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The statue of Glaucus

What the pessimist takes for the nature of man is a work of time and society: like the sea-worn statue of Glaucus, the human soul is so disfigured that it is no longer recognizable.

Objects to Anthropological pessimism

Rousseau · Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Preface · 1755

1. The pessimist reads human nature in man as he is before our eyes: rivalry, calculation, greed. From this he concludes that such is our depth.
2. But social man is no longer the original man: on the statue of Glaucus, that sea-god, time and storms had so eaten away the features that it looked less like a god than a wild beast. So too the human soul, altered by social life and the passions it breeds, has changed to the point of being almost unrecognizable.
3. To describe this disfigured figure and call it 'nature' is to take the effect for the origin: the traits the pessimist ascribes to man in himself are the imprint of his history.

Therefore So the pessimist reasons over a damaged image: one must, beneath the layers deposited by society, recover the man of nature before judging his depth, failing which one takes the disease for health.