Tentative Answer: Man's Glory and Suffering in Rousseau

2. Man’s difference from animals leads to man’s glory, but also his suffering. Compare Rousseau on this with the religious traditions.

One of the central formulations Rousseau adopts in order to critique Hobbes' state of nature is a grand deconstruction of the "natural man" conceit. He claims that images of strife, war, and precarity are exaggerated, and urges Hobbes to consider the socially imposed origins of the motivating forces that often lead man to its own destruction. After all, without the immense structural power of human sociality, man is not capable of accessing the desires and wills that result in crisis. And yet it is difficult to fathom any heightened human accomplishments, which necessarily exist in opposition to notions of failure. Thus, at the end of the day, Rousseau settles for an image of the natural man that is decidedly neutral: unabashedly dismissing the violence of Hobbes, yet remaining acutely perceptive of the limits of any form of achievement.

This muted state of mankind presents surprisingly close resonances with a few writings in the Abrahamic religious tradition, notably Paul's letter to the Galatians. We talked extensively last semester about how Paul construed sin to be an integral byproduct of law, in that by creating regulatory systems for society, man is primed on what not to do, which introduces an entirely new locus of possibilities for action. Law brings great benefit, assuming that it is adhered to, because it generates a framework for stability that facilitates higher-order development and growth. But it also rests on a recognition of how human fault and suffering can be generated, which can be dangerous. Rousseau's Discourse carries strikingly similar conclusions, but uses social life as an analytic instead of legality, rendering it more pertinent to diverse arrays of human existence and cooperation.