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Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment. Denise Schaeffer
Читать онлайн.Название Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780271064451
Автор произведения Denise Schaeffer
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
However, as Rousseau continues his discussion of human wisdom and its relation to happiness, he leaves behind the image of an insect caught it its own web and begins to emphasize the reflective dimension of human happiness. While he advises man to “remain in the place which nature assigns to you in the chain of being” (83; 4:308), he also notes that the wise man “knows how to stay in his place” (84; 4:310, emphasis added). Unlike the insect, who remains in place by instinct or impotence, or natural man, who lacks the foresight and experience to understand the consequences of leaving it, the wise man understands his distinctive place in the chain of being and knows how to maintain it. Rousseau contrasts this wisdom not only with the simplicity of other animals but with that of the human child, who “does not know his place [and] would not be able to keep to it” (84; 4:310). Unlike the child, whose equilibrium and thus happiness must be maintained by an external force (in this case, the tutor), the wise man must possess, in addition to an equilibrium of desires and faculties, some faculty that allows him to reflect on and maintain that very equilibrium. This is likely to involve the “superfluous” faculties that, Rousseau laments, tend to serve as instruments of unhappiness rather than happiness (81; 4:305). Rousseau’s implicit question seems to be not simply whether this superfluity can be severely curtailed or even avoided altogether but whether it can be harnessed to serve the cause of happiness rather than unhappiness.
Rousseau’s distinction between childish happiness and adult happiness implies that only children (specifically, children whose equilibrium has been maintained for them) can be perfectly happy. But this happiness is fleeting. Rousseau insists that childhood gaiety and innocence be preserved and cherished rather than sacrificed to an uncertain future, but at the same time he has long-term aspirations for his pupil’s happiness. “I shall not seek a distant happiness for him at the expense of the present. I want him to be happy not once but always, if it is possible” (326–27; 4:653). Insofar as growing up means learning to maintain your own equilibrium—learning how to stay in your place—it means relinquishing a perfect (but externally maintained) equilibrium for a less perfect but more independently maintained equilibrium. This raises the question of how a child held to one standard becomes an adult held to a very different standard. How does one learn to stay in one’s place if one has always been made to stay in one’s place? Rousseau underscores the importance of this transition at the beginning of book III, when he begins to characterize his subject not simply as “the child” but as “the child whom one wants to make wise” (166; 4:428).
The implied distinction between being happy and knowing what happiness is runs parallel to the distinction between staying in place and knowing how to stay in place. Both are related to the central issue of book II: how to combine integrity and motion, or movement and staying in place. Rousseau’s prescribed education for the preadolescent is designed at once to preserve childhood innocence and to bring the child to “the maturity of childhood” (162; 4:423). One must therefore grow and learn—both in order to achieve the maturity of childhood and, more fundamentally, because perfectibility is part of human nature. The challenge is to do so while remaining unified and whole. Perfect equilibrium is a static condition, but it is in the nature of human beings to move. In light of this fundamental tension, Rousseau’s choice of illustration for book II—Chiron training the young Achilles to run—takes on added significance. At stake is not only the matter of teaching a child to move with swiftness and agility but also the underlying issue of how one might encourage a child to run or, more broadly, to move—that is to grow, learn, and change—while keeping him in his place by forestalling the development of all his superfluous faculties. The two objectives are intimately related inasmuch as Rousseau claims that the key to forestalling the development of superfluous faculties involves preserving the child as a purely physical being. Thus running is an appropriate activity for the child, whereas reading, which stimulates the imagination, is not. But there is more to Rousseau’s discussion of learning to run; he raises the broader question of how, in light of his insistence on a negative education, one might properly learn anything at all.
Learning to Run
It is far from immediately clear why Rousseau focuses any attention at all on the issue of teaching a child to run, as opposed to simply letting the child run free, since he ridicules the common practice of teaching children to walk. “Is there anything more foolish than the effort made to teach them to walk, as if anyone were ever seen who, due to his nurse’s negligence, did not when grown know how to walk?” We tend to teach children what they would better learn by themselves, he complains, and forget to teach them “what we alone can teach them” (78; 4:300). Rousseau argues that the child ought to be allowed complete freedom of movement and learn to accept the consequences of that freedom. A child should be taken daily to an open field. “There let him run and risk about; let him fall a hundred times a day. So much the better. That way he will learn how to get up sooner” (78; 4:301). Ideally, children teach themselves to run, it would seem, just as they teach themselves to walk. Yet the illustration that introduces book II is not of a child spontaneously running free but of Achilles being trained by Chiron. What is the true lesson of this stage of Rousseau’s educational project?
Rousseau’s discussion of children learning to run involves more than honing physical skills; it also introduces questions of motivation and direction. His main anecdote about teaching a young man to run (which includes the only reference to Chiron in the text) concerns an indolent boy who lacks not only the strength and skill to run but also the motivation. For the educator facing the task of motivating the boy, Rousseau remarks, “the skill of Chiron himself would have hardly sufficed.” He adds, “The difficulty was all the greater since I wanted to prescribe to him absolutely nothing. I had banished from among my rights exhortations, promises, threats, emulation, the desire to be conspicuous. How could I give him the desire to run without saying anything to him?” (141; 4:393).
This passage distills a well-recognized difficulty that pervades Rousseau’s entire corpus: the tension between will formation, on the one hand, and agency and authenticity, on the other. Rousseau’s various legislator figures condition the will of their subjects to love the objects that will best support their freedom—yet this conditioning calls into question the value or character of that freedom. Of course, Emile is a child at this point in Rousseau’s narrative, and careful control of his environment and experiences is arguably justified by his young age. The question of whether his freedom is ultimately genuine must be reserved for later. But the passage raises a related question, having to do with integrity as well as freedom. Before we come to the question of whether Emile is free, we must address the question of whether he is himself—or a self at all. “Doubtless he ought to do only what he wants; but he ought to want only what you want him to do. He ought not to make a step without your having foreseen it” (120; 4:363). How are we to reconcile Rousseau’s emphasis on active formation of the will with his admonition to allow the child’s character to reveal itself, unfettered? Rousseau’s confidence that the child who experiences no direct opposition to his desires will show himself “fearlessly” and “precisely as he is” (120; 4:363) belies the catch-22 that he has introduced. Indeed, he claims that precisely because the child will reveal himself entirely unselfconsciously, the educator will be in a position to study him at leisure—with the same careful