Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Book Review: Public Vision, Private Lives<br />
5 1<br />
City,” “The Solitaire,” “The Mountain Village,” “The Middle Way,” <strong>and</strong> “The<br />
Flourishing City.” Cladis freely acknowledges (8–10, 241) these are not<br />
Rousseau’s terms, but rather his own inventions. He is somewhat uneasy about<br />
reshaping Rousseau, but believes himself justified, first because he does not<br />
think his typology does any real violence to Rousseau’s thought (10), <strong>and</strong> second<br />
because it will be of great use in sorting through these supremely<br />
confusing yet urgent matters.<br />
II.<br />
The book is, in many ways, an impressive effort. Cladis is perhaps<br />
a bit hyperbolic, breathless, even, in his characterization of the modern<br />
“crisis” of underst<strong>and</strong>ing public vs. private (a point he concedes: 32), but his<br />
basic argument is sound. Twenty-first-century democracy does seem to have a<br />
rough time defining the scope of the “private” <strong>and</strong> estimating its proper dignity.<br />
And as the constitutional history of the right to privacy amply<br />
demonstrates, rights-talk is unlikely to resolve the matter for us. Cladis’s book<br />
is more uneven in its treatment of Rousseau, although there, too, it possesses<br />
distinct virtues. Even when he errs, Cladis’s arguments are often subtle <strong>and</strong><br />
always intricately developed. His treatment of secondary literature is lacking<br />
(which he acknowledges: 3), but he does cover a great deal of Rousseau’s corpus,<br />
giving consideration not only to all the major works (Emile, Social<br />
Contract, Second Discourse, etc.) but also some fairly obscure ones (such as the<br />
letters to Mirabeau, Deschamps, <strong>and</strong> Vernes). But although he clearly possesses<br />
the ambition requisite for underst<strong>and</strong>ing Rousseau, it is not clear Cladis fully<br />
succeeds, either with respect to Rousseau’s underst<strong>and</strong>ing of public vs. private<br />
or his underst<strong>and</strong>ing of religion.<br />
According to Cladis, Rousseau helps us underst<strong>and</strong> the conflict<br />
between private <strong>and</strong> public goods just as he himself does: as the<br />
fundamental problem for modern man (ix–xii). Our modern souls are divided<br />
because we are torn between our public <strong>and</strong> private lives. We yearn for domesticity<br />
<strong>and</strong> reverie on the one h<strong>and</strong>, <strong>and</strong> citizenship <strong>and</strong> community on the<br />
other, but we can’t have it all. Wholeness eludes us, for we cannot truly satisfy<br />
all these desires, nor can we deny them. It is neither possible nor desirable to be<br />
whole; we must therefore embrace the tension, <strong>and</strong> realize that life is better<br />
divided than whole. But Cladis fails to convince that Rousseau sees things in<br />
this way. Rousseau attributes modern man’s lack of wholeness to a conflict<br />
between nature <strong>and</strong> convention; he recognizes the conflict between private <strong>and</strong>