作者：阿蘭·布魯姆 Allan Bloom

In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau summons men to hear for the first time the true history of their species. Man was born free, equal, self-sufficient, unprejudiced, and whole; now, at the end of history, he is in chains (ruled by other men or by laws he did not make), defined by relations of in equality (rich or poor, noble or commoner, master or slave), dependent, full of false opinions or superstitions, and divided between his inclinations and his duties. Nature made man a brute, but happy and good. History?—and man is the only animal with a history—by the development of his faculties and the progress of his mind has made man civilized, but unhappy and immoral. History is not a theodicy but a tale of misery and corruption.?

Emile, on the other hand, has a happy ending, and Rousseau says he cares little if men take it to be only a novel, for it ought, he says, to be the history of his species. And therewith he provides the key to Emile. It is, as Kant says, the work which attempts to reconcile nature with history, man's selfish nature with the demands of civil society, hence, inclination with duty. Man requires a healing education which returns him to himself. Rousseau's paradoxes—his attack on the arts and the sciences and his practice of them, his praise of the savage and natural freedom over against his advocacy of the ancient city, the general will and virtue, his perplexing presentations of himself as citizen, lover, and solitary—are not expressions of a troubled soul but accurate reflections of an incoherence in the structure of the world we all face, or rather, in general, do not face; and Emile is an experiment in restoring harmony to that world by reordering the emergence of man's acquisitions in such a way as to avoid the imbalances created by them, while allowing the full actualization of man's potential. Rousseau believed that his was a privileged moment, a moment when all of man's faculties had revealed themselves and when man had, furthermore, attained for the first-time knowledge of the principles of human nature. Emile is the canvas on which Rousseau tried to paint all of the soul's acquired passions and learning articulated in such a way as to cohere with man's natural whole ness. It is a Phenomenology of the Mind posing as Dr. Spock.?

Thus, Emile is one of those rare total or synoptic books, a book with which one can live and which becomes deeper as one becomes deeper, a book com parable to Plato's Republic, which it is meant to rival or supersede. But it is not recognized as such in spite of Rousseau's own judgment that it was his best book and Kant's sentiment that its publication was an event comparable to the subject to French Revolution. Of his major works it is the least studied or commented on. It is as though its force had been entirely spent on impact with men like Kant and Schiller, leaving only the somewhat cranky residue for which the book retains its fame in teacher training schools—the harangues against swaddling and in favor of breast feeding and the learning of a trade. Whatever the reasons for its loss of favor (and this would make an interesting study) Emile merits advocacy for it is a truly great book, one which lays out for the first time and with the greatest clarity and vitality the modern way of posing the problems of psychology.?

By this I mean that Rousseau is at the source of the tradition which replaces virtue and vice as the causes of a man's being good or bad, happy or miserable, with such pairs of opposites as sincere/insincere, authentic/inauthentic, inner directed/other-directed, real self/alienated self. All these have their source in Rousseau's analysis of amour de soi and amour-propre, a division within man's soul resulting from man's bodily and spiritual dependence on other men which ruptures his original unity or wholeness. This distinction is supposed to give the true explanation of the tension within man which had in the past been under stood to be a result of the opposed and irreconcilable demands of the body and the soul. Emile gives the comprehensive account of the genesis of amour-propre, displays its rich and multifarious phenomena (spreads the peacock's tail, as it were), and maps man's road back to himself from his spiritual exile (his history) during which he wandered through nature and society, a return to himself which incorporates into his substance all the cumbersome treasures he gathered end route. This analysis supersedes that based on the distinction between body and soul—which in its turn had activated the quest for virtue, the taming and controlling of the body's desires under the guidance of the soul's reason—and initiates the great longing to be one's self and the hatred of alienation which characterizes all modern thought. The wholeness, unity, or singleness of man—a project ironically outlined in the Republic—is the serious intention of Emile and almost all that came afterward.?

Emile is written in defense of man against a great threat which bids fair to cause a permanent debasement of the species. That threat is the apparently almost inevitable universal dominance of a certain low human type which Rousseau was the first to isolate and name: the bourgeois. Rousseau's enemy was not the ancient regime, its throne, its altar, or its nobility. He was certain that all that was finished, that the inner conviction had left the ancient regime and that revolution would shortly sweep it away to make room for a new world based on the egalitarian principles of the new philosophy. The struggle would concern the kind of man who was going to inhabit that world, for the striking element of the situation was and is that the menace comes from a low human consequence of a true theoretical insight. The bourgeois is the incarnation of the political science of Hobbes and Locke, the first principles of which Rousseau accepted. Here Tocqueville's scheme in Democracy in America, which is adopted from Rousseau, casts light on his intention. Equality is now almost a providential fact; no one believes any longer in the justice of the principles on which the old distinctions between ranks or classes were made and which were the basis of the old regime. The only question remaining is whether universal tyranny will result or freedom can accompany equality. It is to the formation of free men and free communities founded on egalitarian principles to which Rousseau and Tocqueville are dedicated.?

Now, who, according to Rousseau, is the bourgeois? Most simply, following Hegel's formula, he is the man motivated by fear of violent death, the man whose primary concern is preservation or comfortable preservation. Or, to de scribe the inner workings of his soul, he is the man who, when dealing with others, thinks only of himself, and, in his understanding of himself, thinks only of others. He is a role-player. The bourgeois is contrasted by Rousseau, on the one hand, with the natural man, who is whole and simply concerned with himself, and with the citizen, on the other, whose very being consists in his relation to his city, who understands his good to be identical with the common good. The bourgeois distinguishes his own good from the common good, but his good requires society, and hence he exploits others while depending on them. He must define himself in relation to them. The bourgeois comes to be when men no longer believe that there is a common good, when the notion of the father land decays. Rousseau hints that he follows Machiavelli in attributing this decay to Christianity, which promised the heavenly fatherland and thereby took away the supports from the earthly fatherland, leaving social men who have no reason to sacrifice private desire to public duty.?

What Christianity revealed, modern philosophy gave an account of: man is not naturally a political being; he has no inclination toward justice. By nature, he cares only for his own preservation, and all of his faculties are directed to that end. Men are naturally free and equal in the decisive respects: they have no known authority over them, and they all pursue the same independent end. Men have a natural right to do what conduces to their preservation. All of this Rousseau holds to be true. He differs only in that he does not believe that the duty to obey the laws of civil society can be derived from self-interest. Hobbes and Locke burdened self-interest with more than it can bear; in every decisive instance the sacrifice of the public to the private follows from nature. They produced hypocrites who make promises they cannot intend to keep and who feign concern for others out of concern for themselves, thus using others as means to their ends and alienating themselves. Civil society becomes merely the combat zone for the pursuit of power—control over things and especially over men. With enlightenment the illusions are dispelled, and men learn that they care about life more than country, family, friendship, or honor. Fanaticism, although dangerous and distorting, could at least produce selfless and extraordinary deeds. But now it gives way to calculation. And pride, although the spur to domination, is allied with that noble indifference to life which seems the condition of freedom and the resistance to tyranny. But quenched by fear, pride gives way to vanity, the concern for petty advantages over others. This diminishing of man is the apparent result of enlightenment about his true nature.?

In response to this challenge Rousseau undertakes a rethinking of man's nature in its relation to the need for society which history has engendered. What he attempts is to present an egalitarian politics which can rival Plato's politics in moral appeal rather than one which debases man for the sake of the will-of-the wisp, security. He takes an ordinary boy and experiments with the possibility of his becoming an autonomous man—morally and intellectually independent, as was Plato's philosopher-king, an admittedly rare, and hence aristocratic, human type. The success of this venture would prove the dignity of man as man, of all normal men, and thus provide a high-level ground for the choice of democracy. Since Rousseau, overcoming of the bourgeois has been regarded as almost identical with the problem of the realization of true democracy and the achievement of "genuine personality."?

The foregoing reflections give a clue to the literary character of Emile. The two great moral-political traditions displaced by the modern natural right teachings were accompanied by great works of what may loosely be called poetry. This poetry depicts great human types who embody the alternative visions of the right way of life, who make that way of life plausible, who excite admiration and emulation. The Bible, on the highest level, gives us prophets and saints; and in the realm of ordinary possibility, it gives us the pious man. Homer and Plutarch give us, at the peak, heroes; and, for everyday fare, gentlemen. But modern philosophy could not inspire a great poetry corresponding to itself. The man whom it produced is too contemptible for the noble Muse; he can never be a model for those who love the beautiful. This failing is symptomatic of the maiming of man effected by the prosaic new philosophy. Rousseau picks up the challenge and dares to enter into competition with the greatest of the old poets. He creates a human type whose charms can rival those of the saint or the tragic hero, the natural man, and thereby shows that his thought can comprehend the beautiful in man.?

Emile consists of a series of stories, and its teaching comes to light only when one has grasped each in its complex detail and artistic unity. Interpretation of this first Bildungsroman requires a union of l'esprit de géométrie and l'esprit de finesse, a union which it both typifies and teaches. It is impossible here to do more than indicate the plan of the work and tentatively describe its general intention in the hope of convincing others how imperative it is to study this work.?

I?

Emile is divided into two large segments. Books I-III are devoted to the rearing of a civilized savage, a man who cares only about himself, who is independent and self-sufficient and on whom no duties are imposed that run counter to his inclinations and divide him, whose knowledge of the crafts and the sciences does not involve his incorporation into the system of public opinion and division of labor. Books IV-V attempt to bring this atomic individual into human society and toward moral responsibility on the basis of his inclinations and his generosity.?

Rousseau's intention in the first segment comes most clearly to light in its culmination when Jean-Jacques, the tutor, gives his pupil the first and only book he is to read prior to early adulthood. Before presenting his gift, Jean Jacques expresses to the reader the general sentiment that he hates all books—including implicitly and especially the book of books, the guide of belief and conduct, the Bible. Books act as intermediaries between men and things; they attach men to the opinions of others rather than making them understand on their own or leaving them in ignorance. They excite the imagination, increasing thereby the desires, the hopes, and the fears beyond the realm of the necessary. All the early rearing is an elaborate attempt to avoid the emergence of the imagination which, according to the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, is the faculty that turns man's intellectual progress into the source of his misery. But, in spite of this general injunction against books and in direct contradiction to what he has just said, Rousseau does introduce a book, one which presents a new teaching and a new mode of teaching. The book is Robinson Crusoe, and it is not meant to be merely a harmless amusement for Emile but to provide him with a vision of the whole and a standard for the judgment of both things and men.?

Robinson Crusoe is a solitary man in the state of nature, outside of civil society and unaffected by the deeds or opinions of men. His sole concern is his preservation and comfort. All his strength and reason are dedicated to those ends, and utility is his guiding principle, one which organizes all his knowledge. The world he sees contains neither gods nor heroes; there are no conventions. Neither the memory of Eden nor the hope of salvation affects his judgment. Nature and natural needs are all that is of concern to him. Robinson Crusoe is a kind of Bible of the new science of nature and reveals man's true original condition.?

This novel provides, moreover, a new kind of play for the first activity of the imagination. In the first place, the boy does not imagine beings or places which do not exist. He imagines himself in situations and subject to necessities which are part of his experience. Actually, his imagination divests itself of the imaginary beings that seem so real in ordinary society and are of human making. He sees himself outside of the differences of nation and religion which cover over nature and are the themes of ordinary poetry. Second, he does not meet with heroes to whom he must subject himself or whom he is tempted to rival. Every man can be Crusoe and actually is Crusoe to the extent that he tries to be simply man. Crusoe's example does not alienate Emile from himself as do the other fictions of poetry; it helps him to be himself. He understands his hero's motives perfectly and does not ape deeds the reasons for which he cannot imagine.?

A boy, who imagining himself alone on an island uses all of his energy in thinking about what he needs to survive and how to procure it, will have a reason for all his learning; its relevance to what counts is assured; and the fear, reward, or vanity that motivate ordinary education are not needed. Nothing will be accepted on authority; the evidence of his senses and the call of his desires will be his authorities. Emile, lost in a woods and hungry, finds his way home to lunch by his knowledge of astronomy. For him astronomy is not a discipline forced on him by his teachers, or made attractive by the opportunity to show off, or an expression of his superstition. Thus, Rousseau shows how the sciences which historically made men more dependent on one another can serve their independence. Thus the Emile who moves in civil society will put different values on things and activities than do other men. The division of labor which produces superfluity and makes men partial—pieces of a great machine—will seem like a prison, and an unnecessary prison, to him. He will treasure his wholeness. He will know real value, which is the inverse of the value given things by the vanity of social men. And he will respect the producers of real value and despise the producers of value founded on vanity. Nature will be always present to him, not as doctrine but as a part of his very senses. This novel, properly prepared for and used, teaches him the use of the sciences and makes him inwardly free in spite of society's constraints.?

And this constitutes Rousseau's response to Plato. Plato said that all men always begin by being prisoners in the cave. The cave is the condition of survival resulting from being a member of civil society. The needs, fears, hopes, and indignations of mutually dependent men produce a network of opinions and myths which make communal life possible and give it meaning. Men never experience nature directly but always mix their beliefs into what they see. Liberation from the cave requires the discovery of nature under the many layers of convention, the separating out of what is natural from what is man-made. Only a genius is capable of attaining a standpoint from which he can see the cave as a cave. That is why the philosopher, the rarest human type, can alone be autonomous and free of prejudice. Now, Rousseau agrees that once in the cave, genius is required to emerge from it. He, too, agrees that enlightenment is spurious and merely the substitution of one prejudice for another. He himself was born in a cave and had to be a genius to attain his insight into the human condition. His life is a testimony to the heroic character of the quest for nature. But he denies that the cave is natural. The right kind of education, one independent of society, can put a child into direct contact with nature without the intermixture of opinion. Plato purified poetry so as to make its view of the world less hostile to reason, and he replaced the ordinary lies by a noble lie. Rousseau banishes poetry altogether and suppresses all lies. At most he gives Emile Robinson Crusoe, who is not another but only himself. Above all, no gods. Emile, at the age of fifteen, has a standpoint outside of civil society, one fixed by his inclinations and his reason, from which he sees that his fellow men are prisoners in a cave and by which he is freed from any temptation to fear the punishments or seek the honors which are part of it. Rousseau, the genius, has made it possible for ordinary men to be free, and in this way, he proves in principle the justice of democracy.?

Thus Rousseau's education of the young Emile confines itself to fostering the development of the faculties immediately connected with his preservation. His desire for the pleasant and avoidance of the painful is given by nature. His senses are the natural means to those ends. And the physical sciences, like mathematics, physics, and astronomy, are human contrivances which, if solidly grounded on the pure experience of the senses, extend their range and protect them against the errors of imagination. The tutor's responsibility is, in the first place, to let the senses develop in relation to their proper objects; and, secondly, to encourage the learning of the sciences as the almost natural outcome of the use of the senses. Rousseau calls this tutelage, particularly with reference to the part that has to do with the senses, negative education. All animals go through a similar apprenticeship to life. But with man something intervenes which impedes or distorts nature's progress, and therefore a specifically negative education, a human effort, is required. This new factor is the growth of the passions, particularly fear of death and amour-propre. They—fed by imagination and in terminizing with the desires and the senses—transform judgment and cause a special kind of merely human, or mythical, interpretation of the world. The negative education means specifically the tutor's artifices invented to prevent the emergence of these two passions which attach men to one another and to opinions.?

With respect to fear of death, Rousseau flatly denies that man does naturally fear death, and hence denies the premise of Hobbes's political philosophy (as well as what appears to be the common opinion of all political thinkers). He does not disagree with the modern natural right thinkers that man's only natural vocation is self-preservation or that he seeks to avoid pain. But Rousseau insists that man is not at first aware of the meaning of death, nor does man change his beliefs or ways of life to avoid it. Death, as Hobbes's man sees it, is a product of the imagination; and only on the basis of that imagination will he give up his natural idle and pleasure-loving life in order to pursue power after power so as to forestall death's assaults. The conception that life can be extinguished turns life, which is the condition of living, into an end itself. No animal is capable of such a conception, and, therefore, no animal thus transforms his life. Rousseau suggests that a man can be kept at the animal's unconscious level in regard to death long enough for him to have established a fixed and unchanging positive way of life and be accustomed to pain as well as knowledgeable enough not to be overwhelmed by the fact of death when he becomes fully aware of it. Ordinarily fear of death leads to one of two possible responses: superstition or the attempt to conquer death. The first gives hope that gods will protect men here or provide them with another life. The second, that of the enlightenment, uses science to prolong life and establish solid political regimes, putting off the inevitable and absorbing men in the holding action. Neither faces the fact of death, and both pervert consciousness. This is what Socrates meant by the dictum that philosophy is "learning how to die." All men die, and many die boldly or resolutely. But practically none does so without illusion. Those illusions constitute the horizon of the cave whose conventions are designed to support human hopes and fears. Thus, to know how to die is equivalent to being liberated from the cave. And Rousseau, who argues that there is no natural cave, therefore also concludes that men naturally know how to die. "Priests, doctors and philosophers unlearn us how to die." He does not suggest that every savage or every baby has meditated on death as did Socrates. He means that, naturally, every man has none of the illusions about death which pervert life and require the Socratic effort. The tutor's function is to forestall the ministrations of priests, doctors, and philosophers which engender and nourish the fear of death. The simple lesson is that man must rely on himself and recognize and accept necessity; Rousseau shows how this can be achieved without the exercise of the rarest virtues.?

Although fear of death makes it difficult to accept necessity, it is amour propre that makes it difficult to recognize necessity. This is the murky passion that accounts for the "interesting" relationships men have with one another, and it is the keystone of Rousseau's psychological teaching. The primary intention of the negative education is to prevent amour de soi from turning into amour propre, for this is the true source of man's dividedness. Rousseau's treatment of this all-important theme is best introduced by his discussion of the meaning of a baby's tears.?

Tears are a baby's language and naturally express physical discomfort and are pleas for help. The parent or nurse responds by satisfying a real need, either feeding the baby or removing the source of pain. But at some point, the child is likely to recognize that his tears have the effect of making things serve him through the intermediary of adults. The world responds to his wishes. His will can make things move to satisfy his desires. At this point the baby loses interest in providing himself with things; his inner motive to become strong enough to get the things for himself which others now provide for him is transformed into a desire to control the instrument which provides him with those things. His concern with his physical needs is transformed into a passion to control the will of adults. His tears become commands and frequently no longer are related to his real needs but only to testing his power. He cannot stop it from raining by crying, but he can make an adult change his mind. He becomes aware of will; and he knows that wills, as opposed to necessity, are subject to command, that they are changing. He quickly learns that, for his life, control over men is more useful than adaptation to things. Therefore, the disposition of adults towards him replaces his bodily needs as his primary concern. Every wish that is not fulfilled could, in his imagination, be fulfilled if the adult only willed it that way. His experience of his own will teaches him that others' wills are selfish and plastic. He therefore seeks for power over men rather than the use of things. He becomes a skillful psychologist, able to manipulate others.?

With the possibility of change of wills emerges the justification of blame and hence of anger. Nature does not have intentions; men do. Anger is caused by intentional wrong, and the child learns to see intention to do wrong in what opposes him. He becomes an avenger. A squalling brat is most often testing his power. If he gets what he wants, he is a master. If he fails, he is angry, resentful, and likely to become slavish. In either event he has entered into a dialectic of mastery and slavery which will occupy him for his whole life. His natural and healthy self-love and self-esteem (amour de soi), gives way to a self-love relative to other men's opinions of him; henceforth he can esteem himself only if others esteem him. Ultimately, he makes the impossible demand that others care for him more than they care for themselves. The most interesting of psychological phenomena is this doubling or dividing of self-love; it is one of the few distinctively human phenomena (no animal can be insulted); and from it flow anger, pride, vanity, resentment, revenge, jealousy, indignation, competition, slavishness, humility, capriciousness, rebelliousness, and almost all the other passions that give poets their themes. In these first seeds of amour-propre as seen in tears, one can recognize the source of the human problem. Rousseau's solution to amour-propre, which would seem inevitably to lead to conflict among men, their using one another as means to their own ends, and the need for government and law, is, as with the fear of death, to prevent, at least for a long time, its emergence; no self-overcomings are required. The child must be dependent on things and not on wills. The tutor and his helpers must dis appear, as it were, and everything that happens to the child must seem to be an inevitable effect of nature. Against necessity he will not rebel; it is only the possibility of overcoming necessity or the notion that there is a will lurking behind it which disturbs his unclouded relation to things as they are. It is the intermediary of human beings in the satisfaction of need that causes the problem.?

Now all of this has even more significance than is immediately apparent, for Rousseau suggests that superstition, all attribution of intention to inanimate things or to the world as a whole, is a result of the early experience of will. The parent in moving things at the child's command gives the child the impression that all things are moved by intention and that command or prayer can put them at man's disposal. Moreover, anger itself animates. The child who is angry at what does not bend to his will attributes a will to it. This is the case with all anger, as a moment's reflection will show. Anger is allied with and has its origin in amour-propre. Once it is activated, it finds intention and responsibility everywhere. Finally, it animates rivers, storms, the heavens, and all sorts of benevolent and malevolent beings. It moralizes the universe in the service of amour-propre. In early childhood, there is a choice: the child can see everything or nothing as possessing a will like his own. Either whim or necessity governs the world for him. Neither is true, but for the child, the latter is the more salutary because nature is necessity and the primary things are necessary. The passions must submit to necessity, whereas necessity cannot be changed by the passions. Before he comes to terms with will, a man must have understood and accepted necessity. Otherwise, he is likely to spend his life obeying and fearing gods or trying to become one. Rousseau, unlike more recent proponents of freedom, recognized that without necessity the realm of freedom can have no meaning.?