His rejection is therefore somewhat disingenuous. But it points to a larger, recurring issue. To overcome the difficulty generated by the requirement that the child be a completed whole before education can begin, Rousseau shifts the burden onto the tutor, demanding that he be a completed whole before he can begin the education of another. In other words, wholeness must somehow precede the very educational process that is supposed to produce wholeness. Moreover, the idea that the child would at some level emulate the wholeness of the tutor in order to achieve wholeness himself leaps over the need to educate someone to be an independent self who does not imitate others—in other words, it leaps over the possibility of what Rousseau would consider a genuine education and resorts instead to something that could just as easily produce the “virtues of apes.” Either the child imitates the adult who gives alms, for example (and therefore does not develop virtue but only the appearance of it), or he does not merely imitate because he is already virtuous—and therefore does not need to develop virtue. Education is either absent or superfluous. The fundamental question that remains is how virtue might come into being if it is not already there. Once again, as we saw in chapter 1, Rousseau’s argument founders on the question of origins.
The ambiguity in Rousseau’s treatment of imitation suggests why even the early part of Emile’s education cannot, despite Rousseau’s rhetoric, be a purely “negative” education. It is noteworthy that one of his strongest statements about the need to “put off, if possible, a good lesson for fear of giving a bad one” (96; 4:327) is followed by an admission that one cannot avoid lessons altogether and must therefore choose carefully. A pattern is beginning to emerge, in which Rousseau adds a caveat to what he initially presents as an absolute rule. Rousseau “breaks” his own rules against imitation and positive lessons. This pattern continues well into book III, in which he lifts his supposedly absolute ban on books and allows Emile to read Robinson Crusoe, “since we absolutely must have books” (184; 4:454). In the chapters that follow, we shall explore the ways in which this tendency to qualify absolutes extends also to the poetic images (such as natural man and citizen) that function as absolute standards in Rousseau’s thought as a whole.
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