of the tender mother comes in a note: “The mother wants her child to be happy, happy now. In that she is right. When she is mistaken about the means, she must be enlightened” (38; 4:246). While Rousseau may appeal to natural motherhood as an antidote to social corruption, the model of motherhood he ultimately portrays is an instructed, rather than simply natural, model.
Thus, although Rousseau initially presents the tender mother’s solicitude as a corrective to the tendency of les sages to “seek the man in the child” without focusing on the child per se, he offers several indications that this maternal perspective, too, requires correction insofar as maternal tenderness can, as mentioned earlier, be “blind.” Rousseau reprimands mothers whose protective focus on keeping a child safe (which is, of course, a sort of fence building) works against the child’s development of the capacity to live in the fullest sense, and in the fullness of time. “One thinks only of preserving one’s child. That is not enough. One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man” (42; 4:253). In other words, the protective mother needs to see the man in the child. It is precisely for this reason that Rousseau requires a good mother who knows how to think; one who is not only tender but also foresighted. Feminine care and philosophical reflection are conjoined in Rousseau’s ideal reader (and will eventually come to resemble Sophie, whose name means wisdom). Only by tapping into the mother in the thinker, and the thinker in the mother, might one develop the perspective that enables one to discern the child in the man and the man in the child.
Because human beings are inevitably shaped by environmental influences, the art of education—that is, conscious influence—is necessary. Rousseau’s gardening metaphor captures these two sides of education, negative and positive. Education is like the cultivation of a nascent plant. This cultivation is a matter of both preserving the plant’s original form and allowing it to grow into its fully developed form. On the one hand, education means building a fence in order to protect the original form. On the other hand, education “gives us” everything we need as grownups, which we lack as children. The problem is that in civil society we reverse these functions; we “teach children what they would learn much better by themselves” and “forget what only we could teach them” (78; 4:300). That is, we pervert nature where we ought to preserve it through a negative education, and fail to provide the positive education essential to human flourishing. Because we have utterly confused the two, Rousseau separates them in order to clarify each. Thus Emile’s education appears to be divisible into two stages: negative (preserving) in books I–III, and positive in books IV–V. But these two dimensions of education are two sides of one coin—essentially, not sequentially, related. Again, this reflects Rousseau’s attempt to correct the perspectives of both the mother and the sage insofar as the task of discerning the child in the man is inseparable from the task of discerning the man (that is, the well-formed man) in the child.
Preserving nature requires more than a natural bond between mother and child, because it requires more than instinct. It requires an unnatural knowledge of nature. Foresight, which is characterized as inimical to natural human independence and happiness in the earliest stages (of infancy, or of the history of the human species), is at the same time necessary to the achievement of that independence and happiness, even in the context of the “natural” family unit. Rousseau needs to replace the nuclear family with an “expert,” not because he can’t find a mother willing to nurse her baby but because however “good” such a mother might be, there is no guarantee that she knows how to think. Rousseau needs something beyond the natural attachment of parents for children, even as he insists that only the natural attachment of parents for children will generate the level of commitment necessary to the intensive task of “building the fence.” But knowledge of where to build the fence—the “circumference” or parameters of nature—is not natural. It is no wonder, then, that Rousseau presents these two steps as separable, allowing that someone other than the mother may draw the circumference of the fence that she must build. But these two apparently separable steps are not in fact sequential or separable, because each presupposes the other. The preservation of nature presupposes knowledge of its boundaries, or “the circumference,” just as one must see natural man “fully formed” in order to preserve his original form. And yet he must be preserved in order to achieve that form.
What Rousseau initially presents as separate—unselfconscious affection on the one hand, and cultivated expertise on the other—he spends the rest of Emile trying to put together. That this is his goal is already reflected in his identification of “a mother who knows how to think” as his ideal reader, a figure who is not presupposed but rather (ideally, by design) brought about by reading Emile. Her judiciousness, in other words, only emerges over the course of the five books of Emile.
The Ambiguous Origins of a Good Education
It turns out, then, that a mother is both necessary and insufficient in order to carry out Rousseau’s project. Rousseau first hints at this insufficiency when he insists that fathers as well as mothers must be wholly invested in raising their children. (The father is the first candidate for the “someone else” who is to determine the circumference—soon to be replaced by the tutor.) With this move, Rousseau rather quickly begins introducing consideration upon consideration that complicate his own simple formulas and prescriptions. To be sure, these complications arise initially from the fact of the already corrupt state of civil society. Fathers claim that they are too busy to raise their own children, and hire governors. The “natural” answer to the needs of nature is no longer available. It is in response to this situation, it seems, that Rousseau launches into a discussion of the difficulties of finding a good governor. But the difficulties he identifies do not simply stem from the fact that the governor is someone other than the father; they would apply equally to any father. The major difficulty is that in order to know how to provide a good education, one must oneself be the product of a good education. Therefore, identifying the original source of a good education is nearly impossible.
The more one thinks about it, the more one perceives new difficulties. It would be necessary that the governor had been raised for his pupil, that the pupil’s domestics had been raised for their master, that all those who have contact with him had received the impressions that they ought to communicate to him. It would be necessary to go from education to education back to I know not where. How is it possible for a child to be well raised by one who was not well raised himself? (50; 4:263)
Each good educator presupposes a previous good educator, going back to “I know not where.” This difficulty is the difficulty of all origins. It cannot be avoided by preserving the family structure. A simply “natural” education was never available, because the problem is built into nature itself, as a careful analysis of Rousseau’s requirements of natural mothers (and now fathers) has shown.
The requisite knowledge that grounds a legitimate education, Rousseau suggests, can be acquired only in practice, by blocking out all social influences and watching the form that an individual takes over a lifetime. Although it would be preferable if the governor had already educated someone, Rousseau adds that this would be “too much to wish for,” because “the same man can give only one education.” This raises a question of legitimacy: “If two were required in order to succeed, by what right would one undertake the first?” (51; 4:265). If one is required to have educated in order to be entitled to educate, and to be educated in order to be receptive to education, then how can one ever begin? This crisis reverberates throughout Rousseau’s major works. In the Social Contract, the formation of a people is a task that seems to require a people already formed. “Just as the architect, before putting up a big building, observes and tests the ground to see whether it can bear the weight, so the wise founder does not start by drafting laws that are good in themselves, but first examines whether the people for whom he destines them is suited to bear them” (SC, 157; 3:384–85). Rousseau goes on to explain that nations, like men, must reach maturity before they are ready to be made subject to law (158; 3:386). This puts the lawgiver in a difficult position, since this necessary “maturity” is achieved primarily by living under good laws and institutions. “For a newly formed people to understand
