Rousseau third lecture
A. A couple of things from Part One:
1. Endnote O (pp. 167-8, referring to p. 99) makes an important distinction between two sorts of concern with oneself: (1) self-love (amour de soi), which is the natural concern with one's own preservation and welfare mentioned already in the Preface (p. 70); pride (amour-propre), which is a socially generated concern with e.g. status.
2. The "faculty of self-improvement" (p.88) is central to Rousseau's conceptual revolution: seeing human nature in one sense (the fundamental characteristics of human individuals) as changeable in a special way.
B. Beginning of Part Two (pp. 110-6):
1. Here Rousseau speculates about the first step out of the pure state of nature. More difficulty in securing basic needs elicits more resourcefulness: primitive tools, cooperative activity such as hunting; huts to live in; family life (associated with "movements of the heart," p. 112, and again pp. 113-4); simple artistic activity (song and dance). Note how Rousseau stresses that the newly social (or protosocial) way of life brings with it new modes of consciousness (feeling), e.g. a primitive version of romantic love. And now there's scope for amour-propre.
2. He says this is the best things have ever been (p. 115), even while (in the same breath) he's noting ways in which things have started to deteriorate (less fortitude, dilution of natural pity). Why doesn't he count the pure state of nature best? Suggested answer: the beings who live in that way aren't yet quite human. (That's a merely animal way of life.) "Human being" can express a biological classification, and surely Rousseau doesn't mean to suggest that the beings he considers in Part One are biologically different from us. But it can also express a metaphysical/moral classification (compare p. 87), and in these terms it makes sense to say: Until those special potentialities (free will, changeability) begin to be actualized, human beings aren't yet on the scene. The earliest members of our biological species weren't yet human. In these terms, Rousseau's thought is that there are costs inevitably involved with our becoming human; the first real human beings (who weren't the first members of the species) had it the best.