Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment

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Denise Schaeffer. Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment

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ROUSSEAU

ON EDUCATION,

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Thus, while I agree with commentators that Rousseau seeks not simply to explain but to produce the political effects he theorizes, I argue that Emile represents Rousseau’s attempt to cultivate the capacity for independent judgment, and not simply to foster the salutary prejudices and illusions that might substitute for it. These prejudices and illusions play an important role, to be sure, but they are only one part of Rousseau’s strategy. Focusing on the twofold character of Rousseau’s project in Emile will enhance our understanding of the psychology that makes possible the political middle ground identified in the existing scholarship that focuses on Rousseau’s concern for complex middle states over simple, unified wholes. Emile is certainly about combining independence and interdependence, but it is also exemplifies another (related) middle ground. That is, as a philosophical novel it occupies a middle ground between Rousseau’s treatises and his literary works, such as La nouvelle Heloise. Emile does not simply tell the story of an idealized education; it includes commentary and critical reflection on that poetic representation throughout. Both substantively and structurally, it is a crucial text for exploring Rousseau’s take on the proper perspective toward idealized images.

For a book that is often considered to be primarily about achieving wholeness and psychic unity, Emile is strikingly riddled with divisions that resist assimilation to a stable whole. A crucial bifurcation occurs between book III and book IV, which heralds a “second birth” for Emile. This major fault line in Emile’s education separates the physical and the moral dimensions of that education, or, put another way, separates Emile’s education in independence from his education in interdependence.35

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