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

5 4 Interpretation
risk of being glib, suffice to say that he under-appreciates the dignity of natural
goodness because he neglects the importance of strength vs. weakness in
Rousseau’s thinking on morality. Both goodness and virtue are legitimately
“moral”, but the latter implies moral strength whereas the former does not.
Cladis needlessly complicates matters by using terms and categories
which are not Rousseau’s. This is most obviously so when he replaces
nature vs. convention with private vs. public, and gives the latter a significance
it does not have for Rousseau. It is also so vis-à-vis his above-mentioned
“Weberian ideal types.” Whatever limited assistance “The Flourishing City,”
“The Garden,”“The Solitary,” etc. may provide in the good fight against rightstalk,
in the attempt to understand Rousseau, they obscure much more than
they clarify. Again, Cladis freely admits they are made up, and they do not all
represent grievous misunderstandings of Rousseau, but, for one simply interested
in what Rousseau thinks, they mislead. Cladis fears he will be accused of
systematizing the fundamentally unsystematic thought of Rousseau, but the
problem is much simpler: his types combine things which do not belong
together and separate things which do. As we know from contemporary experience
with postmodern scholars and as the early moderns knew from their
experience with the scholastics, inventing new terms without giving adequate
justification for their necessity is usually unsound policy in philosophy.
To his credit, Cladis recognizes the importance of the superficial
contradictions in Rousseau’s thought (9–10). He understands that, not
only are they intentional, part of a larger teaching, but also that they show the
way to Rousseau’s most valuable insights. But one need not conclude from this
that, at his deepest level, Rousseau is fundamentally unsystematic (xii, 9, 230),
and thus a partisan of dividedness, not wholeness. Another approach is possible,
such as is pursued by Arthur Melzer in his remarkable book The Natural
Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Melzer 1990). Melzer,
too, appreciates the pedagogical and rhetorical purpose of Rousseau’s contradictions,
but he makes discoveries Cladis does not because he stresses the
fundamentally “systematic” character of Rousseau’s thought (such as, for
example, the absolute centrality of the sweet sentiment of existence for
Rousseau). In our jaded, postmodern times, we forget that it is not such an easy
task to develop a system, a theory of the (human) whole convincing in its unity
and comprehensiveness. Eighteenth-century systematizing undoubtedly had
its excesses, but without some sort of systematic spirit, philosophy runs the risk
of being inconsistent, parochial or both.