Compassion and the general will in Rousseau

Abstract

Rousseau, as his regular readers know, subscribed to the hypothesis that in human evolution we can distinguish two clearly defined moments: one relating to the natural conditions of man as a species – completely determined by the environment in which he lived and the impulses that nature placed in him as guidance for his survival – and the other moment in which he finds himself under self-determined conditions of existence, since his actions become governed by interests that go beyond the mere preservation of life and reproduction. The division of the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men can be considered the work that most clearly addresses these, let's say, disparate elements in the consideration of human nature, with a long digression on how we would be and live both in the moments before the formation of stable associations of people and in the moments when such collaborative stability seems fully assumed, despite the difficulties intrinsic to coexistence between beings of the same species, but with such different interests. By linking this type of understanding of the strategy of reading and interpreting human history carried out by the citizen of Geneva, it seems interesting to make some considerations about the, so to speak, natural aspect of common human life – even though Rousseau considers this possibility taking as a starting point a deliberate agreement – ​​and the rational unity of wills represented in the concept of the General Will, in The Social Contract. We believe that the impossibility of explaining the evolution of human life, from isolation to community life, from a perspective that was not dear to an Enlightenment thinker of the 18th century, led Rousseau to recognize in the feeling of compassion, innate to man, a kind of natural basis for the rational unity that we can only achieve through an agreement of mutual collaboration, a free and voluntary agreement.