cause; the social spirit which must be the product of social institutions would have to preside over the setting up of those institutions; men would have to have already become before the advent of the law that which they become as a result of law” (156; 3:383).
It is not surprising, then, that when Rousseau fantasizes about where he would like to have been born, had he not had the good fortune of being born in Geneva, he chooses a “long-standing republic” whose origins are “lost in the darkness of time” (SD, 81; 3:113). Such a wish simply defers the problem of origins.
A parallel conundrum surfaces in the opening dialogue of Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, as “Rousseau” first begins to converse with “a Frenchman.” In response to the Frenchman’s demand that he “explain” himself, “Rousseau” laments, “I’ll explain what I mean, but it will be either the most useless or most superfluous of efforts, since everything I will say to you can be understood only by those to whom there is no need to say it.”9 Rousseau suggests that although he wishes to instruct his readers, the only readers who will learn from him are the ones who already know, at least on some level, what he is trying to teach them.
How does a good lawmaker or educator come to be? How does a well-governed populace or individual come to be? How does a good reader come to be? These are all different versions of the same problem for Rousseau, who seems tempted by the resolution of divine intervention. The legislator must have divine qualities in order to effect the necessary coincidence of good laws and a good people, as each presupposes the other (echoing the Republic’s miraculous coincidence of philosophy and political power in the philosopher-king). The education of Emile—the education of nature—is the “first,” or original, education that makes others possible, grounding them not only in the experience of the author in writing the book but also in that of the reader in reading the book. Emile’s education is analogous to the Republic’s city-in-speech in allowing the pursuit of a philosophical question that has concrete political consequences without actually setting into motion any of those political consequences. As an education “in speech,” or a first education, Emile is designed to make a certain experience available to the reader while avoiding the degeneration that Rousseau believes tends to result from the expansion of human experience.
It is for this reason that Rousseau contrives to proceed independently of any preexisting context for his thought experiment. He declares Emile an orphan. Moreover, without reflecting on the kind of education that a suitable tutor would need to have had in order to carry out a “natural” education, he takes for granted that he possesses the necessary qualities. In other words, the origins of the tutor’s own wisdom are erased, or at least “lost in the darkness of time,” to borrow the language of the Second Discourse. This creates an illusion of a radically new beginning, which is possible only in theory or in fiction. Political and educational programs—even the most revolutionary—always begin in medias res. It is only as author that Rousseau can put an end to the infinite regress, functioning (like “the author of things”) as an unmoved mover. The question becomes whether it is possible to be a nonauthoritarian author. Rousseau certainly distances himself from his own authority by repeatedly inviting the reader to judge his efforts. And yet this could be dismissed as yet another ruse of a master manipulator. We seem to be left with the unsatisfying choice between requiring a radically new beginning and allowing the problem of legitimacy to be covered over by poetic illusion.
In book I of Emile, however, Rousseau does not cover over the problem of origins but rather draws attention to the difficulties that inhere in his attempt to resolve it. For example, he draws attention to the problem of time. By raising the question of the proper age for a governor, Rousseau acknowledges that the wisdom that confers legitimacy can be developed only over time, but meanwhile time passes, conditions change, and it may be too late to begin anew. Wisdom lends legitimacy to rule but exacerbates inequality, while youthfulness creates the appearance of equality but limits the degree of wisdom that can be expected, and therefore undermines the legitimacy of any authority that is exercised. The younger the governor is, the less likely he is to have had any previous teaching experience. Rousseau tries to narrow the inevitable gap between the governor and the student by insisting that they be as close in age as possible. He acknowledges the paradoxical nature of this requirement, however, when he states that the governor should be “as young as a wise man can be” (E, 51; 4:265). With this comment, along with his remark that it would be “too much to wish for” an educator to have already educated someone (ad infinitum), Rousseau points to the impossibility of the very conditions of legitimacy he has invoked.10 It is by simultaneously appealing to them and questioning the appeal that he models an intermediate standard of “authorial” authority that avoids the twin extremes discussed above. Book I of Emile both makes a beginning and draws attention to the problem of making a beginning. In light of this, we must pay careful attention not only to how the precepts laid out in book I provide a foundation for the project as a whole, allowing these to condition our reading of the subsequent chapters, but also to how these precepts are revisited, qualified, and refined as Rousseau’s project in Emile unfolds.
A pattern has emerged: the tender and foresighted mother requires that someone else draw the circumference for her as she builds a fence around her child’s soul; the existence of a suitable governor requires that a suitable governor already exist in order to raise the child; moreover, that governor needs to have already educated a pupil before he is fit to educate another one. And yet all of these double requirements must be met somehow simultaneously; the ideal mother both is natural and knows how to think. Finally, and most important, we must know nature in order to preserve it, but we must preserve it if it is to be available to us as an object of knowledge. Even as Rousseau claims to begin with nature, he suggests that the question of what nature is cannot be answered before the project (which nature supposedly guides) is completed, and hence cannot function as a direct or unmediated source of universal rules or standards that can be applied to all particulars. This, again, is what calls for judgment and also makes judgment possible. Rousseau’s opening claim that everything is good in the hands of the “author” of things and degenerates in the hands of man (37; 4:245) points indirectly to the need for a realm between natural perfection (which denies freedom and makes judgment superfluous) and utter deformity (in which our judgments are indistinguishable from corrupt prejudices and in which we are thus also left fundamentally unfree in a different way). Rousseau’s exploration of the question of a “natural education” aspires to locate the genuinely human somewhere between these two poles in order to preserve both human freedom and the possibility of judgment.
The Body, the Senses, and the Foundations of Judgment
[Emile] gets his lessons from nature and not from men. . . . His body and his mind are exercised together. Acting always according to his own thought and not someone else’s, he continually unites two operations: the more he makes himself strong and robust, the more he becomes sensible and judicious. (E, 119; 4:361)
The first three books of Emile are generally understood to constitute Emile’s “negative” (93; 4:323) education, that is, an education designed to preserve his natural wholeness while forestalling the development of prejudices and passions (especially amour-propre) by warding off all social influences. Rousseau states that this first, negative education “consists not at all in teaching virtue or truth but in securing the heart from vice and the mind from error.” One must “let childhood ripen in children” (94; 4:324) rather than hurry to fill their minds and souls with lessons and virtues that they are unprepared to acquire, and that are unnecessary in any case. He insists
