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

 

1. Distracting, then guiding, the eroticism of youth

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

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

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

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

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

 

2. Reasoning with youth

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

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

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

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

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

 

3. Introducing Emile to civil society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

4. How to be a Savoyard Vicar of sex

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

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

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

 

5. Emile’s moeurs, Emile’s taste

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

6. Lessons of a Savoyard Vicar of taste

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

1. Why does Rousseau make religion central to his account of sex education?

The longest chapter of the Emile, Book IV consists of three parts. The first concerns what our contemporaries call ‘sex education.’ The third concerns the more refined topic of sensibility, of manners as much as morals, the ways of courtship, marriage, and of social life generally. The second, central section addresses religion. Although Book III is central to the Emile in terms of its structure, being the third of five chapters, the discussion of religion at the core of Book IV is central in terms of the book as a whole, taking up the pages Rousseau has placed in the middle of the volume. Why?

Rousseau has prepared his reader for this discussion, to some extent all along, but particularly in the paragraphs leading up to the introduction of religion. He has reminded us that he rejects “the systematic spirit,” a spirit including that of systematic theology at the least; he is Socratic, not Thomistic or Calvinistic (IV.254). More, “I found myself not on what I have imagined but on what I have seen” (IV.254); he is no visionary, no prophet. He nonetheless recognizes that while “man does not easily begin to think,” “as soon as he begins, he never stops” (IV.254). Having taught Emile how to think—unsystematically and concretely, not comprehensively and abstractly—he will likely begin to think not only of where children come from but where Man comes from.

And if he doesn’t do so spontaneously, his entrance into civil society guarantees he will be so prompted. There, citizens will urge religious doctrines and practices upon him. “Enclosed in a social whirlpool” in which such claims and indeed demands swirl, Rousseau does not want him to “let himself get carried away by either the passions or the opinions of men”; Emile should “see with his eyes” and “feel with his heart,” allowing “no authority” (as for example the Catholic Church) to “govern him beyond that of his own reason” (IV.255)—that is, beyond what he can think of by himself, without being told. Up to now, “the progress natural to the mind is accelerated but not upset” (IV.255). In listening to the opinions of fellow citizens, “nothing is more fit to make a man wise than follies that are seen without being shared, and even he who shares them is still instructed, provided he is not their dupe, and does not bring to them the error of men who commit them” (IV.255). Indeed, if any youth has been readied to hold himself back from hasty generalizations about religious and philosophic doctrines—or their combination, theology—it is Emile. 

Human beings do not incline toward grand abstractions derived from sensed reality. “We are limited by our faculties to things which can be sensed, we provide almost no hold for abstract notions of philosophy and purely intellectual ideas” (IV.255). To think abstractly, “we must either separate ourselves from the body—to which we are so strongly attached—or make a gradual and slow climb from object to object, or, finally, clear the gap rapidly and almost at a leap, by a giant step upward of which childhood is not capable and for which even men need many rungs especially made for them” (IV.255). Rousseau has shown how the middle explanation can occur, by the comparison of one sense-impression to another. As for ‘Diotima’s ladder,’ “the first abstract idea is the first of these rungs, but I have great difficulty in seeing how anyone got it into his head to construct it” (IV.255). Yet it must have been done, since human beings have been brought to make mistakes, to depart from their sensuality. In the Platonic version, we have a natural eros, a natural desire to know, a desire analogous to sexual desire in the sense that it too gets us ‘out of ourselves,’ wanting someone or something beyond ourselves. In the Biblical version, Adam and Eve undergo no childhood, and so fall victim to the Serpent’s temptation, his assurance that they won’t die if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but they will become like God in obtaining this knowledge. Their shame at their nakedness, their openly displayed bodies, bespeaks an entirely unchildlike concern for seeing themselves as others see them, along with a concern about their own organs of generativity—evidence of a mutual dependency that they now want to conceal from one another. Rousseau, who begins his account of human nature with the infant, cannot approach the problem in either the Platonic or the Biblical way. At the same time, he cannot disregard the problem of religion, the core of the problem of the civil society Emile is about to enter, especially since all religions govern sexual conduct and some attempt to govern sexual longing itself.

 

2. God, the first ‘abstraction’ 

There is an “incomprehensible Being who embraces everything, who gives motion to the world and forms the whole system of beings” (IV.255). All-important, this Being is also entirely abstract; “he escapes all our senses,” hidden behind his work (IV.255). “‘What is He? Where is He?'”: when we ask these questions, “our mind is confused and goes astray, and we no longer know what to think,” having departed from our own sensual experience (IV.255). In civil society, this is where we approach the moment of ‘being told.’

Rousseau criticizes Locke’s way of beginning to think about God. “Locke wants to begin by the study of spirits and later go on to that of bodies” (IV.255). This only leads to superstition and error, following neither reason nor “nature in its proper order” (IV.255). It “serves only to establish materialism” (IV.255)—which may of course be why Locke recommends it, but that is another matter. 

As Allan Bloom mentions, the passages in Locke Rousseau criticizes are paragraphs 190-192 in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. [1] Here Locke introduces the study of natural philosophy. Natural philosophy is “a speculative science” and therefore probably not a science at all. “I have reason to say, we never shall be able to make a Science of it” (¶190), inasmuch as “the Works of Nature are contrived by a Wisdom, and operate by ways too far surpassing our Faculties to discover, or Capacities to conceive, for us ever to be able to reduce them into a Science” (¶190). Natural philosophy seeks knowledge of “the Principles, Properties, and Operations of Things as they are in themselves,” and it consists two parts, “one comprehending Spirits with their Nature and Qualities”—usually called metaphysics— and “the other Bodies” (¶190). The comprehension of Spirits “ought to go before the study of Matter” because, although it isn’t “a Science that can be methodized into a System,” it can enlarge “our Minds towards a truer and fuller comprehension of the intellectual World, to which we are led both by Reason and Revelation” (¶190). Accordingly, he recommends a distinctive form of Bible study consisting not of reading Scripture itself but of reading “a good History of the Bible, for young People,” as seen in a contemporaneous set of selections from the Book of Proverbs (¶190). Such practical advisements “will be a good Preparation to the study of Bodies” (¶190). Young minds never impressed with “Goblins, Spectres, and Apparitions” will be less likely to be frightened “into a compliance” with the commands of nursemaids, a great convenience to such rulers but “a great inconvenience” to those so spooked “all their Lives after, by subjecting their Minds to Frights, fearful Apprehensions Weakness, and Superstition” (¶191), and thus inapt for real science. [2]

Further, beginning the study of natural science with the study of invisible “spirits” will prepare the mind to think in terms of such natural laws as gravity, which cannot be apprehended by the senses. Locke writes that gravity is “impossible to be explained by any natural Operation of Matter, or any other Law of Motion, but the positive Will of a Superiour Being, so ordering it” (¶192). Whether this correctly states the teaching of Newton’s Principia Mathematica may be doubted, and indeed it may be doubted that Locke himself thought so. But the claim that metaphysics can provide a foundation for physics, and that studying the Bible (edited the Lockean way) gives the Young Gentleman an appealing way to begin to think metaphysically in a way that will support instead of interfere with real science, while (not incidentally) appeasing the worries of the pious, sharply opposes the Rousseauian dicta, “Things! Things! Things!” and “Facts! Facts! Facts!”

“Since our senses are the first instruments of our knowledge, corporeal and sensible beings are the only ones of which we immediately have an idea. The word spirit has no sense for anyone who has not philosophized. To the people and to children, a spirit is only a body,” as seen in their propensity to “imagine spirits who cry out, speak, flutter, and make noise” (IV.255). To try to teach about spirits first is only to accustom people “to say words without understanding them,” after which “it is easy to make them say whatever one wants” (IV.256). Spirit-education is only an instrument of rule by opinion, and thereby of amour-propre.

 

3. The origin of religions

Accordingly, the first religion was animistic. People “filled the universe with gods that could be sensed” (IV.256), sometimes imagining every thing to be inhabited by a god. Idolatry was the form of worship consistent with this first religion, its intention having been to control or at least appease the gods in things by producing the only things human beings could control, artifacts. Human persons supposed that they could influence the actions of divine persons embodied in all the things around them, whether these threatened or attracted.

Monotheism began to replace polytheism when human beings began to conceive of a first cause, an origin of all these many god-things. It remained anthropomorphic, however: “Once the imagination has seen God, it is very rare that the understanding conceives Him. This is precisely the error to which Locke’s order [of study] leads.” (IV.256). And this is what makes it so difficult for Rousseau to conceive of how impersonal abstractions could have occurred to human minds.

He doesn’t attempt to say. [3] He does point to a problem “the abstract idea of substance” raises: “in order to admit of only one substance, this substance must be assumed to have incompatible qualities, such as thought and extension, which are mutually exclusive since one is essentially divisible and the other excludes all divisibility” (IV.256). How does thought, which cannot be sensually perceived, cohabit with matter? It can only be that “beings in which these two qualities are joined are composed of the two substances to which these two qualities belong”—in other words, Being consists of two primary substances, not one. 

Biblical dualism poses a still more difficult-to-understand dualism, the dualism between the two substances joined together and “the divine nature,” between “the incomprehensible idea of the action of our soul on our body and the idea of the action of God on all beings” (IV,.256). Such ideas as “creation, annihilation, ubiquity, eternity, omnipotence”—all the principal divine powers and attributes—can scarcely find a place in the minds of adults, let alone “young minds still busy with the first operations of the senses and able to conceive only what they touch” (IV.257). Speak to children about God’s power and “they will estimate Him to be almost as strong as their father” (IV.257). That being so, although “I foresee how many readers will be surprised at seeing me trace the whole first age of my pupil without speaking to him of religion,” but if “there are mysteries it is impossible for man not only to conceive but to believe… I do not see what is gained by teaching them to children, unless it be that they learn how to lie early” (IV.257).

What about the child’s salvation? “This dogma badly understood is the principle of sanguinary intolerance and the cause of all those vain instructions that strike a fatal blow to human reason in accustoming it to satisfy itself with words” (IV.257)—again, the rule of mere opinion. (It is especially in matters of religion that opinion triumphs” (IV.260). Crucially, “the obligation to believe assumes the possibility of doing so” (IV.257). When it comes to religion, children don’t understand most of what they’re told, and what they’re told is “a question of geography,” a matter of whether he was born in Rome or Mecca (IV.258). Moreover, “when a child says that he believes in God, it is not in God that he believes, it is in Peter or James who tell him that there is something called God” (IV.258). Since “reason tells us that a man can be punished only for the mistakes of his will, and that an invincible ignorance could not be imputed to crime,” children cannot be damned. More, “the only unbelievers who will be punished are those whose heart closes itself to the truth”; “let us refrain from proclaiming the truth to those who are not in a condition to understand it, fort to do this is to want to substitute error for truth” (IV.259).

“We who pretend to shake off the yoke of opinion in everything, we who want to grant nothing to authority, we who want to teach nothing to our Emile which he could not learn by himself in every country, in what religion shall we raise him? To what sect shall we join the man of nature?” (IV.260). None: “we shall put him in a position to choose the one to which the best use of his reason ought to lead him” (IV.260). Recalling “my motto” (borrowed from Juvenal), “Dedicate life to truth,” but also acknowledging that in addressing the question of religious belief and education “I walk on fires covered by deceitful cinders,” Rousseau refrains from engaging in any more controversy in his own name and instead offers an account of “what a man more worthy than I thought”—a man whose sentiments, moreover, Rousseau offers merely “for examination,” not as an argument of his own (V.260). As Professor Jensen observed, Book IV has no frontispiece; Rousseau places the illustration here, near the center of the Emile. The illustration depicts Orpheus with his lyre, bringing religion to the people. Rousseau likes the association of religion with music, and his worthy man offers a natural religion, a religion in harmony with nature—deducible from it and compatible with it. [4] That is, within the story of the upbringing of the frankly imaginary Emile, Rousseau inserts a supposedly true story about another teacher and another pupil. It is the former pupil who tells the story.

 

4. The Savoyard Vicar

Once upon a time, a “poor Savoyard vicar” rescued a youth—first from a house maintained by the Church for proselytes and then from the life of hunger and indigence into which the lad quickly fell (IV.262). The vicar was motivated by “a natural inclination,” the sentiment of compassion; the narrator makes no mention of charity inspired by the Holy Spirit (IV.262). Seeing the bitterness “opprobrium and contempt” had caused in the youth’s heart—he “had seen that religion served only as the mask of interest and sacred worship only as the safeguard of hypocrisy” and “the sublime original ideas of the divinity disfigured by the fantastic imaginations of men”—the vicar befriended him. In the house for proselytes, the youth had found “that in order to believe in God he had to renounce the judgment he had received from Him”; as a consequence, he returned their contempt, disdaining men who “thought they knew more about these things than he did,” but in fact didn’t know that they knew nothing (IV.263).

The combination of skepticism and bitterness had bad moral effects. “The forgetting of all religion leads to the forgetting of the duties of man” (IV.263). “Incredulity and poverty, stifling his nature little by little, were leading him rapidly to his destruction and heading towards the morals of a tramp and the morality of an atheist” (IV.263). He was Emile’s age, “that happy age when the blood is in fermentation and begins to heat up the soul without enslaving it to the furies of the senses,” still too young to be tempted by the cruder forms of vice but vulnerable to “gentler seductions,” had they been offered. The unnamed youth is Emile without Emile’s governor, without Emile’s childhood education. Rousseau evidently offers him as the means of asking the question, ‘Can a youth who grew up without the attentive care of Rousseau’s governor still be saved after having been exposed to the false education of the Church?’ And can he be guided away from becoming the village atheist, or worse, an Enlightenment philosophe? 

The vicar began his own kind of gentle seduction, a seduction to virtue. Where the Church failed, he aimed to succeed in inducing a salutary conversion.  “The first thing he did was to gain the proselyte’s confidence by not selling him his benefactions, by not pestering him, by not preaching to him, by always putting himself within his reach, by making himself small in order to be his proselyte’s equal” (IV.263). He let the youth talk, and never criticized the “chatter” (IV.263). The vicar understood that “there is a degree of degradation which takes away life from the soul, and the inner voice cannot make itself heard to someone who thinks only of feeding himself” (IV.264). Seeing him dangerously near the “moral death” to which such involuntary poverty inclines those who suffer it, the vicar began not by lecturing him on humble acceptance of God’s providential judgment but “by awakening amour-propre and self-esteem in him” (IV.264). That is, in conversing with the angry young skeptic he does exactly the opposite of what the governor did with the innocent Emile. Cure of a corrupted youth must differ sharply from the preventative ‘vaccine’ Emile receives, although the heart-winning way of friendship and seeming equality remains the same. The vicar “reanimated a generous ardor in [the youth’s] heart by the account of others’ noble deeds,” awakening in him “the desire to perform like deeds” (IV.264). “He made the boy regain a good enough opinion of himself so as not to believe he was a being useless for anything good and so as not to want any longer to make himself contemptible in his own eyes” (IV.264).

“What struck me the most,” the narrator recalls, “was seeing in my worthy master’s private life virtue without hypocrisy, humanity without weakness, speech that was always straight and simple, and conduct always in conformity with his speech” (IV.264). The vicar thus did not exhibit the failures priests are most excoriated for: the sham virtue scored by Protestant reformers; the milk-and-toast Christianity mocked by Machiavelli; the orotundity of the Ciceronian oratory taught in the schools; the failure to match what one says with what one does, which is a common enough complaint about clergy and indeed anyone in authority, anywhere.

It now becomes evident why Rousseau has introduced us to the Savoyard vicar. This is a portrait of what a priest should be. Rousseau would reform both of the two ruling ‘estates’ of Europe; more realistically, he would show them, and his other readers, what it would take for them to reform themselves. His advice to the Second Estate, the aristocrats, has been constant throughout Emile’s early education, which is really as much an education of aristocrats via a discussion of educating an aristocratic boy. Here he has turned to educating the First Estate, the celibate clergy, showing them how to speak not with children who are typically under the rule of parents and the tutors they hire, but the youths who have been placed on the road to moral ruin by those well-intentioned parents and tutors, themselves badly educated. Aristocrats rule by example and by action; priests rule by example and by speech, by doctrine, by the Word of God as they conceive it. Rousseau intends to teach priests both a different way of teaching and a different doctrine to teach, both consistent with the new and better political regimes that might find a place for priests after replacing the doomed monarchies. In this way, he would ‘save’ the priests, and the Church, from itself.

The vicar increasingly won the youth’s respect; eventually, “so much goodness had entirely won my heart” (IV.265). This aroused his curiosity, as “I was waiting with agitated curiosity for the moment when I would learn the principle on which he founded the uniformity of so singular a life,” a life entirely different from the spirit of “proud misanthropy, a certain bitterness against the rich and happy of the world, as though they were such at my expense and their pretended happiness had been usurped from mine” (IV.265)—the spirit seen in Shakespeare’s character Jaques in All’s Well That Ends Well. In that play, Jaques is finally excluded from the regime of happy lovers. The loveless youth here will be ‘seduced’ into a life of loving rightly, and this is how the central section of Book IV relates to the sections around it. If Adam and Eve become curious about good and evil—already corrupted, in Rousseau’s estimation, by a poorly-conceived ‘verbal’ education, an education undertaken in the mode of commands, of obedience and therefore of potential disobedience instead of loving consent—the youth’s curiosity is piqued by the vicar’s happiness and lovingkindness. 

Having balanced the youth’s angry and small-souled pride with a nobler pride—both, however, based on the bad sentiment of amour-propre—the vicar now “prevented it from turning into hardness of soul” (IV.265).  He did this by showing the youth how the “vain appearance” offered by priests and human beings in civil society generally covered “real evils”; further, these real evils result from their “errors,” which cause them to endure “miseries”; as a result, he began “to pity them more than to envy them” (IV.265). Amour-propre arises from comparing one’s own lot in life with that of others; having already contracted this vice, this civil-social perversion of natural amour de soi, the youth’s reform must proceed from that bad condition of the soul, that bad sentiment. “Moved with compassion for human weaknesses by the profound sentiment of his own,” the vicar “saw men everywhere groaning under the yoke of the rich and the rich under the yoke of prejudice” or error (IV.265). With this example before him, the youth began to redirect his contempt not for the victims of such errors, who are finally blameless because no one willingly commits an error, but for the errors that cause the harm. As the vicar tells him, “Peace of soul consists in contempt for everything that can trouble it” (IV.265). 

Hearing this aphorism, the proud youth willingly humbles himself, rather than having been humiliated by the vicar along the lines of conventional clerical education, which only provokes resistance in a spirited youth, servility in a fearful one. “What is the use of being born?” he cries (IV.265). And “Who knows how to be happy?” (IV.266). It is the moment his teacher has been waiting for. “I do” (IV.266). And—now addressing the youth as “my child,” his child by consent not by birth or by authority—”I shall be glad to tell you” (IV.266). 

But still not in the mode of exhortation or of command. The vicar will not pile aphorism upon aphorism. By convention, a priest hears confessions; the vicar instead will teach by the means of his own confession. 

 

5. The vicar’s profession of faith

The confessional mode is the right way to address the youth. It involves neither “learned speeches” nor “profound reasonings,” only the attempt to talk “good sense” by a truthful man (IV.266). “I do not want to argue with you or event attempt to convince you. It is enough for me to reveal to you what I think in the simplicity of my heart. Consult yours during my speech. This is all I ask of you.” (IV.266). Since “reason is common to us,” “if I think well, why would you not think as I do?” IV.266). This further relaxes the amour-propre the vicar had first fanned, then directed.

The vicar confesses that he became a priest too hastily, soon “sens[ing] that in obliging myself not to be a man I had promised more than I could keep” (IV.267). Although the Church teaches that conscience registers the thoughts and sentiments of the Holy Spirit, the vicar evidently thinks not: “remorse always reproaches us feebly for what well-ordered nature permits us, and all the more so for what it prescribes to us” (IV.267), “persist[ing] in following the order of nature against all the laws of men” (IV.267). He will come to discuss the laws of God a bit later.

The youth is at the time of life when he can learn to resist the passions he has before the powerful passions of puberty buffet him, the better to see that order of nature and fit his soul to it. This again directs him away from amour-propre and toward natural self-love. The vicar warns him of the social consequences of doing this, having endured the contempt of his fellows for not joining them in their pursuit of vice.

He found himself, uncorrupted, in much the same mental confusion that the youth has found himself, corrupted. “I was in that frame of mind of uncertainty and doubt that Descartes demands for the quest for truth”—implying that his friend is well-situated to find answers to the questions that torment him. He assures him, “this state is hardly made to last,” being “disturbing and painful”; “my heart was not sufficiently corrupted to enjoy myself in it,” he continues, subtly appealing to the youth’s self-love, again (IV.267). In his perplexity, “I said to myself, ‘I love the truth I seek it and cannot recognize it. Let it be revealed to me, and I shall remain attached to it. Why must it hide itself from the eagerness of a heart made to adore it.” (IV.267-268). That is, the vicar prayed not to God but to himself. The human self will turn out to be the most reliable source of certain knowledge of human nature.

Church teachings were no help. “I was born in a church which decides everything and permits no doubt; therefore, the rejection of a single point made me reject all the rest”; “by being told ‘Believe everything,’ I was prevented from believing anything, and I no longer knew where to stop” (IV.268). If one sets no limits on belief of what one is told, there are no limits to disbelief of what one is told. The Church offers no criterion for judging the teachings it propounds.

Philosophers, who discovered, were no better. “I found them all to be proud, assertive, dogmatic (even in their pretended skepticism), ignorant of nothing, proving nothing, mocking one another; at this last point which was common to all, appeared to me the only one about which they are all right” (IV.268). “If you ponder their reasoning, they turn out to be good only at destructive criticism,” a point recalling what Rousseau said in his own name in the Preface to the Emile, which he describes as a constructive book, unlike the critiques of the philosophes.

His inquiry led him to consider “the insufficiency of the human mind” and the pride of the human soul as the intellectual and moral causes of such diverse and contradictory opinions, respectively. Intellectually, “this immense machine,” the universe, is immeasurable; its “first laws” and its “final cause” are unknown and unknowable to us (IV.268). Nor do we know ourselves. “We believe we possess intelligence for piercing these mysteries, but all we have is imagination” (IV.268). Philosophers take these imaginings and love them not because it is true (how does he know?) but because it is his own. As soon as he compares his imaginings to those of other philosophers, amour-propre kicks in. “Where is the one who in the secrecy of his heart sets himself any other goal than that of distinguishing himself?” (IV.268). 

Seeing this, the vicar “learn[ed] to limit my researches to what was immediately related to my interest, to leave myself in a profound ignorance of all the rest” (IV.269). That is, he learned the lesson the governor teaches the child Emile; again, Rousseau would teach the clergy (and with them, now, the intellectual ‘clerisy’ of the Enlightenment) how to think. It begins with the Socratic self-limitation, knowledge of one’s own ignorance. 

If I consult “the inner light,” he told himself, “it will lead me astray less than [the opinions] lead me astray; or at least my error will be my own, and I will deprave myself less in following my own illusions than in yielding to [the philosophers’] lies” (IV.269). In this introspection, he soon “found that the first and most common” of his own opinions “was also the simplest and most reasonable” (IV.269). The more systematic and elaborate the set of thoughts the more likely they go wrong. “But what a difference with direct proofs!” And among them, “Must not the only one which explains everything be preferred, if it contains no more difficulties than the others?” (IV.269).

With “the love of truth as my whole philosophy,” and hearkening to his “inner light” as “my whole method,” a method that prevents entanglement in “the vain subtlety of arguments” the vicar “resolved to accept as evident all knowledge which in the sincerity of my heart I cannot refuse my consent” and “to accept as true all that which appears to me to have a necessary connection with this first knowledge” (IV.269-270).

“But who am I? What right have I to judge things, and what determines my judgments?” (IV.270). He must look inward “in order to know the instrument I wish to use and far I can trust its use” (IV.270).

 

6. The vicar looks within: the mind

Rousseau borrows his introspective method from Descartes but applies it not only to the mind but to the heart. He comes up with somewhat different results. Considering himself, he knows he exists; he knows he has “senses by which I am affected” (IV.270). With this certainty comes his “first doubt”: “Do I have a particular sentiment of my existence, or do I sense it only through my sensations? (IV.270). He judges the question unresolvable. He knows he has sensations inside of him but their cause is outside of him; therefore, the objects of these sensations are “not the same thing” (IV.270). He calls the things outside him, taken together, “matter”; he calls the things outside him, perceived separately, “bodies” (IV.270). By comparing the objects perceived by his sensations he discovers that he infers that he has “a faculty of comparing them” (IV.270). “To perceive is to sense; to compare is to judge. These are not the same thing. By sensation, objects are presented to me separated, isolated, such as they are in nature. By comparison I move them, transport them, and, so to speak, I superimpose them on one another in order to pronounce on their difference or their likeness and generally on all their relations” (IV.271). So, for example, I perceive a large stick and a small stick, but when I compare them and judge that one is longer than the other, I am judging. Sensual perception is passive; judgment active. Judgment requires attention, meditation, reflection; whatever I call it, “it is in me and not in things,” as “I alone produce it, although I produce it only on the occasion of the impression made on me by objects” (IV. 271). Here is where I can make mistakes and also where I exercise intellectual freedom, being “the master of giving more or less examination to what I sense” (IV.272). “I am not simply a sensitive and passive being but an active and intelligent being”; “I dare to pretend to the honor of thinking” (IV.272). I also “know that the truth is in things and not in the mind which judges them, and that the less of myself I put in the judgments I make, the more sure I am of approaching the truth” (IV.272). This again is exactly what Emile had been trained to do in childhood. 

“Thus my rule of yielding to sentiment more than to reason is confirmed by reason itself,” in the sense that, by means of comparison, of judgment, of reason, I have determined that my senses are more reliable than judgment. I exist; therefore I sense and judge.

“The first object which presents itself to me for comparison with [objects] is myself” (IV.272). In matter, I see motion and rest. Neither motion nor rest is “essential to matter” but they differ from one another in that motion is the effect of a cause whereas rest is the absence of such a cause (IV.272). Might rest not be the effect of some other cause? No, because rest is only relative; all things are in motion. There are two kinds of motion: “communicated” motion, caused by something external to the body that is moved; “spontaneous” motion, caused by something internal to the body that is moved. I am self-moving; by analogy, so are other animals. Unlike the universe as a whole, which exhibits “regular, uniform” movement and is likely to be “subject to constant laws,” spontaneous motion implies liberty (IV.273). What is the cause of the motion of the universe? “I believe I sense a hand that makes it turn” (IV.273). The introduction of belief suggests that the vicar knows he might be mistaken, unless he is deploying a metaphor. The vicar criticizes philosophers who contend that the universe moves itself. “Let Descartes tell us what physical law made his vortices turn. Let Newton show us the hand which launched the planets on the tangent of their orbits.” (IV.273). [5]

 

7. The vicar’s three articles of faith

This leads the vicar to his “first principle” or first article of faith: “Every motion not produced by another can only come from a spontaneous, voluntary action. Inanimate bodies act only by motion, and there is no true action without will…. I believe therefore that a will moves the universe and animates nature. This is my first dogma, or my first article of faith.” (IV.273). He does not claim to know how a will produces a physical action but introspection shows that it does. “The will is known to me by its acts, not by it nature” (IV.274). It is, he concedes, “obscure,” but it “makes sense and contains nothing repugnant to reason or to observation” (IV.274). His dualism is superior to the monism of materialism, which would require motion to be inseparable to matter and always “in it to the same degree”; if so, it could not increase or decrease, as it manifestly does (IV.274). Locke’s materialism is mistaken because matter cannot think, a machine cannot think, and matter is not self-moving.

This leads the vicar to his second article of faith, an argument from design for the existence of God. “If moved matter shows me a will, matter moved according to certain laws shows me an intelligence”; “to act, to compare, and to choose”—to give objects one direction and not another—are “operations of an active and thinking being” (IV.275). Listening “to our inner sentiments” we “recognize the harmony of the beings and the admirable concurrences of each piece in the preservation of the others” (IV.275). This harmony is what Orpheus and his lyre symbolize. Consider the opposite hypothesis: “If organized bodies were combined fortuitously in countless ways before taking on constant forms, if at the outset were formed stomachs without mouths, feet without heads, hands without arms, imperfect organs of every kind which have perished for want of being able to reserve themselves, why do none of these unformed attempts strike our glance any longer, why did nature finally prescribe laws to itself to which it was not subjected at the outset? (IV.275). Chance combinations of bodies, even bodies as small as atoms, “will never result in anything but products of the same nature as the elements that are combined” (IV.276). (Here the vicar commits an error, succumbing to the fallacy of composition.) 

Whether the world is eternal or created, whether there is a single principle of things, or two, or many of them, and what their nature is, he confesses not to know. Like Emile and his governor, he simply asks “what does it matter to me?” (IV.277). “As soon as this knowledge has something to do with my interests, I shall make an effort to acquire it,” but until then “I renounce idle questions which may agitate my amour-propre but are useless for my conduct and are beyond my reason” (IV.277). Is it useful? What good is it? These are familiar questions from previous chapters.

What is useful and good is some sense of “what rank I occupy in the order of things that the divinity governs and I can explain” (IV.277). My species is “incontestably in the first rank: for by my will and by the instruments in my power for executing it, I have more force for acting on all the bodies surrounding me, for yielding to or eluding their actions as I please, than any of them has for acting on me against by will by physical impulsion alone; and by my intelligence I am the only one that has a view of the whole” (IV.277). “Man is the king of the earth he inhabits”; he arrives at this thought by natural reason, unassisted by the teaching of the Book of Genesis (IV.277). This results in no blasphemy, however. Knowing he cannot be the God who rules the universe, he is grateful to God for making him a man and humbled in knowing he didn’t make himself a man. “I adore the supreme power, and I am moved by its benefactions. I do not need to be taught this worship; it is dictated to me by nature itself,” the natural consequence of self-love, which preserves us and wishes us our good (IV.278). Nature is the Bible of the natural religion.

If so, then, why is the human being so confused and disorderly, as the vicar was and the youth now is? This too may be discovered by introspective consideration of our own nature. “In meditating on the nature of man, I believed I discovered in it two distinct principles: one of which raised him to the study of eternal truths, to the love of justice and moral beauty, and to the regions of the intellectual world whose contemplation is the wise man’s delight; while the other took him basely into himself, subject him to the empire of the senses and to the passions which are their ministers, and by means of these hindered all the sentiment of the former inspired in him” (IV.278). That is, “man is not one”; man is by nature dual. “I want and I do not want; I sense myself enslaved and free at the same time. I see the good, I love it, and I do the bad” (IV.279). This confession, too, amounts to humbling himself to the youth even as he aims at humbling the youth; they share the same reason for humility. 

It is at this point that he reassures the youth that “I shall always be of good faith,” even if mistaken about the conscience and the morality it enjoins. It is this moral sense, not reason, that enables us to act for our own good, “but my will is independent of my senses; I consent or I resist; I succumb or I conquer” (IV.280). This “sentiment of my freedom is effaced in me only when I become depraved and finally prevent the voice of the soul from being raised against the law of the body” (280). The will is identical to the judgment, inasmuch as it is judgment that causes the will to will, the judgment that enables us to compare one possible course of action to another. “One chooses the good as he has judged the true; if he judges wrong, he chooses badly” (IV.280). “And what is the cause which determines [man’s] judgment? It is his intelligent faculty, it is his power of judging: the determining cause is in himself” (IV.280).

This is the source of what later philosophers will call ‘autonomy.’ “I am not free not to want my own good; I am not free to want what is bad for me. 
But it in precisely this that my freedom consists—my being able to will not only what is suitable to me, or what I deem to be such, without anything external to me determining me” (IV.280). “The principle of every action in in the will of a free being. One cannot go back beyond that.” (V.280). The existence of the will, “an immaterial substance” which causes human action is “my third article of faith” (IV.281). As for “providence,” it “does not will the evil a man does in abusing the freedom it gives him” but neither does it “prevent him from doing it, whether because this evil, coming from a being so weak, is nothing in its eyes”—it “cannot disturb the general order”—or because “it could not prevent it without hindering his freedom and doing a greater evil by degrading his nature” (IV.281). Divine reward would make no sense if we had no power to do evil. As for the evil men suffer, the vicar goes so far as to claim that “pain has little hold over someone who, having reflected little, possesses neither memory nor foresight”—man as he exists in nature (IV.282). “Take away our fatal progress, take away our errors and our vices, take away the work of man, and everything is good” (IV.282). Hence his self-command: “Be just and you will be happy,” at least in the long run (IV.282). Since the soul and the body “are of such different natures, the soul may well survive the body and receive compensation for the afflictions in this life imposed on it by evil men (IV.283); however, he soon adds that the good will itself may not be recompensed, being already good and therefore happy to continue “to exist according to its nature” (IV.284). Nor does he claim that the soul is immortal, as “my limited understanding conceives nothing without limits” (IV.283). As for wicked souls, he doubts that they are condemned to “endless torments” because wicked souls already repay part of their debt in this life, simply by experiencing their own vices (IV.284). 

The vicar understands all this not by revelation but by “the inner sentiment that leads me to judge of causes according to my natural lights” (IV.2867). No divine revelation through the Bible is required.

 

8. The vicar looks within: the heart

What do the natural lights of the natural religion tell us about the right “manner of conduct”? (IV.286). And “what rules ought I to prescribe for myself,” based on these “truths”? (IV.286). Once again, neither the reasoning of philosophers nor the revelation of prophets and priests is necessary, as he finds these rules “written by nature with ineffaceable characters in the depth of my heart” (IV.286). “Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions are the voice of the body” (IV.286). Conscience “is to the soul what instinct is to the body”; the vicar distinguishes between the passions of the body and its instincts because the latter are unfailingly right, passions often wrong, interfering with conscience. 

“All the morality of our actions is in the judgment we ourselves make of them. If it is true that the good is good, it must be so in the depths of our hearts as it is in our works, and the primary reward for justice is to sense that one practices it” (IV.287). If autonomy means giving oneself the law, morality means judging the actions we take by the light of that law. Therefore, “let us return to ourselves, my young friend! Let us examine, all personal interest aside, where our inclinations lead us.” (IV.287). Introspection shows that a good act “is sweeter to do and leaves us with a more agreeable impression after having done it” than a wicked act” (IV.287). “Take this love of the beautiful from our hearts, and you take all the charm from life” (IV.287). The one “whose vile passions have stifled these delicious sentiments in his narrow soul, and who, by dint of self-centeredness, succeeds in loving only himself, has no more transports,” no joy, no sweetness in his life (IV.288). “This unfortunate man no longer feels, no longer lives. He is already dead.” (IV.288). Thus the vicar gently draws the misanthropy out of the youth. “Let us obey nature” (IV.288). It is human opinion that condemns human nature, that makes misanthropes out of men and boys.

We see evidence of this not only in ourselves but “in all the nations of the world” (IV.288). Despite “so many inhuman and bizarre cults,” the “prodigious diversity of morals and characters,” the “same notions of justice and decency,” the “same notions of good and bad” persist (IV.288). The gods of the ancient pagans were “abominable” but the ancient heroes were good; “the chaste Lucretia worshiped the lewd Venus” (IV.288). “The holy voice of nature, stronger than that of the gods, made itself respected on earth and seemed to relegate crime, along with the guilty, to heaven,” thanks to the “innate principle of justice and virtue” that exists “in the depths of soul,” the “principle that I have the name conscience” (Iv.289). Montaigne, who denies this, is mistaken; political economists and others who explain morality in terms of self-interest overlook the fact that self-sacrifice, universally admired as good not only by those who observe it but by those who undertake it, serves ones good, not one’s interest.

 

9. Moral sentiments

Conscience judges, but the acts of conscience “are not judgments but sentiments. Although all our ideas come to us from outside, the sentiments evaluating them are within us, and it is by them alone that we know the compatibility or incompatibility between us and the things we ought to seek or flee.” (IV.290). If to exist is to sense, if sensibility is anterior to reasoning, sentiments anterior to ideas, then the core of our nature, the core of what is our good, dwells within us. For the individual, the moral sentiments are amour de soi, fear of pain, horror of death, and desire of well-being. For the species, sociability is core moral sentiment, serving the others. “It is from the moral system formed by this double relation to oneself and to one’s fellows that the impulse of conscience is born. To know the good is not to love it; man does not have innate knowledge of it, but as soon as his reason makes him know it, his conscience leads him to love it. It is this sentiment which is innate.” (IV.290).

Just as Rousseau had exclaimed “Things! things!” when educating the young child, just as he had exclaimed “Facts! facts!” when educating the older child, so the vicar exclaims to the youth, “Conscience, conscience!” (IV.290). Conscience is a natural sentiment, and the vicar makes no mention of its direction by a Holy Spirit, or of the conscience as the place wherein such a spirit might dwell. It is “the infallible judge of good and bad,” the thing that makes “the excellence of [man’s] nature and the morality of his actions” (IV.290). Conscience enables men to bypass “the terrifying apparatus of philosophy,” enabling us to “be men without being scholars” (IV.290). It shines as “a more certain guide” than philosophy “in this immense maze of human opinions” (IV.290). 

Recognizing the existence of conscience is one thing. One must also “know how to recognize it and to follow it” (IV.291). After all, many do not. “Conscience is timid; it likes refuge and peace. The world and noise scare it.” (IV.291). “Fanaticism dares to counterfeit it and to dictate crime in its name” (IV.291). Ignored, “it “gives up” and “no longer speaks to us” (IV.291). Much of the Emile has been devoted to showing the malign effects of human opinion and of the amour-propre it generates. But because the reward of following conscience is an undeniable good, a good even the wicked, who themselves occasionally yield “to the temptation of doing good,” feeling its naturalness and sweetness when they do, acting according to conscience is worth the effort. The word for this effort is virtue. “Virtue is similar to Proteus in the fable: when one wants to embrace it, it at first takes on countless terrifying forms and finally reveals itself in its own form only to those who did not let go” (IV.291); for whatever reason, the vicar ignores the example of Isaac in the Bible.

If knowledge of the good is not innate, although the capacity to recognize the good is, where does knowledge of the good come from? Once again, from nature. The difference between a good man and a bad one is that “the good man orders himself in relation to the whole, and the wicked one orders the whole in relation to himself. The latter makes himself the center of all things; the former measures his radius and keeps to the circumference. Then he is order in relation to the common center, which is God, and in relation to all the concentric circles, which are the creatures.” (V.292). “This is the natural law” (IV.292). No “felicity is sweeter than sensing that one is ordered in a system in which everything is good” (IV.292).

Concluding his confession of faith, the vicar alludes to the youth’s stage of life—his own, when his own crisis of faith occurred. “There is an age when the heart is still free, but ardent, restless, avid for the happiness it does not know; it seeks it with a curiosity born of incertitude and, deceived by the senses, finally settles on a vain image of happiness and believes it has found it where it is not” (IV.293). The vicar admits that “I recognized them too late and have been unable to destroy them completely,” although even when they “seduce me, they no longer deceive me” “I know them for what they are” and even when “I follow them, I despise them” (IV.293). While waiting for final deliverance from them in death, “I am already happy in this life because I take little account of all its ills,” which are “almost foreign to my being” and because “all the true good that I can get out of [life] depends on me”—not, he tacitly suggests, on God. Indeed, while “I converse” with God, “fill all my faculties with His divine essence,” and “am moved by His benefactions,” blessing Him “for his gifts,” “I do not pray to Him” (IV.293). “If the strength for going farther is lacking of me, of what can I be guilty? It is up to the truth to come near nearer.” (IV.294).

 

10. The natural religion

The narrator remarks, “To the extent that he spoke to me according to his conscience, mine seemed to confirm what he had told me” (IV.294). He promised to test the vicar’s claims by imitating him, by “carry[ing] your discourse with me in my heart” (IV.294)—indeed the only way it can be tested.

The vicar can ask for no more, claiming no divine inspiration and telling the youth to “attribute to my discourse only the authority of reason,” as this is “natural religion” not revelation (IV.295). The supposedly divine revelations contradict one another. “If one had listened only to what God says to the heart of man, there would never have been more than one religion on earth” (IV.295). There is evidence of this in his researches, in which he “found nothing in natural religion but the element of every religion” (IV.295). This suggests that the differences among religions arose from distortions introduced by men. Sure enough: If we are “sincerely seeking the truth,” “let us grant nothing to the right of birth and to the authority of fathers and pastor, but let us recall for the examination of conscience and reason all that they have taught us from our youth” (IV.297). And if they tell us to subject our reason to what they call revelation, we know that “he who deceives me can say as much. I need reasons for subjecting my reason.” (IV.297). “The God I worship is not a god of shadows. He did not endow me with an understanding in order to forbid me its use.” (IV. 300). This comports with Rousseau’s pervasive critique not only of opinion but especially of aristocratic opinion. And with his call for reform of the clerical aristocracy: “The minister of the truth does not tyrannize reason; he enlightens it,” even as he has attempted to do in his confession (IV.300).

When considering alleged revelation, three criteria apply: “that I was witness to the prophecy; that I was witness to the event; that it was demonstrated to me that this event could not have tallied fortuitously with the prophecy” (IV.301). Since these three criteria, taken together, are impossible to meet, miracles and prophecies “come down to a belief [in] the faith of others, and a subjection of the authority of God, speaking to my reason, to the authority of men” (IV.301). Consistent with the governor’s professed hatred of books, the vicar avers, “I shall never be able to conceive that what every man is obliged to know is confined to books,” which were “written by men” and not, by implication, God (IV.303). 

The un-bookish natural religion comprehends what Edmund Burke would call the beautiful and the sublime. “The death of Socrates, philosophizing tranquilly with his friends, is the sweetness one could desire; that of Jesus, expiring in torment, insulted, jeered at and cursed by a whole people, is the most horrible one could fear” (IV.308). “The life and death of Socrates are those of a wise man, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god” (IV.308). Jesus’ “elevated and pure morality of which he alone gave the lessons and the example” should be separated from “the unbelievable things,” the “things repugnant to reason and impossible for any sensible man to conceive or accept” found in the Gospels—miracles being the unstated but obvious examples (IV.308).

The natural religion is not only reasonable but useful, again a teaching consistent with what the governor has impressed upon Emile. As a vicar, “I shall always preach virtue to men,” “exhort them to do good,” attempt to “set a good example,” “strengthen their faith in the truly useful dogmas every man is obliged to believe” (IV.309). Intolerance is not among those dogmas; in the natural religion, no one is damned, a doctrine that “blaspheme[s] divine justice” and “lie[s] about the Holy Spirit” (IV.309). On these terms, “my good friend, I find nothing so fine as being a parish priest” (IV.309). “O if I could ever serve some poor parish of good people in our mountains, I would be happy, for it seems to me that I could be the cause of my parishioners’ happiness. I would not make them rich, but I would share their poverty.” (IV.309). In this portrait of the Savoyard vicar Rousseau guides priests as he had previously guided aristocrats, turning them toward nature and away from convention both in their minds and hearts and also into the countryside, away from the cities where opinion and social hierarchy rule. “I would have them love concord and equality, which often banish poverty and always make it bearable” (IV.310).

No intolerance, then, but what is the basis of toleration? “I would bring [my parishioners] to love one another without distinction and to regard one another as brothers, to respect all religions, and to live in peace, with each observing his own,” awaiting “greater enlightenment” while “protect[ing] public order” (IV.310). With the governor, he expects “everything [to be] shaken” in the regimes of Europe; the natural religion he espouses will, he claims “preserve the trunk at the expense of the branches” (IV.310). “Consciences which are agitated, uncertain, almost extinguished, and in the condition in which I have seen yours”—the condition of many souls in pre-revolutionary France and elsewhere—need “to be reinforced and awakened; and in order to put them back on the foundation of eternal truths, it is necessary to complete the job of ripping out the shaky pillars to which they think they are still attached” (IV.310).

As the governor effectively replaces the pupil’s father, so the vicar replaces the Church fathers from whom he had rescued the youth. He now addresses him as “my son”: “keep your soul in a condition where it always desires that there be a God, and you will never doubt it” (IV.311). If you are “sincere and without pride,” you will “know how to be ignorant” and “deceive neither yourself nor others” (IV.313). “Proud philosophy leads to freethinking as blind devoutness leads to fanaticism,” so “avoid these extremes” (IV.313). “Dare to acknowledge God among the philosophers; dare to preach humanity to the intolerant” (IV.313). In rescuing the youth from the school for proselytes, in proselytizing him in this new way, the vicar prepares him for becoming another priest of the natural religion, even as Rousseau would prepare priests and would-be priests for the new church that will survive the coming revolutions.

Rousseau concludes his discussion of religious education with an apologia. “I have transcribed this writing not as a rule for the sentiments that one ought to follow in religious matters, but as an example of the way one can reason with one’s pupil in order not to diverge from the method I have tried to establish” (IV.313), namely, that of investigation in accordance with sense perception and reasoning uninfluenced by books. “So long as one concedes nothing to the authority of men”—especially priests—or to “the prejudices of the country in which one was born”—the local religion—the “light of reason alone cannot, in the education founded by nature, lead us any farther than natural religion. This is what I limit myself to with my Emile. If he must have another religion, I no longer have the right to be his guide in that. It is up to him alone to choose it.” (IV.313). 

 

Notes

1. See Emile, 489 n.32.
2. In associating superstition with nursemaids, Locke adroitly appeals to the gentry-class father’s preference for keeping control of his son’s education and to whatever social prejudice Father might entertain—all in an effort to reform the gentry class Father represents by giving its sons a new, Lockean education aimed at utility and commerce instead of honor and war.
3. As Peter Emberley so cogently argues, such a silence may be telling. In this introduction to the Savoyard vicar’s confession, and in the confession itself, Rousseau may use dualism as a cloak concealing a more fundamental materialism. See Peter Emberley: “Rousseau versus the Savoyard Vicar: The Profession of Faith Considered.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 14, Numbers 2 & 3, May & September 1986, 299-329.
4. For a thorough discussion of the Orpheus story as it relates to the Emile, see Emberley, 310-311.
5. As Emberley shows, Rousseau himself elsewhere presents a much more thoroughgoingly materialistic analysis of the ‘self,’ which he explains as a “physiopsychological motion of the body”; see Emberley, 317.

 

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

 

“We are, so to speak, born twice: once to exist and once to live; once for our species and once for our sex” (IV.211). For Rousseau, being ‘born again’ takes on a different meaning than it does in Christianity. Before puberty, “children of the same sexes have nothing apparent to distinguish them: the same visage, the same figure, the same complexion, the same voice” (IV.211). “Everything is equal” (IV.211). Puberty brings differentiation but also dependence; in the male, it also brings crankiness—a “change in humor, frequent anger, a mind in constant agitation, makes the child almost unmanageable” as “his feverishness turns him into a lion”; “he no longer wishes to be governed,” even by his best friend, the governor (IV.211). He is “truly born to life”; “nothing human is foreign to him” (IV.211). 

So nature would have it, and it is futile to attempt “to control nature” (IV.211). To do so would be to defy “God”; “nothing of the kind is written in the human heart.” (Rousseau is silent on what is written in Scripture) (IV.211). Nor is there any need to control natural passions, which are “very limited” (IV.212) “They are the instruments of our freedom; they tend to preserve us. All those which subject us and destroy us come from elsewhere,” and “we appropriate them to the detriment of nature” (IV.212). He has already argued as much regarding the “primitive, innate passion” of self-love, good in itself but perverted into amour-propre by civil society. If a child’s parents and governor treat him well, showing him that they “not only are useful to him but they want to be,” he “begins to love them” (IV.213). “But as he extends his relations, his needs, and his active or passive dependencies, the sentiment of his connections with others is awakened and produces the sentiment of duties and preferences. Then the child becomes imperious, jealous, deceitful, and vindictive,” comparing himself to others and developing amour-propre for the first time (IV.213). This is Rousseau’s equivalent of the Christian interpretation of Genesis, the Fall of Man.

The natural irascibility of adolescence thus finds not only reinforcement but acceleration as the boy enters civil society, with its chain of dependencies. In sexual love, dependence upon another human being who does not necessarily love you with the reciprocity the boy has seen in his parents and governor finds its most poignant instance. “One sex is attracted to the other; that is the movement of nature. Choice, preferences, and personal attachments are the work of enlightenment, prejudice and habit…. One loves only after having judged; one prefers only after having compared” (IV.214). Comparison is natural, made possible by reason; far from being blind, love “has better eyes than we do and sees relations we are not able to perceive” (IV.214). But reason’s judgments, Rousseau has argued, are easily skewed by the amour-propre civil society fosters. “Love must be reciprocal. To be loved, one has to make oneself lovable.” (IV.214). And civil society holds up false idols of lovability.

This new and troubling need for sexual love raises questions that can no longer be avoided. When governing prepubescent children, parents and the governor can readily deflect the curiosity about childbirth that leads to questions about sex. Silence is often golden in this. The child has already seen his importunate questions on other topics unanswered, often with the counter-question, ‘Why is that useful?’ “If one decides to answer” a young child’s question, ‘Where did I come from?’ “let it be with the greatest simplicity, without mystery, without embarrassment, without a smile” (IV.216). Never make him ashamed of such a question since “true innocence is ashamed of nothing” (IV.217)—an instance in which Rousseau and the Bible concur. Rousseau recalls approvingly the answer of a mother to her son, who asked “where do children come from.” “My child, women piss them out,” like kidney stones, “with pains which sometimes cost them their lives.” (IV.218). Enough said. “The accessory ideas of pain and death cover this process with a veil of sadness which deadens the imagination and represses curiosity. Everything turns the mind toward the consequences of the delivery and not toward its causes.” (IV.218).

Such honest half-answers should suffice—until puberty. When nature begins to take its inevitable course, do not let the child’s imagination exacerbate a passion that already exerts such power over the human soul. “It is the errors of imagination which transform into vices the passions of all limited beings” (IV.219). “The summary of the whole of human wisdom in the use of the passions”—and notice that Rousseau continues the theme of utility, introduced in his earlier chapters, a theme derived from Machiavelli and Locke—is, first, “to have a sense of the true relations of man, with respect to the species as well as the individual,” and second, “to order all the affections of the soul to these relations” (IV.219). 

Nature itself has now changed the true relations of your pupil to other human beings. “So long as his sensibility remains limited to his own individuality,” as it has been in childhood, “there is nothing moral in his actions” (IV.219). His education through the age of twelve has dealt with him on that basis. “It is only when [his sensibility] begins to extend outside of himself that it takes on, first, the sentiments and, then, the notions of good and evil which truly constitute him as a man and as an integral part of his species” (IV.219-20). Here morality begins.

Let it not be tragedy. Do not force nature by doing anything that intensifies his sexual imaginings. “The true course of nature is more gradual and slower. Little by little the blood is inflamed, the spirits are produced, the temperament is formed.” (IV.220). Prepubescent and pubescent boys often feel the sentiment of friendship more intensely than sexual love. Encourage this, because it promotes benevolence toward human beings generally. “Adolescence is not the age of vengeance or of hate; it is that of commiseration, clemency, and generosity” (IV.220). The boy sympathizes with his pals; they depend on each other, passing (sometimes failing) tests of loyalty. Having learned his limitations vis-à-vis things, in childhood, he readily sees his limitations vis-à-vis persons. “It is man’s weakness which makes him sociable; it is our common miseries which turn our hearts to humanity; we would owe humanity nothing if we were not men” (IV.221). More radically, since “a truly happy human being is a solitary being,” and “God alone enjoys absolute happiness,” human beings must love; they are needy (IV.221). (Why, then, would God love man? Rousseau doesn’t ask the question, as he is a discreet writer.)

This is the basis of Rousseau’s emphasis on compassion, the distinguishing characteristic of his moral theory. “If our common needs unite us by interest”—as seen in his teaching on property—our “common miseries unite us by affection,” whether in friendship or in love (IV.221). 

In this we are equal by nature. Born naked and poor, “subject to all the miseries of life,” and “condemned to death,” men should study man. “When the first development of his senses lights the fire of imagination, he begins to feel himself in his fellows, to be moved by their complaints and to suffer their pains” (IV.222). Emile is ready for this study because he was never taught to pretend he felt compassion for others when he was a child; “he has not been showed the art of affecting sadness he does not feel” or to “feign tears at the death of anyone” (IV.222). Pity or compassion, “the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart according to the order of nature,” is the first we feel in relation to others (IV.222). It often first occurs to us not in relation to persons but animals; in a child, “the convulsions of a dying animal will cause him an ineffable distress before he knows whence come these new movements within him” (IV.222). Indeed, “how do we let ourselves be moved by pity if not by transporting ourselves outside of ourselves and identifying with the suffering animal, by leaving, as it were, our own being to take on its being? (IV.223).

This “nascent sensibility” must be guided, keeping Emile away from sentiments “which contract and concentrate the heart and tighten the spring of the human I” (IV.223). Follow these three maxims: 1) “it is not in the human heart to put ourselves in the place of people who are happier than we, but only in that of those who are more pitiable” (IV.223); therefore, bring Emile into the company of the poor, not the rich. 2) “One pities in others only those ills from which one does not feel oneself exempt” (IV.223); therefore, “make him understand well that the fate of these unhappy men can be his, that all their ills are there in the ground beneath his feet,” that he is subject to “all the same vicissitudes of fortune” (IV.224). Emile will learn at a young age what Rousseau attempts to teach his aristocratic and oligarch readers in their maturity. 3) “The pity one has for another’s misfortune is measured not by the quantity of that misfortune but by the sentiment which one attributes to those who suffer it” (IV.225). Once again, Rousseau aims his critique at ‘the few’: “the rich are consoled about the ill they do to the poor, because they assume the latter to be stupid enough to feel nothing at all,” and “it is natural that one consider cheap the happiness of people one despises” (IV.225). That goes for “political men” and “philosophers,” too (IV.225). But if you “study people of this order,” if you study the poor, “you will see that although their language is different, they have as much wit and more good sense than you do”; once you’ve learned that, you may yet learn to “respect your species” (IV.226). “Speak before [Emile] of humankind with tenderness, even with pity, but never with contempt. Man, do not dishonor man!” (IV.226). 

“It is by these roads and other similar ones—quite contrary to those commonly taken—that it is fitting to penetrate the heart of a young adolescent in order to arouse the first emotions of nature and to develop his heart and extend it to his fellows” (IV.228). It is noteworthy that there is no mention of any specifically Christian charity; according to Rousseau, compassion or agapic love is entirely natural to the adolescent. The main thing is not to mix it with amour-propre by linking it to a personal interest in vanity, emulation, or glory—those “sentiments that force us to compare ourselves with others” (IV.228). No competitions or prizes should be offered for displays of kindness. 

To direct youthful sentiments toward pity is to direct them away from “boisterous games and turbulent joy,” which too often “veil disgust and boredom” (IV.229). It will moderate sexual passion, too, as Emile puts himself in the place not only of his fellows but of the girls he now finds himself attracted to. “The sweetest habit of soul consists in a moderation of enjoyment which leaves little opening for desire and disgust,” the “restlessness of desire [that] produces curiosity and inconstancy” (IV.229). Emile isn’t on track to become “a male nurse or a brother of charity” or “to march from sick person to sick person, from hospital to hospital” (IV.231); that would tend to harden his heart, not open it, to inure him to the suffering of others and not to feel it. “A single subject well chosen and shown in a suitable light will provide him emotion and reflection for a month”; “by thus husbanding examples, lessons, and images…you will long blunt the needle of the senses and put nature off the track by following its own directions” (IV.231). He will think of girls a bit less, human beings a bit more. But not just any human beings, not ‘mankind’ in general. It is too early for such a grand sentiment. Rather, Emile will become a better friend to his friends, those with “ways of thinking and feeling clearly in common with him,” “whose nature has a more manifest identity with his own and thus make him more disposed to love himself” (IV.233).

For “we like what does us good,” what serves our natural self-interest, our amour de soi (IV.234). Don’t fight that natural sentiment. “The heart receives laws only from itself. By wanting to enchain it, one releases it” to vice; “one enchains it” to virtue “only by leaving it free” (IV.234). The fish comes to the lure by itself; it only struggles when it feels the pain of the hook. (Would-be ‘fishers of men,’ take note.) Emile’s governor can expect gratitude from his pupil only if he refrains from telling him what he owes him. “Gratitude is a natural sentiment,” “provided that you yourself have not put a price on it” (IV.234). 

From compassion, friendship, and gratitude “we enter the moral order” strictly speaking, the realm of good and bad, justice and injustice (IV.235). Such moral terms are not abstractions, not mere words; they are “true affections of the soul enlightened by reason, and hence only an ordered development of our primitive affections” (IV.235). “By reason alone, independent of conscience, no natural law can be established,” as “the entire right of nature is only a chimera if it is not founded on a natural need in the human heart” (IV.235). That is, “love of man derived from love of self is the principle of human justice”; the Biblical command to love one’s neighbor as oneself means nothing if it is only a command (IV.235). 

Given Emile’s entrance into civil society, what will become of the dangerous inclination to compare oneself with others? No doubt, “the first sentiment aroused in him by this comparison is the desire to be in the first position,” the consequence of amour-propre (IV.235). In Emile’s case, however, given his prior education, his libido dominandi has a good chance to be “humane and gentle,” not “cruel or malignant” (IV.235). He has already seen “the accidents common to the [human] species” and felt compassion for them, knowing that he too can be afflicted with misery (IV.235). “Now comes the measurement of natural and civil equality and the picture of the whole social order” (IV.235).

“Those who want to treat politics and morals separately will never understand anything of either of the two” (IV.235). Moral and political freedom equally depend upon “the moderation of hearts,” not “the strength of arms” (IV.236)—this, with a disapproving glance at Machiavelli. The fewer desires you have, the less you depend on other people, and that goes not only for physical desires but more especially for the desire for honor. “In the state of nature there is a de facto equality that is real and indestructible, because it is impossible in that state for the difference between man and man by itself to be great enough to make one dependent on another. In the civil state there is a de jure equality that is chimerical and vain because the means designed to maintain it themselves serve to destroy it and because the public power, added to that of the stronger to oppress the weak, breaks the sort of equilibrium nature had place between them” (IV.236). In civil society, “the multitude will always be sacrificed to the few, and the public interest to particular interest,” even when the few tell the many how much they intend to do for them, how much they intend to treat them as equals; “the distinguished orders who claim they are useful to the others are actually useful only to themselves at the expense of their subordinates” (IV.236). This fundamental problem of civil society is Emile’s new study.

“We must begin by knowing the human heart” (IV.236). Emile should understand “that man is naturally good,” “judg[ing] his neighbor by himself” (IV.237). But also “let him see that society depraves and perverts men” (IV.237). These dual realizations will incline him “to esteem each individual but despise the multitude,” to distrust the masks men put on to get ahead in civil society while recognizing that “there are faces more beautiful than the mask covering them” (IV.237). 

If he knows his own heart, he knows the human heart in its nature. But as yet he knows nothing of the masks, none of which he has been taught to don. How will he learn this much-needed knowledge without ruining his own nature? Spying on others would only lead to scandalmongering and satire. Teaching generalities about particulars would make no sense. Philosophizing would leave him uncomprehending. “I would want to show him men from afar, to show him them in other times or other places and in such a way that he can see the stage without ever being able to act on it. This is the moment for history.” (IV.237). 

There are risks here, as well. Historians write of catastrophes, not of peace and prosperity. They have prejudices and what we would now call ‘agendas.’ Some good historians are bad for young men. “The worst historians for a young man are those who make judgments. Facts! Facts!” Rousseau demands, echoing his “Things! Things!” of the previous chapter. As always, he wants Emile to form his own judgments: “If the author’s judgment guides him constantly, all he does is see with another’s eye; and when that eye fails him, he no longer sees anything” (IV.239). Modern historians won’t do, because “our historians” want only to impress us with their own brilliance (IV.239). The ancient historians “put less wit and more sense in their judgments,” but “even with them one must be very selective, and not the most judicious but the simplest must be chosen first”: not Polybius or Sallust and surely not Tacitus, who wrote for “old men” and cannot be understood by the young (IV.239). “One has to learn to see in human actions the primary features of man’s heart before wanting to sound its depths. One has to know how to read facts well before reading maxims. Philosophy in maxims is suitable only to those who have experience. Youth ought to generalize in nothing.” (IV.239). Although “Thucydides is to my taste the true model of historians,” “report[ing] facts without judging them” while “omit[ting] none of the circumstances proper to make us judge them ourselves,” he writes only of war. “War hardly does anything other than make manifest outcomes already determined by moral causes which historians rarely know how to see” (IV.240). 

“I would prefer to begin the study of the human heart with the reading of lives of individuals; for in them, however much the man may conceal himself, the historian pursues him everywhere” (IV.240). “This is why Plutarch is my man” (IV.240). Even with him, care must be taken to guard Emile against ‘identifying with’ Plutarch’s great ones. If his previous education has succeeded, he will never prefer to be anyone “other than himself,” never “become alien to himself” (IV.243). It is more than probable than Rousseau thinks here not only of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives but of the Bible.

He is confident Emile can read history this way. By now, he will have “a great interest in knowing [men] and a great impartiality in judging them,” “a heart sensitive enough to conceive all the human passions and calm enough not to experience them” (IV.244). Opinion “has not acquired its empire over him” and although he now feels the passions, they “have not yet agitated his heart” (IV.244). Self-sufficient, “free of prejudices,” and “nurtured in the most absolute liberty” (ruled, as far as he can tell, only by things and not by his governor), “he conceives of no ill greater than servitude” and so “pities these miserable kings, slaves of all that obey them,” these “false wise men, chained to their vain reputations,” these “rich fools, martyrs to their display,” these “conspicuous voluptuaries, who devote their entire lives to boredom in order to appear to have pleasure” (IV.244). Emile “pities even the enemy who would do him harm, for he would see his misery in his wickedness” (IV.244). Emile is a sort of natural Christian; this is possible, in Rousseau’s mind, because human nature is naturally good, not nearly so innately wicked as to need divine grace to pardon and to correct it.

And, like a Christian, he must resist pride. Contemplating Plutarch’s great but flawed men, he might “believe himself worthier” than they (IV.245). He should instead learn from great men, who see and feel their superiority to others “and are no less modest because of it,” being “too sensible to be vain about a gift they did not give themselves” (IV.245). Too, Emile’s own mediocrity should rescue him from such thoughts, at least insofar as he has been educated to know his own limitations. “I have assumed for my pupil neither a transcendent genius nor a dull understanding. I have chosen him from among the ordinary minds in order to show what education can do for man. All rare cases are outside the rules.” (IV.245). There are few Rousseaus, and we find his self-portrait not in the Emile but in the Confessions. The governor will do a rare intervention, discussing Plutarch with his pupil in such a way as to let him see that yes, you see the follies of the great, but do not overlook their humility. “The sole folly of which one cannot disabuse a man who is not mad is vanity. For this there is no cure other than experience.” (IV.245). Use the vicarious experiences derived from Plutarch’s Lives to steer him away from vanity. “Warn him about his mistakes before he falls into them”; when, inevitably, he makes one, “do not reproach him” (“you would only inflame his amour-propre and make it rebel”) but “gently efface his humiliation with good words” (IV.257). Then, you will have strengthened his trust in you. [1]

From Robinson Crusoe to Plutarch’s Lives: Emile lives one book at a time. This leaves much more time for action. In adolescence, the time to begin his education for civil-social life, you should “busy your pupil with all the good actions within his reach,” assisting indigents “not only with his purse but with his care,” with his time and energy more than his money (IV.250). If he would speak in public, let him represent them, not himself. “In the fire of adolescence the vivifying spirits, retained and distilled in his blood, bring to his young heart a warmth which shines forth in his glance, which is sensed in his speech, which is visible in his actions” (IV.252). In so serving those who cannot help themselves and (as pertinently) cannot help him, “there is little useful knowledge which cannot be cultivated in a young man’s mind,” and this will be a utilitarianism of compassion not of selfishness. (IV.252). It will also be service without servility; instead of groveling before his social superiors in the hope of winning their favor, he will assist those who can never repay him.

He will become less ‘selfish’ without compromising his own sense of ‘self,’ his own amour de soi. “Those who never deal with anything other than their own affairs are to passionate to judge things soundly”; ‘in everything that hampers their slightest advantage, they immediately see the overturning of the whole universe” (IV.252). They become revolutionaries of egoism. “Let us always keep him at a distance from himself” (IV.252). He will still put self-interest first, but “the greatest happiness of all” will be his “first interest after his private interest” (IV.253). He will begin to think of these as closely related, “for not only does he get an inner enjoyment from them, but also, in making him beneficent for the profit of others, I work for his own instruction” (IV.253).

Nor will this compassion become sentimental. “To prevent pity from degenerating into weakness, it must… be generalized and extended to the whole of mankind” in the sense that “one yields to it only insofar as it accords with justice, because of all the virtues justice is the one that contributes most to the common good of men” (IV.253). One may pity one’s enemy but not indulge his wickedness; the standard of “mankind,” of “the common good of men” applies to the good and the bad alike, and is indeed the only way to distinguish between them (IV.253) “We must pity for our species still more than for our neighbor,” Rousseau replies Jesus, “and pity for the wicked is a very great cruelty to men” (IV.253). 

As for Emile, he knows not “what philosophy is” and has not “even heard of God” (IV.254). In managing this ignorance in his pupil, Rousseau has “trust[ed] only in observation of children and of the men they become, “found[ing] myself not on what I have imagined but on what I have seen” (IV.254). Emile has not yet been ready for philosophy and religion, and as always, “the progress natural to the mind is accelerated but not upset” by the untraditional education he has been given (IV.254). For a soul to rise to “abstract notions of philosophy and purely intellectual ideas” it must “make a gradual and slow climb from object to object” (IV.254). Emile finally has been prepared to take that step, to begin to think about God. To show how this might be done, Rousseau introduces his reader to the Savoyard Vicar.

 

Note

1. Here Rousseau takes a point from François de Fénelon’s novel, the Telemachus, which will be mentioned explicitly later on, in connection with the education of Emile’s future wife, Sophie, and of Emile himself. In chapter X, Ulysses’ son, Telemachus, searching for his father with the aid of Mentor (really the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, who has taken on the shape of an elderly man), criticizes the conduct of King Idomeneus of Salente, a man of great merit who has nonetheless made serious mistakes. Mentor corrects the young man, who is beginning to show the asperity of youth in judging elders. He remarks the limits of any ruler’s knowledge and the defects inherent in every man, ruler or not. Even your own father, the greatest of all Greek kings, would have made innumerable errors had he not been guided by (ahem) Minerva. “Learn, O Telemachus, not to expect from the greatest of men more than is compatible with human capacity.” (Fénelon: Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. Patrick Riley translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. X: 157-160). It is a very good lesson to impress upon any young men, especially a young man who will become a king.