Monday, February 25, 2008

When Did That Ever Stop Me?

I'm neither a Rousseau nor a Hegel scholar, so this may be spectacularly ill-starred, but this passage, from the end of the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality seems to me very Hegelian, as indeed the partly implied and of course admittedly hypothetical history of amour-propre in general I think is:

In reality, the source of all these differences [between humans in the state of nature and those in society] is, that the savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him.

Of course, this is only the second stage of the dialectic: you need to see that the other does and needs to do likewise to get the full, and at least so far as I understand it, for Hegel, the psychologically and morally satisfying effects of recognition. That said, though, I've read things which indicate that Rousseau's view of amour-propre changes between the second Discourse and both Emile and the Social Contract, written several years later, getting more sophisticated and allowing for a morally acceptable form of it.

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