Jean Jacques Rousseau · Politics
Rousseau’s piercing psychology of how society makes us define ourselves by comparison - the source of both our vanity and our misery.
Rousseau locates a precise psychological turning point in humanity’s fall. As people began to live together - gathering at the door of huts, dancing, singing - they started to look at one another and to want to be looked at. The one who sang or danced best, was handsomest or strongest or cleverest, was noticed and esteemed. And in that moment of being ranked, something new and fateful was born: the need to be valued by others, to stand above them in their eyes.
Once we live in others’ opinions, Rousseau argues, we split in two: there is what we are, and what we appear to be - and we come to care far more about the appearance. We perform, flatter, and dissemble; we wear masks to win esteem; we lose touch with our genuine selves beneath the social role. The civilised person, for all his polish, is alienated - ‘always outside himself,’ living in the gaze and judgement of others, never simply being who he is. Authenticity, being true to one’s real self, is exactly what society costs us.
Out of his analysis of the social mask, Rousseau gives the modern world one of its most powerful ideals: authenticity - the imperative to be true to one’s genuine inner self rather than living as a performance for others. This idea is so familiar to us now that it is hard to see how original it was. The split Rousseau identifies - between what we are (our real feelings, our genuine self) and what we merely appear to be (the polished, flattering, conforming social mask) - and his insistence that the first is precious and the second a kind of corruption, founded a whole modern way of thinking about the self. To ‘find yourself,’ to ‘be true to yourself,’ to distrust social convention as false and to prize sincere self-expression as the highest value - all of this is Rousseauian. He even pioneered the literary form built for it: his Confessions, an unprecedented attempt to expose his real inner self in all its messiness, founded the modern autobiography of self-revelation.
The ideal of authenticity reframes the whole problem of amour-propre. The trouble with living in the eyes of others is not just that it makes us anxious and competitive, but that it makes us false - it alienates us from our own true selves, replacing genuine being with mere seeming. We become actors playing a role for an audience, and lose the person underneath. This diagnosis launched a tradition that runs through Romanticism (with its cult of sincere feeling and the genuine self against stifling convention), through existentialism (with its demand for authentic existence against ‘bad faith’ and the conformist crowd), and into the contemporary culture of self-discovery, self-expression, and ‘living your truth.’ It is one of the defining values of modern Western life. But it carries its own difficulty, which Rousseau’s critics and successors would press: is there really a single, fixed ‘true self’ beneath the social roles, waiting to be uncovered - or are we, as social creatures, partly constituted by our relations and roles, so that the dream of a pure authentic self stripped of all social influence is a fantasy? The ideal of authenticity is Rousseau’s gift to modernity, and its tensions are part of the gift.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that amour-propre is self-love based on comparison. Explain how it both drives social life and poisons it, in your own words.
Leads to G. W. F. Hegel.
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