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to run at all, he had to learn to see it as good for something. Rousseau yokes together the issues of learning to run and learning to see because his concern is how one moves from a rudimentary to a more complex form of judgment.

      Learning to See

      Rousseau presents seeing as both utterly simple and highly complex. It is simple insofar as it is natural and physical; it is complex insofar as appearances can be deceiving. Every child has the capacity to see well as long as misguided parents and educators do not hamper this ability by taking away opportunities to hone and exercise it. In this sense, seeing is spontaneous, and a negative education is all that is necessary to preserve it. At the same time, however, “much time is needed to learn how to see” (143; 4:396). As in the case of running, the training Rousseau prescribes for learning to see links seeing to both the skill of estimating distances at a glance and the capacity for philosophy and independent reasoning. “Our first masters of philosophy are our feet, our hands, our eyes.” To seek knowledge without using the senses is “to teach us to use the reason of others. It is to teach us to believe much and never to know anything” (125; 4:370). At the same time, the simple acquisition of sense data is by itself insufficient. “To exercise the senses is not only to make use of them, it is to learn to judge well with them” (132; 4:380). The issue thus becomes how to understand the faculty of judgment as grounded in accurate and autonomous sense perception but not reducible to it.⁷ In insisting on this irreducibility, Rousseau challenges Helvétius, whose influential De l’esprit promoted a sensationalist view of judgment that grounded judgment in nothing other than sensation: “Juger n’est jamais que sentir.” Helvétius argued that the mind passively receives impressions from external objects and experiences a sensation in response. The mind is able to remember the sensation and the object(s) to which it is attached, and as a result can piece together judgments about the world. There is no judging faculty, according to Helvétius, apart from sensation and memory. Rousseau, in contrast, held this view to be too passive. Even as he insisted on the importance of sensation in human cognition and judgment, he nevertheless argued for an understanding of judgment as active rather than passive.⁸ “Our sensations are purely passive,” he says in Emile, “while all our perceptions or ideas are born out of an active principle which judges” (107; 4:344).

      While Rousseau’s more direct response to Helvétius is found in the context of the Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith in book IV, in book II his discussion of the senses—especially that of sight—addresses not only the distinction between the passive and active senses of judging but also their interdependence. Thus the relationship between Rousseau’s two senses of learning to see bears on the question of his understanding of good judgment and how it is formed. Since he also links seeing with philosophizing (just as Aristotle identifies sight as the sense most closely linked with the desire to know), an analysis of the way in which Rousseau teaches his pupil(s) to see also sheds light on what he thinks it means to make a human being wise. “Man learns to see with the eyes of the mind as well as with the eyes of the body.”⁹

      The explicit pedagogical advice of book II elaborates the connection between both senses of seeing well. Rousseau focuses on the first, physical sense when recommending exercises (such as night games) to sharpen the child’s sight (and other senses). At first, Rousseau suggests that learning to see well is simply a matter of training the naked eye to see independently. The goal is to prevent the child from adding any extraneous interpretation to what his senses reveal to him. To that end, parents should avoid any reaction to the child’s experiences, so as not to influence his perception of them, and prohibit the use of external aids such as binoculars. Clarity in sense perception, unadulterated by anything that the mind might add, is the goal. Similarly, when teaching a child to draw, one must ensure that the child has “no other master than nature and no other model than objects. I want him to have before his eyes the original itself and not the paper representing it, to sketch a house from a house, a tree from a tree, a man from a man, so that he gets accustomed to observing bodies and their appearances well and not to taking false and conventional imitations for true imitations” (144; 4:397).

      However, Rousseau’s insistence on the purely negative quality of such seeing—in the sense of seeing without interference—soon falters, when he acknowledges the inaccuracy of the senses, which may lead even the most rudimentary judgments astray. He takes a two-pronged approach to this problem. First, one must aim to be as accurate as possible; each sense must be fine-tuned to its peak performance. Even so, it is not possible to rely on the accuracy of each sense by itself. The only recourse, if one wants to remain on the level of the senses, is to draw on the assistance of another sense—a system of checks and balances among the five senses. “Instead of simplifying the sensation, double it, always verify it by another. Subject the visual organ to the tactile organ” (140; 4:92). This solution falters as well, however, and Rousseau ultimately moves from the purely physical to the intellectual:

      It remains for me to speak in the following books of the cultivation of a sort of sixth sense called common sense, less because it is common to all men than because it results from the well-regulated use of the other senses, and because it instructs us about the nature of things by the conjunction of all their appearances. This sixth sense has consequently no special organ. It resides only in the brain, and its sensations, purely internal, are called perceptions or ideas. It is by the number of these ideas that the extent of our knowledge is measured. It is their distinctness, their clarity which constitutes the accuracy of the mind. It is the art of comparing them among themselves that is called human reason. (157–58; 4:417)

      The “sixth sense” links a conception of human reason as independent of the senses with the senses themselves, functioning as a middle ground. Reason emerges as neither reducible to the senses (as it is for Helvétius) nor independent of them. If “the child whom one wants to make wise” must first learn how to see, this is why. Rousseau may insist that the child be preserved as a primarily physical being who interacts with the world around him on physical (not moral) terms, but this goal is not opposed to the goal of teaching the child to reason. It in fact lays the groundwork for the independent exercise of reason. A child whose senses have been properly developed can become an accurate judge within the context of the physical world around him. “Now we are well informed about the character of foreign bodies in relation to our own, about their weight, shape, color, solidity, size, distance, temperature, rest, and motion” (150; 4:407). In other words, the child, understood as a strictly physical being, has become a good judge of physical reality insofar as it relates to his immediate surroundings; “he judges, he foresees, in everything immediately related to him” (119; 4:361). Having learned to run well and to see well, he has thereby learned to judge well within the limits appropriate to childhood.

      Learning to Learn

      Of course, the human child is not meant to remain forever a purely physical being, and arguably the goal of childhood education is preparation for adulthood. While, as I noted in chapter 1, Rousseau is critical of those who see children only as future men, he is also critical of the tender mother who thinks only of her child’s present happiness. “That is not enough,” Rousseau counters. “One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man” (42; 4:253). Thus, by Rousseau’s own admission, childhood education must prepare a child for adulthood, even as it aims toward the “maturity of childhood” rather than full maturity. To what degree does Rousseau succeed in meeting this challenge? The education he lays out in the first half of book II may suffice to teach a child how to move in a physical sense, but does it teach a child to move in the sense of learning, growing, changing?

      To address this question, we might consider Rousseau’s argument that adults must refrain from encouraging children to consider what lies beyond their immediate physical existence, putting off moral lessons until much later. The goal at this point, he insists, is to prevent vice from developing, rather than to encourage the development of virtue. Rousseau’s claim, however, is not simply that children are not far enough along the path of development to be genuinely virtuous, for such a claim could easily be countered with the argument that they should therefore be encouraged to “practice” virtuous behavior as they grow. Rousseau rejects the assumption that going through the motions of

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