"Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile? Is it not that...man, in losing through old age or other accidents all that his perfectibility has enabled him to acquire, thus falls even lower than the animal itself?" (p45)
This quote, along with a few other things Rousseau said (such as the difference between savage man and man with machine) made me think that Rousseau sees man as a mainly declinitive (yes, I made that word up, but it's the best suited in my mind...) creature. This was rather counter-intuitive for me, especially since we have in our culture, and I do not believe it is a newer sentiment, an attribution of wisdom to the aged. It does, however, seem to be somewhat in line with the description of the immortals in Gulliver's Travels, and that made me wonder if (as long as I'm not misreading what Rousseau is saying here) both Swift and Rousseau would coincidently be wrong together, or if they were right about this decline? Is there a point in the course of human life that man starts to fall and lose all that he has gained? Moreover, has man on the whole started (or did he start a long time ago) to decline (which is something else I think Rousseau has been saying)? It does appear to me that I am leaving out the possibility of the decline not being necessary, but then my question is simply how does man avoid the decline?
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