it runs away with the desire for it.
Instant beauty may be deliberate,
but constant beauty will never be.
You will end up in beauty when you pursue something other than beauty,
so my young friend,
--why not focus your attention other than beauty?
Isabella Tianzi Cai
PH412 Philosophy of the Enlightenment
April 23, 2009
Why does Rousseau appeal to the most natural attribute of Sophie when he conjures her up? As he states it: “Sophie ought to be a woman as Emile is a man” (357). This is a powerful statement and difficult to refute because what is, is. In fact, Aristotle precedes Rousseau in this view by fusing the formal cause and the final cause of a thing. Aristotle would agree with Rousseau that because Sophie is a woman, she ought to be a woman.
However, what is a woman? Although Rousseau does not idealize women including Sophie, his description of women is by and large historically and culturally constrained. Sometimes, he even discriminates against women for their intelligence: “The quest for abstract and speculative truths, principles, and axioms in the sciences, for everything that tends to generalize ideas, is not within the competence of women. All their studies ought to be related to practice” (386). I would rather think people in terms of their temperament and disposition when commenting on their intelligence. Just like in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment, some people are extroverted (E), others introverted (I); some are intuitive (N), others sensing (S); some are thinking (T), others feeling (F); and lastly, some are judging (J), others perceiving (P). Their analysis, which posits that INTP type handles abstract theories best of all, is far more convincing than Rousseau’s discussion on women and their intelligence.
Nevertheless, some of Rousseau’s observations correspond to those of my own. For example, I agree that generally speaking, “[m]an says what he knows; woman says what pleases” (376). I am glad that Rousseau does not think that it is a fault to be sensitive and attuned to people’s sentiments because men and women ought to complement each other, but I still find an assessment like that of MTBI speaks more volumes about what people are and not just who men or women are.
