in the Second Discourse hints at this very possibility. He argues that because the child must express his needs, it is the child (not the mother) who must invent the words to ask his mother for a particular thing (SD, 121; 3:147). Rousseau goes on to insist that this private language remains private, dying out when the mother and child part company, because his larger point is to show that language in any meaningful sense was not a part of original human nature. However, his passing remarks about how a child asks its mother to fulfill his needs raises the question—a question that goes unasked in the Second Discourse but receives considerable attention in Emile—of how the mother might respond without turning her child into a little tyrant who expects other human beings to fulfill his every whim. Such an expectation can arise, Rousseau makes clear, even when the needs themselves are very simple, as they are for infants. “The first tears of children are prayers; if one is not careful, they soon become orders” (E, 66; 4:287).
Moreover, we must consider what triggers the development of new needs and desires, which is habit. Two critical junctures in the Second Discourse identify habituation as that which transforms an innocuous (and reversible) physical dependence into a pernicious (and irreversible) psychological dependence. As man discovers fire and rudimentary tools, the “repeated utilization” (application reitérée) of various things in relation to himself and others is what engenders the perception of relations among human beings, which is the first step on the road to the unhealthy comparisons that are a function of amour-propre. Rousseau calls this the “first stirring of pride” (SD, 144; 3:166). Then, when human beings leave behind their nomadic existence and settle in rustic huts, cohabitation leads to habituation, which sets in motion another major revolution: the first developments of the heart. “The habit of living together gave birth to the sweetest sentiments known to men: conjugal love and paternal love” (SD, 146–47; 3:168). Rousseau contends that human beings can be exposed to potentially transformative things such as fire and iron ore without becoming dependent upon them, and can encounter one another briefly (even sexually) without becoming dependent upon one another, but repeated exposure triggers fundamental alterations in human nature.
One must wonder, then, at the language Rousseau uses in his brief description of the prolonged encounter between mother and infant. “The mother nursed her children at first for her own need; then, habit having endeared them to her, she nourished them afterward for their need. As soon as they had the strength to seek their food, they did not delay in leaving the mother herself” (SD, 121; 3:147). Why wouldn’t the habit of nursing endear the mother to the child just as it endears the child to the mother? Why wouldn’t the habit of seeing one another lead to the desire to see one another again, leading to the first movements of the heart? Is some sort of “fence” necessary to protect against this? Without addressing these considerations, Rousseau maintains that the child leaves the mother easily, and that soon the two do not even recognize each other.
My point is not simply to poke holes in the argument of the Second Discourse. I am not the first to notice that Rousseau’s account of the mother-child relationship strains credulity. But the account tends to be read as consistent with the rest of Rousseau’s argument in the Second Discourse, whereas I am arguing that on Rousseau’s own terms—in which the absence or presence of habituation is what maintains or destroys individual independence—the account is self-undermining. Rousseau goes to great lengths to argue that one form of physical contact that is necessary for the survival of the species (sexual intercourse) does not bring about a psychological attachment, but he says nothing about how another, equally critical form of physical contact (nursing) avoids the same potential problem—a problem to which he draws attention by mentioning in passing that one becomes “endeared” to the other.
It is perhaps for this reason that in the Second Discourse Rousseau moves on from the discussion of the mother-infant relationship by asking his readers to “suppose that this first difficulty [has been] conquered” (SD, 121; 3:147). He means the difficulty of reconciling a rudimentary language with his depiction of the state of nature as asocial; but “conquering” the problem of language by limiting language to the period of infancy only draws attention to yet another problem—the problem of infancy itself, which opens up the possibility of ruining natural independence only one generation into the story. The silence of the Second Discourse on this point is filled in by the extended discussion of infancy in Emile. Emile does not simply “apply” the concept of nature developed in the Second Discourse to a social context; it, too, explores nature as a question.
A mother in the state of nature may not have needed to build a fence to ward off corrupting social influences, because those influences did not exist; but she did have to keep her little “shrub” alive until it could survive on its own. In so doing, she had to keep the child from becoming psychologically dependent upon her—either by becoming “endeared” (attached) to her, or by wanting to dominate her will, or both. This imperative is inextricable from Rousseau’s fundamental contention that the desire to dominate others is not natural to human beings. They are not born with this desire, but “as soon as they can consider the people who surround them as instruments depending on them to set them in motion, they make use of those people to follow their inclination and to supplement their own weakness. That is how they become difficult, tyrannical, imperious, wicked, unmanageable . . . for it does not require long experience to sense how pleasant it is to act with the hands of others and to need only to stir one’s tongue to make the universe move” (E, 67–68; 4:289).
If it takes only a very small taste of the experience of wielding another person as an instrument to develop a taste for domination, then that possibility is as much a problem in nature (between mother and child) as it is in society, especially in light of Rousseau’s insistence that we are born in a state of equilibrium (despite our physical weakness) precisely because the mother acts as an extension of the child’s faculties. It seems that a child must wield the mother like an instrument in order to be considered a self-sufficient “whole,” and yet he cannot wield her or his wholeness will be disrupted by the emergence of a spirit of domination. Reflecting on the problem of infancy in the state of nature raises interesting questions about our supposed natural independence and how it is maintained.
Although book I of Emile ends where the Second Discourse begins, so to speak (when the child can walk, talk, and feed himself), only in Emile does Rousseau draw attention to the fact that a very great deal can go wrong before that point. However, read alongside Emile, the account in the Second Discourse invites us to see that the problem of “building the fence” is not simply a challenge that arises within society; it is a problem generated by nature itself, and by the need to know nature in some way in order to preserve it. But the process of seeking to know nature inevitably interferes with the preservation of nature. If a mother turns her infant into a tyrant by bringing him something he wants rather than transporting him to the thing he desires, for example, it is not due to the corruption of society; corruption would account for her lack of attentiveness, but not to her misplaced attentiveness. Her misplaced attentiveness is an expression of the very attachment that Rousseau sees as necessary to preserving a child’s potential for natural freedom and happiness until his weak infant body develops enough strength for the idea of freedom to have any meaning.
While “there is no substitute for maternal solicitude” (E, 45; 4:257), it is precisely the mother’s attachment to this particular child that works against her ability to raise the child to become, like natural man, an “abstract man” (42; 4:252) who is prepared to suffer the blows of fate and accidents of fortune throughout life. To raise such a man, “we must generalize our views” (42; 4:252). It is exactly this broader, more generalized view that is not natural to us. Solicitous mothers are in one sense like Thetis, seeking to dip their children in the water of the Styx; their good but misguided intentions lead them to plunge their children into “softness,” which “open[s] their pores to ills of every sort to which they will not fail to be prey when grown” (47; 4:259). Thus, while Rousseau’s advice to protect the child requires a tender and attentive mother,
