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).

 

 

 

Seth Benardete: Encounters and Reflections. Ronna Burger, editor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

 

From “Encounters,” Benardete’s recollections of the individuals he met in the course of his inquiries, the book moves to the second part of the “indeterminate dyad” of his life, discussions of the philosophic problems he and his dialogic partners considered over the course of years. Writings and readers being yet another such dyad, the talk centers on philosophic books, especially the Platonic dialogues—themselves dyadic, of course.

Michael Davis asks him to elaborate on his account of structure and plot in Homer’s Iliad. Benardete recalls that he had discovered the structure of the poem ‘retroactively,’ having first read Diotima’s description of the “ladder of love” in Plato’s Symposium and then finding a similar pattern in Homer. “But I didn’t ask the question, How come the combat between Paris and Menelaus is replaced by the combat between Hector and Ajax?” That is, what causes men and their actions to move up the ladder? What happens is that Achilles’ challenge to the authority of Agamemnon with respect to Briseis “is then picked up in the third book by Menelaus, who realizes that, in order to justify his claim to Helen, he has to accept the principle Achilles introduced.” That is “the principle of natural right, which is not based on law.” Achilles had challenged the legal, convention-based authority of King Agamemnon on the grounds that he had won Briseis by dint of his own virtues. “When Menelaus accepts the challenge from Paris, it means he gives up his legal right to [Helen], and says ‘I have to earn it.'” The movement to the second rung of the ladder is made not on the foundation of the ladder’s structure but on the action, itself founded on the argument or at least assertion of Achilles. In the remainder of the poem, “Achilles has to learn that he in fact has this principle in himself”; he “needed nine years to grow up at Troy before he comes to know that he is the number one guy.” 

In his Herodotean Inquiries Benardete discovered the same thing in the Father of History. Book II, on Egypt, “is the level of dianoia [thought]”; Book III, on Persia, is the level of pistis or trust; Book IV, on Scythia and Libya, is on eikasia or imaging. Pistis is central to the sequence, as Darius teaches the Persians to tell lies “for the sake of some good” and, conversely, to “tell the truth for the sake of some good.” He thus “destroys the nomos,” the law, “for the sake of tyranny” or lawless rule. If the lie is discovered it will ruin trust in the laws, which are said to be divinely inspired. Accordingly, the theme of imaging in the next Book makes much of “likeness and similitude,” inasmuch as a lie told for the sake of some good must be plausible if it’s to work, if it’s to serve that good. The equivalent to the dyad of imagining in Book IV is “the problem of two,” the problem of the dyad, seen in the previous account of Egypt. Egypt is characterized by unusual pairings consisting of “two things that don’t fit together but do belong together”—male and female, water and earth, permanence and change, body and soul. The self-contradictory character of Egyptian conventions, including its laws, is displayed by the practice of mummification, which assumes that the soul is somehow made immortal by preserving the body. 

Benardete had uncovered the structure of Herodotus’ History, but as he explains, “Only years later did I see what it means that the pattern is broken at III.38. That’s when the tyranny of Polycrates on Samos comes in right after the burial question come up. It marks the end of the holy law then you begin looking at things in light of the political…. Book IV does represent the level of eikasia [image]; but it belongs to the political which has been introduced in contrast to the sacred,” and must “be understood in terms of Greek freedom,” the principle opposed to Persian tyranny in the great war between the two geopolitical rivals.  That is the movement, as distinct from the structure, of Herodotus’ narration or history.

The same dyadic insight applies to Greek tragedies and to Platonic dialogues. In the dialogues, “there is in fact an argument in the action” and “the discovery of the action is a second sailing.” For example, in the Republic Socrates constructs the pattern, the idea, the form of the best regime. But it emerges step by step in the dialogue, points in which a question arises that ends up undermining the pattern. This is one way in which Socrates’ famous irony works. The issue is still broader than that. “The real question—you might say the Platonic question: Is the trap door in a Platonic writing an imitation of the trap door in nature?” Here is where the eccentricity of Being and the eccentricity of beings comes in, most notably human beings (so memorably displayed in the book’s “Encounters” section). The Platonic dialogue and ancient poetry “always have to do with the oddity of the individual”—club-footed Oedipus, snub-nosed Socrates. “Something is being disclosed in a particular that is incapable of being disclosed in any other way”—not, for example, “by a formula or concept.” Yes, Oedipus is a ‘tragic hero’ and a ‘king’; yes, Socrates is a ‘philosopher.” Yet they are individuals too, not simply ‘types’ or ‘forms.’ This “problem in nature” can only “come up experientially, as it does in the reading of the dialogue,” which imitates the particularity of Being as exhibited by Plato’s drama individual persons arguing with one another. In his own experience, Benardete found this dyadism even in his experience of studying the texts, as he noticed that “teaching a text twice” is “the crucial experience” in understanding it.

Such dyadic clashes make the arguments in dialogue move ahead. In his conversation with Socrates in the Republic, Thrasymachus raises the question of the relation between eidetic analysis, understanding things according to the ideas, and the good. But when frustrated Thrasymachus walks off and Glaucon takes over the argument, his use of the term eidos “with regard to the good” transforms “into a massive problem what had apparently been only a speck on the horizon in Thrasymachus’s account.” Glaucon asks, What is justice? And does it make you happy? Those are two very different questions: the answer to the ‘what is’ question may not tell you what the good is. Maybe being just won’t make you happy. (In the New Testament, it would make you very unhappy, were it enforced with no divine grace on offer.) This is the dialectical movement that impels Socrates to take the next step on the ‘ladder’ of the argument, to introduce the city, the polis, into the discussion, claiming initially that the city is the image of the soul, the soul ‘writ large’ and therefore easier to see and consider. In Socrates’ imagery, the city is a sort of cave, with its idols and shadow-images on the walls. “Glaucon turns out to be looking at the statues, the shadows on the wall of the cave, and asking Socrates, who, if he had these statues, would be happy? And Socrates proves that’s quite impossible.” Glaucon trusted that justice is a reality, which is supposed to make on happy, but justice as he’s been thinking of it is “in fact an idealization of the images in the cave, and therefore doesn’t stand independent of it.” 

As for the good, Glaucon opined that “the three highest goods” are “health, sight, and understanding.” “Socrates proves that you can’t have them unless you’re just.” The tyranny at the core of Glaucon’s soul, and of Thrasymachus before him, is doubly mistaken. It takes the city’s conventions for justice, whereas real justice is only discovered outside the cave, via the philosophic ascent into the light of the sun, into nature. Human happiness— the real good—cannot be acquired without natural justice as a virtue in the soul, There is a true form of self-interest that must be distinguished from the self-interest of tyrant’s ruling principle. Because other regimes (warrior aristocracies, oligarchies, democracies) are all based on the compromises necessary when the city is ordered by a class structure and ruled by more than one person, it is the regime of the tyrant that brings out most clearly the question of self-interest—the question of what way of life is truly good. The tyrant is ‘the city’ at its purest, its most uncompromising, its most determinedly ‘idolatrous.’ This is why it ‘must’ kill Socrates, even when its regime is officially a democracy. Socrates seeks the real good, but the city is “dream-like,” shadowy, chaining its denizens in front of unrealities, not wanting them to awaken and get out. The action of the argument of the dialogue represents the attempted ascent from the world of opinion. “One of the first things I remember from Strauss was how you could understand the whole Republic in terms of moving from the moral dimension of the first analysis of poetry to the metaphysical dimension of the second analysis of poetry, and the reason for that is the intervention of philosophy in between.” In this movement, as in the movement from Thrasymachus to Glaucon to Socrates, “you’re really pulling out what was there to begin with though you didn’t know it.”

“The difference between the pattern and the argument might have become most manifest to me in working on the Gorgias.” The structure is determined by Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, who represent the three parts of the soul in Republic IV—reason or calculation, spiritedness, and desire. They engage in discussion of the beautiful, the just, and the good, but the development of the discussion in sequence is driven by the different errors each makes. At the root is “the problem of eidetic analysis,” namely, that “on the surface, you start with a fully articulated Platonic realm of concepts that either do not overlap at all”—the beautiful, the good, and the just are clear and distinct ideas, having nothing to do with one another—or “they are identical”—all mere instantiations of ‘the ideal.’ But as the argument goes on, one sees “these funny overlaps, which makes it impossible for them to be understood as separate” or identical. To overcome this perplexing structural dilemma, one must follow the unfolding of the argument as it puts the ideas into dialectical movement.  

This dialectical movement can be seen once again in Plato’s most obviously ‘cosmological’ dialogue, the Timaeus, where one finds a “double account of space.” “Timaeus first gives an account of the transformation of matter through the elements” (that is, earth, air, fire, and water), an account which shows that when I point to ‘this’ or ‘that’ thing, I am pointing to a thing located in space. But “then he gives a second account which is not understood that way, but is in fact a dialogue.” These two accounts display the difference “between scientific discourse and dialogic discourse.” Scientific discourse reduces to numbers, explaining things we perceive in space on the grounds of the radically un-spatial character of temporal abstraction, which is the subject of mathematics, (one is followed by two, then by three, and on ad infinitum) Dialogue occurs in space: it “involves the facing of the other in which there is reversal of left and right.” That is, when you and I engage in dialogue, my left is your right and vice-versa. This can’t “be reduced from mere number,” as Burger observes, nor, Benardete adds, can it be understood “in terms of mere relations of body” but in terms of two souls and their minds, two individuals, eccentric, contradicting one another, engaging in dialectic. 

Timaeus seems to assume initially that the “city in speech,” the polis Socrates builds with his words in the Republic, could be realized, put into time and space. But the cosmology he proposes to support this claim “turns out to be a likely story, and not about the realization, because it’s not a real cosmology.” While his first cosmology claimed that the four elements “transform into each other perfectly,” he later “says he’s made a terrible mistake,” and “in fact only three of the elements do this, but earth does not.” But the realization of the city in speech would require it precisely to ‘come down to earth,’ the element that stubbornly resists transformation. Earth occupies space, solidly, and in that space “you are not the other,” since your right is his left. If each of you is eccentric to the other, neither of you can be pushed into an ‘ideal’ regime, a city in speech in which all the elements are fully harmonized. The city in speech must remain a utopia, a nowhere-ville.

In the Phaedrus Benardete saw how the indeterminate dyad effects the philosophic quest; the dialogue provided him with an important model of how interpretation of a dialogue should be guided by the action of the argument. Attention to the structure of the dialogue, consisting of two parts, shows that “Plato was proposing the Platonic dialogues as the new Olympian gods to replace the old ones.” “They would be the new dispensation.” Upon further consideration—a second teaching of the dialogue—he traced “the motion of the argument” and saw how each speech emerges out of the previous one, but with “an inversion of the prior section when it’s absorbed in a subsequent section.” Socrates’ final account is of the beloved “seeing himself in the image held up by the lover and falling in love with that without knowing what it is.” The discovery of oneself, self-knowledge, is the Platonic second sailing. Benardete proposes that this is “in fact the paradigm of all understanding.”

This is related to the teaching of the Sophist. From his conversation the day before, Theaetetus has apparently concluded that Socrates is a sophist, and Socrates fears that the Eleatic Stranger, who now takes his place, has come to refute him. But precisely through “a systematic series of errors on the part of the speaker,” the Stranger discovers the sophist as “the phantasma of a philosopher,” while setting out to vindicate Socrates from that charge. The hunt for the sophist shows how eidetic analysis “necessarily breaks down” under dialectical scrutiny, if reality is analogous to the ever-changing sophist, then “the elusiveness of the sophist turns out to be the elusiveness of being.” In their failure to recognize that, holding on to the assumption of a fixed realm of ideas, “everybody was a Platonist before Plato.” Pre-Socratic philosophers, who attempted to describe nature with scientific precision, were all terribles simplificateurs. 

How does eidetic analysis break down? For that, Benardete turns to the Philebus, where he discovered “the importance of the apeiron [the unlimited].” “There is an internal tension within an eidos,” which Benardete called the “indeterminate dyad,” following the language of Aristotle in Metaphysics XIII.7. [1] The absolute separation of limitedness and the unlimited, with which the Philebus seems to begin, “cannot be maintained, but in fact they intrude on one another because each has another split in it, which shows that it has the other within itself.” Take the limited (pera]. It has two parts: “the limited that is connected with the measured,” with more and less; and numbers, which in themselves have no more or less, but also “no connection to the real,” being pure ‘abstractions,’ as later thinkers would say. Insofar as it can be measured, the limited has within it the unlimitedness of more and less. As Robert Berman puts it, “the indeterminate dyad is this symmetry-breaking element that reveals the dynamic of the argument,” the movement that otherwise could not occur, given the apparently but not really static and limited character of the ideas. 

To illustrate the internal tension within the idea, which opens up an internal structure, Benardete sails back to the philosopher’s definition of justice in the Republic: “‘minding one’s own business’ and ‘minding own business well’ is an indeterminate dyad, and the whole Republic turns on that. The city is just when each class in it minds its own business. But the philosopher minds his own business well: his justice is the consequence of “his own ordered soul,” in which reason rules spiritedness, which rules the appetites; he does indeed mind his own business, and he does it well, in accordance with human nature. But the class system of the city in speech can never be instituted on the solid element of earth. The city is composed of individual persons, which are not parts of the order of the city in the same way that the parts of the human soul are parts of the soul. There is a naturalness, a ‘givenness,’ of a soul which the city’s parts can never fully have. “When the city tries to be just on its own principle you necessarily get tyranny, because you’re not able to separate the individual from the principle of the city, whereas in every other regime, there’s always a difference and that’s what makes you free,” enabling your soul to make rational choices that best bring out its nature, not merely following the roles the city assigns to it. “Any attempt to make the city conform to” Socrates’ model of the soul “would in fact destroy the city,” as Aristotle observes in the Politics. And, Benardete adds, given the fact that reason rules the philosophic soul, the justice of his soul is identical to wisdom, or at least to the reasoning inquiry after it. Cities don’t do that, however much they may seek ‘enlightenment.’ The enlightenment they seek in modern times is scientific, but science (that is, precise knowledge), however worthwhile, isn’t the same as wisdom. If being is an elusive sophist, the scientific attempt to pin it down will never suffice to rule human beings, humanly.

Sailing still again, back to the Symposium, Benardete returns to Diotima’s ladder. It is an image of philo-sophia, not wisdom but the love of wisdom. “The beautiful, the just, and the good constantly come up as a triad in Plato.” Philosophic eros is a desire for the good, for happiness. The unphilosophic lover loves the beautiful and the city loves what it takes to be justice. The indeterminate dyad here is the reality of philosophic eros as a particular case of eros generally, just as poetry is a particular case of artistry or making. With regard to love, “the truth is that what is understood to be the lover is the perpetuation” of the poet who writes a love poem to his beloved—the “perpetuation of the poet in the form of beautiful images of the other,” rather as the beloved as described in the Phaedrus turns out to be the reflection of the lover. “The poet preserves himself in the poem totally disguised in his praise of the beautiful, which is ether reality or the law or heroes or whatever.” The poem he makes is “his product in a way that the child is not, and can never be, yours. In the Phaedrus, where love leads up to philosophy, the philosopher produces speeches, an activity ‘which looks on the surface to be very similar to what the poet is doing, but in fact contains within it this pointing to being, rather than to fiction.” Therefore, in the Symposium, eros has three dimensions: love of wisdom or philosophy, love of the good, and love of the beautiful or poiēsis. And in the Phaedrus the third kind of love, seen in “the rhetoric of poetry,” is brought back into dialectics, into philosophy or the love of wisdom, especially as it culminates in happiness, the good. That brings the life of the mind back to the indeterminate dyad, back from three-ness. Plato and the classics generally resist Hegelianism, which insists on a dialectic culminating in a third term, a synthesis, which claims that Being ultimately will become a determinate triad, which is really a monad, the ‘end of history,’ the end of dialectic, the end of ‘History,’ the end of freedom.

Plato explores the meaning of friendship in the Lysis, which on Benardete’s reading recalls a major theme of the Republic. the analysis of the central part of the soul. This part of the soul, spiritedness, thumos, resists “accepting the good,” whether it is defined in terms of reason or in terms of the desires. Spiritedness wants to preserve the self, and even to exalt it in victory and honor; it gets angry when either reason or the desires try to tug it away from such things. As Burger puts it, “there is an attachment to the self” which does not want “the reception of the good” because the reception of the good “would transform the self.” Philosophy itself, Benardete says, “has the same split in it.” Socrates is “moved by the desire for his own understanding,” a subordination of himself to “his own good”; however, in order to preserve philosophy itself, Socrates sees that he must consent to his own destruction at the hands of the city, to drink the hemlock it thrusts upon him. Benardete concludes: “All philosophic understanding, as Socrates represents it, has to be in the category of crisis, because it always involves a problem that comes up as a crisis.” This is the dyad of the philosophic life—on “the one hand, philosophical, on the other, political.” “So the Lysis seems to be the key dialogue for understanding the character of Socratic philosophy.” Burger interjects, “you always say that about whatever you just finished working on!” And rightly so, since, as we’ve seen, each dialogue examines an aspect of the indeterminate dyad. 

The dyad of philosophy is always indeterminate because it is “accidental,” meaning an encounter with a question. Pre-Socratic philosophy, “which goes back before the Bible,” rests on wonder at the cosmos, which “is always present.” “It can take profound or not profound expression, but it’s not in crisis.” Because Socratic political philosophy is “always concerned with itself,” its good “always in question” by the city, by citizens, it “has to face the problem of whether its objectivity is sullied by the fact that it’s for your good” in a way that pre-Socratic philosophy, losing itself in wonder at the cosmos, does not wonder about. “The concealed question between the being question,” which pre-Socratics address, “and the intelligibility question has to do with the skewed way in which the question arises, through our interests,” a point pre-Socratics don’t address. Since the interests of the philosopher are eccentric in relation to the interests of the city, Socrates must consider the possibility that he might be killed, that “philosophy of his type will come to an end.” He must reproduce himself by finding youths fit to philosophize. That search itself intensifies the city’s suspicions of his activity. In saying he knows only that he does not know, that he knows the elusiveness of being, he puts himself in contradiction with the city, which requires obedience and therefore certainty, trusting certainty, among its citizens. The city can’t live on inquiry into questions. The philosopher may achieve only knowledge of ignorance. But that includes knowledge of the city, the cave with its idols and their shadows, while the city doesn’t know as much as it must claim to know, in particular how to make human beings happy. 

It is Odysseus during his sailings, not Odysseus at home, who exemplifies this point. “Within the notion of human shape the whole teleological problem is contained.” A being shaped in a certain way has a design fit for some things and not for others; for some things it is good, and those things good for it, for other things it is good for nothing. When Burger asks Benardete about Circe “turn[s] human beings into pigs who still have their minds.” What is the significance of a human mind in a pig shape? Benardete recalls that there is a sequence of three stories. There is Odysseus’ escape from the Cyclopes, which he effects, famously, by giving himself the name, “No One,” and blinding the cannibal, who when he calls out to his fellow Cyclopes will have to shout “No one is slaying me.” In their confusion, Odysseus takes off, having used his mind to save his body. “Odysseus begins with a pun on ‘outis’ and “mētis,’ ‘no one’ and ‘mind.’ He escapes because of this pun, which expresses his anonymity, the nonparticularization of mind.” In the story of his encounter with the goddess Circe, Odysseus rescues his men after having been shown the moly root, and particularly its physis, its nature. Nature is “the ultimate pharmakon against enchantment.” Finally, Odyseus sees Hades, which represents “body without mind,” from which condition no human being can save you. A human being’s natural shape goes with his mind; to separate them is disastrous.

This leads to the complication Benardete already described when discussing Plato. The philosopher’s quest to understand the nature of something might seem to require the mind discovering the idea by an act of noetic perception. But the ‘theoretical’ wisdom so gained “loses its power below the noetic level,” given the physical reality of the body he needs to be human, a body that is “male or female, and not pure human being.” As the Book of Genesis implies, “there’s a noetic human shape,” that of Adam before Eve, but divine surgery changes that, introducing bodily eros, and therefore imperfection, into humanity. The same goes for the prior separation of the heavens from the earth. In the Book of Genesis, of course, God pronounces both of these separations good, but philosophers find problems in them, at least for the new human beings from then on existent. The theme of ‘Athens and Jerusalem,’ the demands for beauty and for justice, symbolize this dyad. Political philosophy is the dyad that addresses this dyad, begins to make sense of it. Strauss argued for “the crucial importance of political philosophy” because the radical historicism of Heidegger on the ‘Right,’ Kojève on the ‘Left,’ and others, an attempt to bring the “speculative philosophy” of the pre-Socratics into the twentieth century while leaving physis behind, proved philosophically and politically catastrophic. Strauss emphasized “how important it was not to go beyond preparing the ground for the possibility of philosophy,” a monition Burger calls “a kind of philosophic sōphrosunē” or moderation, and Benardete responds by contrasting Strauss’s self-understanding with Heidegger, who represented “speculative philosophy in the twentieth century.” Berman asks: “If preparing the ground for philosophy is doing something other than philosophizing, what is philosophizing?” What Strauss had in mind, Benardete surmises, concerned “the way the questions now come to us,” “so deeply infected by the tradition…that you don’t even know where the categories we use are coming from.”

Benardete remarks that Hegel’s Phenomenology marks the beginning of this ill-conceived wedding between the Machiavellian-Baconian project of conquering nature and ‘fortune’ with the ambition of pre-Socratic speculative philosophy. Hegel says that the ancient Greeks “begin with things and we begin with concepts.” ‘Concepts’ are attempts not merely to understand but to master nature and the course of events. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, playing out dialectically over time, makes of nature the concretization of its own unfolding, and unfolding that ends in a final, grand synthesis, the ‘end’ of History—the fulfillment of its telos. In Hegel’s fully articulated system of thought, all Being has reached its conclusion and stands fully revealed, fully known. There is no need for philosophy, the love of wisdom, since wisdom now has been achieved. A meta-physics, a beyond-nature, has been achieved. All dyads are now part of one vast monad. Marx is a historicist who makes Hegelian historicism into a materialism, “dialectical materialism.”

In whatever form it takes, historicism opposes a Socratic understanding of the beings as ‘sophists,’ as things that are “hidden and don’t like to be caught.” There is not and cannot be a science of wisdom. What you might be able to have, what Socrates says he has, is knowledge or ‘science’ of ignorance. Knowledge of ignorance means that you can know a lot about politics, inasmuch as the city, the cave with its idols and their shadows, doesn’t know as much as it supposes it does, and in particular doesn’t know how to make human beings happy. Benardete remarks that “the Jews are an unassimilable element that reveals that the city cannot possibly fulfill what it claims it can fulfill.” As he knows, Strauss began his intellectual life engaged with ‘the Jewish question’ in 1920s Germany, with Zionism. His attempt to recover political life for his unassimilable people led him to political philosophy. This led him to offer his critique of the historicist politics of radical transformation, joined with his critique of historicist philosophy-to-end-all-philosophy.

Michael Davis follows up on “this funny connection” between “radical politics and metaphysics” which comes up in various ways throughout these conversations. That connection “seems to be necessary when something flies in the face of what’s so obviously real that you have to have a very powerful theory to undermine the reality.” Benardete wonders if Christianity might be understood as an example of such a “theory,” although one fraught with difficulty. Christianity makes “a double move with regard to carnality—on the one hand, the incarnation, on the other, the total spiritualization of everything. It contains within itself its own enemy.” He interprets Paul’s (and Jeremiah’s) notion of “the circumcision of the heart” (Romans 2:25-39, cf. Jeremiah 4:4) as “something like self-contempt” or “self-abasement” It is an attack on pride, which a revealed religion sees as a sin against the God compared to whom all humans are lowly and defective. By taking the prophets, including Jeremiah, and “us[ing] them to replace the law,” as Benardete puts it, Christians effected what Burger calls “a second sailing within Judaism.” Benardete understands circumcision as “part of a general practice of denying the body, leading to the tension that you have a totally carnal religion”—Jesus being God incarnate—that nonetheless decarnalizes the body. This “goes with death being so central,” Burger suggests, to Benardete’s concurrence. Death, after all, is his theme. And decarnalization extends to Heaven as understood in Christianity, where “there is no marriage” because “there is no body.” Without the body, without the human shape, will Christians still be human? Not transformed into pigs, obviously, but into what, exactly? And where does this leave politics in Heaven, in the Kingdom of God?

Between the Jerusalem of Israel and the Jerusalem of Jesus there was the Roman Empire. Paul understands “the history of the world” to begin with “the introduction of sin and death through Adam and Eve.” But given man’s self-consciousness of his own sinfulness, a self-consciousness made acute among the Israelites by Moses and his bringing of the divine law, why has Jesus only arrived now, so long afterwards? “Why is this the appropriate moment?” Benardete proposes, “I think it means the death of Augustus and his divinization, where everybody knows that he’s dead and a corpse but he’s made a god anyway.” That is, the world-ruling Roman Empire has “reach[ed] the point of complete false consciousness, which is the ultimate consequence of sin. But at the other end of the Mediterranean, there is the true God, who in fact became a corpse and then a god.” Well, not exactly, He was always God, but for Benardete that claim is precisely what makes Christianity analogous to ‘Augustanism’: “faith is crucial, because it’s really the consciousness of something you know is untrue.” Christianity is reverse ‘Augustanism’: Jesus starts out as a man born of woman, a woman of lowly standing who gives birth in a manger, not a world-ruling emperor at birth but the world-ruling emperor in death. But with Augustus, too, “there’s no longer either imperial expansion or aspiration, along with the collapse of the political entirely”; “everyone has become a slave,” with no eros and no kalon, no nobility, either. With Augustus, “a man on earth” had already allegedly “become a god.” In Christianity, too, the Christian is properly a slave to the incarnate God, but in an entirely spiritualized universal empire. Virgil’s account of Aeneas and of the end of the republican regime in Rome shows that political life is now gone. 

To become human, again, the Romans would need to do as Psyche or ‘Soul’ does in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass—itself a re-write of the Phaedrus. Separated from her beloved, Cupid, she acquires spiritedness, thumos. Spiritedness characterizes politics. The soul begins to philosophize “when she is away from Cupid,” when she discovers the political within herself. She thus “becomes fully human,” ready to redirect the Love she has lost, this time in a better way. [2]

 

Note

1. In that section, Aristotle discusses numbers and ideas or forms. What do ideas contribute to the things that are sensible? Not movement or change, since the ideas are stable. “To say that they are patterns and the other things share in them is to use empty words and poetical metaphors,” as “things do not come into being, unless there is something to originate movement (1080a3-4), as Platonists who don’t really follow Plato say. Nor do numbers originate movement, as Pythagoreans claim. There are two ways to look at numbers. In one way, they are “inassociable”; one is one, in and of itself, two is two, and nothing else, and so on. In another sense, numbers are “associable”; they form a sequence, two following one, three following two, on into infinity, the unlimited, the apeiron. The inassociable numbers resemble Platonic ideas; they are unique unto themselves. Each idea is a form, a delineation, a self-limited entity. The associable numbers are undifferentiated in the sense that they are equally part of the infinite sequence. Benardete sees that the ideas themselves, and not only the associable numbers, have a certain indeterminate quality, despite their formal or limited character.
2. I am grateful to Ronna Burger, who graciously read these two reviews of Encounters and Reflections, making many cogent and substantive suggestions for their improvement. Since I adopted most but not all of her suggestions, all remaining flaws are my fault.