Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Rousseau; Spannung: Stadt, Tugend - Natur

Kurzinhalt: There is an obvious tension between the return to the city and the return to the state of nature. This tension is the substance of Rousseau's thought.

Textausschnitt: 254b There is an obvious tension between the return to the city and the return to the state of nature. This tension is the substance of Rousseau's thought. He presents to his readers the confusing spectacle of a man who perpetually shifts back and forth between two diametrically opposed positions. At one moment he ardently defends the rights of the individual or the rights of the heart against all restraint and authority; at the next moment he demands with equal ardor the complete submission of the individual to society or the state and favors the most rigorous moral or social discipline. Today most serious students of Rousseau incline to the view that he eventually succeeded in overcoming what they regard as a temporary vacillation. The mature Rousseau, they hold, found a solution which he thought satisfied equally the legitimate claims of the individual and those of society, the solution consisting in a certain type of society.1 This interpretation is exposed to a decisive objection. Rousseau believed to the end that even the right kind of society is a form of bondage. Hence he cannot have regarded his solution to the problem of the conflict between the individual and society as more than a tolerable approximation to a solution--an approximation which remains open to legitimate doubts. The farewell to society, authority, restraint, and responsibility or the return to the state of nature remains therefore for him a legitimate possibility.2 The question is, then, not how he solved the conflict between the individual and society but rather how he conceived of that insoluble conflict. (Fs)

255a Rousseau's First Discourse provides a key to a more precise formulation of this question. In that earliest of his important writings he attacked the sciences and the arts in the name of virtue: the sciences and the arts are incompatible with virtue, and virtue is the only thing which matters.3 Virtue apparently requires support by faith or theism, although not necessarily by monotheism.4 Yet the emphasis rests on virtue itself. Rousseau indicates the meaning of virtue clearly enough for his purpose by referring to the examples of the citizen-philosopher Socrates, of Fabricius, and, above all, of Cato: Cato was "the greatest of men."5 Virtue is primarily political virtue, the virtue of the patriot or the virtue of a whole people. Virtue presupposes free society, and free society presupposes virtue: virtue and free society belong together.6 Rousseau deviates from his classical models at two points. Following Montesquieu, he regards virtue as the principle of democracy: virtue is inseparable from equality or from the recognition of equality.7 Secondly, he believes that the knowledge which is required for virtue is supplied, not by reason, but by what he calls the "conscience" (or "the sublime science of the simple souls") or by sentiment or by instinct. The sentiment which he has in mind will prove to be originally the sentiment of compassion, the natural root of all genuine beneficence. Rousseau saw a connection between his inclination toward democracy and his preference for sentiment above reason.8 (Fs)

256a Since Rousseau assumed that virtue and free society belong together, he could prove that science and virtue are incompatible by proving that science and free society are incompatible. The reasoning underlying the First Discourse can be reduced to five chief considerations, which are indeed only insufficiently developed in that work but which become sufficiently clear if, in reading the First Discourse, one takes into account Rousseau's later writings.9 (Fs)