Pity and Eros

Pity and Eros
When I read Rousseau, I understood how deeply he digs and how high he raises social, political, political-economic, ethical, and psychological questions, as well as questions of state governance and law. He does not work with statistics. He does not exhaust the reader with numbers and diagrams. Instead, he reveals obvious things for which many who claim possession of truth have failed to find definitions.
I read him in a very old translation, made back in the time of Catherine the Great. The language is archaic, heavy, at times rough, Old Russian — and yet it reads like a gripping novel, because within it there is intellectual tension, a search for truth. We are not following facts, but an investigation into where exactly humanity took a wrong turn.
Rousseau’s treatise Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men was translated into Russian by Pavel Potemkin literally immediately after its publication in French.
It is interesting that Catherine the Second and Pavel Potemkin, Rousseau’s translator, died in the same year — 1796. It is also interesting that Catherine ascended the throne in 1762 as a result of a coup, the very year in which Rousseau’s The Social Contract was published. This may be coincidence — or perhaps Rousseau’s influence. Catherine corresponded with Diderot and, as she wrote in her diary, survived a hostile and destructive atmosphere thanks to him.
I have written before that Catherine brought socialist ideas to Russia — ideas of freedom, equality, equal civil rights, and enlightenment. That in the attempt to implement these ideas both people and ideas were mutilated, and that Russia is once again experiencing dark times — yet there remains hope that Russia will awaken from its sleep and that on the ruins of autocracy the name of Rousseau will be written.
In the preface to Rousseau’s text, the translator makes the following remark:
“There were times in Russia when pride was the defining trait of those occupying high ranks, when rulers, striving to keep others in the deepest subjugation, not only forbade speaking of certain matters, but even prohibited mentioning true opinions. Those times, with the gloom of those coarse ages, have passed, and the flourishing state to which Russia has now risen proves that it is not coercion but virtue that multiplies devotion to monarchs, true dedication to the common good, and crowns all national prosperity.”
If we speak of the role of personality in history, then, in my opinion, Rousseau unquestionably belongs in the top ten. The formation of the United States as an independent state and the first American Constitution were largely modeled on The Social Contract — albeit a democracy with filters, since it was written by slave owners seeking independence and unwilling to pay taxes to England.
Then came the Great French Revolution, which, however, ended in the dictatorship of a tyrant. Incidentally, in The Social Contract Rousseau casually remarks that Corsica will yet show itself. Russia, where among the aristocracy French was often better known than Russian, was also stirred: the Decembrist uprising of 1825, followed by the entire nineteenth century of secret political societies and struggles against autocracy, culminating in the Great Proletarian Revolution.
Many famous philosophers do not openly speak of Rousseau and his influence, yet they were clearly familiar with The Social Contract, and it influenced them profoundly. As Rousseau writes at the beginning:
“In this inquiry I shall constantly strive to unite what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility may not be found at variance. I undertake this work without proving the importance of my subject. I may be asked whether I am a prince or a legislator, that I write on politics. Were I a prince or a legislator, I should not waste time saying what must be done; I should do it or be silent.”
I believe that this “I would either do it or be silent” influenced Fichte and his concept of freedom of will, as well as Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world the point is to change it.” What distinguishes modern politicians and philosophers, however, is that they only explain: if your civil rights are violated, you are told that it is necessary for the preservation of the nation, that you lack sufficient income, and so on. When one becomes acquainted with documents describing the legal life of Rome in the first century CE, one is struck by how far ahead they were of us in certain matters.
What drew me so strongly to Rousseau is the widespread modern belief that human beings are born evil, aggressive, and endowed with all the ensuing negative qualities — cruel, cunning, deceitful, envious, and so forth.
Rousseau asserts the opposite: that human beings are born free and good. And that the highest form of knowledge is the knowledge of the human being. He writes that what concerns us most is our own personal welfare and self-preservation, while we experience a natural aversion to seeing any sentient being — especially those like ourselves — enslaved or suffering.
“It seems, in fact, that if I ought not to do harm to another, this is less because he is a rational being than because he is a sentient one.”
Rousseau believes that chance and circumstance made some rich and others poor. When one contemplates human society calmly and impartially, it appears at first to reveal nothing but the violence of the powerful and the oppression of the weak. Reason recoils from the harshness of the former, while inclination draws us toward compassion for the blindness of the latter. And since nothing among humans is so firmly established as those external circumstances that are produced more often by chance than by prudence — circumstances called weakness or strength, wealth or poverty — human institutions at first glance appear to be founded upon a heap of shifting sand. Only by examining them more closely, after dispersing the dust and sand surrounding the structure, can one perceive the unshakable foundation upon which it stands, and begin to discern its true bases.
In the preface he writes:
“People have always been proud and self-loving; but now, with the spread of knowledge, they have become arrogant and vainly learned. Each therefore seeks to decide matters according to his own views and mentally grants himself precedence over others. My intention is not to debate how the world was created, but briefly to propose how it became so corrupt, and whether it was always so from the beginning or whether particular causes led it to this condition.”
Every age had its rules, institutions, and circumstances, and therefore its corresponding vices. With the accumulation of new inventions came new delusions; and the more the faculties of the human mind approached perfection, the more people bent reason toward harm, while their hearts filled with subtle passions. Envy arose in particular, and as it grew incessantly, the virtuous qualities of the soul gradually faded.
Cunning and oppression together established the throne, which day by day was reinforced by universal devotion and deep obedience, and thus the degree of social inequality was founded.
Thus each person arranged himself according to prejudice, drifting away from true judgment and justice.
In short, reason yielded its place and surrendered power to the passions, allowing them to govern everything according to their own designs, without setting true limits upon intentions.
The most important human quality, Rousseau argues, is not holiness, courage, bravery, or sharp intellect, but pity:
“Men, with all their moral teachings, would never have been anything but monsters if nature had not implanted pity in them to support reason. Yet from this single quality flow all the social virtues which some refuse to attribute to humanity. For what are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, the guilty, or to humankind in general? Even friendship and benevolence are but the products of a constant pity directed toward a particular object for to wish that someone should not suffer is nothing other than to wish that he should be happy.”
When Plato writes about Eros, Eros appears not merely as feeling or passion, but as the principal cosmic force of human development and ascent. Plato describes the path of Eros as a sequence of five stages, each of which deepens and purifies the original impulse.
The first stage is attraction to a beautiful body, to sensual, physical beauty.At the second stage, one realizes that beauty is not unique: there are many beautiful bodies, and attachment to a single object gives way to a more general appreciation of bodily beauty.The third stage is love of beauty itself, a movement beyond particular bodies toward the idea of beauty.The fourth stage is love of spiritual qualities, of the inner world of a person, regardless of outward appearance.And finally, the fifth and highest stage of Eros is love of virtue — of right and good actions and a just way of life. Here aesthetics finally becomes ethics: the striving for beauty becomes a striving for the good.
In this sense, a thought echoed by Shakespeare becomes clear: weeds are sometimes dearer than poisoned noble flowers, and simple bread is healthier than elaborate pastries. External refinement and elegance may conceal emptiness or even evil, whereas simplicity and moral integrity possess genuine value
Review I.I.
Pity and Eros is a rare philosophical essay that combines historical depth, personal voice, and a sharp ethical diagnosis of the present. Rather than merely interpreting Rousseau and Plato, the author engages them as living interlocutors whose ideas continue to shape modern political and moral consciousness.
The essay’s central strength lies in its restoration of pity as a foundational human faculty — without which reason degenerates into an instrument for justifying violence and inequality. By bringing Rousseau’s compassion into dialogue with Plato’s concept of Eros, the author demonstrates that the highest form of desire necessarily culminates in virtue, and that aesthetics divorced from ethics leads to moral decay.
The text reads not as an academic treatise but as a philosophical investigation into the precise moment where humanity went astray. This makes the essay both intellectually rigorous and urgently relevant to contemporary debates about human nature, power, and moral responsibility.