The Artifice of Human Nature: Rousseau and Herder

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Passages from this work are taken from J-J. Rousseau, Emile or on Education, 532; henceforth Emile.

2. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 12; hereafter Second Discourse.

3. Ibid., 13. Diderot seems to deliberately ignore this aspect of Rousseau's account when claiming that Rousseau preaches “a return to the forest,” Diderot, Réfutation de L'Homme, 431.

4. E.g. Natasha Gill applies the nature-nurture distinction in her analysis of Locke and Rousseau; see Gill, Educational Philosophy, 24–6, 59, 190, 250. Anne Vila also makes use of this distinction when commenting on Diderot in Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 93. Also see Wirth, “Nature versus Nurture.”

5. See, e.g., Prinz, The Emotional Construction, 37, 143.

6. Fernando Vidal for instance writes: “Coupled with the appeal to nature as the cognitive and moral authority, the Enlightenment return to nature was supposed to help liberate humanity from passions and false traditions,” Vidal, “Onanism,” 279.

7. See, e.g., Gill, Educational Philosophy, 187–91 and Fuchs, “Nature and Bildung,” 158.

8. He makes the same point in the Favre Manuscipt; see Emile, 57.

9. Nicholas Dent notes that for Emile's education it is paramount that his “social environment as well as inanimate surroundings” are structured in a certain way and stresses the active role of the teacher in creating such an environment; see Dent, Rousseau, 87, 97.

10. Some have argued that Rousseau operates with the Aristotelian notion of nature, according to which everything that contributes to our well-being and completion in life is deemed natural: see, e.g., Dent, Rousseau, 42 and 97 and Roche, Rousseau, 3ff, for this claim. Yet, it seems that the tutor decides what is able to bring about the flourishing of Emile. Mark Hulliung remarks, “Nothing can be so unnatural as the education of the natural man,” Hulliung, Autocritique, 186.

11. Rousseau's Social Contract outlines the ways in which this republican society can be realized. The legislator has to alter human nature to make possible a society in which virtue can prevail; see Rousseau, Social Contract, 67–70. He writes: “This transition from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his behavior, and endowing his actions with the morality they previously lacked,” ibid. 53.

12. It has been noted that the original cause of amour-propre is the child's desire to command the rage felt when confronted with opposing wills; see Dent, Rousseau, 89–91, and Emile, 197. But of course, the wish to command requires the child to take notice of others and presupposes an interest in them, namely the interest to make them do what one wants them to do. So apparently amour-propre presupposes for its emergence the child's interest in others.

13. See Cooper, Nature, 107, for the claim that virtue is not natural.

14. See Dent, “Species,” for the refutation of this “standard” interpretation. According to him, Rousseau allows for one's opening up towards others “without thereby acquiring a deformed and distorted character and a miserable and perverted mode of life,” ibid., 27.

15. Morals that then enable Emile to live harmoniously in society which constitutes his natural environment. See Timothy O'Hagan for the claim that on Rousseau's naturalist vision individuals “strive to realize an ideal of integrity, which can be attained only when an equilibrium is established or re-established between the individual and its environment,” O'Hagan, Rousseau, 271.

16. This is not to deny that amour-propre can in itself be deemed natural in that it is a natural response to an individual's confrontation with others. Such confrontations are unavoidable given that children are raised by others and live among them. For the distinction between healthy and corrupted amour-propre see Dent and O'Hagan, “Rousseau on ‘Amour-Propre.’”

17. Rousseau distinguishes between “man as a natural being and man as social being,” a distinction that, as Fuchs puts it, creates the paradox that “without sociality, rationality, and history” the man of nature “cannot be human yet, while the human being is no longer natural,” Fuchs, “Nature and Bildung,” 158–9.

18. The opening passage of Book IV reads: “Sophie ought to be a woman as Emile is a man – that is to say, she ought to have everything which suits the constitution of her species and her sex in order to fill her place in the physical and moral order,” Emile, 531 (emphasis added).

19. See Gatens, “Rousseau and Wollstonecraft,” for an analysis of Rousseau's attempt to deny women access to the public sphere of society, which according to Gatens is tantamount to denying them the right to transform their natures. The question that needs to be asked here is how the concept of nature can both justify the kind of society to which Rousseau aspires and provide the starting point from which we must depart in order to acquire sociability.

20. Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la montagne, and Considération sur le Gouvernement de Pologne. Also see Rousseau, Letter to d'Alembert, and Rousseau, Social Contract, 162.

21. See Hulliung, Autocritique, 137–45, for the claim that not only Rousseau, but even the philosophes, Diderot and d'Holbach, at the height of their dissatisfaction with the monarchy, sought to revitalize the traditional family model as a bulwark against the corruption of the world. The interesting point about this is that they did so, although they attacked Rousseau for his reactionary views on the role of women in society.

22. Rousseau openly attacked the salonnières of his time for their participation in le monde; see i.e. Rousseau, Letter to d'Alembert, 324–9. In La Novelle Héloïse Rousseau presents Julie who has been formed by her life in the countryside as an alternative female ideal. See Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 198–224, for an analysis of Julie's female virtues; see Garrard, Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment, ch. 4, for a characterisation of Rousseau's republic as manly.

23. See for instance Rousseau, Letter to d'Alembert, 311–15, where he refers to nature in order to justify female chastity.

24. Herder, Fragmente 1768, 449 (my own translation).

25. Rousseau writes, “It is by means of history that, without the means of philosophy, he [the student] will read the hearts of men; it is by means of history that he will see them, as a simple spectator, disinterested without passion, as their judge and not as their accomplice or as their accuser,” Emile, 392.

26. At the end of Book III, Rousseau notes that it is through his received training that Emile's imagination is somewhat atypical in that it is “in no way inflamed and never enlarges danger,” Emile, 359. This means that an untrained imagination typically affects the mind negatively, revealing once again the crucial importance of actively forming human nature into something it cannot be by itself.

27. Rousseau describes the negative consequences of the imagination in the example of a man who receives a letter with supposedly bad news. This man would ignore “the place that nature assigns to [him],” Emile, 214, and unnecessarily trouble himself with things he could safely ignore. The same logic applies to insatiable desires: we only need to stop imagining unattainable things to restore us to a peaceful state of mind; see Emile, 363–4.

28. The tutor not only offers guidance, but forces his influence upon Emile at a critical point in his development when Emile wants to break away from him. Interestingly, the method here consists in manipulating Emile's imagination; see Emile, 494–7.

29. There are limits to our ability to understand another person's situation. Herder concedes that it is difficult for us to understand someone who has been socialized entirely differently; see Herder, Ideen, 331.

30. See Frazer, Enlightenment of Sympathy, ch. 6, for this interpretation.

31. Herder, Letters, 397.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Herder suggests that an understanding of human nature depends on one's ability to feel one's way into the sensibility of human kind; see Ideen, 294. This shows that not only with respect to moral issues, but also in relation to the broader question of what we are, the acknowledgement of variety and difference is crucial.

35. Again, the rationale behind this is that for Herder understanding is relative to the way we have learnt to conceptualize the world on the basis of our interactions with a given social environment. In order to develop a general understanding of human nature (as opposed to a culturally conditioned understanding), it is therefore necessary to imagine and feel our way into a variety of different manners of thinking. See Herder, Abhandlung, 782–3, for the claim that it is by “Einfühlung” that we come to know other people's thoughts. I will say more about this shortly.

36. Herder, Letters, 397. In Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774) Herder applies the method of imaginative projection in order to produce an understanding of morality in history. As such, it covers both a synchronic and diachronic dimension.

37. Yet Herder recognizes that an excessive stimulation of the imagination tends to overwhelm the rather limited capacity of the human mind and for this reason must be avoided; see Ideen, 332.

38. Herder claims that even in science there is a place for the imagination (in the sense of using metaphors and analogies); see Herder, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden, 330.

39. For a more detailed account of the suggested parallel between imagining and experiencing see Waldow, “Back to the Facts.”

40. Stressing the fundamental character of sensibility and our connectedness with the world in the processes of knowledge acquisition, Marion Heinz writes: “Since man can acquire an understanding of the world only when his sensibility is affected, the disposition of his organs and the concrete location of his body in the world become most basic determinants of knowledge beyond which he cannot go,” Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus, 24.

41. Heinz calls this relation of the individual to her world “Kreaturgepräge,” a term that stresses the importance of the subject's needs in her specific situation that impact on the way concepts are formed; see Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus, 163.

42. For passages from this work I have used Michael Forster's translation in Herder, Philosophical Writings; I will refer to these passages by Ursprung, page number in the German original, F and the page number in English translation. References without citations will be given to the German original only.

43. See Sikka, “Herder's Critique,” for an account that recognizes the Lockean legacy in Herder's philosophy of language. See Taylor, “The importance of Herder,” especially 50–1, for an account that stresses dissimilarities between Locke and Condillac on the one hand and Herder on the other.

44. To claim that nature functions as the starting point for the development of language is not to deny that for Herder the emergence of language is necessary, given that humans are put in the state of “Besonnenheit” (Ursprung 722). See Nigel DeSouza, “Language, Reason and Sociability,” for a discussion of Herder's critique of Condillac who, according to Herder, ignores the difference in kind between human and animal language.

45. This is not to say that Herder suggests that nature entirely fixes the way we think and use language. He is clear that “Besonnenheit” sets us free from instinct, and through this enables us to develop language, precisely because we can freely overlook (“freistehend”) and freely organise (“frei wirkend”) our sensory inputs; see Ursprung, 716–19.

46. Ursprung, 770.

47. DeSouza makes this point in relation to the faculty of reason. For Herder, he claims, the “flooding of the senses” is a necessary prerequisite for the actualization of human reason: see DeSouza, “Language, Reason and Sociability,” 227.

48. See Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus, 159, for the contrast between Locke's and Herder's theory of representation.

49. See Locke, Essay, 158–9.

50. For Herder it is the fact that we feel something when being affected by the world that matters to his theory of language and thought; it is not the fact that we can trace a sensation to its original physical cause that makes for our ability to think meaningfully and develop reason. Feelings stimulated by our imagination and those caused by perceptual stimuli therefore both stand on the same footing: they offer us the raw materials for developing a more diverse conceptual scheme and through this offer us novel ways of understanding the world. See Waldow, “Back to the Fact,” for a longer version of this argument.

51. Herder describes translation and the study of the grammar and syntax of another language as ways to “discover” new ways of thinking; see his Fragmenten 1767, 199–207. The use of mythology is described in Fragmente 1768, 449.

52. So imagining is not only important to develop cross-cultural tolerance, as Frazer claims – see Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy, 158 – more fundamentally, imagining also helps us to complete our naturally scant experiences of human life and morality. It thereby helps us to develop an understanding of what morality consists in, not just with respect to our narrow circle but in general.

53. For a critical assessment of the use of literature and theatre in Emile's moral instruction see Emile, 516. For Rousseau's claim that the theatre leads to moral corruption see Rousseau, Letter to d'Alembert. See Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 182–224, for an account of how Rousseau uses fiction, namely his own novels, to portray a superior state of morality.

54. If we follow Heinz's claim that for Herder assimilation is the principle that rules our engagement with the world, the multiplication of one's own sentiments by imagining oneself into culturally diverse situations can be construed as a process through which we assimilate bits and pieces of human life as it exists in its diverse manifold instantiations; see Heinz, Sensualistischer Idealismus, 106–8, 135, 155.

55. See, e.g., Gill, Educational Philosophy, especially 250. Second nature in this sense just is what others today call nurture; see note 5 above.