The Diagnostician of Despair

On an October afternoon in 1749, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, too poor to afford a carriage, was striding along the road from Paris to Vincennes. He had already made the six-mile hike several times since late summer, when his close friend and fellow philosophe Denis Diderot, accused by the royal censor of writing pamphlets “contrary to religion, the state, and morals,” had been hauled off to the dungeons at the château of Vincennes. “As I was the friend who sympathized most deeply with his sufferings,” Rousseau recalled, “I believed I was also the one whose company would give him the greatest consolation.”

To pass the time that day, Rousseau had brought along a copy of a literary journal, the Mercure de France. Reading as he walked, his eyes fell on a notice from the Academy of Dijon, inviting essays on the question of whether progress in the arts and sciences purified or corrupted our morals. It was an odd question to pose, particularly for Rousseau’s contemporaries, who, basking in the glow of the Enlightenment, heralded progress as an unadulterated good.

And yet, the announcement struck Rousseau with revelatory force. Dropping to the ground under one of the trees lining the road, he burst into tears, overwhelmed by a “crowd of great truths” that revealed the abuses of religious and secular institutions, but also contradictions in the cures prescribed by enlightened thinkers. How clearly, he later recalled, he saw “that man is naturally good and that it is from these institutions alone that men become wicked.” At that moment, he later wrote in his Confessions, “I saw another universe and became another man.”

This year marks the 275th anniversary of Rousseau’s revelation, a conversion experience no less epochal than the illumination that jolted Paul on his way to Damascus. Rousseau spent the rest of his life expressing in a stunning variety of genres—discourses and essays, novels and autobiographies—these great truths that, though we can debate their veracity, have changed not just how we view the world, our place in it, and how we relate to one another, but also how we have come to see our very own selves. And what we see is as provocative today as it was in the 18th century.

An unsettlingly paradoxical figure, Rousseau was an unsettling knot of paradoxes, a successful playwright who inveighed against the very existence of theater; the admired author of a pedagogical novel who left his many newborns in orphanages; an influential theorist of political community who fled the company of others; a misogynist who encouraged mothers to breast-feed their infants; and a supremely gifted writer who never failed to write how much he regretted becoming a writer. Today, Rousseau is held responsible for, among other things, romanticism and individualism, but also for totalitarianism and communism.

Yet one truth, wrought in that moment of fiery illumination, as he made his way from Paris to Vincennes, runs deepest and undisputed through his writings. It is his insight that humankind is subject to a kind of ontological drift—a widening rift between the world and one’s own self, between others and that same self, and yet more alarmingly, between our inner and outer selves. Rousseau was, in effect, the diagnostician of despair who captured the affliction of alienation in all of its dimensions.

The source of our affliction was the very thing we thought made us better: civilization. He devoted the rest of his life to developing this insight. In the essay he submitted to the academy, later published as his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau attacked the conviction that reason and progress are unquestionable goods. Think again, Rousseau declares. The sciences have been harnessed to the pursuit of our desires, whereas the arts have taught us nothing more than the vile and deceitful art of hypocrisy: “One no longer dares to appear to be what one is; and under this perpetual constraint, the men who make up that herd called society … will all do the same things unless more powerful motives deter them.”

Four years later, in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau revisited this counterintuitive line of thinking. His effort was so effective that it prompted Voltaire, the embodiment of enlightened ideals, to explode: “No one has employed so much intelligence to turn us men into beasts.” In this extraordinary work, Rousseau secularizes the Judeo-Christian account of humankind’s loss of innocence. He portrays man at the dawn of time—the being he calls l’homme sauvage, or natural man—as self-sufficient and self-unaware. It could not be otherwise, Rousseau asserted, since this being lacked not only the language to express thought, but also thought itself. “His soul, which nothing agitates,” Rousseau wrote, “gives itself over to the sole feeling of its present existence.”

In a word, because we were dumb—both literally and figuratively—we were content. Over the long passage of time, however, we were drawn away from our splendid but stupid isolation and towards the company of others. Perhaps while dancing or singing, Rousseau suggests, “each began to look at others and to want to be looked at himself.” The consequences were fatal. “For one’s advantage, it was necessary to appear to be different from what in fact one was. To be and appear to be became two entirely different things, and from this distinction came ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake.”

The need for self-preservation—what Rousseau terms amour de soi, or self-love—metastasized into the desire for self-recognition, which he calls amour-propre, or vanity.

As Rousseau would have it, the ascent of humankind, in reality, amounts to little more than a collective descent into deceit. Whereas natural man lived within himself, Rousseau writes, “sociable man, always outside himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others.” With the insatiable desire for approval came the insidious practice of pretense; what we once were gave way to how we now appeared; our dependence upon others rendered us unable to be ourselves. Rousseau’s modern man, in Alan Bloom’s wonderful phrase, “is the person who, when dealing with others, thinks only of himself, and on the other hand, in his understanding of himself, thinks only of others.”

Nearly 300 years have passed since Rousseau’s epiphany, yet the light it casts is sharper and bleaker today than it was then. He would not have bothered to note the irony of marketing firms offering advice on how companies can brand themselves as “authentic,” just as he would not bat an eyelash to learn that the rise of depression and disassociation has tracked the rise of social platforms. In his Second Discourse, he predicted that although his contemporaries already suffered from the dire consequences of living only in the opinion of others, their lot would pale in comparison to the “terror of those who will have the misfortune to live after you.” This is as sobering a thought for me, as I wait for the comments to appear below this essay, as it is for you as you consider whether to post one.