Archives for March 2021

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile, or, on Education. Allan Bloom translation. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

 

 

1. Living ‘la différence’

Rousseau calls Book V “the last act in the drama of youth” (V.357). Here, the search for Sophie will end, happily. In this search, Rousseau somewhat uncharacteristically concurs with the Bible (“It is not good for man to be alone”) but disagrees again with Locke, who, in his characteristically unerotic way, stops his education before the Young Gentleman marries (V.357). “But as I do not have the honor of raising a gentleman”—Emile being an aristocratic young man educated to avoid the corruption of bourgeois life—I “shall take care not to imitate Locke on this point” (V.357).

Who is Sophie? What manner of woman ought Emile to marry? She “ought to be a woman as Emile is a man—that is to say, she ought to have everything which suits the constitution of her species and her sex in order to fill her place in the physical and moral order” (V.357). Rousseau devotes the first portion of Book V to “examining the similarities and the differences of her sex and ours” (V.357). 

Men and women are fundamentally equal. “In everything not connected with sex, woman is man,” with the same organs, needs, and faculties (V.357). “In everything connected with sex,” however, “woman and man are in every respect related and in every respect different,” forming a complementary dyad (V.357). “The difficulty of comparing them comes from the difficulty of determining what in their constitutions is due to sex and what is not” (V.357), what is natural and what is conventional. This difficulty becomes acute when considering the “moral influence” sexual differences and sexual relations “must have” on the souls of men and women. But the fact of equal humanity remains fundamental, even as ‘equality’ cannot mean ‘sameness’: “How vain are the disputes as to whether one of the two sexes is superior or whether they are equal—as though each, in fulfilling nature’s ends according to its own particular purpose, were thereby less perfect than if it resembled the other more! In what they have in common, they are equal. Where they differ, they are not comparable.” (V.358). 

Men are physically stronger than women; in their relations, therefore, men “ought to be active and strong” women “passive and weak” (V.358). The man’s “merit is in his power; he pleases by the sole fact of his strength” (V.358). “This is not the law of love, I agree. But it is that of nature prior to love itself.” (V.358). Those who deny it deny reality. On this elemental level, woman must submit. However, she has a power, as well. “Her own violence is in her charms. It is by these that she ought to constrain him to find his strength and make use of it.” (V.358). And so she puts up some resistance to his advances; she can do this because her suitor isn’t the only one—he competes with other men. Knowing that she cannot win a fight with a man, she can avoid physical conflict altogether, relying on psychological ruse. As Professor Jensen remarked, recalling Machiavelli, the man may be the lion, but the woman is the fox. The man “triumphs in the victory that the other has made him win” (V.358). All this is good. “How can one fail to see that if reserve did not impose on one sex the moderation which nature imposes on the other, the result would soon be the ruin of both, and mankind would perish by the means established for preserving it?” (V.358-359).

For example, women are no longer receptive to men when pregnant, “accept[ing] no more passengers when the ship has its cargo” (V.359). Menstruation further limits their passion. Thus “instinct impels them, and instinct stops them” (V.359). Morally, this results in womanly modesty, a woman’s inclination to insist on men’s respect for her person. The Supreme Being gave man “inclinations without limit” but also the capacity for freedom, that is, the capacity for self-command (V.359). “While abandoning man to immoderate passions, He joins reason to these passions in order to govern them,” giving him the ability to restrain himself in the face of womanly modesty. “While abandoning woman to unlimited desires”—not passions, which are active and strong—the Supreme Being “joins modesty to these desires in order to constrain them” (V.359). To both men and women, but especially to women, “He adds yet another real recompense for the good use of one’s faculties,” taste (V.359). But not any taste. This is “the taste we acquire for decent things when we make them the rule of our actions” (V.359). Taken together, human moral capacities, whether those characteristically male or female, deriving from the physical differences between the sexes, or those shared by all human beings regardless of sex (compassion, for example), distinguish human sensibilities from “the instincts of beasts” (V.359). Lions and foxes in their own way, yes, but fundamentally human.

Distinctively human happiness in sexual relations cannot then result from bestial force, from rape. “The freest and sweetest of all acts does not admit of real violence. Nature and reason oppose it: nature , in that it has provided the weaker with as much strength as is needed to resist when it pleases her; reason, in that real rape is not only the most brutal of all acts but the one most contrary to its end—either because the man thus declares war on his companion and authorizes her to defend her person and her liberty even at the expense of the aggressor’s life, or because the woman alone is the judge of the condition she is in, and a child would have no father if every man could usurp the father’s rights” (V.359).

This means that the physically stronger man only “appears to be the master but actually depends on the weaker” (V.360). This isn’t a mere convention, some “frivolous practice of gallantry,” nor is it a matter of amour-propre, “the proud generosity of a protector”; it derives from “an invariable law of nature which gives woman more facility to excite the desires than man to satisfy them” (V.360). The fox’s “usual ruse” against (but also in favor of) the lion “is always to leave this doubt between them,” the “doubt whether it is weakness which yields to strength or the will which surrenders” (V.359). Does she really love me? the man asks. She leaves him in suspense. Why do women “pretend to be unable to lift the lightest burdens”? Because they not only wish “to appear delicate” but to take “the shrewder precaution” of “prepar[ing] in advance excuses and the right to be weak in case of need” (V.360). Pregnant, a woman needs a gentle but leonine defender. Without one, how would the species survive?

 

2. The problem with modern morals

Modern morals differ from those of the ancients, and that difference comes from the “gallantry” that rules the customs of courtship under the aristocracy which developed with the feudal order of civil society (V.360). “Finding that their pleasures depended more on the will of the fair sex than they had believed, men have captivated that will by attentions for which the fair sex has amply compensated them” (V.360). Even in these exercises of amour-propre one sees “how the physical leads us unawares to the moral, and how the sweetest laws of love are born little by little from the coarse union of the sexes.” (V.360). “Women possess their empire not because men wanted it that way”—their passions could truly rule men would tyrannize—but “because nature wants it that way” (V.360). This empire “belonged to women before they appeared to have it” (V.360).

“There is no parity between the two sexes in regard to the consequences of sex,” for the simple and obvious reason that women get pregnant and suckle their children while men do neither (V.361). Woman therefore “needs patience and gentleness, a zeal and an affection that nothing can rebuff in order to raise her children”; “she serves as the link between them and their father,” as “she alone makes him love them and gives him the confidence to call them his own” (V.361). The male mates with the female out of erotic passion but he cares for the woman who cares for their children out of love of ‘his own.’ Crucially, this depends not on virtues but on taste, “or else the human species would soon be extinguished” (V.361), virtue being in chronically short supply.

This is why Rousseau deprecates what would come to be called modern feminism. “The strictness of the relative duties of the two sexes is not and cannot be the same. When woman complains on this score about unjust man-made inequality, she is wrong.” (V.361). Her error comes from taking “this inequality” to be “a human institution,” a work of prejudice not of reason (V.361). Nothing could be further from the truth. “It is up to the sex that nature has charged with the bearing of children to be responsible for them to the other sex” (V.361). Yes, the unfaithful husband is “unjust and barbarous” (V.361). “But the unfaithful woman does more; she dissolves the family and breaks all the bonds of nature” by making her husband wonder whether or not the child he would love as his own really is his own. “What does the family become in such a situation if not a society of secret enemies whom a guilty woman arms against one another in forcing them to feign mutual love?” (V.361). It is not enough to be a wife; one ought to be Caesar’s wife, above reproach, “judged to be faithful by her husband by those near her, by everyone” (V.361). Women’s modesty isn’t only for courtship but for life; her “honor and reputation [are] no less indispensable to them than chastity” (V.361). Whispered to feminists: “To maintain vaguely that the two sexes are equal and their duties are the same, is to lose oneself in vain declaiming; it is to say nothing as long as one does not respond to these considerations” (V.362). 

Ah, the feminist replies, women “do not always produce children” (V.362). True enough, “but their proper purpose”—their indisputable physical nature—is indeed “to produce them” (V.362). If not women, who? Or what? True, in the big cities, women produce few children, but “what would become of your cities if women living more simply and more chastely far away in the country did not make up for the sterility of the city ladies?” (V.362). A “woman’s status” doesn’t change if she is or is not a mother, as “both nature and morals ought to provide” (V.362). For example, between her pregnancies shall we ordain that women become warriors, “chang[ing] temperament and tastes as a chameleon does colors,” “delicate at one moment and robust at another”? (V.362). Or shall we require them to take up arms at the age of fifty, when they can no longer bear children, at the age when men are no longer eligible for conscription both by nature and by law?

Feminists remind Rousseau of Plato’s imaginary republic. He has the women of the ‘guardian’ class undertake the same physical exercises as the men. “I can well believe it! Having removed private families from his regime and no longer knowing what to do with women, he found himself forced to make them men.” (V.362). In his quest for justice, Plato ignores “the sweetest sentiments of nature,” pretending to overlook the “natural base on which to form conventional ties; as though the love of one’s nearest were not the principle of the love one owes the state; as though it were not by means of the small fatherland which is the family that the heart attaches itself to the larger one; as though it were not the good son, the good husband, and the good father who make the good citizen!” (V.363). In this, the ‘ancient’ philosopher Rousseau more closely resembles is Aristotle.

 

3. Education for womanhood

Given the physical and (therefore) moral differences between the boys and girls who will become men and women, “they ought not to have the same education” (V.363). In this as in all else, “always follow nature’s indications” (V.363). In so doing, men will stop complaining about women. If you say women generally have such-and-such a fault that men generally don’t have, “your pride deceives you” (V.363). Women’s supposed failings would be failings in a man, but “they are their good qualities” (V.393). Conversely, women should not complain that men deprive them of a man’s education, refusing to admit them to colleges. “Would to God that there were none for boys; they would be more sensibly and decently raised!” (V.363). If women stop taking the time to make themselves up, to practicing the “mincing ways [which] seduce us,” to dress tastefully and engage in witty badinage, they will indeed become more like men. But “the more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters,” falling back on their uncontestable superiority of physical strength (V.363). 

The sexes are already equal. “All the faculties common to the two sexes are not equally distributed between them; but taken together, they balance out. Woman is worth more as woman and less as man.” (V.364). (And, one can only conclude, vice-versa.) If women imitate men to the neglect of femininity they will suffer. “Crafty women see this too well to be duped by it,” and so aim at “usurp[ing] our advantages” without “abandon[ing] theirs” (V.364). They want the option of choosing between career and staying at home with the children, but woe betide the male naïf who supposes he can abandon his duties as breadwinner. This notwithstanding, when it comes to juggling career and motherhood, women “are unable to manage both well—because the two are incompatible—and they remain beneath their own level without getting up to ours, thus losing half their value” while nonetheless complaining of unequal pay and glass ceilings preventing their promotion at work (V.364). 

“Does it follow that she ought to be raised in ignorance of everything and limited to the housekeeping functions alone?” (V.364). It does not. They are not by nature the servants of men or household automatons. In giving women “agreeable and nimble minds,” nature “wants them to think, to judge, to love, to know, to cultivate their minds as well as their looks” (V.364). “These are the weapons nature gives them to take the place of the strength they lack and to direct ours” (V.364). Emile’s education was limited to what was suitable for a man to know; Sophie’s education should be limited to what is suitable for a woman to know. Since the natural purposes, inclinations, and duties of men and women differ, their education should be different. “Woman and man are made for one another, but their mutual dependence is not equal” (V.364).

On the elemental, physical level, men want women but women need men as much as they want them. Woman needs man and man must have his mate, as someone once sang. It is simply a fact that men “would survive more easily without [women] than they would without us”; therefore, “they depend on our sentiments,” having been placed by nature “at the mercy of men’s judgments, as much for their own sake as for that of their children” (V.364). Women must learn to be esteemed, to please—not only to be temperate but to be “recognized as such” (V.364). Emile was educated to resist opinion, to eschew amour-propre because “opinion is the grave of virtue among men” (V.364). But opinion is virtue’s “throne among women” (V.365), their title to rule.

“To please men, to be useful to them”—notice that Sophie shall be as much a ‘utilitarian’ as Emile, if not in the same way—to “make herself loved and honored by them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make their lives agreeable and sweet”—lives which, outside the household, remain harsh and often bitter—such “are the duties of women at all times, and they ought to be taught from childhood” to perform them (V.365). This scarcely means that a woman should learn to please every Tom, Dick, or Harry who comes along. “There is quite a difference between wanting to please the man of merit, the truly lovable man, and wanting to please those little flatterers wo dishonor both their own sex and the one they imitate. Neither nature nor reason can bring a woman to live in men what resembles herself; nor is it by adopting their ways that she ought to seek to make herself loved.” (V.365). After all, “one has to be foolish to love fools,” and Sophie is no one’s fool (V.365).

To be useful to one another, men and women need complementary physical training. “Women need enough strength to do everything they do with grace; men need enough adroitness to do everything they do with facility” (V.367). Women need to be healthy if they are to bear children. Paradoxically, girls boarding in convents, living on “coarse food” and playing outdoor games, turn out healthier than those raised amongst family members at home, where they are “delicately fed, always pampered or scolded, always seated within range of her mother’s eyes, shut up in a room” (V.367). “This is how the body and the heart of youth are ruined”; “everything that hinders and constrains nature” should be firmly uprooted (V.367). 

 

4. Girls’ minds and hearts

“Whatever humorists may say, good sense belongs equally to the two sexes” (V.368). By temperament “girls are generally more docile than boys” but that doesn’t mean “anything ought to be demanded from them whose utility they cannot see,” and mothers should show that to them, especially since “intelligence is more precocious in girls than in boys” (V.368). Unlike boys, girls should learn to read, so long as they see its utility. (“There are very few girls who do not abuse this fatal science more than they make good use of it.”) (V.368). To keep them focused on useful things, they should learn arithmetic before anything else, “for nothing presents a more palpable utility at all times, requires longer practice, and is so exposed to error as calculation” (V.368). As gluttonous as any boy, your daughter may be rewarded with sweet cherries when she finishes her arithmetic lesson; “I assure you that she would soon know how to calculate” (V.368).

Tocqueville admires the sober industriousness of American girls and women. He may have learned to do so from Rousseau, who commends vigilance and the habit of work. “Always justify the cares that you impose on young girls, but always impose cares on them,” “idleness and disobedience” being “the two most dangerous defects” to which they are prone (V.369). This teaches habits of constraint, and since the “most severe of all constraints,” propriety, will be their lifelong duty, they should begin to practice it as soon as possible, “tam[ing] all their caprices in order to submit them to the wills of others” (V.369). To avoid “dissipation, frivolity, and inconstancy” “teach them above all to conquer themselves” (V.369). 

Girls “indulge themselves in their games with even more intensity than boys do,” so take care to interrupt them before they get carried away (V.370). “Do not deprive them of gaiety, laughter, noise, and frolicsome games, but prevent them from getting their fill of one in order to run to another” (V.370). Habits of constancy reinforce their true nature. And since “the first and most important quality of a woman is gentleness,” which she should practice for her own sake even more than for her husband’s, the gentleness and docility inculcated in girls by accustoming them to halt their games before they’ve become satiated with them will serve them and their families well (V.370). “Shrewish” and “imperious” habits stemming from natural talkativeness wrongly guided will wreck their household; “they are often right to complain, but they are always wrong to scold” (V.370). “Each sex should keep to its own tone. A husband who is too gentle can make a woman impertinent; but unless a man is a monster, the gentleness of a woman brings him around and triumphs over him sooner or later” (V.370). Their natural cleverness suffices, adding charm “to the society of the two sexes,” “repress[ing] the petulance of children,” even restraining husbands who incline to brutishness (V.372). “I know that crafty and wicked women abuse it. But what does vice not abuse?” (V.372).

 

5. The education of taste

“Everything that hinders and constrains nature is in bad taste” (V.367). Girls differing from boys by nature, their tastes differ, too. “Boys seek movement and noise: drums, boots, little carriages. Girls prefer what presents itself to sight and is useful for ornamentation: mirrors, jewels, dresses, particularly dolls,” the latter being “the special entertainment of this sex,” “determined by its purpose,” raising children (V.367). As for ornamentation or adornment, it constitutes “the physical part of the art of pleasing,” the one with which girls begin (V.367). 

As they mature, girls like boys will the more sophisticated tastes of the mind. It is “by means of taste [that] the mind is imperceptibly opened to ideas of the beautiful of every sort and, finally, to the moral notions related to them” (V.375). Among the powers of the mind “talent of speaking holds first place in the art of pleasing,” and “young girls learn to chatter attractively” in short order (V.375). They “talk sooner, more easily, and more attractively” than boys, as befits their need to please and to charm (V.376). “Man says what he knows; woman says what pleases”; “the truth ought to be the only element common in their discourse” (V.376).

For this reason, “one should not restrain the chatter of girls, like that of boys, with this harsh question: ‘What is it good for?’ but one should put another question, whose response is no easier ‘What effect will it have?'” (V.376). If a girl learns to subordinate this question to the governing principle—not to lie—her taste will develop into sound morality without losing its charm.

 

5. Religiosity rightly understood 

Christianity should be handled with care. Do not let it become too austere. “By enslaving decent women only to gloomy duties, we have banished from marriage everything which could make it attractive to men” (V.374). This is because Christian education often puts so much emphasis on women’s duties that it makes them “intractable and vain” (V.374). “By forbidding women song, dance, and all the entertainments of the world, [Christianity] makes them sullen, shrewish, and unbearable in their homes,” preventing them “from being lovable” in the eyes of their husbands (V.374). But “after all, Christians are men” (V.374). Make the home miserable and they will seek their pleasures elsewhere.

Neither boys nor girls can “form for themselves any true idea of religion”—by which (in this book, at least) Rousseau means the “natural religion”—but he wants the girl’s parent or governor speak to her sooner about it (V.377). This advice might be supposed to register girls’ superior verbal precociousness; Rousseau has something else in mind, however. “Women’s reason is practical and makes them very skillful at finding means for getting to a known end, but not at finding that end itself” (V.377). Religion consists of means to an all-important end. If you “wait for girls to be in a position to discuss these profound questions methodically,” you “would run the risk of never speaking to them about it at all” (V.377). This, he adds, suggests why religion should and does uphold the sanctity of the marriage vow. The partnership of man and woman “produces a moral person of which the woman is the eye and the man the arm, but they have such a dependence on one another that the woman learns from the man what must be seen”—the end or purpose of their shared life—and “the man learns from the woman what must be done,” the means to that end (V.377). “If woman could ascend to general principles as well as man can, and if man had as good a mind for details as woman does, they would always be independent of one another, they would live in eternal discord, and their partnership would not exist. But in the harmony which reigns between them, everything tends to the common end; they do not know who contributes more. Each follows the prompting of the other; each obeys, and both are masters.” (V.377). Here again, Rousseau departs from Plato for Aristotle, who finds in marriage the distinctively political relationship, the condition of ruling and being ruled, in turn.

To be unable to define the end of any activity is to be unable rightly to measure the means to that end. “Unable to draw the rule of their faith from themselves alone, women cannot set limits of certainty and reason to their faith; they let themselves be carried away by countless external influences, and thus they are always beneath or beyond the true”—natural extremists, as it were, “libertines or fanatics” (V.377). “There are none who know how to join wisdom with piety” (V.377). This isn’t their fault, simply. It is an excrescence of our own “ill-regulated authority,” whereby “libertinism of morals makes piety despised” among ‘secularists’ and “the terrors of repentance” render piety tyrannical among ‘religionists’ (V.377). Naturally ruled by opinion, women find themselves led astray by contemporary bad opinion. In speaking to girls of religion, then, take care to explain yourself in the Cartesian way—clearly and distinctly. “Faith that is given to obscure ideas is the first source of fanaticism, and faith that one is required to give to absurd things leads to madness or disbelief” (V.378).

Don’t make religion “an object of gloom and constraint” for girls, an onerous “task or a duty” (V.378). For example, don’t make them memorize articles of faith or even prayers. Instead, pray in front of them “without forcing them to be there,” always speaking to Jesus Christ in the succinct manner of Jesus Himself, and “with suitable meditation and respect” (V.378). As always with Rousseauian education, “Set an example! Otherwise one never succeeds at anything with children.” (V.378). “It is less important that young girls know their religion early than that they know it well and, above all, that they love it” (V.378).

Rousseau reserves his sharpest criticism for the practice of requiring children to memorize the Catholic Church catechism. The catechism supplies answers to the questions it asks—exactly what Rousseau had disparaged in his discussion of Emile’s education as a “mature child.” Girls mature before boys do. Therefore, “they ought to respond [to questions] only with what they think and never with what has been dictated to them,” inasmuch as “in the mouths of children these answers are really lies, since the children expound what they do not understand and affirm what they are not in a position to believe. Even among the most intelligent men,” Rousseau adds, pointedly, “show me those who do not lie in saying their catechism.” (V.378).

Instead of all that, teach the girl a simple catechism based on nature, showing her that she will grow, become a mother, grow old, then die, leaving behind her children. This is the catechism of the natural religion. What the boy receives as an adolescent the girl receives as a mature child. Such doctrines as the virgin birth and such questions as whether “the substance of the Father and the Son are the same or only similar” have no more relevance “to the human species than knowing on what day of the moon one ought to celebrate Easter” (V.381). “Let each person think about these things as he pleases” (V.381). What all persons need to know about God is that he exists, we are His children, He commands us to be just and loving to one another, beneficent and merciful, keep our promises “even to our enemies and His” (V.381). “These and similar dogmas are the ones it is important to teach the youth and to persuade all the citizens to accept” (V.381). 

Given the practical bent of girls and women, don’t try to “make your daughters theologians and reasoners; teach them regarding heaven only those things that serve human wisdom,” “accustoming them always to feel themselves under the eyes of God” and therefore “to do good without ostentation because He loves it; to suffer evil without a murmur because He will compensate them for it; finally, to be all the days of their lives as they will be glad to have been when they appear before Him” (V.381). “This is the true religion.” prey neither to impiety nor fanaticism (V.381). It is religion within the limits of natural reason alone, presented in terms a mature female child can understand and accept. These are the terms of opinion, the ruler of women.

 

6. The arbiter of opinion, and the arbiter of the arbiter

What, then, can arbitrate among the opinions girls and women will hear? “To what will we reduce women if we give them as their law only public prejudices?” (V.382). The person who wins Emile’s heart and nurtures their children must never be “abased” (V.382). As the governor has taught Emile, so Sophie will be taught that “a rule prior to opinion exists for the whole human species,” a rule which gives “inflexible direction” to the content of all other rules (V.382). “This rule is the inner sentiment” (V.382), he reminds us, the rule that “prejudges prejudice itself,” and if the rule of opinion and the rule of inner sentiment do not cohere, our education has failed. “Sentiment without opinion will not give [girls] that delicacy of soul which adorns good morals with worldly honor; and opinion without sentiment will only make them false and dishonest women who put appearance in the place of virtue” (V.382).

What can make these two rules cohere, arbitrate the verdicts of the arbiter, serve as the Supreme Court of the soul? “That faculty is reason” (V.382). Many ask if women are capable of “solid reasoning,” whether one should bother to “cultivate” it in them, and whether such efforts can succeed. More, given Rousseau’s standard of utility in all things for those who are citizens, “is its cultivation useful for the functions which are are imposed” on women? “Is it compatible with the simplicity that suits them?” (V.382). 

Once again, Rousseau eschews the extremes. On the one side are those who would make a wife “only the master’s first servant,” dutifully mending his clothes and cooking his meals; on the other side are those who, “not content to leave her above us in the qualities proper to her sex,” would “make her our equal in all the rest” at the same time” (V.382). Women are as capable of exercising their reason when it comes to arriving at knowledge of their duties as men are. “The obedience and fidelity she owes to her husband and the consequences of her position so natural and easily sensed that she cannot without bad faith refuse her consent to the inner sentiment that guides her, nor fail to recognize her duty if her inclinations are still uncorrupted” (V.382). In so acting as to “merit [the] esteem” of her husband, she will obtain it—if he has any sense at all (V.383). He probably will, since she chose him. 

To assure this, she will need to know a lot more than sewing and weaving and cooking. She will need to know the ‘weaving’ of men’s institutions, practices, and proprieties. And to know that, she will need to know “the source of human judgments” and “the passions determining them” (V.383). To be sure, she will register the opinions of others, but with her conscience or inner sentiment to guide her, and her conscience itself guided by a rational understanding of her rightful duties as well as those of her husband, she will compare the opinions of others in civil society with her conscience, “prefer[ring] the former only when the two are in contradiction” (V.383). Thus “she becomes the judge of her judges; she decides when she ought to subject herself to them and when she ought to take exception to them” (V.383). And, of course, “none of this can be done well without cultivating her mind and her reason” (V.383).

In this, she builds on her own nature. At the dinner table, the man can say “what was said to him” and what the people around him did; meanwhile, the woman notices “what was whispered at the other end of the table” (V.384). She can read faces, gestures. “In what does this whole art depend if not on sharp and continuous observations which make her see what is going on in men’s hearts at every instant, and which dispose her to bring to each secret movement that she notices the force needed to suspend or accelerate it? Now, is this art learned? No, it is born with women,” whose “presence of mind, incisiveness, and subtle observations” constitute “the science of women.” (V.384). It is the womanly form of noēsis. “Cleverness at taking advantage” of these strengths and the insights gained by means of them is the womanly form of phronēsis.

With its clumsy efforts at ‘enlightenment,’ “the maxims of modern philosophy” crudely ridicule women’s modesty and “its alleged falseness” (V.386). “I see that the most certain effect of this philosophy will be to take from the women of our age the bit of honor remaining to them,” but more than that, and as bad or worse, it will rob them of the subtlety of their intellects and the authority of their judgments in ‘theory and practice’ (V.386).

 

7. What’s a girl to do?

To resist the ham-handed denaturing of women, the education of girls should aim at three things. First, girls should learn “to love their duties out of regard for their advantage” (V.386). For girls and boys, men and women, and human beings as such, “the essential thing is to be what nature made us” (V.386). 

Second, and generally speaking, “the quest for abstract and speculative truths, principles, and axioms in the sciences, for everything that tends to generalize ideas, is not within the competence of women” (V.386). They are the practical ones, the ones better suited to “apply the principles man has found, and to make the observations which lead man to the establishment of principles” (V.386). It should be noticed that this would in no way preclude a woman from scientific investigations, although it would mean that far fewer women than men are likely to become ‘theoretical physicists.’ But of course for most women, as for most men, non-scientists, the work of life will be more down-to-earth. In the household, a woman makes up for her inferiority of physical strength with mental facility. As she “estimates and judges the forces she can put to work to make up for her weaknesses,” namely, “men’s passions,” she develops a “science of mechanics” which is “more powerful than ours,” as its “levers unsettle the human heart” (V.387). In her “profound study of the mind of man—not an abstraction of the mind of man in general, but the minds of the men around her, the minds of the men to whom she is subjected by either law or opinion,” she “will read in men’s hearts better than they do,” even as they “philosophize about the human heart better than she does” (V.387). “It is for women to discover experimental morality, so to speak, and for us to reduce it to a system. Woman has more wit, man more genius; woman observes, and man reasons”—i.e., reasons ‘abstractly.’

Third, parents and governors should let girls see the world. It is folly to lock them up in convents. When they do retreat to the ‘cloister’ of the household as adults, their home will then be no cloister but a center of civil society in which she and her husband will radiate their good influence within a real, local community. Rousseau again criticizes the uncivil society of the major cities, where mothers lose their subtlety and therefore their power, pushing their children and often their husbands aside in an attempt to shine in the court of public opinion. But that is an unjust and foolish court, that rewards false modesty and real libertinism—habits not of liberty but of despotism. A woman’s “real empire begins with her virtues” (V.390). “Woe to the age in which women lose their ascendancy and in which their judgments no longer have an effect on men! This is the last degree of depravity.” (V.390).

Moderns have forgotten that in Sparta, ancient Germany, and Rome women upheld the public virtues, the manly virtues. In Rome especially, “all the great revolutions…came from women,” whether it as liberty from the tyranny of the Tarquins, plebeian accession to consular office, the downfall of the Decemvirs (V.390) and other events familiar to Rousseau’s readers from Livy.

Will the exercise of such formidable powers make women less lovable? Hardly: “I maintain that virtue is no less favorable to love than to the other rights of nature, and that the authority of the beloved gains no less from virtue than does the authority of wives and mothers” (V.391). Why so? because “there is no true love without enthusiasm, and no enthusiasm without an object of perfection, real or chimerical, but always existing in the imagination” (V.391). In love, “everything is only illusion,” imaginary; yet love itself really does animate and direct us toward “the sentiments for the truly beautiful,” which takes us out of ourselves, and really does elevate our souls, make them better than they would be than if we thought of love as a “sensual and coarse passion” (V.391). No one willingly dies, no one sacrifices his ‘self,’ his ‘I’ for a body, however enticing. This is as close as Rousseau gets to an explaining the agapic love of Christianity, the sublime, in terms of beauty, in terms of nature instead of divinity conceived as holy, as super-natural.

“Throughout the ages the natural relations do not change” (V.391). If one obeys even “fantastic opinions” while “be[ing] in command of oneself,” that is “a grand and beautiful thing” in reality and not in fantasy (V.391). That is why “the true motives of honor will always speak to the heart of every woman of judgment who knows how to seek life’s happiness in her position,” every woman who is honored and honors herself for her chastity (V.391). Such sentiments and motives are neither too base nor too sublime but stand the natural test of reason.

“Do you want, then, to inspire young girls with the love of good morals? Without constantly saying to them, ‘Be pure,’ give them a great interest in being pure,” a rational interest (V.392). Show the value of purity to them “in the present moment, in the relationships of their own age, in the character of their lover. Depict for them the good man, the man of merit; teach them to recognize him, to love him, and to love him for themselves, to prove to them that this man alone can make the women to whom he is attached—wives or beloveds—happy” (V.392). This is the way “to lead them to virtue by means of reason,” showing them “that the empire of their sex and all its advantages depend not only on the good conduct and the morals of women but also on those of men, that they have little hold over vile and base souls, and that a man will serve his mistress no better than he serves virtue” (V.392). Ruling this “noble empire,” a woman esteemed by her lovers “sends them with a nod to the end of the world, to combat, to glory, to death, to anything she pleases” (V.393). But what she pleases will be no whim.

“This is the spirit in which Sophie has been raised” (V.393), and it is to her Rousseau now turns. 

 

 

 

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile, or, On Education. Allan Bloom translation. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

 

1. Distracting, then guiding, the eroticism of youth

Nature “forms the natural man” more readily than it forms “the moral man” (IV.314). In youth, the body is strong “while the soul is still languorous and weak” (IV.314). The fundamental fact for the governor to keep in mind is that “temperament always precedes reason”; this being so, Emile’s education thus far has consisted in improving his temperament by restraining his passions, “the empire of the senses,” and arousing his reason as it slowly develops, “in order that man may as much as possible always be one” (IV.314). Both sentiments and reason are natural; the educator’s challenge is to unite them in a way that serves the good of the pupil. Now that he has been introduced to the god of the natural religion, “what new holds we have given ourselves over our pupil,” “new means of speaking to his heart” which enable him to find “his true interest in being good,” in “doing good” without social or legal pressures, in “being just between God and himself” and doing his duty, “carrying virtue in his heart” with no bifurcation between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ man. In a word, Emile has been ‘saved’—saved from being a ‘bourgeois,’ an outwardly respectable but inwardly conniving engine of amour-propre. (IV.314). He is morally unified, always “one” not dual or self-contradictory. As such, he can enjoy “that durable happiness which the repose of a good conscience and the contemplation of this supreme Being promise him in the other life after he has spent this one well” (IV.314). He does not “adorn vice with the mask of virtue” (IV.315). 

Moreover, unlike other youths, Emile does not associate reason with dominance. He is neither rebellious nor self-indulgent but instead “ready to subject himself to the yoke of nascent reason” by consent, finding in reason a useful instrument of self-government (IV.315). Now that he is too old to tolerate “anything children are told,” “I speak to him as to a man and tell him only new things,” things that would have bored him as a child but now are more “to his taste” (IV.316). The capacity to reason well and the onset of sexual passion occur at about the same time—the “true moment of nature” (IV.316), of human maturity. “Since man must die, he must reproduce in order that the species may endure and the order of the world be preserved” (IV.316). “Still your disciple,” “he is no longer your pupil” but “your friend” (IV.316). Locke advises the father of the Young Gentleman to introduce him to such matters as care for the family estate at a young age, saying that the sooner you treat him as a man the sooner he will become one. Locke says little or nothing about sexual passion. Rousseau sharply departs from this, emphasizing the difficulty of the transition from a childhood spent in a household and adulthood spent in civil society, often in the company of women.

“One must use a great deal of art to prevent social man from being totally artificial” (IV.317). The encounter with women, above all other encounters, can lead a youth to such artificiality—preening himself in order to please the pretty girls. For the sake of Emile’s health and morals, his virginity should, and can, be prolonged until the age of twenty or later. “Up to now I stopped him by his ignorance”; now that he is a man “he has to be stopped by his enlightenment” (IV.318). How?

“This is my moment to present my accounts to him” (IV.318). The governor will explain to Emile how Emile was educated, “what he is and what I am, what I have done, what he has done, what we owe each other, all his moral relations” (IV.318). He also needs an account of his future struggles, how to overcome them, what his governor can do to help and what he must do to help himself. He must finally learn how to govern his sexual nature, to recognize “the new perils which surround him, and all the solid reasons which ought to oblige him to keep an attentive watch over himself before listening to his nascent desires” (IV.318). “Instruct him in these dangerous mysteries which you have so long hidden from him with so much care,” lest he learn them “from another” or “from himself” (IV.318). In the Confessions Rousseau emphasizes the dangers of masturbation, the empire of sexual passion that it inaugurates. “As long as he continues freely to open his soul to me and to tell me with pleasure what he feels, I have nothing to fear,” but as soon has he becomes timid, reserved, shameful, “there is no longer a moment to lose, and if I do not hurry to instruct him, he will soon be instructed in spite of me” (IV.319). 

Reasoned instruction must be carefully prepared. “Never talk reason to young people, even when they are at the age of reason, without first putting them in a condition to understand it” (IV.319). Otherwise you are wasting your breath. To keep Emile out of the boudoir, get him out of the house. Introduce him to a new physical activity: hunting. “He will lose in it—at least for a time—the “dangerous inclinations born of softness,” as “the hunt hardens the heart as well as the body,” accustoming the young hunter “to blood, to cruelty,” to the chase of Diana instead of the chase after Aphrodite (IV.320). The passion for the hunt “serves to suspend a more dangerous passion” (IV.321). Perhaps not incidentally, hunting is a well-respected aristocratic pastime; in pursuing it, he will scarcely endure any ridicule from his peers. Rousseau carefully selects elements of his contemporary civil society that can be usefully integrated into Emile’s education, even as educates him to resist so many civil-social conventions that are useless or injurious. As a result, the governor and Emile will not exhaust themselves in fighting an all-fronts struggle. Fighting the good fight requires fighting intelligently. 

 

2. Reasoning with youth

Distraction will only go so far. How will the governor talk reasonably but also effectively to him? “One of the errors of our age is to use reason in too unadorned a form, as if men were all mind”—the error of the Enlightenment (IV.321). “The impression of the word is always weak, and one speaks to the heart far better through the eyes than through the ears,” as the Bible sometimes fails to understand (IV.321). Reason can restrain but it seldom arouses the soul toward great actions. “Always to reason is the mania of small minds. Strong souls have quite another language,” (IV.321).

As a result of the combination of reasoning and weak-souled amour-propre, “in the modern age men no longer have a hold on one another except by force or by self-interest; the ancients, by contrast, acted much more by persuasion and by the affections of the soul because they did not neglect the language of signs,” the language of the visual rather than the language of the aural (IV.321). One still sees this language in the ceremonies of the Catholic Church and of the Doge of Venice. In antiquity the Romans reinforced words with signs—the fasces, the statues of gods and men, temples and capital buildings. “Never reason in a dry manner with youth”; Rousseau doesn’t acknowledge it, but he takes a page from the Gospels in advising governors to “clothe reason in a body if you want to make youth able to grasp it” and “make the language of the mind pass through the heart, so that it may make itself understood” (IV.323).

The account the governor gives of himself and of the education he has given Emile must be stated in a way which “reveal[s] that I have done it for myself”—so as not to strain the young man’s credulity—but also “my tender affection” for him as “the reason for all my care” (IV.323). “Instead of narrowing his soul by always speaking of his interest, I shall now speak of mine alone, and I shall thereby touch him more” with “the sentiments of friendship, generosity, and gratitude which I have already aroused and which are so sweet to cultivate” (IV.323). Above all, he will inspire Emile’s compassion. “You are my property, my child, my work. It is from your happiness that I expect my own. If you frustrate my hopes, you are robbing me of twenty years of my life, and you are causing the unhappiness of my old age.” (IV.323). Compassion, the natural equivalent of Christian agapic love, will bring governor and pupil closer together, ‘abiding’ in one another’s souls as God does in the souls of Christians, Christian souls ‘in’ God. The well-unified young man will unite in sympathy with his governor, consenting to his continued guidance.

Having “prepare[d] the moment for making oneself understood,” the governor now “expounds the laws of nature in all their truth,” showing “him the sanction of these same laws in the physical and moral ills that their infraction brings down upon” those guilty of sexual misconduct (IV.324). “If he is speaking of this inconceivable mystery of generation, one joins to the idea of the allure given to this act by the Author of nature the idea of the exclusive attachment which makes it delicious, and the idea of the duties of fidelity and of modesty which surround it and redouble its charm in fulfilling it its object” in that “sweetest of associations,” marriage (IV.324). Contrast this with “the horrors of debauchery,” its “foolish degradation” and the “final destruction” it can lead to, death by venereal disease (IV.324). “If, I say, one shows him clearly how the taste for chastity is connected with health, strength, courage, the virtues, love itself, and all the true goods of man, I maintain that one will then render this chastity desirable and dear to him and that his mind will be amenable to the means he will be given for preserving it” (IV.324).

At every step, “clothe reason in forms which will make it loved” (IV.325). Do indeed “speak to him of love, of women, of pleasures”; in this you become his “confidant,” and “only by this title” will “you truly be his master” (IV.325). Again in imitation of God, enter into a contract, a covenant, with him, but a rational covenant in which he pledges to follow your commands and you pledge to show him the reasons for them. In these ways you will find in his “nascent desires” not “an obstacle to the lessons of reason” but “the true means of making him amenable to those very lessons (IV.327). “One has a hold on the passions only by means of the passions. It is by their empire that their tyranny must be combated; and it always from nature itself that the proper instruments to regulate nature must be drawn.” (IV.327). Specifically, “in making him sense how much charm the union of hearts adds to the attraction of the senses, I shall disgust him with libertinism, and I shall make him moderate by making him fall in love” (IV.327). 

 

3. Introducing Emile to civil society

“Emile is not made to remain always solitary” (IV.327). He has social duties he needs to perform. Although he has knowledge of “man in general” he has yet to “know individuals,” to learn how to live among them (IV.327). Here, women are. “His passions will doubtless be able to lead him astray,” but “at least he will not be deceived by the passions of others,” carried away “by the example of others or seduced by their prejudices” (IV.327).

As for social practices, Emile’s inexperience actually will serve as an advantage. Most children learn manners before they know the purpose of the practices they are taught. Having reached the age of reason, Emile will readily learn them, with the advantage of knowing “the reasons for them”; he will then “follow them with more discernment” and thus with “more exactness and grace” (IV.327). Whereas “your child’s knowledge will be only in his memory,” Emile’s knowledge “will be in his judgment”; “in a year he will be more amiable and judiciously polite than a young man who has been reared in society from childhood” (IV.327). 

The best way to bring him into civil society and to guide his erotic passion at the same time is to propose a new kind of hunt: the hunt for a wife. He is more than ready to go along with that. “Imagine whether I shall know how to get his ear when I depict the beloved whom I destine for him” (IV.328). This provides Rousseau an opportunity to analyze the question of illusion and reality in love. Far from being a ‘Romantic,’ Rousseau maintains that “if we saw what we love exactly as it is, there would be no more love on earth” (IV.329). After the initial illusion, we eventually become disillusioned; “the magic veil drops, and love disappears” (IV.329). By providing Emile with an imaginary woman he makes him disillusioned with real ones ‘up front,’ preventing him “from having illusions about real objects” (IV.329)—the real women of Paris being unsuitable for him, anyway.

As for the image, she will not be perfect, lest Emile never accept any woman at all. “I shall choose such defects in his beloved as shall suit him, as to please him, and to serve to correct his own” (IV.329). We will name her “Sophie,” he tells him, with a play on ‘philo-sophy’ or the love of wisdom. But this young philosopher will never be a Socrates, or a Rousseau. The ‘philosophy’ he will pursue is a more practical form of the love of nature. “The name Sophie augurs well,” he tells Emile; “if the girl whom you choose does not bear it, she will at least be worthy of bearing it” (IV.329). Emile will anticipate that you may already have found her, and he will be right. Sophie’s modesty and simplicity will stand in contrast with the Parisian sophisticates he meets, inoculating his soul against them. Having fixed his heart this way, the governor will need to “defend him only against his senses; his heart is safe” (IV.329). 

The “wildness of youth” is caused by Rousseau’s old enemy, opinion (IV.330). Young men egg each other on in their amorous misadventures, ridiculing the chaste man, affronting whatever he has of amour-propre, and especially of vanity. This is why a good-hearted country boy soon gets corrupted in his morals by the city men he falls in with (as for example at university). “His heart is still the same, but his opinions have changed” (IV.330). But “I have worked for twenty years to arm Emile against mockers” (IV.332). “I ask whether there is a young man on the entire earth who is better armed than Emile against everything that can attack his morals, his sentiments, or his principles?” (IV.331). He already views adultery and debauchery with a horror that will keep him out of the clutches of married women and prostitutes, respectively. Marriageable girls will tend to have their own reserves of “fear and shame” (IV.331). ‘Peer pressure’ will have little sway with him, as “nothing makes one more insensitive to mockery than being above opinion,” in expecting, demanding reasons for changing his conduct, not jibes (IV.331). “It then becomes a question of showing him that they deceive him and that, in feigning to treat him as a man, they really treat him as a child,” in contrast to his governor, who always “treat[s] him like a man” (IV.331). That is, Emile’s amour de soi will resist their appeals to amour-propre, the power of which the other young men will overestimate, having themselves been miseducated by the laws of opinion, which they have learned to manipulate in accordance with the amour-propre which animates their own souls. Emile will easily be persuaded that, unlike the governor, his peers “do not love you” and “take no interest in you” except to act upon their “secret spite at seeing that you are better than they are,” which is the sole cause of their attempts “to bring you down to their low level” (IV.331). Given his prior education, Emile “recognizes the voice of friendship, and he knows how to obey reason” (IV.332).

Given the good order of Emile’s soul, “I would rather see him in the midst of the worst society of Paris than alone in his room or in a park, given over to all the restlessness of his age” (IV.333). The hunt for ‘Sophie’ in civil society, like the hunt for wild game, actually serves as another distraction from the worst forms of eroticism. Emile will be so busy defending his virtue against the wiles of loose women and vulgar young men that he will be far less likely to succumb to masturbatory fantasies. As Rousseau puts it, more delicately, “the most dangerous of all the enemies that can attack a young man, and the only one that cannot be put out of the way, is himself,” since “the senses are awakened by the imagination alone” (IV.333). He goes so far as to claim that “their need is not properly a physical need” at all but a product of “mute fermentation [that] certain situations and certain spectacles arouse in the blood of the young without their being able to discern for themselves the cause of this first disturbance” (IV.333). “I am persuaded,” Rousseau avers, “that a solitary man raised in a desert”—a Robinson Crusoe without prior experience of civil society—a man “without books, without instruction, and without women, would die there a virgin at whatever age he had reached” (IV.333).

Be that as it may, what about the young man who has been raised in conventional civil society, the many non-Emiles?

 

4. How to be a Savoyard Vicar of sex

The body completes its growth at the age of twenty. Until then, sexual continence is primarily a matter of health, of living “in accordance with the order of nature,” which punishes dissipation of bodily energies in sexual misconduct, energies that are better directed toward the body’s natural growth (IV.334). After the age of twenty “continence is a duty of morality” not of physical nature, and it becomes “important to learn to rule oneself, to remain the master of one’s appetites” for the sake of the good order not only of nature but of civil society and one’s life in it (IV.334). 

“Remember that I am no longer speaking of my pupil here, but of yours. Do his passions, which you have allowed to ferment, subjugate you? Then yield to them openly, without disguising his victory from him.” (IV.334). You cannot control his debaucheries, but you can make sure you know about them. “It is a hundred times better that the governor approve an offense and deceive himself than that he be deceived by his pupil and that the offense take place without his knowing anything about it,” for if you tell yourself that you can pretend your pupil is a fine young man, his “first abuse that is tolerated will lead to another, and this chain ends only with the overturning of all order and contempt for all law” (334). 

What to do? First, “show your weaknesses to your pupil if you want to cure his own” by letting him “see that you undergo the same struggles which he experiences,” letting him “learn to conquer himself by your example” (IV.334). Second, show him the malign effects of habitual debauchery, appealing to his amour-propre in so doing. Such roués, “vile and cowardly even in their vices…have only small souls because their worn-out bodies were corrupted early. There hardly remains enough life in them to move.” (IV.335). Unable “to feel anything great and noble,” they “are only vain, rascally, and false,” lacking even “enough courage to be illustrious criminals” (IV.335). They are contemptible, “the scum of our youth” (IV.335). Finally, appeal to the young man’s libido dominandi as a brake on his eroticism. Tell him, “If there were a single man among them who knew how to be temperate and sober and who knew how in their midst to preserve his heart, his blood, and his morals from the contagion of their example, at the age of thirty he would crush all these insects and become their master with less effort than he had exerted in remaining his own master!” (IV.335). As Socrates recommends in the Republic, deploy thumos against the epithumia. It is a dangerous expedient, as there is no guarantee that thumos will in turn obey logos (as Socrates would have it do) but at least the young man will pursue a nobler passion.

 

5. Emile’s moeurs, Emile’s taste

In his social debut, Emile won’t “shine”: “The qualities which strike people at first glance are not his,” as “he neither has them nor wants to have them” and “does not care to be esteemed before being known” (IV.335). He has humanity, not politesse; he harbors neither esteem nor contempt for men; neither disputatious nor flattering, he speaks frankly and “says only useful things”; “he is never more at ease than when no attention is paid to him”; he remains “serene and cool,” “never troubled by shame” (IV.336). As a man of amour de soi in a civil society full of amour-propre, he is to that extent remarkable but not noticeably so, and so should offend no one. 

He will keep his mind focused on the purpose of his venture, but never coldly. “When one loves, one wants to be loved. Emile loves men; therefore he wants to please them”—and women, too. (IV.337). Among women he “will sometimes be timid and embarrassed” but will rather display a “tender eagerness” (IV.337). “Since true politeness consists in showing benevolence to men” (338), and since Emile’s natural compassion has been cultivated by the governor, “he will not be celebrated as a likeable man,” but those he meets “will like him without knowing why” (IV.339). He says only useful things because such things are what he thinks of; “his intelligence will be sharp and limited,” with “solid sense and healthy judgment”—a man who “never runs after new ideas” or “pride[s] himself on his cleverness” (IV.339). He ideas aim at what is “salutary and truly useful to men,” and since these “in all times” “constitute the only true bonds of society,” he will rather more social than civil (IV.339). 

Previously, Emile has studied men’s passions in history. As he now studies their morals in society, “he will often have occasion to reflect on what delights or offends the human heart,” “the principles of taste” (IV.340). Taste is “the faculty of judging what pleases or displeases the greatest number,” and not many men have a sure sense of that, bound up as they are with their own passions (IV.340). Taste isn’t a matter of good and bad but of “what is “at most of interest as entertainment,” not of need (IV.340). Nonetheless, given the social character of human beings and their consequent inclination to imitate one another, taste has a connection to morality, inasmuch as imitation leads to action and actions can indeed be good or bad. The rules of taste are relative to “climates, morals, government, institutions” as well as “age, sex, [and] character” (IV.340), but “all the true models of taste are in nature” (IV.341). Unfortunately, in civil society “those who lead us” in matters of taste are “the artists, the nobles, and the rich, and what leads them is their interest or their vanity” (IV.341). 

In this study, Emile should “consult the taste of women in physical things connected with the judgment of the senses”—do women generally not have keener senses of scent and flavor than men?—and “consult the taste of men in moral things that depend more on the understanding”—on ‘thinking abstractly.’ Rousseau deplores the recently established authority of women in literary matters; “since they have set about judging books and relentlessly producing them, they know longer know anything,” having distracted themselves from the province of their strength (IV.341).

In addition to studying taste, Emile will refine his own. “I shall go further still to preserve in him a pure and healthy taste” (IV.342). He will now begin to read books, “enjoyable books”; he will learn “how to analyze speech, to make him sensitive to all the beauties of eloquence and diction” (IV.342). He will learn Latin “in order to know French” (IV.342), but more, to appreciate “a certain simplicity of taste that speaks straight to the heart and is found only in the writings of the ancients” (IV.342). Just as he already has found solid political judgments in the ancient historians he will find solid literary taste in them, too, as they are “rich in facts and sparing in judgments,” just the opposite of so many of the moderns (IV.342). “Our bombastic lapidary style is good only for inflating dwarfs. The ancients showed men as they are naturally, and one saw that they were men.” (IV.343). 

In reading these books, he will find that “there is no true progress of reason in the human species, because all that is gained on one side is lost on the other: all minds always start from the same point, and since the time used in finding out what others have thought is wasted for learning to think for ourselves, we have acquired more enlightenment and less vigor of mind. We exercise our minds, like our arms, by having them do everything with tools and nothing by themselves” (IV.343), making ourselves dependent on “newspapers, translations, and dictionaries.” (344). These are carriages tempting us never to walk, never to go anywhere under our own power.

Emile will go to the theater “to study not morals but taste” (IV.344). The theater teaches no truth but it does delight and entertain. “There is no school in which one learns so well the art of pleasing men and of interesting the human heart” (IV.344). The same goes for poetry, which has “exactly the same aim” (IV.344). “My principle aim in teaching him to feel and to love the beautiful of all sorts is to fix his affections and tastes on it, to prevent his natural appetites from becoming corrupted, and to see to it that he does not one day seek in his riches the means for being happy” (IV.344). Admittedly, “taste is only the art of knowing all about petty things,” but “the agreeableness of life depends on a tissue of petty things” (IV.344). Properly to appreciate petty things is what Rousseau calls “real voluptuousness, apart from prejudices and opinion” (IV.344). It is epicureanism rightly understood, and thus rightly limited.

 

6. Lessons of a Savoyard Vicar of taste

As before, Rousseau turns from the model of ‘his Emile,’ “whose pure and healthy heart can no longer serve as a model for anyone” in modern times, to seek “in myself an example that is more evident and closer to the morals of the reader” (IV.344). Rousseau, it might be said, is the adult version of the youth whom the Savoyard vicar advised.

If I were a rich man, he begins, I would be like all other rich men in some respects. I would be insolent and low, “sensitive and delicate toward myself alone,” disdainful toward “the miseries of the rabble”; I would put my fortune at the service of satisfying my pleasures, making this my sole occupation (IV.345). But I would also differ from the others. I would be sensual and voluptuous, not proud and vain, indolent not ostentatious. I would use my riches to purchase “leisure and freedom,” tempering “my sensuality” for the sake of my health (IV.345). And, like Emile in one way, I would “always stay as close as possible to nature, in order to indulge the senses I received from nature” (IV.345). I would enjoy the four seasons, not flee them in ‘vacationing’; I would eat foods in season, at the peak of their flavor; I would have few servants, “as all that is done by means of other people is done badly” (IV.346). My life would be active, unburdened by sedentary boredom. My house and its furnishings would be simple. I wouldn’t gamble, except for small stakes—for enjoyment, not for greed in hoped-for gain. I would dress modestly so as not to flaunt my rank over others. 

In my relations with those around me, “the only bond of my associations would be mutual attachment, agreement of tastes, suitableness of characters,” “giv[ing] myself over to them as a man and not as one of the rich” (IV.348). “I would want to have a society around me, not a court; friends, and not protegés” (IV.348). Both independence and equality, then, “permit[ting] my relationships to have all the candor of benevolence; and where neither duty nor interest entered in any way, pleasure and friendship would alone make the law” (IV.348-349). As for women, love like friendship is “infallibly killed by money”; I would ‘keep’ no woman. “It would be sweet to be liberal toward the person one loves, if this did not constitute a purchase” (IV.349). Rousseau adds, prudently, “it remains to be known where there is a woman with whom this procedure would not be a folly” (IV.349).

“The people hardly ever get bored” because they live active lives; “many days of fatigue make them taste a few days of festival with delight” (IV.350). For the rich, on the contrary, “boredom is their great plague,” as they “pass their lives in fleeing it and being overtaken by it” (IV.350). Women, especially, are “devoured by it, under the name of vapors” or, as a later generation would say in more clinical language, neurasthenia (IV.350). Better, then, for the rich to live a simple life in the country, pursuing active, outdoor pastimes with friends. In such a life, “each of us, openly preferring himself to everyone else” in the modern manner, “would find it good that all the others similarly preferred themselves to him” (IV.352). This isn’t Emile’s egalitarianism. It is an egalitarianism that will make sense to wealthy men and women tired of the niceties of the drawing room. In the society of the country, rightly lived, “we would be our own valets in order to be our own masters; each of us would be served by all the others; the time would pass without being measured” (IV.352). “If some country celebration brought the inhabitants of the place together, my companions and I would be among the first ones there,” bringing to marriage celebrations “gifts as simple” as the “good people” in the families and friends who are rejoicing (IV.352). 

But, the aristocrat will want to know, “What about the hunt?” (IV.352). Hounds and foxes, excitement. Yes, but also extensive lands, guards, rents; quarrels, hatred, and lawsuits; resentful neighbors; poachers, and therefore guards. “Do you wish to disengage the pleasures from their pains? Then remove exclusiveness from the pleasures. The more you leave them to men in common, the more you will always taste them pure.” (IV.353). If my neighbors reduce the amount of game when they hunt, “there will be more skill in seeking it and more pleasure in shooting it” (IV.353). “Exclusive pleasures are the death of pleasure” for naturally sociable man (IV.353). “The demon of property infects everything it touches” (IV.354). Therefore, “when I am rich, I shall act in this respect just as I did when I was poor” (IV.354). 

Why this excursus, this advice to aristocrats and oligarchs “on true taste,” on “the choice of agreeable leisure” (IV.354)? Once again, as with his remarks on religion and on sexual conduct, Rousseau readies the Second Estate and the upper bourgeoisie for the collapse of the regime in which they have only seemingly prospered. In France, they have been drawn into the cities by the Bourbon monarchy, by the vulgar splendor and moral corruption of Versailles. That monarchy is doomed. Get out of town and befriend the people before it, and you, are ruined. If you object that the simple enjoyments of country life, no longer in the castles of the feudal aristocracy but among the people, ‘first among equals,’ “are within the reach of all men and that one does not need to be rich to enjoy them,” you are right (IV.354). “This is precisely what I wanted to get at” (IV.354). Your riches are quite likely to disappear—and if not yours, then the riches of your sons and daughters. “The man who has taste and is truly voluptuous has nothing to do with riches. It suffices for him to be free and master of himself.” (IV.354).

As for Emile, at some point he can’t get away from Paris fast enough. He has satisfied himself that Sophie isn’t there. If she isn’t in Paris, why would he stay?