Physical Inoculation and Moral Invulnerability:

Physical Inoculation and Moral Invulnerability:

Dipping Emile into the (French) Styx

Presented at the

1996 AESA Convention

Montreal

Gerald Pillsbury

Dept. of Education

Western Michigan University

Kalamazoo, MI 49008

616-387-2979

Fax: 616-387-2882

email: Pillsbury@WMICH.edu

The frontispiece of Emile shows Thetis dipping the infant Achilles into the Styx which, if you recall the myth, rendered him invulnerable to virtually all attack. The placement of the illustration suggests that invulnerability plays a central role in the education he provides Emile. Indeed in Book V (443), Rousseau tells Emile that whereas Thetis dipped Achilles' body in the Styx, he has attempted to do the same for his soul.

That the invulnerability Achilles enjoyed protected his physical body points to an suggestive conjunction of historical events. The 18th century was a time of intense interest in the processes of inoculation and vaccination against disease. While the first decisive steps towards modern preventative medicine were certainly still a ways off when Rousseau wrote Emile in 1762, a primitive form of inoculation, however, had come to England and the continent of Europe from the East in the early 1700s and was gaining notoriety. In fact, Lady Mary Wortley Montague reported the procedure in 1718 and had herself and her children inoculated. Within a few years, most of the royal family in England was inoculated.

Along with the frontispiece, the interest in vaccination at the time Rousseau wrote Emile raises a number of questions. What, if any, connection can we draw between the moral education Rousseau seeks to provide Emile and the popular practice of inoculation against small pox? Might Rousseau be suggesting that we can inoculate the soul against vice and error in a way similar to inoculating the body against devastating diseases? Could the spirit be protected in a way analogous to that which affords protection to the body? Given that our everyday progressive conceptions of education owe a great debt to Rousseau's philosophy of education, to what extent do our conceptions of moral education rely on physical inoculation as a model?

Rousseau says yes: we can develop a kind of immunity to error and vice. His argument

is a bit convoluted. Such a defense, he finds, comes about by learning the virtue of sophrosyne, a virtue central to Plato's vision of moral life but largely forgotten since. But for sophrosyne to offer such protection, Rousseau gives the ancient Greek virtue a new twist. In contrast to Plato who located this virtue in the soul, Rousseau locates it in the body. A somatic sophrosyne will prevent all depravities from ever gaining the necessary hold within the person from which they might corrupt the body and mind.

Despite the implausibility of this epistemology, current discourse about moral education recapitulates much of the somatic elements of Rousseau's approach. Ultimately, locating sophrosyne within the body alienates human beings from one another and precludes the possibility of community. My plan in this paper is to begin by looking at Rousseau's adaptation of sophrosyne, then examine how he came to locate this virtue in the body and finally explore the consequences of tying virtue to the body.

Rousseau's sophrosyne

With Emile, Rousseau sought to improve upon the vision of education presented in the Republic. In that dialogue, Plato establishes the classical canon of four principal virtues: courage, wisdom, justice and sophrosyne. The last was a virtue that the 18th century as well as us in contemporary times have little understanding. Among the populace of ancient Greece, the common understanding of sophrosyne was roughly expressed as the combination of the twin Delphic dicta "know thyself" and "nothing in excess." For Rousseau, it was with this virtue as a shield that men were able to hold back the desiccating forces of civilization and the decline of this virtue greatly hastened the modern corruption of mankind. We can usefully read Emile as Rousseau's project to restore this virtue to a central place in our conception of a moral life. But to do so, he makes a key alteration in the conception of the virtue. Whereas Plato's innovation was to locate sophrosyne in the soul, Rousseau returned it to the body.

In The Republic, Plato began with a related popular understanding, then developed a more coherent accounting of the nature of this virtue and the implications it had for human nature and society. He began by first defining sophrosyne as obedience to authorities, and "establishing one's own authority over the pleasures of drink, sex, and food." Sophrosyne here was a virtue of the soul which exercised control over the body. When Plato subsequently divided the soul into a rational, a spirited, and an appetitive part, sophrosyne became a kind of harmony between the three parts. Thus, sophrosyne in Plato's conception was both a virtue of the various parts of the soul and a virtue of the soul as a whole. Of course, repeatedly through the dialogues, Plato defined virtue as a type of knowledge. Sophrosyne, then, was the knowledge that led to a state of concord throughout the soul and knowledge within each part of the soul that encouraged self-restraint. Such knowledge in the various parts came through habit or reason.

Because Rousseau does not use the word sophrosyne in Emile, we must infer his claims about the virtue from other comments,