Rousseau and language

a reflection on the origin of evil in humanity

Abstract

In the famous short story The egg and chicken of the Ukrainian writer Clarice Lispector, the author resumes that classic question that has been going through the history of humanity about who was born first; the egg or the chicken? In an analogous way we could also question the emergence of evil in humanity presenting two possibilities, namely: is language or society responsible for the birth of evil? We know that from the perspective of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau humanity is taken by the antagonism between nature and culture and this is the result of the process of degeneration of that through the inevitable process of perfectibility, continuously and without return causing the fall and moral degradation of the human being. However, unlike what some may think, it was not the needs that took men out of the state of nature, but passions, which can be represented by singing, dancing and sensual gesture, that is, language. For Rousseau, the spoken language is not something natural or inherent to the human being, it is something that has arisen over time in the history of mankind. According to the genebrino, the first humans did not use spoken language, because there was no need, since they lived in isolation and only found one similar sporadically. Thus, with the progress of human language, which can be considered the first social institution, we realize that the bases for the origin of civil society were established with the process of evolution of human language, which moved further and further away from nature to approach the artificiality of civil conventions, dictated by rationality, which elaborated new forms of relationship between men, based on positive laws, social contract and a new political order. In this sense, to the extent that language promotes the emergence of society, it also increasingly promotes the degeneration of the language, leaving it increasingly distant from nature, in a dialectical way. Thus, we aim at resuming the dichotomy between language and society, in order to establish a reflection about the origin of evil in humanity.