Читать книгу Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment - Denise Schaeffer - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe Body, the Senses, and the Foundations of Judgment
[Emile] gets his lessons from nature and not from men. . . . His body and his mind are exercised together. Acting always according to his own thought and not someone else’s, he continually unites two operations: the more he makes himself strong and robust, the more he becomes sensible and judicious. (E, 119; 4:361)
The first three books of Emile are generally understood to constitute Emile’s “negative” (93; 4:323) education, that is, an education designed to preserve his natural wholeness while forestalling the development of prejudices and passions (especially amour-propre) by warding off all social influences. Rousseau states that this first, negative education “consists not at all in teaching virtue or truth but in securing the heart from vice and the mind from error.” One must “let childhood ripen in children” (94; 4:324) rather than hurry to fill their minds and souls with lessons and virtues that they are unprepared to acquire, and that are unnecessary in any case. He insists that children are not naturally inclined toward the vices we attribute to them. Those vices are the product of a faulty education. By nature, children are “little innocents” whose simplicity should be preserved for as long as possible. Rousseau prefers that children remain “ignorant and true” rather than “learn their lessons and lie” (102; 4:336). The task of the educator is therefore “to do nothing and let nothing be done” (93; 4:323).
But Rousseau follows this general rule by raising “another consideration,” one that suggests an altogether different reason for “doing nothing” and invites us to reconsider the idea of a purely negative education. Rousseau advises the educator to observe the child closely and over a long period of time before beginning to educate—indeed, before saying “the first word to him.” His rationale is that “one must know well the particular genius of the child in order to know what moral diet suits him. Each mind has its own form.” The educator must let the germ of the child’s unique individual character “reveal itself freely” (94; 4:324). If childhood must be allowed to ripen, it is not simply to preserve a universal, original state as long as possible but to allow the development (unfettered, without distortion) of the child’s unique self, which is revealed over time. Thus, although Rousseau argues vehemently against turning children into miniature adults with a precocious pseudomaturity, he also conceives of growth and maturation within childhood. “Each age, each condition of life, has its suitable perfection, a sort of maturity proper to it” (158; 4:418). Is “doing nothing” sufficient to bring about this maturation?
What exactly Rousseau means by the distinctive maturity of childhood, and how it is cultivated, complicates the notion of a purely negative education while bearing on several fundamental issues with regard to his views on the education of judgment. The mark of a child’s having reached “the perfection of his age” (161; 4:423) is precisely the development of a certain species of judgment, not simply physical maturation. While initially in book II Rousseau insists that children are incapable of judging, he later refers to their capacity to exercise good judgment, at least with regard to the physical world. And he concludes book II with an anecdote about a child whose judgment he praises as “incisive” (163; 4:425). This refers to a rudimentary form of judgment that is distinctly appropriate to children as children, but at the same time sets the stage for—and in some ways serves as a model for—good judgment at any age. “One must have a great deal of judgment oneself to appreciate a child’s” (162; 4:424). Rousseau’s admiration of the incisive child is matched by his admiration for the child’s father, who is able to perceive this trait in his child. This ability marks the father not only as a good father but as a wise man. Such wisdom is rare. “None of us is philosophic enough to know how to put himself in a child’s place” (115; 4:355). Time after time, in the course of explaining the limitations and characteristics of a child’s perspective, Rousseau offers parallel reflections on various adult figures and their good or poor judgment. Specifically, in order to achieve the distinctive maturity of childhood, children must be taught both to run well and to see well. Rousseau’s treatment of each of these lessons unfolds in two registers. Learning to run entails learning to exist as a being whose nature cannot remain static but rather moves (since we are, after all, perfectible beings). Learning to see means developing not only visual acuity with regard to physical distances but also the ability to discern the nature of reality. By attending to both registers of Rousseau’s lessons on these points, we can better understand the broader significance of this educational stage of Emile.
On one level, then, Rousseau’s concerns center on physical education of the body and the senses in order to prevent the stimulation of imagination or any passions before their time. On another, he explores the nature of judgment, which is rooted in the “natural” perspective of a purely physical being but not reducible to it. The point of this second stage of Emile’s education is not simply to preserve the simplicity of his existence (and to establish the importance of such simplicity for human beings in general), but rather to establish the complexity of what it truly means for a being whose origins lie in a purely physical existence (in which Emile represents human beings as such) to learn to judge.1 In this chapter, I explore this complexity with regard to the relationship between the physical and the intellectual in Emile’s education and, more broadly, in Rousseau’s understanding of good judgment.
The Child as a Physical Being
Inasmuch as Rousseau continues to emphasize the importance of a negative education, book II in some ways simply extends the principles developed in book I to the growing child. The prepubescent Emile is primarily a physical being, and his lessons reflect this. On this issue Rousseau is critical of Locke, who maintains that one must reason with children. “The masterpiece of a good education is to make a reasonable man, and they claim they raise a child by reason! This is to begin with the end, to want to make the product the instrument. If children understood reason, they would not need to be raised” (89; 4:317). Attempting to use reason with children does not simply miss the mark; its impact turns out to be harmful rather than neutral. Reasoning with children involves the use of language that they are not equipped to comprehend. They may in fact learn to speak as they are spoken to, but this is only a façade, Rousseau insists. Their apparently sophisticated bons mots are at best empty chatter, and at worst pernicious indicators that they are well on their way to becoming miserable adults (civil men) who speak and live inauthentically.2
What language, then, is appropriate for the child learning to speak? The language of the body. At this stage the tutor couches all lessons in the language of the body and encourages Emile to interpret the world around him based on two bodily experiences that children have on a regular basis: hunger and illness. For example, Emile learns the utility of astronomy when he is lost in the middle of the forest at lunchtime, and he is inspired to run faster for the sake of a very specific prize: a cake. The tutor also mentions another child who was taught geometry “by being given the choice every day of waffles with equal perimeters done in all the geometric figures. The little glutton had exhausted the art of Archimedes in finding out in which there was the most to eat” (146; 4:401). If Locke’s motto can be said to be “lead them with reason,” Rousseau’s is surely “lead them with cakes,” for “a child would rather give [away] a hundred louis than a cake” (103; 4:338). Even complex human emotions can be explained to children in purely physical terms. What does a child see when looking at an angry person, for example? “He sees an inflamed face, glittering eyes, threatening gestures; he hears shouts—all signs that the body is out of kilter.” Thus one should tell the child calmly, “This poor man is sick; he is in a fit of fever” (96; 4:328).
Thus moral lessons must be postponed, Rousseau contends, because attempts to inculcate them at this age will inevitably result in unintended consequences due to the bodily character of the child’s perspective. At the same time, Rousseau suggests that the child must begin to move beyond this limited perspective. Book II opens with the announcement that we have entered into “the second period of life,” which refers to the period just beyond infancy through age twelve. However, this second stage is actually a first insofar as it is only now that, “strictly speaking [proprement], the life of the individual begins” (78; 4:301). This birth of individuality functions as a second beginning and prefigures the “second birth” at the beginning of book IV (that is, the beginning of the significance of the individual’s sex/gender). It is the first of these two rebirths.3
Just as it is only after infancy that, strictly speaking, the life of the individual begins, so too is it only at this point that the story of Emile truly begins. In other words, Emile is “reborn” for the reader as a concrete example rather than an abstraction; he is particularized. To be sure, the idea of Emile figures briefly in book I, when Rousseau first sets up his thought experiment, but the child does not yet come alive on the page. We are told that Emile is an orphan, and then in effect he disappears into a field of generalities. Rousseau’s subsequent remarks refer to “one’s child” or “all children.” Occasionally, he mentions his imaginary pupil in passing (with a pronoun), but Emile does not actually appear as a character. We are not invited to picture little Emile crawling about. Rather, “the child” functions as an abstraction in book I. Only in book II do the details of Emile’s particular experiences become significant. From this point forward, Rousseau illustrates his arguments with anecdotes depicting the tutor’s interaction with Emile. Emile appears by degrees, just as natural man in the Second Discourse vanishes by degrees. As Emile must learn gradually to see and judge the world around him, the reader must learn to see and judge Emile.
Once individuality becomes an issue, so does happiness—and not before. Rousseau waits until book II to explain the understanding of happiness that guides his entire endeavor, or at least serves as a point of departure. “A being endowed with senses whose faculties equaled his desires would be an absolutely happy being” (80; 4:304, emphasis added). This would seem to suggest that for Rousseau the natural man, in his simplicity and physical robustness, is the best judge, or sets the standard against which the human condition must be judged. “The closer to his natural condition man has stayed, the smaller is the difference between his faculty and his desires, and consequently the less removed he is from being happy” (81; 4:304). But it is precisely the perfect equilibrium of absolute happiness that makes it impossible to stay close to this natural condition, for natural man lacks the foresight and experience to understand and maintain his condition.4 Our perfectibility may be what moves us away, but our unselfconsciousness and ignorance are what make us susceptible to moving in directions that diminish our happiness and freedom.
This helps us to make sense of why Rousseau introduces his definition of the absolutely happy being with the remark that we cannot know what absolute happiness or unhappiness is (80; 4:303). Even as he states this unequivocally, Rousseau at the same time implies that it might be possible to experience absolute happiness. The absolutely happy being thus resembles the natural man of the Second Discourse insofar as he experiences perfect contentment but does not know enough to appreciate its fragility. Such a being is an absolutely happy being but does not know it. The underlying question is whether knowing that one is happy is an essential component of being happy.
To the degree that Emile exemplifies the happy equilibrium of desires and faculties, his equilibrium is maintained artificially by the tutor’s absolute control over him. He resembles natural man but has the added benefit of the tutor’s guiding hand to protect his innocence (whereas Rousseau introduces his portrait of natural man in the Second Discourse with the remark that he will consider what human beings would become if left to themselves). Emile does not know what happiness is, or even that he is happy (awareness of which requires comparison to other states, a lesson Rousseau saves for a later time). One should not mistake Emile’s lack of self-awareness for evidence that Rousseau’s model of human happiness (and, by extension, human freedom) excludes self-reflection. Rousseau gives us several indications, even at this early stage in Emile’s upbringing, that a perfect equilibrium maintained by external force(s) rather than by self-consciousness is not in fact his ultimate model.
Rousseau begins by distinguishing the happy child from the spoiled (gaté) child, clarifying that his point is not to fulfill every desire (which is a recipe not for equilibrium but for disequilibrium, since desires can be limitless) but precisely to limit desire in the first place. Making a child happy does not mean making him spoiled, and making a child good does not mean making him unhappy. So far, we are in familiar territory, for this is all quite consistent with Rousseau’s conception of man’s natural goodness. However, once Rousseau has articulated this formulaic conception of happiness (happiness equals equilibrium), he raises the following question: “In what, then, consists human wisdom or the road of true happiness?” (80; 4:304). Rousseau’s initial answer to this question reinforces the importance of equilibrium between desires and faculties. Of all the animals, human beings alone have superfluous faculties, and these become the instruments of our unhappiness. Specifically, foresight and imagination awaken new hopes and desires and extend the “measure of the possible” (91; 4:304), causing us to project goals and destinations at which we never arrive. Therefore, Rousseau advises that we restrict ourselves to a very narrow, simple sphere of existence, within which equilibrium is possible. “Let us measure the radius of our sphere and stay in the center like the insect in the middle of his web; we shall always be sufficient unto ourselves; and we shall not have to complain of our weakness, for we shall never feel it” (81; 4:305).
However, as Rousseau continues his discussion of human wisdom and its relation to happiness, he leaves behind the image of an insect caught it its own web and begins to emphasize the reflective dimension of human happiness. While he advises man to “remain in the place which nature assigns to you in the chain of being” (83; 4:308), he also notes that the wise man “knows how to stay in his place” (84; 4:310, emphasis added). Unlike the insect, who remains in place by instinct or impotence, or natural man, who lacks the foresight and experience to understand the consequences of leaving it, the wise man understands his distinctive place in the chain of being and knows how to maintain it. Rousseau contrasts this wisdom not only with the simplicity of other animals but with that of the human child, who “does not know his place [and] would not be able to keep to it” (84; 4:310). Unlike the child, whose equilibrium and thus happiness must be maintained by an external force (in this case, the tutor), the wise man must possess, in addition to an equilibrium of desires and faculties, some faculty that allows him to reflect on and maintain that very equilibrium. This is likely to involve the “superfluous” faculties that, Rousseau laments, tend to serve as instruments of unhappiness rather than happiness (81; 4:305). Rousseau’s implicit question seems to be not simply whether this superfluity can be severely curtailed or even avoided altogether but whether it can be harnessed to serve the cause of happiness rather than unhappiness.
Rousseau’s distinction between childish happiness and adult happiness implies that only children (specifically, children whose equilibrium has been maintained for them) can be perfectly happy. But this happiness is fleeting. Rousseau insists that childhood gaiety and innocence be preserved and cherished rather than sacrificed to an uncertain future, but at the same time he has long-term aspirations for his pupil’s happiness. “I shall not seek a distant happiness for him at the expense of the present. I want him to be happy not once but always, if it is possible” (326–27; 4:653). Insofar as growing up means learning to maintain your own equilibrium—learning how to stay in your place—it means relinquishing a perfect (but externally maintained) equilibrium for a less perfect but more independently maintained equilibrium. This raises the question of how a child held to one standard becomes an adult held to a very different standard. How does one learn to stay in one’s place if one has always been made to stay in one’s place? Rousseau underscores the importance of this transition at the beginning of book III, when he begins to characterize his subject not simply as “the child” but as “the child whom one wants to make wise” (166; 4:428).
The implied distinction between being happy and knowing what happiness is runs parallel to the distinction between staying in place and knowing how to stay in place. Both are related to the central issue of book II: how to combine integrity and motion, or movement and staying in place. Rousseau’s prescribed education for the preadolescent is designed at once to preserve childhood innocence and to bring the child to “the maturity of childhood” (162; 4:423). One must therefore grow and learn—both in order to achieve the maturity of childhood and, more fundamentally, because perfectibility is part of human nature. The challenge is to do so while remaining unified and whole. Perfect equilibrium is a static condition, but it is in the nature of human beings to move. In light of this fundamental tension, Rousseau’s choice of illustration for book II—Chiron training the young Achilles to run—takes on added significance. At stake is not only the matter of teaching a child to move with swiftness and agility but also the underlying issue of how one might encourage a child to run or, more broadly, to move—that is to grow, learn, and change—while keeping him in his place by forestalling the development of all his superfluous faculties. The two objectives are intimately related inasmuch as Rousseau claims that the key to forestalling the development of superfluous faculties involves preserving the child as a purely physical being. Thus running is an appropriate activity for the child, whereas reading, which stimulates the imagination, is not. But there is more to Rousseau’s discussion of learning to run; he raises the broader question of how, in light of his insistence on a negative education, one might properly learn anything at all.
Learning to Run
It is far from immediately clear why Rousseau focuses any attention at all on the issue of teaching a child to run, as opposed to simply letting the child run free, since he ridicules the common practice of teaching children to walk. “Is there anything more foolish than the effort made to teach them to walk, as if anyone were ever seen who, due to his nurse’s negligence, did not when grown know how to walk?” We tend to teach children what they would better learn by themselves, he complains, and forget to teach them “what we alone can teach them” (78; 4:300). Rousseau argues that the child ought to be allowed complete freedom of movement and learn to accept the consequences of that freedom. A child should be taken daily to an open field. “There let him run and risk about; let him fall a hundred times a day. So much the better. That way he will learn how to get up sooner” (78; 4:301). Ideally, children teach themselves to run, it would seem, just as they teach themselves to walk. Yet the illustration that introduces book II is not of a child spontaneously running free but of Achilles being trained by Chiron. What is the true lesson of this stage of Rousseau’s educational project?
Rousseau’s discussion of children learning to run involves more than honing physical skills; it also introduces questions of motivation and direction. His main anecdote about teaching a young man to run (which includes the only reference to Chiron in the text) concerns an indolent boy who lacks not only the strength and skill to run but also the motivation. For the educator facing the task of motivating the boy, Rousseau remarks, “the skill of Chiron himself would have hardly sufficed.” He adds, “The difficulty was all the greater since I wanted to prescribe to him absolutely nothing. I had banished from among my rights exhortations, promises, threats, emulation, the desire to be conspicuous. How could I give him the desire to run without saying anything to him?” (141; 4:393).
This passage distills a well-recognized difficulty that pervades Rousseau’s entire corpus: the tension between will formation, on the one hand, and agency and authenticity, on the other. Rousseau’s various legislator figures condition the will of their subjects to love the objects that will best support their freedom—yet this conditioning calls into question the value or character of that freedom. Of course, Emile is a child at this point in Rousseau’s narrative, and careful control of his environment and experiences is arguably justified by his young age. The question of whether his freedom is ultimately genuine must be reserved for later. But the passage raises a related question, having to do with integrity as well as freedom. Before we come to the question of whether Emile is free, we must address the question of whether he is himself—or a self at all. “Doubtless he ought to do only what he wants; but he ought to want only what you want him to do. He ought not to make a step without your having foreseen it” (120; 4:363). How are we to reconcile Rousseau’s emphasis on active formation of the will with his admonition to allow the child’s character to reveal itself, unfettered? Rousseau’s confidence that the child who experiences no direct opposition to his desires will show himself “fearlessly” and “precisely as he is” (120; 4:363) belies the catch-22 that he has introduced. Indeed, he claims that precisely because the child will reveal himself entirely unselfconsciously, the educator will be in a position to study him at leisure—with the same careful study that must be conducted as preparation for shaping his every desire. In other words, the anecdote in book II that relates most directly to the book’s thematic illustration raises an issue that has to do not simply with physical strength but also with integrity of character—that is, with remaining oneself.
New skills cannot be acquired authentically, according to Rousseau, unless the acquisition is driven by the pupil’s own desire for them. But the desire to acquire a new skill, once stimulated, is almost always linked to some form of desire for recognition. The lazy boy whom Rousseau teaches to run is motivated by the desire for the cakes that are the prize in a race. For Rousseau, the desire for cakes is natural, but the desire for recognition as the winner is born of unnatural amour-propre. In this particular anecdote, Rousseau downplays this potential hazard. He notes that the first few times he and his charge passed by the young boys racing one another to win a cake, “it did not register and produced nothing.” So Rousseau expands the event (which was, of course, prearranged) to include more contestants and draw more attention to the winner. “The one who won [the prize] was praised and given a celebration; it was all done with ceremony.” Predictably, his young charge gets caught up in the excitement, as passersby clap and cheer for the runners. “These were for him the Olympic games.” Finally, it enters the boy’s head that “running well could be good for something” (141–42; 4:394).
While it is clear that the child’s interest has been stimulated by the spectacle and ceremony and not simply by the cakes, Rousseau moves on as though the potential for triggering amour-propre had never arisen. Indeed, he suggests that winning makes the boy generous, and he happily shares his cake with the others. In later episodes (beginning in book III), however, Rousseau further develops his reflections on a difficulty that is raised here only indirectly. These arise when the newly developed desire is the desire to learn new things—a desire that an educator must stoke if the child is to grow and mature but that threatens to disturb the fragile equilibrium between desires and faculties that is the hallmark of self-sufficiency, according to Rousseau. Whereas teaching a child to run will augment his strength, thus enhancing his independence, stimulating his desire for knowledge will expand his needs insofar as it makes him want something he lacks. The desire to learn takes one outside oneself, and therein lies the danger, for it is because he lives outside himself that civil man is so miserable.
In addition to creating a potential disequilibrium between desires and faculties, the desire to learn can easily turn into the desire to be learned. This desire not only stimulates vanity but leads to the desire to appear learned rather than to be learned. One therefore risks inflaming amour-propre in an effort to stimulate intellectual curiosity. For Emile, this problem is addressed through a contrived encounter with a magician who publicly humiliates Emile when he tries to show off some newly acquired knowledge. After watching the magician make a toy duck move at will, Emile is inspired to figure out the trick, and thus to discover the underlying scientific principles (that is, to learn the cause of the magician’s effects). Once he learns how magnets make the duck move, he cannot wait to reveal his knowledge to the magician, and to the audience; “he would want the whole of humankind to be witness to his glory” (173; 4:438). Emile declares in front of the crowd that the trick is easy, and shows off his ability to manipulate the duck with a magnet hidden in a piece of bread. The magician responds graciously and invites Emile and his tutor back the next day to perform in front of an even larger crowd. This time, however, the duck flees. The crowd jeers; Emile complains and challenges the magician to attract the duck. The magician pulls the iron out of the bread, revealing Emile’s attempted deceit, and goes on to manipulate the duck with another piece of bread, his gloved finger, even his voice. Emile and the tutor sneak away, humiliated.
The next day, the magician comes to their door to confront them about their conduct. He chastises them for seeking honor “at the expense of an honest man’s subsistence” (174; 4:439). He explains that he did not show them his master strokes straightaway, for he keeps them in reserve rather than showing off giddily all that he knows. He then reveals his secret device for manipulating the duck: a lodestone. He begs them not to abuse this knowledge and to exercise restraint in the future. Specifically, he reprimands the tutor for failing to guide Emile and protect him from his humiliating mistake. The following day they return to the fair and do not breathe a word of what they know.5 Emile’s incipient amour-propre has been squelched, but his perspective has also been broadened.
A child does not simply grow into his body at this age; he grows into his individual identity. Inasmuch as this is when “the life of the individual begins,” it is also at this stage that the child “gains consciousness of himself. . . . He becomes truly one, the same, and consequently already capable of happiness or unhappiness. It is important, therefore, to begin to consider him as a moral being” (78; 4:301, emphasis added). Gaining consciousness of oneself is the first step toward becoming self-conscious in the sense of living in the opinion of others; the Second Discourse presents this as a very slippery slope. In Emile Rousseau considers whether we can grow and learn while staying “truly one, the same.” To put it another way, one must learn to move while staying in place. Rousseau’s exploration of the matter of learning to run, which seems philosophically inconsequential, introduces the larger issue of learning, growing, and changing while remaining within various boundaries: the boundary of childhood simplicity, the boundary of the self, and, most broadly, the boundaries that nature imposes on human beings.
Rousseau argues explicitly in book II that the education from postinfancy to preadolescence must concern itself primarily with the child’s physical development, so that a child’s strength can “catch up” to his desires before his desires extend beyond what a self-sufficient individual can satisfy. The child is born too weak to satisfy even his limited needs for food and physical comfort. Limiting his needs and desires to these things while he grows and matures physically allows the child to achieve the perfect equilibrium between faculties and desires that makes human beings happy and free in the original state of nature. Beyond this, however, there is a second objective built into Rousseau’s concern with training the muscles and physical senses. To “learn to think,” it is necessary to hone “the instruments of our intelligence,” which are “our limbs, our senses, our organs” (125; 4:370). Thus the child concentrates on physical education—not to avoid thinking but precisely in order to learn to think. “Let him be a man in his vigor, and soon he will be one in his reason” (118; 4:359). How are these goals connected for Rousseau? The link between physical strength and reason is that both are essential to an individual’s independence and self-sufficiency. Precisely by learning to fend for oneself physically, one learns to think independently. “Since [Emile] is constantly in motion, he is forced to observe many things, to know many effects. . . . Thus his body and his mind are exercised together. Acting always in accordance with his own thought and not someone else’s, he continually unites two operations: the more he makes himself strong and robust, the more he becomes sensible and judicious” (119; 4:361). The scope of a child’s exercise of judgment is strictly delimited, pertaining only to everything immediately (that is, physically) related to him. Rousseau depicts children learning to judge heights, lengths, depths, and distances with a view to acquiring cherries, cakes, and other edible treats.6 In other words, they learn to judge the physical world around them as a means to fulfilling a physical desire. Even the single positive lesson Rousseau allows during this stage—a lesson about respecting private property—is organized around the child’s desire to eat some delicious melons. Education at this stage involves manipulating the child’s desire for sweets in order to stimulate him to learn how to fulfill that need himself—by judging the shortest path to winning the cake, for example, or judging a tree’s height accurately in order to pick the cherries. Within a small radius, equilibrium between desires and faculties is thus achieved.
Many of these judgments involve correctly calculating distances with the naked eye. With practice, the child learns to rely on himself rather than on others or even on instruments, and develops “a glance almost as sure as a surveyor’s chain” (143; 4:396). In characterizing the five senses as the instruments of human intelligence, Rousseau emphasizes sight in particular as the key to demonstrating how the senses can serve as the foundation of judgment. “Sight is, of all the respects, the one from which the mind’s judgments can least be separated” (143; 4:396). Rousseau introduces this issue in the anecdote about the lazy boy who learned to run, in which the boy’s ability to see was educated in two senses: in order to win, he had to learn to measure distances accurately by sight, but in order to develop the desire to run at all, he had to learn to see it as good for something. Rousseau yokes together the issues of learning to run and learning to see because his concern is how one moves from a rudimentary to a more complex form of judgment.
Learning to See
Rousseau presents seeing as both utterly simple and highly complex. It is simple insofar as it is natural and physical; it is complex insofar as appearances can be deceiving. Every child has the capacity to see well as long as misguided parents and educators do not hamper this ability by taking away opportunities to hone and exercise it. In this sense, seeing is spontaneous, and a negative education is all that is necessary to preserve it. At the same time, however, “much time is needed to learn how to see” (143; 4:396). As in the case of running, the training Rousseau prescribes for learning to see links seeing to both the skill of estimating distances at a glance and the capacity for philosophy and independent reasoning. “Our first masters of philosophy are our feet, our hands, our eyes.” To seek knowledge without using the senses is “to teach us to use the reason of others. It is to teach us to believe much and never to know anything” (125; 4:370). At the same time, the simple acquisition of sense data is by itself insufficient. “To exercise the senses is not only to make use of them, it is to learn to judge well with them” (132; 4:380). The issue thus becomes how to understand the faculty of judgment as grounded in accurate and autonomous sense perception but not reducible to it.7 In insisting on this irreducibility, Rousseau challenges Helvétius, whose influential De l’esprit promoted a sensationalist view of judgment that grounded judgment in nothing other than sensation: “Juger n’est jamais que sentir.” Helvétius argued that the mind passively receives impressions from external objects and experiences a sensation in response. The mind is able to remember the sensation and the object(s) to which it is attached, and as a result can piece together judgments about the world. There is no judging faculty, according to Helvétius, apart from sensation and memory. Rousseau, in contrast, held this view to be too passive. Even as he insisted on the importance of sensation in human cognition and judgment, he nevertheless argued for an understanding of judgment as active rather than passive.8 “Our sensations are purely passive,” he says in Emile, “while all our perceptions or ideas are born out of an active principle which judges” (107; 4:344).
While Rousseau’s more direct response to Helvétius is found in the context of the Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith in book IV, in book II his discussion of the senses—especially that of sight—addresses not only the distinction between the passive and active senses of judging but also their interdependence. Thus the relationship between Rousseau’s two senses of learning to see bears on the question of his understanding of good judgment and how it is formed. Since he also links seeing with philosophizing (just as Aristotle identifies sight as the sense most closely linked with the desire to know), an analysis of the way in which Rousseau teaches his pupil(s) to see also sheds light on what he thinks it means to make a human being wise. “Man learns to see with the eyes of the mind as well as with the eyes of the body.”9
The explicit pedagogical advice of book II elaborates the connection between both senses of seeing well. Rousseau focuses on the first, physical sense when recommending exercises (such as night games) to sharpen the child’s sight (and other senses). At first, Rousseau suggests that learning to see well is simply a matter of training the naked eye to see independently. The goal is to prevent the child from adding any extraneous interpretation to what his senses reveal to him. To that end, parents should avoid any reaction to the child’s experiences, so as not to influence his perception of them, and prohibit the use of external aids such as binoculars. Clarity in sense perception, unadulterated by anything that the mind might add, is the goal. Similarly, when teaching a child to draw, one must ensure that the child has “no other master than nature and no other model than objects. I want him to have before his eyes the original itself and not the paper representing it, to sketch a house from a house, a tree from a tree, a man from a man, so that he gets accustomed to observing bodies and their appearances well and not to taking false and conventional imitations for true imitations” (144; 4:397).
However, Rousseau’s insistence on the purely negative quality of such seeing—in the sense of seeing without interference—soon falters, when he acknowledges the inaccuracy of the senses, which may lead even the most rudimentary judgments astray. He takes a two-pronged approach to this problem. First, one must aim to be as accurate as possible; each sense must be fine-tuned to its peak performance. Even so, it is not possible to rely on the accuracy of each sense by itself. The only recourse, if one wants to remain on the level of the senses, is to draw on the assistance of another sense—a system of checks and balances among the five senses. “Instead of simplifying the sensation, double it, always verify it by another. Subject the visual organ to the tactile organ” (140; 4:92). This solution falters as well, however, and Rousseau ultimately moves from the purely physical to the intellectual:
It remains for me to speak in the following books of the cultivation of a sort of sixth sense called common sense, less because it is common to all men than because it results from the well-regulated use of the other senses, and because it instructs us about the nature of things by the conjunction of all their appearances. This sixth sense has consequently no special organ. It resides only in the brain, and its sensations, purely internal, are called perceptions or ideas. It is by the number of these ideas that the extent of our knowledge is measured. It is their distinctness, their clarity which constitutes the accuracy of the mind. It is the art of comparing them among themselves that is called human reason. (157–58; 4:417)
The “sixth sense” links a conception of human reason as independent of the senses with the senses themselves, functioning as a middle ground. Reason emerges as neither reducible to the senses (as it is for Helvétius) nor independent of them. If “the child whom one wants to make wise” must first learn how to see, this is why. Rousseau may insist that the child be preserved as a primarily physical being who interacts with the world around him on physical (not moral) terms, but this goal is not opposed to the goal of teaching the child to reason. It in fact lays the groundwork for the independent exercise of reason. A child whose senses have been properly developed can become an accurate judge within the context of the physical world around him. “Now we are well informed about the character of foreign bodies in relation to our own, about their weight, shape, color, solidity, size, distance, temperature, rest, and motion” (150; 4:407). In other words, the child, understood as a strictly physical being, has become a good judge of physical reality insofar as it relates to his immediate surroundings; “he judges, he foresees, in everything immediately related to him” (119; 4:361). Having learned to run well and to see well, he has thereby learned to judge well within the limits appropriate to childhood.
Learning to Learn
Of course, the human child is not meant to remain forever a purely physical being, and arguably the goal of childhood education is preparation for adulthood. While, as I noted in chapter 1, Rousseau is critical of those who see children only as future men, he is also critical of the tender mother who thinks only of her child’s present happiness. “That is not enough,” Rousseau counters. “One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man” (42; 4:253). Thus, by Rousseau’s own admission, childhood education must prepare a child for adulthood, even as it aims toward the “maturity of childhood” rather than full maturity. To what degree does Rousseau succeed in meeting this challenge? The education he lays out in the first half of book II may suffice to teach a child how to move in a physical sense, but does it teach a child to move in the sense of learning, growing, changing?
To address this question, we might consider Rousseau’s argument that adults must refrain from encouraging children to consider what lies beyond their immediate physical existence, putting off moral lessons until much later. The goal at this point, he insists, is to prevent vice from developing, rather than to encourage the development of virtue. Rousseau’s claim, however, is not simply that children are not far enough along the path of development to be genuinely virtuous, for such a claim could easily be countered with the argument that they should therefore be encouraged to “practice” virtuous behavior as they grow. Rousseau rejects the assumption that going through the motions of virtue produces virtue; such attempts at habituation, he maintains, encourage a discrepancy between the internal state of mind and external behavior—inadvertently cultivating an insincerity that begets vice, not virtue. Thus, for the same reason that it is wrong to try to reason with children, it is futile at best to coax children to do virtuous deeds in an effort to habituate them. A child who is trained to go through the motions of being charitable, for example, does not become charitable; he becomes an imposter. Coaxing such behavior from children cultivates “virtues by imitation,” which is to say, “the virtues of apes” (104; 4:339). In Rousseau’s view, the child who imitates adults only appears to learn and mature; the maturation is a superficial veneer. The child learns not how to become virtuous but how to hide his lack of virtue. This is one origin of the false front that civil man wears. At stake here is the ability to distinguish between true learning and false (merely apparent) learning, such as that exhibited by the child who chatters precociously. But Rousseau makes it easier for us to discern the mark of false learning. He insists that children at this age should be made to “taste” their lessons, rather than be taught the names for things. But this “tasting” is characterized as unconscious conditioning. We are left with two inadequate models: tasting without knowing, on the one hand, and superficial knowledge (knowing names without tasting), on the other. The question remains, how does one achieve real knowledge? How does one actually and truly learn?
Teaching inappropriate lessons produces false learning (or worse). Fables are out, and so is coaxing certain behavior. What, then, are appropriate lessons? Rousseau offers two pieces of advice on this point, both of which raise more problems than they answer. First, he counsels his readers to “know well the particular genius of the child in order to know what moral diet suits him” (94; 4:324). This suggests that the child’s unique character must be known before we can know what education suits him; but by the time his character is fully formed, it may be too late to educate him. Still, Rousseau recommends taking the time to allow the child’s nature to reveal itself before one begins, which strikingly recalls the paradox we saw in book I: that nature (in this case the child’s innate temperament) must guide the process of discovery even as it is what is discovered in the process. Here, Rousseau generates a similar paradox by advising educators to “spy out nature for a long time; observe your pupil well before saying the first word to him. To start with, let the germ of his character reveal itself freely; constrain it in no way whatsoever in order better to see the whole of it” (94; 4:324). We are back to the difficulty of knowing when the whole is a completed whole, to say nothing of the more immediate difficulty of how one might manage to say nothing to a child until his character is fully revealed.
Rousseau acknowledges that this requirement may present an insurmountable hurdle. “I sense these difficulties; I agree they are difficulties. Perhaps they are insurmountable. But it is still certain that in applying oneself to overcoming them, one does overcome them up to a certain point. I show the goal that must be set; I do not say that it can be reached” (94–95; 4:325). At this point, perhaps in order to resolve this impasse, he introduces the idea that there is in fact a place for imitation in this otherwise “negative” education. “Remember that before daring to undertake the formation of a man, one must have made oneself a man. One must find within oneself the example the pupil ought to take for his own” (95; 4:325). A governor should lead by example rather than try to coax virtuous deeds from the child. “Be virtuous and good. Let your examples be graven in your pupils’ memories until they can enter their hearts. Instead of hastening to exact acts of charity from my pupil, I prefer to do them in his presence and to deprive him of even the means of imitating me in this, as an honor which is not for his age” (104; 4:339).
The proposition that one must lead by example is perplexing, however, in light of Rousseau’s scathing critique of “the virtues of apes.” Is he for or against imitation? On the one hand, he contends that if Emile begins to imitate the tutor’s acts of charity (behaving like the rich man that he is not), he must be forbidden to do so. However, Rousseau goes on to add that he would not mind if Emile should steal some money from him in order to give it away covertly. “This is a fraud appropriate to his age, and the only one I would pardon him” (104; 4:339). Rousseau would pardon this fraud because it is committed with a view to being good, not with a view to appearing good. Only if the act is covert—if it does not appear—is it truly virtuous rather than an empty gesture.10 A good deed done in secret avoids the superficiality of imitation and becomes in some sense genuine. Still, imitation seems to play an important role in motivating the behavior.
Imitation is both problematic and necessary, it seems. While Rousseau at first allows that “at an age when the heart feels nothing yet, children just have to be made to imitate the acts whose habit one wants to give them,” he nevertheless resolves that we must “give up the apparent good which imitation can produce” (104; 4:338–39). He uses imitation to solve a problem—that there is no other way to begin to teach children to be virtuous—but then rejects the solution. However, he continues to proceed as though the problem were solved. His rejection is therefore somewhat disingenuous. But it points to a larger, recurring issue. To overcome the difficulty generated by the requirement that the child be a completed whole before education can begin, Rousseau shifts the burden onto the tutor, demanding that he be a completed whole before he can begin the education of another. In other words, wholeness must somehow precede the very educational process that is supposed to produce wholeness. Moreover, the idea that the child would at some level emulate the wholeness of the tutor in order to achieve wholeness himself leaps over the need to educate someone to be an independent self who does not imitate others—in other words, it leaps over the possibility of what Rousseau would consider a genuine education and resorts instead to something that could just as easily produce the “virtues of apes.” Either the child imitates the adult who gives alms, for example (and therefore does not develop virtue but only the appearance of it), or he does not merely imitate because he is already virtuous—and therefore does not need to develop virtue. Education is either absent or superfluous. The fundamental question that remains is how virtue might come into being if it is not already there. Once again, as we saw in chapter 1, Rousseau’s argument founders on the question of origins.
The ambiguity in Rousseau’s treatment of imitation suggests why even the early part of Emile’s education cannot, despite Rousseau’s rhetoric, be a purely “negative” education. It is noteworthy that one of his strongest statements about the need to “put off, if possible, a good lesson for fear of giving a bad one” (96; 4:327) is followed by an admission that one cannot avoid lessons altogether and must therefore choose carefully. A pattern is beginning to emerge, in which Rousseau adds a caveat to what he initially presents as an absolute rule. Rousseau “breaks” his own rules against imitation and positive lessons. This pattern continues well into book III, in which he lifts his supposedly absolute ban on books and allows Emile to read Robinson Crusoe, “since we absolutely must have books” (184; 4:454). In the chapters that follow, we shall explore the ways in which this tendency to qualify absolutes extends also to the poetic images (such as natural man and citizen) that function as absolute standards in Rousseau’s thought as a whole.
