Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom by Laurence D. Cooper

Author:Laurence D. Cooper [Cooper, Laurence D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI000000 PHILOSOPHY / General, PHI019000 PHILOSOPHY / Political, PHI046000 PHILOSOPHY / Individual Philosophers
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

There is one more feature of the second subsection that we’d do well to examine before moving on. Rousseau says he had anticipated that a rigorous review of his opinions would lead to painful doubts. This seems believable enough—except that he had previously been no stranger to doubt yet, as far as we can tell, had not suffered for it. Although he had reached age forty “without any principles determined by [his] reason” (6), “carelessness and . . . peace of mind [had] always constituted [his] most dominant pleasure and most lasting propensity” (7; emphasis added). Why should doubt and uncertainty begin to bother him now? Perhaps he only now came to see what was at stake; perhaps doubt incurred by philosophy is uniquely troubling. But perhaps Rousseau is also, or alternatively, saying something about a certain kind of philosophy.

It is in paragraphs 11 and 12 that Rousseau first reports that he was pained by doubt. He points an accusing finger: “They had not persuaded me, but they had troubled me.” The they in question are modern philosophers, among whom he was then living: “Instead of removing my doubts and ending my irresolution, they had shaken all the certainty I thought I had concerning the things that were most important for me to know” (11). But the modern philosophers couldn’t have taken away from Rousseau a certainty he hadn’t had to begin with. What, then? My suggestion: they may have inspired in him a felt need for certainty that he hadn’t theretofore felt. They may have taught him that he needed to know things that, until then, he had been satisfied merely to opine. They may have taught him that, concerning God and the soul, neither faith nor probabilistic reasoning can suffice—and that neither faith nor probabilistic reason need suffice since rational certainty has been made possible by Descartes and the new philosophy he had launched. Now Descartes had not inculcated in human beings a need for certainty that hadn’t previously been felt. But he had purported to show that certainty about God and the soul, the need for which had surely been deepened and intensified by Christianity, could be achieved by reason. The promise of certainty will in itself make uncertainty less tolerable. In this segment of the Third Walk, then, Rousseau presents a sort of symbolic telling, in the guise of a memoir, of the story of modern philosophy and its effects on humanity. Whether his doubts really made him suffer, and why, is finally unknowable. But we do know—at any rate he shows us—that his story took him far from where the modern philosophers would have had it go. Like the ancient philosophers whom he is so careful to distinguish from the moderns, Rousseau is a zetetic skeptic, neither claiming nor suffering for lack of Cartesian certainty.15

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