The Case Against Nature: Rousseau’s Seductive Myth

The Swiss philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was one of nature’s greatest advocators. He believed that nature was inherently good and society inherently oppressive. The famous first line of his book, The Social Contract, is that ‘man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains’.

We have, in many ways, inherited this beneficent view of nature. As Alan Levinovitz writes in Natural: The Seductive Myth of Nature’s Goodness, ‘the appeal to natural goodness is among the most influential arguments in the history of human thought… Just consider the common pairing of “natural” with “healthy,” “true,” “pure,” “honest,” “authentic,” “simple” and “real”’.

However, as Erich Neumann writes in the Origins of Consciousness, the ‘dawn state of perfect containment and contentment was never an historical state’ — Rousseau was simply projecting the psychic phase of infant contentment into history. It is nostalgia for a worry-free, pre-conscious existence — something incompatible with adult reality.

In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia answers Rousseau with a spirited defence of society:

Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature’s power. Without society, we would be storm-tossed on the barbarous sea that is nature. Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature… let nature shrug, and all is in ruin. Fire, flood, lightning, tornado, hurricane, volcano, earthquake — anywhere at any time. Disaster falls upon the good and bad

‘Life’, she says, ‘requires a state of illusion’ — like belief in the ‘ultimate benevolence of nature. Without it, culture would revert to fear and despair’. This is why we convince ourselves nature is pretty and bucolic.

But as Paglia reminds us, ‘what is pretty in nature is confined to the thin skin of the globe upon which we huddle. Scratch that skin, and nature’s daemonic ugliness will erupt’.