Abstract
Rousseau’s story about Emile having his first moral lesson in property rights by planting beans in a garden plot has educationally been discussed from various perspectives. What remains unexplored in such readings, however, is the connection of the theory of the natural learner with the Lockean rationalization of appropriation of land through cultivation. We will show that this connection forms the subtext of the ‘beans’ episode and grounds the rich and complex textual operations that give to the episode a strong political character. The aim is to unearth the common, colonial cause that the ideas of the natural learner, property as original relation to land and contractuality may make in Locke-inspired, early modern pedagogy and to explore the ambivalences in Rousseau’s text that are thus created.
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Notes
As Gay-White and Wadewitz (2009) explain, Locke and Rousseau’s pedagogical writings provided much of the theory that underpins the theatricality of artificial situations that generate a socializing aesthetic experience.
However, Lines detects a paradox or, perhaps, a contradiction in Rousseau’s employing an artificial situation for effecting natural learning: ‘Thus Emile suffers the natural consequences of his bad actions. That may be a good idea, but is such a manipulated scenario really a natural experience?’ (Lines 2009, p. 52, emph added).
Amongst other things that Rousseau wants Emile to learn from peasants’ ways are: some eating habits; speaking regulation; and good grasp of few and manageable ideas (Rousseau 2009).
A. Rosenberg identifies a coincidence of Rousseau’s views on agriculture only with a long tradition revived by the physiocrats of Rousseau’s day. But Locke’s views are also similar as we will see later on.
Arneil is based mainly on paragraph 37 of the Two Treatises. More generally, through a discussion of ample textual evidence she concludes: ‘it must be recognized that natural rights theory, particularly with regard to the origins of private property, has specific historical roots in England’s colonization of the new world’ (Arneil 1994, p. 609).
For more on the connection between the Lockean utopianization of the child as a natural learner and colonial and gendered assumptions, see, Gregoriou and Papastephanou (2013).
Ferguson sees this episode pedagogically interesting amongst other things ‘because it exactly inverts the Lockean model’. Whereas Locke counsels that adults should continually extend credit to underwrite children’s efforts, ‘Rousseau’s account involves substituting a vision of an infinite series of losses for Locke’s vision of an infinite projection of credit’ (Ferguson 1984, p. 81).
We borrow Derrida’s term, here. See, Derrida (1994).
Malta, the island, that is evoked through the name of the fruit, was at the time of the writing of Emile still under the Knights’ ‘colonial’ control before passing to French hands by Napoleon’s conquest in 1798 and then to British colonial rule in 1814.
In Rousseau’s words, Emile as an adult ‘most often roams through the surrounding countryside. He pursues his natural history; he observes and examines the earth, its products and its cultivation’ (2009, p. 622).
Rousseau’s ambivalence regarding peasants and savages as others to his ideal ‘man’, e.g. that the savage is presented as craftier than the dull peasant (Rousseau 2009, p. 56), while, at another instance, Rousseau’s utopian subject must work like the peasant in order to avoid becoming lazy like a savage (p. 353) is an interesting and relevant issue, yet for another article, for reasons of space. It is important to stress here, however, that the colonial spectrology in Rousseau’s text is not confined to the ‘other’ outside borders.
For instance, to restore all men to their primal duties Rousseau suggests that one should ‘begin with Mothers; you will be surprised by the changes you will produce’. For Rousseau, the whole moral order degenerates, as nature becomes quenched in every breast (Rousseau 2009, p. 12).
Unlike hauntology, ontology focuses on the actual that is easily recognizable as existing or valid and easily detectable as the cause or explanation of facts.
According to Francisco (2012, p. 66), this solves the apparent paradox that Rousseau, in Emile, considers learning about property morally so important, whereas in the Discourse on Social Inequality he condemns property as the root of all evil. Indeed, for Rousseau, since there can be no return to the moment when the first man fenced land to make it his own and thus no way to stop him from initiating the institution of property, the only thing left is at least to teach about property in a critical way (ibid, pp. 67–68).
To ‘discover the best rules of society […] would require a superior intelligence who saw all of man’s passions and experienced none of them, who had no relation to our nature yet knew it thoroughly, whose happiness was independent of us and who was nevertheless willing to care for ours […]. It would require gods to give men laws’ (Rousseau 1997, pp. 68–69, emph added). In reality, of course, the law-giver is human, not divine.
Friedrich Ratzel coined the term Lebensraum in 1901; it was then used as a slogan in Germany referring to the unification of the country and the acquisition of colonies, based on the English and French models, and the westward expansion of the United States. Wikipedia source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum) drawing from Smith (1980).
In a footnote Rousseau explains the following: ‘This is why most children want to have back what they have given and cry when one does not want to return it to them. This no longer occurs when they have gotten a good conception of what a gift is, but then they are more circumspect about giving’ (p. 231).
For the notions of inward and outward patriotism, see, Papastephanou (2013).
In other words: In what sense does the artificiality of the context that Jean–Jacques creates for Emile domesticate the real situations of conflict over the past and its pending debts?
Wikipedia source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil
This gruesome expansion of Blut und Boden is surely replete with memory; but this memory cannot be attuned to justice.
For a critical discussion of the association of Rousseau and progressive pedagogy, see Avi Mintz (2012).
For the notion of modern developmentalism and its relation to our globalized world see, Papastephanou et al. (2012).
The term ‘first philosophy’ or prima philosophia designates the science of the being as being which later, in the seventeenth century was called ‘ontology’. See, Apel (1998, p. 43).
For the Rousseau of the Encyclopaedia entry on political economy, ‘the foundation of the social pact is property’. ‘Its first condition is that everyone should be guaranteed the peaceful enjoyment of what he owns’; ‘the right of property [is] the true foundation of political society’ (Rousseau, cf. Pierson, p. 2).
Here, we adapt Ferguson (1984, p. 83).
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Papastephanou, M., Gregoriou, Z. Locke’s Children? Rousseau and the Beans (Beings?) of the Colonial Learner. Stud Philos Educ 33, 463–480 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-013-9397-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-013-9397-9