Emile

Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In Book I, Rousseau discusses not only his fundamental philosophy but also begins to outline how one would have to raise a child to conform with that philosophy. He begins with the early physical and emotional development of the infant and the child. Emile attempts to "find a way of resolving the contradictions between the natural man who is 'all for himself' and the implications of life in society". The famous opening line does not bode well for the educational project—"Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man". But Rousseau acknowledges that every society "must choose between making a man or a citizen" and that the best "social institutions are those that best know how to denature man, to take his absolute existence from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the I into the common unity". To "denature man" for Rousseau is to suppress some of the "natural" instincts that he extols in The Social Contract, published the same year as Emile, but while it might seem that for Rousseau such a process would be entirely negative, this is not so. Emile does not lament the loss of the noble savage. Instead, it is an effort to explain how natural man can live within society. Many of Rousseau's suggestions in this book are restatments of the ideas of other educational reformers. For example, he endorses Locke's program of "harden bodies against the intemperance of season, climates, elements; against hunger, thirst, fatigue". He also emphasizes the perils of swaddling and the benefits of mothers nursing their own infants. Rousseau's enthusiasm for breastfeeding led him to argue: "But let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature's sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled"—a hyperbole that demonstrates Rousseau's commitment to grandiose rhetoric. As Peter Jimack, the noted Rousseau scholar, argues: "Rousseau consciously sought to find the striking, lapidary phrase which would compel the attention of his readers and move their hearts, even when it meant, as it often did, an exaggeration of his thought". And, in fact, Rousseau's pronouncements, although not original, affected a revolution in swaddling and breastfeeding