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The Utility of Ink: Rousseau and Robinson Crusoe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Denise Schaeffer
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Extract

While scholars have argued that in Emile Rousseau uses Robinson Crusoe as a model of self-sufficiency to further his ideal of a “natural” man, this essay argues that Rousseau's presentation of Defoe's hero points in precisely the opposite direction. Crusoe is not a natural man but rather a social man in isolation, and makes his solitude an object of reflection. He therefore assists in the development of Emile's awareness of himself as an individual, which marks the transition between Emile's existence as a merely physical being and his existence as a moral being. Crusoe prepares Emile to address the question, “What is society good for?” by expanding Emile's understanding of what is good. The implications of these considerations for understanding Rousseau's ideas about authorship, identity, and the possibility of a truly self-sufficient individual are developed.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , Winter 2002 , pp. 121 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2002

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References

I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting this project.

1. Emile, 78Google Scholar; IV: 301. All references to Emile, which I will henceforth cite parenthetically in the text, are first to page references in Bloom, Allan, ed., Emile or On Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979)Google Scholar, and then to the volume and page number of Oeuvres complètes, ed. Gagnebin, Bernard and Raymond, Marcel (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959–1995)Google Scholar.

2. See, for example, Strong, Tracy B., Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications, 1994), pp. 109–110Google Scholar.

3. See, for example, Bloom, Allan, ed., Emile or On Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979), “Introduction,” pp. 8–9Google Scholar; and Starobinski, Jean, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 109, 230Google Scholar. Several commentators have noted the degree to which Crusoe departs from Rousseau's vision of “natural man.” See Flanders, Todd R., “Rousseau's Adventure with Robinson Crusoe.” Interpretation, 24:3 (1997): 319–37Google Scholar; Nourrisson, Paul, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et Robinson Crusoé (Paris, Editions Spes, 1931)Google Scholar; Novak, Maxmillian E., Defoe and the Nature of Man (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1963)Google Scholar. While Novak provides the general argument that Robinson Crusoe illustrates the misery, rather than the felicity, of human beings in the state of nature, Nourrisson and Flanders devote more focused attention to the question of Rousseau's use of the novel. Nourrisson claims that Rousseau, had an “idée fixe” (p. 27)Google Scholar, a morbid obsession with solitude, that caused him to misunderstand Crusoe's novel. A much more subtle and productive approach is taken by Flanders, who argues that Rousseau engaged in a wholesale revision of the novel as presented in Emile, since Crusoe's religiosity and his Englishness would get in the way of the goals of Emile's “natural” education. Flanders sees in Rousseau's editing an implicit criticism of Crusoe that serves to highlight for the reader the contrast between Crusoe as the quintessential portrait of the problems of civil society (and early modern understandings of society in particular) and Emile as the portrait of the possibilities of original freedom in nature. His reading preserves a dichotomy between Defoe's Crusoe and Rousseau's Crusoe, and between society and nature.

4. Bloom, , “Introduction” to Emile, p. 9Google Scholar. In contrast, Christopher Kelly provides a more subtle interpretation of Emile's identification with Crusoe: “Emile does imagine himself to be Robinson Crusoe, but he is aware of differences between himself and the character in the book. Robinson has fears that Emile would never have had and makes mistakes that Emile would never make. Emile identifies with Robinson's situation rather than with the man” (Rousseau's Exemplary Life: The Confessions as Political Philosophy [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987], p. 93Google Scholar). My own reading is more compatible with Kelly's than with Bloom's, , although Kelly presents Crusoe's “situation” as characterized by “self-sufficiency” (p. 79)Google Scholar, which I will dispute.

5. “Puisqu'il nous faut absolument des livres.”

6. Clearly, the seeds of morality have been planted and indeed cultivated to some degree in Emile long before their fruits become apparent; for example, he learned a basic lesson about property in book 2. Rousseau highlights the preparatory significance of that incident in discussing the lessons about division of labor that Emile will be pushed to consider upon reading Robinson Crusoe: “The society of the arts consists in exchange of skills, that of commerce in exchange of things, that of banks in exchange of signs and money. All these ideas are connected, and the elementary notions are already grasped. We laid the foundation for all this at an early age with the help of Robert, the gardener” (p. 189; IV:461)Google Scholar.

7. For an insightful discussion of Rousseau's understanding of the unnaturalness of the human desire for knowledge, particularly as the issue is presented in the Lettres Morales, see Kelly, Christopher, Rousseau's Exemplary Life, pp. 40–45Google Scholar. Kelly goes on to argue that the Confessions is Rousseau's attempt to overcome this problem, and therefore serves as a foundation for Rousseau's system as a whole.

8. For a stimulating interpretation of the various ways that the “compass” functions as an allegory in book 3, see Ellis, Madeleine B., Rousseau's Socratic Aemilian Myths: A Literary Collation of Emile and the Social Contract (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1977), pp. 155–67Google Scholar.

9. Rousseau makes one more suggestion that addresses these issues before turning to Robinson Crusoe. Almost as an aside, he suggests that a tutor comment on a child's development with reference to the child's own past rather than by comparison with other children. “I see no problem in his being his own competitor,” he says (184; IV:454)Google Scholar. Another way to translate this sentence would be, “I see no problem in his emulating himself.” A younger Emile would function as “another self” to an older Emile. But Rousseau does not elaborate on this point, nor is the reader given any example of how it might work. The problem of course is that this purported solution requires a stable identity over time, and therefore assumes in advance that which it is meant to bring into existence: a sense of oneself as an “I.” This is the problem that remains to be resolved in book 3.

10. Strong offers an alternative explanation for Rousseau's opposition to books: “From the beginning, the reason for the opposition to books is Rousseau's resistance to permanent definition…What is wrong with precision is that it eliminates the human from the world” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary, p. 38Google Scholar).

11. It is of course important that absent from these needs is the one that would be the most threatening to Emile's education at this point: sexual desire. Just as Emile has not yet felt “[t]he most violent, the most terrible” need of sexual desire, Crusoe lacks “the lust of the flesh.” Only in this very limited sense can it be said that the two men have more strength than they do needs, and that they are independent beings.

12. Flanders, , “Rousseau's Adventure with Robinson Crusoe,” pp. 321, 325Google Scholar. Flanders argues that Rousseau effectively creates a new Crusoe out of whole cloth.

13. Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Shinagel, Michael (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 36Google Scholar.

14. Novak, , Defoe and the Nature of Man, p. 25Google Scholar.

15. Nourrisson argues that Rousseau's fixation on Crusoe's parasol is based on the illustration of Crusoe that graced the edition of the novel that Rousseau most likely encountered. Nourrisson, , Jean-Jacques Rousseau et Robinson Crusoé, p. 28Google Scholar.

16. It is unlikely that Rousseau overlooked this important detail. In Confessions, book 7, Rousseau refers to himself as “another Robinson Crusoe” as he prepares to spend twenty-one days in a bare lazaretto after the passengers of a ship he was traveling on are quarantined. His Crusoe-like preparations entail choosing carefully the provisions he will bring from the ship, including not only clothing and linens, but also paper, ink, and a dozen books. Ironically, he has two trunks of supplies at his disposal as he bravely endures his “bare” solitude.

17. Defoe, , Robinson Crusoe, p. 47Google Scholar.

18. Gildin, Hilail, Rousseau's Social Contract: The Design of the Argument. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 66Google Scholar.

19. Many commentators have identified the parallels between Emile and On the Social Contract, and in particular between Emile and the people. See, for example, Ellenburg, Stephen, Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An Interpretation From Within (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 271–318Google Scholar; Grant, Ruth W., Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 125–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Melzer, Arthur, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 245–49Google Scholar; and Shklar, Judith, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 165Google Scholar.

20. Gildin, , Rousseau's Social Contract, pp. 87–88Google Scholar.

21. Plutarch, , Lives of the Noble Greeks, trans. Scott-Kilvert, Ian (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 44Google Scholar.

22. Rousseau, , Du contrat social, Oeuvres complètes, III: 394Google Scholar.

23. Defoe, , Robinson Crusoe, p. 47Google Scholar.

24. Ibid., p. 43.

25. Ibid., p. 95.

26. “Similarly, in the Second Discourse, natural man makes sense only as that for which civil man longs. That natural man has no real existence apart from this looking back seems clear from the difficulty Rousseau has in finding appropriate examples, all of which prove to be either animals or already in some measure civil” (Davis, Michael, The Autobiography of Philosophy [Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999], p. 111, n. 22)Google Scholar.

27. See discussions of this issue in ibid., especially pp. 265–67; Herbold, Sarah, “Rousseau's Dance of Veils: The Confessions and the Imagined Woman Reader” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 3 (1999): 333–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Strong, , Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary, p. 17Google Scholar.

28. Morgenstern provides a detailed analysis of the way in which the tutor monitors the development of pity in Emile in order to teach him that he has semblables (peers). While she considers the role the imagination plays in this development, she limits her discussion to Emile's study of history. My analysis is intended to show that Emile must be self-aware before he can see that he has peers. See Morgenstern, Mira, Rousseau and the Politics of Ambiguity: Self, Culture and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 63–71Google Scholar.

29. Thus Rousseau advises complete ignorance with regard to sexuality before the “second birth.” In light of this, it is all the more significant that Crusoe lacks the desires of the flesh. It would be much more dangerous to Emile to be exposed too soon to a fictional character with sexual dimensions than to a fictional character with religious dimensions.

30. Bloom, Allan, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p.73Google Scholar.

31. Bloom points out that in the earliest draft of Emile, Rousseau had written and then crossed out the following statement: “If I am asked how it is possible for the morality of human life to emerge from a purely physical revolution, I will answer that I do not know” (Emile or On Education, p. 488, n. 2Google Scholar).

32. My argument here does not hinge on the substance of Crusoe's religion, although Nourrisson argues that despite Crusoe's Christianity, there are many parallels between his religious experiences on the island and the natural religion described in Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith in Emile. In his most vivid moment of religious conversion, Crusoe (like the Savoyard Vicar) is led by the exercise of reason to affirm the existence of God by marveling at nature and its necessary author (Jean-Jacques Rousseau et Robinson Crusoé, pp. 70–73Google Scholar). See also Ellenburg, , Rousseau's Political Philosophy, p. 300Google Scholar.

33. A parallel can be drawn to amour-propre, which is utilized as a necessarybut-dangerous tool throughout Emile despite Rousseau's criticisms of it. The most thorough treatment of the positive qualities of amour-propre is found in Laurence Cooper, D., Rousseau, Nature and the Problem of the Good Life. (University Park: Perm State University Press, 1999), chap. 4Google Scholar.

34. Rêveries, third walk, Oeuvres complètes, I: 1013Google Scholar.

35. The significance of this apparent contradiction in the Reveries is thoroughly explored and illuminated in Davis, , The Autobiography of PhilosophyGoogle Scholar. My understanding of the Reveries is deeply indebted to Davis's.

36. See, for example, Confessions, book 12.

37. Emile's encounter with the magician is his first experience of another as other. His prior encounter with Robert the gardener may have resulted in a contract regarding personal property, but Emile's reasoning was never pushed beyond a selfish motive. His “respect” for Robert's property derived solely from his desire for the melons Robert had planted.

38. Rousseau may be attempting to resolve a similar problem in the Second Discourse when he describes how natural man first compared himself to animals, and sensed his superiority to them, before comparing himself to other human beings.

39. Rêveries, Oeuvres complètes, 1: 1099Google Scholar.

40. He makes this task explicit for himself in the third walk of the Reveries. On the general theme of the differences between Emile and Rousseau (as he presents himself in the Confessions), see Kelly, , Rousseau's Exemplary Life, especially chap. 3Google Scholar.

41. In a similar vein, Rousseau goes on to indicate in book 4 that even when a more mature man sees himself reflected in his beloved's eyes, he needs to reflect on that reflection. “From the need for a mistress is soon born the need for a friend” (215; IV: 494)Google Scholar.