Doctor Rafa Bids Farewell to her Undergraduate Career

"This essay is about many things. Primarily, it is about how Plato and Rousseau use fictional students in their works for the purpose of educating the reader. However, it is also about my own philosophic education that developed while pursuing this project, because, I too, am a reader of these books.

It is often said that philosophy is not useful. This could not be further from the truth; the political philosophy classes at Ursinus have taught me a great deal about myself, and I am a better person for it. We read theses texts believing that either Glaucon or Emile is being educated, but really it is we, the readers. I believe an adequate defense of this subject can be demonstrated not simply by the degree to which I know the texts, but rather how much I have learned about myself.

The first section of this essay is meant to be a joke, because we should always be able to look back on our more ignorant selves and laugh. It is filled with many references to how I was raised by my family, remnants of high school education, and supposed moments of enlightenment.

The second section is about how mistakes that are made in ignorance lead to knowledge. Another way of saying this is that often something true can be derived from faulty premises. I explain Socratic Irony through example rather than definition.

The third section is probably what many would consider the formal paper, and is therefore the greatest in size. It discusses exactly why and how Plato and Rousseau engage the reader in private education. First I deny that they are truly interested in “politics” as it is now commonly understood. Secondly I consider their respective historical contexts as explanations for why their rhetoric often makes it appear otherwise.

The fourth section returns to your humble author, now looking forward to the real world with a politics degree in hand. The hope is that by demonstrating a student who can interpret self into a text – who compares values with the models that are being offered – that the study of political philosophy is vindicated to all who question its value.

Some useful definitions before proceeding,
Kallipolis - the city that Socrates and his interlocutors outline in the Republic. It is constructed with the intention of making it perfectly just. It is often referred to as “the city in speech”.
Eudaimonia - I understand this term to be defined as “human flourishing” from some objective standpoint.


“Philosophy, to me, has always been a very personal thing.”
I
The first memory I have of philosophy is watching a Monty Python skit in which the Greek philosophers play the German philosophers in a game of soccer. The joke is that all of them stand around thinking until the final minute, at which point Archimedes shouts “Eureka!”, only to forward the ball to Socrates. The master thinker scores off of a header. Being 5 years old I thought that the joke was that the guy with soccer in his name was the best player. I was wrong, but at least I got to laugh.

Sometime in early high school I remember picking up one of my mom's college books entitled Introduction to Philosophy printed by the University of Chicago Press. I read the first few chapters on freedom and determinism, so I suppose the fact that I am now a philosophy major settles that question. I remember developing a love of “the truth”, as well as a reputation for being an argumentative asshole in English class.

Next thing I know I am sitting in a circle with the Ursinus philosophy department as a prospective student with my mother. She made sure to ask, “What can someone do with a philosophy major?” Kelly Sorensen responded that the department likes to refer to the major as pre-comedy. I should have taken the hint that my life was about to become a complete joke.

And now I stand before you, delivering a presentation on my final philosophy paper. The culmination of 4 years, or perhaps a lifetime of philosophical education seems to hang in the balance:

* * *

Rousseau sustained that education begins with mothers. My mother, like most others, always instilled in me that honesty is the best policy. Therefore, I believe the best way to explain my “thesis”, or rather, my “hypothesis”, or perhaps even my outright “guess”, as well as the results that developed from it, is to recount my method as precisely and as honestly as I can recall. Moreover, if reading the Republic taught me anything, it is that truth is best conceived through dialectic, so I will treat my readers as if I were discussing the matters plainly before you. I have read countless pages (that is to say, if one cannot count to 2000) in support of this undertaking, and as the works of Rousseau and Plato are enormous, my citations in this first section, or references for that matter, will be consistent in the following manner: I have none.

Great works of political philosophy should be printed with pages made of gold as an indication of their value and to save me the cost of highlighting. I have accrued easily 40 pages of typed notes, and at this point there are too many quotations to choose from. I am like Friedrich Nietzsche demanding that horizons on knowledge be established in his Untimely Meditations; I know not where to begin and feel myself confronted with the abyss. Fortunately, however, likely no amount of reading could completely solve the questions I originally set out to answer; I can at least say in my defense that if I have not by this point read all that my nature will allow, I have read at least enough to begin filling in that infinite hole with books from the Myrin Library. Thus, I take this paper as an opportunity to pour out my mind in its pure and present state in regard to this daunting subject. If I crash and burn into a miserable failure of stream-of-consciousness and scatterbrained strategies, I retain the opportunity of a second draft as a more formal approach to this paper. If I do not begin by writing this informally, I fear I will never begin writing at all.
Running out of time on both my college career and this particular deadline, I must confess: If the words do not flow loosely at this juncture, I have learned not a thing at all:

As a freshman I read much of Plato’s Republic and walked away with certain opinions of what it was about. For example, I remember that I believed it was a great book, that it contained many themes, that Socrates’ arguments often made no sense, that in spite of this he taught his interlocutors a great bit, and, perhaps most vehemently, did I opine that the absolute communism of family was nothing short of absolutely absurd. The first opinion, namely that the book is “great”, is really only a consequence of the second opinion, that it had many themes: Discussions of the goodness of justice, the function of philosophy itself (it really is a very vain subject, philosophy, constantly praising, blaming and defending itself again!), and the “best” regime were the big draws. These meta-themes carried all sorts of lovely philosophical baggage that included music, poetry, and the passions, all causing quite a stir among the class.

In particular, however, I remember quite distinctly being surprised that many students thought that the kallipolis had significant merit as a practical political solution. Equally was I surprised of the fury with which the others claimed that the kallipolis could not be established because it violated “human nature”… whatever that means! It was clear to me, even as a foolish freshman, that such a “city in speech” served only as a model for the interlocutors to contrast against their own Athens or – perhaps as applied to we moderns – capitalist, liberal democracy. It is true that the kallipolis offends our human needs to the point of its impossibility, but can one really conceive that Plato was not cognizant of this as well? The book is a masterpiece and inspiration for an entire field of inquisitive thought but – no – today we are going to sit here in class and argue about whether Plato was a fool or not. Something smells funny.

What if this is a complete fabrication and I did not in fact initially interpret the kallipolis this way? What if I am merely putting together pieces after reading someone else’s (ahem, Allan Bloom's) answer? I have convinced myself that this is not the case by the following proof: A) I had not read Plato since freshman year and B) I assumed this interpretation as part of my thesis before I began researching this paper. That’s called a syllogism, and it means you have to think for a second. Apparently I remember some of Aristotle, too. The point is, at least in this case, that I have preserved some level of intellectual hygiene. I have come to, perhaps with the tiniest bit of guidance, my own conclusions from my own premises. I think...

II

Let us jump forward in time three earth-revolutions around the Sun. In a capstone course on Rousseau, urged only by a single-sentenced-suggestion by the late, great, Allan Bloom, from a point I cannot recall in his texts, I began to consider an analysis of the Republic in light of Rousseau’s Emile to be a worthy endeavor. Fortunately, one does not have to go far to discover a connection between the books, although one may need to be equipped with a philosophical jet-pack to discover all of them.

Within the first five pages of his Emile, Rousseau claims that the Republic is the most “beautiful treatise on public education ever written” (See, quoted straight from the old noggin). Additionally, Rousseau states that those who think the Republic is about politics are not only entirely mistaken, but must be the type to judge books solely by their titles. There are a few major questions an attentive reader must ask him or herself at this point.

The first question is why, if the Republic is as spectacularly beautiful as Rousseau suggests, does this Frenchmen decide to write his own treatise on education? Why not print a reissue that includes a massive interpretive essay instead? Secondly, why—perhaps in part due to high school English teachers from whom I was demanded multi-layer interpretations of text, or, perhaps from hearing the answer from a professor at a point I have since forgotten—did I feel as if the reader should need no clarification that the Republic was in fact about education? For what reason would Rousseau possibly decide to be explicit to his readers that Plato’s magnum opus was about public education, even though it was so clear to me, a now educated and wise senior – unlike those silly freshmen who see contradictions in Rousseau – that this was in fact the case? Who the heck is this guy talking to, idiots?

Initially, my rationale for why the Republic must primarily be a book about education was that the main characters all have their perceptions of justice, philosophy, and the good wildly reordered by Socrates. Socrates brutally rakes these young men’s prejudiced minds over the coals of dialectic. This education points out their prejudices as Athenians and teaches the comrades that injustice is not so clearly superior to justice. As aforementioned, the communism of families makes the political suggestions absurd to a point where the kallipolis can only be understood as a model for some educational purpose. From this perspective I laughed and said to myself, ‘The Republic is not about a republic!’ patting myself on the back while continuing to churn through the monolith that is Emile. I did not look back for quite some time...

But that is only to consider half of what Rousseau claimed, and upon this second reading of Emile I needed to write a paper about it, so I probably needed to consider the other half. Rousseau stated not only that the Republic is the most beautiful educational treatise ever written, but that it is the most beautiful public treatise on education ever written. What now to make of this annoying and additional adjective? First, I considered the possibility that by public Rousseau was referring to the method of rearing children in the kallipolis, for it was the only example I could remember of people being educated en masse in the dialogue. However, if the Republic cannot be a discussion dedicated to politics precisely because the kallipolis is not meant to be taken seriously, it is hard to believe that the education that it enumerated would be worthy of being labeled as beautiful. How could something that is not meant to be taken seriously be considered beautiful? Jokes are funny. They are not beautiful.

I had never read a book analyzing Socratic Method or Platonic rhetoric until approximately yesterday. But, somewhere along the line, some little bird whispered the phrase “Socratic Irony” into my ear. I cannot give you a textbook definition of what Socratic Irony is, but if I had to guess, no one really can, and I would also assume that it is one of those things that cannot be explained without some kind of ceremony and a reference to things that simultaneously exist and do not. But again, I fearlessly return to my wonderful education as a high school English student: I remember irony explained in the particular form of dramatic irony, in which an audience knew what was happening to a character in a play all the while the character had not the slightest inkling of – for example – impending sexual relations with his mother. Regular irony is more of an obvious conflict of a falsity standing in perfect darkness next to a contradicting truth, without necessarily maintaining the oblivious actor that distinguishes it from dramatic irony.

Therefore, unless we take the interpretation that Socrates is completely and utterly deranged, it is safe to assume that Socratic Irony refers to points when contradictions are unabashedly obvious to a reader during a Socratic dialogue.

For some reason I developed a hunch, a hypothesis if you will. Could this conception of Socratic Irony that I had built from iron-clad reasoning with potentially false premises explain Rousseau’s peculiar relation to the Republic? Rousseau called the Republic beautiful, but yet he did not call it perfect. I wondered: perhaps the education of Emile is a supplement to the intractable problems in the dialogue that seemed to be blatantly tagged by Socratic Irony? Maybe Plato left a to-do list of philosophical paradoxes marked by obvious moments of confusion for some thinker with new insights to resolve? I was getting warmer, but I still did not have a definitive answer to why Emile was a necessary creation in the eyes of Rousseau. Nonetheless, such a lofty description as “beautiful” implies that there was something that Rousseau must have retained from the Republic. This common element must have needed some sort of update, furtherance, or modernization from its original idea to impel Rousseau to deliver the 500 page birth that is Emile. The obvious solution would be to suggest that the Republic is simply about public education and Emile is simply about private education, as Rousseau literally stated. Careful understanding of the texts demonstrates that this is certainly not the case, and that much of Plato is reborn in Rousseau.

I can now set the jokes and contradictions aside. The point has been made that humor can entice, and contradiction is a powerful assistant in the learning process. Apparent contradiction is what makes us question – and thus potentially transform – our opinions. My wondering mind has thus arrived at a sensible thesis.

III

In this essay, I hope to demonstrate a single thread that extends from Classical Antiquity to Modernity in the minds of Plato and Rousseau in terms of their respective treatises on education, a thread that is essential to Political Philosophy if it is to be defined as the study of how to live a good life. This commonalty consists in that Emile and the Republic are parallel displays of private education, each for the purpose of producing “just” souls: it is a style of writing that allows for multiple interpretations based upon the character of the reader to reflect upon oneself using the student of the text as a mirror. By private education, I mean the common definition: the instruction of either one or a very few students by a similar number of teachers. By a “just” soul I mean a soul in which each of its constituent parts receives precisely what it needs, barring a starvation or conquest of the others that would destroy the whole. To be a masterful teacher one must know one’s audience; not only do Socrates and the Governor know their students better than the students initially know themselves, but Plato and Rousseau incorporate rhetorical devices into their educational treatises because they are aware of the various types of readers. Such readers are necessarily engaged in a kind of philosophical education simply by picking up their books. Without being able to know one’s pupil ahead of time, an author must write in such a way as to teach any student or to guide that student to the path of self-examination. I believe that this solves the riddle of why Rousseau labeled the Republic a book on public education even though the text itself describes the private education of Glaucon and his cronies: Any reader who picks up the dialogue will be forced to understand his own soul in relation to the various models that are offered. In this sense, Emile operates the same way, and both texts can be rightly understood as true Political Philosophy. As texts, both the Republic and Emile describe private educations. Considered as physical books, or perhaps more precisely considered as media, the Republic and Emile are publicly available vehicles for personal education and transformation of society, one soul at a time. The Republic is beautiful to Rousseau because it artfully gave the public a way to privately educate themselves. His goal as an author was to do for early modernity what Plato did for the ancients: reorient human beings towards a better balance of the soul.

This essay is divided into three main sections. The first explains why political reform is not an effective means for making better lives in the eyes of both Plato and Rousseau. This can begin to account for their emphasis on private/individualistic education with variable student-types in mind, specifically as an alternative to political revolution. The second section explains why Rousseau had to write his own educational treatise by examining his rhetoric for his Enlightenment-era audience. The concluding section expounds upon the actual teachings in the Republic and Emile, demonstrating a distinct similarity between Plato and Rousseau's conception of the just soul.

Plato and Rousseau’s Qualms with Macro-Progressive Politics

The Republic maintains a thematic chicken and the egg dilemma: Does the character of a people determine the regime and its laws, or does the regime, through its laws, determine the character of the people? This is tantamount to asking “what is to be done?” if one is searching for a better life. Although it is more or less common sense that political reform itself cannot be guaranteed to change historical and cultured minds, Socrates plays the devil’s advocate by advancing the kallipolis. By doing so he is putting a question to the reader of whether the properly ordered soul, for the purpose of a citizen’s eudaimonia, is the same as the properly ordered city for the sake of its own eudaimonia. The suggestion that the interlocutors are searching for a city to achieve its own eudaimonia instead of a city in which citizens themselves experience eudaimonia should be one of the first perplexing premises of the kallipolis, as well as the first glaringly ironic Socratic attack against it. We construct cities for the benefits of the humans that populate them. We do not construct cities for the benefit of cities themselves.

Before this poor argument is even made, however, the kallipolis truly begins to seem implausible with Socrates' particular delineation of his noble lie:

“...I'll attempt to persuade first the rulers and the soldiers, then the rest of the city, that the rearing and education we gave them were like dreams; they only thought they were undergoing all that was happening to them, while, in truth, at that time they were under the earth within, being fashioned and reared themselves, and their arms and their other tools being crafted...(414 d)”

If the noble lie is to be believed, it would probably be best that it were believable. However, the suggestion that twelve year olds would find this plausible is outlandish. Is a guardian really going to be able to convince a child that every person, place, and thing that he sees is now above ground, while formerly they were below the surface of the earth? Children are curious and not easily satisfied. No amount of propaganda could convince a child that the world as he now sees it is real while previously it was a dream without some wild transformation actually taking place—such as physically being below ground only to climb through the surface and see the light of day. Even if it were to work on some particularly gullible lad, the lie would undoubtedly damage him; the child would be perplexed at the nature of reality and would always be on edge, always expecting the next life-changing revelation. The guardians would essentially be telling their young ones, “Everything you used to know was a lie,” a statement that hardly seems conducive to feelings of trust and respect for the authority of their word as rulers.

A third example of Socratic Irony is the suggestion of how the kallipolis will defend itself when attacked by foreign invaders. Adeimantus is concerned in book IV as to how a city can raise an army if it is to have no wealth as Socrates suggests. After putting forth the ideas that the kallipolis' army will be spartan in nature and take on enemies one at a time, Socrates continues by asking:

“What if they sent an embassy to the other city and told the truth? 'We make use of neither gold nor silver, nor is it lawful for us, while it is for you. So join us in making war and keep the others' property.' Do you suppose any who hear that will choose to make war against solid, lean dogs rather than with the dogs against fat and tender sheep? (422 d)”

At this point Socrates has essentially offered his army up to any city that could use some assistance in battle. An army of this sort would be decimated in little time, although not due to war for its own defense, but due to constant offensive alliance with others for the purpose of not defending itself, a strange tactic indeed. Considering the difficulty of raising citizens with such high character, the reader should begin to balk at the level of responsibility the guardians have in protecting society compared to how many of them could actually be produced.

In his The Paradoxes of the Republic, William Chase Greene states the following concerning these types of moments in the dialogue: “Plato wishes us to share with him some conviction which he holds deeply, and which he will even overstate deliberately in order to shock us into accepting its main import, though not necessarily in details or all its implications; he may not even be sure himself that it can ever be fully grasped or fully implemented by imperfect inhabitants of this sorry world.” The interlocutors accept Socrates' premises not only out of respect for his age and wisdom but because they are curious of where the argument will lead them, even if the premises themselves are faulty. Socrates makes claims that are so far-fetched one cannot help but want to hear him continue. Ultimately, his conclusions are often accepted because there are pleasing or beautiful, while the premises along the way have been forgotten (or forgiven). As his mouthpiece, Socrates does indeed make broad generalizations of political solutions for Plato that are deliberately exaggerated; whether or not the impossibility of these solutions indicates that our world is “sorry”, however, may not be so easily established as Greene thinks. As the essay proceeds, we will see a much more optimistic – or at least constructive – view of humanity from Plato's Socrates.

But first, the most damaging cracks in the walls of the kallipolis must be examined. The communism of families that Socrates advocates ends up warranting a serious objection from Adeimantus. In the famous book V, Socrates must fight against the “three waves” of objections, which to any considerate reader compounds the impossibility of the kallipolis, as George Klosko puts it, “not arithmetically, but geometrically,” e.g. multiplying slim ratios against each other until the plausibility approaches nil.

The first wave is the objection to shared roles of male and females, and consequently, a sharing of public spaces between the sexes while nude. The second wave is the abolition of families in favor of arranged, sacred marriages creating a community of people who see all their peers, quite literally in some cases, as brothers and sisters. And finally, the third wave is the suggestion that the only way the kallipolis can exist is if the philosophers are also rulers, or alternatively, the rulers are also philosophers.

The interlocutors are suspicious of this phase of the kallipolis because of the pride men possess when in comes to their wives and their children. It is unfathomable to them that there will be arranged mating based purely on the will of the philosopher kings; sexual relations with a woman is one of the most compelling reasons to be good or honored by society as a man. Although Socrates eventually concedes that the best men will be rewarded with the most sex, the path along the way still seems ridiculous.

For example, the first two waves in fact contradict each other. If men and women are to dwell together in the nude, then they certainly will not be able to abstain from sex as the guardians expect them to. As Bloom suggests in his interpretive essay, the nudity of men in the locker room may be convention because it can be desexualized, but public nudity between the sexes is impossible if reproduction is to be controlled by the guardians. Men and women cannot deny their sexual urges in such situations.

The third wave—that the philosophically enlightened must rule if the city is to be just—is implausible because of the inherent difference between intellectual and political clout. One who pursues truth is not guaranteed the monopoly of force that is necessary for maintaining power, and conversely one who possesses all the wealth or capital in the world cannot be assured a mind directed towards eternal truths. If anything, a king will become fixated on the control, conquest, and distribution of all earthly things, the furthest values from those of the true philosopher.

So if the kallipolis is so laughable, what is the real point of this particular discourse? The obvious problem with the kallipolis is that it has ignored bodily needs in favor of a city that is ruled by total wisdom. This serves to contrast two opposing kinds of life, the practical and the theoretical, the “vulgar” and the “philosophical”. Every reader must lay somewhere on the line between these two opposing world views; the quantity and types of objections he or she has to the furtherance of the philosophical life enlightens the reader as to exactly where his or her nature stands on this line. If the kallipolis seems ridiculous, then the reader is not prepared to make the sacrifices of bodily desires for the procurement of intellectual ones. If one finds the kallipolis to not only be good for the masses but as enabling the highest life of the theoretical man, then that reader likely has a nature that can only be fulfilled by a closer approximation to the latter.

Bloom states, “To become either a member of a city—or a philosopher—one must break with one's primary loyalty. The bodily or blood ties are not the only thing that is natural to man; nor are they the most important thing... The communism of women and children, by suppressing family ties, serves to emancipate men's love of the good (385).” Both the citizen of classical antiquity and the philosopher of whom Bloom speaks suppress parts of the soul that we, the masses/bourgeoisie of the democratic era, find non-suppressible. Or, as Laurence Cooper explains it in reference to Rousseau, “[Rousseau] also knew that the city in speech was created as a sort of soul writ large, and that what is said about the city is supposed to be true in some sense of the soul—indeed, that at least some of what is said of the city may be true only of the soul (112).” Eudaimonia and a devotion to the theoretical life are not attributes of a city, but by supposing they are, Socrates is able to entice Glaucon with a way of life that is an alternative to the unjust and pleasure seeking man. In the quest for justice it is established that wisdom through philosophy is necessary for “justly” distributing goods to the various parts of one's nature, and thus a kind of philosophical education is necessary for Glaucon's maturity. This is why I disagree with Laurence Cooper's assessment that the Republic is about public education for Rousseau for its “education of citizens”: Glaucon is certainly not a classical citizen as a Spartan or Rousseau would consider him; he is capable of much more and not denatured, Glaucon maintains an eros for something besides honor.

My stance on the kallipolis thus far should indicate exactly where I lay on the aforementioned line between the “vulgar” and the “philosophic” lives, but this is to jump ahead to the conclusion. First we must consider why Rousseau, too, has qualms with regime change as a method of improving the lives of human beings.

Rousseau was staunchly against regime change and certainly an anti-revolutionary, despite what any text of the Social Contract seems to offer as contradiction. The epistle dedicatory to his Second Discourse is filled with praise of stable and long-lived regimes: “If they [the masses] attempt to shake off the yoke, they move all the farther away from freedom because, as they mistake unbridled license for freedom, which is its very opposite, their revolutions almost always deliver them up to seducers who only increase their chains.(115)” Rousseau goes on to suggest that constant changing of laws inhibits legitimacy in the public's eye, that tradition is authority, yielding an almost sacred power. From Arthur Melzer's Rousseau's Mission and the Intention of his Writing we receive the following picture:

“Rousseau explicitly and repeatedly condemned revolution, describing himself as 'the man in the world who has the greatest respect for the laws, for national constitutions, and who has the greatest aversion for revolutions and plotters of all kind. Even if a revolution could be salutary, it remains 'almost as much to be feared as the evil which it could cure; it is blameworthy to desire it and impossible to foresee it.'”

Melzer further points out that in his Letters Ecrites de la Montagne Rousseau suggested that even if the gains of a revolution were “incontestable” no one in their right mind would try to overturn a stable, 1300 year old French regime. Melzer cites additional text demonstrating that, for “Rousseau the conservative”, social mobility can be a problem, the misery of the masses are due to their own vices, that the people do not understand how different governments are good for different situations, and that “Above all, one must respect local customs and inherited institutions”. Christopher Kelly echoes similar arguments for inherited institutions in his Rousseau and the Case for (and against) Censorship, in which he shows Rousseau's respect for civic religion:

“Most crucial is the area of shared moral opinions of the society, its morals, and beliefs, or what Rousseau calls 'sentiments of sociability.' These sentiments are in a certain sense what constitute the community and give it an identity. They differ from fundamental principles because they lack any ultimate rational grounding or because they are not consciously examined by most members of the community. Rousseau insists that a community can demand conformity to these sentiments of sociability in form of adherence to a civil religion (1241).”

From this evidence it should now be clear that neither Plato nor Rousseau are serious about regime change as political solutions, regardless of what the Republic details for various regimes or what the Social Contract defines as legitimate. Suddenly these eminent political philosophers are not so political and the Republic and Emile can be seen together for what they really are: treatises on education.

Fighting to educate the youth in order to give them just souls, Plato and Rousseau share a common enemy: The sophist. Now we must explain how Plato and Rousseau are striving for the same ends through opposite means due to their respective places in history, fighting sophistry in its many forms.

From the Republic and his own sentiments regarding revolution Rousseau knew that private education is the only hope for creating just souls. However, he was living in a very different time than Plato. In Athens, philosophy was under threat of exile, but with the arrival of modernity, philosophy had ascended to the throne with every laymen believing he was king. The sophists – the Thrasymachi of the world – now ruled. Hobbes had made us matter in motion, Adam Smith had made us self-interested, and Locke made nature horrifying. There was no longer anything beautiful or external to the world; merely calculating, wealth-gathering, pain-avoiding individuals crawling along. Rousseau, the hero, was bent on reestablishing the goodness of man, even if it meant attacking his own kind in the philosopher – or worse – lying. Christopher Kelly points out Rousseau's anti-philosophical tone early on in his career:

“First, within his discussions of the sciences or what he also calls learned activities, Rousseau accuses all philosophers past and present—with virtually no exceptions—of holding opinions contrary to popular beliefs in such things as the existence of God, immortality of the soul, the conscience, friendship, patriotism, and the sanctity of marriage...Even in the best cases, he argues, philosophy tends to form bad citizens either by making its adherents indifferent to social life because it attracts them to solitary contemplation or by making them disgusted with social life because it teaches them to despise nonphilosophers. In short, the study of philosophy tends to an antisocial, misanthropic activity. (1238-1239)”

Interestingly, this description of the philosopher sounds very similar to the charges that were leveled against Socrates by the Athenians when he was put on trial for being an atheist and a corrupter of the youth. Although there may be reason to be suspicious of the faith of Socrates and Rousseau, the Republic, the Second Discourse, and Emile each offer teachings of benevolent gods/universe. Plato, through Socrates, changes all of poetry such that the gods are truly gods and not reflections of mankind's worst passions. Similarly, Rousseau uses his “physiodicy” in the Second Discourse and the profession of faith of the natural religion in Emile, in the first case to put culpability in mankind’s hands and in the second case to maintain faith in the supernatural. It cannot be said that the authors are attempting to create atheists; rather they are simply trying to form better believers by creating something better to believe in. Athens would not let Socrates critique the ethics of the poets so he cried “More philosophy!” Decadent Europe had lost and manipulated its faith in god due to rational self-interest, so Rousseau shouted “Burn your libraries!” In both cases the goodness of man is being sought, but the authors must take opposite approaches to get there.

This raises a difficult problem for Rousseau, however. In the Republic it is established that philosophy is good for determining what is just: a statesman must be wise to put each man in his proper place, and an individual must be wise as to know the various parts of his soul in order to adequately feed their needs. Rousseau is thus forced to defame philosophy in the name of the “sublime science of simple souls” even though it is necessary for other, perhaps not so simple souls. For this issue, I am back on Laurence Cooper's side, for he suggests that a kind of veiled philosophical education is taught to Emile without focusing on the word itself throughout book V of Emile. Those who wish to remain unphilosophical will read over this portion maintaining the perception that Emile is a simple lad, dedicated to family, hard work, and virtue. Readers who identify with an Emile who is more philosophical cannot deny that much of his education was myth or cleverly unmentioned truths, but they can point to his sense of right and wrong, his scientific education, and the politics he observed through travel as depicting a man well on his way to a more contemplative life.

Rousseau, like Plato, has clearly demonstrated himself as a master of irony. The physiodicy that suggests nature has no part to blame in mankind's vices and misfortunes, all the while maintaining that evolution is the product of a series of natural accidents, can be seen through as a hoax by any careful reader. The capacities that Emile wields could hardly qualify him as a simple soul; his sentiment and virtue make him a rare breed indeed. Nonetheless the full spectrum of humans, from the simplest to the most philosophically voracious, will find in Emile, just like Glaucon or Adeimantus, a student that is undergoing the process of education. This event is a chance to reevaluate and reattempt one's own education: we must use the lessons of the teacher in our own reasoning and the characteristics of the student for mirroring and thus discovering our own nature. When I first read Emile I once said that it is important to see yourself as both the Governor and Emile, and I believe this is still true. We are capable of both rationally giving ourselves ethics to improve the quality of our being and discovering what the unchanging parts of our nature are in relation to the student being taught, allowing us to reorganize our actions such that they are in accordance with the nature of our soul.

IV

It is a Friday morning and the Sun has risen to about 30 degrees over the south-by-southeastern horizon. It is truly a beautiful thing. For the first time, in what is perhaps my entire life, I can write that I am perfectly happy. At particular moments at Ursinus, and often while lying awake in bed, I would not have wished the things I felt on my worst enemies. And yet, if I could do it all over again, I would not change a thing that I have done.

In many ways I feel as if writing this paper has saved my soul. At Ursinus College, I have seen and been offered the lives of many different kinds of people. Every part of my soul was pulled in various directions by the plurality of values and ways of life: scientific geniuses, money makers, social workers, pleasure seekers, artists, and all sorts of wild combinations. Nonetheless it is time to graduate and to return home. It is time to return to and accept my natural self, a self that I have only come to understand through comparison to those around me and the models offered by philosophic education. I have seen Thomas Hobbes everywhere except, ironically, my Political Philosophy classes, and maybe that is a good thing. I have been enticed by Schiller, and I have imitated him. Nietzsche has been my copilot, and I have laughed at him. I have read Plato, and I have learned from him. I have reread Emile, and I grown to admire him. He is a young man of hard work, self-sufficiency, dedication to family, and virtue. He is the fictional model to which my nature is most closely aligned. I can feel at peace knowing a model that is not torn between duty and inclination in the way I previously felt for so long.

The Governor has no overwhelming reason to help Emile. Emile is not the Governor's next of kin; he is essentially an orphan of common, perhaps degenerate, mind. The Governor has acted purely out of love of mankind. Fruitfully, Emile has seen various ways of life and ultimately ended up good. He has denied his vanity: he has refrained from the honor of the soldier, he has refrained from the fame of the actor. He has denied his appetites, both of sexual and simple pleasures. Emile is most certainly a man of virtue and of dedication to family, but the question remains: is Emile a philosopher?

I believe I am in accordance with Laurence Cooper in that Emile received a kind of philosophical education, but is not yet a philosopher. Emile has travelled and considered many walks of life; he is capable of discussing useful sciences, natural right, and even love, but he is by no means the philosopher that Socrates, or Allan Bloom, suggests: one that thrives off of contemplation of eternal truths with a relative disinterestedness towards society, one who is good by being solitary and not necessarily through proactive virtue. However, even Socrates communicated enough to have his ideas written down by others, and consequently, we could know no such theoretical man, as he would by definition not be part of society, we can only imagine him. If logic were to have its way – if a ruler were to only be a ruler if he ruled without flaw, if a doctor were only a doctor if he cured every patient – then we have never known a single philosopher in the history of mankind; not Plato, not Rousseau, not Socrates, and not even the Solitary Walker. These are all certainly closer approximations to the Form of a philosopher than Emile, but none of them are truly philosophers in the strictest sense because they require the companionship of other human beings. That is not to say that these characters went without sacrifice, but it does demonstrate that they were somewhere along a line, and therefore not necessarily at a particular extreme. Emile is exactly the same, just not as far along that line.

And that is where we stand as readers: at the consideration of a life lived somewhere between the practical and the common and the theoretical and the impossible, continuously slipping to the latter in age. Between the denatured Spartan who lacks a self and the most detached and solitary dreamer, we must discover ourselves on the line of human possibilities. For now Emile is my guide, and he will make a fine one. You can laugh, but he should have been the history of my species. I thank Rousseau for this most constructive work. At this point, I can only hope that my thankfulness is not mistaken for obsequiousness.

Philosophy is not a subject for me; it is a way of life. The texts I read are new modes of thinking and of understanding myself in relation to the world around me. I cannot say I am a proper philosophical scholar, I am no expert on Rousseau or Plato, but I can say that I now know how to become an expert on myself. And, without reading much Plato, I believe that in the process I have answered one of Socrates' riddles:

I have heard it said that Political Philosophy is both the study of how to live a good life and also learning how to die, I now know this is the same thing stated two different ways. For what could allow one to die in peace besides the honest, self-reflecting knowledge that one has lived a good life? I cannot put a price on such wisdom, even it is wrong. I leave Ursinus with an education that I believe will allow me to live such a life. As a final proof of my education, consider a bit of dialectic between myself and a friend from just the other night, truth in its natural state:

“Walking down the hall, I suddenly remembered a quote from Professor Dannhauser and laughed. He once said in the course on Nietzsche that, 'ugliness is its own counter- argument.' I rushed downstairs amongst the party to tell my closest friend. He said, 'I feel like what you are saying must be circumstantial,' gesturing his arms towards the spilled beer bottles and reckless students, shouting in drunken reverie. However, that scene was not in fact what I had in mind, so I responded, 'Only if circumstantial is the same as universal.' He said to me that I had spoken the truth. I felt fulfilled, I told no one else, and I returned upstairs to go to bed.”

My education in philosophy is rooted in circumstance; acts that were out of my control or moments of complete misinterpretation have guided me along the way. Nonetheless, I cannot help but think I have discovered something true. Ultimately, the use of rhetoric within these great texts on private education serves the same purpose. It may seem as if Emile, Glaucon and his associates are all receiving some sort of enlightenment, but that would be total nonsense; Emile, Glaucon, Adeimantus, and perhaps even the Solitary Walker are all fictions – but they are good ones – and they exist only in the mind. In truth, the only person who has received an education is you—the interpreting, self-reflective, and considerate reader. "

I will miss you, Ursinus. I will miss you Stern, and Kelly, and Florka. I will miss my own frustration over supposed scholars and their veils of disinterest. I will miss my friends, the kind of friends who are working on the same projects I am, who are at a similar intellectual moment. I will miss the ease of simply appearing in a beloved professor's office and presenting, bold and inquisitive, whatever problems of the universe have been plaguing me today.

I'll miss you, Ursinus, final chapter of my childhood. From here, I attempt to take up my mantle. I look forward to it; the struggle, the active.

But I'll miss you.