Constitutive Elements of the Discourse of Natural Instruction in Rousseau's Emile: Situations and Implications

In Emile, (1) Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes a mythical process of education through which the master reveals to his pupil wisdom that is simultaneously social and natural. The master's part in this myth is to be nature's emissary, since Rousseau wishes to restitute natural directivite (2) in Emile via the master's teachings. The word "myth" describes this process well, because mythology treats of forces similar to those Rousseau wishes to introduce. "[R]epresenting beings who embody under symbolic shape the forces of nature [or] aspects of the human condition," (3) myth brings nature into human form while justifying human subordination to nature, recalling Rousseau's insistence that nature govern human behavior. The master's stagings expose a natural, non-anthropological yet distinctively social discourse. Though Rousseau finds La Fontaine's fables potentially confusing for children, he develops his pedagogic mythology via fable-like, pragmatic "texts"--which I will call myth/fables since they employ elements of both genres--that supply Emile with both active and passive directives through a generic yet metaphoric discourse that avoids negative or "historical" components while exposing nature's code. (4) I will examine this discourse from many perspectives to determine its structure, operations, and effects. First I will locate each discursive element, describing its role and its relations to other elements via concepts from Ferdinand de Saussure (5) and Roman Jakobson (6) as well as from Rousseau's ideas on communication. Next I will examine how Rousseau can restitute the saine, unvarying "ur" text of nature at different times in Emile's growth. Finally, I will typify myth/fables, looking at their representational yet metaphoric structures to see how Emile can receive and assimilate knowledge in spite of their overdetermined poeticity or interpretibility. I will cite Bruno Bettelheim (7) and Vladimir Propp (8) in examining the organicity of these myth/fables, a feature which lets them enhance nature's communication of order, then view interactions involved in their interpretation through concepts derived from Hans Robert Jauss (9) and Paul Ricoeur. (10) In Cours de linguistique generale Saussure outlines the physiology of langue's operations in the speech circuit (sender, message, receiver), but only after distinguishing langue from langage, the general ability to send and interpret signs. One must not confuse social consensus with regard to signs (langue) with the heterogeneous, indistinct capacity for semiologic communication (langage) that appears across "several physiological, physical and psychic domains" (Saussure 25). The distinction explains why "articulating words exercises itself only with the instrument created and supplied by [a given] collectivity" (27), and helps us isolate an important characteristic of langue--its temporality. Words cannot be exchanged in synchrony; speech involves mechanisms of transmission that presuppose exteriorization of psychophysical combinations from one individual to another. Saussure points to each individual's ability to express personal thoughts and to the consciousness and individuality of each participant in describing this non-instinctive acoustic phenomenon. If Saussure identifies sender, message, and receiver as the physiological components of speech, Roman Jakobson, in "Linguistics and Poetics," describes operant functions in the message as an independent element in this circuit. To work efficiently, the message must have a context that the receiver comprehends, use a code that the participants share, and operate via a contact, a physical and psychological connective that each participant can enter. Primary functions are the emotive focus on the sender's sentiments, the conative influence on the sentiments or actions of the receiver, and the referential concentration on context or situation. Of the remaining functions, the phatic emphasizes means of contact, the metalinguistic describes and clarifes the code, and the poetic draws attention to the form of the message itself. …