For Rousseau, we are most ourselves when we act outwardly in accordance with that inner, pristine voice of nature because we are naturally free, independent individuals. And this ideal, free human is what later writers dubbed Rousseau’s noble savage: the individual in the pristine state of nature, uncorrupted by the demands of civilized society with its hypocrisies and sharp antitheses between outward behavior and that inner voice of nature, is answerable to no one and free to be himself. That is the modern myth of selfhood that now dominates the Western imagination and that underlies the
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