New York Diary

L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. Peut-être ils sont les chaînes d'une ignorance inculte et stupide, heeuuu?

I've been reading Rousseau lately--not The Social Contract, which it seems that everybody reads at sometime or another, but Emile, which I first encountered when I was a freshman in high school. I didn't read it then, but I recently encountered an unglamorous Everyman's Library copy of that text in my grandfather's library, and I remembered the old intention to read it. My grandfather generously gifted the book to me.

Let me say two things upfront, for those of you who may not be familiar with either the book or its author. First, Emile is primarily a discourse on education, a hypothetical educational project in which Rousseau explains the best way to teach a child so that he grows into a self-aware, happy man. Second, Rousseau himself is a right bastard: sexist, racist, and full of himself to boot. This is not obvious from The Social Contract (or at least, I don't remember it much in that work), but it is clear as a bell in Emile

This does not make any of his educational ideas self-evidently false.

But there is something else that I dislike about Rousseau's weltenschuang (if one can appropriately mix the French and the German here)--something that I dare say is a bit more intellectual and a bit more to the substance of Rousseau's educational claims. Fundamentally, I really just don't like philosophies (and theologies) which privilege innocence, the "state of nature," and stupidity (not that their proponents would use that word, of course). Rousseau is the creator of the "Noble Savage." He is perhaps best known, in this day and age, for his declaration, "Man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains." His educational program consists, primarily, of shielding the child from the "corrupting influence" of other people and the things that they have created in this world; he suggests that we should not force a child to learn, but rather that, by secretly controlling everything from his friendships to the activities which he witnesses, we will create a world in which the child decides he is interested in "the right" things, and then chooses to learn about them on his own.

But I don't buy it. Of course it is desirable for a child--or an adult, for that matter--to be interested in the world and eager to learn things about it. But Rousseau's Noble Savage idea is a direct descendent of the Church's weird privileging of innocence and ignorance (consider the ideal state in the Garden of Eden: very, very like the state of Rousseau's ideal modern man). The problem with both of these conceptions is the idea that growing up, becoming a mature, well-educated, industrious, sexually desirable and desirous adult, is taken to be a bad thing. For both Rousseau and the church against which he so often thinks he is arguing, experience distances one from the ideal (whether we style that ideal as "savage freedom" or "Godly innocence not yet sullied by our inevitable human failings"). For Rousseau, education consists in giving a boy enough self-knowledge that his natural virtues overpower the corrupting and unhappy ways of the other people that he will meet when he is an adult.

Rousseau takes this to be a claim about freedom and happiness. His educational program is geared towards letting a child choose his own interests from the beginning, and stumbling and having to work through his own (albeit child-sized) hardships (even suggesting that it is better that a child be allowed to make his own mistakes and die in the process than to have him grow into an adult who did not have the same liberty-filled education). A self-directed life like this is, for Rousseau, the only truly happy life. So, while at the beginning we only give the child the perpetual illusion of choice while simultaneously carefully controlling all the aspects of the world he sees, later on the man benefits from always doing that which he is naturally predisposed to do, and by acting in harmony with his desires instead of getting sucked into doing what other people think is important.

In a world where there is prestige in the acquisition of things we neither particularly want or need, in which we let magazines tell us we are too fat or too ugly or too sexually incapable, in which people with all the luxuries they could want are chronically depressed and engage in all sorts of self-harm, what Rousseau says is somewhat compelling. He might be right that people are unhappy and unfulfilled in life if we do not have full moral control over our selves; he might be right that psychological pressure is the source of many of our gravest ills; he might be right that we ought to reconsider what we mean when we say that we are "free."

But Rousseau is naive to think we can escape society in the way that he suggests. He wants to educate Emile to be an individual among men - but he runs into deep and untenable difficulties when he considers love and marriage, for example. (He decides, ultimately, that the only way for Emile to continue to act as an individual is to have his wife act always according to his will, as an extension of himself: "The whole education [of women] ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them and to make life agreeable and sweet to them--these are the duties of women at all times." Note that this is not just an unconsidered sexism; Rousseau has written himself into a wall, strongly privileging the family unit but also placing as his first goal the absolute autonomy of his student, and that man's ability to always act freely on his desires. If Emile must always be able to make free choices, and if he is also to be able to live a life with somebody else, then it follows that she's going to have to always go along with his choices.) Rousseau finds himself in a tight spot when he dismisses everything but practical education, too, suggesting that for their own benefit all children should learn a manual trade so that they can work and be their own bosses--but this at the same time deprives society of everything from firefighters to doormen. And Rousseau doesn't even consider the possibility of the occasional failure of socialization under his progam; his entire scheme rests on the assumption that a child will on his own choose to have principles which are broadly compatible with the principles and values of the society which he will grow up to join. But what if he never wants to study basic math? What if he takes pleasure in hurting animals? What if he just learns to kill his own food--a perfectly morally defensible position, yes, but perhaps not if he later lives in an American suburb and takes this to mean that he should strangle the pigeons and shoot the dogs.

And this is precisely the problem. Rousseau pretends he wants his child to learn about himself and to discover his own desires, but in fact he wants the child to discover on his own the desires of the society away from which he is being diligently kept by his loving parents. In the meantime, he may well be discovering a great many natural principles on his own, but he is also being deprived of much of what we know, and of the kind of rigor with which we come to know things well. It may not be pleasant to memorize verb conjugations or to study the laws of physical motion (though it might be), but it is effective--and it is by doing the hard intellectual work of learning (at whatever level) that we come to know something well. Experts are made, not born.

Moreover, knowledge is progressive. The idea that a child should start from scratch when we already know so much seems to me at best ignorant and at worst immoral. The reason we teach what we know is that we already know it. A man might feel a sense of accomplishment when he invents the wheel, but surely that's nothing more than an illusion if in fact the wheel has already been around for millenia. Better to teach the man about kinetics and let him undertake a real accomplishment, let him invent a real new thing.

And better to grant that the relationships we make, the things we learn, the education we foster, is a good thing representative of very real and very desirable growth and maturity--rather than a continuous progression away from the ideal of self-centered desire fulfillment. For if it is instead the latter of these two options, then surely the prescription must be to stop our social interaction, our education, and, in the final estimation, our life as a respectable, caring, productive human being. In the final estimation, this is a philosophy neither of hope nor of happiness.

And besides all that, the whole darned program is entirely impractical and impossible to implement anyhow. I find that reassuring, I confess.

posted by Skay @ 12:42 AM