Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

Book Review: Public Vision, Private Lives
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City,” “The Solitaire,” “The Mountain Village,” “The Middle Way,” and “The
Flourishing City.” Cladis freely acknowledges (8–10, 241) these are not
Rousseau’s terms, but rather his own inventions. He is somewhat uneasy about
reshaping Rousseau, but believes himself justified, first because he does not
think his typology does any real violence to Rousseau’s thought (10), and second
because it will be of great use in sorting through these supremely
confusing yet urgent matters.
II.
The book is, in many ways, an impressive effort. Cladis is perhaps
a bit hyperbolic, breathless, even, in his characterization of the modern
“crisis” of understanding public vs. private (a point he concedes: 32), but his
basic argument is sound. Twenty-first-century democracy does seem to have a
rough time defining the scope of the “private” and estimating its proper dignity.
And as the constitutional history of the right to privacy amply
demonstrates, rights-talk is unlikely to resolve the matter for us. Cladis’s book
is more uneven in its treatment of Rousseau, although there, too, it possesses
distinct virtues. Even when he errs, Cladis’s arguments are often subtle and
always intricately developed. His treatment of secondary literature is lacking
(which he acknowledges: 3), but he does cover a great deal of Rousseau’s corpus,
giving consideration not only to all the major works (Emile, Social
Contract, Second Discourse, etc.) but also some fairly obscure ones (such as the
letters to Mirabeau, Deschamps, and Vernes). But although he clearly possesses
the ambition requisite for understanding Rousseau, it is not clear Cladis fully
succeeds, either with respect to Rousseau’s understanding of public vs. private
or his understanding of religion.
According to Cladis, Rousseau helps us understand the conflict
between private and public goods just as he himself does: as the
fundamental problem for modern man (ix–xii). Our modern souls are divided
because we are torn between our public and private lives. We yearn for domesticity
and reverie on the one hand, and citizenship and community on the
other, but we can’t have it all. Wholeness eludes us, for we cannot truly satisfy
all these desires, nor can we deny them. It is neither possible nor desirable to be
whole; we must therefore embrace the tension, and realize that life is better
divided than whole. But Cladis fails to convince that Rousseau sees things in
this way. Rousseau attributes modern man’s lack of wholeness to a conflict
between nature and convention; he recognizes the conflict between private and