clear why Rousseau focuses any attention at all on the issue of teaching a child to run, as opposed to simply letting the child run free, since he ridicules the common practice of teaching children to walk. “Is there anything more foolish than the effort made to teach them to walk, as if anyone were ever seen who, due to his nurse’s negligence, did not when grown know how to walk?” We tend to teach children what they would better learn by themselves, he complains, and forget to teach them “what we alone can teach them” (78; 4:300). Rousseau argues that the child ought to be allowed complete freedom of movement and learn to accept the consequences of that freedom. A child should be taken daily to an open field. “There let him run and risk about; let him fall a hundred times a day. So much the better. That way he will learn how to get up sooner” (78; 4:301). Ideally, children teach themselves to run, it would seem, just as they teach themselves to walk. Yet the illustration that introduces book II is not of a child spontaneously running free but of Achilles being trained by Chiron. What is the true lesson of this stage of Rousseau’s educational project?
Rousseau’s discussion of children learning to run involves more than honing physical skills; it also introduces questions of motivation and direction. His main anecdote about teaching a young man to run (which includes the only reference to Chiron in the text) concerns an indolent boy who lacks not only the strength and skill to run but also the motivation. For the educator facing the task of motivating the boy, Rousseau remarks, “the skill of Chiron himself would have hardly sufficed.” He adds, “The difficulty was all the greater since I wanted to prescribe to him absolutely nothing. I had banished from among my rights exhortations, promises, threats, emulation, the desire to be conspicuous. How could I give him the desire to run without saying anything to him?” (141; 4:393).
This passage distills a well-recognized difficulty that pervades Rousseau’s entire corpus: the tension between will formation, on the one hand, and agency and authenticity, on the other. Rousseau’s various legislator figures condition the will of their subjects to love the objects that will best support their freedom—yet this conditioning calls into question the value or character of that freedom. Of course, Emile is a child at this point in Rousseau’s narrative, and careful control of his environment and experiences is arguably justified by his young age. The question of whether his freedom is ultimately genuine must be reserved for later. But the passage raises a related question, having to do with integrity as well as freedom. Before we come to the question of whether Emile is free, we must address the question of whether he is himself—or a self at all. “Doubtless he ought to do only what he wants; but he ought to want only what you want him to do. He ought not to make a step without your having foreseen it” (120; 4:363). How are we to reconcile Rousseau’s emphasis on active formation of the will with his admonition to allow the child’s character to reveal itself, unfettered? Rousseau’s confidence that the child who experiences no direct opposition to his desires will show himself “fearlessly” and “precisely as he is” (120; 4:363) belies the catch-22 that he has introduced. Indeed, he claims that precisely because the child will reveal himself entirely unselfconsciously, the educator will be in a position to study him at leisure—with the same careful study that must be conducted as preparation for shaping his every desire. In other words, the anecdote in book II that relates most directly to the book’s thematic illustration raises an issue that has to do not simply with physical strength but also with integrity of character—that is, with remaining oneself.
New skills cannot be acquired authentically, according to Rousseau, unless the acquisition is driven by the pupil’s own desire for them. But the desire to acquire a new skill, once stimulated, is almost always linked to some form of desire for recognition. The lazy boy whom Rousseau teaches to run is motivated by the desire for the cakes that are the prize in a race. For Rousseau, the desire for cakes is natural, but the desire for recognition as the winner is born of unnatural amour-propre. In this particular anecdote, Rousseau downplays this potential hazard. He notes that the first few times he and his charge passed by the young boys racing one another to win a cake, “it did not register and produced nothing.” So Rousseau expands the event (which was, of course, prearranged) to include more contestants and draw more attention to the winner. “The one who won [the prize] was praised and given a celebration; it was all done with ceremony.” Predictably, his young charge gets caught up in the excitement, as passersby clap and cheer for the runners. “These were for him the Olympic games.” Finally, it enters the boy’s head that “running well could be good for something” (141–42; 4:394).
While it is clear that the child’s interest has been stimulated by the spectacle and ceremony and not simply by the cakes, Rousseau moves on as though the potential for triggering amour-propre had never arisen. Indeed, he suggests that winning makes the boy generous, and he happily shares his cake with the others. In later episodes (beginning in book III), however, Rousseau further develops his reflections on a difficulty that is raised here only indirectly. These arise when the newly developed desire is the desire to learn new things—a desire that an educator must stoke if the child is to grow and mature but that threatens to disturb the fragile equilibrium between desires and faculties that is the hallmark of self-sufficiency, according to Rousseau. Whereas teaching a child to run will augment his strength, thus enhancing his independence, stimulating his desire for knowledge will expand his needs insofar as it makes him want something he lacks. The desire to learn takes one outside oneself, and therein lies the danger, for it is because he lives outside himself that civil man is so miserable.
In addition to creating a potential disequilibrium between desires and faculties, the desire to learn can easily turn into the desire to be learned. This desire not only stimulates vanity but leads to the desire to appear learned rather than to be learned. One therefore risks inflaming amour-propre in an effort to stimulate intellectual curiosity. For Emile, this problem is addressed through a contrived encounter with a magician who publicly humiliates Emile when he tries to show off some newly acquired knowledge. After watching the magician make a toy duck move at will, Emile is inspired to figure out the trick, and thus to discover the underlying scientific principles (that is, to learn the cause of the magician’s effects). Once he learns how magnets make the duck move, he cannot wait to reveal his knowledge to the magician, and to the audience; “he would want the whole of humankind to be witness to his glory” (173; 4:438). Emile declares in front of the crowd that the trick is easy, and shows off his ability to manipulate the duck with a magnet hidden in a piece of bread. The magician responds graciously and invites Emile and his tutor back the next day to perform in front of an even larger crowd. This time, however, the duck flees. The crowd jeers; Emile complains and challenges the magician to attract the duck. The magician pulls the iron out of the bread, revealing Emile’s attempted deceit, and goes on to manipulate the duck with another piece of bread, his gloved finger, even his voice. Emile and the tutor sneak away, humiliated.
The next day, the magician comes to their door to confront them about their conduct. He chastises them for seeking honor “at the expense of an honest man’s subsistence” (174; 4:439). He explains that he did not show them his master strokes straightaway, for he keeps them in reserve rather than showing off giddily all that he knows. He then reveals his secret device for manipulating the duck: a lodestone. He begs them not to abuse this knowledge and to exercise restraint in the future. Specifically, he reprimands the tutor for failing to guide Emile and protect him from his humiliating mistake. The following day they return to the fair and do not breathe a word of what they know.5 Emile’s incipient amour-propre has been squelched, but his perspective has also been broadened.
A child does not simply grow into his body at this age; he grows into his individual identity. Inasmuch as this is when “the life of the individual begins,” it is also at this stage that the child “gains consciousness of himself. . . . He becomes truly one, the same, and consequently already capable of happiness or unhappiness. It is important, therefore, to begin to consider him as a moral being” (78; 4:301, emphasis added). Gaining consciousness of oneself is the first step toward becoming self-conscious in the sense of living in the opinion of others; the Second Discourse presents this as a very slippery slope. In Emile Rousseau considers whether we can grow and learn while staying “truly one,
