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Bad Education: Pity, Moral Learning, and the Limits of Rousseauan Friendship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2014

John Warner
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Abstract

Despite a recent resurgence of interest in friendship and a seemingly inexhaustible fascination with Rousseau, scholars have neglected Rousseau's conception of friendship. The work that does exist emphasizes friendship's ability to inculcate virtue, and moors Rousseau to the classical notion that friendship catalyzes ethical improvement. However, Rousseau lowers the aim of friendship by decoupling it from the process of moral learning and putting limits on the degree of intimacy between friends. The argument is made in four steps. First, Rousseau's theory of friendship differs from its relevant predecessors in both origin and end. Second, the effort to ground friendship in pity bounds emotional intimacy, since pity introduces elements of character difference as well as sameness. Third, Rousseauan friendship fails to catalyze virtue and is successful instead in providing consolation. Finally, the essay considers the function of friendship in a Rousseauan polity.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014 , pp. 243 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2014 

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References

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7 Reisert, Friend of Virtue: since “each [friend] regards the other as almost a part of himself,” and since friendship is “the sole relationship within which education to virtue can take place,” it is clear Reisert conceives of Rousseau as carrying the classical ideal forward along these two key dimensions (Friend of Virtue, 80).

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18 Rousseau, Second Discourse, 95. How critical Rousseau's engagement is, is a matter of some debate. Sorenson occupies a middle ground between Plattner, who views Rousseau as breaking radically with traditional teleology, and Lemos, who believes Rousseau's providentialist language moors him to a broadly teleological view of the world. See Sorenson, Leonard, “Natural Inequality and Rousseau's Political Philosophy in His Discourse on Inequality,” Western Political Quarterly 43 (1990): 763–88Google Scholar; Plattner, Marc F., Rousseau's State of Nature (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Lemos, Ramon M., Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An Exposition and Interpretation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

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21 Rousseau, Second Discourse, 131–32; cf. Rousseau, Confessions, 361–62.

22 Rousseau, Second Discourse, 95.

23 Rousseau, Emile, 221, italics original.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 223.

26 Reisert, Friend of Virtue, 90.

27 Ibid., 88. Marks endorses this view: see Marks, “Rousseau's Discriminating Defense,” 732n24.

28 Marks, “Rousseau's Discriminating Defense,” 732.

29 Reisert, Friend of Virtue, 80, 90, 84.

30 Rousseau, Emile, 222.

31 Rousseau himself emphasizes the importance of “first encounters” in Emile (414–15), where the conditions under which Emile and Sophie meet are carefully manipulated in order to get the couple off on the right foot. See also Julie, 556, where St. Preux balks at the prospect of marrying his friend Claire. Despite being attracted to Claire, he claims he has simply been friends with her for too long to view her as a lover. In both cases, the way in which relationships develop has much to do with the conditions out of which they emerge.

32 Rousseau, Julie, 332, emphasis added.

33 Ibid., 157.

34 Rousseau, Confessions, 361, 365–67. On Julie's sales, see Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Viking, 1984), 42Google Scholar.

35 For all the faults of the characters, Rousseau nonetheless believes that “one learns to love mankind” through Julie's portraits of love and friendship. See Rousseau, Julie, 9.

36 Rousseau, Julie, 456.

37 Cf. Reisert, Friend of Virtue, 94–95.

38 Rousseau, Julie, 456. Cf. Reisert, Friend of Virtue, 94–95.

39 Montaigne, Essays, 170; Cicero, De amicitia §8.

40 Cf. Rousseau, Second Discourse, 122–23.

41 Rousseau, Julie, 457.

42 Ibid., 460.

43 Ibid., 275.

44 Ibid., 277.

45 E.g., at ibid., 103, 135, 167.

46 Disch, Lisa, “Claire Loves Julie: Reading the Story of Women's Friendship in La Nouvelle Héloïse,” Hypatia 9, no. 3 (1994): 19–45Google Scholar. See esp. 25–28.

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48 Ibid., 257.

49 Ibid., 257n.

50 Ibid., 291.

51 Ibid., 342.

52 Cf. Disch, “Claire Loves Julie,” 37–41.

53 Rousseau, Julie, 432.

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55 Cf. Reisert, Friend of Virtue, 104–5.

56 Rousseau, Emile, 233n.

57 Although see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1162a5.

58 Rousseau, Emile, 316.

59 Ibid., 323.

60 Charvet, John, The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974)Google Scholar, 19; Allan Bloom, introduction to Emile, 19; Nussbaum, Martha, Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 385CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Marks, “Rousseau's Discriminating Defense,” 732.

62 See, respectively, Orwin, Clifford, “Moist Eyes—From Rousseau to Clinton,” The Public Interest, Summer 1997Google Scholar, 7; Boyd, “Pity's Pathologies Portrayed”; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Preface to Narcisse, in Rousseau on Philosophy, Morality, and Religion, ed. Kelly, Christopher (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2007), 25Google Scholar.

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65 E.g., ibid., 445.