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

5 2 Interpretation
public, but as a derivative, not fundamental one. Why is modern man neither
virtuous nor happy, according to Rousseau? Well, because he is unable to overcome
either his natural selfishness or satisfy his limitless (because unnatural)
desires. Only a whole man can be virtuous or happy, but modern man cannot
be whole-he is too distant from nature to be self-sufficient yet not distant
enough to be fully conventional. To characterize this as a matter of public vs.
private is to miss the point, because, for one, private goods can be just as easily
unnatural as natural. Domesticity is not natural, and what would it mean to
speak of the private life of natural man? Rousseau is more likely to take up the
distinction between private and public with relation to such concerns as authorial
responsibility, or the importance of respecting others’ private beliefs as
private (“Letter to Voltaire,” Rousseau 1992; “Letter to d’Alembert,” Rousseau
1960; and, more generally, Kelly 2001). The connection between private vs.
public and the divided modern soul is just not as direct as Cladis makes it out
to be.
In all fairness to Cladis, he does announce he intends to drop
“nature” in his treatment of Rousseau: “Rousseau, no doubt, was interested in
discerning the difference between the natural Solitaire and the artificial, social
human. But our interest need not be bound to his” (84). Rousseau will be of
more use to us if we scrap his “essentialist” and “metaphysical and epistemological
oddities” (85). So, at some level, Cladis knows that he is departing from
Rousseau’s own intent in emphasizing private vs. public at the expense of
nature vs. convention, but two problems remain. First, Cladis is not totally consistent
in his scrapping of “nature” or “natural.” In his treatment of Rousseau,
he often uses the term without quotation marks (which makes it hard to know
if he is distancing himself from it or not), and he relies heavily on the concept
“human” (as in “fully human existence”). It is not clear why “human” does not
suffer from the same essentialism “nature” does. Second, he bases his argument
that Rousseau, like him, views modern dividedness as a good thing in part on
his reinterpretation of Rousseau’s analysis of modern dividedness. It is not logically
impossible to base an argument about what a great thinker thought on a
prior reinterpretation of his thought, but it is a tough act, for it entails understanding
the thinker better than he understood himself. Cladis does seem to
believe that he understands Rousseau better than he understood himself (in
some respects), but he never attempts to prove this in any sustained, focused
way. His reinterpretation comes across as blithe and willful, and thus the conclusions
Cladis draws about what Rousseau really thought from what he
should have thought remain poorly grounded. In short, Cladis’s intention to