Nature and the Individual in Rousseau's Emile, an Outline:  

I. Introduction

• Rousseau's Emile is an exploration of education.

• The goal of education, according to Rousseau, should be to produce someone like Emile at twenty years old.

• In developing his educational theory, Rousseau draws on his ideas about reality, knowledge, social and political structures, and human nature.

• Rousseau does not distinguish between education and upbringing, as he believes the educator's role is to enable the full development of the student, including moral, emotional, physical, social, and intellectual maturity.

• Rousseau addresses themes of educational theory, and also has recourse to his ideas about the nature of reality, knowledge, social and political structures, and human nature.

• Rousseau seeks to raise Emile as a "natural man" who is also a virtuous citizen.

• The challenge is to raise a natural man who can enter social relations without being distorted.

• The way to achieve individual happiness and social strength, on Rousseau’s view, is to educate individuals in accord with their natural character and capacities.

II. The Child

• Rousseau was not a feminist.

• Sophie is to be raised and educated to be a companion for Emile, with Emile's experience taking precedence.

• From birth, Emile embodies the good, and Rousseau advocates for "negative education," where the teacher allows the child's natural characteristics to develop unfettered.

• Caregivers should avoid restricting the infant's movements and guide the child's experience to allow his natural goodness to develop.

• Children should not be raised with the desire to please others or expect others to do as they please.

• Cities are detrimental to a child's development, and it is better for nature to be his teacher.

• Emile gathers impressions and knowledge through exploration of his surroundings.

• Rousseau's empiricism is evident in his belief that everything learned comes from sensory engagement with the environment.

• Rousseau believes that all people have an innate moral sense and understanding of fairness and justice.

• Amour de soi (self-love) is self-oriented, and Rousseau wants children to grasp what makes something theirs so that this sense is not extended beyond its proper range.

• Rousseau uses the idea of the "state of nature" to understand and justify features of people’s lives, especially of their political lives.

• Europeans began to use the idea of what was called the “state of nature” as a way of understanding and justifying features of their lives, especially of their political lives.

• The political theorists of the time, including Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, used another intellectual device to account for how societies developed out of an asocial natural condition, and that device is what they called the social contract.

• Rousseau uses the principle of mixing labor with the land to help Emile grasp what it means for something to be his property.

• Emile learns not only what it means for something to belong to him but also what it means for something to belong to someone else.

• Many things that people teach children are pointless because they are not ready for it.

• Rousseau thinks that developing his own language, and the way of engaging the world that it carries with it, is a process not even remotely well along at this point in Emile’s development.

• Rousseau objects to teaching reading to children of this age and thinks that Emile is likely to develop an interest in reading when he sees something of value in it.

• Rousseau will not teach the young Emile arithmetic or geometry either, and for roughly the same reasons.

• Emile learns what he needs to know and develops his strengths and capacities in the most useful way possible through guided interaction with his environment.

• Emile also has extensive opportunity to develop physically, which is as important for Emile’s overall education as anything else.

III. The Adolescent

• As Emile grows older, the pedagogical principles remain the same, but the content of his education expands with his passions, abilities, and sensibilities.

• It is important for Emile to know not what there is to be known but what for him is useful to know.

• Emile will seek out what is interesting and useful for him, and Rousseau will make his curricular and pedagogical decision on that basis.

• Rousseau will give Emile Robinson Crusoe to read, as it represents a man in relation to nature without complex social relations.

• Emile has a firm background in the knowledge and understanding of his natural environment based in experience and usefulness.

• With puberty, Emile's emotional life begins to assert itself.

• Amour de soi is the source of the other passions.

• The challenge in education is to cultivate a natural benevolence, which becomes all the more necessary and difficult as Emile enters the broader society.

• If allowed to develop, the urge to advance oneself at the expense of others or even to evaluate oneself in relation to others (both born of amour propre) gives rise to jealousy and pride.

• With respect to talking with Emile about sex, Rousseau advises honesty and truthfulness but also saying as little as possible.

• In the study of history, the worst historians for a young man are those who make judgments.

• Facts are emphasized, and Emile should make his own judgments to learn to know men.

• Rousseau thinks that it is a mistake to introduce children to religion.

• It is far better to wait until Emile is mature enough to make some sense of religious ideas, and he will then be free to make whatever use of them he sees fit.

• The even minimal introduction of religious matters brings Rousseau and Emile to the study of speculative matters, which include metaphysics and epistemology.

• Rousseau was suspicious of religious authority and tradition.

• If people do not blindly accept tradition, then they need other sources for knowledge, and this rule applies to religious knowledge no less than to knowledge of nature, people, and morals.

• Rousseau advocates the blend of empiricism and rationalism to which we alluded earlier.

• People are able to know the world around them through experience.

• Rousseau accepted the recent discoveries of Isaac Newton, like most of his contemporaries, and the general view of the material world that they expressed.

• Rousseau clearly endorses a dualistic conception of human being.

• The first is a version of what is commonly called the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which in Rousseau’s hands.

• The second argument for the existence of God that Rousseau believes to be implied by nature’s passivity is what is commonly called the argument from design, or the teleological argument, and it was also widely accepted in the eighteenth century.

• For Rousseau, they give him what he calls “articles of faith” that allow him to fill out other aspects of his general philosophic conception.

• God is not only an intelligence that is sufficiently powerful to animate the world and to give it order but also the source of nature’s inherent goodness.

• A second implication of the goodness of God and nature is Rousseau’s attribution to people of a natural benevolence, itself an aspect of each individual’s innate moral sense.

• Rousseau proposes, the most coherent way to understand our own freedom is as the freedom to will the good and to pursue justice.

• These are the conceptions of nature, knowledge, human being, and religion to which Emile is exposed.

• Rousseau clearly thinks, though, that because they are so reasonable and clear, Emile can be expected to find them congenial ways to understand himself, his world, and his God.

IV. The Citizen

• At this point in his life, Emile's attention will be taken by matters of the heart, and his life will advance necessarily as a member of a specific society.

• Emile’s life partner must herself be educated in such a way that she and Emile can forge a bond that will be beneficial for them both.

• Rousseau takes a position that is difficult because it clashes thoroughly with how in our time we think about women’s place in society, the equality of women and men, and the education of women.

• Rousseau refers to Plato’s “civil promiscuity which throughout confounds the two sexes in the same employments and in the same labors and which cannot fail to engender the most intolerable abuses”.

• In Rousseau’s opinion, men and women should complement, not reflect, one another.

• Sophie is no exception, are docile and subject to proprieties.

• Girls are by their natures not able to examine difficult matters rationally, religion among the more important of them.

• All of Sophie’s education is based on the assumption that her function in life will be to support Emile.

• When they have both reached the point that independently they cannot develop further, they will be introduced.

• Rousseau reveals to Emile that he is in fact not quite ready to settle down with Sophie.

• To reach that point, Rousseau tells Emile that he must leave Sophie for two years of travel, after which he may return and settle down with her.

• Emile’s challenge in his travels is to explore relations with fellow citizens, so he now must undertake the study of government.

• The conflict is the tension between his place as a natural man and the necessity that he live as a citizen in a society and a polity.

• Rousseau introduces the concept of the "general will".

• In order to do that, though, one first has to have a sense of the “principles of government,” by which Rousseau means an adequate theory of government that will provide the criteria to evaluate existing governing arrangements and state institutions.

• Even in the state of nature, he notes, there are families, and individuals grow up subject to some degree of authority.

• The nature of that agreement is what forms the basis of legitimate government.

• Each of us puts his goods, his person, his life, and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and we as a body accept each member as a part indivisible from the whole.

• It is the general will that orients these relations.

• The idea of the general will is critical for Rousseau’s understanding of political life and of the character of a citizen, and by implication what it is to educate for citizenship.

• One of the reasons for the difficulty is that Rousseau is struggling here with a fundamental problem of philosophy, which is the relation of the one and the many.

• Modern liberalism developed sufficiently through the eighteenth century to inform the most significant political developments of the time, the American and French revolutions, and it has developed greater maturity through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as it continues to develop today.

• From its earliest days, the liberal justification of the state is to protect individuals’ rights and entitlements.

• Rousseau has problems with both the Platonic and the liberal alternatives.

• With its emphasis on the individual, it can conceive only of a many, but not a “one”.

• Some liberals have happily noticed this, as, for example, did Margaret Thatcher when she famously claimed that there is no such thing as society.

• Something must be shared, or held in common, by people in order to engender a unity or community, and whatever this is provides meaning and purpose for individuals.

• The individualism of liberalism fails to enable the creation of a unity out of a meaningful many.

• In a society composed of natural men, which is to say of people brought up and educated as Emile has been, all of the individuals will share the traits and implications of natural, undistorted reason and of natural virtue, or the moral sense.

• In a society of natural men, then, the individual will, which is to say each person’s interests, good, virtue, and so forth, will accord with the general will.

• Freedom and justice, rather, require the compatibility of the individual will with the general will, a condition possible only in a society composed of free, natural men and women.

• These are people educated as Emile has been (and as Sophie has been, if we are prepared to grant Rousseau the sexism embedded in the distinction between them as he draws it).

V. Education

• Thus educated, Emile the man and citizen takes up his life with Sophie and his place in society.

• Like Plato, Rousseau holds that the general role or purpose of education in a society is to enable the development of the virtuous individual and a sound, equally virtuous, polity.

• Rather unlike Plato, though, Rousseau thinks that the best route to these ends is to educate the natural person, and here we can begin to speak about the person rather than the man.

• Rousseau’s emphasis on the natural person is somewhat unusual for his time.

• Nature for him is entirely and absolutely good, as he states in no uncertain terms in the opening words of Emile.

• The state could be expected to have on education that he argues for a pedagogy abstracted from social circumstances.

• It is only for the natural person that the individual will can conform to the general will, which is the condition of freedom, citizenship, and a properly ordered state.

• Rousseau disagreed with Plato about the abilities of women and the reasons for their education and thought that boys and girls (and young men and women) should receive very different education.

• Aside from the distinctions based on gender, Rousseau thought that all people are by nature equal, and it is therefore in all their interests, as well as in the interest of society, that they be educated in the ways that will enable the natural character of all to emerge.

• Rousseau pays a great deal of attention to the content of education, more so than does Plato.

• Rousseau’s empiricism is the direct source of his recommendation that whenever possible, a child’s learning should come from his or her own direct experience.

• He believed that even though people are born to a considerable extent with a mind that can be described as a blank slate, which is then filled in by experience, people are also born with an innate moral sense.

• The moral sense, if the teacher can prevent it from being distorted or obscured, serves the child as an instinctive guide in drawing lessons from experience.

• Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology has the strongest impact on his sense of the content of education.

• The moral content of a child’s education is to focus on his interest in himself and on what interests him.

• Another important feature of Rousseau’s understanding of human being is that he was one of the first influential thinkers to advance the idea that childhood is a distinct phase in a person’s development.

• Academic skills and fields of study are also subject to the levels of a child’s development and are not to be forced.

• Other subjects are to be introduced as a child develops.

• Rousseau’s approach to the human and social topics is noteworthy.

• Rousseau pays as much attention to methods of instruction as he does to content, and for similar reasons.

• By a negative education, he means that the best pedagogical actions people can take are to get out of the child’s way and allow her natural propensities and goodness to flower.

• Rousseau is also convinced, and this has to do with his sense of the goodness of nature and the threats posed by society, that it is far better for a child to learn through experience with things than experience with people.

• Engaging with other people, in the context of social expectations, when a child is not ready is conducive not to learning and development but to the deleterious effects of amour propre.

• In other aspects of instructional method, Rousseau draws his ideas from his sense of the developmental character of children.

• Rousseau does not have much to say about where education is to take place, but what he does have to say, he is adamant about.

• Because nature is inherently good, and because society tends to be corrupt and a corrupting influence, it is almost necessary that a child be removed from social circumstance as early as possible.

• Even as an infant, we ought to attend to an understanding of a person’s nature, and so, as he advises, we ought not to swaddle a child because such constriction impedes her natural freedom.

• Rousseau was a broad, deep, and idiosyncratic thinker.

• There is no doubt much of what Rousseau thinks that any one or more of people disagree with, but there is also quite a bit of good sense here.

VI. Conclusion

• The question we might ask, and we could ask it with respect to Plato as well, is that given how different our circumstances are from Rousseau’s, is it even possible to incorporate into our teaching and learning environments anything that he recommends?

• The answer to this question, and again, it also applies to Plato, and for that matter to anyone’s ideas and recommendations, is that we are best advised to regard them as pointers rather than as literal prescriptions.