État de nature
At Rousseau’s, the state of nature is not a historical era but a methodological hypothesis: a regulated fiction that isolates the original man—self-sufficient, without industry or fixed language, neither good nor evil—to gauge all that society has added or corrupted. It is “a state that no longer exists, that perhaps never existed, that likely never will,” yet one of which we must form accurate notions to judge the present state. There, man is driven by two principles prior to reason—*self-love* and *pity*—not by calculation or rivalry. What tears him from it is not a vice but a faculty, *perfectibility*. Not to be confused with a lost golden age: this is not an origin story but a measuring tool.
un état qui n’existe plus, qui n’a peut-être point existé, qui probablement n’existera jamais, et dont il est pourtant nécessaire d’avoir des notions justes, pour bien juger de notre état présent.
Rousseau makes clear from the outset: what he seeks is not a fact but a key. The state of nature is “a state that no longer exists, that perhaps never existed, that will likely never exist,” and yet we must form accurate notions of it “to properly judge our present condition.” The paradox is embraced: we posit a man we have never seen, not to recount his origins, but to disentangle in modern man “what belongs to his own nature from what circumstances and progress have added or altered in his primitive state.”
Hence the methodological rule laid down at the threshold of the Discours: “Let us therefore set aside all facts, for they do not bear on the question.” This is not about historical truths but “hypothetical and conditional reasoning,” akin to physicists’ speculations on the formation of the world. In thought, we strip away all that society has deposited—industry, fixed language, comparison, property—and observe what remains: a self-sufficient being, placed “at equal distances from the stupidity of beasts and the fatal enlightenment of civilized man,” neither good nor evil because he does not yet know what it means to be good.
This man is not moral; he is innocent. Two principles move him before any reason: self-love, which drives him to self-preservation, and pity, which restrains him from harm. What will draw him out of this state is not a fall but a latent power, perfectibility—the faculty of endless transformation, for better and, more often in Rousseau’s view, for worse.
≠ the myth of the golden age: the golden age is a past we mourn, the state of nature a hypothesis we wield; one consoles, the other judges. ≠ perfectibility, which is not the state itself but the faculty that takes us out of it: the state of nature tells us where we begin, perfectibility tells us why we do not remain there. It is not a place to return to, but a measure for understanding the path we have traveled.