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

 

This is the third set of notes on the Emile, in response to an online class offered by Kenyon College Professor Emerita of Political Science Pamela K. Jensen in January-February 2021.

 

 

1. The second stage of childhood, the third stage of life

The child is weak, but in the years immediately preceding adolescence, beginning about the age of twelve, “the growth of strength has passed that of need” (III.165). His needs are still modest, but he can do more than merely satisfy them. “From where does man’s weakness come? From the inequality between his strength and his desires. It is our passions that make us weak, because to satisfy them we would need more strength than nature gives us. Therefore, diminish desires, and you will increase strength.” (III.165). Emile’s desires have not diminished, but they’ve stayed the same while his strength of body and of mind has increased. This is the only time of life in which this is so.

It is therefore “the most precious time of life, a time which comes only once, a very short time, one even shorter… because of the importance of his using it well,” of “channel[ing], so to speak, the overflow of his present being into the future” (III.166). Nature makes this “the time of labors, of instruction, of study” (III.166). In the first stage of childhood, following infancy, the governor had contrived to educate Emile with the constraint of physical things, not of human wills—or so Emile has been led to believe. As a result, Emile does not resent his governor, or anyone else; in his weakness, he does not think, ‘Just you wait.’ In this second stage, with his mental and physical powers increasing, he will be governed not so much by necessity but by consideration of the useful. In this, Rousseau follows Hobbes and Locke.

“At first children are only restless” (III.167); therefore, the right kind of restraint is (well-arranged) physical necessity. Now, at the second stage, “they are curious; and that curiosity, well directed, is the motive of the age we have now reached” (III.167). Well-directed curiosity derives from the “innate desire for well-being” and the natural need to satisfy it, not “the desire to be esteemed as learned” (III.167). Even a philosopher, “relegated to a desert island with instruments and books,” will turn his attention to exploring the island, not to speculations about “the system of the world, the laws of attraction, differential calculus” (III.167). Why would he? He has no one to impress, there. For children at this stage, “let us… also reject in our first studies the kinds of knowledge for which man does not have a natural taste and limit ourselves to those instinct leads us to seek” (III.167).

The topic of education will now be nature. Emile has already been dealing with nature in its most immediate aspect, learning the constraints imposed by physical things. The next step is not to attempt to bring him to understanding nature as a whole, nature as a system of interrelationships. Rather, you should draw his attention to “the phenomena of nature” as they present themselves to his senses, “feed[ing] his curiosity” but never satisfying it with explanations of your own (III.168). Let him try to understand them by figuring them out for himself. “If ever you substitute in his mind authority for reason, he will no longer reason” (III.168). “In general, never substitute the sign for the thing except when it is impossible for you to show the latter, for the sign absorbs the child’s attention and makes him forget about the thing represented” (III.170). Let him make his own ‘signs’—for example, draw his own maps of his neighborhood. That way, he will know exactly what the lines he draws represent, having seen for himself the things they represent. The goal of his exercises in cartography “is not that he know exactly the topography of the region, but that he know the means of learning about it,” which he will do first by exploring and then by summarizing the results of his exploration on a piece of paper with a visual depiction of what he sees. “Remember always that the spirit of my education consists not in teaching the child many things, but in never letting anything but accurate and clear ideas enter his brain” (III.171). His reason and judgment will develop gradually, but they will be stunted if his mind gets filled with “prejudices”—literally, with ‘pre-judgments,’ judgments founded upon the opinions he receives from others. 

Since prejudices are so much more easily absorbed than rational knowledge and judgment—all you need to do is listen to someone tell you what he says is the truth, never expending the effort to find it out—the second stage of childhood is a race against time. In the first stage of childhood, the governor ‘wastes’ time, guarding against premature teachings while waiting for the child to grow up a bit. “Now it is exactly the opposite, and we do not have enough time to do everything which would be useful” because the stage of passion, and especially sexual passion, will arrive very soon (III.172).  “The age of peaceful intelligence” is so brief that the best the governor can do “not to teach him the sciences but to give him the taste for loving them and methods for learning them when this taste is better developed” (III.172). The way to do that is to “accustom him little by little to paying continual attention to the same object,” attention sustained not by constraining him but by yourself attending to his “pleasure or desire,” stopping “before he gets bored,” doing “nothing in spite of himself” (III.172). Don’t answer “silly questions”; “pay less attention to the words he pronounces than to the motive which causes him to speak” (III.172). He is beginning to reason, now, so keep his reasoning focused on observing one phenomenon and then on learning what follows from it, its consequences, seeing the “chain by which each particular object attracts another and always shows the one that follows” (III.172). These are not the “general truths by which all the sciences are connected with common principles,” which is what philosophers track, but the concrete effects of concrete objects. 

 

2. A ‘Socratic’ lesson

This sounds like a childhood version of the beginning of philosophy, when philosophers looked to the heavens and attempted to understand the stars and the planets, only to stumble over the irregularities of the earth, to the amusement or indignation of non-philosophers. Consideration of such incidents led Socrates to take his famous ‘turn’ toward political philosophy. Rousseau has Emile take exactly that turn, lest he think only of things and not of persons. He tells the story of Emile and the “magician-Socrates” (III.175). One day, Rousseau and Emile go to see a magician’s show. The magician seems to move toy ducks around on a table by his own mental energy, but Emile can duplicate the trick by taking a piece of bread, wrapping it around a magnet, then moving the duck around, just as the magician does. He demonstrates this trick to the crowd, winning its applause and embarrassing the magician. The magician gets his revenge, however. Inviting Emile to return, he re-enacts the trick by a different, still entirely un-magical means which overrides Emile’s magnet and him the like embarrassment in front of the crowd. Afterwards, he drops by to chastise Emile and his governor for trying to deprive him of his livelihood.

Professor Jensen offered an excellent analysis of this incident—which, as usual, has been orchestrated by the governor. It bridles the boy’s amour-propre; Emile learns to be cautious about displaying his knowledge in a way that boosts yourself in the eyes of others and injures another person. Also, by generously showing Emile how he foiled him, the magician lessens any resentment Emile might feel against him; more, it makes of Emile a friend of this ‘Socrates,’ a friend of philosophy. Like Socrates, the magician refuses to take money (although, it might be added, he does take money from the rubes). And by telling the governor to warn Emile to be cautious, he gives the governor an additional way to influence his pupil without inciting resentment. 

There is another dimension, congruent with these. The ancient philosophers learned, starting with Socrates, that caution is needed when philosophizing in the city. In turning to away from the open pursuit of natural philosophy toward political, indeed politic philosophy, Socrates survived in Athens to the age of seventy; several of his natural-philosophy predecessors didn’t last that long. Emile learns the lesson of caution at a young age, and at the cost of considerably less pain and with less danger to the kind of life devoted to inquiries into nature. If Emile is to enter civil society without being prejudiced by its opinions, he needs to understand the conditions under which he will be living. He can maintain his independence of mind and heart, identify and defend his self-interest, but only if he understands how that self-interest will be punished if it descends into amour propre. He has had his first lesson in civility, and is now ready to think about how to define his own inquiries. The lesson is indispensable, given Emile’s ongoing education in the rudiments of science. Without the magician-Socrates, he might turn into the modern equivalent of the ancient nature-philosophers or worse, an ‘intellectual’ who prattles about ‘science’ without knowing much about it.

The Enlightenment philosophes attempted to bring natural science fully into civil society. That is what they meant by ‘Enlightenment.’ Socrates would regard such a project dangerous to both philosophy and civil society because civil society rests on conventions, myths that natural science ‘lays bare’; such laying-bare of conventions ruins them. At the same time, the attempt to replace myths with natural science, if possible in any comprehensive way, would lead to continuous destabilization because what scientists know changes rapidly and often cannot readily be understood by non-scientists. This leads the optimists among natural scientists and natural science fans to posit ‘change’ and indeed ‘progress’ as the animating force of politics. It also leads them to call for the rule of scientists, as Francis Bacon in fact did, more than a century before the philosophes. Like Socrates, Rousseau views this project with skepticism. Unlike Socrates, he lives in a regime already enamored of modern science. He intends to educate Emile in a way that will enable him to navigate the hazards of such a world.

 

3. Lessons in utility

Returning now to physics, the study of physis or nature as it presents itself in the phenomena, Emile will see his need to build instruments for conducting experiments. “I want us to build all our machines ourselves” (III.176)—this, again, on the principle of avoiding ‘pre-packaged’ learning. This way, “one’s reason does not get accustomed to a servile submission to authority; furthermore, we make ourselves more ingenious at finding relations, connecting ideas, and inventing instruments than we do when, accepting all of these things as they are given to us, we let our minds slump into indifference,” with “the senses caus[ing] the senses to be neglected” (III.176). “The more ingenious are our tools, the cruder and more maladroit our senses become,” as we denature ourselves in the pursuit of knowledge about natural phenomena. “If, instead of gluing a child to books, I bury him in a workshop, his hands work for the profit of his mind; he becomes a philosopher and believes he is only a laborer” (III.177). This last mot is a bit of an exaggeration, as Emile is no philosopher-to-be. But by playing “the games of philosophy,” the independent inquiry into natural phenomena unassisted by received opinion, he can “rise to the true functions of man,” in due course (III.177).

“In quest for the laws of nature, always begin with the phenomena most common and most accessible to the senses, and accustom your pupil to take these phenomena not for reasons but for facts” (III.177). Take up a stone and drop it. Ask Emile why it fell. Because it is heavy, he will say. “What is heavy? That is what falls. The stone falls, therefore, because it falls?” (III.177). With that, Emile learns that he doesn’t really know why the stone falls; like Socrates, he knows he doesn’t know. “This is his first lesson in systematic physics, and, whether it profits him in this study or not, it will still be a lesson in good sense” (III.177). 

The same lesson in theoretical wisdom applies to practical wisdom. Like all human beings, Emile wants to be happy; “the irrepressible law of necessity always teaches man early to do what does not please him in order to prevent an evil which would displease him more” (III.178). From this “use of foresight” “all human wisdom or all human misery” derives (III.178). “The happiness of the natural man is as simple as his life,” consisting “in not suffering,” in “health, freedom and the necessities of life” (III.177). The “happiness of moral man is something else,” but “not the question here” (III.177). Emile isn’t ready for moral reasoning, but he is ready for utilitarian reasoning. Don’t tell your pupil to do things ‘for his own good’ when he doesn’t yet know what that is. Don’t try to tell him what it is, either. If you do that, “you take away from him man’s most universal instrument, which is good sense,” accustoming “him to let himself always be led, never to be anything but a machine in others’ hands,” “credulous and a dupe when he is grown up” (III.178). You will turn him into the moral equivalent of the marks at the magic show before he matures into a person who can think morally.

What Emile knows at age twelve is what pleases him. Very well then, set him to discover what actions will conduce to securing those things or conditions. “As soon as we have succeeded in giving our pupil an idea of the word useful, we have another great hold for governing him,” so long as we think of utility in “a sense relative to his age” and “he sees clearly its relation to his present well-being” (III.178). 

“‘What is it good for?’ This is now the sacred word, the decisive word between him and me in all actions of our life” (III.178). It eliminates pointless questions and the waste of energy they occasion in governor and pupil alike. “He who is taught as his most important lesson to want to know nothing but what is useful interrogates like Socrates. He does not put a question without giving himself the reason for it, which he knows will be demanded of him before he is answered.” (III.179). The opens a sort-of-Socratic dialogue between you, as he will ask you the same question of anything you bring before him. If I follow this principle consistently, “my conduct, always clear in his mind, would never be suspect to him” (III.179). And it puts you in the position to say, when he asks you a question, “In what way is what you ask me useful to know?” (III.179). 

 

4. Showing, not telling

As Rousseau has said before, “I do not like explanations in speeches. Young people pay little attention to them and hardly retain them. Things, things! I shall never repeat enough that we attribute too much power to words. With our babbling education we produce only babblers.” (III.180). Attributing too much power to words, it might be suspected, extends to the Biblical teaching, and when directing Emile’s attention to things heavenly he teaches astronomy, not theology, and first convinces him of its utility. On a walk in the forest, he leads Emile to a place where he can no longer get his bearings. And it is lunchtime; he want to get home. He can now ask Emile about the position of the sun in the sky, asking him relate that to his knowledge of direction. Let him solve the puzzle of how to get home while learning why simple astronomical observations can help him quench his thirst and relieve his hunger. “It is easy to prove to a child that what one wants to teach him is useful, but to prove it is nothing if one does not know how to persuade him. In vain does tranquil reason make us approve or criticize; it is only passion which makes us act” (183). 

“Never show the child anything he cannot see” (III.184). And relate what you show him to himself, his interests and desires. Comparisons with other children are odious; never let there be “any comparisons with other children, no rivals, no competition, not even in running, once he has begun to reason,” lest he learn “out of jealousy or vanity” (III.184). Compare him only to himself, as he was before he learned what he just learned, and as he might be if he learned something new. “He will want to outdo himself. He ought to. I see no problem in his being his own competitor.” (184). 

Showing, not telling: This is why “I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know.” (III.184). As Professor Jensen remarked, the frontispiece to Book III depict Hermes, inscribing a statement of the elements of science high on a pillar, where no flood could wash them away, obliterate them from human memory. But Rousseau insists, “Well-prepared minds are the surest monuments on which to engrave human knowledge” (III.184). Human nature, not man’s art, even the art of writing, is the true location of knowledge. Is there a book a book whose author “invent[s] a situation where all man’s natural needs are shown in a way a child’s mind and sense, and where the means of providing for these needs emerge in order with equal ease”? (III.184). Such a book, a book that provides “the lively and naïve depiction of this state,” is “the first exercise [that] must be given to his imagination,” which before now has been kept under wraps as much as possible (III.184). “This book will be the first that my Emile will read. For a long time, it will alone compose his whole library, and it will always hold a distinguished place there. It will be the text for which all our discussions on the natural sciences will ser4ve only as a commentary.” (III.184). It is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

 

5. The blessed isle of self-sufficiency

“Robinson Crusoe will serve as a test of the condition of our judgment during our progress” (III.184). Crusoe “on his island, alone, deprived of the assistance of his kind and the instruments of all the arts, providing nevertheless for his subsistence, for his preservation, and even procuring for himself a kind of well-being—this is an object interesting for every age and one which can be made agreeable to children in countless ways” (III.184). Although not “the state of social man,” and therefore not likely “to be that of Emile” in adulthood, it is the basis on which “he ought to appraise all the others” because “the surest means of raising oneself above prejudices and ordering one’s judgments about the true relations of things is to put oneself in the place of an isolated man and to judge everything as this man himself ought to judge of it with respect to his own utility” (III.185). To read Robinson Crusoe is to engage in what much later would be called a ‘thought experiment’ aimed at discovering what you really need, and how to obtain it.

Rousseau wants Emile to immerse himself in this one book that teaches him to immerse himself in things, letting him “think he is Robinson himself,” worrying not about what other people think but “about the measures to take if this or that were lacking to him; to examine his hero’s conduct; to investigate whether he omitted anything, whether there was nothing to do better; to note Robinson’s failings attentively; and to profit from them so as not to fall into them himself in such a situation” (III.185). This, not some El Dorado of fantasy, “is the true ‘castle in Spain’ of this happy age when one knows no other happiness than the necessities and freedom” (185). Just as important, it is the rare book that does not speak as if it were authoritative; Defoe never ‘lays down the law.’ He invites his reader to admire the life of independence and to think about what such a way of life, such a regime on the self-ruling ‘one’ would make it necessary for ‘the one’ to do.

As he thinks of what he would need if he were Robinson, Emile “will be more ardent for learning than is the master for teaching,” wanting “to know all that is useful, and he will want to know only that” (III.185). Robinson Crusoe engages Emile’s imagination but, unlike almost any other novel, does so ‘realistically,’ pointing him away from the fantasies so many novels spur, toward hard physical nature. Soon, “he will not want to live there alone”; his later passion will set him in search for a woman, no longer for a helpful companion, a ‘Friday,’ a governor (III.185).  He will reach the stage of life when ‘romance’ beckons, with its erotic fantasies. Before then, he must learn what his own real needs are, and how to secure them.

“The practice of the natural arts, for which a single man suffices, leads to the investigation of the arts of industry, which need the conjunction of many hands” (III.185). It is “the introduction of the superfluous [that] makes division and distribution of labor indispensable,” with a hundred men working together giving subsistence to two hundred (III.185). More, once “a part of mankind rests, it is necessary that the joint efforts of those who work make up for the idleness of those who do nothing” (III.185). The governor should “keep away from your pupil’s mind all notions of social relations which are not within his reach,” but he should “show him the mutual dependence of men” in terms of its utility to each person in that network, and to judge their work, and that network, in terms of what is really useful to them to achieve their real, their natural needs.

He will then see how badly social esteem is distributed by civil society, when he does enter it. Public esteem attaches “to the different arts in inverse proportion to their real utility” (III.186). This, Rousseau insists, “is the way it ought to be,” for “the most useful arts are those which earn the least, because the number of workers is proportioned to men’s needs, and work necessary to everybody must remain at a price the poor man can pay” (III.186). As a result, we honor as “artists” (as distinguished from mere “artisans”) those “who work solely for the idle and the rich,” and “since the merit of these vain works exists only in opinion, their very price constitutes a part of that merit, and they are esteemed in proportion to what they cost” (III.186).

 

6. Rousseau’s critique of judgment

While the price of necessary goods should remain low, that is no excuse for esteeming the expensive desiderata of the wealthy. On the contrary, “these are the specious maxims which guide the false prudence of fathers in making their children slaves of the prejudices they feed them and playthings themselves of the senseless mob which they expect to make the tool of their passions” (III.187). Rousseau tells the aristocratic fathers of all the aristocratic young Emiles that they must stop taking human nature to be what it seems in civil society they see around them. You cannot know the natural sentiments of human beings, or teach your children what those are, by assuming that society-bred sentiments are the natural ones. The purpose of thinking about man outside civil society, the man on the island, is to provide a criterion for esteeming and disesteeming independent of conventional opinion, a natural criterion. “Before instructing [your son] in our sentiments, begin by teaching him to evaluate them. Does one know a folly when one takes it to be reasonable?” (III.187). Teach him instead to know “what things are in themselves, and you teach him afterward what they are in our eyes” (III.187). This is the true way of the aristocrat, he tells the aristocrat: “It is thus that he will know how to compare the opinion to the truth and to raise himself above the vulgar; for one does not know prejudices when one adopts them, and one does not lead the people when one resembles them” (III.187). 

At this stage of life, Emile “knows no human being other than himself alone, and he is even far from knowing himself,” remaining on the mental level of the utilitarian, a seeker of physical goods. For now, at least, “It is by their palpable relation to his utility, his security, his preservation, and his well-being that he ought to appraise all the bodies of nature and all the works of men” (III.187). He will rank the arts not in terms of their exquisiteness, as a conventional aristocrat does, but in terms of their utility. Agriculture ranks first, ironworking second, woodworking third. He will be inclined to think that perfecting the arts, subdividing them and “infinitely multiplying the instruments of all of them” indicates only that “all these people are stupidly ingenious,” narrowing their knowledge to a specialty while simultaneously subjecting themselves to innumerable other arts and their artisans (III.188). “A city is needed for every worker,” each ignorant of the basic skills needed to survive on a desert island (III.188).

Emile now can begin to understand the civil society he will spend his life in. “The society of the arts consists in exchange of skills, that of commerce in exchange of things, that of banks in exchange of signs and money” (III.189). He learned the first notion of this as a small child in his ruined bean garden, from Robert the gardener, who taught him about property and property rights before he understood the word ‘property’ or the word ‘rights.’ “It only remains for us now to generalize these same ideas and extend them to more examples to make him understand the workings of trade taken by itself and presented to his senses by the details of natural history regarding the products peculiar to each country, by the details of arts and sciences regarding navigation, and finally, by the greater or lesser problems of transport according to distance, the situation of lands, seas, rivers” (III.189).

He is now ready to see the fundamental philosophic distinction between nature and convention. “No society can exist without exchange, no exchange without a common measure, and no common measure without equality. Thus all society has as its first law some conventional equality, whether of men or things” (III.189). Such “conventional equality” differs substantially from “natural equality”; it “makes positive right—that is, government and laws—necessary” (III.189). This ‘turns’ Emile once again from natural things to civil-social things. Robert had taught him something about economic relations, namely, that the property you have earned will only be respected if you respect the property others have earned; the “magician-Socrates” had taught him another thing about such relations, that you should allow other people to earn their property, to ‘mind your own business’ without seeking to preen yourself in front of the crowd. Now he learns something about political relations. “The political knowledge of a child ought to be distinct and limited; he ought to know about government in general only what relates to the right of property, of which he already has some idea” (III.189). He will see that money, a conventional thing, provides “a term of comparison for the value of things of different kinds,” the “true bond of society” in the sense of an association for mutual provision of wants.

“To what an abundance of interesting objects can one thus turn a pupil’s curiosity without ever abandoning the real material relations which are within his reach or allowing a single idea that he cannot conceive to spring up in his mind!” (III.190). With this pedagogic art in hand, the governor can bring his pupil “ever closer to the great relations he must know one day in order to judge well of the good and bad order of civil society” (III.190).

 

7. Dining out, judiciously

Emile has learned what sort of food is good for him. It is now the time to link his good, natural taste to good ‘taste’ or judgment respecting social relations. The governor takes Emile “to dine in an opulent home” (III.190). Silverware, foie gras, lackeys—the whole apparatus of “pleasure and festivity” is on display (III.189). After a while, the governor leans over to ask Emile how many people he estimates it took to make all of this happen. “What a crowd of ideas I awaken in his brain with these few words!” (III.189). “While the philosophers, cheered by the wine, perhaps by the ladies next to them, prate and act like children”—Voltaire, Diderot— Emile “is all alone philosophizing for himself in his corner” (III.189). (Having “none of the foppish and affected air which is so pleasing to women, he is made less of by them than are other children,” and as a consequence “he enjoys himself less with them and is less spoiled by their society, whose charms he is not yet in a condition to sense”) (III.192n). “With a healthy judgment that nothing has been able to corrupt, what will he think of this luxury when he finds that every region of the world has been made to contribute; that perhaps twenty million hands have worked for a long time; that it has cost the lives of perhaps thousands of men, and all this to present to him with pomp at noon what he is going to deposit in his toilet at night” (III.189). In a sentence, Rousseau has debased equally the titled old-regime aristocrats of Europe and its new, moneyed oligarchs in the mind of his pupil and in the minds of his readers, some of whom are aristocrats and oligarchs.

Next, ask him to compare this meal with “a simple, rustic dinner” with a peasant family, a meal “prepared by exercise, seasoned by hunger, freedom, and joy” (III.190). You will “make him feel that all the apparatus of the feast did not give him any real profit, and that since his stomach left the peasant’s table as satisfied as it left the financier’s, there was nothing more in the one than in the other that he could truly enjoy” (III.190). This “taste for the country I assume in my pupil is a natural fruit of his education” (III.192n.). You won’t need to moralize over the difference. Simply ask him where he would prefer to dine, the next time they go out.

This is the way to “assist nature” in its struggle against social corruption, “forestall[ing] in him the prejudices most men have in favor of the talents they cultivate and against those they have neglected” (III.192). Emile will begin to see “the order of the whole,” an insight which in turn enables him to see “the place where each part ought to be”; “what we are proposing to acquire is less science than judgment” (192). 

 

8. What is the use of “Emile”?

At the beginning of this second stage of childhood, before the onset of sexual passion and the social pressures that come with it, Rousseau and Emile “have launched ourselves into the heavens; we have measured the earth; we have harvested the laws of nature” (III.193). “Now we have returned to ourselves,” to the very small society of governor and pupil (III.192), having made a sound judgment with respect to the rich and the poor as they live in civil society. Emile himself will live in that larger civil society, soon enough, but not before he has learned to “convert to our use all that we can appropriate for ourselves and to profit from our curiosity for the advantage of our well being” (III.192). Civil society runs on exchanges, but in entering it with Rousseau’s kind of education we will know something most citizens do not know: the mutual needs, as distinguished from the inflated mutual wants, civil society can serve. There is little realistic choice between living in civil society and remaining in the state of nature; “no one can remain in it in spite of the others, and it would really be leaving it to want to remain when it is impossible to live there, for the first law of nature is the care of preserving oneself” (III.193). Robinson Crusoe gets to his island by the means of shipwreck.

Locke would educate the “Young Gentleman,” not the young, titled aristocrats, whom he regards as useless. Rousseau educates a young aristocrat, or at very least a young gentleman, but not to become a gentleman of the conventional sort. Like Locke’s pupil, Emile will learn “the ideas of social relations,” especially the fact that “in order to have instruments for his use, he must in addition have instruments for the use of other men with which he can obtain in exchange the things which are necessary to him and are in their power. I can easily bring him to feel the need for these exchanges and to put himself in a position to profit from them.” (III.193). Profit: like Locke, Rousseau’s pupil will enter his adolescence ‘bourgeoisified,’ useful to others, no gaudy parasite on the backs of his fellows. He knows how to preserve his own life and to help others to preserve theirs. In knowing this, he knows—contra the aristocracy—that “man is the same in all stations; the rich man does not have a bigger stomach than the poor one,” that “the master does not have arms longer or stronger than his slave’s, that “a man of great family is no greater than a man of the people,” and that, above all, “the natural needs are everywhere the same,” and so “the means of providing for them ought to be equal everywhere,” that education should be suited to nature, not convention, even when we all know that we must live our lives amidst the conventions of civil society (III.194). 

Fine sentiments, Rousseau, but (taking a page from your book) what good are they to Emile, or to anyone else? Rousseau has his answer ready. If Emile is educated to live as an aristocrat or an oligarch, what will become of him if “fortune pleases” to ruin him? (III.194). “What is more ridiculous than a great lord who has become destitute and brings the prejudices of his birth with him to his distress?” (III.194). Ah, but you say, that will never happen, or at most the odds of that happening are vanishingly small. Rousseau demurs. Are “the blows of fate” really “so rare that you can count on being exempted from them?” (III.194). Look around you. “You trust in the present order of society without thinking that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions, and it is impossible for you to foresee or prevent the one which may affect your children” (III.194). Already, under the economic and social forces that will come to be called ‘capitalism’ and ‘democratization,’ “the noble become commoners, the rich become poor, the monarch becomes subject” (III.194).

“We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions…. I hold it to be impossible that the great monarchies of Europe still have long to last. All have shined, and every state which shines is on the decline.” (194n.). “Who can answer for what will become of you then? All that men have made, men can destroy. The only ineffaceable characters are those printed by nature; and nature does not make princes, rich men, or great lords.” (194). Invoking the beatus illi theme, dear to the hearts of the poets whose verses aristocrats in their refinement savor, Rousseau exclaims, “Happy is the man who knows how to leave the station which leaves him and to remain a man in spite of fate!” (III.194). Emile is well on his way to becoming such a man.

The aristocrat sputters back. My father earned the inheritance he passed on to me. He established his family. By what right will anyone take it away from me? “So be it: he has paid his debt” to the civil society that formed him, “but not yours” (III.195). Indeed, “you owe others more than if you were born without property, since you were favored at birth”; “no father can transmit to his son the right to be useless to his fellows” (III.195). Emile’s lessons in the utility aim as well at Rousseau’s readers. “Outside of society isolated man, owing nothing to anyone, has a right to live as he pleases. But in society, where he necessarily lives at the expense of others, he owes them the price of his keep in work. To work is therefore an indispensable duty for social man,” and “every idle citizen is a rascal” (III,.195).

Still the aristocrat resists. My son should learn a trade? Become an artisan? An unthinkable debasement! Rousseau answers: Think about it. “I want to give him a rank he cannot lose” (III.196). Further, “the goal is less to learn a trade in order to know a trade than to conquer the prejudices that despise a trade”—your prejudices, Father (III.196). Therefore (now appealing to the aristocratic love of honor) “do not work out of necessity; work out of glory. Lower yourself to the artisan’s station in order to be above your own. In order to subject fortune and things to yourself”—as Machiavelli urges—begin “by making yourself independent of them.” (III.196). And, while we’re at it, “I do not want him to be an embroiderer, a gilder, or a varnisher, like Locke’s gentleman,” or (still worse) a musician, actor or author (III.197). Better a shoemaker than a poet. A useful trade isn’t enough; it must be one that doesn’t “demand from those practicing it qualities of soul that are odious and incompatible with humanity” (III.197). Have your son take “a decent trade,” remembering nevertheless that “there is no decency without utility” ( II.197). With a glance at the New Testament, Rousseau suggests the carpenter’s trade—clean, useful, easily practiced at home. Father, do you call it debasement to have your son learn the trade that the Son of the Father of all fathers Himself practiced? What kind of aristocrat do you think you are? Regimes of throne and altar, indeed.

Rousseau’s careful reader, Alexis de Tocqueville, carried this part of Rousseau’s policy into the even more democratic and capitalist Europe of the nineteenth century. In his books, Tocqueville urges his fellow aristocrats not to contest with democrats for political and social power—it’s too late for that—but to moderate the excesses of democrats, to guide them toward defending political liberty in its only feasible regime under conditions of social equality, namely, republicanism. The other regime possibility under those conditions is despotism, which Tocqueville saw in the Bonapartes. Given capitalism, democracy or egalitarian civil societies might also spawn a new kind of aristocracy, really an oligarchy consisting of corporate magnates. Given the existence of the modern, centralized, bureaucratic state, another ‘aristocracy,’ eventually calling itself ‘meritocracy,’ could also arise, resulting in what Tocqueville calls the soft despotism of the administrative state. As we now know, these rival forms of oligarchy have squared off against one another, and also at times collaborated with one another, in their struggles to achieve sovereignty over ‘the democracy.’ And all of these kinds of regimes seek rule over education, which informs the way of life of any regime. Rousseau understands all of that in principle, and the Emile seeks to persuade his aristocratic and oligarchic contemporaries to think more carefully about how to govern before, during, and after the regime changes to come.

 

9. A child in full

Rousseau brings Emile “the habit of exercising his body and of manual labor” along with “the taste for reflection and meditation,” the capacity to “work like a peasant and think like a philosopher so as not to be as lazy as a savage,” as preening aristocrats are (III.202). To think like a philosopher may not quite to think as a philosopher; Rousseau himself didn’t live the Emilian way of life. Rousseau will have more practical than theoretical wisdom. The problem with aristocrats and oligarchs is that they lose sight of the practical virtues whereby the money they live on was made. By contrast, Emile has the chance to become a happy man: “The great secret of education is to make the exercises of the body and those of the mind always serve as relaxations from one another” (III.202).

Emile will be ready for the coming revolutions in civil society. He “will not be a worker for long without experiencing for himself the inequality of conditions which he had at first only glimpsed” (III.202). This goes for his governor and, by extension, his father and all rich men. When your son asks, How do you contribute to civil society, what will you say? I will say to Emile, “I promise you to answer concerning my case when you give an answer with which you are satisfied concerning your own case,” and “in the meantime I shall take care to give to you and the poor what surplus I have and to produce a table or a bench every week so as not to be completely good for nothing” (III.203). And you, reader?

Emile should find an answer to his own question readily and fairly soon. He is “ready to stop being a child,” having “become aware of himself as an individual,” not as a creature of civil-social conventions (III.203). By self-awareness or self-consciousness Rousseau means that Emile “senses more than ever the necessity which attaches him to things,” not fashionable opinions (III.203). First having exercised his body and his senses, then having exercised his mind and his judgment, we have finally “joined the use of his limbs to that of his faculties,” making him “an acting and thinking being” (III.203). To “complete the man,” we must make him “a loving and feeling being—that is to say, to perfect reason by sentiment” (III.203). Having climbed the Lockean ladder, which reaches up to the second stage of childhood, the stage of utility, he sees himself and the rest of nature according to the light of nature, having come to the habits of attending to his sense impressions, comparing them one to another, and beginning to figure out how one relates to another. “Nature never deceives us. It is always we who deceive ourselves,” with our self-flattering artifices, empty words and carelessly wasteful deeds (III.203). Judgments based on accurate perception of nature will elevate the boy or the man who encounters those who base their judgments the amour propre which, among other things, blinds European rulers and their pet poets and philosophes to the revolutions to come. In this way, Socratic knowledge of one’s own ignorance is the true wisdom, and the Biblical ‘judge not, that ye be judged,’ the true spirit. “That is the lesson of nature as well as of reason” (III.204).

As for Emile, he will enter the society of men “to live, if not like them, at least with them” (III.205). Although he won’t be ‘judgmental,’ in the sense of the Biblical command, he will need to judge; “let us teach him, therefore, to judge well” by judiciously managing his childhood experiences by steering him away from conventional opinion, towards things, natural necessities, and the fostering of common sense (III.205). He will then reach the ‘age of reason,’ since “the art of judging and the art of reasoning are exactly the same,” being the art of finding contradictions in our own opinions and those of others, knowing what we (and they) don’t know, giving “nothing to opinion” and “nothing to authority” (III.207). Emile can now begin to do this because his education has advanced, in body and in mind, “only in proportion to one’s strength” (III.207). A socially radical but actually moderate education has produced a naturally moderate child, readying himself for the civil-social radicalism Rousseau foresees. He has a mind that knows how to learn, a soul that knows how to adapt to changing circumstances. Industrious, temperate, patient, firm, courageous, as unduped by conceited imaginings as he is uncowed by fearful ones, Emile “is accustomed to submitting to the law of necessity without resistance, when he has to die, he will die without moaning and without struggling” after having lived free, little dependent “on human things” (III.208). 

He is of course still a child, with “only natural and purely physical knowledge,” knowing “the essential relations of man to things but nothing of the moral relations of man to man” and “hardly know[ing] how to generalize ideas and hardly how to make abstractions” (207). But “he is all that one can be at his age” (208). He is a child and full, preparatory to becoming a man in full. Before that, however, there is adolescence to survive, to overcome, to profit from.

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

 

Note: This is a continuation of notes on Rousseau’s Emile, written after viewing a series of online lectures by Kenyon College Professor of Politics Emerita Pamela K. Jensen in January-February 2021.

 

 

BOOK TWO

The frontispiece to this book continues the story of young Achilles, now being taught to run by Chiron the Centaur, a task undertaken with a lazy boy, as described here.

 

1. Childhood liberty

Childhood begins with the beginning of speech. The child will cry less than the infant, and this trend needs reinforcement. If the child hurts himself, don’t fuss over him. “All my fussing would only serve to frighten him more and increase his sensitivity” but “if he sees me keep my composure, he will soon regain his” (II.77). Childhood is when the boy gets his “first lessons in courage” (II.77-78); if he can bear slight pains without terror, someday he will be able to bear great ones. “To suffer is the first thing he ought to learn and the thing he will most need to know” (II.78) if he would maintain his liberty, his freedom from dependence upon others (human and divine). More generally, “our didactic and pedantic craze is always to teach children what they would learn much better by themselves and forget what we alone could teach them” (II.78). Rousseau would minimize teaching by others, even by the governor, maximize self-teaching, which is really teaching from nature, which will occasionally skin his knees but thereby make him watch where he’s going.

For “with their strength develops the knowledge which puts them in a condition to direct it” (II.78). Childhood, the second stage of human life, initiates “the life of the individual,” “consciousness of himself,” the sense of himself as a person who recalls the identity of himself as he moves forward in time (II.78). Few people remember a thing of their lives before the age of three or even four, but after that we can say what happened to us, what our experiences were. This enables us to be moral beings for the first time, persons who can retain the lessons of experience. 

 

2. The beginnings of moral education in liberty

Inasmuch as most children will die before adolescence, don’t put them through disciplinary torments for the sake of “an uncertain future” (II.79). “Men, be humane. This is your first duty.” (II.79). It is also a duty to yourself, as in being humane you “do not prepare regrets for yourself in depriving them of a few instants nature gives them” (II.79). That being so, what will make them happy in childhood? “A being endowed with senses whose faculties equaled his desires would be an absolutely happy human being,” a being with no frustrations but able to obtain exactly what he wants (II.80). The governor should try to put the child’s “power and will in perfect equality”; if he can do this, “the man will be well-ordered” (II.80). 

Unlike other animals, “Man alone has superfluous faculties” (II.81). The human characteristic that inflates desires beyond our powers is imagination, which “extends for us the measure of the possible, whether for good or bad” (II.81). Imagination is limitless. Since “unhappiness consists not in the privation of things but in the need that is felt for them,” and imagination so widens the scope of our desires, the child should be brought to restrain his imagination. This is the path to genuine liberty: “Man is very strong when he is contented with being what he is; he is very weak when he wants to raise himself above humanity” (II.81). Rousseau makes it plain that he is also thinking of religiously-inspired desires; “the necessity of dying is for the wise man only a reason for bearing the pains of life,” those pains he was taught to bear in childhood (II.81), not a spur to dream of the afterlife. Nor is the atheist Hobbes correct in calling death the King of Terrors. By nature, we only worry about self-preservation insofar as we have the means to preserve ourselves; neither animals nor savages complain about death. The aspect of imagination called foresight is “the true source of all our miseries,” but “the first law of resignation comes to us from nature” (II.82). “O man, draw your existence up within yourself, and you will no longer be miserable”; “do not rebel against the hard law of necessity” (II.83). It is noteworthy that Rousseau writes in these pages more about adults, about the right mindset of parents and governors, than he does about the child they educate. They will rule the child, but “even domination is servile when it is connected with opinion,” for then “you depend on the prejudice of those you govern by prejudices” (II.83). “As soon as you must see with the eyes of others, one must will with their wills,” and “you will always do what others want” (II.84). You ruin your natural amour de soi and with it the child’s.

“The first of all goods is not authority but freedom,” as freedom is prerequisite to morality, to choosing the right path (II.84). “The truly free man wants only what he can do and does what he pleases. that is my fundamental maxim.” (II.84). If our fantaisies rule us, if we give in to “desires which are not true needs and which can only be satisfied with another’s help,” we lose that freedom. This occurs when “parents who live in the civil state,” with its many artificial desires dictated by society’s opinions, “transport their child into it before the proper age,” increasing his weakness by “giving him more needs than he has” (II.84). Emile at this stage “ought to be neither beast nor man, but child” (II.85).

 

3.  Dependence on nature versus dependence on men

Human dependency comes in two forms: “dependence on things, which is from nature” and “dependence on men, which is from society” (II.85). (Rousseau studiously overlooks dependence on God.) Dependence on things is amoral, in no way detrimental to freedom; it fosters no vices. But dependence on men “engenders all the vices, and by it, master and slave are mutually corrupted” (II.85). Within civil society, this may be remedied in part by substituting the rule of law for the rule of men “and to arm the general will with a real strength superior to the action of every particular will” (II.85)—the lesson of Rousseau’s contemporaneously published Social Contract. The impersonality of the law and of the general will to some extent unites the advantages of impersonal nature with the advantages of civil society, as impersonality cannot be resented, cannot lead either to servility or to libido dominandi. In a rightly ordered civil society “freedom which keeps man exempt from vices would be joined to morality which raises him to virtue” (II.85). It must be, then, that for Rousseau the claim that God is the ultimate reality, the Creator of nature, can only make men servile or satanic, not only regarding fellow-men but regarding the highest form of Being. “The wise man does not need laws,” human or divine (II.91), but for the many unwise men, and all children, the impersonality of human laws and civil society’s general will must suffice.

For Emile, “experience or impotence alone ought to take the place of law for him” (II.85). Provide for his needs, not his desires. That will make him “free but not imperious” (II.86). Don’t allow his desires to be “exacerbated by the ease of getting” (II.88). Make him work for what he gets. Do not let him learn to please. “Guard, above all, against giving the child vain formulas of politeness, which serve at need as magic words for him to submit to his will everything which surrounds him and to obtain instantly what he pleases” (II.86). This will only make him “politely imperious,” a person who has learned to veil his arrogance. “The child who has only to want in order to get believes himself to be the owner of the universe; he regards all men as his slaves” and rages at any disobedience, any refusal (II.87). Many of the child’s desires are for innocent pleasures, the pleasures of need satisfied. The “one single desire of children which ought never to be satisfied [is] that of being obeyed” (II.89n.). “Nature has made children to be loved and helped,” not to be “obeyed and feared” (II.88).

 

4. Reasoning too soon

Rousseau condemns Locke’s recommendation to reason with children. This is premature. “Nature wants children to be children before being men. If we want to pervert this order, we shall produce precocious fruits which will be immature and insipid and will not be long in rotting.” In keeping with his respect for the stages of human development, Rousseau insists that “childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling which are proper to it. Nothing is less sensible than to want to substitute ours for theirs”—to direct the child’s attention to questions concerning the management of Father’s estate, as Locke would have it—and “I would like as little to insist that a ten-year-old be five feet tall as that he possess judgment” (II.90). At his age, reason is useless; reason is “the bridle of strength, and the child does not need this bridle” (II.89). Indeed, “if children understood reason, they would not need to be raised” (II.89), and reasoning with them will only turn them into little sophists. “To know good and bad, to sense the reason for man’s duties, is not a child’s affair”; lured by profit or constrained by force,” children “pretend to be convinced by reason” in order to win your approval and thereby get what they want (II.90). This has three malign effects: “you set them against your tyranny and turn them away from loving you”; you teach them to be liars; you accustom them to conceal a secret motive with an apparent one, thus giving them the means of deceiving you (91). “Use force with children, and reason with men” (II.91).

But not just any force. The child’s ideas should “stop at sensations,” to be sure (II.89), but these should not be sensations of pain inflicted by his parents or his governor. This will only weaken his natural amour de soi. “Command him nothing, whatever in the world it might be, absolutely nothing. Do not even allow him to imagine that you might have any authority over him. Let him know only that he is weak and you are strong, that by his condition and yours he is necessarily at your mercy…. Let him see this necessity in things, never in the caprice of men. Let the bridle that restrains him be force”—impersonal force—and “not authority.” (II.91). Don’t “forbid him to do that from which he should abstain” but put it out of his reach, “prevent[ing] him from doing it without explanations, without reasonings” (II.91). By this means he will become “patient, steady, resigned, calm even when he has not got what he wanted, for it is in the nature of man to endure patiently the necessity of things but not the ill will of other” (II.91). Practice saying, simply, “there is no more” (II.91). In so saying he will obey without resenting the command, because no command has been issued. This is the way of “well-regulated freedom” (II.92). “The worst education is to leave him floating between his will and yours” (II.91). 

Against Paul the Apostle and against John Locke, Rousseau maintains that “there is no original perversity in the human heart” (II.92). Wickedness is not innate to the child but made by bad education. Rather, in setting limits only by the means of things, not by the means of your will, the child “is made supple and docile by the force of things alone without any vice having the occasion to germinate in him, for the passions never become animated so long as they are of no effect,” as they never are, finally, when aimed at things, which have no will, no feelings, no ‘agendas to resist (II.92). If I fall to the ground and hurt myself, I may pound the earth in rage. But not for long, once I see that the earth doesn’t care what I feel about it. The pain in the hand that pounds underlines the lesson. “Devoid of all morality in his actions,” the child “can do nothing which is morally bad and which merits either punishment or reprimand” (II.92); this looks like Rousseau’s own reprimand of God in the Garden of Eden, who commanded Adam and Eve, thereby giving the Serpent his chance.

 

5. Amour de soi versus amour propre

Amour de soi is “the sole passion natural to man” (II.92). It is self-love without reference to the opinion of others. If directed by reason and modified by pity in the stages of life after childhood, it will produce humanity and virtue in the human soul. It is the passion that supports equality. Amour-propre, by contrast, is self-love misdirected toward winning the praise of others—honor, for example—a self-love that induces one to preen himself, to want to feel superior to others. Reason is what guides, disciplines amour-propre. Until the child reaches the ‘age of reason,’ until he has outgrown childhood, “it is important for him to do nothing because he is seen or heard—nothing, in a word, in relation to others; he must respond only to what nature asks of him, and then he will do nothing but good” (II.92-93), that is, nothing with evil intention, nothing for the purpose of vaunting himself over anyone else. He will do ‘bad’ things in the sense that he will blunder. The remedy for that is to put nothing costly within his reach, so that his blunders won’t have any bad effect.

This means that “the most useful rule of all education… is not to gain time but to lose it,” by which Rousseau means the governor must wait until reason develops and guard the child carefully against amour-propre in the meantime. “The most dangerous period of human life is that from birth to the age of twelve” (II.93), when adults are most tempted to reason with the child, and thus to denature him by setting him onto a way of thinking that he is more likely to fake than to truly practice. “Listen to a little fellow who has just been indoctrinated. let him chatter, question, utter foolishness at his ease, and you are going to be surprised at the strange turn your reasoning have taken in his mind. He mixes up everything, turns everything upside down” (II.96). If you try to set him straight, you awaken his amour-propre: “he no longer seeks to learn; he seeks to refute you” (II.96). To avoid this, “Let childhood ripen in children” by “exercis[ing] his body, is organs, his senses, his strength, but keep his soul idle for as long as possible” (II.94). “Bringing reason to bear on unpleasant things only makes reason tedious for him and discredits it early in a mind not yet in a condition to understand it” (II.94); it makes reason seem to him a mere method to talk other people into giving him what he wants. Therefore, “put off, if possible, a good lesson for fear of giving a bad one. On this earth, out of which nature has made man’s first paradise, dread exercising the tempter’s function in wanting to give innocence the knowledge of good and evil.” (II.97). Do this not by issuing commands or precepts, which Rousseau evidently thinks was God’s mistake.

 

6. Know your student, know yourself

To avoid such mistakes, to navigate the child around these dangers of childhood, learn his “particular genius” by carefully observing him as he acts in the freedom you have given him (II.94). The time you sacrifice in doing this now “you will regain with interest at a more advanced age” (II.94). By knowing him, you will better be able to manage his love and his anger. Manage his love by making yourself loveable, not hateful, by refraining from issuing commands but also refusing to indulge his whims, as previously explained. As for anger, represent it to the child as a sickness rather than a matter of will. When the child himself gets angry, treat him as if he were ill. He will come to regard his own passions as diseases to be cured. Above all, “to be the child’s master one must be one’s own master” (II.97). This will enhance your authority with the small person who needs to learn to ‘treat’ his passions. “One ought never to permit a child to play with grownups as with his inferiors or even as with his equals” (II.97n.). The effort taken to know the child will redound to the benefit of the governor, who will better come to know himself.

 

7. Property, Emile’s first idea

Emile will act in a world in which he perceives himself to be restrained much more by things, by nature, than by people. In civil society, many things are, however, owned by people. Since “things do not defend themselves” and the people who do defend them may interfere with his moral education by issuing commands (e.g., do not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), Emile’s first idea, property, must be introduced with great care. The idea must be introduced not as a prohibitory command but as a sort of ‘object lesson.’ Rousseau’s presents his solution to this problem in his story of the bean garden, which Professor Jensen analyzed in some detail, pointing out the parallel between this little garden and the Garden of Eden. The governor encourages Emile to plant beans in a garden plot. In Lockean terms, Emile “mixes his labor” with the bean seeds, the bean plants, and the earth; he senses that the bean garden belongs to him, having exercised “the right of the first occupant by labor” (II.99). One day, he arrives at his garden to find that his plants have been torn out. That doesn’t sit well with him, and the governor helps to locate the perpetrator of the offense, the gardener, who of course is in on both plots—Emile’s plot of bean plants and the governor’s plot to teach Emile about property. The gardener explains that Emile had encroached on his plot of ground, which he intends to use to plant melons. The governor then negotiates a settlement, whereby the gardener agrees to allow Emile to plant beans in one portion of the gardener’s plot, in exchange for a share in the produce. Emile has learned what property is, and what the right to property is, without being subjected either to commands or to a lesson on property rights.

After the conclusion of Professor Jensen’s remarks, one questioner recalled the difference between this lesson and the teaching on property in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. In the Discourse, the introduction of property is presented as a usurpation of nature, previously held in common, but an individual. In the Emile, Rousseau presents property as a right. It may be that the discrepancy may be explained by the difference between the two books. In the Discourse, Rousseau presents what he takes to be the true account of how human inequality came to be; he is ‘theorizing’ about the nature of property itself. In the Emile, Rousseau is preparing a boy to take a place in civil society. Property rights form a major part of the foundation of civil society; Emile will be remarkable enough in the eyes of ordinary citizens; he should not think of himself as ‘above them.’ That is, in the hands of a wise governor, a child can learn about property as the foundation not of inequality but of equality, civil equality. 

 

8. How to teach a child

The lesson taught in the bean garden provides an example of how all lessons should be taught to a child. “Lessons ought to be more in actions than in speeches, for children easily forget what they have said and what is said to them, but not what they have done and what has been done to them” (II.100). Therefore, “punishment as punishment must never be inflicted on children, but it should always happen to them as a natural consequence of their bad action” (II.101). Rousseau considers the problem of lying. If the child lies, skip the reprimand; make a point of disbelieving them when they tell the truth; this follows as a natural, not to say reasonable, consequence of their action. What is more, most lying can be prevented in the first place. “It is the law of obedience which produces the necessity of lying,” since obedience is irksome, a challenge to one’s self-love (II.101). And indeed many children are not really lying, at all; they are merely ignorant. “Since the child does not know what he is doing when he commits himself, then he cannot lie in committing himself” (II.100). He remembers his promise but he doesn’t understand “the importance of keeping it,” cannot “foresee the consequence of things”; in failing to keep his commitment, “he does nothing contrary to the reason of his age,” which is rudimentary (II.102). This means that “children’s lies are all the works of masters, and that to teach them to tell the truth is nothing other than to teach them to lie. In one’s eagerness to control them, to govern them, to instruct them, one finds one never has sufficient means for reaching the goal” (II.102). Once again, Rousseau is correcting God. 

If, instead, I “make his will independent of either the will or the judgments of others,” and especially of myself, “I reduce any interest in him to lie” (103). Therefore, make children “give no promises that they would be tempted not to keep” in defense of their self-love (II.102). “Do you want, then, that he be faithful to his word” Be discreet in exacting it.” (II.103). So as not to let his readers ignore his real target here, Rousseau adds, “The vices are given them by forbidding them to have them. Does one want to make them pious? They are taken to church to be bored.” (II.103). 

Speaking of church, Rousseau uses the practice of donating alms as an opening for criticizing the way the Church teaches charity and the way Locke teaches liberality. The governor should be the one who gives alms, giving the child the impression that at “his age he is not worthy” of doing so (103). The child has little comprehension of the value of the money he is giving, which “cannot be a merit” (II.103). If he gives something that is actually of value to him—a toy, a snack—then he could be considered “truly liberal” (II.103). But “I have seldom seen in children any but these two kinds of generosity: giving what is good for nothing for them, or giving what they are sure is going to be returned to them” (II.103). Locke recommends that Father should “arrange it” so “that they be convinced by experience that the most liberal man always comes out best” (II.103); such “usurious liberality” is no liberality at all. “We should look to the habit of the soul rather than to that of the hands” (II.103-04). If Locke may be said to question Christian charity by showing its underlying self-interest, Rousseau would show how to test charity or compassion to see if it’s real. Unlike Locke, he would inculcate genuine compassion, but he is confident he can do it better than the Church does. 

Most educators encourage the child’s natural curiosity. So does Rousseau, but in much the same way he encourages charity. “I do not answer his questions when he pleases but when I please; otherwise I would be the servant of his will” (II.104). This serves two intellectual purposes in addition to the moral one: it intensifies the child’s curiosity, making him more interested in finding out the answer; it allows the governor to judge whether the child is ready to learn the answer. 

Nor should the governor encourage the child to imitate him, as imitation is “the virtue of apes” (II.104). Imitation “comes from the desire always be transported out of ourselves,” a desire Emile “surely will not have” (II.104). Like curiosity, imitation is natural, and indeed belongs “to well-ordered nature, but in society it degenerates into vice” (II.104). Natural amour de soi, yes; unnatural amour-propre, no.

 

9. The sole moral lesson for children

“The only lesson of morality appropriate to childhood, and the most important for every age, is never to harm anyone. The very precept of doing good, if it is not subordinated to this one, is dangerous, false, and contradictory.” (II.104-05). This is because the wicked man does indeed do good—to himself—even if he harms a hundred others. Not for Rousseau the classical argument that doing evil harms the soul of the evildoer, much less the Biblical command to love one’s neighbor as oneself; such an argument, such a command, would likely have no good effect on a child who covets his neighbor’s ice cream cone. Better to avoid occasion for doing harm, altogether. The child should be “attached to human society as little as possible, for in the social state the good of one necessarily constitutes the harm of another” (II.105n.); social life is too often a ‘zero-sum game.’ A “solitary education give[s] childhood the chance to ripen” (II.105). Again, “leave nature to act for a long time before you get involved with acting in its place, lest you impede its operations”; “do not be overly frightened by alleged idleness” (II.107). 

In society, too, parents like to show off their children, brag about them, even to the point of self-deception. As Professor Jensen emphasized, your little babbler is bound to come up with a few bon mots, simply by random chance. “Examine your alleged prodigy”; if you do, you will find that “at one moment you would say, ‘He’s a genius,’ and at the next, ‘He’s a fool.’ You would be mistaken in both cases: what he is is a child.” (II.106). “From giddy children come vulgar men,” so don’t let it happen to yours (II.106). Sensible ideas come slowly to a child, and are indeed always sensible.

 

10. Rousseau’s Lockean understanding of understanding

“Childhood is reason’s sleep” (II.107). Children have no ideas in the ‘adult’ sense of the term. They do receive what Locke calls ‘simple ideas’ or sense-impressions. Thus “the entire difference” between a child “who has genius and one who does not is that the latter accepts only false ideas, and the former, finding only such, accepts none. Thus the genius resembles the stupid child in that the latter is capable of nothing while nothing is suitable for the former” (II.106). Beware of the child who learns easily. His “brain, smooth and polished, returns, like a mirror, the objects presented to it. But nothing remains; nothing penetrates” (II.107). What the governor wants to see is a child who learns the relations among his passively received sense-impressions, a learning “born out of an active principle which judges” (II.107).

Children do reason, but only in matters that relate “to their immediate and palpable interest” (II.108). This is the intellectual problem with education by command and precept and memorization. Emile should learn “the things represented” by words, by the “signs”; if he learns the things, the signs will be understood from that” (II.109). Teaching more than one language to a child is foolish. Reason is common to all or almost all languages, but “in each language the mind has its particular form,” a form shaped by “the vicissitudes of morals” in the nation that speaks it. To have two languages rightly, the child would “have to know how to compare ideas” (II.109), which he cannot yet do.

“It is the first thing he takes on another’s word without seeing its utility himself, that his judgment is lost” (II.111-12). The “suppleness” of a child’s brain should be exercised in understanding only “ideas which he can receive and are useful to him” (II.112)—not lessons drawn from history or geography, for example, which, even when accurate, do him no immediate good that he can conceive. He especially deprecates fables, a point both Allan Bloom and Professor Jensen remark. Rousseau offers an extended critique of La Fontaine’s well-known fable, “The Crow and the Fox,” wherein the fox tricks the crow into dropping a piece of cheese by the adroit use of flattery. Children often apply the ‘moral’ of such stories “in a way opposite to the author’s intention” (II.115). Being self-loving, they prefer the sly fox to the vain crow. They don’t look inward, at their own faults, but outward, at how to manipulate others into getting what they want. In reading such tales to children, “none of us is philosophical enough to put himself in a child’s place,” to accurately predict what they will take away from them. Reading itself “is the plague of childhood and almost the only occupation we know how to give it. At twelve Emile will hardly know what a book is.” (II.116). This includes reading the Bible, with its many commands. “Demand nothing of children through obedience” (II.116). “of what use will reading be if it has been made repulsive to him forever?” (II.117).

Emile will learn to read by having his “desire to learn” awakened (II.117)—and surely not by Locke’s method, which is to teach the letters of the alphabet by making the process a game, with dice. “If instead of constantly leading [his mind] astray in other places, other climates, other times, at the extremities of the earth and up to the heavens, you apply yourself to keeping him always within himself and attentive to what touches him immediately, then you find him capable of perception, memory, and even reasoning. This is nature’s order.” (II.117-18). That is, if your head, or the head of an author, “always controls his arms, his head becomes useless to him” (II.118). Body and mind should “move together in harmony” (118). The properly educated child judges, foresees, and reasons “in everything immediately related to him” (II.119). “Constantly in motion,” and so more experienced than the sedentary bookworm, “he gets his lessons from nature and not from men,” developing into a Spartan doer and a laconic speaker, not an Athenian babbler. Accordingly, he will be brought to learn to read rather as he is brought to donate alms, by seeing its utility to himself, by receiving invitations to interesting events that he cannot read and which, by design, there will sometimes be no one around to interpret for him. 

 

11. How to be a governor without appearing to govern

The schemes necessary to induce the child to want to respect property, to give alms, to want to read, depend upon the governor’s ability to rule without commanding and without forcing. “One of children’s first efforts, as I have said, is to discover the weakness of those who govern them” (II.121). The policy, therefore, is to “let him believe he is the master” of himself, “and let it always be that you are” (II.120). Given the frontispiece showing the centaur Chiron teaching the young Achilles to run, Professor Jensen unfolded Rousseau’s story of how he taught Emile—initially a something of a lazy young aristocrat—how to run. He does it by setting up races with cakes as the prizes for the fastest runner. Since other children compete for the prize, Rousseau takes care that it isn’t a medal, a token of honor, anything that would foster amour-propre in the child. Only cakes, objects that appeal to his natural, bodily appetite. Sure enough, Emile overcomes his indolence and starts using his legs. “The capriciousness of children is never the work of nature but is the work of bad discipline” (II.121); Emile will discipline himself to run if his governor provides the right incentives and devises the course by which Emile can reach his goal by running.

That is, the governor rules Emile by means of Emile’s senses and appetites. As per Locke, “everything which enters into the human understanding comes there through the senses” (II.125). “Man’s first reason is a reason of the senses; this sensual reason serves as the basis of intellectual reason”; “our first masters of philosophy are our feet, our hands, our eyes” (II.125). Books “teach us to use the reason of others,” but the body’s good constitution makes the mind’s operations “easy and sure” (II.125). Teach Emile “the art of being ignorant,” the means of finding things out for himself and not filling his head with the claims of others (II.126). This will be a school of hard knocks, and rightly so. “In general, the hard life, once turned into a habit, multiplies agreeable sensations; the soft life prepares for an infinity of unpleasant ones” (II.129). “To exercise the senses is not only to make use of them, it is to learn how to judge well with them” (II.132), learning from experience, by testing—not incidentally the basis of the modern scientific method. 

To effect this, Rousseau recommends that Emile learn to walk at night. Night walks teach him not to be frightened by things he can’t see clearly, not to imagine things inaccurately. It is “only by the fire of the imagination,” a fire the inexperienced night-walker uses in his attempt to illuminate the darkness, that “the passions are kindled” (II.135). “In everything, habit kills imagination” (II.135), and in accustoming oneself to moving about in the gloom one finds it conceals few terrors. The terrors will diminish still further if Emile participates in games at night, playing with cheerful companions. “Nothing is more reassuring” than the sound of laughing and calm talk (II.136). In adulthood, “instead of fearing” the dark, Emile “will like it” (II.137). One might say that he will come to fear death less, reach out neither to Hobbesian monarchs or the Biblical God.

 

12. Sensual knowledge

While Rousseau has little use for Locke’s pedagogical teachings, his Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he esteems and largely follows Locke’s great book on what eventually came to be called ‘epistemology,’ his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The child’s education will be conducted in accordance with his sense-impressions or, in Locke’s terminology, his “simple ideas.” Rousseau treats the educational uses of each sense in turn. Each sense conduces to certain kinds of judgments, and these must be carefully governed.

Like Machiavelli and all rigorous empiricists, Rousseau puts the sense of touch first. Its judgments are crude but sure, “rectify[ing] the giddiness of the other senses which leap far ahead to objects they hardly perceive” and “giv[ing] us most immediately the knowledge necessary to our preservation” (II.138). The maid left the iron on the floor. Is it still hot? Neither his sight nor his hearing tell him. The child touches it, and now he knows. This sense needs ‘education’ in the form of training. The hand should be sensitized; put Emile to playing the harpsichord not the stringed instruments, which callous the skin. The rest of the skin needs toughening, since we must “always guard man against unexpected accidents” (II.139). The feet especially should become calloused, ready to walk and run over rugged terrain. Train Emile to balance himself like a goat, not to prance like a ballet dancer.

In contrast to touch, sight is “the most defective” sense because it is “the most extended one,” thus most susceptible to mirages, untouchable illusions of all sorts (II.140). It needs to be balanced with touch. It can be disciplined. “Since sight is, of all the senses, the one from which the mind’s judgments can least be seated, much time is needed to learn how to see” (II.143). Teach Emile to estimate distances accurately. Drawing will make his eye more exact, his hand more flexible. Geometry is useful if taught as “the art of seeing” not as a means of reasoning, of ‘proofs,’ which is too advanced for a child (II.145). Moreover, “I do not intend to teach geometry to Emile; it is he who will teach it to me; I will seek the solutions, and he will find them, for I will seek them in such a way as to make him find him” (II.145). For example, if I take a string and anchor one end of it on a flat surface, then trace a circle, Emile will observe; then, if I try to measure the radii at different places along the arc of the circle, my pupil will impatiently point out that they must always be the same, so long as I keep the string taut. Certain games also can train the eye without risking injury, such as badminton.

Rousseau’s treatment of hearing is most interesting for what he leaves out. To judge by hearing is to estimate distances, as for example the time between the lightning flash and the thunder. Although Emile learns to play a musical instrument to train his touch, he takes no courses in music appreciation, and he listens to no sermons. It is rather education in speaking and singing, in exercising the voice not in refining the ear that he will be engaged. The voice is the “active organ” that corresponds to “the passive organ,” the ear (II.148). Emile will be taught to strive for clarity in both speaking and singing. He won’t raise his voice so much as make it better modulated, more precise.

Rousseau’s analysis of taste quickly leads to consideration of food. The other senses can be trained to judge “the character of foreign bodies in relation to our own, about their weight, shape, color, solidity, size, distance, temperature, rest, and motion,” the better to increase our chances of surviving in a material world. “But that is not enough. Our own body is constantly being used up and needs constantly to be renewed. (II.150). It is in his discussion of taste, not of touch, sight, or hearing, that Rousseau mentions “the supreme goodness,” “the Author of things,” who (or which) provides bodily nourishment for human beings as such and for particular climates, individual temperaments, and “according to the way of life prescribed to him by his station” (II.150). Human beings have been given the pleasures of the palate to tell us “what suits our stomach” (II.151). The child’s natural sense of taste must never be denatured. “The farther we are removed from the state of nature, the more we lose our natural tastes, or, rather, habit give us a second nature that we substitute for the first to such an extent that none of us knows this first nature any more” (II.151).

Since, of all the senses, “taste provides those [sensations] which generally affect us the most,” and since this sense “is entirely physical and material,” the “only one which says nothing to the imagination,” it is “the most suitable means for governing children” (II.152), as already seen in the story of teaching Emile to run fast. “The motive of gluttony is in particular preferable to that of vanity, in that the former is an appetite of nature, immediately dependent on sense, while the latter is a work of opinion subject to the caprice of men and all sorts of abuses” (II.152); gluttony registers amour de soi, vanity amour-propre. Gluttony usually fades with childhood, replaced by more powerful passions. Also, Emile’s food will consist of fruits, dairy products, and “ordinary bread,” not fattening meats and pastries; his appetite for such nutritious foods won’t fatten him, given his ceaseless activity. Meats, especially, are to be avoided, as “great eaters of meat are in general more cruel and ferocious than other men” (“English barbarism is known”) (II.153).

Smell is “the sense of the imagination,” its effects being “well known in love” (II.156). It is “almost numb in most children,” but insofar as they do perceive odors these should be coordinated with taste. Do not, for example, give the child a bitter medicine that has a sweet smell. That will make Emile distrust you.

“A sort of sixth sense, common sense isn’t so much common to all men but common in that it “results from the well-regulated use of the other senses, and because it instructs us about the nature of things by the conjunction of all their appearances” (II.157). As per Locke, common sense resides in the brain; its sensations are “purely internal” (II.157). The conjunctions of simple ideas in the brain yields what Locke calls “complex ideas,” and it is by these “that the extent of our knowledge is measured” (II.157). Borrowing now from Descartes, Rousseau wants these ideas to be clear and distinct, accurate. What he calls “childish reason” consists of the process of “forming simple ideas by the conjunction of several sensations,” in contrast to “intellectual or human reason,” which forms “complex ideas by the conjunction of several simple ideas” (II.158). There is no point, and much danger, in attempting to teach a child to reason ‘intellectually. That is a task for the “mature man” (II.158). “Each age, each condition of lie, has its suitable perfection, a sort of maturity proper to it” (II.158). Childhood education aims at developing “a mature child,” one who has honed his senses to perceive reality, not to conceive fantasies, whether he dreams them up himself or receives them from someone else. In this, he is one with Locke, who warns sternly against encouragement of any poetic flair the Young Gentlemen may exhibit and indeed urges Father to stamp it out. 

 

13. Equality as the foundation of liberty

Emile will not read as readily as other children. Books haven’t been his companions (“What sad furnishings for his age!”) (II.159). Having read “in the book of nature, “no “constraint and boredom” has impeded him, “my happy, lovable pupil” (II.159). He is healthy, vigorous, independent, free of insolence, vanity, shame, and fear. He “never utters a useless word,” and “if he knows nothing by heart, he knows much by experience”; “he has less memory than judgment” (II.160). “You will find in him a small number of moral notions which relate to his present condition, none concerning men’s relative condition. Of what use would these latter be to him, since a child is not yet an active member of society?” (II.160). In his bean plot he learned “why what is his is his and why what is not his is not his. Beyond this he knows nothing” of civil society (II.160). He does understand the advantage of trustworthiness in personal relations, knowing that if the governor promises him a favor in exchange for a favor done by him, the governor will make good on his promise; “he asks nothing better than to extend his domain and to acquire rights over you that he knows to be inviolable” because you always keep your promises (II.160). Whether with respect to property or friendship, he understands and practices reciprocity on equal terms.

If he is the one who needs assistance, “he will ask for it from the first person he meets without distinction”—as readily “from the king as from his lackey”—because “all men are equal in his eyes” (II.160). He will do so with “neither the crawling and servile submission of a slave nor the imperious accent of a master,” having “a modest confidence in his fellow man” (II.161). It is this sense of the natural equality of human beings which undergirds his liberty, having neither the will to rule others nor the will to be ruled by them. Aristotle describes political rule as reciprocal ruling and being ruled, but Rousseau prefers reciprocal not-ruling and not-being-ruled. “Leave him alone at liberty” (II.161). He “is always master of himself” (II.161), and so will do no harm to others, viewing both men and things with settled courage.

Rousseau has prepared Emile for entrance into civil society, not for the philosophic life and assuredly not for the monastic life. Among his fellow children, “he judges, reasons, and foresees better than all of them” (II.162). Among his peers, “one would say nature is at his command, so easily does he know how to bend everything to his will. He is made for guiding, for governing his equals,” who “will always sense his superiority over them” and accede to it. “Without wanting to command, he will be the master; without believing they are obeying, they will obey” (II.162). “He has come to the maturity of childhood” (II.162).

In founding modern political philosophy, Machiavelli invites men to liberate themselves from the moderation of the ‘ancients’ and the humility of the Christians, invites them to dare to master fortune, conquer nature. Politically, this means founding lo stato, the modern, centralized state which will replace the small city-states of Italy and the larger feudal states elsewhere. But will that centralized state impede that liberty, impose a new kind of tyranny? Or will peoples finally overthrow the monarchic regimes that rule the modern state (as Rousseau predicts), without adequately preparing themselves for self-rule, bringing self-destruction in the wake of revolution? Rousseau undertakes to solve this problem with a new kind of education. In Book III will bring Emile to the third stage of childhood, which requires a third kind of education.

 

 

 

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

 

Note: Beginning in January 2021, Kenyon College Professor Emerita of Political Science Pamela K. Jensen delivered a series of on-line lectures on each of the five “books” of Rousseau’s Emile. What follows are some of my own thoughts on the book, after re-reading it and thinking along with Professor Jensen’s remarks, which are available on the Kenyon College website. I offer them only as “notes,” in keeping with Rousseau’s own description of his book as “disordered and almost incoherent.” Our teachers stand before us as role models.

 

1. The Preface

Rousseau writes that he began his book “to gratify a good mother who knows how to think” (33). A book on education is needed because “the literature and learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification,” to tearing-down, to ‘critique,’ not to building. This, then is an ‘edifying’ work, its constructiveness perhaps guided by philosophy but not straightforwardly philosophic. Voltaire and the other thought-masters of the Enlightenment, following “le sage Locke,” had emphasized the need to make philosophy useful, to bring the light of nature back into the dark cave of human conventions, but they have failed. “In spite of so many writings having as their end, it is said, only what is useful for the public, the first of all useful things, the art of forming men, is still forgotten” (33). But what of Locke himself, and his influential Some Thoughts Concerning Education? Does it not offer a panoply of useful suggestions for educating “the young gentleman”? Evidently not: “After Locke’s book, my subject is still entirely fresh” (33). When it comes to education, truly useful advice has yet to be tendered, even by ‘utilitarians.’

Why so? Because “Childhood is unknown” (33). “The wisest men concentrate on what it is important for men to know without considering what children are in a condition to learn. They are always seeking the man in the child without thinking of what he is before being a man.” (33-34). Rousseau may well be thinking of Locke’s admonition to the Young Gentleman’s father: “The sooner you treat him as a man, the sooner he will be one.” Direct your son to think about the management of your estate, and he will mature more quickly, put away childish things with more alacrity. Not so fast, Rousseau insists: “Begin,” rather, “by studying your pupil better. For most assuredly you do not know them at all.” (34). Human beings must be led along with “the march of nature” (34). Like all marches, nature proceeds in stages, one step at a time. One picks up the pace only at the risk of exhaustion. Men have yet to understand human nature, and botch the education of their children for that reason. In turning at least initially to thoughtful mothers, Rousseau marks a new beginning. Mothers are present at the beginning, at the archē, of the child’s life; knowing their children most intimately, from the beginning, they will more readily see what Rousseau would educate educators to do. Whereas Locke addresses fathers, encouraging them to make men out of their sons, Rousseau addresses mothers, who know their children as children.

Whether it is the atheist philosophes of the Enlightenment or the priestly schoolmasters of the Church, “I do not see as do other men. I have long been reproached for that.” (34). What is more, with Rousseau (Rousseau assures us) what you see is what you get. “I say exactly what goes on in my mind,” “expanding freely my sentiment” (34). I turn the light of philosophic Enlightenment inward, so all can see who and what I am. The maxims of Rousseau that differ from those of others are “among those whose truth or falsehood is important to know and which make the happiness or the unhappiness of mankind” (34)—urgent stuff, indeed. He eschews ‘halfway’ reforms, educational compromises: “There would be less contradiction in man” if educators either stayed strictly within the bounds of convention or renovated everything. Rousseau intends to show what comprehensive renovation, a regime change or revolution in education, would look like, if it were conducted in the light of nature directed into the human soul as it is, by nature. The education proposed here will “be suitable to man and well adapted to the human heart” (34). It is the intention to compromise that mirrors the practice of saying what one really thinks. That is why Rousseau makes such a point of his sincerity, his openness. One might say that he introduces a rhetoric of sincerity, a persona of the dauntless truth-teller.

Rousseau ends his preface by assuring his readers that he recognizes the importance of circumstances in applying his teachings on teaching. His book is general. If parents adopt his maxims (leaving aside the question of whether he thinks they should), they will need to adapt them to their own way of life, and to their own child. There is no household ‘in general,’ nor is there any child ‘in general.’ Handle both with care.

 

2. Book I: Plunging right in

The frontispiece of Book I depicts the goddess Thetis plunging her infant demigod son, Achilles, into the sacred River Styx, whose waters will make every inch of him invulnerable. She grips him firmly by the ankle; according to the familiar legend, this allowed his unwashed heel to fall prey to a poisoned arrow, and him with it. The water of Christian baptism, by contrast, symbolizes the thoroughgoing invulnerability of Christian souls, not mere bodies, souls bathed as it were by the Holy Spirit. Rousseau’s interpretation of such efforts will prove decidedly more naturalistic. For him, as for Heraclitus, nature is a river, always on the move, and is itself a rigorous teacher of those who live in or on it.

“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man” (I.37). This implies that human nature, at very least prelapserian human nature, ‘falls’ not to demonic influence but to human influence, as man “wants nothing as nature made it,” not even himself, “not even man” (I.37). “Were he not to do this, however, everything would go even worse, and our species does not admit of being formed halfway” (I.37); that is, the attempt to bring a natural man into modern society would only ruin him.

With that sobering caution, Rousseau addresses “tender and foresighted” mothers with respect to the care of their infants (I.37). By nature, women are the child’s first caregiver. “Form an enclosure around your child’s soul at any early date” (I.38), guarding him against opinions, especially false opinions about infant care. “Plants are shaped by cultivation, and men by education” (I.38), of which there are three kinds: education from nature—the physical development of human faculties and bodily organs; education from men—the use of the human being as he develops; and education from things—from the experiences he undertakes and undergoes. At best, these “three masters” should harmonize (I.38). “Education is certainly only habit” (I.39), the ways of life the  child’s ‘schoolmasters’ inculcate. But only those habits endure which comport with nature, “the idea of happiness or of perfection given to us by reason” (I.39). Habits can be corrupted by unreasonable, false, opinion. The political community is ruled by opinion; the citizen is rule in accordance with what other human being in that community want for him and from him. Therefore, “one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time” (I.39). Once again, no compromises. 

Political communities or ‘states’ have regimes, and regimes have consequences. For example, “the wars of republics are crueler than those of monarchies. But if the war of kings is moderate”—kings often want merely to carve off a piece of another king’s territory—it is “their peace which is terrible.” (481 n.2). “It is better to be their enemy than their subject,” as the history of the twentieth century would so starkly demonstrate, when tyrants would kill more of their own subjects than they caused to be killed by beginning two world wars (481 n.2). Given the decisive effect of politics on human life, “distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.” (I.39). ‘Enlightenment’ philosophes are insufficiently enlightened with respect to the states they expect to enlighten. They do not understand the necessary limits of politics.

In contrast to the citizen, who “is only a fractional unity dependent on the denominator,” “natural man is entirely for himself” (I.39). “Good social institutions are those that best know how to denature man,” to “transport the I into the common unity” (I.40). The mistake of all previous modern ‘social contract’ thinkers has been to ignore this. “He who in the civil order wants to preserve the primacy of the sentiments of nature does not know what he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither for himself nor for others. He will be one of the men of our days: a Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois. He will be nothing.” (I.40). That is the core of Rousseau’s critique of Locke, and of Hobbes before him.

So, if “you want to get an idea of public education,” of education for citizenship, “read Plato’s Republic,” “the most beautiful educational treatise ever written” (I.40). But there is no longer any genuine public education in modernity because there is no more genuinely ‘political thing’; under the centralized modern state, there is civil society, but even that, at best, involves electing representatives to govern, not a people assembling to govern themselves. In terms of politics, the modern state is, and can only be, a halfway house. For education, this means that “public instruction no longer exists and can no longer exist, because where there is no longer fatherland, there can no longer be citizens. These two words, fatherland and citizen, should be effaced from modern languages.” (I.40). Education supported by public funds and undertaken by public employees is “only fit for making double men, always appearing to relate everything to others and never relating anything except to themselves alone”—a “composite impulse which leads us to neither one goal nor the other” (I.41), to neither manhood nor citizenship but to hypocrisy.

 

3. Home-schooling

Locke is right about some things, first of all the superiority of ‘home-schooling’ to public education in the modern world. Locke eschews public schooling because boys grouped together play games of dominance with one another, kindling the thumotic passions of the soul instead of the peaceful habits of commerce, better inculcated at home, where the boy can attend to matters associated with the governance of property. In contrast, Rousseau wants home-schooled children to receive “the education of nature” that schooling within a social group must ruin (I.41). More, if widespread, the right kind of home-schooling might serve a philosophic purpose. “What will a man raised uniquely for himself become for others? If perchance the double object we set for ourselves could be joined in a single one by removing the contradictions of man, a great obstacle to his happiness would be removed” and “the natural man would be known” (I.41). If there is any chance at all of conjoining man and citizen, parents in civil society would need to know what natural man is. Such knowledge would no longer be restricted to the philosopher, Rousseau. This would be ‘Enlightenment,’ indeed, but far removed from the false, Lockean-Voltairean Enlightenment prevailing now.

It is noteworthy that in the United States, beginning in the 1970s, Christian parents removed their children from public schools, from which prayer had been removed and the ‘secular’ education of John Dewey consummated. Christian home-schooling attempts not to raise children according to nature (the human heart being corrupt, desperately evil to the point of unknowability) but according to the laws of the City of God, a spiritual approximation of the ancient polis and its education for virtue.

 

4. Education according to nature

“Prior to the calling of his parents is nature’s call to human life. Living is the job I want to teach him.” (I.41). Parent want to mold the child in imitation of their badly-molded selves. “What must be done is to prevent anything from being done” (I.41), prevent anything from being superimposed on the child. In modernity, life is mobile, animated by an “unsettled and anxious spirit” (I.42)—an insight Tocqueville would elaborate, attributing it to the ‘democracy’ or ‘equality of conditions’ in modern societies. Rousseau anticipates this, writing, “our true study is that of the human condition” (I.42). But for him the human condition isn’t a social condition, whether democratic or aristocratic. It is much more elemental than that. “To live is not to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence” (I.42). That anticipates not so much Tocqueville as Nietzsche. “the man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life” (I.42). “Civil man,” by contrast, “is born, and dies in slavery,” “enchained by our institutions” (I.42). Born free, everywhere in chains: the celebrated formulation Rousseau published in the Social Contract, which (as Professor Jensen noted) appeared the same year as the Emile, 1762.

 

5. Education from nature

Therefore, begin with childbirth and with the first human association. “There is no substitute for maternal solicitude” (I.45). Without it, the son is ungrateful, failing to feel the most elemental human sentiment, love for the one who gave him birth, the one who carried him when he could not even survive in the world. To decline to offer such solicitude is the “original sin” (I.45); it kills the child more surely than Eve’s succumbing to the temptation of the serpent, which brought the curse of death upon her, her mate, and all their children. The mother must feed her children at her breast, nurture them herself, forming the sentiment of gratitude with this intimacy. While establishing this natural bond, she must also take care never to introduce artificial bonds prematurely. Swaddling clothes are such bonds, literally wrapping the child in artifice. If you bind your children in cloth “you thwart him from their birth” (I.43). You destroy their natural liberty. All the bonds, all the restraints on the infant should be natural ones. To remove these is to promote licentiousness; to respect them is to promote liberty. “Do you wish to bring everyone back to his first duties? Begin with mothers. You will be surprised by the changes you produce. Everything follows successively from this first depravity,” the refusal of breast feeding and the imposition of swaddling clothes—from frustrating nature and imposing convention (I.46). Abolish this original sin. “Llet mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled”; “let women once again become mothers, men will soon become fathers and husbands again” (I.46). “No mother, no child” (I.46). The reciprocal rule of husband and wife, which Aristotle calls political rule strictly speaking, has in Rousseau’s view the more fundamental reciprocal relationship—though not of course reciprocal rule—between the mother and her newborn child. 

 

6. An unsentimental sentimental education

Now that nursing mothers have become common, the opposite problem has become prevalent: the mother whose child can do no wrong, in her eyes. As the mother of God, Mary came to (and was indeed obliged to) worship her son. But there has been only one Madonna. Child pampering is no answer to child neglect. This is where not the Biblical Madonna but the goddess Thetis comes in, the mother who plunges her child into cold water. Toughen the boy up, a bit. “Observe nature and the follow the path it maps out for you. It exercises children constantly; it hardens their temperament by tests of all sorts; it teaches them early what effort and pain are.” (I.47). In Rousseau’s day, many children died in childhood. “The tests passed, the child has gained strength; and as soon as he can make use of life, its principle becomes sounder” (I.47). Pampered children more often die young. Therefore, “steep them in the waters of the Styx,” granting them, if not immortality, a better chance at a longer and more vigorous life (I.47). In this, Professor Jensen observed, Rousseau silently follows Locke, who wants to toughen the Young Gentleman for life in the world of commerce and politics.

The child cries. The mother rushes either to pacify or threaten him. Thus he learns either to dominate, calling Mother to satisfy his whims, or to serve, cringing at the prospect of punishment for voicing a real complaint—becoming a tyrant, a slave, or some monstrous combination of the two. “It is thus that we fill up his young heart at the outset with the passions which later we impute to nature”—in the manner of the Apostle Paul and his atheist followers in this respect, Hobbes and Locke—and that, “after having taken efforts to make him wicked, we complain about finding him so” (I.48). “Finally when this child, slave and tyrant, full of science and bereft of sense, frail in body and soul alike, is cast out into the world, showing there his ineptitude, his pride, and all his vices, he becomes the basis for deploring human misery and perversity. This is a mistake. He is the man of our whims; the man of nature is differently constituted.” (I.48). Mothers, be warned.

 

7. Bringing up father

“As the true nurse is the mother, the true preceptor is the father”; “let the child pass from the hands of the one to the other” (I.48). As with the mother, the father must bind the child to him, but always in a way that hues to the regime of nature. Small children should never be sent off to school, as those without attentive parents “will bring back to the paternal home the habit of having no attachments” (I.49). “As soon as the society of the family no longer constitutes the sweetness of life, it is of course necessary to turn to bad morals to find a substitute” (I.49), morals such those learned from schoolteachers, religious or secular. 

A father undertakes a triple debt: he owes to his species a man; he owes to his society sociable men; he owes to his state citizens. We have already seen that these tasks are incommensurable, or very nearly so. “To make a man, one must be either a father or more than a man oneself” (I.49-50)—a man who oversees the education of his son or a god, or even perhaps a Rousseau. Differently stated, the problem is, “How is it possible that a child be well raised by one who was not well raised himself?” (I.50). The father should raise his child to be his friend, but if not well raised, can the father be, or have, a true friend? 

Here is where “Emile” comes in. Rousseau will give himself “an imaginary pupil” to raise (I.50). He will become the model tutor, the model governor of this child. The governor’s “task is less to instruct than to lead” (I.52), inasmuch as mere instruction does not educate. This governor should be young, as “there are not enough things in common between childhood and maturity for a really solid attachment ever to be formed at this distance” (I.51). (“Children sometimes flatter old men, but they never love them” [I.51].) The child should have one such governor for the first 25 years of his life. If the father is the preceptor, the governor is the true educator, the true leader or (as the word ‘education’) implies, the true ‘drawer-out’ of the child’s nature. It is the governor the child will love the most, more than either parent. Rousseau does not want ‘the faith of our fathers’ to prevail, at least in its traditional form. Nature itself will do most of this work, so the leader exists in order to make sure nothing interferes with its beneficent course. “There is,” after all, “only one science to teach to children,” as distinguished from men: “It is that of a man’s duties” (I.51). [1] They should be able to live according to those duties in a variety of circumstances; “the natural education ought to make a man fit for all human conditions” (I.52).

For this, the governor Rousseau will make a contract with Emile’s parents—not unlike his famous ‘social contract,’ as Professor Jensen noted. The boy “ought to honor his parents, but he ought to obey only me. That is my first or, rather, my sole condition,” along with its corollary, that there shall be no involuntary separation of pupil and governor (I.53). This means that Father’s precepts will assume the status of advice, not commands.

 

8. The living body

Rousseau wants to govern a healthy child. “I am not able to teach living to one who thinks of nothing but how to keep himself from dying” (I.53). “The body must be vigorous in order to obey the soul” and, conversely, “a frail body weakens the soul” (I.54). That is because “the weaker the body, the more it commands; the stronger it is, the more it obeys” (I.54). Medicine may or may not cure an individual, but it is bad for mankind. Whereas Christian educators often distrusted physicians because suffering pushes the soul into thinking of salvation after the body’s miserable life is mercifully over, Rousseau has other idea. “Naturally man knows how to suffer with constancy and dies in peace” (I.55). Pace Hippocrates, Socrates, Jesus, but “it is doctors with their prescriptions, philosophers with their precepts, priests with their exhortations, who debase his heart and make him unlearn how to die.” (I.55). “Let the child know how to be sick,” as this is “nature’s art” (I.55). “The only useful part of medicine is hygiene” (I.55). If Emile needs medical attention, his governor will call a nurse, selecting a woman healthy of body and of heart.

 

9. Nature, the true educator

Given a healthy body, Emile should not ruin it, or his soul, by growing up in a city. “Men are not made to be crowded into anthills but to be dispersed over the earth which they should cultivate. The more they come together, the more they are corrupted” since “cities are the abyss of the human species.” (I.54). It is in the countryside, “where education begins with life,” that “the child is at birth already a disciple, not of the governor, but of nature. The governor only studies under this first master and prevents its care from being opposed” (I.61). 

Newborns know nothing and can do nothing. They are capable of learning, and that’s all. Rousseau goes so far as to assert that “the movements and the cries of the child who has just been born are purely mechanical effects, devoid of knowledge and of will,” evidence of “the primitive ignorance and stupidity natural to man” (I.61-62). To use Locke’s formula, he is a tabula rasa. And even more radically so than for Locke, inasmuch as Locke reserves the term for the human mind, whereas Rousseau extends the description to the heart. For this reason, “I know of no philosopher who has yet been so bold as to say: this is the limit of what man can attain and beyond which he cannot go. We do not know what our nature permits us to be.” (I.62). The Emile is an attempt to think, to imagine, what natural man is. 

Newborns perceive only pleasure and pain. This being the case, human nature is highly malleable, and the governor must see to it that it never much hardens. “The only habit that a child should be allowed is to contract none” (I.63). This will defend his liberty, without which no real morality, no real sense of duty, can exist. How, then, can the governor proceed to do this?

“Prepare from afar the reign of his freedom and the use of his forces by leaving natural habit to his body, by putting him in the condition always to be master of himself and in all things to do his will, as soon as he has one” (I.63). This preparation will consist, first, of observing the child’s pre-language ‘language,’ consisting of his vocalizations and gestures. So, for example, observe any child’s “resentment, fury, and despair” at being struck by another person: “If I had doubted that the sentiment of the just and the unjust were innate in the heart of man, this example alone would have convinced me” (I.66). “This disposition of children to fury, spite, and anger requires extreme attentiveness” (I.66). To curb it, remember that “as long as children find resistance only in things and never in wills, they will become neither rebellious nor irascible and will preserve their health better” (I.66). A child quickly learns that there’s no use in raging at a boulder. It doesn’t care, and it has no intention that might be manipulated, nothing about it that can either be tyrannized or bowed down to. 

This point is indispensable for human liberty. “The first screams of children are prayers. If one is not careful, they soon become orders” (I.66). Utterly dependent because so weak, they will learn “the idea of empire and dominion” if their prayers are too readily answered (I.66). The governor must distinguish expressions of need from commands. Never fuss over the fussy child. Since “all wickedness comes from weakness,” from the habits of tyranny and servility weakness will produce if badly governed, “make him strong” and “he will be good” (I.67). “He who could do everything would never do harm” (I.67)—an anthropological and indeed theological claim that Rousseau will return to later in the book, in the section titled “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” A child may destroy things, but at least initially he does so without malice, “without knowing what he does” (I.67). What is paramount is not to prevent him from damaging things but from learning to use other persons as instruments, via words. The libido dominandi derives from the child’s discovery of such manipulation.

Words, eventually, will lead to reasoning, although not for a long time. “Reason alone teaches us to know good and bad. Conscience, which makes us love the former and hate the latter, although independent of reason, cannot be developed without it.” (I.67). That innate sense of justice will need careful cultivation, but only when the time comes, when Emile’s nature has matured.

Meanwhile, his governor will follow four maxims: first, let him use all the strength nature gave him (he doesn’t have much, so he can’t do much harm in exercising it, if his ‘environment’ is well designed; second, supplement all strength he needs for obtaining his physical ends, as he is scarcely ready to understand metaphysical ends; third, limit your assistance to useful things only; finally, study his vocalizations, gestures, and eventually his language carefully, distinguishing what is natural and what is merely opinion, perhaps opinion taken up from his nurturing mother or his preceptorial father. Again, “the spirit of these rules”—Rousseau winks at Montesquieu, who, with his phrase “spirit of the laws” himself winks at the Bible—is “to accord children more true freedom and less dominion,” to encourage them to do things for themselves instead of commanding or imploring others. What is true freedom or liberty?’ “Accustomed early to limiting their desires to their strength, they will feel little the privation of what is not going to be in their power” (I.68). This will indeed minimize prayer directed at powerful persons. “Your caresses will not cure his colic; however, he will remember what must be done to be humored, and if he once knows how to make you take care of him at his will, he has become your master” (I.68). Who is the governor, then?

As for speech, often considered the distinctively human characteristic, don’t delay it and don’t rush it. The child should not be prattled at; speak distinctly and repeat what you say. Country children, Rousseau adds, speak more distinctly than city children because they spend more of their time at greater distance from their mothers—out in the barnyard, not cooped up in an apartment nursery. But do not attempt to enhance their vocabulary prematurely. “It is a very great disadvantage for him to have more words than ideas” (I.74). Let speech develop at nature’s pace. Rousseau is the first modern philosopher to insist upon the integrity of the stages of natural growth and development.

The development of speech brings the toddler to childhood proper. This stage of life, and the education appropriate to it, is the topic of Book II.

 

Note

1. In choosing a child to be tutored, Rousseau writes, “I would only take a common mind, such as I assume my pupil to be. Only ordinary men need to be raised; their education ought to serve as an example only for that of their kind. The others raise themselves in spite of what one does.” (I.52). In his footnote to this passage, Allan Bloom remarks that Rousseau’s Confessions is “the description of the education of a genius” (482 n.21).