LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

does the term “judgment” mean in this context? Unlike Kant, Rousseau does not provide a formal account of judgment, although he refers to it frequently, especially in Emile. What he does say about judgment indicates that in his understanding judgment must be distinguished from formal reasoning, which seeks to understand particulars in light of valid universals. For Kant, the question of the relationship of judgment to purely logical reasoning results in a distinction between “determinate judgment,” which involves the correct application of general rules, and “reflective judgment,” which proceeds in the absence of such rules. Kantian reflective judgment operates specifically in the realm of aesthetics and taste. Hannah Arendt famously extends reflective judgment to the realm of politics. It is precisely because the particulars of political life are not fully subsumable under universal rules—which is what most fundamentally distinguishes political science from the natural sciences—that politics is both possible and necessary, and those particulars are not subsumable precisely because human beings are free.²¹ The attempt to turn politics into an exact science or expertise is, from Arendt’s perspective, a threat to human freedom, even if the attempt is motivated by a concern to foster freedom. In other words, the capacity for reflective judgment is both a product and a condition of our freedom. And yet this absence of determinative universal rules does not mean that we devolve to the realm of purely subjective opinion. The concept of judgment, as murky as it may be, is a marker for this necessary in-betweenness. As Linda Zerilli puts it in her influential analysis of Arendt:

      A freedom-centered practice of judgment, then, cannot be modeled on the rule-following that characterizes what Kant calls determinate judgment. To obtain critical purchase on our social arrangements and the ungrounded form of life, but without yielding to the temptation of the external standpoint, we need to develop a practice of judgment that is not rule-governed. Judging without the mediation of a concept is a quotidian skill we do well to learn and practice. It always carries the risk that we will fall back on known concepts or rules for making sense of political reality out of our own sense of frustration or inadequacy. And yet if we want to come to terms with new objects and events, including those that have no place within our system of reference save as curious anomalies to the rule that merely preserve the rule, we need to develop the faculty of judgment.²²

      In opposite ways, both the detachment of the universal rule (and of those who seek to apply it to politics) and the partisanship of the demagogue pose a threat to judgment. Rousseau was intensely concerned with this risk (in both forms) and sought to address it rather than to circumvent it. He was also acutely aware of how difficult it is to introduce the new, or that which finds no immediate place within existing frames of reference. “‘Propose what can be done,’ they never stop repeating to me; it is as if I am told, ‘Propose what is done’” (E, 34; 4:242–43). He sought to change how people see, in order to disabuse them of the prejudiced conceptions of nature, freedom, and happiness that produce widespread inequality and misery. Such reform would never be achieved by rational argument alone, he believed, but required a reorientation of human sentiments, specifically by means of an appeal to the imagination. Emile is, in part, such an appeal. But it does not only appeal to the imagination; it also appeals to judgment. “In expounding freely my sentiment, I so little expect that it be taken as authoritative that I always join it to my reasons, so that they may be weighed and I be judged” (34; 4:242).

      Rousseau’s engagement with the question of judgment is not primarily a theoretical engagement, but rather an intervention. That Rousseau does not provide a formal account of judgment should not dissuade us from exploring his understanding of it. As Leslie Paul Thiele has observed, it is questionable whether we can “gain theoretical access to the essence of this mysterious faculty.”²³ Charles Larmore similarly argues that an understanding of judgment “lies beyond the limits of theory” and requires examples “such as those we find presented by the literary imagination.”²⁴ The effort to capture the essence of a judging stance that is simultaneously immersed in the experience of the particular to be judged, yet capable of some degree of detachment that makes critical reflection (and the very distinction between good versus poor judgment) possible, often proceeds metaphorically precisely because of this indeterminate character. Beiner, for example, drawing on Arendt, invokes the notion of spectatorship (understood as active and critical engagement, as opposed to passive watching) to capture precisely this in-between state. While one might think of spectators as governed by pathos rather than by praxis, or as mere “‘patients’ absorbing stimuli rather than ‘agents’ exercising active discrimination and intelligent reflection,” the spectator in Beiner’s sense interprets and judges, even as she is immersed in the experience of absorbing the spectacle.²⁵ I propose that this is the stance that Rousseau evokes when describing a mature individual populace or capable of exercising judgment with regard to all authoritative claims and dominant discourses and images—even as he argues that certain “chimeras” are necessary to the health and growth of that capacity for judgment.

      The figure of Emile is itself such a chimera, created for Rousseau’s reading audience, who are meant to be deliberately seduced by his example²⁶ but also invited—frequently and explicitly—to judge that example, not simply to affirm it unreflectively. The model of good judgment that is developed throughout Emile is thus rooted in Emile’s example but also transcends that example in important respects. The education of Emile is not identical to the education of Emile, though at times it runs parallel to it.²⁷ Emile is educated to judge the world around him in increasingly complex ways, applying first a standard of utility, then of beauty, then of the good. The reader’s capacity for judgment is being similarly honed, though on a higher plane. The reader, whom Rousseau addresses directly throughout Emile, is as much a part of Rousseau’s pedagogical efforts as Emile is—perhaps even more so. Part of the reader’s education involves being inspired by Emile’s example, but part of it, too, is achieving some critical distance from that example; Emile’s deficiencies thus serve an important function in the reader’s education. That said, I would also submit that the internal education of Emile—Emile’s education—is, at least in its aspirations, more oriented toward a genuinely independent faculty of judgment than is often recognized, even if those aspirations are imperfectly realized. And the unfolding of Emile’s education forms but one part of the reader’s education, which is also primarily an education in judgment—including the ability to judge Emile. Rousseau’s ideal reader of Emile, initially characterized as a mother who knows how to think (E, 33; 4:241), is ultimately referred to in book V as a mother who is judicious (364; 4:701). Rousseau criticizes his readers for being too prejudiced to judge his pupil or his project soundly, yet he continually engages their judgment in different ways. By attending to how his engagement with the reader develops and changes over the course of Emile, we learn something about how he thinks judgment might be reformed. Rousseau, who complained that his readers did not understand him, does his part to educate them to do so.²⁸

      I am not the first to draw attention to the importance of this dimension of Rousseau’s work. What is the character of the education he imparts to his reader? In many readings of Rousseau’s rhetorical strategy, a parallel is drawn between the tutor’s cultivation of necessary prejudices in Emile and Rousseau’s cultivation of necessary prejudices in the reader. One such salutary prejudice would be an idealized view of the goodness of nature, which allows the reader, like Emile, to be “shielded” from “the dangers that even measured progress and a limited social life entail.” While Emile may offer a more complex view of nature than the idealization we find in the first part of the Second Discourse, “downplaying or concealing this view is part of Rousseau’s rhetorical strategy,” employed for the political purpose of preserving a salutary prejudice in favor of the goodness of nature.²⁹ The primary goal of Rousseau’s political/philosophical project is thus understood to be the production of certain beneficial psychological or social dynamics at the expense of revealing the truth about them. For example, we might understand Rousseau’s goal as the cultivation of a salutary but unreflective love of virtue by means of identification with Emile’s example.³⁰ On this view, Rousseau manipulates the reader (for his or her own good), just as the tutor manipulates Emile.

      My analysis seeks to extend this insight by subjecting

Скачать книгу