Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile, or On Education. Allan Bloom translation. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
“We are, so to speak, born twice: once to exist and once to live; once for our species and once for our sex” (IV.211). For Rousseau, being ‘born again’ takes on a different meaning than it does in Christianity. Before puberty, “children of the same sexes have nothing apparent to distinguish them: the same visage, the same figure, the same complexion, the same voice” (IV.211). “Everything is equal” (IV.211). Puberty brings differentiation but also dependence; in the male, it also brings crankiness—a “change in humor, frequent anger, a mind in constant agitation, makes the child almost unmanageable” as “his feverishness turns him into a lion”; “he no longer wishes to be governed,” even by his best friend, the governor (IV.211). He is “truly born to life”; “nothing human is foreign to him” (IV.211).
So nature would have it, and it is futile to attempt “to control nature” (IV.211). To do so would be to defy “God”; “nothing of the kind is written in the human heart.” (Rousseau is silent on what is written in Scripture) (IV.211). Nor is there any need to control natural passions, which are “very limited” (IV.212) “They are the instruments of our freedom; they tend to preserve us. All those which subject us and destroy us come from elsewhere,” and “we appropriate them to the detriment of nature” (IV.212). He has already argued as much regarding the “primitive, innate passion” of self-love, good in itself but perverted into amour-propre by civil society. If a child’s parents and governor treat him well, showing him that they “not only are useful to him but they want to be,” he “begins to love them” (IV.213). “But as he extends his relations, his needs, and his active or passive dependencies, the sentiment of his connections with others is awakened and produces the sentiment of duties and preferences. Then the child becomes imperious, jealous, deceitful, and vindictive,” comparing himself to others and developing amour-propre for the first time (IV.213). This is Rousseau’s equivalent of the Christian interpretation of Genesis, the Fall of Man.
The natural irascibility of adolescence thus finds not only reinforcement but acceleration as the boy enters civil society, with its chain of dependencies. In sexual love, dependence upon another human being who does not necessarily love you with the reciprocity the boy has seen in his parents and governor finds its most poignant instance. “One sex is attracted to the other; that is the movement of nature. Choice, preferences, and personal attachments are the work of enlightenment, prejudice and habit…. One loves only after having judged; one prefers only after having compared” (IV.214). Comparison is natural, made possible by reason; far from being blind, love “has better eyes than we do and sees relations we are not able to perceive” (IV.214). But reason’s judgments, Rousseau has argued, are easily skewed by the amour-propre civil society fosters. “Love must be reciprocal. To be loved, one has to make oneself lovable.” (IV.214). And civil society holds up false idols of lovability.
This new and troubling need for sexual love raises questions that can no longer be avoided. When governing prepubescent children, parents and the governor can readily deflect the curiosity about childbirth that leads to questions about sex. Silence is often golden in this. The child has already seen his importunate questions on other topics unanswered, often with the counter-question, ‘Why is that useful?’ “If one decides to answer” a young child’s question, ‘Where did I come from?’ “let it be with the greatest simplicity, without mystery, without embarrassment, without a smile” (IV.216). Never make him ashamed of such a question since “true innocence is ashamed of nothing” (IV.217)—an instance in which Rousseau and the Bible concur. Rousseau recalls approvingly the answer of a mother to her son, who asked “where do children come from.” “My child, women piss them out,” like kidney stones, “with pains which sometimes cost them their lives.” (IV.218). Enough said. “The accessory ideas of pain and death cover this process with a veil of sadness which deadens the imagination and represses curiosity. Everything turns the mind toward the consequences of the delivery and not toward its causes.” (IV.218).
Such honest half-answers should suffice—until puberty. When nature begins to take its inevitable course, do not let the child’s imagination exacerbate a passion that already exerts such power over the human soul. “It is the errors of imagination which transform into vices the passions of all limited beings” (IV.219). “The summary of the whole of human wisdom in the use of the passions”—and notice that Rousseau continues the theme of utility, introduced in his earlier chapters, a theme derived from Machiavelli and Locke—is, first, “to have a sense of the true relations of man, with respect to the species as well as the individual,” and second, “to order all the affections of the soul to these relations” (IV.219).
Nature itself has now changed the true relations of your pupil to other human beings. “So long as his sensibility remains limited to his own individuality,” as it has been in childhood, “there is nothing moral in his actions” (IV.219). His education through the age of twelve has dealt with him on that basis. “It is only when [his sensibility] begins to extend outside of himself that it takes on, first, the sentiments and, then, the notions of good and evil which truly constitute him as a man and as an integral part of his species” (IV.219-20). Here morality begins.
Let it not be tragedy. Do not force nature by doing anything that intensifies his sexual imaginings. “The true course of nature is more gradual and slower. Little by little the blood is inflamed, the spirits are produced, the temperament is formed.” (IV.220). Prepubescent and pubescent boys often feel the sentiment of friendship more intensely than sexual love. Encourage this, because it promotes benevolence toward human beings generally. “Adolescence is not the age of vengeance or of hate; it is that of commiseration, clemency, and generosity” (IV.220). The boy sympathizes with his pals; they depend on each other, passing (sometimes failing) tests of loyalty. Having learned his limitations vis-à-vis things, in childhood, he readily sees his limitations vis-à-vis persons. “It is man’s weakness which makes him sociable; it is our common miseries which turn our hearts to humanity; we would owe humanity nothing if we were not men” (IV.221). More radically, since “a truly happy human being is a solitary being,” and “God alone enjoys absolute happiness,” human beings must love; they are needy (IV.221). (Why, then, would God love man? Rousseau doesn’t ask the question, as he is a discreet writer.)
This is the basis of Rousseau’s emphasis on compassion, the distinguishing characteristic of his moral theory. “If our common needs unite us by interest”—as seen in his teaching on property—our “common miseries unite us by affection,” whether in friendship or in love (IV.221).
In this we are equal by nature. Born naked and poor, “subject to all the miseries of life,” and “condemned to death,” men should study man. “When the first development of his senses lights the fire of imagination, he begins to feel himself in his fellows, to be moved by their complaints and to suffer their pains” (IV.222). Emile is ready for this study because he was never taught to pretend he felt compassion for others when he was a child; “he has not been showed the art of affecting sadness he does not feel” or to “feign tears at the death of anyone” (IV.222). Pity or compassion, “the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart according to the order of nature,” is the first we feel in relation to others (IV.222). It often first occurs to us not in relation to persons but animals; in a child, “the convulsions of a dying animal will cause him an ineffable distress before he knows whence come these new movements within him” (IV.222). Indeed, “how do we let ourselves be moved by pity if not by transporting ourselves outside of ourselves and identifying with the suffering animal, by leaving, as it were, our own being to take on its being? (IV.223).
This “nascent sensibility” must be guided, keeping Emile away from sentiments “which contract and concentrate the heart and tighten the spring of the human I” (IV.223). Follow these three maxims: 1) “it is not in the human heart to put ourselves in the place of people who are happier than we, but only in that of those who are more pitiable” (IV.223); therefore, bring Emile into the company of the poor, not the rich. 2) “One pities in others only those ills from which one does not feel oneself exempt” (IV.223); therefore, “make him understand well that the fate of these unhappy men can be his, that all their ills are there in the ground beneath his feet,” that he is subject to “all the same vicissitudes of fortune” (IV.224). Emile will learn at a young age what Rousseau attempts to teach his aristocratic and oligarch readers in their maturity. 3) “The pity one has for another’s misfortune is measured not by the quantity of that misfortune but by the sentiment which one attributes to those who suffer it” (IV.225). Once again, Rousseau aims his critique at ‘the few’: “the rich are consoled about the ill they do to the poor, because they assume the latter to be stupid enough to feel nothing at all,” and “it is natural that one consider cheap the happiness of people one despises” (IV.225). That goes for “political men” and “philosophers,” too (IV.225). But if you “study people of this order,” if you study the poor, “you will see that although their language is different, they have as much wit and more good sense than you do”; once you’ve learned that, you may yet learn to “respect your species” (IV.226). “Speak before [Emile] of humankind with tenderness, even with pity, but never with contempt. Man, do not dishonor man!” (IV.226).
“It is by these roads and other similar ones—quite contrary to those commonly taken—that it is fitting to penetrate the heart of a young adolescent in order to arouse the first emotions of nature and to develop his heart and extend it to his fellows” (IV.228). It is noteworthy that there is no mention of any specifically Christian charity; according to Rousseau, compassion or agapic love is entirely natural to the adolescent. The main thing is not to mix it with amour-propre by linking it to a personal interest in vanity, emulation, or glory—those “sentiments that force us to compare ourselves with others” (IV.228). No competitions or prizes should be offered for displays of kindness.
To direct youthful sentiments toward pity is to direct them away from “boisterous games and turbulent joy,” which too often “veil disgust and boredom” (IV.229). It will moderate sexual passion, too, as Emile puts himself in the place not only of his fellows but of the girls he now finds himself attracted to. “The sweetest habit of soul consists in a moderation of enjoyment which leaves little opening for desire and disgust,” the “restlessness of desire [that] produces curiosity and inconstancy” (IV.229). Emile isn’t on track to become “a male nurse or a brother of charity” or “to march from sick person to sick person, from hospital to hospital” (IV.231); that would tend to harden his heart, not open it, to inure him to the suffering of others and not to feel it. “A single subject well chosen and shown in a suitable light will provide him emotion and reflection for a month”; “by thus husbanding examples, lessons, and images…you will long blunt the needle of the senses and put nature off the track by following its own directions” (IV.231). He will think of girls a bit less, human beings a bit more. But not just any human beings, not ‘mankind’ in general. It is too early for such a grand sentiment. Rather, Emile will become a better friend to his friends, those with “ways of thinking and feeling clearly in common with him,” “whose nature has a more manifest identity with his own and thus make him more disposed to love himself” (IV.233).
For “we like what does us good,” what serves our natural self-interest, our amour de soi (IV.234). Don’t fight that natural sentiment. “The heart receives laws only from itself. By wanting to enchain it, one releases it” to vice; “one enchains it” to virtue “only by leaving it free” (IV.234). The fish comes to the lure by itself; it only struggles when it feels the pain of the hook. (Would-be ‘fishers of men,’ take note.) Emile’s governor can expect gratitude from his pupil only if he refrains from telling him what he owes him. “Gratitude is a natural sentiment,” “provided that you yourself have not put a price on it” (IV.234).
From compassion, friendship, and gratitude “we enter the moral order” strictly speaking, the realm of good and bad, justice and injustice (IV.235). Such moral terms are not abstractions, not mere words; they are “true affections of the soul enlightened by reason, and hence only an ordered development of our primitive affections” (IV.235). “By reason alone, independent of conscience, no natural law can be established,” as “the entire right of nature is only a chimera if it is not founded on a natural need in the human heart” (IV.235). That is, “love of man derived from love of self is the principle of human justice”; the Biblical command to love one’s neighbor as oneself means nothing if it is only a command (IV.235).
Given Emile’s entrance into civil society, what will become of the dangerous inclination to compare oneself with others? No doubt, “the first sentiment aroused in him by this comparison is the desire to be in the first position,” the consequence of amour-propre (IV.235). In Emile’s case, however, given his prior education, his libido dominandi has a good chance to be “humane and gentle,” not “cruel or malignant” (IV.235). He has already seen “the accidents common to the [human] species” and felt compassion for them, knowing that he too can be afflicted with misery (IV.235). “Now comes the measurement of natural and civil equality and the picture of the whole social order” (IV.235).
“Those who want to treat politics and morals separately will never understand anything of either of the two” (IV.235). Moral and political freedom equally depend upon “the moderation of hearts,” not “the strength of arms” (IV.236)—this, with a disapproving glance at Machiavelli. The fewer desires you have, the less you depend on other people, and that goes not only for physical desires but more especially for the desire for honor. “In the state of nature there is a de facto equality that is real and indestructible, because it is impossible in that state for the difference between man and man by itself to be great enough to make one dependent on another. In the civil state there is a de jure equality that is chimerical and vain because the means designed to maintain it themselves serve to destroy it and because the public power, added to that of the stronger to oppress the weak, breaks the sort of equilibrium nature had place between them” (IV.236). In civil society, “the multitude will always be sacrificed to the few, and the public interest to particular interest,” even when the few tell the many how much they intend to do for them, how much they intend to treat them as equals; “the distinguished orders who claim they are useful to the others are actually useful only to themselves at the expense of their subordinates” (IV.236). This fundamental problem of civil society is Emile’s new study.
“We must begin by knowing the human heart” (IV.236). Emile should understand “that man is naturally good,” “judg[ing] his neighbor by himself” (IV.237). But also “let him see that society depraves and perverts men” (IV.237). These dual realizations will incline him “to esteem each individual but despise the multitude,” to distrust the masks men put on to get ahead in civil society while recognizing that “there are faces more beautiful than the mask covering them” (IV.237).
If he knows his own heart, he knows the human heart in its nature. But as yet he knows nothing of the masks, none of which he has been taught to don. How will he learn this much-needed knowledge without ruining his own nature? Spying on others would only lead to scandalmongering and satire. Teaching generalities about particulars would make no sense. Philosophizing would leave him uncomprehending. “I would want to show him men from afar, to show him them in other times or other places and in such a way that he can see the stage without ever being able to act on it. This is the moment for history.” (IV.237).
There are risks here, as well. Historians write of catastrophes, not of peace and prosperity. They have prejudices and what we would now call ‘agendas.’ Some good historians are bad for young men. “The worst historians for a young man are those who make judgments. Facts! Facts!” Rousseau demands, echoing his “Things! Things!” of the previous chapter. As always, he wants Emile to form his own judgments: “If the author’s judgment guides him constantly, all he does is see with another’s eye; and when that eye fails him, he no longer sees anything” (IV.239). Modern historians won’t do, because “our historians” want only to impress us with their own brilliance (IV.239). The ancient historians “put less wit and more sense in their judgments,” but “even with them one must be very selective, and not the most judicious but the simplest must be chosen first”: not Polybius or Sallust and surely not Tacitus, who wrote for “old men” and cannot be understood by the young (IV.239). “One has to learn to see in human actions the primary features of man’s heart before wanting to sound its depths. One has to know how to read facts well before reading maxims. Philosophy in maxims is suitable only to those who have experience. Youth ought to generalize in nothing.” (IV.239). Although “Thucydides is to my taste the true model of historians,” “report[ing] facts without judging them” while “omit[ting] none of the circumstances proper to make us judge them ourselves,” he writes only of war. “War hardly does anything other than make manifest outcomes already determined by moral causes which historians rarely know how to see” (IV.240).
“I would prefer to begin the study of the human heart with the reading of lives of individuals; for in them, however much the man may conceal himself, the historian pursues him everywhere” (IV.240). “This is why Plutarch is my man” (IV.240). Even with him, care must be taken to guard Emile against ‘identifying with’ Plutarch’s great ones. If his previous education has succeeded, he will never prefer to be anyone “other than himself,” never “become alien to himself” (IV.243). It is more than probable than Rousseau thinks here not only of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives but of the Bible.
He is confident Emile can read history this way. By now, he will have “a great interest in knowing [men] and a great impartiality in judging them,” “a heart sensitive enough to conceive all the human passions and calm enough not to experience them” (IV.244). Opinion “has not acquired its empire over him” and although he now feels the passions, they “have not yet agitated his heart” (IV.244). Self-sufficient, “free of prejudices,” and “nurtured in the most absolute liberty” (ruled, as far as he can tell, only by things and not by his governor), “he conceives of no ill greater than servitude” and so “pities these miserable kings, slaves of all that obey them,” these “false wise men, chained to their vain reputations,” these “rich fools, martyrs to their display,” these “conspicuous voluptuaries, who devote their entire lives to boredom in order to appear to have pleasure” (IV.244). Emile “pities even the enemy who would do him harm, for he would see his misery in his wickedness” (IV.244). Emile is a sort of natural Christian; this is possible, in Rousseau’s mind, because human nature is naturally good, not nearly so innately wicked as to need divine grace to pardon and to correct it.
And, like a Christian, he must resist pride. Contemplating Plutarch’s great but flawed men, he might “believe himself worthier” than they (IV.245). He should instead learn from great men, who see and feel their superiority to others “and are no less modest because of it,” being “too sensible to be vain about a gift they did not give themselves” (IV.245). Too, Emile’s own mediocrity should rescue him from such thoughts, at least insofar as he has been educated to know his own limitations. “I have assumed for my pupil neither a transcendent genius nor a dull understanding. I have chosen him from among the ordinary minds in order to show what education can do for man. All rare cases are outside the rules.” (IV.245). There are few Rousseaus, and we find his self-portrait not in the Emile but in the Confessions. The governor will do a rare intervention, discussing Plutarch with his pupil in such a way as to let him see that yes, you see the follies of the great, but do not overlook their humility. “The sole folly of which one cannot disabuse a man who is not mad is vanity. For this there is no cure other than experience.” (IV.245). Use the vicarious experiences derived from Plutarch’s Lives to steer him away from vanity. “Warn him about his mistakes before he falls into them”; when, inevitably, he makes one, “do not reproach him” (“you would only inflame his amour-propre and make it rebel”) but “gently efface his humiliation with good words” (IV.257). Then, you will have strengthened his trust in you. [1]
From Robinson Crusoe to Plutarch’s Lives: Emile lives one book at a time. This leaves much more time for action. In adolescence, the time to begin his education for civil-social life, you should “busy your pupil with all the good actions within his reach,” assisting indigents “not only with his purse but with his care,” with his time and energy more than his money (IV.250). If he would speak in public, let him represent them, not himself. “In the fire of adolescence the vivifying spirits, retained and distilled in his blood, bring to his young heart a warmth which shines forth in his glance, which is sensed in his speech, which is visible in his actions” (IV.252). In so serving those who cannot help themselves and (as pertinently) cannot help him, “there is little useful knowledge which cannot be cultivated in a young man’s mind,” and this will be a utilitarianism of compassion not of selfishness. (IV.252). It will also be service without servility; instead of groveling before his social superiors in the hope of winning their favor, he will assist those who can never repay him.
He will become less ‘selfish’ without compromising his own sense of ‘self,’ his own amour de soi. “Those who never deal with anything other than their own affairs are to passionate to judge things soundly”; ‘in everything that hampers their slightest advantage, they immediately see the overturning of the whole universe” (IV.252). They become revolutionaries of egoism. “Let us always keep him at a distance from himself” (IV.252). He will still put self-interest first, but “the greatest happiness of all” will be his “first interest after his private interest” (IV.253). He will begin to think of these as closely related, “for not only does he get an inner enjoyment from them, but also, in making him beneficent for the profit of others, I work for his own instruction” (IV.253).
Nor will this compassion become sentimental. “To prevent pity from degenerating into weakness, it must… be generalized and extended to the whole of mankind” in the sense that “one yields to it only insofar as it accords with justice, because of all the virtues justice is the one that contributes most to the common good of men” (IV.253). One may pity one’s enemy but not indulge his wickedness; the standard of “mankind,” of “the common good of men” applies to the good and the bad alike, and is indeed the only way to distinguish between them (IV.253) “We must pity for our species still more than for our neighbor,” Rousseau replies Jesus, “and pity for the wicked is a very great cruelty to men” (IV.253).
As for Emile, he knows not “what philosophy is” and has not “even heard of God” (IV.254). In managing this ignorance in his pupil, Rousseau has “trust[ed] only in observation of children and of the men they become, “found[ing] myself not on what I have imagined but on what I have seen” (IV.254). Emile has not yet been ready for philosophy and religion, and as always, “the progress natural to the mind is accelerated but not upset” by the untraditional education he has been given (IV.254). For a soul to rise to “abstract notions of philosophy and purely intellectual ideas” it must “make a gradual and slow climb from object to object” (IV.254). Emile finally has been prepared to take that step, to begin to think about God. To show how this might be done, Rousseau introduces his reader to the Savoyard Vicar.
Note
- Here Rousseau takes a point from François de Fénelon’s novel, the Telemachus, which will be mentioned explicitly later on, in connection with the education of Emile’s future wife, Sophie, and of Emile himself. In chapter X, Ulysses’ son, Telemachus, searching for his father with the aid of Mentor (really the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, who has taken on the shape of an elderly man), criticizes the conduct of King Idomeneus of Salente, a man of great merit who has nonetheless made serious mistakes. Mentor corrects the young man, who is beginning to show the asperity of youth in judging elders. He remarks the limits of any ruler’s knowledge and the defects inherent in every man, ruler or not. Even your own father, the greatest of all Greek kings, would have made innumerable errors had he not been guided by (ahem) Minerva. “Learn, O Telemachus, not to expect from the greatest of men more than is compatible with human capacity.” (Fénelon: Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. Patrick Riley translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. X: 157-160). It is a very good lesson to impress upon any young men, especially a young man who will become a king.
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