy unless we have filet mignon.

However, on closer examination, we find that just as pity and self-love are essentially ambiguous, so is the notion of a pure, original independence that bears no “blame” in humanity's corruption. To demonstrate this essential ambiguity, let us reconsider this oft-quoted passage, bearing in mind that it is impossible to be “independent” from things such as food and shelter if we are to survive:

Here Rousseau is making two claims at once. First, he says that dependence on “things” and dependence on men are different in kind; and second, that these two types of dependence have different implications for freedom and morality. It turns out, however, that neither claim is exactly correct.

First it should be noted, as I have argued above, that Rousseau actually identifies (but does not name) three different modes of dependence: dependence on “things,” dependence on others for “things,” and dependence on others for self-esteem and other psychological needs, complicating Rousseau's claims from the start. Furthermore, since “biologically based needs quickly cease to be purely biological in nature,”Footnote ⁴² these three layers of dependence cannot be easily disambiguated. That is, the negotiation of even the most basic forms of dependence, such as dependence on food, is necessarily informed by amour-propre and requires faculties such as comparison and imagination. Indeed, Rousseau suggests that the “mechanical prudence” necessary for survival led directly to the inflammation of amour-propre. As savage man trapped and tricked his prey and became aware of his own superiority, “the first glance he directed upon himself produced in him the first stirrings of pride” (SD, 144). Not least because we lack instincts, our dependence on “things” is always experienced indirectly, through the faculty of amour-propre especially, both before and after the onset of sociability. Consequently, it is difficult to imagine the circumstances under which dependence on things could “engender no vices,” since “dependence on things” necessarily forces Rousseau's human beings to differentiate themselves, imagine, reflect, and compare in order to survive. “Dependence on men” for cooperation and self-esteem makes this condition much more complicated and therefore more difficult to manage, but not significantly different in kind: in both cases our pride is escalated along with our ability to fulfill our essentially fluid (and therefore morally problematic) needs.

Even more radically, though, I argue that dependence on things can never be devoid of the problems associated with mediation. As noted previously, and in contradiction with his claim in the passage presently under consideration, Rousseau makes it clear that the object world is itself fluid, inevitably rendering any human relationship with “things” potentially problematic. The human body, an object for Rousseau in its own way, is implicated in this process as well:

Here, Rousseau contrasts a seemingly immediate body-as-tool scenario with an indirect (and therefore, he implies, morally suspect) body-as-using-tool scenario. But contrary to Rousseau's intimation, the relationship between the body and the environment actually goes in two directions in both cases, implicating the presence of mediation: in the case of the “savage” (as well as the “civilized” man), the body is “learning,” habituating itself to its environment, and participating in life's fundamental fluidity; both the savage and the civilized man experience the world through the mediation of a body which is itself subject to the changing circumstances presented by the external world.

To take a related example, man's lack of instincts, in this case his “original” omnivorousness, actually gets him into moral trouble: in mimicking animals to meet his basic needs, he “feeds himself equally well with most of the diverse foods,” but while a rule-bound “pigeon would die of hunger near a basin filled with the best meats,” “dissolute men abandon themselves to excess” (SD, 106, 113–14). In the example of the omnivore faced with myriad food options, as well as in the above example of man's relationship to his malleable body, dependence on things threatens to create a problematic sort of “freedom” or boundlessness, both “before” and “after” leaving the state of nature. Rousseau emphasizes that “civilized” men, fuelled by inventiveness and amour-propre, tend to create for themselves desires which, by definition, can never be satisfied. But less obviously, without established rules to follow and with an excess of choice, even Rousseau's nascent humans are subject to the “excesses” of life; his innocent savages, much like his “civilized” objects of attack, become lost in a world of flux owing to a lack of restriction on behavior, a “freedom” which is written into their very natures. Similarly, lacking a body with pre-set reactions to stimuli creates an ever-multiplying set of “choices” that can quickly spin out of control. Interestingly, in these cases, like that of the Vicar, dependence on hard and fast rules would seem to be a more attractive option than lawless “independence” for Rousseau, suggesting an alignment between freedom and a certain sort of imposed and binding dependence, not (as is often thought) independence.

In all, the notion that dependence on things and dependence on men differ in kind and consequence becomes difficult to accept. Why, then, does Rousseau say that if we can transform “dependence on men” into “dependence on things,” our moral problems will be solved and freedom will result? We have seen that “dependence on things” certainly can generate vices, undermining Rousseau's claims about the amorality of this type of dependence. At the same time, he undercuts the notion that “dependence on things” will ameliorate the problem of living in relation to unstable external objects by attributing movement to those objects even as he lauds their inflexibility. Arash Abizadeh captures this tension particularly well:

Thus instability seems to be a complex and ultimately insoluble problem but one with which we must inevitably grapple nonetheless.

Again, however, this is not to say that the distinction between inflexibility and instability is rendered meaningless. Indeed, as with the stability provided by conscience, Rousseau does see the usefulness of manufactured inflexibility, such as the inflexible rules of a tutor backed up by the illusion of a cooperative universe, the Vicar's willful adoption of salutary untruths, or citizens submitting to an absolutely binding law (“whosoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body”Footnote ⁴⁴) in order to be free.Footnote ⁴⁵ And as with the tutor, the role of the legislator in imposing boundedness, stability, and dependence in the experience of citizens is crucial; he must “take away man's own forces in order to give him forces that are foreign to him and that he cannot make use of without the help of others” (SC, II.vii.3), making individual citizens inextricably dependent on one another. Moreover, the legislator must “necessarily have recourse to another order of authority, which can win over without violence and persuade without convincing” (SC, II.vii.9).Footnote ⁴⁶ Just as Emile needs to be convinced that the universe is benevolent toward him in order to develop morality, not through logical proofs or abstract reasoning but through being made to experience this as true, so citizens need to be assured that the polity is well disposed toward them. Like the tutor, the legislator does not employ rational arguments but uses rhetoric to establish affective ties among the people, ties made binding because they are made to feel the rightness of their boundedness and all this entails. Thus it seems correct to conclude that “Rousseau does not argue that freedom is maintained in spite of manipulative and deceitful practices. He claims instead that freedom is maintained because of those very practices.”Footnote ⁴⁷

At the same time, Rousseau is clearly pessimistic about the long-term effectiveness of even these strategies; anything to which we attach our sentiments, and therefore anything in particular on which we become dependent for the necessary boundedness of a free and virtuous life, is always at risk of change, decay, and decline. The problems raised by the fluid nature of the external world can be seen clearly in Rousseau's autobiographical writings and in his novels, where happiness is always fleeting and Rousseau's heroines always die,Footnote ⁴⁸ but they can be seen in his political works as well. Book IV of the Social Contract, for example, can be read as Rousseau's attempt to hold fast what will inevitably slip away. In Book III, in the chapter entitled “On the Death of the Body Politic,” he tells us that “if we want to form a lasting establishment, let us not … hope to make it eternal. To succeed it is necessary not to attempt the impossible, nor to flatter oneself with giving a solidity to the work of men that human things do not allow” (SC, III.xi.1). However, in Book IV, he goes on to give prescriptions for rendering constant a people's habits and mores; his advocacy of censorship and civil religion make perfect sense in this light, as well as his generally hostile attitude toward change and especially revolution. This is perhaps also why Rousseau constantly changes the subject in the Poland. Ostensibly a book about constitutions, he spends the majority of his time explaining how the Poles might become “a people.” This is to be accomplished through distinctively Polish habits, customs, mores, costumes, music, and rituals, not through any abstract attachment to a constitution. The latter attachment will inevitably fail if the more basic one has not been rendered sufficiently stable.