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Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment. Denise Schaeffer
Читать онлайн.Название Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment
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isbn 9780271064451
Автор произведения Denise Schaeffer
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
Preserving nature requires more than a natural bond between mother and child, because it requires more than instinct. It requires an unnatural knowledge of nature. Foresight, which is characterized as inimical to natural human independence and happiness in the earliest stages (of infancy, or of the history of the human species), is at the same time necessary to the achievement of that independence and happiness, even in the context of the “natural” family unit. Rousseau needs to replace the nuclear family with an “expert,” not because he can’t find a mother willing to nurse her baby but because however “good” such a mother might be, there is no guarantee that she knows how to think. Rousseau needs something beyond the natural attachment of parents for children, even as he insists that only the natural attachment of parents for children will generate the level of commitment necessary to the intensive task of “building the fence.” But knowledge of where to build the fence—the “circumference” or parameters of nature—is not natural. It is no wonder, then, that Rousseau presents these two steps as separable, allowing that someone other than the mother may draw the circumference of the fence that she must build. But these two apparently separable steps are not in fact sequential or separable, because each presupposes the other. The preservation of nature presupposes knowledge of its boundaries, or “the circumference,” just as one must see natural man “fully formed” in order to preserve his original form. And yet he must be preserved in order to achieve that form.
What Rousseau initially presents as separate—unselfconscious affection on the one hand, and cultivated expertise on the other—he spends the rest of Emile trying to put together. That this is his goal is already reflected in his identification of “a mother who knows how to think” as his ideal reader, a figure who is not presupposed but rather (ideally, by design) brought about by reading Emile. Her judiciousness, in other words, only emerges over the course of the five books of Emile.
The Ambiguous Origins of a Good Education
It turns out, then, that a mother is both necessary and insufficient in order to carry out Rousseau’s project. Rousseau first hints at this insufficiency when he insists that fathers as well as mothers must be wholly invested in raising their children. (The father is the first candidate for the “someone else” who is to determine the circumference—soon to be replaced by the tutor.) With this move, Rousseau rather quickly begins introducing consideration upon consideration that complicate his own simple formulas and prescriptions. To be sure, these complications arise initially from the fact of the already corrupt state of civil society. Fathers claim that they are too busy to raise their own children, and hire governors. The “natural” answer to the needs of nature is no longer available. It is in response to this situation, it seems, that Rousseau launches into a discussion of the difficulties of finding a good governor. But the difficulties he identifies do not simply stem from the fact that the governor is someone other than the father; they would apply equally to any father. The major difficulty is that in order to know how to provide a good education, one must oneself be the product of a good education. Therefore, identifying the original source of a good education is nearly impossible.
The more one thinks about it, the more one perceives new difficulties. It would be necessary that the governor had been raised for his pupil, that the pupil’s domestics had been raised for their master, that all those who have contact with him had received the impressions that they ought to communicate to him. It would be necessary to go from education to education back to I know not where. How is it possible for a child to be well raised by one who was not well raised himself? (50; 4:263)
Each good educator presupposes a previous good educator, going back to “I know not where.” This difficulty is the difficulty of all origins. It cannot be avoided by preserving the family structure. A simply “natural” education was never available, because the problem is built into nature itself, as a careful analysis of Rousseau’s requirements of natural mothers (and now fathers) has shown.
The requisite knowledge that grounds a legitimate education, Rousseau suggests, can be acquired only in practice, by blocking out all social influences and watching the form that an individual takes over a lifetime. Although it would be preferable if the governor had already educated someone, Rousseau adds that this would be “too much to wish for,” because “the same man can give only one education.” This raises a question of legitimacy: “If two were required in order to succeed, by what right would one undertake the first?” (51; 4:265). If one is required to have educated in order to be entitled to educate, and to be educated in order to be receptive to education, then how can one ever begin? This crisis reverberates throughout Rousseau’s major works. In the Social Contract, the formation of a people is a task that seems to require a people already formed. “Just as the architect, before putting up a big building, observes and tests the ground to see whether it can bear the weight, so the wise founder does not start by drafting laws that are good in themselves, but first examines whether the people for whom he destines them is suited to bear them” (SC, 157; 3:384–85). Rousseau goes on to explain that nations, like men, must reach maturity before they are ready to be made subject to law (158; 3:386). This puts the lawgiver in a difficult position, since this necessary “maturity” is achieved primarily by living under good laws and institutions. “For a newly formed people to understand wise principles of politics and to follow the basic rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit which must be the product of social institutions would have to preside over the setting up of those institutions; men would have to have already become before the advent of the law that which they become as a result of law” (156; 3:383).
It is not surprising, then, that when Rousseau fantasizes about where he would like to have been born, had he not had the good fortune of being born in Geneva, he chooses a “long-standing republic” whose origins are “lost in the darkness of time” (SD, 81; 3:113). Such a wish simply defers the problem of origins.
A parallel conundrum surfaces in the opening dialogue of Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, as “Rousseau” first begins to converse with “a Frenchman.” In response to the Frenchman’s demand that he “explain” himself, “Rousseau” laments, “I’ll explain what I mean, but it will be either the most useless or most superfluous of efforts, since everything I will say to you can be understood only by those to whom there is no need to say it.”9 Rousseau suggests that although he wishes to instruct his readers, the only readers who will learn from him are the ones who already know, at least on some level, what he is trying to teach them.
How does a good lawmaker or educator come to be? How does a well-governed populace or individual come to be? How does a good reader come to be? These are all different versions of the same problem for Rousseau, who seems tempted by the resolution of divine intervention. The legislator must have divine qualities in order to effect the necessary coincidence of good laws and a good people, as each presupposes the other (echoing the Republic’s miraculous coincidence of philosophy and political power in the philosopher-king). The education of Emile—the education of nature—is the “first,” or original, education that makes others possible, grounding them not only in the experience of the author in writing the book but also in that of the reader in reading the book. Emile’s education is analogous to the Republic’s city-in-speech in allowing the pursuit of a philosophical question that has concrete political consequences without actually setting into motion any of those political consequences. As an education “in speech,” or a first education, Emile is designed to make a certain experience available to the reader while avoiding the degeneration that Rousseau believes tends to result from the expansion of human experience.
It is for this reason that Rousseau contrives to proceed independently of any preexisting context for his thought experiment. He declares Emile an orphan. Moreover, without reflecting on the kind of education that a suitable tutor would need to have had in order to carry out a “natural” education, he takes for