Rousseau: Happiness and the possibility of philosophy.

摘要

In modern philosophy, especially late modern philosophy, the pursuit of happiness has virtually disappeared. Nietzsche's Zarathustra is the example par excellence: he is no longer concerned with happiness, but only with his work.1 The subordination of happiness to work is likewise indicative of what Heidegger sympathetically called Nietzsche's destruction of Platonism; above all, the traditional unity of happiness and philosophy. The destruction of Platonism therefore anticipates not only the destruction of an ancient philosophical tradition, but also the unity of philosophy and happiness. Yet there is reason to argue that it was not Nietzsche but Rousseau who initiated the destruction of Platonism so understood. For in Rousseau one finds the image of the solitary walker for whom reverie, not philosophy, appears as the highest spiritual aim. Provided this observation, it is remarkable that there is almost no commentary on Rousseau's conception of philosophy. This study intends to expose this obscure aspect of Rousseau's thought in order to discover his understanding of the possibility of human happiness. In so doing, this study situates Rousseau's thought within the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger; and to that end, it is organized around three fundamental aims: (1) to show that Rousseau is a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy, without whom it is impossible to understand the conditions that led to the forgetting of the question of happiness in the history of philosophy, (2) to show that according to Rousseau's principles the question of human happiness is in fact the founding problem of philosophy, and (3) to show that Rousseau's thought on the possibility of philosophy reveals the primal repression of the genuine source of philosophical eros in what Freudian psychoanalysis has called a primal seduction. This dissertation argues for the existence of a nascent doctrine of seduction already at work in Rousseau's thought; and by making this doctrine visible, this study intends not only to make the case for Rousseau's relevance to contemporary debates concerning the possibility of philosophy, but also to initiate a larger project aimed at giving a psychoanalytic account of the history of philosophy.;1Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 237, 327. Or in German, see Nietzsches Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe [electronic resource]; idem, Kritsche Gesamtausgabe , VI-1.291, 401; Kritsche Studienausgabe, 4.295, 405. These page numbers correspond, respectively, to the sections titled "Das Honig-Opfer" and "Das Zeichen."