Voltaire’s Socrates and the Enlightenment Plato

• In Event: Narrative and Political Theory: Experimentation, Canon Dynamics, and Reinvention

Abstract

Plato is often celebrated as a founding figure for western philosophy, and in particular as an original champion of liberal values that – like the sovereignty of reason, the intellectual freedom of the individual, or the questioning of traditional authority – have later come to correspond with those of the Enlightenment.
However, as scholars of Plato’s reception history know all too well, his philosophy had also been variously interpreted over the centuries to stand for different sets of values, some of which appear to be in direct tension with those Enlightenment ideas with which he is associated today. At significant junctures in its classical and early modern reception, for instance, Platonic philosophy was celebrated for the mystical overtones of its metaphysics, or alternately for its treatments of topics like beauty, love, and inspiration. How, then, did Plato’s modern reputation come to congeal into its current form?
This paper offers a novel reading of Voltaire’s Socrate (1759), presenting this work as a significant turning point contributing to the origins of “the Enlightenment Plato.” By paying close attention to both the literary construction and the historical context of the play, the paper breaks down the portrait of Plato that Voltaire helped turn into a monolith, and it draws renewed attention to the Platos that subsequently got left out.
The paper recovers the conflicting interpretive traditions of Platonism that were available to the leading figures of the Enlightenment. It shows, in particular, that Voltaire and his contemporaries inherited an intellectual milieu in which a skeptical Platonic tradition, emphasizing the relentlessly critical nature of Socratic inquiry, coexisted alongside a Neoplatonic tradition emphasizing the mystical aspects of Plato’s philosophical system. The accomplishment of Voltaire’s Socrate, I argue, was the distinctly political reinvention of the former tradition, in large part at the expense of the latter. Voltaire’s radical reimagining of Plato’s source material, then, also occluded the mystical elements in Plato’s philosophy that had long been on the forefront of the interpretation of Plato, and it helped seal the decline of the Neoplatonic tradition.
Socrate is a relatively unknown work, and among those who are familiar with it, the comedy is often regarded as little more than a thinly veiled satire on contemporary French society and the opponents of the philosophes. When the play is read as a landmark in the reception history of Plato, however, we can see that it was also an act of canon-formation. Voltaire constructed a new Plato who became an effective, if ambiguous, symbol of Enlightenment values – a portrait that continues to stay with us today. Voltaire’s Socrate offers contemporary political theorists an instructive case study in the dynamics of canonization.

Author

• Tae-Yeoun Keum, University of California, Santa Barbara