run, which seems philosophically inconsequential, introduces the larger issue of learning, growing, and changing while remaining within various boundaries: the boundary of childhood simplicity, the boundary of the self, and, most broadly, the boundaries that nature imposes on human beings.
Rousseau argues explicitly in book II that the education from postinfancy to preadolescence must concern itself primarily with the child’s physical development, so that a child’s strength can “catch up” to his desires before his desires extend beyond what a self-sufficient individual can satisfy. The child is born too weak to satisfy even his limited needs for food and physical comfort. Limiting his needs and desires to these things while he grows and matures physically allows the child to achieve the perfect equilibrium between faculties and desires that makes human beings happy and free in the original state of nature. Beyond this, however, there is a second objective built into Rousseau’s concern with training the muscles and physical senses. To “learn to think,” it is necessary to hone “the instruments of our intelligence,” which are “our limbs, our senses, our organs” (125; 4:370). Thus the child concentrates on physical education—not to avoid thinking but precisely in order to learn to think. “Let him be a man in his vigor, and soon he will be one in his reason” (118; 4:359). How are these goals connected for Rousseau? The link between physical strength and reason is that both are essential to an individual’s independence and self-sufficiency. Precisely by learning to fend for oneself physically, one learns to think independently. “Since [Emile] is constantly in motion, he is forced to observe many things, to know many effects. . . . Thus his body and his mind are exercised together. Acting always in accordance with 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” (119; 4:361). The scope of a child’s exercise of judgment is strictly delimited, pertaining only to everything immediately (that is, physically) related to him. Rousseau depicts children learning to judge heights, lengths, depths, and distances with a view to acquiring cherries, cakes, and other edible treats.6 In other words, they learn to judge the physical world around them as a means to fulfilling a physical desire. Even the single positive lesson Rousseau allows during this stage—a lesson about respecting private property—is organized around the child’s desire to eat some delicious melons. Education at this stage involves manipulating the child’s desire for sweets in order to stimulate him to learn how to fulfill that need himself—by judging the shortest path to winning the cake, for example, or judging a tree’s height accurately in order to pick the cherries. Within a small radius, equilibrium between desires and faculties is thus achieved.
Many of these judgments involve correctly calculating distances with the naked eye. With practice, the child learns to rely on himself rather than on others or even on instruments, and develops “a glance almost as sure as a surveyor’s chain” (143; 4:396). In characterizing the five senses as the instruments of human intelligence, Rousseau emphasizes sight in particular as the key to demonstrating how the senses can serve as the foundation of judgment. “Sight is, of all the respects, the one from which the mind’s judgments can least be separated” (143; 4:396). Rousseau introduces this issue in the anecdote about the lazy boy who learned to run, in which the boy’s ability to see was educated in two senses: in order to win, he had to learn to measure distances accurately by sight, but in order to develop the desire to run at all, he had to learn to see it as good for something. Rousseau yokes together the issues of learning to run and learning to see because his concern is how one moves from a rudimentary to a more complex form of judgment.
Learning to See
Rousseau presents seeing as both utterly simple and highly complex. It is simple insofar as it is natural and physical; it is complex insofar as appearances can be deceiving. Every child has the capacity to see well as long as misguided parents and educators do not hamper this ability by taking away opportunities to hone and exercise it. In this sense, seeing is spontaneous, and a negative education is all that is necessary to preserve it. At the same time, however, “much time is needed to learn how to see” (143; 4:396). As in the case of running, the training Rousseau prescribes for learning to see links seeing to both the skill of estimating distances at a glance and the capacity for philosophy and independent reasoning. “Our first masters of philosophy are our feet, our hands, our eyes.” To seek knowledge without using the senses is “to teach us to use the reason of others. It is to teach us to believe much and never to know anything” (125; 4:370). At the same time, the simple acquisition of sense data is by itself insufficient. “To exercise the senses is not only to make use of them, it is to learn to judge well with them” (132; 4:380). The issue thus becomes how to understand the faculty of judgment as grounded in accurate and autonomous sense perception but not reducible to it.7 In insisting on this irreducibility, Rousseau challenges Helvétius, whose influential De l’esprit promoted a sensationalist view of judgment that grounded judgment in nothing other than sensation: “Juger n’est jamais que sentir.” Helvétius argued that the mind passively receives impressions from external objects and experiences a sensation in response. The mind is able to remember the sensation and the object(s) to which it is attached, and as a result can piece together judgments about the world. There is no judging faculty, according to Helvétius, apart from sensation and memory. Rousseau, in contrast, held this view to be too passive. Even as he insisted on the importance of sensation in human cognition and judgment, he nevertheless argued for an understanding of judgment as active rather than passive.8 “Our sensations are purely passive,” he says in Emile, “while all our perceptions or ideas are born out of an active principle which judges” (107; 4:344).
While Rousseau’s more direct response to Helvétius is found in the context of the Savoyard Vicar’s profession of faith in book IV, in book II his discussion of the senses—especially that of sight—addresses not only the distinction between the passive and active senses of judging but also their interdependence. Thus the relationship between Rousseau’s two senses of learning to see bears on the question of his understanding of good judgment and how it is formed. Since he also links seeing with philosophizing (just as Aristotle identifies sight as the sense most closely linked with the desire to know), an analysis of the way in which Rousseau teaches his pupil(s) to see also sheds light on what he thinks it means to make a human being wise. “Man learns to see with the eyes of the mind as well as with the eyes of the body.”9
The explicit pedagogical advice of book II elaborates the connection between both senses of seeing well. Rousseau focuses on the first, physical sense when recommending exercises (such as night games) to sharpen the child’s sight (and other senses). At first, Rousseau suggests that learning to see well is simply a matter of training the naked eye to see independently. The goal is to prevent the child from adding any extraneous interpretation to what his senses reveal to him. To that end, parents should avoid any reaction to the child’s experiences, so as not to influence his perception of them, and prohibit the use of external aids such as binoculars. Clarity in sense perception, unadulterated by anything that the mind might add, is the goal. Similarly, when teaching a child to draw, one must ensure that the child has “no other master than nature and no other model than objects. I want him to have before his eyes the original itself and not the paper representing it, to sketch a house from a house, a tree from a tree, a man from a man, so that he gets accustomed to observing bodies and their appearances well and not to taking false and conventional imitations for true imitations” (144; 4:397).
However, Rousseau’s insistence on the purely negative quality of such seeing—in the sense of seeing without interference—soon falters, when he acknowledges the inaccuracy of the senses, which may lead even the most rudimentary judgments astray. He takes a two-pronged approach to this problem. First, one must aim to be as accurate as possible; each sense must be fine-tuned to its peak performance. Even so, it is not possible to rely on the accuracy of each sense by itself. The only recourse, if one wants to remain on the level of the senses, is to draw on the assistance of another sense—a system of checks and balances among the five senses. “Instead of simplifying the sensation, double it, always verify it by another. Subject the visual organ to the tactile organ” (140; 4:92). This solution
