Lessons on Rousseau. Louis Althusser
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of Rousseau’s thought.
Before approaching Althusser’s lesson, let us take a look at the way Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality presents itself. This text – often called the ‘second Discourse’ because it was preceded by the ‘Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts’ – has two parts. The first runs from the origin to the eve of society; the second treats the establishment of society beginning with the emergence of property. (‘The true founder of civil society was the first man who … thought of saying, “This is mine.”’5) In his course, Althusser basically discusses Part I, the pages in which Rousseau describes the origin before society (‘the state of pure nature’). Here, Rousseau criticizes his predecessors for bungling this question: these philosophers ascribed to men in this supposedly natural state traits that are social, not natural (language, reason, property, the sense of honour, and so on), presupposing interhuman relations that were already social (aggressiveness, mutual assistance). In short, they put society in nature: ‘they talk of savage man and they paint civilized man’.6 One must, then, avoid this mistake and ‘dig down to the roots’7 in order to describe a genuinely natural state, with men who are simply a sort of animal; they live scattered, without relations, without language or reason, and so on: men who roam all alone through the forest and sleep three-quarters of the time. Rousseau’s text presents itself as a narrative, a sort of fictional vision that describes original man (Rousseau’s famous ‘good savage’, who is so frequently evoked): a man living in solitude, peaceful, robust and naive, savouring a childish happiness; a sort of Eden that was to become the object of a celebrated gibe of Voltaire’s, who felt the sudden urge ‘to go on all fours’ after reading the book. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality quotes only a few authors and seems to want to avoid philosophical speculation.8 Its descriptive style and simple diction have given rise to the idea of a visionary, utopian, romantic Rousseau, and it is classified more often as ‘literature’ than as ‘philosophy’ in school and college curricula.
The second part of the Discourse explains that this state of ‘infancy’ could well have gone on forever, but that natural catastrophes, accidents, modified this first life, which became impossible (because of climatic change, the increasing scarcity of foodstuffs, and so on). Men were forced to gather in groups (families, villages, huts) and they forged connections with each other (to hunt big game, for example). This new life engendered new feelings: self-esteem (how others see me), imagination, reason. This second epoch, which Rousseau calls the ‘youth of the world’, is a first step beyond nature, a step, but just a step, and it would have been possible to remain there too for ever; things were not so bad that they had to be changed.9 A ‘fatal accident’,10 however, opened the third period: thanks to some chance occurrence (perhaps the eruption of a volcano), men discovered metallurgy, and the domestication of fire enabled them to clear land and invent agriculture; this led to a sort of system of economic exchange (a division of labour between metallurgists and farmers), a system that lasted as long as there was still land to be cleared.
The next section of the Discourse is about the origin of property, starting with the moment when all the available land had been cleared: some people (the ‘rich’) owned land, while others (the ‘poor’) owned nothing. At this point, a state of war began, for the poor sought to seize land for themselves, until the rich proposed a contract that put an end to the war and allowed them to keep their wealth: this is how inequality among men originated. There follows a description of political life, its corruption and slide towards tyranny. Althusser does not, however, analyse these pages in his course, confining himself to a few remarks about the return of the origin (state of nature) at the end of the process (the descent into tyranny).
As we have already said, Rousseau’s text resembles a narrative, almost a novel, of human history;11 an imaginary panorama inspired by travel narratives (the remote savages of the islands) and rounded off by Buffon’s observations (Rousseau refers to Buffon in numerous notes): ‘I see an animal less strong than some … I see him eating his fill under an oak tree, quenching his thirst at the first stream … What is true of animals in general is, according to the reports of explorers, true of most savage peoples as well.’12
Althusser’s course
Althusser’s course is not about the ‘basic concepts’ of Rousseauism, that is to say, natural law, human nature, food (fruit or meat), health, goodness, self-esteem, property, and so on.13 Althusser takes up a problem in the margins of these concepts: that of the unfolding of history, that of the transition from one period to the next, from a present moment to its future. He treats the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality not as a narrative, but as a conceptual progression, a series of novel philosophical problems in search of solutions never before proposed. He presents the text as a series of links in a chain, commanded by what Rousseau posits at the outset: the true origin, ‘the root’, ‘pure nature’. He goes on to show how each textual detail is a theoretical response to problems generated by this theory itself; what seemed to us to be mere stage decorations, mises en scène, or dramatis personae reveal themselves to be, as Althusser reads them, veritable philosophical concepts. There we have Althusser’s ‘signature’, his distinctive trademark: he ‘flushes out’ concepts the way a hunter flushes out game and fashions new concepts in order to insert the theories that he establishes in them.
His three lectures break down as follows: the first is about the origin of society, the second examines the genesis of society, while the third returns to the state of origin and explains its coherence in detail.
What is striking about this approach to the text is that, far from presenting Rousseau’s positions – his ‘ideas’, as one says – Althusser trains our attention on the problem commanding them, drawing out the distance between the problem and its solution as far as is possible and displaying all the threads which separate them, tautened to the snapping point. Rousseau, to repeat, criticizes his predecessors on the grounds that their ‘origin’ is already social and that they have not attained the true origin. With this as his starting point, Althusser examines Rousseau’s text to show that his critique of other philosophers is posed in terms such that we can no longer see how he can avoid the mistake for which he criticizes others: for he criticizes them for making a mistake while simultaneously showing that this mistake was inevitable! Thus Rousseau calls the use of reason into question, for reason is not natural but social and is therefore incapable of grasping the state of nature. Yet philosophy has no tool other than reason with which to think anything at all, and if reason is invalidated, it is hard to see how it could conceive of something that excludes it for essential reasons. No one can draw a straight line with a skewed ruler, not even the person who denounces the warp in the tool. Philosophy is caught, Althusser says, ‘in the circle of denaturation’, from which it is impossible to get out of with our faculties (reason, imagination, and so on), which are themselves, as products of this denaturation, caught in this ‘circle’. How is one to free reason from this circle that produces it, in order to think outside the circle, in order to think true nature? Althusser, accordingly, presents Rousseau as caught in the trap which he set for his predecessors, but which was sprung on him: by invalidating reason itself, not just an error in reasoning, he renders himself powerless. Rousseau ‘leaves this circle by way of the inside’, Althusser explains, ‘by going back into [himself]’ and listening to ‘the voice of [his] heart’.14 Althusser wrests the Rousseauesque ‘heart’ from Romantic or intuitionist interpretations of it in order to confer epistemological status on it: it is, within denatured nature itself, the voice of nature that will be able to guide reason. The heart is not one element among others in Rousseau’s thought; it is the operative key to an impossible operation, the production of knowledge about true nature. There is more: by making reason dependent on the heart, by thus endowing it with secondary status, Rousseau ‘marks himself off from’, or ‘takes his distance’ from, the Enlightenment philosophy which posits reason as the fundamental, supreme principle. The ‘heart’ is thus not a thing – not even a deeply personal thing – but a theoretical operation, the consequence of which is a grasp of the true origin, the state of pure nature. ‘Pure’, in the expression ‘state of pure nature’, indicates – Althusser dwells on this – the difference