Abstract
When in the Emile Rousseau declares that his goal is “to form the man of nature” he makes clear that by this he does not have in mind some naïve return to “the depths of the woods.” Instead, his text offers a nuanced vision of this task of formation, which rests on a unique model of the relation between nature and normativity. After examining this model, I proceed to a reconsideration of Rousseau’s well-known diatribes against society for its role in fashioning the distorted moral sensibilities of his contemporaries. Here I focus in particular on his perceptive insight into what accounts for the terrible success of society’s educational method, namely, the way it targets the full gamut of our intellectual, affective and imaginative capacities. I then show how Rousseau seeks to offer a sentimental education to rival this in which Emile is given bodily practice at seeing, feeling and responding to a very different set of impressions. Finally, I explore how Rousseau’s constant emphasis on the difficulties involved in managing such a program bring to the fore his view of the cultivation of moral sensibility as a complex art.
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Notes
- 1.
Kant quoted in Dent (2005, v).
- 2.
For example, the language of error and illusion can be seen in Rousseau’s descriptions of them as having imaginations ‘full of countless vain projects, troubled by countless whims’, as desiring ‘chimeral goods’ and as having minds filled with ‘countless ridiculous prejudices’ (Rousseau 2010, 409).
- 3.
Rousseau himself speaks in similar terms, for example in the Emile when describing the temptations with which Emile might be faced, he writes that in considering his rank he will be tempted to “say to himself, “I am wise, and men are mad.” In pitying them, he will despise them; in congratulating himself, he will esteem himself more, and in feeling himself to be happier than them, he will believe himself worthier to be so. This is the error most to be feared, because it is the most difficult to destroy” (Ibid., 400, my emphasis).
- 4.
Ibid., 401.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Rorty (1998, 238).
- 7.
Ibid., 237.
- 8.
Rousseau quoted in Vila (1998, 184).
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Rousseau (2010, 372, 373, 383, 389).
- 11.
Lloyd (1983, 321).
- 12.
The term “perceptual lucidity” comes from O’Neal (1985, 56).
- 13.
As Voltaire summed up this response in a rather nasty letter: “The desire to walk on all fours seizes one when one reads your work. However, as I lost that habit more than sixty years ago, I unfortunately sense the impossibility of going back to it, and I abandon that natural gait to those who are worthier of it than you and I” (Voltaire quoted in Johnston 1999, 30).
- 14.
Dent (2005, 41). For example, Kant, for one, recognized this of Rousseau, as Cassier explains: “Kant judges that Rousseau’s purpose did not involve inviting man to go back to the state of nature but rather to look back to it in order to become aware of the errors and weaknesses of conventional society” (Cassier quoted in Marks (2005, 114).
- 15.
In contrast then to the way Locke or Hobbes appeal to nature as a negative standard, it seems evident that Rousseau wants to invoke it positively as a normative guide of some sort for the sake of evaluating and improving current arrangements (Marks 2005, 17). As Dent puts it, he wants to use “the criterion of ‘naturalness’ as a test and measure of the satisfactoriness or otherwise of various particular social attitudes, relations, institutions” (Dent 1988, 16). Marks too offers “a Rousseau for whom nature remains a guide and limit for human beings in their pursuit of the best way of life” (Marks 2005, 118).
- 16.
Rorty (1998, 239).
- 17.
Scott (2006, 246).
- 18.
Cooper (1999, 48–50).
- 19.
For further on this point, see Marks (2005, 111).
- 20.
Ibid., 20.
- 21.
Rousseau (2010, 412).
- 22.
Ibid., 355.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Ibid., 163.
- 25.
Ibid., 273.
- 26.
Ibid., 272.
- 27.
For further on this, see Marks (2005, 45).
- 28.
Rousseau (2010, 410).
- 29.
Ibid., 389, 375.
- 30.
Cooper (1999, 10–11).
- 31.
Ibid., 69.
- 32.
Rousseau (2010, 163).
- 33.
Ibid., 387.
- 34.
Cooper (1999, 64).
- 35.
Rousseau (2010, 163).
- 36.
- 37.
Marks (2005, 113).
- 38.
Lloyd also captures this idea in her claim that “Reason and Nature are not, for Rousseau, equal and independent terms, complete in themselves; …their interdependence is quite complex” (Lloyd 1983, 323).
- 39.
Thus, as Grimsley puts it, “the true significance of nature will appear only gradually” (Grimsley 1983, 48).
- 40.
Marks (2005, 51).
- 41.
Here commentators also point to other texts, particularly Rousseau’s autobiographical works, which provide a similar type of close “study and description of extraordinary types and their way or ways of life” (Marks 2005, 51).
- 42.
Rousseau (2010, 165–6).
- 43.
Cooper also highlights the way the appeal to nature does not provide any kind of easy short-cuts for Rousseau: “But this guidance [of nature] is neither easy to attain nor easy to follow. It is not a simple thing to extend and strengthen one’s natural dispositions or even to know how to try to do so. Once one has left the state of nature for the civil state, nature ceases to speak very clearly – or, which is much the same thing in its effect, one ceases to hear its voice very distinctly” (Cooper 1999, 64); its “guidance is much less direct and articulate” (Ibid., 9). As such, Cooper argues that this implies a new conception of the work we might need to do in order to access it. As he explains in a quote which highlights the crucially experimental flavor of Rousseau’s approach: If one wishes to find a standard in nature “he must be more creative. Rather than expect answers to his questions, he must develop proposals of his own and then test them against nature. Nature remains the final arbiter, but it merely nods, as it were, rather than speaks. No longer a source of positive guidance, it is at most a touchstone” (ibid., xiv, my emphasis). As such, as already suggested, the task of discerning what counts as natural in society will be a lengthy, complex process that can only be worked out developmentally in experience.
- 44.
Marks (2005, 116, 117).
- 45.
For further on this point, see Cooper (1999, 68–9).
- 46.
For example, chapter two of Cooper (1999) “aims to ascertain the criteria of post-state-of-nature naturalness” (Cooper 1999, 12). However, final conclusions regarding these criteria are seldom entirely favorable especially when the further developmental stages involving Sophie are taken into account. Thus, for example, Marks concludes that in the end we are left to wonder “if Rousseau’s account of nature’s end is not misleading and exaggerated” (Marks 2005, 116).
- 47.
Rousseau (1990, 112).
- 48.
Rousseau (2010, 401).
- 49.
Ibid., 377. Note that given there is no putting off the birth of amour-propre, Rousseau will go on to argue that it is also necessary to school Emile in the inequality that characterizes society but this ability to see people in terms of their differences comes later and concerns Emile’s political rather than moral development, see Rousseau (2010, 389).
- 50.
This would be to engage Rousseau on his own methodological terms since as suggested above for him what is ‘natural’ is discerned only in and through these processes of formation and not at some pure origin prior to sociality. As such, an alternative criterion of naturalness (natural sociality) could only be gained by telling a different developmental story.
- 51.
Rousseau (2010, 384).
- 52.
Ibid., 401.
- 53.
Rousseau (1990, 113) (my emphasis). A similar idea is found in the Emile where Rousseau writes, “And were he despised by only a single man, that man’s contempt instantly poisons the others’ applause” (Rousseau 2010, 381). Another example of Rousseau depicting artificial moral sensibility as involving a systematically distorted way of experiencing things is found where he writes: “Relating everything to themselves alone and regulating their ideas of good and bad according to their own interest, they fill their minds with countless ridiculous prejudices, and in everything that hampers their slightest advantage, they immediately see the overturning of the whole universe” (ibid., 409).
- 54.
Rousseau (1990, 113).
- 55.
But why should we think excess has this effect? Some hints can be found in the following quote where Rousseau contrasts earlier, simpler forms of society with the gradually increasing complexity that becomes characteristic of it: “As society becomes more closely knit by the bond of mutual needs, as the mind is extended, exercised, and enlightened, it becomes more active, embraces more objects, grasps more relationships, examines, compares. In these frequent comparisons, it doesn’t forget either itself, its fellows, or the place it aspires to among them. Once we have started to measure ourselves this way, we never stop” (ibid., my emphasis).
- 56.
Rousseau (2010, 412).
- 57.
Rousseau (2010, 364). Rousseau explains how comparison breeds these passions as follows: “As soon as one adopts the habit of measuring oneself against others and moving outside oneself in order to assign oneself the first and best place, it is impossible not to develop an aversion for everything that surpasses us, everything that lowers our standing, everything that diminishes us, everything that by being something prevents us from being everything” (Rousseau 1990, 112). See also: Rousseau (2010, 364, 378).
- 58.
Rousseau (2010, 373 ff).
- 59.
Gill (2010, 184).
- 60.
Ibid., 181. Gill, however, also goes on to locate profound points of discontinuity with this tradition, seeing Rousseau’s Emile as designed to challenge and rethink many of its key tenets. I comment further on her arguments below.
- 61.
Rorty (1998, 242).
- 62.
As Gaukroger explains: “In his Traité des sensations, Condillac goes beyond Locke’s enquiry into how ideas come into our mind, asking also about the origins of our mental faculties themselves” (Gaukroger 2010, 413–4).
- 63.
Some examples of Rousseau’s attention to this question are provided by Rorty as she explains his account of how in society the imagination takes the form of “fantasy, still linked to the satisfaction of desire, but now constructing and exploring remote possibilities, whose conceptualisation generates more desires, and whose satisfaction creates even more refined possibilities” (Rorty 1998, 241). Likewise, rationality itself takes on a distinctive shape: “A calculating form of prudential rationality directed to satisfying desires develops in an uneasy relation to the fantasy-imagination” (ibid.).
- 64.
Ibid.
- 65.
Ibid., 242.
- 66.
Gill (2010, 7).
- 67.
Rousseau suggests that if there is any hope with regard to even those most deeply-ingrained distortions of our moral perception, those that are “the most difficult to destroy” (Rousseau 2010, 400), then it will be the case that “[f]or this there is no cure other than experience” (ibid., 401). In this, we might see Rousseau as holding true to his experimentalist commitment to not rule out anything in advance of testing it out in experience. As he explains this principle in the context of stretching Emile’s physical sensibility: “We can know the use of our organs only after having employed them. It is only long experience which teaches us to turn ourselves to account, and this experience is the true study to which we cannot apply ourselves too soon” (ibid., 289, my emphasis).
- 68.
Ibid., 401 (my emphasis).
- 69.
Ibid.
- 70.
Ibid., 412.
- 71.
Ibid. 380.
- 72.
Gill (2010) argues that there is, however, a major tension surrounding this idea of education in Rousseau’s work, which sets him quite apart from other French Enlightenment thinkers. Indeed, she goes so far as to suggest that he would reject the idea of offering an alternative “education” altogether if education means, as it did for most French sensationalists, mere external conditioning and habituation (Gill 2010, 201). Rousseau, Gill argues, is deeply concerned with the passivity and determinism this picture ends up producing, such that someone like Helvétius can write as if good citizens can be scientifically engineered (Gill 2010, 206). On Gill’s account, Rousseau’s Emile is specifically designed to buck this trend. Particularly though the story of the Savoyard Priest, she argues that Rousseau seeks to emphasize the role of our active capacities and some sort of inner moral sense (conscience) as vital to any moral development, hence rejecting the idea that virtue can be produced simply by orchestrating one’s external environment. What makes this assessment complicated, however, is that, as Gill notes, Rousseau clearly never renounces the basic principles and methods of sensationalist philosophy: designing an alternative experiential education for Emile still remains the central plank of his approach. Thus, while outside the scope of this present chapter, Gill’s work highlights the need to explore how the methods I will examine in this section relate to Rousseau’s later claims in the Savoyard Priest passages. The tensions that remain in his account as a result of this (for example, his fascinating ambivalence about the role of habit in moral cultivation, see Gill (2010, 190 fn 12) are vital to understanding his attempt to fundamentally reinterpret the legacy of French sensationalist thought. Later in this chapter I will, however, broach one aspect of this conflict in Rousseau’s “response to theorists’ increasingly scientific approach to pedagogy” (Gill 2010, 187), which can be seen in his constant emphasis on any program of moral cultivation remaining a complicated art.
- 73.
Rousseau (2010, 371).
- 74.
Rousseau (2010, 378).
- 75.
Ibid., 384.
- 76.
Ibid., 412.
- 77.
Ibid., 390.
- 78.
Gill also highlights this point: “Negative education is more than the elusive method Rousseau disarmingly describes as “doing nothing,” or “preventing anything from being done”…Behind the general advice “don’t do anything” lies a set of more specific rules that aim to inhibit particular educational practices advocated by many eighteenth-century theorists” (Gill 2010, 187).
- 79.
Rousseau (2010, 370).
- 80.
Ibid., 371.
- 81.
Ibid. Even where Rousseau admits there may also be no stopping the eventual birth of amour-propre, he again implies that the crucial question is how it is then directed, thus he admonishes: “Let us extend amour-propre to other beings. We shall transform it into a virtue” (ibid., 409).
- 82.
Rousseau (2010, 485).
- 83.
Lloyd (1983, 325).
- 84.
Rousseau (2010, 412).
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
Vila (1998, 183). Commenting on Rousseau’s later declared intention to write a morale sensitive, Vila writes that Rousseau “believed that morality could be achieved through material means – that is, by a proper understanding and treatment of the body” (ibid., 186). This again, though, would sit in tension with the themes I outlined earlier that Gill (2010) sees Rousseau as emphasizing in the Savoyard Priest section.
- 87.
Rousseau (2010, 371).
- 88.
Ibid., 374–5 (my emphasis).
- 89.
Ibid., 379, 364, 370, 410.
- 90.
Rousseau writes that experience shows us as a general rule that “all men are affected sooner and more generally by wounds, cries, groans, the apparatus of painful operations, and all that brings objects of suffering to the senses…they are universal, and no one is completely exempt from them” (ibid., 379).
- 91.
Ibid., 372. That is, experiences of the fact that “men are not naturally Kings, or Lords, or Courtiers, or rich men. All are born naked and poor; all are subject to the miseries of life, to sorrows, ills, needs, and pains of every kind. Finally, all are condemned to death” (ibid., 373).
- 92.
Ibid.
- 93.
Ibid.
- 94.
As he puts it elsewhere: “On the basis of this principle it is easy to see how all the passions of children and men can be directed to good or bad” (ibid., 364).
- 95.
Ibid., 375 (my emphasis).
- 96.
Ibid., 376 (my emphasis).
- 97.
Ibid., 401 (my emphasis).
- 98.
Ibid., 373.
- 99.
Of course, part of helping Emile come to see and feel “the human calamities” involves working on the various beliefs and conceptions that inform his sentiments since, as Rousseau puts it, “truth of sentiments depends in large measure on correctness of ideas” (ibid., 380). It is thus no more a merely physical program than it is a merely intellectual one. Emile’s thoughts and judgments about others play a crucial role in his sensory-affective experience of them, and vice versa. It must be noted, however, that at another point in the text when worrying about potential objections to this method (particularly the risky dangers of overexposure to such scenes), Rousseau steps back from this insistence on bodily proximity by claiming that it is in fact one’s reflection on any such bodily encounters which is more significant than that experience itself (ibid., 384).
- 100.
Ibid., 380.
- 101.
Ibid., 382.
- 102.
Ibid., 377.
- 103.
Ibid., 383.
- 104.
Ibid., 382.
- 105.
Much critical work has also focused on exposing the sinister degree of surveillance and manipulation such a controlled program would require.
- 106.
Ibid., 379 (my emphasis).
- 107.
Ibid., 384.
- 108.
Ibid.
- 109.
Ibid., 379 (my emphasis).
- 110.
Here consider for example Rousseau’s commendation of a father’s actions of choosing an “emphatic scene which struck the young man, made an impression on him which was never effaced” (ibid., 385). Describing this general approach Rousseau writes: “To the extent he becomes enlightened, choose ideas which take account of that fact; to the extent his desires catch fire, choose scenes fit to repress them” (ibid., 384–5).
- 111.
The following quote perfectly encapsulates this worry: “The object is not to make your pupil a male nurse or a brother of charity, not to afflict his sight with constant objects of pain and suffering, not to march from sick person to sick person, from hospital to hospital, and from the Grève to the prisons. He must be touched and not hardened by the sight of human miseries. Long struck by the same sights, we no longer feel their impressions. Habit accustoms us to everything. What we see too much, we no longer imagine, and it is only imagination which makes us feel the ills of others. It is thus by dint of seeing death and suffering that Priests and Doctors become pitiless. Therefore, let your pupil know the fate of men and the miseries of his fellows, but do not let him witness them too often” (ibid., 384).
- 112.
Ibid., 410.
- 113.
On this distinction between morals and politics, see Rousseau (2010, 389).
- 114.
Ibid., 406–7.
- 115.
Ibid., 410.
- 116.
Gaukroger (2010, 419).
- 117.
For Rousseau’s emphasis on a program of active beneficence and learning to be good by doing good, see Rousseau (2010, 406–7).
- 118.
Ibid., 364 (my emphasis).
- 119.
Ibid., 376.
- 120.
Ibid., 371. We can perhaps see an analogue of this in Rousseau’s odd little discussion of the physical agility of children, where he writes: “It seems to me, that the supposed ineptitude of children at our exercises is imaginary and that, if they are not seen to succeed at some, it is because they have never been given practice in them” (Rousseau 2010, 290).
- 121.
Ibid., 379.
- 122.
Ibid., 401.
- 123.
Rousseau (2010, 412).
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Pierdziwol, A. (2013). Extending Nature: Rousseau on the Cultivation of Moral Sensibility. In: Lenz, M., Waldow, A. (eds) Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6241-1_9
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