Rousseau and the origin of man's corruption: critique of social evils and defense of human dignity
Natural innocence. Sociability. Corruption. Social evil. Human dignity.
Our thesis entitled, Rousseau and the origin of man's corruption: critique of social evils and defense of human dignity, aims to investigate the way in which the passage from a condition of innocence, proper to the state of nature, to the condition of corruption, proper to the state of society, took place, starting from the moral and political philosophy of the Geneva philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), taking as its main source the 1755 work Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality between men). To do this, we focus on understanding the nature of man and investigating the foundations of society. Our main question is: according to Rousseau, how did human corruption come about and how did it contribute to the emergence, implementation and spread of social evils in the world? According to Rousseau, the main social evil is moral or political inequality, as a result of which others arise, such as slavery, murder, war, etc. Before that, we should consider that feelings of envy, greed, vanity, etc., arose with the advent of sociability. Our aim, therefore, is to learn about the steps of human corruption, in the process of moving from the state of nature to the civil state, when love of self is replaced by love of self and natural independence is exchanged for social dependence, or slavery. Some philosophical questions form part of the main thrust of our thesis: was there a mutation in human nature that caused man to let go of the independence of the state of nature and begin to live in bondage to its shackles? How did a good nature become an evil nature? What contribution did the transition from the state of nature to the civil state and the birth of private property make to the progress and spread of various types of social evil? What is our philosopher's critique of the various injustices that exist in the reality of society? These questions, among others, will permeate the structure of our study. Our thesis is structured in four chapters. In the first, The Rousseaunian Natural Man, we aim to find out if there is evil in the state of nature, and to do this we take a close look at the conditions of human nature and its behavior. The main thrust of the study, in this first part, considers the physical, psychological and moral characteristics of the natural man. Above all, we want to know whether self-love, piety, perfectibility and language contributed to the evolution of human thought and behavior, putting an end to natural amoralism and contributing to the emergence of social evils. In the second chapter, the harbinger of human corruption, our object of investigation is the emergence of sociability and its consequences, as a contribution to the birth of the first social evils, i.e. the replacement of love of self by love of self. The study focuses on the transition from the isolation of the state of nature to the construction of the first social contacts and the first forms of social coexistence. Here, we want to know whether the advent of sociability contributed to the process of human corruption. In the third chapter, the consolidation of social evils, we consider how social evils came about with the transition from the state of nature to the civil state, with the emergence of private property. We also highlight the main levels of social evil consolidated by inequality since the advent of property, inequality between rich and poor, powerful and weak, master and slave. We explain that the justification of inequality or social evils came about through laws and politics with a first social pact, the negative social pact. In the last section of this chapter, we show how man has lost his transparency, which is characteristic of the state of nature, and has come to live overshadowed by the veil of corruption, oscillating in the antithesis between being and seeming. In the last chapter, we wanted to show our philosopher's defense of social and political freedom through a strong critique of any kind of slavery, whether practiced by a particular individual or by different governments. Finally, we aim to make a connection between the ideas discussed in the previous sections on the origin of human corruption and some of Rousseau's theses that awaken in us the possibility of thinking about the transition from the reality of slavery to civil or political freedom, through the proposal of the positive social pact in The Social Contract. Our thesis highlights not only the narrative of the genesis of human corruption, but also the criticism of social evils and the philosopher's unconditional defense of social equality, political freedom and human dignity.