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

 

1. Travel rightly understood

As Rousseau has insisted throughout, “Too much reading only serves to produce presumptuous ignoramuses” (V.450). Parisians being among the most widely-read persons in the world, they stare at foreigners uncomprehendingly for the simple reason that they have only read about them. “One has to have seen the bourgeoisie of this great city close up and to have lived with them to believe that people with so much cleverness can be so stupid”; “a Parisian believes he knows men, and he knows only the French” (V.451). Parisians prove that books “are good for learning to babble about what one does not know” (V.451). For his part, Rousseau writes, “I hold it to be an incontestable maxim that whoever has seen only one people does not know men; he knows only the people with whom he has lived” (V.451). 

Travel alone does not educate, however. The aristocratic and bourgeois practice of sending their young men on a ‘grand tour’ of Europe is another instance of stupidity. “There are many persons who are informed still less by travel than by books, because they are ignorant of the art of thinking,” incapable of “see[ing] anything on their own” (V.452). “It is necessary to know how to travel” (V.452). “The instruction that one extracts from travel is related to the aim that causes travel to be undertaken” (V.454). He who travels to confirm “a system of philosophy” will “never see anything but what he wants to see”; he who seeks profit learns only how to cut deals (V.454). Serious travel “is suitable for only very few people,” those “sure enough about themselves to hear the lessons of error without letting themselves be seduced and to see the example of vice without letting themselves be carried away” (V.455). If, as a wise man of antiquity said of ruling authority, it “shows the man,” “travel pushes a man toward his natural bent and completes the job of making him good or bad” (V.455). Power corrupts the already corrupt and ennobles the good because it releases him from many conventions, gives him freedom to act; travel does that, too, getting men away from the laws and customs of their own country, unmooring them. Inasmuch as most young men have been badly educated, “more men come back” from their travels “wicked than good, because more leave inclined to evil than to good,” “contract[ing] all the vices of the peoples they frequent and none of the virtues with which these vices are mixed” (V.455). But those, like Emile, “whose good nature has been well cultivated, and who travel with the true intention of informing themselves, return better and wiser than they left” (V.455). It is easy to imagine Chateaubriand and Tocqueville reading this passage.

Intelligent travel, then. But it isn’t enough to decide to gather information. “Everything that is done by reason ought to have its rules” (V.455). As a child, Emile learned about “his physical relations with other beings” and the limits those other natural beings impose upon him; in youth he learned “his moral relations with men,” the limits imposed by natural and conventional right (V.455). In young manhood he must “consider himself in his civil relations with his fellow citizens,” beginning “by studying the nature of government in general, the diverse forms of government, and finally the particular government under which he was born, so that he may find out whether it suits him to live there” (V.455). He is now a young adult, and so has the right to reaffirm or to renounce his citizenship. He has attained the age of self-government. Emile plans to establish a household. “This plan is laudable; it is one of man’s duties,” the governor tells him (V.456). “But, before marrying, you must know what kind of man you want to be, what you want to spend your life doing, and what measures you want to take to assure yourself and your family of bread. Although one ought not to make such a care his principal business, one must nonetheless think about it once.” (V.456). 

Emile thinks, briefly, and avers that he only wants Sophie and a field to till. If he were alive today, he would say he wants only Sophie, a cellphone, and a laptop to tap on. The problem is exactly the same, however. Where will you till or tap? “In what corner of the earth will you be able to say, ‘Here I am master of myself and of the land which belongs to me?'” (V.457). Where can you go to find a place “where one can be independent and free” without needing to harm others or fearing harm? (V.457). Farming (or working at home with a cellphone and a laptop) brings more independence than most forms of employment. “But where is the state where a man can say to himself, ‘The land I tread is mine?'” (V.457). “Be careful that a violent government, a persecuting religion, or perverse morals do not come to disturb you there,” to say nothing of “boundless taxes that would devour the fruit of your efforts” and “endless litigation that would consume your estate” (V.457). Where, “above all,” can you go to “shelter yourself from vexation by the noble and the rich”? (V.457). You cannot maintain your property without political influence, and vice-versa. Political life is indispensable. In your travels you had better learn about politics, not from books so much as from citizens and subjects.

 

2. Knowledge of political right

“The science of political right is yet to be born, and it is to be presumed that it never will be born,” Rousseau writes, in a book published in the year The Social Contract was published, and as he prepares a condensed version of the argument he makes there for his pupil. “The only modern in a position to create this great and useless science was the illustrious Montesquieu. But he was careful not to discuss the principles of political right,” “content to discuss the positive right of established governments,” which is hardly the same thing (V.458). But to “judge soundly” what has been established, one must know “what ought to be” (V.458). The governor will interest Emile in this inquiry by guiding their travel with two questions: “What importance does it have for me?”—the familiar question of ‘what good is it?’—and “What can I do about it?”—the question of capability and limitation, again familiar to Emile from his childhood, on (V.458). 

To this matter of judgment Rousseau adds a “second difficulty,” one that derives from “the prejudices of childhood, from the maxims on which one has been raised, and above all from the partiality of authors who always speak of the truth” while only thinking of “their interest” (V.458). This will not be so great a problem for Emile as it is for most. “He hardly knows what government is. The only thing important to him is to find the best one,” and his nearly book-free, opinion-free education has prepared him for that (V.458).

The third difficulty, “more specious than solid,” is that many will say that judging political conventions well is difficult, a hard task even for philosophers. Rousseau disagrees. “I am certain that in researches of this kind great talents are less necessary than a sincere love of justice and a true respect for the truth” (V.458).

How, then, to establish the standard of judgment, the principles of political right? This task requires not travel but thought. It is preliminary to travel. “By first going back to the state of nature, we shall examine whether men are born enslaved or free, associated with one another or independent” (V.459). Do they “join together voluntarily or by force”? (V.459). If by force, can this force “form a permanent right by which this prior force remains obligatory, even when it is surmounted by another,” or indeed whether it forms any right at all (V.459). Is force providential, therefore right because God ordains it? If force is indeed providential, and God ordains that we are ruled by a bad regime, have we the right to overthrow it. (Or as Rousseau puts it, “We shall examine whether one cannot say that every illness comes from God, and whether it follows from this that it is a crime to call the doctor.”) (V.459). Or does conscience oblige me to give my purse “to a bandit who demands it on the highway, even if one could hide it from him”? (V.459). “After all, the pistol he holds is also a power” (V.459). Indeed, can ‘power’ not be subdivided into ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ power, and consequently be made “subject to the laws from which it gets its being”? (V.459).

Rejecting “this right of force” for “the right of nature,” Rousseau identifies the right of nature with “paternal authority” (V.459). He suggests paternal authority has no greater extent than “the utility of the child, his weakness, and the natural love the father has for him” (V.459). At maturity the child becomes “the sole natural judge of what is suitable for his preservation” and therefore “his own master,” “independent of every other man, even of his father,” given the fact that “the son loves himself” even more than his father loves him (V.459). This rules out the kind of absolute patriarchal authority in families and in civil societies praised by Robert Filmer, among others.

Such independent individuals could form civil societies rightly “by choice,” only, their amour de soi directing them to form a “free and voluntary association” (V.459). No one can justly consent to a condition of unconditional slavery, which would be to “renounce his person, his life, his reason, his I, and all morality in his actions—in a word, [to] cease to exist before his death in spite of nature, which gives him immediate responsibility for his own preservation, and in spite of his conscience and his reason, which prescribe to him what he ought to do and what he ought to abstain from doing” (V.460). And if a slave “cannot alienate himself without reserve to his master, how can a people alienate itself without reserve to its chief?” (V.460). As with individuals, so with groups of individuals: they remain judges of the freely consented-to social contract they have entered.

A people, then, consists not of an ethnic or linguistic community but a group of individuals who have formed either an explicit or a tacit contract with one another. “The social contract is the basis of every society,” whatever its regime may be (V.460). “The tenor of this contract” is simply stated: “Each of us puts his goods, his person, his life, and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and we as a body accept each member as a part indivisible from the whole” (V.460). This collective body is a moral entity, its powers limited by the natural rights it should be designed to protect. “This public person, understood generally, takes the name body politic; its members call it state when it is passive, sovereign when it is active, and power when it is compared to other bodies politic. Speaking of the members collectively they take the name people; individually they are called both citizens, as members of the city or participants in the sovereign authority, and subjects, as subject to the same authority.” (V.460). This implies “a reciprocal commitment of the public and the individuals”—ruling and being ruled (V.460). There being “no common superior who can judge their differences,” the individual and the body politic remain the only ones entitled to break the contract (V.461)—by self-exile in the case of the individual, by expulsion of the individual by the body politic. Since “the individuals have subjected themselves only to the sovereign, and the sovereign authority is nothing other than the general will…each man who obeys the sovereign obeys only himself,” making himself “more free under the social pact than in the state of nature,” where he needed to guard himself against other individuals who also respected no ruling authority (V.461). 

The general will must indeed be general, not particular. For example, the sovereign authority “has no right to touch the possessions of one or more individuals” but it “can legitimately seize the possessions of all, as was done at Sparta in the time of Lycurgus” (V.462). Debt forgiveness, which aims at a particular group, is outside the legitimate power of the sovereign authority. That is, all laws must be truly general, applicable to all citizen-subjects. “The sovereign never has the power to make any statute applying to a particular object,” although of course in enforcing its laws the sovereign acts on individuals and groups (V.462). The executive should be elected by the sovereign people. This will put some constraint on the dangerous power to act on individuals, inasmuch as “the particular will” of the individual who wields that power “will often be contrary to the general will,” as “private interest always tends to preferences, and the public interest always tends to equality” (V.462-463). Another constraint on executive power is the law, enacted by the general will.

Rousseau doubts not only that a people can have a rightful master but also whether it can have a rightful set of representatives. Even representative government involves particular wills too much in the formation of the laws by which those individuals, along with everyone else in the body politic, should be governed. Only small bodies politic can govern themselves without masters or representatives, and so it is hard “for a large populace to be its own legislator” (V.463). Rousseau proposes that the body politic, in its capacity as sovereign, must have no more power than the “power of the citizens, who are on the one hand subjects and on the other sovereigns” (V.463). This is because “the more the state expands, the more liberty diminishes,” and the citizens must have the power to resist encroachments on their rights, including liberty (V.463). 

There is also the opposite danger: The sovereign people might become corrupt. “The less the particular wills correspond to the general will—that is, the less morals correspond to laws—the more the repressing force ought to increase” (V.464). Such an increase in force doesn’t entail an increase in the number of government officials, however, as a bloated sovereign will only get in its own way. “The more the state expands, the more the government ought to contract, so that the number of chiefs decreases in proportion to the increase in the size of the people” (V.465). As a reader of Fénelon’s Telemachus, Rousseau admires the way Mentor advises King Idomeneus to single-handedly reform the morals of the people of Salente, which the king had allowed to become lax. 

“From this we can draw the conclusion that there is not a single and absolute constitution of government, but that there ought to be as many governments differing in nature as there are states differing in size,” and in citizen virtue (V.464), although roughly speaking there are three main regime types: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. “The combinations of these three forms can give rise to a multitude of mixed forms, each of which is multipliable by all the simple forms” (V.466). Generally speaking, the larger the state the more it will require a small but powerful sovereign authority; an empire, for example, will likely require a monarch or “prince.” A medium-sized state should be an aristocracy. A small state can be a democracy, wherein “the particular and individual will ought to be almost nonexistent,” since all citizens participate in the formation of the laws in accordance to a general will that is readily determined by voting, with no need for representatives. Rousseau is no ‘idealist’; he recognizes that “according to the natural order” the particular will is always “preferred over all the others” (V.464). Under democracy, possible only in a small body politic, these self-loving particular wills coalesce into the general will by the act of voting directly on the laws that will govern them. 

“By following the thread of these researches, we shall come to know what the duties and the rights of citizens are, and whether the former can be separated from the latter” (V.466). Emile will also know what a true “fatherland” is, a body politic that really does serve the utility with its citizens insofar as they are subjects, a body politic that doesn’t take advantage of the weakness of the individual citizen and that respects his amour de soi.

 

3. Guarding natural right in a world of sovereign “powers”

Given the diversity of size and moral character seen in the many peoples of the world, “we shall compare them in order to observe their diverse relations” (V.466). Travel is the best way to undertake what is now called ‘comparative political science’. Such study gives an intelligent purpose to travel. “Tyranny and war” are “the greatest plagues of humanity,” and even if the formation of bodies politic may lift men out of the perils of the state of nature the dangers such bodies pose to one another will make Emile wonder “whether it would be better to have no civil society in the world than to have many” (V.466). After all, in the state of nature an individual may hold himself in relative isolation from others, whereas in civil society he is subject to the depredations of foreign peoples, often organized for plunder or conquest. Moreover, if small bodies politic are the only ones amenable to the regime of democracy, the regime which best aligns particular wills with the general will, how will such small and therefore relatively weak entities defend themselves against the larger and often less just aristocracies and monarchies?

Typically, small bodies politic defend themselves by entering into leagues and confederations for mutual defense. “We shall investigate how a good federative association can be established, what can make it durable, and how far the right of confederacy can be extended without jeopardizing that of sovereignty,” a perennial problem in Europe seen in the proposal of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who “proposed an association of all the states of Europe in order to maintain perpetual peace among them” (V.466). Even if such an association could be established, would it last? Given the likelihood of war, “we shall lay down the true principles of the right of war,” which the main authority on the subject, Hugo Grotius, has failed to propound (V.467).

The governor now reveals the real reason why he has had Emile take Sophie’s copy of the Telemachus on this journey. In that novel, Fénelon has his hero visit a variety of cities, variously governed; he has him fight wars according to strict standards of natural right (no deception of the enemy, no countenancing of individuals from the enemy side who offer to betray their own country to you); he has his hero’s guide frame a just regime, a standard by which other regimes may be judged. However, “since Emile is not a king” like young Telemachus “and I am not a god” like Telemachus’ governor, Mentor, who is Minerva in human form, “we do not fret about not being able to imitate Telemachus and Mentor in the good that they did for men. No one knows better than we do how to keep in our place, and no one has less desire to leave it” (V.467). Emile and the governor travel to learn but never intervene in the affairs of the peoples amongst whom they travel. Not only are they not kings, they do not aspire to be kings, even the best of whom “do countless real evils without knowing it for the sake of an apparent good” they believe they are doing (V.467). 

Traveling to learn and not to rule or to teach, they will avoid the capital cities. “All capitals resemble one another. All peoples are mixed together in them, and all morals are confounded. It is not to capitals that one must go to study nations. Paris and London are but the same city in my eyes.” (V.468). Instead, we shall “go to the remote provinces, where there is less movement and commerce, where foreigners travel less, where the inhabitants move around less and change fortune and status less—in order to study the genius and the morals of a nation” (V.468).

For the ideal, Fénelon’s Telemachus. For the real, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. “One can do no better than have recourse to this work” to study “the necessary relations between morals and government” (V.468). For Emile, Rousseau again boils things down, offering “two easy and simple rules for judging the relative goodness of government” (V.468): population growth (or at least stability) and the even distribution of the population throughout the territory of the country. With respect to population growth, Rousseau stipulates that it be natural, not immigrant-based; a naturally growing population indicates general prosperity. With respect to population distribution, an even distribution indicates a predominantly agrarian population; “it is big cities which exhaust a state and cause its weakness”; indeed, “France would be much more powerful if Paris were annihilated” (V.469). 

If you want to understand a people, get out of the cities. “You gain nothing by seeing the apparent form of a government disguised by the machinery of administration and the jargon of administrators if you do not also study its nature by the effects it produces on the people and throughout all the levels of administration” (V.469). Outside the cities you will see the land—quite literally, the country—and the people who live on it, “who constitute the nation” (V.469). What is more, “the closer they are to nature, the more [the people’s] character is dominated by goodness,” as Rousseau has made evident by his description of Emile’s education at every stage, his education in self-government by means of constant attention to things, to facts, to the limits imposed upon human passions and imaginings by nature, which is the true ‘governor’ or ‘tutor’ (V.469).

His travels completed, and “with a heart no less tender than it was before his departure, Emile brings back to [Sophie] a more enlightened mind, and he brings back to his country the advantage of having known governments by all their vices and peoples by all their virtues” (V.471). Having been introduced to “some man of merit” in each country he has visited, Emile will correspond with them regularly, a “useful and agreeable” practice which serves as “an excellent precaution against the empire of national prejudices which attack us through life and sooner or later get some hold on us” (V.471) by “giv[ing] us the means to pit one set of prejudices unceasingly against the other and thus to guarantee ourselves from them all” (V.471). And so Emile will be armed with another way to combat the sway of opinion, with its insistent appeals to amour-propre.

 

4. Combatting the apolitical

If anything, Emile returns from his travels more the ‘idealist’ than the ‘cynic,’ very far indeed from having been corrupted by foreign ways. He determines not to depend upon his inheritance. “Rich or poor, I shall be free. I shall not be free in this or that land, in this or that region; I shall be free everywhere on earth. All the chains of necessity are broken for me; I know only those of necessity.” (V.472). Death itself is no punishment but yet another “law of nature” (V.472). “Come, give me Sophie, and I am free.” (V.472).

The governor kindly brings another natural necessity to his pupil’s attention. “This extravagant disinterestedness does not displease me at your age. It will decrease when you have children.” (V.473). Yes, it is true that human laws and other conventions usually disguise “only individual interest and men’s passions” (V.473). And it is true that “the eternal laws of nature and order to exist,” taking the place of “positive law” for “the wise man” (V.473). They are indeed “written in the depth of his heart by conscience and reason: It is to these that he ought to enslave himself in order to be free” (V.473). These truths notwithstanding, however, “where is the good man who owes nothing to his country?” (V.473). In the state of nature, a man would live “happier and freer”; he would be good but not, as the governor has emphasized before, lacking in virtue (V.473). “The public good, which serves others only as a pretext, is a real motive for him alone. He learns to struggle with himself, to conquer himself, to sacrifice his interest to the common interest.” (V.473). It is the laws which “have taught him to reign over himself,” although they have surely not made him free (V.473). 

Therefore, Emile’s generous cosmopolitanism, his proto-Kantianism, will not suffice. You were born in civil society and you thereby contracted duties to it. “Your compatriots protected you as a child; you ought to love them as a man,” living among them, making yourself useful to them by living “where they know where to get you if they ever have need of you” (V.473-474). 

Rousseau thus teaches aristocrats to prefer natural to conventional right while never abandoning civil society and their duties within it. He would have them abandon the great city, Paris, the palace at Versailles where absolute monarchs have drawn them in order to corrupt and rule them. Live, then, in the countryside with Sophie, but “do not let so sweet a life make you regard painful duties with disgust, if such duties are ever imposed on you,” as Roman Cincinnatus consented to be called from his plow to save the republic. And, of course, modern France being no ancient Rome under the republic, “if this function is onerous to you there is a decent and sure means to free yourself from it,” namely, “to fulfill it with enough integrity so that it will not be left to you for long” (V.474-475). “As long as there are men who belong to the present age, you are not the man who will be sought out to serve the state” (V.475). With the impending regime change Rousseau has predicted, however, who knows?

 

5. The married couple

Trusted, the governor advises Emile and Sophie on the right conditions of intimacy. To Emile he urges respect. “Obtain everything from love without demanding anything from duty, and always regard Sophie’s least favors not as your right but as acts of grace,” the grace of nature (V.477). “The lover who has delicacy and true love” will discern “his beloved’s secret will”; be guided by it (V.477). “Even in marriage pleasure is legitimate only when desire is shared” (V.477).

The next day, alone with Sophie, he explains why he said these things. It is true that “in becoming your husband, Emile has become the head of the house. It is for you to obey, just as nature wanted it”—it being recalled that men are physically stronger than women (V.478). “However, when the woman resembles Sophie, it is good that the man be guided by her. This is yet another law of nature.” (V.478). As I said yesterday, you will be “the arbiter of his pleasures”; this will “give you as much authority over his heart as his sex gives him over your person” (V.478). Accordingly, so long as “you reign over yourself” you will “reign over him” by means “of love”—if “you make your favors rare and precious,” never severe but modest, never cold but chaste (V.478-479). 

This is how he will come to “give you his confidence, listen to your opinions, consult you about his business, and decide nothing without deliberating with you about it,” enabling you to “bring him back to wisdom”—very much in accordance with the meaning of her name—when “he goes astray,” leading him “by gentle persuasion” and “mak[ing] yourself lovable in order to make yourself useful” (V.479). The governor calls this “us[ing] coquetry in the interests of virtue and love to the benefit of reason” (V.479). 

This is how a marriage can be made to endure. “Enjoyment wears out pleasures, and love is worn out before all others,” but if you can make it last for a while, “a sweet habit fills the void it leaves behind, and the attraction of mutual confidence succeeds the transports of passion” (V.479). “When you stop being Emile’s beloved, you will be his wife and his friend,” the mother of his children, “his other half to such an extent that he can no longer do without you” (V.479). The link the governor has forged between eros and agape (reconceived as natural), love and compassion, finds its embodiment in an (again natural) version of the Christian conception of the marital bond as ‘one flesh.’

Then, in front of them both, the governor announces, “Here my long task ends, and another’s begins,” Sophie’s task as Emile’s new “governor” (V.479). But when Sophie becomes pregnant with their first child, Emile invites the governor to remain, to “advise and govern us” both (V.480). 

 

 

 

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

 

1. Sophie’s nature

Sophie is “well-born,” born of good though no longer ennobled or wealthy parents. More important, she is well-born in the sense that she is a woman of “good nature” (V.393). Admittedly, she isn’t perfect. Her “very sensitive heart” occasionally “makes her imagination so active that it is difficult to moderate” (V.393). “Her mind is less exact than penetrating; her disposition is easy but nevertheless uneven; her face is ordinary but agreeable; her expression gives promise of a soul and does not lie” (IV.393). Other women may have a greater measure of any of these qualities of mind, heart, and body, “but none has a better combination of qualities for making a favorable character”; indeed, “if she were more perfect, she would be much less pleasing” (V.393). Just as Emile never makes a shining first appearance but gains friends over time, Sophie makes men who meet “forget beautiful women, and beautiful women are dissatisfied with themselves”—perhaps because they are forgotten (V.393). “The more one sees her, the better she looks; she gains where so many others lose, and what she gains, she never loses again” (V.393). She dresses well—that is, modestly and attractively. She has musical taste but no musical talent, which would fit her for display, leave her vulnerable to amour-propre. Her household skills show that “she learns to govern her own household by governing her parents'” household. She practices cleanliness; her diet is moderate because she’s been taught to see the advantage of moderation for her own well-being (V.393).

She has her caprices, since “her disposition, which is a bit too intense, degenerates into refractoriness, and then she is likely to forget herself” (V.396). But not for long. “Leave her time to come back to herself” or, if the mood persists, punish her and she will immediately see the justice of it, submitting docilely; “one sees that her shame comes not so much from the punishment as from the offense” (V.396). She understands human equality regardless of social status, being ready “to kiss the ground before the lowliest domestic” whom she has offended “without this abasement causing her the least discomfort; and as soon as she is pardoned, her joy and her caresses show what a weight has been removed from her good heart” (V.396). In all, “she suffers the wrongs of others with patience and makes amends for her own with pleasure” (V.396). As always, Rousseau finds this not in an amendment owed to the power of the Holy Spirit but in nature, in “the lovable nature of her sex before we have spoiled it” (V.396). Sophie is the natural Eve, untainted by the amour-propre that animates civil society, the animating spirit of what Christians call ‘the world.’ This nature differs from that of men. “Woman is made to yield to man and to endure even his injustice. You will never reduce young boys to the same point. The inner sentiment in them rises and revolts against injustice. Nature did not constitute them to tolerate it.” (V.396). Our own contemporaries would say that boys have testosterone, girls estrogen.

Sophie adheres to the natural religion, with fidelity to morality not doctrine. Her ruling passion is the love of virtue, which she loves because “virtue constitutes woman’s glory and because to her a virtuous woman appears almost equal to the angels”; moreover, virtue is “the only route of true happiness,” whereas vice leads to “misery, abandonment, unhappiness, and ignominy” (V.397). And finally, her beloved father and mother also love it. Virtue is the “passion” that finally rules her desires, “all her petty inclinations” or caprices (V.397). She “will be chaste and decent until her last breath” (V.397). She is no “amiable French woman, cold by temperament and coquettish by vanity, who wants to shine more than to please, and who seeks entertainment and not pleasure”; instead, she is loving, and her dreams of love aim more at “pleas[ing] a single decent man—and pleas[ing] him forever—than [in] gain[ing] the acclaim of the fashionable which lasts one day and then changes into jeers the next” (V.397).

Although by nature physically weaker than men, “women’s judgment is formed earlier than men’s” (V.397). This comes from their very weakness: “almost from infancy women are on the defensive and entrusted with a treasure that is difficult to protect”; like Eve, “good and evil are necessarily known to them sooner” because satans come after them sooner (V.397). 

 

2. A father’s advice on marriage

Her father has counseled her on the conditions of the marriage which will result when she finds the man she dreams of loving. He begins with a dose of realism. “The greatest happiness of marriage depends on so many kinds of suitability that it is folly to want to obtain all of them together”; since “perfect happiness is not of this earth,” be sure to “secure the most important ones” (V.400). Remember that “the greatest unhappiness, and the one that can always be avoided, is being unhappy due to one’s own fault” (V.400). 

In a husband, there are three kinds of “suitability”: natural suitability, conventional suitability, and the suitability that “depend[s] only on opinion” (V.400). Parents can judge a suitor’s suitability in terms of convention and of opinion, but their “children alone are the judges” of natural suitability, of what a later generation would call ‘compatibility’ (V.400). Natural suitability is the most important kind because social position and wealth “can change” but “the persons alone always remain” (V.400). “It is only as a result of personal relations that a marriage can be happy or unhappy,” as Father and Mother know, because at one time “your mother had position” and “I was rich”: “These were the only considerations which led our parents to unite us. I lost my wealth. She lost her name and was forgotten by her family. Of what use is it to her today to have been born a lady? In our disasters the union of our hearts consoled us for everything. The similarity of our tastes caused us to choose this retreat. We live here happily in poverty.” (V.400). This is another dimension of the lesson Rousseau would teach aristocrats. Your daughters, like your sons, perhaps like yourselves, will not be ‘titled,’ will not be wealthy, for much longer. Strengthen nature in yourselves as insurance against the coming convulsion in conventions, the revolution in opinions. “The kinds of suitability which caused us to be married have vanished. We are happy due only to those that were counted for nothing.” (V.400). 

Therefore, “it is up to the spouses to match themselves,” first by “mutual inclination,” attraction of “their eyes” to bodies and “their hearts” to souls (V.400). From this union there comes their first duty, which is “to love each other”—the natural equivalent to Christ’s spiritual command (V.400). Before the legal, conventional union of marriage this natural union is “the right of nature, which nothing can abrogate” (V.400). “Those who have hindered it by so many civil laws have paid more attention to the appearance of order than to the happiness of marriage and the morals of citizens” (V.400). Your father and mother want you only to be “your own mistress”; we “rely on you for the choice of your husband,” and these are “our reasons for leaving you entirely at liberty” (IV.400). Having done so, “use this liberty wisely” (V.400). True, you are good, reasonable, obedient to natural right and to God; you “have talents which suit decent women, and you are not unendowed with attractions” (V.400). You have “the most estimable goods” but you lack “those which are most esteemed,” money and social standing (V.400). Do not aspire to marry a man above your station; in this, “guide your ambition not by your judgments nor by ours, but by the opinion of men,” who disdain the female arriviste (V.400). 

Rousseau approves of Sophie’s father’s advice. “I say her judgment, her knowledge, her taste, her delicacy, and especially the sentiments on which her heart has been fed in her childhood will oppose to the impetuosity of her senses a counterweight sufficient to vanquish them or at least to resist them for a long time” (V.402). The liberty her parents have allowed her will itself give her “new elevation of soul,” making her “harder to please in the choice of her master” (V.402). Sophie has “the temperament of an Italian woman,” an “ardent temperament”; she has “the sensitivity of an Englishwoman,” the Jane Austen of a few decades hence; she “combines with them—in order to control her heart [the Italian] and her senses [the Englishwoman]—the “pride of a Spanish woman, who, even when she is seeking a lover, does not easily find one she esteems worthy of her” (V.402).

This difficulty has intensified, unbeknownst to her parents, thanks to Sophie’s favorite book. Her standards seem impossibly high, unrealistic, not in terms of the social ambitions her father warned her against but in terms of the rectitude he and his wife had always fortified. She seems to have taken as her “model of the lovable man” some ideal beyond the realm of human possibility. “How had this extravagant delicacy been able to take root in her”? (V.404). It is her mother, not her father, who pries the truth out of her. She throws a book down on the table. Mother opens it and finds Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus. She wants a man like the son of Ulysses as envisioned by an ordained priest. You have not, she reminds her mother, formed me for a man of her own time, and I am not so base as to adopt, or adapt to, the corrupt ways of a modern husband, nor such a fool as to suppose that I might convert him to my own ways, my own ‘regime.’ “Give me a man imbued with my maxims or one whom I can bring around to them, and I shall marry him. But until then, why do you scold me? Pity me.” (V.405). I know that Telemachus himself “is only a fiction,” but I do seek “someone who resembles him”; we must not “dishonor humanity,” dishonor the nature that must persist in some real man, somewhere (V.405). “Perhaps he is seeking me. He seeks a soul that knows how to love him.” (V.405). I do not know who he is or where he is, but I do know “he is none of those I have seen” and “doubtless…none of those I shall see” (V.405). “If I can love nothing but virtue, the fault is less mine than yours,” as “you made virtue too lovable for me” (V.405). At this, mother must smile invisibly, since she knows the arrangements regarding the arrival of Emile.

 

3. An excursus on nature as it relates to marriage

The rise of civil society vastly complicates human life, including relationships between men and women. “One must not confound what is natural in the savage state with what is natural in the civil state” (V.406). In the savage state “all women are suitable for all men because both still have only the primitive and common form” of body and mind, but in the civil state social institutions differentiate us in two ways. Each mind receives its own “form” from “the well-ordered conjunction of nature and education”; then, as these characters develop, civil society “distinguishes ranks,” social classes (V.406). These social classes obscure the distinctions among characters, making it hard to establish good matches in marriage. Ill-matched marriages further contribute to social disorder. And so, “the farther we are removed from equality, the more our natural sentiments are corrupted; the more the gap between noble and commoner widens, the more the conjugal bond is relaxed; and the more there are rich and poor, the less there are fathers and husbands” first, because husbands and wives are incompatible and second, because the rich hand off their children to wet nurses and nannies (V.406). There are no more natural families, only masters and slaves.

To counter this derangement, “stifle prejudices, forget human institutions, and consult nature” (V.406). Aim at uniting persons who are suitable according to the civil-social conjunction of nature and education—according, that is, to their characters. “The influence of natural compatibilities”—natural in the second, civil-social sense—is “alone decisive for the fate of married life” (V.406).

This still gives parents and governors considerable work to do, and it is indeed considerable work, work that takes thought. Neither Emile nor Sophie knows that Emile’s governor and Sophie’s parents have not only educated their young charges but found them to be compatible in character, long before they will meet. This, too, is an ‘arranged marriage,’ but one arranged on far different principles than those prevalent among contemporary aristocrats and oligarchs. “There are maxims of prudence that ought to limit the search of a judicious father”—for example, a man should never marry ‘above himself,’ socially, and a woman should never marry ‘beneath herself.’ An upper-class woman will hardly lower herself to obey a bourgeois or lower-class man but will rather act “as a tyrant toward the head of the house” (V.408). But an upper-class man who marries a virtuous woman of lower social rank will make “the natural and the civil order agree,” with far fewer problems (V.407). 

What is more, in civil society there are “only two classes which are separated by a real distinction” (V.408). Since “by nature man hardly thinks”—an art learned in civil society along with all the others—the two real classes consist of those who think and those who don’t (V.408). “A man from the first of these two classes ought not to make an alliance in the other, for the greatest charm of society is lacing to him when, despite having a wife, he is reduced to thinking alone” (V.408). “It is a sad thing for a father of a family who enjoys himself in his home to be forced to close himself up and not be able to make himself understood by anyone” (V.408). This doesn’t mean he should take “a brilliant wife” who makes his house into “a tribunal of literature over which she would preside,” a wife who “disdains all her woman’s duties and always begins by making herself into a man” (V.409). Similarly, a man should avoid marrying a beautiful woman. “Such a marriage is hell” V.409). In both cases, vanity, amour-propre, will be sure to ruin everything. A certain Aristotelian ‘mean,’ what Rousseau calls “mediocrity,” should be the man’s aim: a woman with “an attractive and prepossessing face that inspires not love but benevolence”; the graces that “do not wear out like beauty” but are “constantly renewed,” as pleasing after thirty years of marriage than on the wedding night (V.410).

Such a match for Emile is Sophie. Like him, “a pupil of nature,” his “equal in birth and merit” but “inferior in fortune,” her charm will work on him “only by degrees,” over the years, “only in the intimacy of association,” and as a result will impress him “more than anyone else in the world” (V.410). “She has taste without study, talents without art, judgment without knowledge,” and so will happily learn the solid things Emile can teach (V.410). The “feigned search” Emile conducted with the governor in Paris was “only a pretext for making him learn about women, so that he will sense the value of he one who suits him” (V.407). Now, “let us work to bring them together” (V.410).

The two men travel back to the countryside, slowly, on foot, like such philosophers as “Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras” (V.412). Neither the governor nor Emile is in a hurry. Emile has been habituated against boredom, and he enjoys investigating local farms, chipping on boulders to better know their nature, satisfying his curiosity about plants and fossils. “Your city philosophers learn natural history in museums; they have gadgets; they know names and have no idea of nature,” but “Emile’s museum” is “the whole earth” (V.412). His body comports with nature as much as his mind does, exercising vigorously and sleeping well. “When one wants to travel, one has to go on foot” (V.412). As always, the senses are the doors to the library of real knowledge of life itself.

 

4. The courtship

Rousseau again pauses to criticize writings on education which fail to “the most important and most difficult part” of it, “the crisis that serves as a passage from childhood to man’s estate” (V.415). Courtship and marriage, the formation of a family, may be dismissed as mere ‘romance’ by educationists, but they constitute “the romance of human nature,” the key element in “the history of my species” (V.415). “You who deprave it, it is you who make a romance of my book” (V.415).

Having been introduced to Sophie, having recognized her by the coincidence of her name with that of the name his governor had given to the image of right woman (a coincidence that Emile evidently never stops to think about), Emile wants to settle into her neighborhood, to live as close to her as possible. Bad plan, the governor advises. “Your honor is in you alone” but “hers depends on others”; a woman must consider the opinion of the neighbors (V.418). “What an injustice it would be” to ignore this difference, and “what sensitive man wants to ruin the girl he loves” by scandalizing the town in which she lives? (V.418). Emile immediately retracts, willing “to sacrifice his happiness a thousand times for the honor of the one he loves” (V.418). This natural equivalent of self-sacrificial Christian charity “is the first fruit of the cares I took in his youth to form in him a heart that knows how to love” (V.418).

For her part, Sophie hesitates to continue the romance because Emile is rich. The governor again explains. Sophie worries about “the effect wealth has on the soul of the possessor,” knowing that “the rich all count gold before merit” (V.423). The only way to prove to her that you aren’t the usual Midas is to “make yourself known to her,” over time; that, and constancy, will “surmount her resistance” (V.423). Emile’s “decent heart is delighted that in order to please Sophie” he needs only to be himself (V.423). The governor is equally delighted. “Never in my life have I done anything which raised me so much in m own eyes and made me so satisfied with myself” (V.423). Rousseau addresses not only the parents of ‘the few’ but also the ones they engage as tutors, really mentors of their children.

Progressively reassured regarding the character of her young man, Sophie opens her mind to him. “The art of thinking is not foreign to women,” Rousseau allows, “but they ought only to skim the sciences of reasoning,” concentrating on “ethics and matters of taste” (V.426). “Sometimes on their walks, as they contemplate nature’s marvels, their innocent and pure hearts dare to lift themselves up to its Author. They do not fear His presence. They open their hearts jointly before Him.” (V.426). Do lovers need more physics, more cosmology than that? In her increasing confidence Sophie remains a modest conqueror, anti-imperial to the core, inasmuch as in “triumph[ing] with modesty” she has won “a victory which costs her her freedom,” and happily so (V.428). 

Love is exclusive. Will jealousy poison it? Not here: for one thing, Sophie gives Emile no cause for it, having lost interest in her other suitors and placing them firmly in the category of casual friends and acquaintances. What is more, among modern Europeans “jealousy has its motive in the social passions more than in primitive instinct,” as “the lover hates his rivals far more than he loves his mistress” (V.430). Today’s man suffers from the vanity of amour-propre more than from frustrated love. Jealousy is “not as natural as is thought,” and Emile’s esteem for Sophie, his knowledge of her virtue, attenuates any such passion. Insofar as he does feel it, “Emile will be not quick to anger, suspicious, and distrustful but delicate, sensitive, and timid,” “more alarmed than irritated,” paying “more attention to his mistress than to threatening his rival” (V.431). He won’t be offended by a rival—is Sophie not worthy to be sought after?—but “will redouble his efforts to make himself lovable, and he will probably succeed” (V.431). 

 

5. The test

Emile is no daydreaming lover. “On the days when he does not see her, he is not idle and sedentary. On those days he is Emile again. He has not been transformed at all.” (V.435). He continues to explore the countryside around him. He watches the farmers and often lends them a hand. “The farmers are all surprised to see him handle their tools more easily than they do themselves, dig furrows deeper and straighter than theirs, sow more evenly, and lay out embankments with more intelligence. They do not make fun of him as a fine talker about agriculture. they see that he actually knows about it. In a word, he extends his zeal and his care to everything which is of primary and general utility.” (V.435). He balances his utilitarianism with compassion, visiting the peasants’ homes, financing but also taking care to supervise needed repairs; he takes care of the sick, “always do[ing] as much good with his person as with his money” (V.436). And he balances his compassion with justice, serving as an arbiter of disputes between peasants and between peasants and landlords. Finally, he retains an egalitarian spirit: “In becoming the benefactor of some and the friend of the others, he does not cease to be their equal” (V.436).  He does not ‘condescend.’ He is Rousseau’s model of what an aristocrat should be, another of his examples of how aristocrats should comport themselves according to what is natural in the civil state, before the coming revolution sweeps their conventions away.

Sophie sees some of this. On one occasion, she watches Emile doing his carpentry work. “This sight does not make Sophie laugh. It touches her; it is respectable. Woman, honor the head of your house. It is he who works for you, who wins your bread, who feeds you. This is man.” (V.437). She expects and demands his love but has no intention of becoming the carpenter of his soul. On the contrary, “she did not want a lover who knew no law other than hers. She wants to reign over a man whom she has not disfigured. It is thus that Circe, having debased Ulysses companions, disdains them and gives herself only to him whom she was unable to change.” (V.439). As Allan Bloom remarks, Ulysses could not be changed by Circe’s witchcraft because he had discovered an antidote to it, the moly root; in uncovering it, Homer tells us, Ulysses saw its nature—reportedly the first instance of the word ‘nature’ in world literature. Symbolically, then, Ulysses’ knowledge of nature triumphs over Circe’s knowledge of art; Rousseau’s theme throughout his writings, one might say, is the need for the triumph of nature, carefully understood and adapted, over such artifices as deface nature, the conventions that de-nature nature, especially human nature.

One point on which Sophie insists is strict timing of Emile’s visits. “To be early is to prefer himself to her; to be late is to neglect her” (V.439). “Sophie is excessively jealous of all her rights and watches to see how scrupulously Emile respects them” (V.439). One day, Emile and the governor are detained because they stop to help an injured peasant. Sophie is indignant—until she learns the reason. Waiting no further, she is the one to propose marriage. Rousseau has his characters reverse the conventional order in favor of a natural rejoicing at a suitor’s acts of natural compassion. Rousseau’s governor remarks to the reader: “Man, love your companion. God gives her to you to console you in your pains, to relieve you in your ills. This is woman.” (V.442). 

In reply to the Gospels, Rousseau has his narrator tell us to behold the man and to behold the woman. He maintains that their examples, if followed, will save many lives and enhance the well-being of human beings on earth.

The real test is yet to come. The governor stuns Emile one day, claiming that Sophie has died. He soon reveals his deception, to the young man’s understandable outrage. But the governor’s lie has a benevolent intention behind it. In the theater, Emile, “you saw heroes, overcome by extreme pains, make the stage reverberate with their senseless cries, grieving like women, crying like children, and thus meriting public applause” (V.443). And you criticized them as bad examples, men of false virtue. But now you have become one of those stage heroes. Yes, “you know how to suffer and die,” and “you know how to endure the law of necessity in physical ills, but you have not yet imposed laws on the appetites of your heart, and the disorder of our lives arises from our affections far more than from our needs” (V.443). ‘Virtue’ derives from the word vir, the Latin word for strength. “Strength is the foundation of all virtue” (V.444). Where is yours?

The governor distinguishes between goodness and virtue. You are a good man, and my education has made you so. Goodness, however, requires no pain, no effort. “He who is only good remains so only as long as he takes pleasure in being so. Goodness is broken and perishes under the impact of the human passions. The man who is only good is good only for himself,” sparing himself the struggle of the “painful duties” that only virtue enables him to perform (V.444). “Up to now, you were only apparently free. You had only the precarious freedom of a slave to whom nothing has been commanded. Now be really free. Learn to become your own master. Command your heart, Emile, and you will be virtuous.” (V.445). You must learn to take the passion of love and “rule it like a man,” precisely so that you will be able to meet your duties as a husband and father, forsaking all future passions (V.445). Even a good passion, love for a good woman, must be ruled. 

Why? “What is forbidden to us by nature is to extend our attachments further than our strength”; Emile learned that in childhood (V.445). “What is forbidden to us by reason is to want what we cannot obtain”; Emile learned that in his youth (V.445). “What is forbidden to us by conscience is not temptations but rather letting ourselves be conquered by temptations. It is not within our control to have or not to have passions. But it is within our control to reign over them.” (V.445). This is the lesson of manhood—the lesson Emile must learn now. If you learn it, “then you will be happy in spite of fortune and wise in spite of the passions”; “you will not, it is true, have the illusion of imaginary pleasures, but will also not have the pains which are their fruit” (V.446). You will know good and evil, as you must, but you will know how to reverse the curse of Adam, and you will do it from your own strength, not from the grace of God. In commanding Rousseau’s book to be burned, the French Catholic Church knew an enemy when they saw one.

Emile listens, apprehensively. “He has a presentiment that, in showing him the necessity for exercising strength of soul, I want to subject him to this hard exercise” (V.446). “What must be done?” he asks the governor; “You must leave Sophie,” the governor replies (V.447). After Emile calms down, he explains. At the moment, in your love for Sophie, “there is nothing beyond what you have felt” (V.447). Much of what you have felt centers on what you have only imagined. Such felicity “always loses its flavor when it is the heart’s habitual state,” as it will be in marriage (V.447). More, only “the single Being existing by itself” is truly beautiful; the beauty of a human being is flawed, and those flaws will become apparent in a few years; you’ve known Sophie for fewer than five months (V.447). But “you must think about a marriage for all seasons” (V.447). You know she pleases you, but does she suit you? If you leave her for a couple of months, she may forget you. 

What is more, and even more important, you are both too young for marriage—you, twenty-two, she, eighteen. “What a father and mother of a family! To know how to raise children, at least wait until you cease being children!” (V.448). If she becomes pregnant now, her health and the health of the child will suffer. Would you not “have a robust wife and robust children than satisfy this impatience at the expense of their life and their health”? (V.448). 

And what of you? As the head of a family you will become a full citizen, with the duties of a citizen. Do you know what those are? “Do you know what government, laws, and fatherland are? Do you know what the price is of your being permitted to live and for whom you ought to die?” (V.448). In fact, “you still know nothing” of such things (V.448). 

You must therefore leave Sophie, “leave in order to return worthy of her” (V.448). This is the only way to “learn to bear her absence” and to “win the prize of fidelity” (V.448). 

When told of this course, Sophie—knowing both Emile and the governor too well to be deceived—understands who is demanding it and attempts to flatter him out of the decision. The governor consoles and reassures her, promises that if she remains “as faithful to [Emile] as he will be to her…in two years he will be her husband” (V.449). “I am the guarantor of each for the other” (V.449). She recalls Eucharis, from Fénelon’s Telemachus, the nymph on Circe/Calypso’s island who falls in love with the hero, in vain; “she really believes she is in her place” (V.450). So as not “to allow these fantastic loves to awaken during Emile’s absence,” he proposes that they exchange going-away gifts. She will give him her copy of the Telemachus —thereby removing it from her hands and giving him an image of her imaginary hero—and he will give her a collection of essays from The Spectator, that eminently sober publication written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, with the aid of which she can study “the duties of decent women, and recall that in two years these duties will be yours” (V.450). That is, the governor removes the imaginary romantic hero from Sophie’s mind, replacing it with an image of herself as a real wife even as he gives utilitarian, down-to-earth Emile a book that will elevate his imagination to thoughts of the virtuous and not merely good man his bride has long dreamed of.

“Finally the sad day comes. They must separate.” (V.450). Emile will undertake the young aristocrat’s customary tour of continental Europe in the customary company of his governor-guide. The content of the tour will be anything but customary.

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.