Page 35 - GALIET ILLUSION: Rousseau IV

dystopia, trampling on Rousseau’s ideals of a General Will’s equanimity, impartiality and rightfulness,86 and on Plato’s ideals of the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good. Not only are we confounded, but Plato might spin in the Elysian fields beneath the specter of their desecrated utopias, once emblem of antiquity’s dream of the love of virtue and of wisdom, where the realm of appearances, or opinion and belief never wore the verdant laurels of genuine Beauty and understanding, and where the pursuit of the highest degree of being, noesis, an intellective seeing, was the worthiest degree of being: intellective seeing.87 In both Plato and Rousseau, society was to always aim at a genuine common wealth where the common good, or what is common to the different interests prevailed. It never sought to harm one law-abiding member or all, unless they were traitors or criminals. 88
In the catastrophism of a 20th century riddled with tyrannies and broken Social Pacts and their nauseas and naufragios, we have stagnated, and our present has become infinitely divisible from Plato’s and Rousseau’s heritage. Our humanity, as Rousseau aspired, has not progressed from natural independence to liberty, from an uncertain and precarious life to a more secure one, from instinct and action to justice and morality, from impulse, desire and inclination to duty, right and reason, and from personal strength to invincible rights.89 Neither has the global population gained sublimation of spirit and of mind, moral freedom, self-mastery, and obedience to
86 Ibid., Book II. Chapter 1 and 2.
87 Plato. The Republic. Book VI. See the Allegory of the Divided Line. Hypothesis prepares one for Dianoia and Noesis. Dionoia dwells between opinion and pure understanding. It is the rigorous deductive knowledge, as precise and exact as mathematics. Once this leap is made from dianoia to noesis, humans can see the sun in itself, which is akin seeing the Form of the Good in itself.
88 Rousseau. Book I. Chapter 7. See Plato. The Republic. Book IV: 89 Ibid., Book I. Chapters 8 and 9.
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