The 'State of Nature'

A fascinating notion I am, of course, encountering in my reading of Rousseau. It occurs also in Hobbes and Locke, both quoted by Rousseau, whose works I'd also like to read. Unsurprisingly, I have a special interest in the state of nature set out in the Adam and Eve stories. Literalists, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, will beat Christians over the head with ceaseless demands for for historic 'evidence' for such an event. This, ironically, is evidence of a crass misunderstanding of the nature of myth. Myth seldom derives from historical or archaeological evidence. It is, rather, a portrayal of a perceived present condition projected imaginatively into a story which contains and explains the elements of the present existential condition. The story is an imaginative receptacle of those elements usually placed in an imagined and notional, but not _real_ past, as that enables the literary device to operate. Hebrew writers around 1000 BC(E?) noticed their own existential moral condition and that of their compatriots and sought a device to embody that abstraction. They felt humans were, in some sense, disconsolate, flawed or less than perfect and so invented a notional place of former perfection which never actually existed. Such an invention is no different from Orwell's 'Animal Farm' (where the truth is resited in other species), in Science Fiction (where truth is sited in an imagined future), or in stories about imagined past Golden Ages. None of these 'truths' are sited in real places but that does not make them any less true. The imagined locations are simply vehicles used to express a truth.
In the case of the Garden of Eden a moral truth is expressed by a notional retrospective projection into an imagined world. If present humans feel their inescapable human condition of self-awareness or 'knowledge' is, in some sense, painful of unhappy this might point to a sensed perfection from which we have declined but, interestingly, in Christian theology, available once again in the future rather than the past. Plato does a similar thing with his comparison of present reality with an imagined sphere of perfect forms.
How sophisticated, in literary terms, the writers of Genesis were 3000 years ago! They'd have laughed at you if you'd asked for the GPS location of Eden (once you'd explained what a GPS was). It was always a place over the horizon.