The human perfectibility between unhappiness and morality in the Discourse on inequality

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the paradoxical thesis of Rousseau, found in the Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men, of human perfectibility being implicated in the unhappiness of the species in its process towards the civil state and moral life, as the exercise of virtues. Perfectibility is shown in this analysis to be fundamentally ambiguous: with it, man overcomes all other animals and, also with it, becomes the only subject to become stupid. The process described in the Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men, which results from the passage from natural man to civil man, is taken by this same ambiguity. While the deep feeling of nostalgia denounces the corruption of mankind, perfectibility seems to be moving - as seen in the ninth note added later to the Discourse on inequality by Rousseau - towards an irreversible break with man’s original happiness and the assumption of a destiny other than the one that "ends this short life peacefully", that is, that assumes the moral life.