Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity

5 Between Eros and Will to Power: Rousseau and ‘‘The Desire to Extend Our Being’’

5 between eros and will to power: rousseau and ‘‘the desire to extend our being’’ We all want what’s good. But what is good? Or, to begin with only slightly less ambitious a question, how can we discover the good? Classical philosophy taught that the route to knowledge of the good must begin with what is widely believed to be good: the good is the desirable, and the desirable either is, or is somehow suggested by, what we actually desire. In neither case is the inquiry an easy one, if only because we desire many mutually exclusive things. If the good is suggested by or even if it is included among what we actually already desire, we still must discover the principle by which to discern the ‘‘valid’’ aspect of our desires from those parts which, for reasons of accident or ignorance or misapprehension, do not point toward the truly desirable. Yet however difficult, there is a coherence and an intuitive sense to the philosophic enterprise thus conceived. The good is the desirable and the desirable is to be determined through an examination of our actual desires. Modern and postmodern philosophy have not always maintained this approach to discovering the good. Many, following Kant, have separated the moral good from considerations of desire and happiness, arguing that even if virtue does contribute to happiness, its demands must be determined and met without any regard for one’s own well-being. Far from representing the fulfillment of desire, Kantian autonomy (i.e., adherence to the moral law) consists precisely in subordinating desire to duty. Yet no one, not even those who deny that the good is somehow contained in our desires, would shrink from calling the good desirable. This is important : to call something desirable is to hold that it either satisfies or would satisfy some desire; and to call something most desirable (e.g., Kantian autonomy ) is to hold that it would fulfill the highest or worthiest (though not necessarily the deepest or most powerful) desire (e.g., the desire for freedom and dignity). My point is simply that all serious moral and political thought, whether it would like to or not, is made by its own terms to concern itself 134 rousseau and the expansiveness of being with the factual question of desire. If even the least naturalistic, most deontological view of the good has a vital link to desire, then so does all moral and political thought.1 The good, as the desirable, is fulfilling either of our deepest desire (Plato) or our highest desire (Kant, and also Plato). What, then, are our deepest and our highest desires? Rousseau has an answer worth considering. The structure of his moral and political thought is naturalistic in several ways, and thus is more akin to Plato’s than to Kant’s. First, he avows that things are good only if and to the extent that they fulfill our natural desires. If men had the natures of wolves, he pointedly suggests, the man who resisted preying on his fellows would be depraved (Emile 287). Second, for all that his prescriptive political thought seems to eschew natural desire—Rousseau goes so far as to assert that the best political institutions are those which most denature man—that departure from nature refers to the means by which society can artificially replicate something of the natural man’s soul and satisfy what, at bottom, are deep natural desires (Emile 40); and any adequate political solution must take its bearings from natural right, knowledge of which depends on knowledge of ‘‘the nature of man,’’ which itself includes and arguably is essentially constituted by the desires (SD 93). Finally, Rousseau holds that there is one good, arising from one desire, that outranks all others and indeed comprehends them, in the sense that these other goods are good only to the extent that they participate in or contribute to the primary good. In this, Rousseau’s good is comparable to Plato’s good, and his understanding of the desire for this good is comparable to Plato’s eros. Yet Rousseau’s good is not, in its content, presented as synonymous with Plato’s, and Rousseau does not endorse or otherwise indicate that he subscribes to the Platonic conception of eros. The kinship between his thought and Plato’s appears to be formal or structural more than substantive. Rather than suggest that there is some particular condition or state of...