Second, Ajax’s preoccupation with the value of his identity also lies at the center of Rousseau’s notion of amour-propre.43 Individuals in the competition for esteem become defined by their talents and abilities. They shape the core of a person’s identity. People are what they achieve. They are not merely singing and dancing; they wish to become great singers and dancers. Although Rousseau does not provide detailed philosophical analysis for his assumption that amour-propre involves the process of identity construction,44 a case can be made for it using clues from the Second Discourse as well as statements from his other writings. In the discourse, amour-propre emerges only in social settings in which people have constant contact with individuals who are not part of their family. In such an environment, people are accustomed to seeing others and being seen by them. They cannot help but compare themselves to them. Importantly, their comparisons are not onetime evaluations. They are made repeatedly and form a pattern that allows people to develop conceptions of their neighbors. In other words, their observations of their peers are cumulative and hence give rise to public identities. In contrast to primitive humans who made few comparisons and probably forgot them upon making them, social humans come to have a defined sense of their neighbors as individual selves. In turn, people define themselves according to how they stack up against their peers and what is reflected back to them by their social interactions. They develop a social persona—they become someone. More simply put, they construct a narrative of their life based on their repeated peer comparisons. This narrative is how they come to know themselves and reflect upon the value of their existence. Rousseau even develops terminology to explain this phenomenon. At the end of the Second Discourse, he calls it “the sentiment of existence” and negatively describes it as tainted by amour-propre.45 In Emile, he more appropriately terms it the “sentiment of identity” and neutrally describes it as a function of memory: “Memory extends the sentiment of identity to all the moments of his existence; he becomes truly one, the same.”46 Or, from the same passage, it is the process by which a person “gains consciousness of himself.”47 Thus, cognitively, amour-propre is a self-conscious reflection of a person’s public identity, which is based on socially recognized superior abilities.
Third, both Ajax and Rousseau view social life and identity as a zero-sum competition. One person’s success is by definition another person’s defeat. There is only one best. Everyone else suffers by comparison. Ajax takes no solace in being a great warrior. He needs recognition that after Achilles he is the best and cannot share this honor with Odysseus or any other warrior. Likewise, at the conclusion of the Second Discourse, Rousseau claims members of the aristocratic classes will fall into the lower ones until only one all-powerful tyrant remains. While such competitiveness need not necessarily undermine the felt need for respect and recognition, it nonetheless is a rather high hurdle in cultures with a strong sense of honor and shame.
Fourth, Rousseau holds a watered-down version of Ajax’s notion of destiny, arguing that an individual’s lot in life is largely predetermined. Nature endows individuals with certain talents and abilities, and there is little one can do to alter where one winds up on the social ladder. Only a few have a realistic chance of being best. This does not mean that identities can never change, as Rousseau thinks that people will always harbor hope that they can find their way to the top: “Remember that as soon as amour-propre is developed, the relative I is constantly in play.”48 Still, once identities are formed, they are difficult to alter. Talents and physical appearance tend not to change much—they are something into which people are born. As Rousseau observes in “Preface to Narcissus, or the Lover of Himself,” “Men are rewarded only for qualities which do not depend on them: for we are born with our talents.”49 To alter one’s identity may very well require moving to a new community and acquiring a new peer group. Even then, a person is still defined by his or her natural abilities and personal achievements that stem from them. Granted, Rousseau’s “fatalism” is less mystical than Ajax’s. He has no corresponding notion of Ajax’s fate. Misfortune in this life results mostly from a person’s destiny—of who the person is. If Bernard Williams is right that Ajax’s suicide is prompted as much by his identity as a great hero as by Athena’s tricking and hence disgracing him, there is no particular reason why Rousseau’s common person would contemplate suicide because of public shame. Common persons have no higher self to reclaim, and they enter society with much lower expectations they will be honored, or even appreciated, by their peers. Presumably, most silently endure their humiliating lot in life—one in which they are cruelly forced to compete in activities at which they can never win. If they commit suicide, it is probably because their constant shame becomes too much to bear or they tire of not mattering and having no meaningful expectations to live up to. The same lesson applies to fallen elites in Rousseau’s world. If they commit suicide, it is because they cannot endure the shame of their declining fortunes or public disgrace. There is nothing redemptive about suicide in the modern age. It is simply a means to eliminate pain.
Finally, Rousseau even claims that modern humans resemble Ajax in their desire for immortality. At the end of the Second Discourse, he states that “the Citizen, forever active, sweats, scurries, constantly agonizes in search of ever more strenuous occupations: he works to the death, even rushes toward it in order to be in a position to live, or renounces life in order to acquire immortality.”50 The moderns, alas, also wish to be sung about.51
Rousseau Contra Sophocles
There are, of course, good reasons not to overstate a Rousseau-Sophocles linkage, though none rises to the level of making such a comparison indefensible. First, there is no direct textual evidence connecting Rousseau’s amour de soi-même and amour-propre distinction to the clash of values in fifth-century Athens that inspired Sophocles to write Ajax. Although Rousseau was familiar with both Homer and Sophocles, as demonstrated by the fact that he refers to them more than a dozen times in his published and unpublished works, he only once connects Homer to either amour-propre or being best and never mentions Sophocles’ Ajax.52 Both poets are mostly background noise cited for relatively minor arguments and concepts that at best play a supporting role in Rousseau’s philosophy. Still, as previously argued, the conceptual similarities between Sophocles’ distinction between democratic and aristocratic personalities and Rousseau’s amour de soi-même and amour-propre are conspicuous. Even if it is conceded that Rousseau did not directly borrow from Sophocles, the analytic similarities between the two distinctions are obvious enough. As I argue in Chapter 2, Rousseau’s entry point into the aristocratic mind-set comes from one of its critics, Saint Augustine.
Second, Rousseau is far less admiring of the Homeric honor culture than is Sophocles.53 On the surface, this may not seem to be the case. In the one passage in which he discusses the content of Homeric ethics, he endorses it as necessary and good, at least for certain peoples. In Considerations on the Government of Poland, he tries to revive Polish patriotism and identify a suitable ruling class through agonistic games and events that reward the most talented and manly. These games, he proposes, should be modeled on “Homer’s heroes,” who “were all distinguished