Anyone who knows Rousseau knows that he was someone intimately familiar with Plato. On a variety of levels—as a literary stylist, as a theorist of education, as a critic of culture—Plato inspired, informed, and provoked Rousseau. The Republic was one of his favorite books, and he was constantly re-reading and re-interpreting Plato's words throughout his most productive years.
But do any of these facts, significant though they are, mean that Rousseau was in some sense a Platonist?
Commentators in the past hundred years have varied in their responses to this question. A few, Charles Hendel above all, have stressed Rousseau's affinities with Plato. And although most scholars acknowledge that Rousseau's metaphysics were Cartesian, and thus neo-Platonic, they also tend to argue that Rousseau's metaphysical views are “detachable” from his moral and political theory, which owes a much more substantial debt to realists and empiricists like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and Montesquieu—a tradition of modern thought far removed from Plato's frank idealism.
Moreover, how Rousseau reconciled his metaphysics with his moral and political theory is itself a topic of controversy. Some scholars have argued for a systematic coherence while others take it as symptomatic that Rousseau himself from time to time conceded that his lifework was complex, and perhaps even contradictory, notoriously quipping that he “preferred to be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”
In trying to make sense of this complicated lifework, some of Rousseau's most provocative modern readers have narrowed their focuses, concentrating on an overarching theme in order to cast Rousseau's life and work in a fresh perspective. For Jean Starobinski, it was the theme of transparency; for Judith Shklar, it was Rousseau's paradoxical approach to authority; and for David Lay William in this sophisticated study, it is the author's preoccupation with Plato.
The argumentative arc of Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment hinges on a very broad categorical distinction, between what Williams calls “Platonic transcendentalism” and “Hobbesian positivism” (p. xxvii). Surveying post-Renaissance Western philosophy, Williams sorts thinkers into one of these two camps, with Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, and Rousseau on the transcendentalist side, and Hobbes and most of Rousseau's contemporaries—Diderot, d'Holbach, La Mettrie—on the positivist or materialist side. He makes his case in eight varied chapters. While half the book covers Rousseau's alleged Platonism in detail, the other four chapters are devoted in turn to Hobbes and Locke, to materialism and Platonism in early modern Europe, to Rousseau's influence on Kant, and—most surprising of all—to a comparison of Rousseau's views with those held by Marx and Foucault. (He argues that the latter, despite their professed philosophical views to the contrary, both succumb to what he calls “the gravitational force of transcendent ideas” [p. 274], which is plausible, given the constant, sometimes surreptitious, recourse of both Marx and Foucault to freedom as a transcendent criterion for judgment.)
According to Williams, who is refreshingly straightforward about defining his terms, “Platonism” involves five substantive commitments: (1) to a metaphysical belief in the existence of immaterial ideas; (2) to an ontological assumption that key normative ideas—of the good, of justice, etc.—are transcendent, in the literal sense that they exist outside the ebb and flow of lived experience in time and space; (3) to an epistemological claim that knowledge of the ideas is possible, at least to a few blessed souls gifted with an ability to reason and to master the intricacies of “dialectical” argumentation; (4) to a moral claim that the ideas of the good, and of justice, etc., should regulate the conduct of life; and, finally, (5) to a political and institutional argument that those who truly know should rule over those who do not, just as reason ought to regulate the passions in the embodied individual (p. xix–xxiii). Since Williams counts Descartes as a modern Platonist, he adds three additional commitments of “modern European Platonism”: the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will.
In works like the Second Discourse, and famously in the “Creed of the Savoyard Vicar” in Emile, it is true that Rousseau, like Descartes, sharply separated the body from the soul, and asserted freedom of the will as an issue of faith and an explicitly “metaphysical” proposition, independent of the material world and inexplicable and indemonstrable through a science of physics. Most scholars, too, have acknowledged the Platonic cast of the argument against theatrical entertainments Rousseau makes in his Letter to d'Alembert, and Williams has a helpful discussion of the short text Rousseau wrote at around the same time, “On Theatrical Imitation,” his “[e]ssay taken from the dialogues of Plato.”
There are many things to like about Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment: it is clearly organized, lucidly written, and crisply argued. Williams has read virtually everything Rousseau ever wrote, he knows the secondary literature inside-out, and he also knows a lot about the history of philosophy. The chapters on morality and the general will in Rousseau are both first rate, as is the chapter on Kant.
But Williams sets the interpretive bar for himself very high, by asserting that Rousseau's work represents a systematic whole, and that its philosophical identity is essentially “Platonic.” He presents a vigorous argument on almost every page, and the overall effect is stimulating. Yet his single-minded interpretation forces him repeatedly to downplay Rousseau's complex views on knowledge and conscience, and Rousseau's equally ambivalent embrace of reverie. Where Plato ostensibly establishes the perfect polity of the Republic through a rational dialectic, Rousseau, in depicting perfect republics, especially in the pages of his novel La Nouvelle Heloise, but also in his evocations of Geneva, trusts to the resources of the imagination the freeing of images from their subordination to ideas. And whereas Plato stipulates that it is philosophers who can truly grasp the eternal ideas of the good and of justice, Rousseau raises a host of skeptical doubts about our capacity to know, raising doubts as well about any putative inner sense, not least by demonstrating, in the Second Discourse above all, how thoroughly evil and unjust currently prevalent conceptions of the “good” and “justice” truly are. And when Rousseau flatly asserts, as he occasionally does, that eternal ideas are “engraved in the human heart,” he leaves the reader uncertain if the heart is really an open book, or if any of its ideas are really legible, never mind trustworthy.
Rousseau's skepticism about the reliability of our inherited moral categories, like his preoccupation with reverie, does not make Rousseau a “Hobbesian positivist,” but nor does it make him a Platonist, either modern or ancient. In fact, this book's dichotomy between Plato and Hobbes is much too simple. Rousseau himself was drawn to a variety of philosophers who cannot be easily sorted according to the categories devised by Williams. The most conspicuous example is Montaigne, someone crucially important to Rousseau's way of thinking, but the great Renaissance pyrrhonist is not mentioned by Williams, not even in passing.
Williams, in other words, presents a one-sided reading of Rousseau. But then, so did Judith Shklar, and so did Jean Starobinski, even more brilliantly. That David Lay Williams does not seem entirely out of place in such exalted company suggests the extent of his accomplishment in this superbly tendentious new study.
