we try to work with a nonteleological conception of nature, and cast Rousseau’s project in Emile as an attempt to preserve nature against corrupting social influences, we must acknowledge that a doubleness inheres even in the minimalist goal of preservation—since preserving nature entails letting it develop until it is tout formé. There is a developmental quality built into even the simplest principle of nature for Rousseau, the ideal of equilibrium, because we cannot preserve natural equilibrium until it has come into its own. At a minimum, the weak and dependent infant must develop into the strong, unspoiled child whose simple needs allow an equilibrium to exist between his desires and faculties.
In this way, Emile addresses a philosophically interesting lacuna in the Second Discourse, while raising the question of how one might be guided by the standard of “nature” even as a complete grasp of it remains elusively out of reach. The “perfection” of our form as we leave the hands of the author is itself an abstraction, an ideal—and disembodied—state of perfect freedom, altered by confinement in a human body and further altered by the unnatural confinement to which that body is subjected over the course of a human life. To understand human freedom, then, one must understand not only its perfect idealization (which functions as a Platonic Form) but also its embodied form. Concrete human freedom is (somehow) formed formlessness. This is the true subject of Emile, inasmuch as Rousseau attempts to make the abstraction of perfect freedom concrete and particular without distorting it in the process. If Emile strikes us as simultaneously ordinary and otherworldly, this is why. He is an intermediate form.
Emile thus occupies the space between what is imaginatively idealized (and thus so far removed from existing circumstances as to be irrelevant) and what is recognizably practical (thus insufficiently critical). That is, in order for Emile’s example to be instructive for readers whose own experience of raising children bears little resemblance to Rousseau’s imaginary scenario, his example must be at once recognizable (thus relevant) and strange (to afford critical distance). The same can be said of the figure of “natural man” in general: he must be recognizably human, yet radically other. To the degree that any imagined ideal is disconnected from existing conditions, it may offer a standpoint for critique but at the same time suffer from a deficiency: this form of critique may be either purely negative and based on fantasy (insofar as it simply retreats from the real in order to remain devoted to the purity of an unachievable ideal) or potentially dangerous (insofar as a self-appointed visionary may seek to remake the world to match the envisioned ideal, by totalitarian means). The challenge of immanent social criticism is to work from within, while harnessing the transformative powers of the creative imagination.
Appealing to the imagination, the Second Discourse furnishes the image of natural man, which provides a beginning point for reflection and reorientation of the reader’s understanding of human nature. This is part of what it means to “clarify” (éclaircir) the question (of natural right), as opposed to resolving it (SD, 92; 3:123); the image orients the inquiry but does not simply answer the question posed. By raising the question of nature anew, Emile functions as Rousseau’s second sailing (to use a Socratic metaphor). As such, it orients itself toward the image that motivated the inquiry in the first place, but also brings a new standard of judgment to bear on it. The image is called upon for guidance as we form our judgments about the human condition, but somehow we must also be able to look upon it with a critical eye.7 But if we are to judge civil man in light of the standard set by Rousseau’s image of natural man, in light of what standard does he expect us to judge whether the natural man has been achieved?
Beginning with the preface and throughout Emile, Rousseau invites his readers to judge his project for themselves. “In expounding freely my sentiment, I so little expect that it be taken as authoritative that I always join to it my reasons, so that they may be weighed and I be judged” (34; 4:242). At the same time, he thinks that his readers’ standards of judgment are deeply corrupted. “All our wisdom consists in servile prejudices” (42; 4:253). Rousseau anticipates that his project will be out of step with the prevailing wisdom and may be dismissed as unrealistic. But he also challenges the value of striving to be more realistic. Proposing “what can be done,” he counters, too often amounts to proposing exactly what is done (34; 4:242–43). While limiting one’s proposals to “what can be done” may seem practical, it is less simply so than it may appear, because in order to take one’s bearings from existing conditions, one must apprehend them properly, and this is precisely what his readers are ill equipped to do. “Childhood is unknown. Starting from the false idea one has of it, the farther one goes, the more one loses one’s way” (33; 4:241–42). Insofar as his readers have a false idea of childhood, they are in no position to judge whether he has offered a sound education for children, or even whether his proposals are feasible.
Part of what Rousseau must do, then—perhaps the most important part of what he must do—is to elucidate the grounds on which his, or any, proposed education ought to be judged. To that end he provides an account not merely of what a natural education ought to look like but of how one ought to look at the subject of this or any education. “Begin, then, by studying your pupils better. For most assuredly you do not know them at all” (34; 4:242). By this Rousseau does not mean that empirical study of existing children will provide the requisite wisdom, any more than he thinks that man can be properly understood on the basis of civil man. Like the statue of Glaucus to which he compares civil man in the preface to the Second Discourse (SD, 91; 3:122), all the examples of children one finds in civil society are deformed. The difficulty lies in discerning the genuine form of an object of knowledge that has been deformed over time by prejudice and social influence. Thus what it means to study one’s pupils “better” is not simply that one must look at them more closely or at greater length, but that one must be able to properly evaluate what one sees when one looks at them. Rousseau’s turning away from actually existing pupils to focus on an imaginary pupil is, in its own way, “practical” insofar as it is designed to help his readers see their own pupils more clearly—which is to say, to judge what they properly are. Only then might we get to the question of how to educate them.
Rousseau’s task, therefore, is not simply to add to the current discourse about a particular subject—childhood—but to challenge the prevailing construction of the subject itself. Before offering a series of recommendations about how children ought to be educated, he addresses the question of how childhood itself is to be understood, and he suggests that the true merit of his project is its elucidation of this subject. “My vision of what must be done may have been very poor, but I believe I have seen clearly the subject on which one must work” (34; 4:242). He criticizes the child-rearing experts of his day8 on the grounds that when they look at their subject, they see not children but future men. “The wisest men concentrate on what it is important for men to know without considering what children are in a condition to learn. They are always seeking the man in the child without thinking of what he is before being a man” (33–34; 4:242).
In contrast to les sages, who see children simply as protomen and thus misunderstand their subject, Rousseau juxtaposes the figure of the tender mother who appreciates the child as a child and concerns herself with the child’s present security and happiness. In effect, Rousseau encourages les sages to become more like mothers. This is perhaps not surprising given that Rousseau often counters the sophisticated “wisdom” of experts with the humble perspective of simple souls. Moreover, Rousseau is often credited with having “invented” childhood as a separate stage of life with its own requirements, inasmuch as he insists that childhood must be considered on its own terms, and we see evidence of that here. But his point here is less to celebrate childhood innocence than to use that innocence as evidence for the natural goodness of human beings. Rousseau assimilates the tender mother’s desire to protect her child from harm to a more expansive imperative that she must shield the child’s natural goodness from the corrupting effects of human opinions and social institutions. First nature itself, and then the child, is compared to a shrub on a busy path that must be protected from damaging external influences. Rousseau addresses himself to a tender and foresighted mother whom he asks to shield the child from the
