"Rousseau was an unusual man, full of paradox and contradictions. He was a sincere believer among sceptics, a prolific writer who condemned literature, a champion of individual freedom whose political doctrine is rigidly collectivist, a hermit who was desperate for approval, a progressive educationalist who packed his children off to an orphanage, a social rebel patronised by the rich, an intellectual who claimed that the natural man was happiest because he was free of ideas. He courted his readers and fled from their attention. He was a sentimental dreamer, an impossible friend, and sometimes a vain and self-obsessed hypocrite. But he was, and always will be, interesting” (Introducing Rousseau: A Graphic Guide, 2015)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an outsider among outsiders, was truly full of contradictions. He was often even misunderstood by his enlightenment philosopher friends. Rousseau sent Voltaire a copy of his "The Social Contract" and Voltaire wrote him the following: "I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all four.”
When contemporary philosophers longed for progress, Rousseau longed for regress to an ancient world that never existed as he dreamed it up. The solitary noble savage was more a reflection of himself, the lonely wanderer, than a realistic depiction of hunter-gatherer life. When others longed for knowledge, he longed for being free from ideas. You could see that as a precursor of modern “mindfulness”. Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition. The goals of rational humanity were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness. Rousseau subscribed to all those goals and yet was more of a romantic than a rational.
And yet, Rousseau and the Enlightenment philosophers did have very similar goals despite their often seemingly contradictory ideas: making the world more like the world of hunter-gathers. Even though the “noble savage” is most associated with Rousseau, many Enlightenment philosophers were inspired by the freedom and egalitarianism of the people in the New World. If we put the Enlightenment philosophers on Solomon Schwarz’s circle of (partially opposing) values, we can place them in the hunter-gatherer area: freedom, openness, nature, justice, universalism and benevolence.
Rousseau was a gatherer type in contrast to his Enlightenment contemporaries like Voltaire and Diderot, who were hunter-types. If Rousseau lived today his restless thinking and philosophising may be diagnosed as ADHD.
In his autobiography, Confessions, the description is clear: ‘To understand the full extent of my delirium at this moment you would have to know how easily my heart is fired by the least thing and with what energy it plunges into imagining the object that attracts it, however worthless this object may sometimes be,’ he writes. ‘A mere nothing will distract me, change me, charm me, fire me, and all else is forgotten. I can think of nothing but the new object of my passion.’ [...]‘I can hardly think at all when I am still,’ Rousseau writes. ‘My body must move if my mind is to do the same.’(source)
Thom Hartmann was the first to suggest that people with ADHD have “hunter” minds. In the case of Rousseau, it was more a prosocial “gatherer” mind who promoted hunter-gatherer collectivism (really a kind of communism) despite being a loner and fiercely individualistic.
His ADHD may also have caused him to send his children to an orphanage as he probably saw himself unable to take care of them. He may even seem a hypocrite when he emphasised the importance of expression to produce a well-balanced, freethinking child. He believed that if children are allowed to develop naturally without constraints imposed on them by society they will develop towards their fullest potential, both educationally and morally. Here again, Rousseau’s views reflect hunter-gatherer practises. Hunter-gatherers do not coerce children in any way. The goal of hunter-gatherer upbringing is independence where it is integration, which includes an element of coercion and conformism, in farmer societies. Hunter-gatherers also practise alloparenting, i.e. the whole band takes care of a child and not merely her mother. Rousseau might have felt not wrong-doing at giving away his children to an orphanage. I have argued that probably the majority of children in foster care are hunter-gatherer type children (link). The frequent incidence of ADHD and ASD among foster children may provide a clue to the validity of this idea.
Showing off and boasting are virtually alien to hunter-gatherers. Hunters who do are ridiculed. This may have been the reason that he fled his readers' attention. At the same time, Rousseau may have suffered from low self-esteem, as is common in people with ADHD. This in turn may have made him desperately seek approval.
Rousseau certainly influenced generations of philosophers and thinkers: the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Reform Pedagogy (Montessori and others) and Marxism. He seems paradoxical because he didn’t have anything like a “system” and he didn’t consider himself a philosopher. However, there was a systematic cause behind his thinking: getting in touch with his hunter-gatherer instincts. Understanding Rousseau as a hunter-gatherer helps us resolve his paradoxes.
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