Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment. Denise Schaeffer
and to see well. Rousseau’s treatment of each of these lessons unfolds in two registers. Learning to run entails learning to exist as a being whose nature cannot remain static but rather moves (since we are, after all, perfectible beings). Learning to see means developing not only visual acuity with regard to physical distances but also the ability to discern the nature of reality. By attending to both registers of Rousseau’s lessons on these points, we can better understand the broader significance of this educational stage of Emile.
On one level, then, Rousseau’s concerns center on physical education of the body and the senses in order to prevent the stimulation of imagination or any passions before their time. On another, he explores the nature of judgment, which is rooted in the “natural” perspective of a purely physical being but not reducible to it. The point of this second stage of Emile’s education is not simply to preserve the simplicity of his existence (and to establish the importance of such simplicity for human beings in general), but rather to establish the complexity of what it truly means for a being whose origins lie in a purely physical existence (in which Emile represents human beings as such) to learn to judge.1 In this chapter, I explore this complexity with regard to the relationship between the physical and the intellectual in Emile’s education and, more broadly, in Rousseau’s understanding of good judgment.
The Child as a Physical Being
Inasmuch as Rousseau continues to emphasize the importance of a negative education, book II in some ways simply extends the principles developed in book I to the growing child. The prepubescent Emile is primarily a physical being, and his lessons reflect this. On this issue Rousseau is critical of Locke, who maintains that one must reason with children. “The masterpiece of a good education is to make a reasonable man, and they claim they raise a child by reason! This is to begin with the end, to want to make the product the instrument. If children understood reason, they would not need to be raised” (89; 4:317). Attempting to use reason with children does not simply miss the mark; its impact turns out to be harmful rather than neutral. Reasoning with children involves the use of language that they are not equipped to comprehend. They may in fact learn to speak as they are spoken to, but this is only a façade, Rousseau insists. Their apparently sophisticated bons mots are at best empty chatter, and at worst pernicious indicators that they are well on their way to becoming miserable adults (civil men) who speak and live inauthentically.2
What language, then, is appropriate for the child learning to speak? The language of the body. At this stage the tutor couches all lessons in the language of the body and encourages Emile to interpret the world around him based on two bodily experiences that children have on a regular basis: hunger and illness. For example, Emile learns the utility of astronomy when he is lost in the middle of the forest at lunchtime, and he is inspired to run faster for the sake of a very specific prize: a cake. The tutor also mentions another child who was taught geometry “by being given the choice every day of waffles with equal perimeters done in all the geometric figures. The little glutton had exhausted the art of Archimedes in finding out in which there was the most to eat” (146; 4:401). If Locke’s motto can be said to be “lead them with reason,” Rousseau’s is surely “lead them with cakes,” for “a child would rather give [away] a hundred louis than a cake” (103; 4:338). Even complex human emotions can be explained to children in purely physical terms. What does a child see when looking at an angry person, for example? “He sees an inflamed face, glittering eyes, threatening gestures; he hears shouts—all signs that the body is out of kilter.” Thus one should tell the child calmly, “This poor man is sick; he is in a fit of fever” (96; 4:328).
Thus moral lessons must be postponed, Rousseau contends, because attempts to inculcate them at this age will inevitably result in unintended consequences due to the bodily character of the child’s perspective. At the same time, Rousseau suggests that the child must begin to move beyond this limited perspective. Book II opens with the announcement that we have entered into “the second period of life,” which refers to the period just beyond infancy through age twelve. However, this second stage is actually a first insofar as it is only now that, “strictly speaking [proprement], the life of the individual begins” (78; 4:301). This birth of individuality functions as a second beginning and prefigures the “second birth” at the beginning of book IV (that is, the beginning of the significance of the individual’s sex/gender). It is the first of these two rebirths.3
Just as it is only after infancy that, strictly speaking, the life of the individual begins, so too is it only at this point that the story of Emile truly begins. In other words, Emile is “reborn” for the reader as a concrete example rather than an abstraction; he is particularized. To be sure, the idea of Emile figures briefly in book I, when Rousseau first sets up his thought experiment, but the child does not yet come alive on the page. We are told that Emile is an orphan, and then in effect he disappears into a field of generalities. Rousseau’s subsequent remarks refer to “one’s child” or “all children.” Occasionally, he mentions his imaginary pupil in passing (with a pronoun), but Emile does not actually appear as a character. We are not invited to picture little Emile crawling about. Rather, “the child” functions as an abstraction in book I. Only in book II do the details of Emile’s particular experiences become significant. From this point forward, Rousseau illustrates his arguments with anecdotes depicting the tutor’s interaction with Emile. Emile appears by degrees, just as natural man in the Second Discourse vanishes by degrees. As Emile must learn gradually to see and judge the world around him, the reader must learn to see and judge Emile.
Once individuality becomes an issue, so does happiness—and not before. Rousseau waits until book II to explain the understanding of happiness that guides his entire endeavor, or at least serves as a point of departure. “A being endowed with senses whose faculties equaled his desires would be an absolutely happy being” (80; 4:304, emphasis added). This would seem to suggest that for Rousseau the natural man, in his simplicity and physical robustness, is the best judge, or sets the standard against which the human condition must be judged. “The closer to his natural condition man has stayed, the smaller is the difference between his faculty and his desires, and consequently the less removed he is from being happy” (81; 4:304). But it is precisely the perfect equilibrium of absolute happiness that makes it impossible to stay close to this natural condition, for natural man lacks the foresight and experience to understand and maintain his condition.4 Our perfectibility may be what moves us away, but our unselfconsciousness and ignorance are what make us susceptible to moving in directions that diminish our happiness and freedom.
This helps us to make sense of why Rousseau introduces his definition of the absolutely happy being with the remark that we cannot know what absolute happiness or unhappiness is (80; 4:303). Even as he states this unequivocally, Rousseau at the same time implies that it might be possible to experience absolute happiness. The absolutely happy being thus resembles the natural man of the Second Discourse insofar as he experiences perfect contentment but does not know enough to appreciate its fragility. Such a being is an absolutely happy being but does not know it. The underlying question is whether knowing that one is happy is an essential component of being happy.
To the degree that Emile exemplifies the happy equilibrium of desires and faculties, his equilibrium is maintained artificially by the tutor’s absolute control over him. He resembles natural man but has the added benefit of the tutor’s guiding hand to protect his innocence (whereas Rousseau introduces his portrait of natural man in the Second Discourse with the remark that he will consider what human beings would become if left to themselves). Emile does not know what happiness is, or even that he is happy (awareness of which requires comparison to other states, a lesson Rousseau saves for a later time). One should not mistake Emile’s lack of self-awareness for evidence that Rousseau’s model of human happiness (and, by extension, human freedom) excludes self-reflection. Rousseau gives us several indications, even at this early stage in Emile’s upbringing, that a perfect equilibrium maintained by external force(s) rather than by self-consciousness is not in fact his ultimate model.
Rousseau begins by distinguishing the happy child from the spoiled (gaté) child, clarifying that his point is not to fulfill every desire (which is a recipe not for equilibrium but for disequilibrium, since