Rousseau’s debacle: Focus on the material or the transcendent?
By: Nicholas M. Riehle
Tags: Rousseau, God, Religion, Morality, Materialism

There are stark differences between Rousseau’s Creed of a Savoyard Priest and his Discourse on Inequality concerning the moral question of philosophical materialism. In both texts, the role of Matter, God, and Freedom are discussed as evidence for or against the validity of materialism as a means of understanding the state of man.

Photo by Sam Loyd on Unsplash

The Role of Man as Matter

In the Savoyard Priest, Rousseau describes the matter by describing different articles of his creed. The first creed assumes that the man, as matter, moves because of a defined cause and not on his own. Rousseau said that “matter receives and transmits motion,” but that matter cannot move on its own volition unless “there is a will which sets the universe in motion.” By saying this, the priest tries to explain how man is subject to a higher force. If this is true, then a material horizontal view, defined as a man seeking answers and power from what is around them rather than the supernatural, would be invalid, as it would not give men enough perspective to understand their role or how they should live their life. The priest continues by saying that materialism has elements which are “repugnant to reason or experience.” This assumption then becomes the basis for a path of logic to describe the importance of considering the supernatural, because though materialism has limits, matter moves according to fixed laws, and that indicates an intelligence dictating matter.

Contrarily to the statements of the Vicar, Rousseau believed that matter, and in effect, man can indeed move upon its own volition and that there was no higher power or “cause” that influenced that. Indeed, The Discourse on Inequality posits that man has the power of perfectibility and that their ability to choose is subsequently their downfall. Whereas in a typical understanding of perfectibility, one believes that it requires the concept of perfection, Rousseau does not believe in the sense of perfection. His idea of perfectibility is based on our desire to progress to become something more significant. As he believes there is no supernal “good” that we can obtain by any effort, perfectibility is defined as the quintessential fool’s errand that leads the human race to attempt to move beyond their natural state which he asserts is the only state where a man could feel any semblance of contentment because he is separated from all that which can cause man misery. He believes that it is impossible to understand why a person without fears or desires should reason, and we make progress in intensifying our earthly passions.

Understanding God

Rousseau addressed God in the Savoyard Vicar, by trying to analyze what the proper relationship is between man and God. He recommends that one uses human reason to arrive at the knowledge of the existence of God and that he should discover the “greatness and truth of God through his own discovery of it,” approaching religion as a skeptic and, at the same time, a free thinker. The Vicar described how the knowledge of God lies in observing the natural order because the natural order is the way God works on the earth. This implies then that any religion that identifies God as the creator and preaches virtue and morality, is true. He asserts that the definition of God is he “who wills and can perform his will, this being active through his own power, this being, whoever he may be, who moves the universe and orders all things.” This allows any overarching force, including nature, to be interpreted as being the supernatural “cause” of matter’s motion. This also allows for criticism of materialism because it opens the possibility of more than just that which is horizontal. As part of the profession of faith of the Vicar, he tries to learn the mode of conduct that God prescribes for man, the nature of God himself, and the reason God places man in the earth and what man’s subsequent moral duties become as a result of God’s providence. The belief in God then disallows a great deal of value being placed in materialism or in a human’s efforts to progress, because, according to the Vicar, it is because of God that everything happens.

Rousseau’s own opinion, however, in the Discourse on Inequality, was that a belief in God served man only as a false hope motivating him to seek to progress and forfeit the simplicity of his natural existence. He believed that Aristotle and the Bible incorrectly presumed that free will was inconceivable and without a higher purpose like “god, nature, or nature’s god.” This presumption led him to create what he believed to be a circular logic that he represented in the Vicar’s testimony, namely that God had to exist because what we see before us had to have been created. After all, we can’t understand it, and if we can’t understand something, then it is part of a higher will. The free will of Rousseau, however, was defined without any moral standard grounded in God or nature. He justified a different morality based on godless freedom without any good or evil. This invited many difficulties in attending to questions of free will, including its value while also trying to justify that neither God nor a morally ordered universe exist.

The implication on freedom

The freedom of man is another vital element of Rousseau’s discussion on materialism. In the Savoyard Vicar, Rousseau says that “Man is free to act, and as such, he is animated by an immaterial substance.” The immaterial substance is the will and power of God. However, the paradox of whether an external force animating someone can allow them to be free is only understood through the lens of different definitions of freedom. For the Vicar, there are feelings which comprise conscience and others which are “mere prejudice” and each hints at man being free to act only within the sphere that God has given him. However, the Vicar identifies the “inner light” as dictating what we should do to not be led astray and implies that the source of that inner light is God. This inner voice then becomes the absolute authority in dictating what is moral. As Rousseau wrote the voice of the Vicar, he wants to make clear an absurdity of logic in the existence of God, namely the fact that the professed source of internal and external will is God and man is not truly free if all elements of his decision making are in the hands of another.

This is in contrast with a materialist understanding, which assumes that man is under no constraints other than those he makes on himself. The Vicar identified two distinct principles that justify the paradox. One of them raised him to the study of the eternal truths, to the love of justice, and of true morality, to the “regions of the world of thought, which the wise delight to contemplate”; the other led him downwards to himself. The result of the latter is that he becomes a slave of his senses, and he is made less free by the passions that the Discourse on Inequality deem to be the source of man’s peace. Rousseau also answered what freedom would mean in a morally undefined, indifferent, and void universe where materialism is the only God. When people choose to delight in their own freedom rather than being part of nature, they are exulting in their exemption from what has the potential to give them the peace and happiness they seek- the simplicity of their past. Rousseau argues that in the state of nature, man cannot be enslaved because for another natural man to subdue him so that he can ease his load, he must go to more efforts than those he is wishing to avoid keeping the slave. Man can only be enslaved if he allows himself to be put in a position of dependability, and Rousseau’s man in nature would never choose that.

Conclusion

Rousseau had a complicated way of describing his opinions on materialism. The contrast between the two documents he wrote is stark, and he focuses on Matter, God, and Freedom to show the differences in perspectives on materialism. The fundamental question is whether any core questions are truly worth asking because the choice in the belief of the transcendence of what is above or what is around us is enough to add or remove all value from life.