‘Émile’ in Rousseau’s Thought
Rousseau’s work, in which philosophical speculation is closely interwoven with visionary dreams, is remarkably coherent despite its many contradictions. It flows entirely from the propositions enunciated in his first treatise on the goodness of nature and the corrupting influence of society, propositions which are summed up in a celebrated passage at the beginning of Émile: ‘God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.’ Indeed, the rehabilitation of Nature was the constant theme of an age in revolt against the Christian doctrine of original sin and the Fall. Other thinkers at that period generally saw in society and its culture the strongest evidence of natural goodness and of the progress it was destined to achieve. Rousseau, on the other hand, by means of an imaginary reconstruction of primitive man and his subsequent evolution, strove in his early works to distinguish Nature from Society, and condemned the latter for having, as it were, artificially and accidentally perverted humanity. Nevertheless, he was obliged to recognize that with this evolution an accomplished fact, it was no longer possible to consider human nature apart from its natural environment. Thus, in the three major works written after his retirement in 1756, he did his best to reconcile Nature and Society by imagining the circumstances under which human groups might live according to nature and justice. The Nouvelle Héloïse describes in glowing terms a society functioning as a family unit in accordance with the principles of nature and justice. The Contrat social does the same for political society, but in the language of Law. We see, therefore, the exact position of Émile; together with its two neighbouring works it forms a coherent trilogy, which provides an answer to the question, how can the Natural Man be formed?
True, Rousseau’s interest in educational questions was evident long before Émile and preceded even the formulation of his philosophy of Nature. His twofold experience as a schoolmaster, in 1740 and 1743, had led him to compile a first Projet d’éducation. After the two treatises, he often ventured into the field of education; nor is it difficult to find traces in those writings of several theses afterwards put forward in Émile. But it is only with the Nouvelle Héloïse, where Rousseau imagines a family group living according to Nature, that education begins to take first place in his thought. The novel includes a long chapter in which, according to his own assertion, is to be found ‘all that is most daring in Émile.’ This latter work resumes and systematizes in the form of a lengthy treatise the views expressed in Héloïse. Chimerical as it may seem to us in many respects, it can safely be said to be the most realistic of Rousseau’s essays. The educational question is the most concrete of all those which he raises in his endeavour to reconcile Nature and Society; and for the first time, instead of envisaging an imaginary society as a thing of the
