Re: Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the O …

看板EngTalk (全英文聊天)作者fizeau (Gratias ad Opus)時間18年前 (2008/01/07 16:46)推噓0(0推 0噓 0→)

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The absolutely primitive passion, which God may not ask us to deny without contradicting Himself, is the love of self [l'amour de soi]. It is well-known that Rousseau distinguishes it from that self-love [l'amour-propre] which is its corrupt form. Now, if the source of all passions is natural, all the passions are not so. "A thousand strange channels have swollen it" (ibid.). What concerns us here about the status of pity, the root of the love of others , is that it is neither the source itself, nor a secondary stream of passion, one acquired passion among others. It is the first diversion of the love of self. It is almost primitive, and it is in the difference between absolute proximity and absolute identity that all the problematics of pity are lodged. "The child's first sentiment is love of self [l'amour de soi]; and his second, which is derived from it, is love of those about him". That diversion/deriva- tion is next demonstrated: it is less an estrangement and an interruption of the love of self than its first and most necessary consequence. If pity mode- rates "the violenec [l'activite] of love of self" (second Discourse, p. 156), it is perhaps less by opposing itself to it than by expressing it in an indi- rect way, by defering it, since such moderation "contributes to the preserva- tion of the whole species" (ibid). It must further be understood how and why pity, itself supplanted by law and society, may also play the role of that which supplants. Why at a given time or all the time does it take the place of culture, being that which "in a state of nature supplies the place of laws, morals, and virtues?" [Discourse, p. 184]. Against what analogue of itself, against what depravity does it guard us, which resembles and yet differs from it enough so that a substitution may take place? Is it by chance that, like many another supplement, the natural and prerefle- xive sentiment of pity, which "contributes to the preservation of the whole species," protects us from, among other deadly menaces, love? Is it by chance that pity protects man (homo) from destruction through the fury of love, to the extent that it protects man (vir) from his destruction through the fury of woman? What God's inscription means is that pity--which ties the child to the mother and life to nature--must protect us from the amorous passion which ties the child's becoming-man (the "second birth") to the mother's becoming- woman. That becoming is the great substitution. Pity protects the humanity of man, and the life of the living, to the extent that it saves, as we shall go on to see, the virility of man and the masculinity of the male. In fact, if pity is natural, if that which brings us to identify with others is an innate movement, love or the amorous passion is, on the contrary, not natural at all. It is a product of history and society. Of the passions that stir the heart of man, there is one which makes the sexes necessary to each other, and is extremely ardent and impetuous; a terrible passion that braves danger, surmounts all obstacles, and in its transports seems calculated to bring destruction on the human race which it is really destined to preserve. What must become of men who are left to this brutal and boundless rage, without modesty, without shame, and daily upholding their amours at the price of their blood? (Discourse, p. 157) Under this bloody picture one must read, as in a palimpsest, the other scene: that which, a moment ago and in the same colors, exhibited a world of dead horses, ferocious animals, and children torn from the mother's breast. The amorous passion is thus the perversion of natural pity. Unlike the latter, it limits our attachment to a single person. As always in Rousseau, evil here has the form of determination, of comparison and of preference. That is to say of difference. This invention of culture denatures pity, deflects its spontaneous movement, which would carry it instinctively and indistinctly toward everything living, whatever may be its species and sex. Jealousy, which marks the gap between pity and love, is not only a creation of culture in our society. As a ruse of comparison, it is a stratagem of femininity, an arresting of nature by woman. What is cultural and historical in love is at the service of femininity: made to enslave man to woman. It is "a facti- tious sentiment; born of social usage, super-subtly celebrated by women, with care for the establishment of their empire, and rendering dominant the sex that ought to obey". Emily will say that "the law of nature bids the woman obey the man". And Rousseau describes here the battle between man and woman accor- ding to the pattern and in the very terms of the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave, which illuminates not only his text but also The Phenomenology of the Mind: If he takes a wife from a lower class, natural and civil law are in accordance and all goes well. When he marries a woman of higher rank it is just the op- posite case; the man must choose between diminished rights or imperfect gra- titude; he must be ungrateful or despised. Then the wife, laying claim to authority, makes herself a tyrant over her lawful head; and the master, who has become a slave, is the most ridiculous and miserable of creatures. Such are the unhappy favorites whom the sovereigns of Asia honor and torment with their alliance; people tell us that if they desire to sleep with their wife they must enter by the foot of the bed (ibid.). -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 163.25.118.131