Vice Is Ignorance: Rousseau’s Response to Socrates

• In Event: Early Modern Responses to Socratic Political Philosophy

Abstract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s response to the thought of Plato is a pervasive feature of his simultaneous critique and development of early modern political philosophy. This paper maintains that Rousseau’s Emile offers a sustained confrontation with the Socratic understanding of moral responsibility as presented in Plato’s dialogues. In Book IV of Emile, Rousseau confronts the Socratic thesis that injustice is due to ignorance about what is truly good for us, that no one freely wills what is bad for themselves in full awareness that it is so, and that pity is a more consistent response to human evil than indignation. Although Rousseau reconstructs this argument both in his own name and in the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” Rousseau ultimately raises doubts about the effectual truth of this Socratic teaching and shows why neither Emile nor the Savoyard Vicar could maintain it consistently. This paper investigates the reasons for these doubts in light of Rousseau’s concept of pride or amour-propre. Rousseau adds to the Socratic thesis a sustained account of the way in which amour-propre opposes this thesis by leading us to hold ourselves and others more freely responsible for our actions than we in fact are. Yet if Rousseau raises greater doubts than Plato about the power of philosophic reason to govern the passions, Rousseau also proposes that ancient philosophy maintained too much doubt about the extent to which an education of the passions themselves might allow the common individual to attain the freedom from indignation and the unity of mind once claimed by the Socratic philosopher. Rousseau’s “Profession of Faith” ultimately offered a democratized reinterpretation of a central Socratic teaching.

Author

• Sophie Pangle, Harvard University