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

Book Review: Public Vision, Private Lives
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reshape Rousseau’s thought for his purposes coexists uneasily with his claim to
“listen to his voice,” that is, get him right.
Cladis argues that Rousseau views modern dividedness as, in
itself, a good thing, preferable to all imaginable alternatives. Not only does
Rousseau believe it impossible to put modern man together again, he did not
desire to; he “refused” to resolve the tension (xii, 214, 230). Poland and St.
Peter’s Island (and presumably Rome and Sparta, too), are for Cladis’s
Rousseau so many dead ends, which demonstrate the undesirability of wholeness
by showing the extremes that it would require. Now Rousseau performed
many revaluations of values in his illustrious career, both by inventing new
moral categories like goodness and also by showing why what had been considered
bad in the (recent) past was actually good, like his defense of nature
against Enlightenment progressivism. But claiming that dividedness is preferable
to wholeness was not a revaluation of his. Indeed, if anything, Rousseau
made dividedness less morally acceptable than it had been in the past, as in the
case of his teaching on hypocrisy. Cladis’s argument that Rousseau believes
dividedness good rests on a somewhat shaky textual basis. He neglects to treat
certain famous passages which seem difficult to square with this thesis, such as
“Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations
and his duties, [civil man] will never be either man or citizen. He will be good
neither for himself nor for others. He will be one of these men of our days: a
Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois. He will be nothing” (Rousseau 1979,
40). Cladis does quote “all institutions that put man in contradiction to himself
are worthless” but seems oblivious to the conflict between it and his main thesis
(194). Also, on several occasions, Cladis quotes from the “Profession of Faith
of the Savoyard Vicar” and passes off the Vicar’s views as those of Rousseau
himself (6, 106, 110, among others). But Rousseau only claims to be the editor
of the “Profession of Faith,” and on the issue of dividedness in particular, we
have good reason to think these are not his views. The Vicar posits a philosophical
basis for his dividedness, namely dualism: human nature is both good
and bad, which means all morality is a struggle of nature against nature
(Rousseau 1979, 278ff.). This would seem to be in tension with what Rousseau
argues elsewhere, that man is naturally whole and good. Moral goodness
involves obeying the harmless impulses of our nature, and moral virtue
involves the conquest of artificial desires by artificial means. Cladis is of course
aware of the natural goodness doctrine; indeed, he argues strenuously against
it, or against attributing any real moral weight to it. Cladis’s critique of natural
goodness is too complicated to go through here in sufficient detail, but, at the