Voltaire and Rousseau: Irreconcilable Contradiction?

Discourse on Inequality

In Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau declares that a natural man is a loner and self-sufficient who should not live in society. Rousseau sees the cause of the misfortunes of the human race in private property. On the margins of this book, Voltaire made many notes.

Speaking about the benefits of people in the state of nature, Rousseau formulates the famous thesis, "If nature destined man to be healthy, I venture to declare that a state of reflection is a state contrary to nature, and that a thinking man is a depraved animal." This place is marked by Voltaire, and he especially underlined the unconvincing words "nature destined man to be healthy". On the bookmark, Voltaire wrote once more: "depraved" (fr. "dépravé").

Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes human nature as being basically good. But painting a picture of the greatest depravity of morals in society, he concludes, "Such is in miniature the moral picture, if not of human life, at least of the secret pretensions of the heart of civilised man." – And to an even greater degree, if it is possible, of a savage," Voltaire adds.

…What if I should undertake to show humanity attacked in its very source, and even in the most sacred of all ties, in which fortune is consulted before nature, and, the disorders of society confounding all virtue and vice, continence becomes a criminal precaution, and a refusal to give life to a fellow-creature, an act of humanity? But, without drawing aside the veil which hides all these horrors, let us content ourselves with pointing out the evil which others will have to remedy.
– The unfortunate Jean-Jacques, whose diseases are well known, the poor who has barely escaped from a bad illness, don't you know that the latter came from the savages?

Rousseau’s praise of the natural state is commented upon laconically, "Gallimatia".
I might observe that in general, the people of the North are more industrious than those of the South, because they cannot get on so well without being so: as if nature wanted to equalise matters by giving their understandings the fertility she had refused to their soil.
– This is not true, all the arts came from tropical countries.

Rousseau disproves the idea of Hobbes who says that people are naturally evil. Voltaire remarks on the margin:
– A savage is fierce as much as a hungry wolf.

…It is then certain that compassion is a natural feeling, which, by moderating the violence of love of self in each individual, contributes to the preservation of the whole species. It is this compassion that hurries us without reflection to the relief of those who are in distress: it is this which in a state of nature supplies the place of laws, morals and virtues, with the advantage that none are tempted to disobey its gentle voice: it is this which will always prevent a sturdy savage from robbing a weak child or a feeble old man of the sustenance they may have with pain and difficulty acquired.
– Would we say that the Iroquois are more compassionate than us?

…let us conclude that, being self−sufficient and subject to so few passions, he could have no feelings or knowledge but such as befitted his situation; that he felt only his actual necessities, and disregarded everything he did not think himself immediately concerned to notice, and that his understanding made no greater progress than his vanity.
– The conclusion of a nasty novel, – Voltaire wrote, who used the word "novel" in a negative sense to describe various authors, but most of all Rousseau.

<…> it is easy to conceive how much less the difference between man and man must be in a state of nature than in a state of society, and how greatly the natural inequality of mankind must be increased by the inequalities of social institutions. <…> But even if nature really affected, in the distribution of her gifts, that partiality which is imputed to her, what advantage would the greatest of her favourites derive from it, to the detriment of others, in a state that admits of hardly any kind of relation between them? Where there is no love, of what advantage is beauty?
– The beauty will arouse love, and the reason will create art.

The second part of the Discourse on Inequality opens with the famous words:

From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

– What! Would this unjust man, this thief be a benefactor to the human race? That is the philosophy of a ragamuffin who would like for the rich to be robbed by the poor.

I could show that it is to this desire of being talked about, and this unremitting rage of distinguishing ourselves, that we owe the best and the worst things we possess, both our virtues and our vices, our science and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers; that is to say, a great many bad things, and a very few good ones.

Voltaire underlines "this desire of being talked about" and comments: "A monkey of Diogenes, you have condemned youself."

I could prove that, if we have a few rich and powerful men on the pinnacle of fortune and grandeur, while the crowd grovels in want and obscurity, it is because the former prize what they enjoy only in so far as others are destitute of it; and because, without changing their condition, they would cease to be happy the moment the people ceased to be wretched.
– How you exaggerate everything, how you misinterpret all things!

Voltaire inserted his notes on margins of the Discourse on Inequality into the article “Man”. This article was included in Voltaire’s Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, where Voltaire developed his controversy with Rousseau.

Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality is cited from the translation of G. D. H. Cole.