Rousseau on the “Contradiction of Soul”

• In Event: Late Modern Critiques of the Bourgeois

Abstract

Many scholars have sought to explain the paradox of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s praise of three incompatible ways of life: the goodness of natural men, the virtue of citizens, and the retreat into the private life of either bourgeois domesticity or solitary reverie. One influential theory says that all these lives are praiseworthy because they involve psychological unity (Melzer). In this paper I put forward a different theory, namely that Rousseau judges different ways of life by the extent to which they allow people to avoid the “contradiction of soul” understood in a precise sense. I provide a novel and detailed account of this contradiction of soul. I then defend the view that Rousseau’s standard for judging human lives is best understood as the avoidance of this summum malum. I show how this way of understanding Rousseau’s argument corrects Melzer’s exaggeration of the selflessness of political virtue and the selfishness of private life. All praiseworthy lives, with the exclusion of life in the pre-social state of nature, require different stratagems for remaining clear about who one is and what one wants. Though this may require virtuous self-overcoming and imaginative self-deceptive, these sorts of soul divisions serve as protections from a far worse “contradiction of soul.”

Author

• Kimberley Burns, University of Dallas