The Dispute: Voltaire vs Rousseau
How often do we have the opportunity to see and enjoy on stage, at the same time, an interpretative duel of the highest level, a dialectical battle of high tension, a combat of ideas and worldviews as ancient and eternal as they are fully current?
A duel between characters who represent two radically opposed, but intimately linked, ways of being in the world.
This article was written by Enric Hidalgo - Student of the Master's Degree in Philosophy and Contemporary Debates on Arts and Technology.
Thought and art on stage
This is what a group of 20 people, between students and teachers of the Master in Philosophy and Contemporary Debates with Arts and Technology, had the pleasure to contemplate last January 10 at the Romea theater, and later to comment in a nearby restaurant, with the play “The dispute. Voltaire - Rousseau”. To the excellent acting work of two giants of the theater as Josep Maria Flotats and Pep Planes, is added the literary and philosophical quality of the text of Jean François Prevand, available in both Catalan and Spanish.
Experiences like this highlight the importance of retaking and deepening an idea: university life is not exhausted in academic life. This is the platform to go out into the world, explore possibilities of intellectual life beyond the classroom, interact with the social and cultural world, and establish strong ties in times of weak thinking, among those who share a path of formation.
Reflecting on Voltaire and Rousseau today
At the end of the performance, we had the opportunity to talk with the actor who plays Rousseau, Pep Planas. The talk turned to whether the world today leans more towards Rousseau or Voltaire. There was consensus among spectators and actor that today's culture leans more towards Rousseau.
The merit of the play lies in its undogmatic presentation of the thinkers as archetypes of two intellectual currents that run through the whole of modernity and that often explain its contradictions, the great philosophical disputes of the last two centuries and, perhaps, the current crisis of the great principles of the Enlightenment.
Precisely because they show both their lights and shadows, both as people and as thinkers. An example that this tension reaches our days is the prologue that Xavier Diez makes of the book “Incompetències bàsiques”, where he points out that much of the current educational problem in Catalonia and elsewhere comes from having bet pedagogically on the Rousseauian postulates.
The validity of enlightened thought
Meanwhile, what Voltaire represents - rationality, tolerance, the cult of the arts, skepticism and the critical spirit - are in decline. The value of the text lies in positioning us in the dispute and showing us that this eternal polarity is intrinsic to human beings and culture. To kill this necessary tension is to kill man himself and culture itself.
The whole history of thought is the movement, often pendular, between the two principles. Even the reasonable aspiration to a certain balance between the two is somewhat unrealistic if it is to be stable. Be that as it may, works like this one help us not to give up the struggle.
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