Chapter 12 Appendix I)

Appendix I) Introducing Rousseau's (German) Peter Goldameer "Among all the people who have written books, Rousseau has achieved the greatest and most remarkable achievements." These are the opening sentences of Henry Mann in his essay "Spirit and Business".When we carefully examine the deep and diverse traces left by Rousseau's works in the social life and ideology of the second half of the eighteenth century, we can see those remarkable achievements in countless cases. These achievements of Rousseau,— - Here what Henry Mann wrote in 1910 needs to be qualified and supplemented today - indeed it was only later surpassed by the achievements of the classic Marxist writers.Rousseau's "Emile" had a revolutionary impact on the entire educational theory and practice; through the example of "New Heloise", the bourgeois novels of the eighteenth century reached a higher aesthetic realm, and thus had It is possible to understand the realities of life more deeply, and perhaps there would be no Werther without "New Heloise".In the decades after 1760 there was not a single literate man whose thoughts and feelings were not in some way influenced by Rousseau, and in the practice of the French Revolution of 1789 Rousseau's ideas were most immediately obtained. A deeply decisive performance.

Among the French Enlightenment thinkers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau occupies a special and important position.Although in the second half of his life he showed fear and recoil at the consequences of his ideas on many occasions, and although he did not treat (formal) democracy in it—and was, of course, rightly aware of its inherent contradictions— as the absolutely best and most rational form of government: every word of his writings is entirely in the service of the revolution and bourgeois democracy.Everything he wrote was addressed to the "third estate" to which he belonged.Rousseau made it clear wherever people of folk origin did not understand.His impassioned statements about human society are full of strong feelings of love and hatred.Those who regard the strict logic and systematicness of thought expression as more valuable than the bold originality of genius thought will accuse Rousseau of being incoherent and full of contradictions: but history has long concluded the great work of Rousseau's life; When the French Revolution was at its height, when the Jacobins quoted his theories, when the Constitution of 1793 adopted sentences from his theories as constitutional clauses, when the masses took up arms to carry out the will of the people, then has made a conclusion on Rousseau's work.

Only after knowing what history has said about him can and must comment on the ambiguity and contradictions of Rousseau's thought; especially later, various world outlooks and class ideologies misinterpreted him as their main witness : He is said to be an opponent of the Enlightenment; since he is empathetic and opposed to reason, he is the forerunner of romantic anti-rationalism; Some people even want to label him as an opponent of society or the state, and Italian fascism wants to describe him, who is firmly opposed to all oppression and humiliation of human beings, as a fascist "totalitarian". protector of the socialist state".How could such a thing happen?

We have already pointed out that Rousseau's thought expression is not always logical, and he often lacks a system in expressing his thought.Far from being a theoretician by his temperament, he was an orator in the best sense of the word.He has no intention of creating a system; no matter whether his short essays or grand works, they are all treatises on current affairs. Although they are based on a unified basic world view, they are completely conceived and discussed for a certain purpose.Most of his arguments are not the product of long-term thinking, but a direct and passionate analysis of various problems that deeply moved him and the times demanded immediate answers.Here is the source of his stirring, impassioned style; here too, the reasons why his writings have been misunderstood in the past, and are still misunderstood today.There is hardly an important term that Rousseau does not use in an ambiguous sense, while the same concept he expresses in different terms.This is perceptible everywhere by careful readers of his books. (Therefore any translation of his work will be problematic, which is only mentioned here in passing.)

One more thing needs to be said: as Engels once pointed out, Rousseau's thought, in essence, is dialectical.If one understands this, some antinomies of thesis and antithesis, which seem insoluble, become meaningful and self-contained, and syntheses can be derived without difficulty.If one looks at the individual arguments of this strong-willed thinker in isolation from their interrelationships, if one reads his work without often thinking from what ideological standpoint he proceeds, in short, he is Speaking for whom, then, it is not difficult to understand, there must be a terrible confusion of thought.The best and surest way to know whose side Rousseau is on, and to understand Rousseau's theory as a unified whole, is to study carefully that work which already clearly has this theory: "".

*** Four years before the publication of "On Inequality", there was already another book, "On Science and Art", which established Rousseau's reputation.This paper is written for a call for essays at the College of Dijon, entitled "Is the Revival of Science and Art Beneficial to the Morality of Dunon?" ".Rousseau gave a negative answer to this question, and he demonstrated it in a treatise on contemporary social culture.Most readers did see the author's courageous and resolute stand; they praised the author's originality in the way of observing the problem and the style of writing, but they did not agree with the denial of the existing social system in this essay on cultural criticism. Like the judges at the Academy of Dijon, which award prizes to authors, they seem to be seldom aware of it.

The second paper was also produced as a result of this Faculty's call for papers.The title of the essay is: "What is the origin of human inequality, and is it recognized by natural law?" Rousseau wrote the essay "On Inequality" to apply.This second paper is not only much larger in length than the first one, but the author's various views are also expressed more clearly and comprehensively.It also seems unsurprising that Rousseau did not receive a prize from the Academy of Dijon this time. Among the contemporaries' comments on this treatise, what particularly deserves our attention is the first review by a German, published in the Berlin Privileged Zeitung on July 10, 1755, from Lessing (G.E. Lessing) handwriting.We know that the future representative of the German Enlightenment had just written his civic tragedy Miss Sara Sampson, and that he understood Rousseau's work better than most French critics, not only It is worth noting, and it is of extremely great significance.Lessing wrote in a review: "Once again we are indebted to the College of Dijon for the task of allowing M. Rousseau to convey to us his views on the origin and causes of human inequality; our simplest view of this treatise is , not in its form of presentation, but in more respects and more essential matters, it deserves the same evaluation as the first, which was fully worthy of the laurels of the Academy Rousseau despises those great principles that try to make human beings more virtuous, but the inequalities that are common among human beings are obviously also not protected by Rousseau. These prejudices are still generally agreed by people, and they are not recognized, but they go forward to pursue the truth; he does not care about the false truth, and he is determined to make the false truth bow to the truth anytime and anywhere. His heart participates in all his speculative observations, so , he speaks quite differently from what the unscrupulous, selfish, or ostentatious sophist, or the sophist who is a master of wisdom, is accustomed to say."

The source of human inequality, according to Rousseau, is in society.Although he began his thesis with a distinction between natural (physiological) and political (ethical) inequalities, in the course of his research natural inequalities became completely unimportant to him.Like all scholars of natural law, Rousseau also discussed from the "state of nature". Before human beings established their social system or political system through a contract-these two concepts have not been clearly distinguished-before, it has always been living in this state of nature.Before we proceed further to examine this "social contract," we must first understand a little about the state of nature discussed in the first part of this essay.

Contrary to Thomas Hobbes's understanding of the state of nature as "a war in which all men kill each other," Rousseau, like John Locke, believed that the natural man was the most peaceful man one could conceive.Self-preservation and compassion are the only psychological agitations of the "natural man" or "savage."But of course this state of absolute peace can exist only in the absence of even the most simple forms of common life.Those purely emergency cooperations that arise spontaneously for hunting, common defense against wild animals, etc., and unions to satisfy sexual instincts, disintegrate again as soon as the purpose has been achieved.To understand things in this way, not only Rousseau, but also all natural law theorists, they do not know the origin of human beings, have no concept of "the role of labor in the transformation from ape to man" (Engels), let alone Talk about doing real research on primitive societies.Rousseau's "natural man" is distinguished from the beast not by labor but by the capacity for self-improvement, which we know today is a pure fiction.For this reason, however, it would be fundamentally wrong to dismiss Rousseau's descriptions of the state of nature as banal or meaningless. "On Inequality" is not a textbook of natural science or history.Rousseau himself has repeatedly pointed out that he does not want to show what has happened, but what might happen.Enlightenment thinkers often only thought in abstract jurisprudential categories, so they always articulated these categories in terms of largely fictitious events or processes.It would be both easy and foolish to point out all the historical or scientific errors in this work.Naturally, Rousseau could not avoid the erroneous views and prejudices of his time.He was faithful enough to admit it openly where he could not find an answer to his question.Here we only take his explanation of language as an example. Rousseau correctly recognized the connection between language and thinking, but the emergence and development of language must be a mystery to him, because he can only imagine that language is in an "agreement" generated on the basis of

Far more important than these details is the idea underlying the first part of this work: that man is by nature good.There is more than a humane, benevolent confession expressed in this sentence; the argument is directly opposed to the Christian teaching that man is sinful.Of course, the sentence that people are kind must be supplemented with another sentence to complete the meaning: when people become social, they become evil.But how did this happen?The second part of this work addresses this question. *** The transition from the state of nature to society by a contract is a theory very common in natural law.In early German natural law theory, in the writings of Althusius, Conring, and Pufendorf, the will of God (mostly deistic) was regarded as Indirect causes of state and society formation.Their argument is that God has arranged the state of nature in such a way that it must have a social contract as a result.The Dutch personality Hugo Grotius was the first to abandon the medium on this question, who saw human appetitus socialis as the cause of society; in Germany it was Thomas Thomasius.Rousseau, on the other hand, does not admit that the sociability of human beings is true, arguing that it has as little value as Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature as one in which human beings generally fear each other.As has been said before, self-preservation and compassion are the only psychological principles of "natural man".Although Rousseau somewhat recognized Christianity, and although he opposed the materialists, he resolutely refused to use religious or metaphysical theories to help him clarify his theory of social generation.The ultimate cause of society and state, and at the same time the immediate source of inequality, is entirely earthly and extremely real: the appropriation of private property.

"Whoever encloses a piece of land and thinks to say: This is mine, and finds some very simple-minded people who believe him, who is the true founder of civilized society. If someone pulls out a stake or fills a ditch Hao, and cried out to his kind: 'Don't listen to this liar, if you forget that the fruits of the land belong to everyone and the land belongs to no one, woe to you! 'How many crimes, wars and killings, how much suffering and terror this man should have saved mankind from! It is with this passage that the second part of the treatise begins. Rousseau does not understand the appropriation of private property as an accident or the arbitrary action of a single individual, as is clear from the passage immediately following the above quotation. It can be inferred: "However, it is evident that by then all things had developed to such a point that they could no longer go on as before; for this idea of ​​private property was not formed in the human mind all at once.It evolved out of many antecedent ideas that could only emerge successively.Before reaching the end of the natural state, human beings have made great progress, accumulated many skills and insights, and passed on these skills and insights from generation to generation. "In fact the first private property began not with the possession of land, but with the possession of livestock, not the distinction between rich and poor, but the distinction between possessing masters and penniless slaves, which defined the nature of the first class society, Apart from these two points, then, it seems amazing that Rousseau saw the causes of human inequality with a more acute eye. In Rousseau's conception, the first stage of inequality is characterized by the establishment of property rights and the resulting "inequality of the rich and the poor", followed by the second stage of inequality, when "powers setting" will produce "inequalities between the strong and the weak". The "authority" is established by a social contract. We have said before that the two concepts of state and society in natural law have not yet been clearly distinguished.Engels wrote in "The Origin of the Family, Private Ownership and the State": "The state is the product of a society that has developed to a certain stage; In order to prevent these oppositions, these classes with contradictory economic interests, from annihilating each other in fruitless struggles and destroying society together, a force that seems to stand above society seems to be able to The power to ease the conflict and bring it into the 'order' becomes necessary. This power that arises from society, is higher than society and is increasingly separated from society is the state." Rousseau said "Setting up organs of power" does not refer to the establishment of a society, but to the establishment of a country. There seems to be no need for further explanation on this point.At this point, therefore, we may well use the term state contract in place of the social contract. In order to correctly understand the content of this contract, it is appropriate to compare it with Hobbes's theory of the state.This representative of the interests of the British bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century declared that human beings had agreed to the contract of the state out of fear of "a war in which everyone kills each other", fear of a lawless and anarchic state of nature; Lands forever surrender sovereignty—and thus an essential part of their liberty—to their heads of state. (As for whether the ruler is called a monarch or a consul, Hobbes thinks there is no big difference.) Rousseau's theory is completely different. He cannot tolerate the idea that people will give up their freedom.In a polemical essay against Pufendorf's doctrine, he called the abandonment of liberty "an affront to liberty and reason."He argues (here he cites Algernon Sidney -ney] the doctrine of popular sovereignty), state power can never be delegated to any individual.The state contract is the fundamental constitutional law, "all members of the state are bound by it without exception."Officials are set up by the state to supervise everyone's compliance with this fundamental law. "The powers of these officials extend to all that is necessary for the observance of this constitution, but they have no right to alter it." Due to the nature of the state contract, it is only immutable if all the parties to the contract abide by the conditions stipulated in the contract.However, Rousseau understands the conclusion of a contract as a private law act between parties with equal rights, and he is bound to fall into a contradiction. power, which itself is not part of the contract.In this place, the unswerving defender of natural law also had to resort to "God's will" to cover up his dilemma. When the third and final stage of inequality comes, when "legal power is transformed into despotic violence" and man is divided into "masters and slaves" against each other, the claim that the state is sanctioned by God immediately stands. Can't stand.The abuse of the powers entrusted to them by the rulers violates the terms of the contract and renders it invalid.The naked violence of the upper class provokes the lower class to use violence to resist: "Here is the apex of inequality, the ultimate point to close a circle, and it meets the starting point from which we started. Here, all individuals are equal. , because they are all equal to zero. The subjects know no law except to obey the will of the prince, and the prince knows no law except to act according to his own pleasure and anger. Thus, the idea of ​​good, the principle of justice, disappears again. Everything is subject to the power of the strong, and a new state of nature arises. This new state of nature is of course different from that from which we started, which is pure nature. state, while the former is the result of extreme corruption. In other respects the two states are little different. The contract which establishes the government has been broken by despotism and completely invalidated, so that the tyrant is only when he is the strongest. , is the master; and when he is expelled, he cannot complain of violence. An insurrection which ends in deposing or strangling a tyrant is as lawful as the tyrant's arbitrarily disposing of the life and property of his subjects the day before. Violence supports him; Violence overthrows him, too. Everything is thus in its natural order." When Engels made an instructive analysis of the work "On Inequality" in "Anti-Dühring", he particularly emphasized the dialectical nature of Rousseau's thought.He first discussed Rousseau's idea that the difference between man and other animals is that man has the ability to tend to perfection, and then wrote: "In this way, Rousseau saw that the generation of inequality is progress. But this progress contains confrontation, which Regression at the same time. . . . As civilization advances, so does inequality. Societies that accompanies civilization create for themselves institutions that are transformed into institutions contrary to their original mission." This development produces The consequence, as we have seen, is that all are oppressed by despots.Engels went on to write, "In this way inequality is transformed into equality again; but not into the old spontaneous equality of primitive people without language, but into the equality of a higher social convention. The oppressor is oppressed, which is Negative negation." Rousseau's work, as Engels said, "can be said to show its dialectical origin brilliantly", it is not only a weapon for ideological struggle against the Christian feudal doctrine that human beings are equal only before God, It also included the revolutionary slogan of the French bourgeoisie, "Equality, Liberty, Fraternity."Thirty-five years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had not only recognized the inevitability of the revolution, but also demonstrated it philosophically and justified the revolution legally. *** "On Inequality" was a work that was completely misunderstood by many of its contemporary critics.The most well-known is Voltaire's ironic letter to Rousseau on March 30, 1755, in which he described this work as "a book against mankind", saying that after reading this book, people would I really want to climb on all fours.In French literature of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries—and not only in some travelogues, but also in the works of writers such as Montagnier, and even in Voltaire's own works (such as in his short story " "Innocence")—Voltaire's criticism of Rousseau is especially astonishing when he often criticizes various phenomena of feudalism in the mouth of the savage, the "natural man".The Polish literary critic Jan Kott, in his essay on Defoe and Swift, after pointing out the connection between the glorification of the savage and civil emancipation, wrote: "The good savage Man has become the model of the industrious, frugal, and honest civic family. The myth of the good savage expresses the belief in the natural goodness of man maintained in civic customs, expresses his own innocence and the insidiousness of the nobility, Corruption, luxury and obscenity are opposed to the joy of the new feeling. The citizen is the natural man in Rousseau's pen. Jean Jacques is therefore the idol of the Jacobins." If Rousseau's praise of "natural man" still has to be It was misunderstood or ridiculed and blamed by many contemporaries mainly because they took Rousseau's original words as an image and took them literally.Rousseau never considered a return to the state of nature possible or even welcome.It is not the state of nature, but the epoch of social formation, that is, the epoch of "the great development of human skill," which he regards as the age of human happiness; Selfishness that stupid contention, but maintains the correct middle way."However, this era is also gone forever. Rousseau's praise of nature has absolutely no meaning of escaping from society.Most of the misunderstandings of his views, past and present, are due to a lack of understanding of his view of nature.Although the content of Rousseau's concept is often not precisely defined individually due to various variations and deviations in meaning, the two words nature and reason are used synonymously in the most general sense. Indisputable.Whatever is natural is good, that is to say, it conforms to the mission of human beings; whatever conforms to the mission of human beings must also be rational, and only in this way can the word rational have any meaning at all. Only by understanding the true meaning of "On Inequality" can we correctly understand Rousseau's main works and "Emile". These two great works can also be said to be the supplement and continuation of this early work.This is not the place to make a detailed comparison and analysis of these three works and analyze their development clues, but there is an important idea, which is at least worth mentioning. The basis of the national contract mentioned in the book is not just an agreement of all signatories. When individuals unite to form a country, an extremely important change will occur in their ideology: their personal will will be subordinated to the general will. "All men are to bring their persons and all their powers under the sway of the general will as supreme; all men as a whole receive each member as part of an indivisible whole".The general will is to the will of all individuals what the whole is to its constituent parts.The general will is a new qualitatively higher category, the basis and premise of the indivisible and indivisible sovereignty of the people, the expression of the will of the people in a real popular democracy, and the general will does not allow Separation of state power as Squieu advocated. Similarly, Rousseau's pedagogy can only be understood in close connection with his political theory.Educating young people is to prepare them for their future tasks as citizens (citoyens) of the state. "It is not a matter here to take a savage and send him off to a lonely wood" - so writes in the fourth book of "Emile", "but it is a matter of love Mier should not be led away by his own emotions and human prejudices amidst the turmoil of the world. He should see with his own eyes and feel with his own heart. In the world, apart from his own reason, There is no power over him." The most natural and rational form of government, according to Rousseau, is popular democracy.He is very skeptical of any representative constitution. "The British people think they are free, they are greatly mistaken, they are only free at the time of parliamentary elections," he wrote in his third book.For the same reason, he is against large states, in which a general assembly of the people is out of the question.The pride with which he wrote "Citizen of Geneva" under his name on the title page of his book was based on the awareness that he had been born in a country in which he believed that his popular democracy would be realized. . The Geneva Constitution of 1536 stipulated that all important state affairs should be decided by the general assembly of citizens (conseilgeneral).Over time, the city's nobles increasingly kept other citizens out of state affairs. The popular uprising of 1707 was suppressed, and the leader of the uprising, Pierre Fatio, was shot. Two new popular uprisings in 1734 and 1737 - the last of which Rousseau himself was in Geneva - were victorious. The Constitution of 1738 reestablished the most important rights of the Citizens' Assembly. Rousseau's dedication in front of his work "On Inequality", and his arrival in Geneva in 1754 to demand the restoration of the Geneva citizenship he lost by his conversion to Catholicism at the age of sixteen, are all the same as those of his native city. It is of great significance to look at the previous struggles of the Communist Party of China.Later, in Geneva, people also burned his "Emile" and refused to grant him the right of residence, so he gave up what he once thought that its constitution was "the country that is closest to the law of nature and brings the greatest benefits to society." of citizenship. *** In the first draft of the introduction to Anti-Dühring, Engels wrote that "this kingdom of reason" that the Enlightenment thinkers had dreamed of was nothing but "the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie...; the rational country, Rousseau's 'social pact' has in practice become, and can only become, a bourgeois democratic republic".During the development of capitalist society, due to the increasingly sharp class contradictions, the bourgeoisie less and less mentioned Rousseau's theory of the state.The general will of democracy and the program of a free parliamentary system are very at odds.During the period of imperialism, Rousseau's exquisite and profound thought became a weapon against the rule of the bourgeoisie.The legacy of the great forerunners of the age of bourgeois revolutions has passed into the hands of the only class capable of creating the prerequisites for genuine democracy.The proletariat will surely achieve what Jean-Jacques Rousseau aspired to: it will abolish human inequality, that is, the division of rival classes, and make it impossible for the institution of inequality to be re-established. (Translated by Meixi)