Where Does Rousseau Want to Return To?: An Examination of Rousseau's Idea of Socialization in the Light of Nietzschean Genealogy

This dissertation, "Where Does Rousseau Want to Return to?: an Examination of Rousseau's Idea of Socialization in the Light of Nietzschean Genealogy" by Ka-ho, Lam, 林家濠, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled Where Does Rousseau Want to Return to?: An Examination of Rousseau's Idea of Socialization in the Light of Nietzschean Genealogy submitted by Lam Ka Ho or the degree of Master of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in March 2007 This thesis examines Rousseau's idea of human socialization with the framework of the Nietzschean genealogical critique. It attempts to elucidate the difficulties associated with such a collaborative effort, summarized in a question borrowed from Nietzsche: where does Rousseau want to return to? The first chapter scrutinizes the difference between Rousseau's account of the state of nature and those of Hobbes and Locke. It argues that the disparity should not be understood as a superficial dispute between the philosophers regarding man's natural qualities manifested in the pre-political state. Rather, Rousseau transgresses the limit posed by his predecessors and examines how those qualities, which are believed to be natural, emerge and lead to socialization. He puts forward the proposition that human being does not possess any inalterable nature. The second chapter presents a critical contention of this thesis and argues that Rousseau's investigation of socialization prefigures the inner logic of the Nietzschean genealogical critique. Rousseau discharges rationality and language from his picture of the state of nature by suggesting that these two qualities to which humanity grounds itself have, in fact, their own historical condition of possibility. He affirms that natural men are asocial not only that they do not spontaneously aspire a social life, but they are equally ill prepared with any substantive quality that renders socialization possible. The chapter also deals with the problem regarding the reality of Rousseau's state of nature in which his depiction of proto-human emerges. The third chapter turns to give a closer look on the specific problem of modern bourgeois society against which Rousseau's critique is directed. Armed with the argument that human existence hinged upon the interaction between individuals' valuation and the change in their living environment, Rousseau contends that bourgeois society is notorious in boosting the growth of luxury, hence subjecting man to social opinions. The chapter examines Rousseau's two distinct psychological principles that dominate individuals in the state of nature and the state of civil society, namely, amour de soi-meme and amour-propre. It also scrutinizes some of the economic policies Rousseau proposes to remedy the problematic amour-propre unique to bourgeois society. The fourth chapter, which is also the last one, examines the possibility of education as a solution to the problematic modern life in Rousseau's philosophy. It discusses the "negative" educational strategies Rousseau presents in Emile and concludes that the ideal of freedom and self-sufficiency for Rousseau is not to be attained by strictly forbidding individuals from the gratification of social needs, which are liable to be false and repressive. This thesis argues that false need should be understood as a moral concept instead of an epistemological one. This interpretation demands for individuals' consciousness of the social dimension of needs in everyday live; it points out that the satisfaction of such needs in bour