Archives for February 2021

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.