Consider the orangutan
by Peter McLaughlin
If anything counts as a ‘Great Book’, one that deserves its spot in the Western canon, it’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s second Discourse. In this 1755 work, Rousseau provided a new vision of human nature, an arresting critique of existing assumptions in political thought, a theory of the development of human societies and inequality, and a radical and still-provocative account of the harms caused by private property.
This essay is not about any of that.
This essay is about orangutan sex.
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Not sex between orangutans, mind you, which could well be an interesting topic to discuss from a biological or even an anthropological perspective. No, the essay you are reading is about sex with orangutans: human beings shagging apes. (If you have now decided that you don’t want to read the rest, that is perfectly understandable, although I promise there is nothing explicit in what follows.)
In a note to the second Discourse, Rousseau claimed it’s possible that orangutans are human—literally, biologically human. Even as he relied upon the accounts of various travellers who described orangutans as animals, Rousseau argued that these travellers were misled by their narrow and Eurocentric ideas, and had not properly established that these apes weren’t some kind of human being (perhaps in that famed “state of nature”). But there was a way to find out:
If the Orang-Outang or others did belong to the human species, there would be one way in which the crudest observers could satisfy themselves on this question even with a demonstration…
What “demonstration” is Rousseau (obliquely) referring to here? Well, in his day the standard way to determine whether two animals are part of the same species was to have them mate and see if they could produce fertile offspring. This method of determining species is still used today: we say that horses and donkeys aren’t the same species because, while they can mate and give birth to mules or hinnies, these animals can’t go on to have offspring of their own. We can see that this was what Rousseau had in mind as, in the same sentence, he writes that “a single generation [would] not suffice for this experiment.” Just as a single generation of mules isn’t enough to conclude that horses and donkeys are the same species, we would need to find out if the mules are fertile by trying to breed another generation. So Rousseau’s idea was…
When I first read this passage, I thought I’d misread it. And when I reread it just now, while writing an article about it, I still doubted myself and thought, “have I been misreading it the whole time?” But I haven’t. There’s no other way to read it. Rousseau was proposing that a human being have sex with an orangutan.
Of course, he quickly qualified this proposal. He said the method was for the “crudest observers”, and immediately afterwards called it “impracticable” because it could not be “tried in innocence”. An impracticable suggestion, however, is still a suggestion. Rousseau could have said that there was no way to know if orangutans were human, or he could just have said nothing. But he did bring it up: this great thinker decided to include, in his greatest work, this idea.
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I came across said idea while writing an essay on Rousseau in Michaelmas term, and before long it was living in my head rent-free. “This can’t be real,” I thought. “Surely someone else would have noticed this before?” It turned out that, indeed, people had noticed it before; but nobody really mentioned how bizarre it was. The following quotation from the work of Robert Wokler, an expert on Rousseau, is a good example: “we could only establish by experiment, [Rousseau] insisted, whether matings between ourselves and orangutans would prove fruitful” (‘Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau's Anthropology Revisited’, 1978). Look at the words used: “experiment”, “matings”, “fruitful”—this man clearly knows what Rousseau meant, but has couched it in this weirdly euphemistic, quasi-scientific language in an attempt to distract us from the fact that Rousseau is talking about having sex with an ape.
On one level, I understood why Rousseau had written this. One of his purposes in the second Discourse was to argue that the natural state of humanity was basically the same as animal life; because animals don’t perpetuate the same sort of social inequalities as humans do, this would mean that their inequalities were entirely unnatural. Comparing human beings to orangutans is one way to make this point; a more extreme way is to say that human beings are, biologically, orangutans. This all makes sense—on one level. But then I come back to the text, and all this knowledge becomes useless for making sense of what’s in front of me. The note is about eight pages long, and the bit I quoted is just stuck right in the middle as if it’s not even a big deal. All I can think is: “this is about orangutan sex.”
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It is at this point that you’re probably expecting me to present the moral of this story. But there’s no message here, except that one of the greatest books in Western intellectual history contains a discussion of orangutan sex. I understand why Rousseau added this note, I get the context, I understand the argument, I can see how it relates to the wider Discourse. But this “explanation” doesn’t succeed in doing what explanations are supposed to do, which is to make it make sense. No matter how much I learn about its context, every time I read this note I’m reduced to incomprehension and disbelief. It doesn’t seem to be an academic or intellectual failure on my part, because I know more information than is reasonable about this bit of Rousseau. The way it seems to me is, the note in itself eludes my understanding.
In ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’ (2003), Cora Diamond writes about what she calls “the difficulty of reality”: something in reality that is, by its very nature, resistant to our thinking about it. Diamond presents this concept as somewhat profound: she discusses it in connection to poetry, fundamental ethical horrors, J. M. Coetzee, and the struggle to ‘get it right’ in philosophy. But I wonder if this concept also applies in this (far less deep) instance. To come across a suggestion that humans and orangutans have sex, in the notes to one of the undisputed classics of political theory—maybe that’s just something that can’t be fully processed without slipping into euphemism or qualification. The “difficulty of reality” might not reflect anything particularly deep about the world, but instead just the fact that sometimes the world (and the people in it) are quite stupid.
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Part of the problem might be the undue reverence we give to canonical texts. Don’t get me wrong, the second Discourse is a great book; but it’s also quite silly in a lot of ways, and indeed what makes it great isn’t wholly separate from what makes it silly. Rousseau’s conception of human nature, for all its influence, is unqualifiedly ridiculous: this is especially true from a modern post-Darwinian perspective, but even in 1755 Rousseau should have known better. And Rousseau is not alone. Have you ever read Kant applying his moral theory to relationships? According to him, marriage (the only permissible site for sexual relations, of course) should be understood as no more than a contract for the mutual use of each other’s genitals. Kant was undeniably a genius, but he was also a weird loner who had no idea what real human relationships were like. If he were alive today, he’d probably be a neckbeard writing treatise-length posts about ‘y no gf’.
Yet when we read canonical texts, even if we disagree (vehemently) with the author or even with the idea of a ‘canon’, there’s a default level of reverence and respect that makes you want to dress up something like “Rousseau says people should have sex with orangutans” in euphemism and indirectness. It’s culturally—emotionally—difficult, even for people who (intellectually) believe that the western canon is problematic, to accept that some Great Books are idiotic: not just at the level of a comment here or there, but at their core. But to ignore this possibility is to foreclose a possible avenue of interpretation before you’ve even begun to read the book. Perhaps the most respect we can offer someone like Rousseau is neither to dress up his bad takes as respectable nor to ignore them entirely: it’s just to treat them as bad takes, written by an idiot, full of orangutan sex, signifying nothing.
Maybe I have squeezed a ‘moral’ out of this story after all. If so, it wasn’t intentional. My goal for writing this essay will have been achieved if just one person picks up a copy of the second Discourse, finds the note, marvels to themselves, and is unable to process it. If I can know that it’s not just me, that it’s actually Rousseau; that, I think, would be enough. Then I could finally rest, and perhaps put all thoughts of orangutan sex behind me.
Peter McLaughlin is a third-year Politics student at Downing College, Cambridge, desperately pretending he never switched from Philosophy.