Sobre a desnaturação humana: a formação e a dissolução dos costumes na antropologia de Rousseau

Abstract

This thesis' aim is to investigate the anthropological formation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought, based on his critical reflections on European customs in the 18th century. To this end, we consider the conjectural notion that is developed in A discourse upon the origin and foundation of the inequality among mankind, which assumes that man would have suffered a radical process of denaturation, the passage from the state of nature to the civil state. Rousseau's allegory considers the man of nature as a free and independent being, who did not use the faculty of reason, nor was he capable of moral considerations. When socialized and policed, the abuse of faculties made him a vile, vain, competitive and ambitious being. Considering this, we intend to answer the following questions: how did the human being become a selfish and disguised being? Was there a social stage when human life was more balanced and communal? Can we say that the notion of civilization that is developed in the Enlightenment period contributed to the formation of ethnocentrist notions? How can we think about a natural state of the human being? How important is the development of personal interests for the formation of society? The present work also implies reflections on the influence of Rousseau's work on the development of modern anthropology, starting from Rousseau's criticism of travelers' accounts of isolated peoples in the New World. With this work, we intend to carry out a bibliographical analysis that can contribute to the renewal of the importance of Rousseau's work in the anthropological context. [resumo fornecido pelo autor]