Читать книгу Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment - Denise Schaeffer - Страница 9
ОглавлениеJUDGMENT AND THE STANDARD OF NATURE
It is not philosophers who know men best. They see them only through the prejudices of philosophy, and I know of no station where one has so many. A savage has a healthier judgment of us than a philosopher does. (E, 243; 4:535)
Whatever else good judgment means for Rousseau, it is certainly grounded in his understanding of nature, which provides a standard against which civil society is to be judged. To what degree, and in what sense (i.e., whether substantively or as a formal standard of wholeness), nature remains relevant to human beings living in society is the subject of much scholarly debate; but Rousseau is unequivocal on the point that a poor or deformed understanding of nature leads to unsound judgment of the human condition. Thus in his preface to the Second Discourse he claims that a correct understanding of the original state of nature (which “no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist”) is necessary “in order to judge our present state correctly” (SD, 93; 3:123). In Emile, Rousseau frequently holds up his pupil, the product of an education according to nature, as an example against which the misery of civil society can be judged.
It is arguable that the understanding of nature developed in Emile is even more relevant to civilized human beings, because while the savage state depicted in the Second Discourse is irretrievably lost to us, Emile is educated to live not in a savage state but in society. Rather than strictly oppose the state of nature and existence in society, Rousseau goes so far as to refer to what is “natural in the civil state” (E, 406; 4:764). This suggests the possibility of a second-order naturalness that might serve as an even more useful guide to our judgments of our present state than the account of the original natural state in the Second Discourse.
As a touchstone for guiding judgment, however, “nature” turns out to be a very slippery concept in Emile. Rousseau suggests that there is a natural order and direction to human development, and that a sound education follows the path that nature lays out for us. Insofar as Emile’s education is to follow that path, its goal “is the very same as that of nature” (38; 4:247). Rousseau then adds, “But perhaps this word nature has too vague a sense,” concluding that “an attempt must be made to settle on its meaning” (39; 4:247). One might understand his “attempt” to settle its meaning as consisting of the substance of the next two paragraphs, which culminate in the definition that nature is whatever human inclinations are before “they are more or less corrupted by our opinions.” Again, this formulation is deceptively simple. What would it mean to relate everything to our “original” dispositions, if we are born in such an undeveloped state? We are not born independent and self-sufficient. “We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment” (38; 4:247). To appeal to natural man as the ideal to which we must orient all education thus begs the question of how one develops into a natural man.1 It seems odd to make such a leap in a book that devotes so much attention to the earliest stages of childhood. The human infant can hardly be the guide for us; it is thus not surprising that Rousseau follows his statement that everything must be related to these original dispositions with a description of natural man (contrasted with both the citizen and the bourgeois). This points us to the Second Discourse, where Rousseau takes as his starting point an image of natural man fully formed (and only subsequently addresses the question of reproduction and the status of children). Perhaps it is there that Rousseau shows us man’s “original” form; but even in that work, Rousseau makes it difficult to discern when his natural man is fully formed, inasmuch as perfectibility is presented as part of man’s original nature.2
In Emile, this doubleness is reflected not only in the contrast between the early and later (negative and positive) phases of Emile’s education but in the very idea of an “original” nature as presented in the earliest stages of Rousseau’s educational project. That is, even as Rousseau counsels his reader to “observe nature and follow the path it maps out for you” (47; 4:259), he suggests that it is actually rather difficult to discern an original nature to use as a formal principle on which to base an increasingly complex naturalness; it, too, is a moving target.3 To be sure, Rousseau claims that the first part of Emile’s education is a negative education, designed only to preserve what is natural while adding nothing to it. However, as early as book I, when Rousseau is most insistent upon the notion of a negative education—that is, the notion that in order to follow nature one must simply avoid opposing it—we perceive the first indications that following nature (whether we want to preserve it or to use it as a formal principle on which to base a more complex, second-order naturalness) is not quite straightforward. Book I both posits nature as a given and poses it as a question.
But what will a man raised uniquely for himself become for others? If perchance the double object we set for ourselves could be joined in a single one by removing the contradictions of man, a great obstacle to his happiness would be removed. In order to judge of this, he would have to be seen wholly formed: his inclinations would have to have been observed, his progress seen, his development followed. In a word, the natural man would have to be known. I believe that one will have made a few steps in these researches when one has read this writing. (41; 4:251)
The “double object” of Rousseau’s project refers of course to the eventual task of introducing a natural man into society in order to test his independence, but not only to that. We cannot judge whether this great reconciliation has been achieved unless natural man is first known. But, as Rousseau points out in the Second Discourse, the very attempt to know ourselves gets in the way (SD, 92; 3:122–23).4 Later in book I of Emile, Rousseau observes, “We do not know what our nature permits us to be” (E, 62; 4:281). Emile thus raises anew the question of the boundary between what is natural and what is artificial in the human condition, perhaps because the Second Discourse problematizes that very boundary even as it purports to delineate it.5 Although Rousseau presents an image of natural man that at first glance seems complete (i.e., natural man reclining under a tree, his needs satisfied), he also presents an evolutionary understanding of human nature that complicates the simplicity of that image. It is precisely by arguing for an evolutionary rather than a static conception of human nature that Rousseau disputes the Hobbesian and Lockean accounts of human nature. He not only draws the line between nature and society in a new place; he also makes it simultaneously easier and more difficult to draw the line at all. Natural man disappears by degrees, until the reader is asked to behold human beings with “all our faculties developed, memory and imagination in play, vanity aroused, reason rendered active, and the mind having almost reached the limit of the perfection of which it is susceptible.” Yet, at the same time, Rousseau refers to this development as “all the natural qualities put into action” (SD, 155; 3:174, emphasis added). Insofar as perfectibility is part of human nature, it makes it difficult to delineate precisely where nature begins and ends. Unnatural faculties exist in man in potentiality (en puissance), although they remain latent until a chance combination of external factors actualizes them.
Scholars tend to try to work around these ambiguities by referring to the “pure” state of nature, distinguished from the successive degrees of change that occur before civil society comes into being, but the result is that we are left with no single way of designating all that comes between the pure state of nature and civil society. So we might divide the process into three parts rather than two: pure state of nature, rustic society (“the happiest and most durable epoch”), and civil society. But even then, transitional periods are unaccounted for. The essay certainly accomplishes its goal of creating a gulf between nature and civil society, but the gulf that separates them also connects them, and is not just an empty space separating/connecting two discrete entities. The space is filled with gradual transitions and alterations that cause the stages “in between” to shade into each of the extremes. Structurally, the essay is divided into two discrete parts, and the first sentence of the second part purports to identify the precise beginning of civil society: the first person who claimed private property was its founder. The turning point has been pinpointed, or so it seems. But this “beginning” is not where the logic of Rousseau’s account of the transition to civil society actually begins; he goes on to retrace the steps that lead up to the development of private property, which is actually an effect of a series of other changes.
I emphasize these ambiguities in the Second Discourse (which others have discussed in more detail)6 in order to highlight the significance of Rousseau’s insistence in Emile that we watch natural man come into being. The account in the Second Discourse begins with a fully formed natural man, in the strict sense that he is not a child. The question of reproduction is addressed as a secondary issue. But human beings are not born fully formed or self-sufficient; far from it. Therefore, even if we try to work with a nonteleological conception of nature, and cast Rousseau’s project in Emile as an attempt to preserve nature against corrupting social influences, we must acknowledge that a doubleness inheres even in the minimalist goal of preservation—since preserving nature entails letting it develop until it is tout formé. There is a developmental quality built into even the simplest principle of nature for Rousseau, the ideal of equilibrium, because we cannot preserve natural equilibrium until it has come into its own. At a minimum, the weak and dependent infant must develop into the strong, unspoiled child whose simple needs allow an equilibrium to exist between his desires and faculties.
In this way, Emile addresses a philosophically interesting lacuna in the Second Discourse, while raising the question of how one might be guided by the standard of “nature” even as a complete grasp of it remains elusively out of reach. The “perfection” of our form as we leave the hands of the author is itself an abstraction, an ideal—and disembodied—state of perfect freedom, altered by confinement in a human body and further altered by the unnatural confinement to which that body is subjected over the course of a human life. To understand human freedom, then, one must understand not only its perfect idealization (which functions as a Platonic Form) but also its embodied form. Concrete human freedom is (somehow) formed formlessness. This is the true subject of Emile, inasmuch as Rousseau attempts to make the abstraction of perfect freedom concrete and particular without distorting it in the process. If Emile strikes us as simultaneously ordinary and otherworldly, this is why. He is an intermediate form.
Emile thus occupies the space between what is imaginatively idealized (and thus so far removed from existing circumstances as to be irrelevant) and what is recognizably practical (thus insufficiently critical). That is, in order for Emile’s example to be instructive for readers whose own experience of raising children bears little resemblance to Rousseau’s imaginary scenario, his example must be at once recognizable (thus relevant) and strange (to afford critical distance). The same can be said of the figure of “natural man” in general: he must be recognizably human, yet radically other. To the degree that any imagined ideal is disconnected from existing conditions, it may offer a standpoint for critique but at the same time suffer from a deficiency: this form of critique may be either purely negative and based on fantasy (insofar as it simply retreats from the real in order to remain devoted to the purity of an unachievable ideal) or potentially dangerous (insofar as a self-appointed visionary may seek to remake the world to match the envisioned ideal, by totalitarian means). The challenge of immanent social criticism is to work from within, while harnessing the transformative powers of the creative imagination.
Appealing to the imagination, the Second Discourse furnishes the image of natural man, which provides a beginning point for reflection and reorientation of the reader’s understanding of human nature. This is part of what it means to “clarify” (éclaircir) the question (of natural right), as opposed to resolving it (SD, 92; 3:123); the image orients the inquiry but does not simply answer the question posed. By raising the question of nature anew, Emile functions as Rousseau’s second sailing (to use a Socratic metaphor). As such, it orients itself toward the image that motivated the inquiry in the first place, but also brings a new standard of judgment to bear on it. The image is called upon for guidance as we form our judgments about the human condition, but somehow we must also be able to look upon it with a critical eye.7 But if we are to judge civil man in light of the standard set by Rousseau’s image of natural man, in light of what standard does he expect us to judge whether the natural man has been achieved?
Beginning with the preface and throughout Emile, Rousseau invites his readers to judge his project for themselves. “In expounding freely my sentiment, I so little expect that it be taken as authoritative that I always join to it my reasons, so that they may be weighed and I be judged” (34; 4:242). At the same time, he thinks that his readers’ standards of judgment are deeply corrupted. “All our wisdom consists in servile prejudices” (42; 4:253). Rousseau anticipates that his project will be out of step with the prevailing wisdom and may be dismissed as unrealistic. But he also challenges the value of striving to be more realistic. Proposing “what can be done,” he counters, too often amounts to proposing exactly what is done (34; 4:242–43). While limiting one’s proposals to “what can be done” may seem practical, it is less simply so than it may appear, because in order to take one’s bearings from existing conditions, one must apprehend them properly, and this is precisely what his readers are ill equipped to do. “Childhood is unknown. Starting from the false idea one has of it, the farther one goes, the more one loses one’s way” (33; 4:241–42). Insofar as his readers have a false idea of childhood, they are in no position to judge whether he has offered a sound education for children, or even whether his proposals are feasible.
Part of what Rousseau must do, then—perhaps the most important part of what he must do—is to elucidate the grounds on which his, or any, proposed education ought to be judged. To that end he provides an account not merely of what a natural education ought to look like but of how one ought to look at the subject of this or any education. “Begin, then, by studying your pupils better. For most assuredly you do not know them at all” (34; 4:242). By this Rousseau does not mean that empirical study of existing children will provide the requisite wisdom, any more than he thinks that man can be properly understood on the basis of civil man. Like the statue of Glaucus to which he compares civil man in the preface to the Second Discourse (SD, 91; 3:122), all the examples of children one finds in civil society are deformed. The difficulty lies in discerning the genuine form of an object of knowledge that has been deformed over time by prejudice and social influence. Thus what it means to study one’s pupils “better” is not simply that one must look at them more closely or at greater length, but that one must be able to properly evaluate what one sees when one looks at them. Rousseau’s turning away from actually existing pupils to focus on an imaginary pupil is, in its own way, “practical” insofar as it is designed to help his readers see their own pupils more clearly—which is to say, to judge what they properly are. Only then might we get to the question of how to educate them.
Rousseau’s task, therefore, is not simply to add to the current discourse about a particular subject—childhood—but to challenge the prevailing construction of the subject itself. Before offering a series of recommendations about how children ought to be educated, he addresses the question of how childhood itself is to be understood, and he suggests that the true merit of his project is its elucidation of this subject. “My vision of what must be done may have been very poor, but I believe I have seen clearly the subject on which one must work” (34; 4:242). He criticizes the child-rearing experts of his day8 on the grounds that when they look at their subject, they see not children but future men. “The wisest men concentrate on what it is important for men to know without considering what children are in a condition to learn. They are always seeking the man in the child without thinking of what he is before being a man” (33–34; 4:242).
In contrast to les sages, who see children simply as protomen and thus misunderstand their subject, Rousseau juxtaposes the figure of the tender mother who appreciates the child as a child and concerns herself with the child’s present security and happiness. In effect, Rousseau encourages les sages to become more like mothers. This is perhaps not surprising given that Rousseau often counters the sophisticated “wisdom” of experts with the humble perspective of simple souls. Moreover, Rousseau is often credited with having “invented” childhood as a separate stage of life with its own requirements, inasmuch as he insists that childhood must be considered on its own terms, and we see evidence of that here. But his point here is less to celebrate childhood innocence than to use that innocence as evidence for the natural goodness of human beings. Rousseau assimilates the tender mother’s desire to protect her child from harm to a more expansive imperative that she must shield the child’s natural goodness from the corrupting effects of human opinions and social institutions. First nature itself, and then the child, is compared to a shrub on a busy path that must be protected from damaging external influences. Rousseau addresses himself to a tender and foresighted mother whom he asks to shield the child from the ruinous impact of human opinions. “Cultivate and water the young plant before it dies. Its fruits will one day be your delights. Form an enclosure around your child’s soul at an early date. Someone else can draw its circumference, but you alone must build the fence” (38; 4:246).
Thus it seems clear that Rousseau’s emphasis on the importance of maternal care reflects his larger emphasis on nature as the proper guide for our judgments and social practices. If mothers would just be mothers again, Rousseau laments, instead of turning their children over to wet nurses and dedicating themselves to the entertainments of the city, all would be well. Indeed, “from the correction of this single abuse would soon result a general reform; nature would soon have reclaimed all its rights” (46; 4:258). Here Rousseau deploys a simple formula that reduces mothering to an activity guided simply by natural instinct rather than expert knowledge. Later in book I, another representative of this simple perspective appears: the figure of the peasant, whose simple, rustic approach to child rearing Rousseau juxtaposes favorably to the corrupt practices of the upper classes (just as the tender mother is contrasted with les sages). With these idealized images of natural parenting, Rousseau seems to suggest that the knowledge of nature required for its preservation is itself naturally available to us. Both of these “natural” perspectives, however, are revealed as incomplete in ways that point to the necessity of good judgment, even within the context of a natural education.
The Tender Mother Reconsidered
While Rousseau effusively praises the mother-child bond as the most natural of bonds, he adds (in a footnote) that what it means to “mother” is not self-evident. “The sense I give to the name mother must be explained; and that is what will be done hereafter” (38; 4:246). Although he seems to want to use the mother figure to pin down the meaning of nature, which he admits is unstable, he then destabilizes the term “mother.” At no point does he explicitly define the term, but we are given some guidance by the adjectives he uses in conjunction with it. From the outset, he addresses Emile to a mother who is both tender and foresighted. This mother is distinguished not only from the frivolous, neglectful mother whom he criticizes for abandoning her duties (and who is, arguably, no mother at all in his estimation) but also, indirectly, from the mother who exhibits “blind tenderness” toward her children, whom he (gently) criticizes in the same note. Tenderness, it seems, can be either blind or foresighted. Rousseau’s project requires “a good mother who knows how to think” (33; 4:241). Rousseau will later refer to his addressee as a “judicious” mother as well (364; 4:701). If the good mother is one who thinks, has foresight, and exercises judgment, what is her relationship to nature? This question can shed light not only on what Rousseau thinks of mothers but, more broadly, on how he understands the relationship between nature and human reflection upon nature, and the bearing of each on the development of the capacity for good judgment.
Much of Rousseau’s explicit practical advice with regard to early childhood suggests that nature clearly and unambiguously indicates the way, and that all we have to do is follow it. For example, children by nature seek freedom from tight clothing and other restrictions, so we should refrain from swaddling them. By nature children suffer a host of painful physical afflictions in their early years, from teething to fevers, from which they emerge stronger and healthier; we should therefore allow them to experience physical hardship in order to harden them. Nature is presented as a given, and the line between nature and nurture as easily discernible. By comparing our original nature to a shrub in the middle of a well-traveled path, Rousseau implies that if protecting the shrub is difficult, it is because social influences are many and strong and begin to operate from the moment of birth, not because the contours of the shrub are hard to see. The analogy works well, to a point, insofar as much of the advice of book I centers on how to care for an infant’s body so that it might be permitted to develop naturally, without artificial restraints such as shoes and swaddling blankets. Human beings are not born physically self-sufficient. It takes about a year for them to become able to walk and feed themselves. During that year, the mother’s task is to protect the “shrub”—the body—from anything that might distort its shape, as it grows into the form that is natural to it. To that end, Rousseau insists that children be bathed in cold water, fed a “natural” (vegetarian) diet, and kept away from doctors, because the natural form of the human body is to be hardy and strong.
When Rousseau focuses on the physical body, his analogy to the shrub works sufficiently well, for just as we can look to the mature plant in full flower to know the form that the young shrub ought to achieve, we can look to the adult human being to set a standard for the infant. At the same time, the fact that human infants are born so physically weak and dependent presents a difficulty for Rousseau’s contention that human beings are by nature physically strong and independent. We have to “catch up” to our natural physical form, more so than other animals. On the level of the individual (if not of the species, though the two problems intersect), there is a tension between the original form and the natural form. This is problematic insofar as Rousseau seeks to draw parallels between the development of the individual and the development of the species.
In the Second Discourse, this difficulty is suppressed. Rousseau covers the months that it takes for the infant to learn to walk (and find its own food, and therefore leave its mother) in a mere sentence or two. Because he is imagining a time before there were swaddling blankets or shoes or wet nurses to distort the natural (physical) maturation of human babies, this brevity may seem justified. Clearly, it was not necessary for the mother to “build a fence” against unnatural influences, because nothing artificial existed to threaten the child’s natural physical development.
It is therefore tempting to think that the only reason we need a book like Emile, and the only reason we need to build a fence, from Rousseau’s point of view, is that Rousseau is trying to reproduce the condition of nature in society. What I referred to earlier as the challenge of Rousseau’s “double object” would again appear to be nothing other than an effect of the already corrupted circumstances in which we cannot help but operate. However, this overlooks an important dimension of the mother’s task as outlined in book I. Her job is simultaneously to allow the unfettered growth of the body and to prevent the growth of unnatural needs and desires. The first task would have been much easier in the savage state than in civil society; the second, however, is likely to have been just as difficult.
Why? If we look carefully at Rousseau’s advice in book I of Emile about preventing the development of unnatural desires (specifically, the desire to dominate others), we see that the transformation of the infant’s physical dependence upon the mother into a psychological need to dominate her and direct her will might easily have been triggered in the state of nature. It is for this reason that Rousseau advises his reader to allow the child to relate only to things, and never to the will of another human being. The experience of the will of another will stimulate the development of the child’s. And since the child is in no position to satisfy his own desires—he is utterly dependent because he is so physically weak—the will that emerges can only be frustrated. The experience of being thwarted will give rise to anger, indignation, and the desire to dominate. It is from a faulty education in infancy, Rousseau suggests, that the corruption, inequality, unfreedom, and unhappiness of civil society all grow.
And yet such a faulty education is just as likely to come from a mother who does nurse her child as from a mother who does not, and just as likely from a mother in the state of nature (insofar as she is attentive and becomes attached) as from a mother in society. Mothers who seek to preserve their children, and to secure their happiness, may do things that, in Rousseau’s view, inadvertently lead to the warping of the child’s sense of self. He notes that the overly attentive mother can be just as harmful as the indifferent mother. “One leaves [nature] by the opposite route as well when, instead of neglecting a mother’s care, a woman carries it to excess” (47; 4:259). For example, Rousseau directs the mother to transport the child to whatever object the child desires, rather than fetching the object and bringing it to the child. Even one deviation from this practice might suffice to cause the child to begin seeing the mother as an instrument to be directed as he wills. And yet Rousseau would be hard pressed to make the case that no mother in the state of nature ever brought a pine cone to her baby when he indicated his desire for it. Indeed, what little Rousseau does say about the mother-child relationship in the Second Discourse hints at this very possibility. He argues that because the child must express his needs, it is the child (not the mother) who must invent the words to ask his mother for a particular thing (SD, 121; 3:147). Rousseau goes on to insist that this private language remains private, dying out when the mother and child part company, because his larger point is to show that language in any meaningful sense was not a part of original human nature. However, his passing remarks about how a child asks its mother to fulfill his needs raises the question—a question that goes unasked in the Second Discourse but receives considerable attention in Emile—of how the mother might respond without turning her child into a little tyrant who expects other human beings to fulfill his every whim. Such an expectation can arise, Rousseau makes clear, even when the needs themselves are very simple, as they are for infants. “The first tears of children are prayers; if one is not careful, they soon become orders” (E, 66; 4:287).
Moreover, we must consider what triggers the development of new needs and desires, which is habit. Two critical junctures in the Second Discourse identify habituation as that which transforms an innocuous (and reversible) physical dependence into a pernicious (and irreversible) psychological dependence. As man discovers fire and rudimentary tools, the “repeated utilization” (application reitérée) of various things in relation to himself and others is what engenders the perception of relations among human beings, which is the first step on the road to the unhealthy comparisons that are a function of amour-propre. Rousseau calls this the “first stirring of pride” (SD, 144; 3:166). Then, when human beings leave behind their nomadic existence and settle in rustic huts, cohabitation leads to habituation, which sets in motion another major revolution: the first developments of the heart. “The habit of living together gave birth to the sweetest sentiments known to men: conjugal love and paternal love” (SD, 146–47; 3:168). Rousseau contends that human beings can be exposed to potentially transformative things such as fire and iron ore without becoming dependent upon them, and can encounter one another briefly (even sexually) without becoming dependent upon one another, but repeated exposure triggers fundamental alterations in human nature.
One must wonder, then, at the language Rousseau uses in his brief description of the prolonged encounter between mother and infant. “The mother nursed her children at first for her own need; then, habit having endeared them to her, she nourished them afterward for their need. As soon as they had the strength to seek their food, they did not delay in leaving the mother herself” (SD, 121; 3:147). Why wouldn’t the habit of nursing endear the mother to the child just as it endears the child to the mother? Why wouldn’t the habit of seeing one another lead to the desire to see one another again, leading to the first movements of the heart? Is some sort of “fence” necessary to protect against this? Without addressing these considerations, Rousseau maintains that the child leaves the mother easily, and that soon the two do not even recognize each other.
My point is not simply to poke holes in the argument of the Second Discourse. I am not the first to notice that Rousseau’s account of the mother-child relationship strains credulity. But the account tends to be read as consistent with the rest of Rousseau’s argument in the Second Discourse, whereas I am arguing that on Rousseau’s own terms—in which the absence or presence of habituation is what maintains or destroys individual independence—the account is self-undermining. Rousseau goes to great lengths to argue that one form of physical contact that is necessary for the survival of the species (sexual intercourse) does not bring about a psychological attachment, but he says nothing about how another, equally critical form of physical contact (nursing) avoids the same potential problem—a problem to which he draws attention by mentioning in passing that one becomes “endeared” to the other.
It is perhaps for this reason that in the Second Discourse Rousseau moves on from the discussion of the mother-infant relationship by asking his readers to “suppose that this first difficulty [has been] conquered” (SD, 121; 3:147). He means the difficulty of reconciling a rudimentary language with his depiction of the state of nature as asocial; but “conquering” the problem of language by limiting language to the period of infancy only draws attention to yet another problem—the problem of infancy itself, which opens up the possibility of ruining natural independence only one generation into the story. The silence of the Second Discourse on this point is filled in by the extended discussion of infancy in Emile. Emile does not simply “apply” the concept of nature developed in the Second Discourse to a social context; it, too, explores nature as a question.
A mother in the state of nature may not have needed to build a fence to ward off corrupting social influences, because those influences did not exist; but she did have to keep her little “shrub” alive until it could survive on its own. In so doing, she had to keep the child from becoming psychologically dependent upon her—either by becoming “endeared” (attached) to her, or by wanting to dominate her will, or both. This imperative is inextricable from Rousseau’s fundamental contention that the desire to dominate others is not natural to human beings. They are not born with this desire, but “as soon as they can consider the people who surround them as instruments depending on them to set them in motion, they make use of those people to follow their inclination and to supplement their own weakness. That is how they become difficult, tyrannical, imperious, wicked, unmanageable . . . for it does not require long experience to sense how pleasant it is to act with the hands of others and to need only to stir one’s tongue to make the universe move” (E, 67–68; 4:289).
If it takes only a very small taste of the experience of wielding another person as an instrument to develop a taste for domination, then that possibility is as much a problem in nature (between mother and child) as it is in society, especially in light of Rousseau’s insistence that we are born in a state of equilibrium (despite our physical weakness) precisely because the mother acts as an extension of the child’s faculties. It seems that a child must wield the mother like an instrument in order to be considered a self-sufficient “whole,” and yet he cannot wield her or his wholeness will be disrupted by the emergence of a spirit of domination. Reflecting on the problem of infancy in the state of nature raises interesting questions about our supposed natural independence and how it is maintained.
Although book I of Emile ends where the Second Discourse begins, so to speak (when the child can walk, talk, and feed himself), only in Emile does Rousseau draw attention to the fact that a very great deal can go wrong before that point. However, read alongside Emile, the account in the Second Discourse invites us to see that the problem of “building the fence” is not simply a challenge that arises within society; it is a problem generated by nature itself, and by the need to know nature in some way in order to preserve it. But the process of seeking to know nature inevitably interferes with the preservation of nature. If a mother turns her infant into a tyrant by bringing him something he wants rather than transporting him to the thing he desires, for example, it is not due to the corruption of society; corruption would account for her lack of attentiveness, but not to her misplaced attentiveness. Her misplaced attentiveness is an expression of the very attachment that Rousseau sees as necessary to preserving a child’s potential for natural freedom and happiness until his weak infant body develops enough strength for the idea of freedom to have any meaning.
While “there is no substitute for maternal solicitude” (E, 45; 4:257), it is precisely the mother’s attachment to this particular child that works against her ability to raise the child to become, like natural man, an “abstract man” (42; 4:252) who is prepared to suffer the blows of fate and accidents of fortune throughout life. To raise such a man, “we must generalize our views” (42; 4:252). It is exactly this broader, more generalized view that is not natural to us. Solicitous mothers are in one sense like Thetis, seeking to dip their children in the water of the Styx; their good but misguided intentions lead them to plunge their children into “softness,” which “open[s] their pores to ills of every sort to which they will not fail to be prey when grown” (47; 4:259). Thus, while Rousseau’s advice to protect the child requires a tender and attentive mother, he suggests at the same time that the instinctive desire to protect one’s child is insufficient. Rousseau’s most explicit correction of the perspective of the tender mother comes in a note: “The mother wants her child to be happy, happy now. In that she is right. When she is mistaken about the means, she must be enlightened” (38; 4:246). While Rousseau may appeal to natural motherhood as an antidote to social corruption, the model of motherhood he ultimately portrays is an instructed, rather than simply natural, model.
Thus, although Rousseau initially presents the tender mother’s solicitude as a corrective to the tendency of les sages to “seek the man in the child” without focusing on the child per se, he offers several indications that this maternal perspective, too, requires correction insofar as maternal tenderness can, as mentioned earlier, be “blind.” Rousseau reprimands mothers whose protective focus on keeping a child safe (which is, of course, a sort of fence building) works against the child’s development of the capacity to live in the fullest sense, and in the fullness of time. “One thinks only of preserving one’s child. That is not enough. One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man” (42; 4:253). In other words, the protective mother needs to see the man in the child. It is precisely for this reason that Rousseau requires a good mother who knows how to think; one who is not only tender but also foresighted. Feminine care and philosophical reflection are conjoined in Rousseau’s ideal reader (and will eventually come to resemble Sophie, whose name means wisdom). Only by tapping into the mother in the thinker, and the thinker in the mother, might one develop the perspective that enables one to discern the child in the man and the man in the child.
Because human beings are inevitably shaped by environmental influences, the art of education—that is, conscious influence—is necessary. Rousseau’s gardening metaphor captures these two sides of education, negative and positive. Education is like the cultivation of a nascent plant. This cultivation is a matter of both preserving the plant’s original form and allowing it to grow into its fully developed form. On the one hand, education means building a fence in order to protect the original form. On the other hand, education “gives us” everything we need as grownups, which we lack as children. The problem is that in civil society we reverse these functions; we “teach children what they would learn much better by themselves” and “forget what only we could teach them” (78; 4:300). That is, we pervert nature where we ought to preserve it through a negative education, and fail to provide the positive education essential to human flourishing. Because we have utterly confused the two, Rousseau separates them in order to clarify each. Thus Emile’s education appears to be divisible into two stages: negative (preserving) in books I–III, and positive in books IV–V. But these two dimensions of education are two sides of one coin—essentially, not sequentially, related. Again, this reflects Rousseau’s attempt to correct the perspectives of both the mother and the sage insofar as the task of discerning the child in the man is inseparable from the task of discerning the man (that is, the well-formed man) in the child.
Preserving nature requires more than a natural bond between mother and child, because it requires more than instinct. It requires an unnatural knowledge of nature. Foresight, which is characterized as inimical to natural human independence and happiness in the earliest stages (of infancy, or of the history of the human species), is at the same time necessary to the achievement of that independence and happiness, even in the context of the “natural” family unit. Rousseau needs to replace the nuclear family with an “expert,” not because he can’t find a mother willing to nurse her baby but because however “good” such a mother might be, there is no guarantee that she knows how to think. Rousseau needs something beyond the natural attachment of parents for children, even as he insists that only the natural attachment of parents for children will generate the level of commitment necessary to the intensive task of “building the fence.” But knowledge of where to build the fence—the “circumference” or parameters of nature—is not natural. It is no wonder, then, that Rousseau presents these two steps as separable, allowing that someone other than the mother may draw the circumference of the fence that she must build. But these two apparently separable steps are not in fact sequential or separable, because each presupposes the other. The preservation of nature presupposes knowledge of its boundaries, or “the circumference,” just as one must see natural man “fully formed” in order to preserve his original form. And yet he must be preserved in order to achieve that form.
What Rousseau initially presents as separate—unselfconscious affection on the one hand, and cultivated expertise on the other—he spends the rest of Emile trying to put together. That this is his goal is already reflected in his identification of “a mother who knows how to think” as his ideal reader, a figure who is not presupposed but rather (ideally, by design) brought about by reading Emile. Her judiciousness, in other words, only emerges over the course of the five books of Emile.
The Ambiguous Origins of a Good Education
It turns out, then, that a mother is both necessary and insufficient in order to carry out Rousseau’s project. Rousseau first hints at this insufficiency when he insists that fathers as well as mothers must be wholly invested in raising their children. (The father is the first candidate for the “someone else” who is to determine the circumference—soon to be replaced by the tutor.) With this move, Rousseau rather quickly begins introducing consideration upon consideration that complicate his own simple formulas and prescriptions. To be sure, these complications arise initially from the fact of the already corrupt state of civil society. Fathers claim that they are too busy to raise their own children, and hire governors. The “natural” answer to the needs of nature is no longer available. It is in response to this situation, it seems, that Rousseau launches into a discussion of the difficulties of finding a good governor. But the difficulties he identifies do not simply stem from the fact that the governor is someone other than the father; they would apply equally to any father. The major difficulty is that in order to know how to provide a good education, one must oneself be the product of a good education. Therefore, identifying the original source of a good education is nearly impossible.
The more one thinks about it, the more one perceives new difficulties. It would be necessary that the governor had been raised for his pupil, that the pupil’s domestics had been raised for their master, that all those who have contact with him had received the impressions that they ought to communicate to him. It would be necessary to go from education to education back to I know not where. How is it possible for a child to be well raised by one who was not well raised himself? (50; 4:263)
Each good educator presupposes a previous good educator, going back to “I know not where.” This difficulty is the difficulty of all origins. It cannot be avoided by preserving the family structure. A simply “natural” education was never available, because the problem is built into nature itself, as a careful analysis of Rousseau’s requirements of natural mothers (and now fathers) has shown.
The requisite knowledge that grounds a legitimate education, Rousseau suggests, can be acquired only in practice, by blocking out all social influences and watching the form that an individual takes over a lifetime. Although it would be preferable if the governor had already educated someone, Rousseau adds that this would be “too much to wish for,” because “the same man can give only one education.” This raises a question of legitimacy: “If two were required in order to succeed, by what right would one undertake the first?” (51; 4:265). If one is required to have educated in order to be entitled to educate, and to be educated in order to be receptive to education, then how can one ever begin? This crisis reverberates throughout Rousseau’s major works. In the Social Contract, the formation of a people is a task that seems to require a people already formed. “Just as the architect, before putting up a big building, observes and tests the ground to see whether it can bear the weight, so the wise founder does not start by drafting laws that are good in themselves, but first examines whether the people for whom he destines them is suited to bear them” (SC, 157; 3:384–85). Rousseau goes on to explain that nations, like men, must reach maturity before they are ready to be made subject to law (158; 3:386). This puts the lawgiver in a difficult position, since this necessary “maturity” is achieved primarily by living under good laws and institutions. “For a newly formed people to understand wise principles of politics and to follow the basic rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit which must be the product of social institutions would have to preside over the setting up of those institutions; men would have to have already become before the advent of the law that which they become as a result of law” (156; 3:383).
It is not surprising, then, that when Rousseau fantasizes about where he would like to have been born, had he not had the good fortune of being born in Geneva, he chooses a “long-standing republic” whose origins are “lost in the darkness of time” (SD, 81; 3:113). Such a wish simply defers the problem of origins.
A parallel conundrum surfaces in the opening dialogue of Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, as “Rousseau” first begins to converse with “a Frenchman.” In response to the Frenchman’s demand that he “explain” himself, “Rousseau” laments, “I’ll explain what I mean, but it will be either the most useless or most superfluous of efforts, since everything I will say to you can be understood only by those to whom there is no need to say it.”9 Rousseau suggests that although he wishes to instruct his readers, the only readers who will learn from him are the ones who already know, at least on some level, what he is trying to teach them.
How does a good lawmaker or educator come to be? How does a well-governed populace or individual come to be? How does a good reader come to be? These are all different versions of the same problem for Rousseau, who seems tempted by the resolution of divine intervention. The legislator must have divine qualities in order to effect the necessary coincidence of good laws and a good people, as each presupposes the other (echoing the Republic’s miraculous coincidence of philosophy and political power in the philosopher-king). The education of Emile—the education of nature—is the “first,” or original, education that makes others possible, grounding them not only in the experience of the author in writing the book but also in that of the reader in reading the book. Emile’s education is analogous to the Republic’s city-in-speech in allowing the pursuit of a philosophical question that has concrete political consequences without actually setting into motion any of those political consequences. As an education “in speech,” or a first education, Emile is designed to make a certain experience available to the reader while avoiding the degeneration that Rousseau believes tends to result from the expansion of human experience.
It is for this reason that Rousseau contrives to proceed independently of any preexisting context for his thought experiment. He declares Emile an orphan. Moreover, without reflecting on the kind of education that a suitable tutor would need to have had in order to carry out a “natural” education, he takes for granted that he possesses the necessary qualities. In other words, the origins of the tutor’s own wisdom are erased, or at least “lost in the darkness of time,” to borrow the language of the Second Discourse. This creates an illusion of a radically new beginning, which is possible only in theory or in fiction. Political and educational programs—even the most revolutionary—always begin in medias res. It is only as author that Rousseau can put an end to the infinite regress, functioning (like “the author of things”) as an unmoved mover. The question becomes whether it is possible to be a nonauthoritarian author. Rousseau certainly distances himself from his own authority by repeatedly inviting the reader to judge his efforts. And yet this could be dismissed as yet another ruse of a master manipulator. We seem to be left with the unsatisfying choice between requiring a radically new beginning and allowing the problem of legitimacy to be covered over by poetic illusion.
In book I of Emile, however, Rousseau does not cover over the problem of origins but rather draws attention to the difficulties that inhere in his attempt to resolve it. For example, he draws attention to the problem of time. By raising the question of the proper age for a governor, Rousseau acknowledges that the wisdom that confers legitimacy can be developed only over time, but meanwhile time passes, conditions change, and it may be too late to begin anew. Wisdom lends legitimacy to rule but exacerbates inequality, while youthfulness creates the appearance of equality but limits the degree of wisdom that can be expected, and therefore undermines the legitimacy of any authority that is exercised. The younger the governor is, the less likely he is to have had any previous teaching experience. Rousseau tries to narrow the inevitable gap between the governor and the student by insisting that they be as close in age as possible. He acknowledges the paradoxical nature of this requirement, however, when he states that the governor should be “as young as a wise man can be” (E, 51; 4:265). With this comment, along with his remark that it would be “too much to wish for” an educator to have already educated someone (ad infinitum), Rousseau points to the impossibility of the very conditions of legitimacy he has invoked.10 It is by simultaneously appealing to them and questioning the appeal that he models an intermediate standard of “authorial” authority that avoids the twin extremes discussed above. Book I of Emile both makes a beginning and draws attention to the problem of making a beginning. In light of this, we must pay careful attention not only to how the precepts laid out in book I provide a foundation for the project as a whole, allowing these to condition our reading of the subsequent chapters, but also to how these precepts are revisited, qualified, and refined as Rousseau’s project in Emile unfolds.
A pattern has emerged: the tender and foresighted mother requires that someone else draw the circumference for her as she builds a fence around her child’s soul; the existence of a suitable governor requires that a suitable governor already exist in order to raise the child; moreover, that governor needs to have already educated a pupil before he is fit to educate another one. And yet all of these double requirements must be met somehow simultaneously; the ideal mother both is natural and knows how to think. Finally, and most important, we must know nature in order to preserve it, but we must preserve it if it is to be available to us as an object of knowledge. Even as Rousseau claims to begin with nature, he suggests that the question of what nature is cannot be answered before the project (which nature supposedly guides) is completed, and hence cannot function as a direct or unmediated source of universal rules or standards that can be applied to all particulars. This, again, is what calls for judgment and also makes judgment possible. Rousseau’s opening claim that everything is good in the hands of the “author” of things and degenerates in the hands of man (37; 4:245) points indirectly to the need for a realm between natural perfection (which denies freedom and makes judgment superfluous) and utter deformity (in which our judgments are indistinguishable from corrupt prejudices and in which we are thus also left fundamentally unfree in a different way). Rousseau’s exploration of the question of a “natural education” aspires to locate the genuinely human somewhere between these two poles in order to preserve both human freedom and the possibility of judgment.
