Human Nature and the Love of Wisdom: Rousseau's Hidden (and Modified) Platonism

Abstract

Book Five of Rousseau's Emile treats the same three themes, in the same order, as Book Five of Plato's Republic, and so can rightly be seen as a response to it. The response appears at first to be largely negative, for Rousseau emphatically rejects the political proposals made by Socrates. Yet Socrates' proposals can also be interpreted nonpolitically, as pertaining to the development of a just or healthy soul. And at this level, there turns out to be surprisingly close agreement and correspondence between the respective Books Five-not just because Rousseau, too, speaks to the development of the healthy soul, but also because the education depicted in Book Five of Emile emerges, on close study, as an education in or toward philosophy. Even as Rousseau embraces a Platonic teaching, though, he modifies it in a way that suggests a certain compatibility between aristocratic and democratic principles. "Let us call your future beloved Sophie. The name Sophie augurs well (329)." 1 In Emile Rousseau depicts the moral and spiritual heights attainable by a man of ordinary gifts (52, 245, 393). Through a natural education, he brings the book's eponymous hero to a clarity of vision, a purity of sentiment, and a wholeness of heart that we cannot but greatly admire. Doubtless this revelation of the extraordinary potential of ordinary men is among Rousseau's reasons for calling Emile "his greatest and best book" (Rousseau 1990b, 23).Yet for all his attainments, Emile does not seem to ascend the very highest peaks, the peaks constituted by the most expansive and hence most enviable experience of existence. The most exalted life to be found in Rousseau's corpus is not Emile's but rather his own, that is, the life of a philosopher, as depicted in the late autobiographical writings. It is not Emile but the solitary walker of the Reveries whose experience of life is godlike (Rousseau 1992, 68-69) and

Rousseau in narratives of Kyiv academic philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries

“…However, since the beginning of the 21 st century, articles criticising this narrative have appeared in several Western journals that specialise in the philosophy of education. In particular, the studies authored by Bernadette Baker [Bernadette 2001], Jürgen Oelkers [Oelkers 2002], Laurence D. Cooper [Cooper 2002], Fritz Osterwalder [Osterwalder 2012], and others, revealing the ideological sources and historical context of Rousseau's creativity and further reception of his ideas, show that his innovative works are significantly overvalued. These authors argue that the reason for the canonization of Rousseau's works was not so much the thinker's genius as the quite specific and immediate ideological attitudes of the narrators.…”