Rousseau: Vital Instinct and Pity

This essay examines the contradictory development of the concept of pity in Rousseau’s work. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), pity exists in the form of a vital instinct, namely the instinct of self-preservation. As a spontaneous and automatic identification with one’s fellows in the state of pure nature, prior to the establishment of the distinction between self and other, it furnishes the vital basis for society as well as for the concept of right. It is also independent of any calculation or moral reasoning and does not rest on a decision or an act of will. Eight years later, in Emile, pity, far from existing spontaneously, must be learned, which in turn requires the use of reason on the part of the pupil. The discrepancy between the different accounts of pity signals less a change of position than the complexity of Rousseau’s notion of nature. Against Hobbes and Locke for whom the state of nature remains ever present in potential if not actual form, Rousseau argues that nature gives rise to a history whose progress negates the origin, which is lost forever. In the case of pity, reason in making a case for pity is the means by which pity in its original existence is rendered unknowable. The disjunction between the two accounts of pity in Rousseau’s work expresses the disjunction between natural and civilized man, between man acting at the behest of life and rational man, self-interested and solitary.