Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment. Denise Schaeffer
most directly to the book’s thematic illustration raises an issue that has to do not simply with physical strength but also with integrity of character—that is, with remaining oneself.
New skills cannot be acquired authentically, according to Rousseau, unless the acquisition is driven by the pupil’s own desire for them. But the desire to acquire a new skill, once stimulated, is almost always linked to some form of desire for recognition. The lazy boy whom Rousseau teaches to run is motivated by the desire for the cakes that are the prize in a race. For Rousseau, the desire for cakes is natural, but the desire for recognition as the winner is born of unnatural amour-propre. In this particular anecdote, Rousseau downplays this potential hazard. He notes that the first few times he and his charge passed by the young boys racing one another to win a cake, “it did not register and produced nothing.” So Rousseau expands the event (which was, of course, prearranged) to include more contestants and draw more attention to the winner. “The one who won [the prize] was praised and given a celebration; it was all done with ceremony.” Predictably, his young charge gets caught up in the excitement, as passersby clap and cheer for the runners. “These were for him the Olympic games.” Finally, it enters the boy’s head that “running well could be good for something” (141–42; 4:394).
While it is clear that the child’s interest has been stimulated by the spectacle and ceremony and not simply by the cakes, Rousseau moves on as though the potential for triggering amour-propre had never arisen. Indeed, he suggests that winning makes the boy generous, and he happily shares his cake with the others. In later episodes (beginning in book III), however, Rousseau further develops his reflections on a difficulty that is raised here only indirectly. These arise when the newly developed desire is the desire to learn new things—a desire that an educator must stoke if the child is to grow and mature but that threatens to disturb the fragile equilibrium between desires and faculties that is the hallmark of self-sufficiency, according to Rousseau. Whereas teaching a child to run will augment his strength, thus enhancing his independence, stimulating his desire for knowledge will expand his needs insofar as it makes him want something he lacks. The desire to learn takes one outside oneself, and therein lies the danger, for it is because he lives outside himself that civil man is so miserable.
In addition to creating a potential disequilibrium between desires and faculties, the desire to learn can easily turn into the desire to be learned. This desire not only stimulates vanity but leads to the desire to appear learned rather than to be learned. One therefore risks inflaming amour-propre in an effort to stimulate intellectual curiosity. For Emile, this problem is addressed through a contrived encounter with a magician who publicly humiliates Emile when he tries to show off some newly acquired knowledge. After watching the magician make a toy duck move at will, Emile is inspired to figure out the trick, and thus to discover the underlying scientific principles (that is, to learn the cause of the magician’s effects). Once he learns how magnets make the duck move, he cannot wait to reveal his knowledge to the magician, and to the audience; “he would want the whole of humankind to be witness to his glory” (173; 4:438). Emile declares in front of the crowd that the trick is easy, and shows off his ability to manipulate the duck with a magnet hidden in a piece of bread. The magician responds graciously and invites Emile and his tutor back the next day to perform in front of an even larger crowd. This time, however, the duck flees. The crowd jeers; Emile complains and challenges the magician to attract the duck. The magician pulls the iron out of the bread, revealing Emile’s attempted deceit, and goes on to manipulate the duck with another piece of bread, his gloved finger, even his voice. Emile and the tutor sneak away, humiliated.
The next day, the magician comes to their door to confront them about their conduct. He chastises them for seeking honor “at the expense of an honest man’s subsistence” (174; 4:439). He explains that he did not show them his master strokes straightaway, for he keeps them in reserve rather than showing off giddily all that he knows. He then reveals his secret device for manipulating the duck: a lodestone. He begs them not to abuse this knowledge and to exercise restraint in the future. Specifically, he reprimands the tutor for failing to guide Emile and protect him from his humiliating mistake. The following day they return to the fair and do not breathe a word of what they know.5 Emile’s incipient amour-propre has been squelched, but his perspective has also been broadened.
A child does not simply grow into his body at this age; he grows into his individual identity. Inasmuch as this is when “the life of the individual begins,” it is also at this stage that the child “gains consciousness of himself. . . . He becomes truly one, the same, and consequently already capable of happiness or unhappiness. It is important, therefore, to begin to consider him as a moral being” (78; 4:301, emphasis added). Gaining consciousness of oneself is the first step toward becoming self-conscious in the sense of living in the opinion of others; the Second Discourse presents this as a very slippery slope. In Emile Rousseau considers whether we can grow and learn while staying “truly one, the same.” To put it another way, one must learn to move while staying in place. Rousseau’s exploration of the matter of learning to run, which seems philosophically inconsequential, introduces the larger issue of learning, growing, and changing while remaining within various boundaries: the boundary of childhood simplicity, the boundary of the self, and, most broadly, the boundaries that nature imposes on human beings.
Rousseau argues explicitly in book II that the education from postinfancy to preadolescence must concern itself primarily with the child’s physical development, so that a child’s strength can “catch up” to his desires before his desires extend beyond what a self-sufficient individual can satisfy. The child is born too weak to satisfy even his limited needs for food and physical comfort. Limiting his needs and desires to these things while he grows and matures physically allows the child to achieve the perfect equilibrium between faculties and desires that makes human beings happy and free in the original state of nature. Beyond this, however, there is a second objective built into Rousseau’s concern with training the muscles and physical senses. To “learn to think,” it is necessary to hone “the instruments of our intelligence,” which are “our limbs, our senses, our organs” (125; 4:370). Thus the child concentrates on physical education—not to avoid thinking but precisely in order to learn to think. “Let him be a man in his vigor, and soon he will be one in his reason” (118; 4:359). How are these goals connected for Rousseau? The link between physical strength and reason is that both are essential to an individual’s independence and self-sufficiency. Precisely by learning to fend for oneself physically, one learns to think independently. “Since [Emile] is constantly in motion, he is forced to observe many things, to know many effects. . . . Thus his body and his mind are exercised together. Acting always in accordance with his own thought and not someone else’s, he continually unites two operations: the more he makes himself strong and robust, the more he becomes sensible and judicious” (119; 4:361). The scope of a child’s exercise of judgment is strictly delimited, pertaining only to everything immediately (that is, physically) related to him. Rousseau depicts children learning to judge heights, lengths, depths, and distances with a view to acquiring cherries, cakes, and other edible treats.6 In other words, they learn to judge the physical world around them as a means to fulfilling a physical desire. Even the single positive lesson Rousseau allows during this stage—a lesson about respecting private property—is organized around the child’s desire to eat some delicious melons. Education at this stage involves manipulating the child’s desire for sweets in order to stimulate him to learn how to fulfill that need himself—by judging the shortest path to winning the cake, for example, or judging a tree’s height accurately in order to pick the cherries. Within a small radius, equilibrium between desires and faculties is thus achieved.
Many of these judgments involve correctly calculating distances with the naked eye. With practice, the child learns to rely on himself rather than on others or even on instruments, and develops “a glance almost as sure as a surveyor’s chain” (143; 4:396). In characterizing the five senses as the instruments of human intelligence, Rousseau emphasizes sight in particular as the key to demonstrating how the senses can serve as the foundation of judgment. “Sight is, of all the respects, the one from which the mind’s judgments can least be separated” (143; 4:396). Rousseau introduces this issue in the anecdote about the lazy boy who learned to run, in which the boy’s ability to see was educated in two senses: