The Distinction Between Society and Nature

I would like to bring attention to one of Rousseau’s most important presuppositions: that there is a radical distinction between nature and society. This distinction is evident from the first paragraph of the Preface, when Rousseau talks of man “as Nature formed him” and the need “to disentangle what he owes to his own stock from what circumstances and his progress have added to or changed in his primitive state” (P.1). The state of nature is some sort of default state, and the changes added by society are accidental changes to the nature of man.

I contend that this is a problematic assumption. Rousseau’s stated goal is “knowing men themselves” (P.1). This means the task set before us is to separate nature and nurture, to separate the essence of man apart from the conditioning arising from his environment. To use a modern analogy, if man were a robot, we are trying to understand his programming. Now, man is a very sophisticated robot, a robot that has the ability to change its own programming to adapt to various situations. In order to get at the original programming, we must find some way of abstracting away the various inputs that change its code.

If we say, with Rousseau, that man is capable of being conditioned, I see no reason for privileging the state of nature as man’s default state. The state of nature, too, provides inputs that man will absorb, causing him to change his programming. Admittedly, the input provided by society is more complex, but the man in Rousseau’s state of nature is only “natural” in the sense that he is not in society. Rousseau’s natural man is only an appearance, not a man-in-himself. Assuming Rousseau’s account is right, we have learned only how man would appear after exposure to a certain kind of environment, but we have not learned what the unconditioned man is like. Even if we were to grant that society is the only force that conditions man, we now have simply sidestepped the question and have made no attempt to understand the part of our nature that allows for such conditioning—the most important part. Either way, the absence of conditions is itself just another external state of affairs.

The antinomy that concerns us is not nature versus society, but man versus nature (here in the sense of that man's environment). In this sense, society and nature are not even distinct. Man is presented with a world; man faces nature. Society is merely a force of nature, acting in that environment.