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Безотговорният разум: интелектуалците и политиката
Историята на Европа през миналия век е пълна с примери за интелектуалци, които подкрепяха идеологическите проекти и политиката на тоталитарните режими, комунистически или фашистки. Но как бе възможно видни философи и писатели да се превърнат в рупори на Сталин и Хитлер? В портретите на Хайдегер, Шмит, Бенямин, Кожèв, Фуко и Дерида американският историк Марк Лила показва как, когато не успеят да овладеят болните си амбиции и самочувствие, интелектуалците лесно се предават на една общочовешка слабост – изкушението на властта и силата.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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About the author
Mark Lilla
23 books176 followersMark Lilla is an American political scientist, historian of ideas, journalist, and professor of humanities at Columbia University in New York City. A self-described liberal, he typically, though not always, presents views from that perspective.
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February 3, 2018
The Obscenely Obsessive Aesthetics of Philosophers
Some weeks ago I criticised a book on scientific aesthetics by a well known scientist for its failure to adequately investigate the fundamental aesthetic drives of individual scientists and of the scientific profession.* If I had read The Reckless Mind first, I could have simply pointed to it as a model for how to carry out such an exercise. Lilla’s book is stuffed with a sensitive appreciation of what makes people who make a living with their minds tick. And his final theoretical speculations are outstandingly provocative.
The main difference in subject matter in the two books is that, while both are about famous intellectuals, Chandrasekhar’s scientists are less controversial than Lilla’s philosophers. The flaws of the latter may be more apparent; but I can’t see any plausible reason why that should make their criteria for living life substantially more visible. Lilla simply does a much better job of shifting through and filtering the mass of largely irrelevant biographical dross to reveal the likely kernel of these remarkable lives. My interpretation of Lilla’s interpretation of Heidegger in the book’s first vignette will, I hope, give a sense of the remarkable job he’s done
Heidegger was a protege of the German philosopher of phenomenology, Karl Jaspers. Heidegger and Jaspers shared an interest in so-called ‘limit situations’, those highly distressing states of severe anxiety and guilt that bring with them the possibility of an appreciation of existence itself. A psychological investigation of these men might presume that such an interest represents some kind of psychological disorder or trauma. But Lilla recognises this as an aesthetical not a psychological fact. It is a concern not originating in one’s history but one shaping one’s future. The concern is symptomatic of a positive, one might say ‘vocational’, stance to the world that hints at the aesthetic involved as an end in itself.
The growing emotional separation of Heidegger and Jaspers during the 1920’s reveals more detail about the aesthetics of each. For Heidegger a limit situation meant not one caused by any particular emotional or physical stress, but the more “primordial anxiety” of “being” itself, specifically the mode of being human. This aesthetic explicitly manifests itself in the gap between the two men when Heidegger writes a review of a book by Jaspers in 1923, and widens thereafter.
The differences between Jaspers and Heidegger were not in the first instance intellectual but aesthetic. Each had a distinctive perspective on the world. An aesthetic is not a rational theory but a filter which simultaneously screens what our experiences will be and guides our responses to them. An aesthetic is necessarily therefore ‘pre-theoretic’, although it may inspire subsequent conceptual development, which, in turn, makes the aesthetic more articulate.
Jaspers’s conception of the limit situation was one of a sort of pre- or anti-Kantian ‘thing-in-itselfness’ which focused his attention on the totality of possible expressions by the world to his consciousness. His phenomenology, however successful or unsuccessful it was, was an aesthetic of ‘sweeping in’ as many perspectives and experiences as possible. It eventually inspired some interesting variations of modern systems theory.
Heidegger’s aesthetic on the other hand accepted Kant’s dictum of the essential alienation of things, the world in general, from the human mind, including the human mind itself, and set about constructing an aesthetic strategy for dealing with this problem. For this, Heidegger created his own aesthetic: Dasein, presence, or the experience of simply being. Dasein as an aesthetic can be known because it is constructed; it does not exist unless one wills it. And it is solely what one wills it to be. Dasein is the aesthetic of one’s own self-creation. This is not a matter of playing God but of actually being divine.
Jaspers implicitly recognises that Dasein is an aesthetic not an intellectual concept, and that it is the principle source of Heudegger’s intellectual power. “He seems to notice what no one else saw,” Jaspers writes in his notebook. Indeed, the things Heidegger saw when he looked at the world were remarkable for their myopic concentration. For example, at one point Jaspers confronts him about Hitler, “How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany?” To which Heidegger responds, “Culture doesn’t matter. Just look at his marvelous hands.” Quite a filter indeed!
The aesthetic of Dasein seeks out and responds to ‘authenticity’. For Heidegger this does not mean honesty, sincerity, ‘being true to oneself.’ Authenticity means taking a ‘stand’ in the world, that is, making a definite choice among innumerable possibilities about who one will be, dismissing as irrelevant those concerns of daily life which inhibit or obscure that stand. Dasein is therefore purposively obsessive. There is no room in its aesthetic for judgments of relative worth of virtue, morality, or constraints, much less for political awareness. And when Dasein’s radar comes across a similarly obsessive Dasein like Hitler, it can only respond as it did: “Just look at his marvelous hands.”
Heidegger was also passionate about what he saw through this filter. Like a sommelier with attitude, he insisted on his aesthetic until many others could taste the delicate balance of his ideas and see exactly how they fit the disparate pieces of the world with a special elegance. Enthusiasm is of course the first rule of sales. What Heidegger was selling so enthusiastically was not so much a complex vocabulary but a way to experience the world.
This is precisely what his popularizers in programmers like EST and Landmark, and other variants of the Human Potential Movement, which are run by his commercial epigones, have capitalized on so successfully. They sell the experience of the aesthetic and then themselves, over and over again. Heidegger’s ideas are a sort of tribal vocabulary that one hears from time to time in public utterances by celebrities, university presidents, and politicians who have been through these programmes.
At some point, before 1933 in any case, Heidegger’s passionately promoted aesthetic consumed its inventor. Jaspers wrires in his autobiography that “It could sometimes seem that a demon had crept into him.” So successful in formulating and demonstrating the power of his aesthetic for interpreting the world, Heidegger apparently forgot that Dasein was an invention, not reality. Lilla reports a conversation in 1936 between Heidegger and the historian Karl Lowith, in which Heidegger explicitly refers to the source of his Nazi sympathy as his own writings. Believing his own academic press, he joined the Nazi Party and his name remains tainted ever since.
One conclusion I draw for Lilla’s Heidegger is that an aesthetic can have great power. In general, the more articulate it is, the more powerful, not just in its ability to organize the world of experience in some more orderly way, but also by attracting others to share in its power. Even after the war, Jaspers, despite criticising Heidegger’s conceptual intellect as authoritarian and recommending to the French war crimes committee that he be prohibited from teaching, still found his aesthetic fascinating. In a letter to Hannah Arendt, Jaspers admits that Heidegger “has knowledge of something that hardly anyone notices these days.” Jaspers’s fascination was not with His friend’s intellect but with the fact “that he lives in depths and with a passion that one dies not easily forget.”
When such a powerful aesthetic escapes from the consciousness of those who use it; as soon as it slips gently into the instinctive, and indeed primordial, parts of the mind; as soon as it is no longer a choice but an involuntary response to the world, it becomes a danger to everyone who comes into contact with it. Jaspers quotes a remark by Heidegger which could be the operational slogan for the aesthetic of Dasein: “One must get involved.” Having made one’s commitment, there are no other significant choices to be made.
And the most startling thing about Heidegger is that he knew this to be a clear danger in purely intellectual terms. Language is, as it were, the ‘ground’ of the aesthetical. An aesthetic cannot stay bottled up as mere sensory perception, it must be expressed in order to exist. And language is the most articulate means for its expression. But language becomes invisible; it hides both itself and the things it denotes. It effectively washes it hands of what it promotes or implies by claiming neutrality or objectivity - what Richard Rorty called the Mirror of Reality. All of this is captured in one of Heidegger’s best known aphorisms: “Language,” he says, “speaks man.” Having forgotten we created it, language exerts a power which is God-like in its transcendence and universal presence. Yet Heidegger entirely de-railed his rational faculty in favour of his aesthetic commitment.
Heidegger’s life is an example of what happens when an aesthetic goes rogue. He didn’t so much join fascism as pursue his criterion of what counts in the world and how what counts fits together without reflection in an insidious trap he had built for himself. The central paradox of Heidegger’s philosophy is that the conscious choice of an aesthetic stand on the world can be even more debilitating and destructive than being manipulated by the world. At least the latter allows for learning and adaptive evolution. Heidegger didn’t recognise that any fixed aesthetic, no matter how it is arrived at, is deadly and so his philosophy never addresses the issue.
Instead of shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave, what Heidegger saw was his own cave paintings flickering in the fire light. It made him giddy, drunk on his home brew, and eventually hung over and claiming he had been a victim. It’s amazing what aesthetics can do to folk, particularly really clever ones.
*https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Some weeks ago I criticised a book on scientific aesthetics by a well known scientist for its failure to adequately investigate the fundamental aesthetic drives of individual scientists and of the scientific profession.* If I had read The Reckless Mind first, I could have simply pointed to it as a model for how to carry out such an exercise. Lilla’s book is stuffed with a sensitive appreciation of what makes people who make a living with their minds tick. And his final theoretical speculations are outstandingly provocative.
The main difference in subject matter in the two books is that, while both are about famous intellectuals, Chandrasekhar’s scientists are less controversial than Lilla’s philosophers. The flaws of the latter may be more apparent; but I can’t see any plausible reason why that should make their criteria for living life substantially more visible. Lilla simply does a much better job of shifting through and filtering the mass of largely irrelevant biographical dross to reveal the likely kernel of these remarkable lives. My interpretation of Lilla’s interpretation of Heidegger in the book’s first vignette will, I hope, give a sense of the remarkable job he’s done
Heidegger was a protege of the German philosopher of phenomenology, Karl Jaspers. Heidegger and Jaspers shared an interest in so-called ‘limit situations’, those highly distressing states of severe anxiety and guilt that bring with them the possibility of an appreciation of existence itself. A psychological investigation of these men might presume that such an interest represents some kind of psychological disorder or trauma. But Lilla recognises this as an aesthetical not a psychological fact. It is a concern not originating in one’s history but one shaping one’s future. The concern is symptomatic of a positive, one might say ‘vocational’, stance to the world that hints at the aesthetic involved as an end in itself.
The growing emotional separation of Heidegger and Jaspers during the 1920’s reveals more detail about the aesthetics of each. For Heidegger a limit situation meant not one caused by any particular emotional or physical stress, but the more “primordial anxiety” of “being” itself, specifically the mode of being human. This aesthetic explicitly manifests itself in the gap between the two men when Heidegger writes a review of a book by Jaspers in 1923, and widens thereafter.
The differences between Jaspers and Heidegger were not in the first instance intellectual but aesthetic. Each had a distinctive perspective on the world. An aesthetic is not a rational theory but a filter which simultaneously screens what our experiences will be and guides our responses to them. An aesthetic is necessarily therefore ‘pre-theoretic’, although it may inspire subsequent conceptual development, which, in turn, makes the aesthetic more articulate.
Jaspers’s conception of the limit situation was one of a sort of pre- or anti-Kantian ‘thing-in-itselfness’ which focused his attention on the totality of possible expressions by the world to his consciousness. His phenomenology, however successful or unsuccessful it was, was an aesthetic of ‘sweeping in’ as many perspectives and experiences as possible. It eventually inspired some interesting variations of modern systems theory.
Heidegger’s aesthetic on the other hand accepted Kant’s dictum of the essential alienation of things, the world in general, from the human mind, including the human mind itself, and set about constructing an aesthetic strategy for dealing with this problem. For this, Heidegger created his own aesthetic: Dasein, presence, or the experience of simply being. Dasein as an aesthetic can be known because it is constructed; it does not exist unless one wills it. And it is solely what one wills it to be. Dasein is the aesthetic of one’s own self-creation. This is not a matter of playing God but of actually being divine.
Jaspers implicitly recognises that Dasein is an aesthetic not an intellectual concept, and that it is the principle source of Heudegger’s intellectual power. “He seems to notice what no one else saw,” Jaspers writes in his notebook. Indeed, the things Heidegger saw when he looked at the world were remarkable for their myopic concentration. For example, at one point Jaspers confronts him about Hitler, “How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany?” To which Heidegger responds, “Culture doesn’t matter. Just look at his marvelous hands.” Quite a filter indeed!
The aesthetic of Dasein seeks out and responds to ‘authenticity’. For Heidegger this does not mean honesty, sincerity, ‘being true to oneself.’ Authenticity means taking a ‘stand’ in the world, that is, making a definite choice among innumerable possibilities about who one will be, dismissing as irrelevant those concerns of daily life which inhibit or obscure that stand. Dasein is therefore purposively obsessive. There is no room in its aesthetic for judgments of relative worth of virtue, morality, or constraints, much less for political awareness. And when Dasein’s radar comes across a similarly obsessive Dasein like Hitler, it can only respond as it did: “Just look at his marvelous hands.”
Heidegger was also passionate about what he saw through this filter. Like a sommelier with attitude, he insisted on his aesthetic until many others could taste the delicate balance of his ideas and see exactly how they fit the disparate pieces of the world with a special elegance. Enthusiasm is of course the first rule of sales. What Heidegger was selling so enthusiastically was not so much a complex vocabulary but a way to experience the world.
This is precisely what his popularizers in programmers like EST and Landmark, and other variants of the Human Potential Movement, which are run by his commercial epigones, have capitalized on so successfully. They sell the experience of the aesthetic and then themselves, over and over again. Heidegger’s ideas are a sort of tribal vocabulary that one hears from time to time in public utterances by celebrities, university presidents, and politicians who have been through these programmes.
At some point, before 1933 in any case, Heidegger’s passionately promoted aesthetic consumed its inventor. Jaspers wrires in his autobiography that “It could sometimes seem that a demon had crept into him.” So successful in formulating and demonstrating the power of his aesthetic for interpreting the world, Heidegger apparently forgot that Dasein was an invention, not reality. Lilla reports a conversation in 1936 between Heidegger and the historian Karl Lowith, in which Heidegger explicitly refers to the source of his Nazi sympathy as his own writings. Believing his own academic press, he joined the Nazi Party and his name remains tainted ever since.
One conclusion I draw for Lilla’s Heidegger is that an aesthetic can have great power. In general, the more articulate it is, the more powerful, not just in its ability to organize the world of experience in some more orderly way, but also by attracting others to share in its power. Even after the war, Jaspers, despite criticising Heidegger’s conceptual intellect as authoritarian and recommending to the French war crimes committee that he be prohibited from teaching, still found his aesthetic fascinating. In a letter to Hannah Arendt, Jaspers admits that Heidegger “has knowledge of something that hardly anyone notices these days.” Jaspers’s fascination was not with His friend’s intellect but with the fact “that he lives in depths and with a passion that one dies not easily forget.”
When such a powerful aesthetic escapes from the consciousness of those who use it; as soon as it slips gently into the instinctive, and indeed primordial, parts of the mind; as soon as it is no longer a choice but an involuntary response to the world, it becomes a danger to everyone who comes into contact with it. Jaspers quotes a remark by Heidegger which could be the operational slogan for the aesthetic of Dasein: “One must get involved.” Having made one’s commitment, there are no other significant choices to be made.
And the most startling thing about Heidegger is that he knew this to be a clear danger in purely intellectual terms. Language is, as it were, the ‘ground’ of the aesthetical. An aesthetic cannot stay bottled up as mere sensory perception, it must be expressed in order to exist. And language is the most articulate means for its expression. But language becomes invisible; it hides both itself and the things it denotes. It effectively washes it hands of what it promotes or implies by claiming neutrality or objectivity - what Richard Rorty called the Mirror of Reality. All of this is captured in one of Heidegger’s best known aphorisms: “Language,” he says, “speaks man.” Having forgotten we created it, language exerts a power which is God-like in its transcendence and universal presence. Yet Heidegger entirely de-railed his rational faculty in favour of his aesthetic commitment.
Heidegger’s life is an example of what happens when an aesthetic goes rogue. He didn’t so much join fascism as pursue his criterion of what counts in the world and how what counts fits together without reflection in an insidious trap he had built for himself. The central paradox of Heidegger’s philosophy is that the conscious choice of an aesthetic stand on the world can be even more debilitating and destructive than being manipulated by the world. At least the latter allows for learning and adaptive evolution. Heidegger didn’t recognise that any fixed aesthetic, no matter how it is arrived at, is deadly and so his philosophy never addresses the issue.
Instead of shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave, what Heidegger saw was his own cave paintings flickering in the fire light. It made him giddy, drunk on his home brew, and eventually hung over and claiming he had been a victim. It’s amazing what aesthetics can do to folk, particularly really clever ones.
*https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
February 24, 2019
Много добра книга! Кратка, но съдържателна, чиято цел е да даде отговор чрез примери на въпроса: Как интелигенцията и в частност философите през 20в. попадат под властта на тиранията и със или без да се усетят, чрез философията, която изповядват, оправдават бруталните режими на Сталин и Хитлер, на колонизаторството и пр.
Книгата започва и свършва с Платон, който определено трябва да препрочета.
Книгата започва и свършва с Платон, който определено трябва да препрочета.
August 31, 2020
Ever since Plato went to Syracuse, philosophers have been tantalized by the prospect of turning tyrants from the dark side. Their track record in this has been abysmal. This loosely is Lilla’s theme in this collection of short pieces, most of which were written originally for the New York Review of Books.
RECKLESS MIND is particularly fun because it treats prominent personalities in 20th century thought (Heidegger, Foucalt, Benjamin, Derrida and more) and not gently. Lilla's wit is razor sharp and his prose is uncommonly clear. His premise that irresponsible philosophizing often leads to authoritarian tendencies is sobering and remains relevant today.
RECKLESS MIND is particularly fun because it treats prominent personalities in 20th century thought (Heidegger, Foucalt, Benjamin, Derrida and more) and not gently. Lilla's wit is razor sharp and his prose is uncommonly clear. His premise that irresponsible philosophizing often leads to authoritarian tendencies is sobering and remains relevant today.
December 4, 2024
Amikor buta emberek tesznek rossz dolgokat, az jogi értelemben lehet bűn, de igazából csak butaság. Viszont amikor okos emberek tesznek rossz dolgokat, na, az morális értelemben is bűn. Alighanem errefelé kell kapirgálni, ha a gonosz kútfőjét keressük. És akkor ugye itt vannak a filozófusok, az okosak az okosak között, a hivatásos gondolkodók - mi van, ha ők tesznek rosszat? Miért tesznek ők rosszat?
Mark Lilla hat filozófusportréban megy utána ennek a kérdésnek. Gondolatainak központjában a "Szürakuszai csábítása"-jelenség áll - a pillanat, amikor a hatalom valami olyat ajánl fel a filozófusnak, aminek az nem tud ellenállni. Például lehetőséget arra, hogy ami addig csak elmélet volt, a gyakorlatban is kipróbálhassa. Platónnal esett meg ilyesmi, amikor Dionüsziosz, Szürakuszai zsarnoka mellett tesztelhette volna a filozófus-király hipotézist. Platón becsületére válik, hogy hamar leesett neki a kísérlet kudarca - ez például Heideggerről vagy Carl Schmittről nem annyira mondható el. Mi történik ilyenkor? Nos, nem az, hogy a filozófus csatlakozik egy ordas eszméhez - ez csak a külszín. A filozófus ugyanis autonóm elme, aki nem szívesen vallaná be, ha elkurvult. Azzal hízeleg hát magának, hogy voltaképp az ordas eszme csatlakozott hozzá, és neki az a feladata, hogy ezt az eszmét a maga szintjére emelje fel. Nem veszi észre, nem akarja észrevenni, hogy ez eleve kudarcra ítélt vállalkozás. A hatalmi akaratnak ugyanis mindig megvannak a saját céljai (például hogy fenn akarja tartani önmagát), és az eszközei is, hogy ezeket a célokat kikényszerítse. Azt hinni, hogy ezek a célok megváltoztathatóak, minimum naivitás. Nem a hatalom idomul a filozófushoz, hanem a filozófus gondolkodása torzul hozzá a hatalomhoz.
A kötet egyes írásai esettanulmányok ehhez a folyamathoz - például a már említett Heidegger- és Schmitt-esszék, vagy Foucault esete, aki viszont a baloldali radikalizmus mellett kötelezte el magát. Esetükben a totalitárius eszmékkel ápolt szoros kapcsolat kulcsa, hogy eleve gondolati rendszerük is kompatibilis volt a hatalmi ideológiával. Schmitt vezérelve, és gondolatai a rendkívüli állapotról például olyan koktélt alkotott, amit mintha kifejezetten a náciknak találtak volna ki. (Megjegyz.: nem véletlen, hogy a fidesz agytrösztjei is az ő politikai filozófiájából merítenek.) A többiek (Walter Benjamin, Kojève és Derrida) viszont legfeljebb érzékelik a vonzást, de nem adják át magukat neki - ilyen értelemben ők csak tágan értelmezve illeszthetőek bele a "Szürakuszai csábítása"-motívumba. Derrida pedig első blikkre kifejezetten kakukktojásnak tűnik - megkockáztatom, hogy ha Lilla nem lenne kiakadva a strukturalizmusra, akkor nem is fért volna be a kötetbe*. Mindezzel együtt ez egy kifejezetten jól felépített, okos és gondolatébresztő szöveg, ami ha nem is hoz be radikálisan új meglátásokat az értelmiség felelősségéről szóló diskurzusba, de helyenként kifejezetten szórakoztatóan rendszerezi annak alapvető kérdéseit.
* Lilla nagyon meggyőzően érvel amellett, hogy Derrida dekonstrukciós elmélete valójában nem filozófia, hanem performance-művészet, értelmiség-triggerelés, öncélú zsonglőrködés a komolynak hangzó filozófiai szakzsargonnal. Konkrétan figyelmeztetnem kellett magam, hogy addig ne fogadjam el a szerző ítéletét, amíg Derridától nem olvastam el valamit. Viszont mivel attól totálisan elment a kedvem, hogy Derridától bármit elolvassák, a kérdés ad acta került.
Mark Lilla hat filozófusportréban megy utána ennek a kérdésnek. Gondolatainak központjában a "Szürakuszai csábítása"-jelenség áll - a pillanat, amikor a hatalom valami olyat ajánl fel a filozófusnak, aminek az nem tud ellenállni. Például lehetőséget arra, hogy ami addig csak elmélet volt, a gyakorlatban is kipróbálhassa. Platónnal esett meg ilyesmi, amikor Dionüsziosz, Szürakuszai zsarnoka mellett tesztelhette volna a filozófus-király hipotézist. Platón becsületére válik, hogy hamar leesett neki a kísérlet kudarca - ez például Heideggerről vagy Carl Schmittről nem annyira mondható el. Mi történik ilyenkor? Nos, nem az, hogy a filozófus csatlakozik egy ordas eszméhez - ez csak a külszín. A filozófus ugyanis autonóm elme, aki nem szívesen vallaná be, ha elkurvult. Azzal hízeleg hát magának, hogy voltaképp az ordas eszme csatlakozott hozzá, és neki az a feladata, hogy ezt az eszmét a maga szintjére emelje fel. Nem veszi észre, nem akarja észrevenni, hogy ez eleve kudarcra ítélt vállalkozás. A hatalmi akaratnak ugyanis mindig megvannak a saját céljai (például hogy fenn akarja tartani önmagát), és az eszközei is, hogy ezeket a célokat kikényszerítse. Azt hinni, hogy ezek a célok megváltoztathatóak, minimum naivitás. Nem a hatalom idomul a filozófushoz, hanem a filozófus gondolkodása torzul hozzá a hatalomhoz.
A kötet egyes írásai esettanulmányok ehhez a folyamathoz - például a már említett Heidegger- és Schmitt-esszék, vagy Foucault esete, aki viszont a baloldali radikalizmus mellett kötelezte el magát. Esetükben a totalitárius eszmékkel ápolt szoros kapcsolat kulcsa, hogy eleve gondolati rendszerük is kompatibilis volt a hatalmi ideológiával. Schmitt vezérelve, és gondolatai a rendkívüli állapotról például olyan koktélt alkotott, amit mintha kifejezetten a náciknak találtak volna ki. (Megjegyz.: nem véletlen, hogy a fidesz agytrösztjei is az ő politikai filozófiájából merítenek.) A többiek (Walter Benjamin, Kojève és Derrida) viszont legfeljebb érzékelik a vonzást, de nem adják át magukat neki - ilyen értelemben ők csak tágan értelmezve illeszthetőek bele a "Szürakuszai csábítása"-motívumba. Derrida pedig első blikkre kifejezetten kakukktojásnak tűnik - megkockáztatom, hogy ha Lilla nem lenne kiakadva a strukturalizmusra, akkor nem is fért volna be a kötetbe*. Mindezzel együtt ez egy kifejezetten jól felépített, okos és gondolatébresztő szöveg, ami ha nem is hoz be radikálisan új meglátásokat az értelmiség felelősségéről szóló diskurzusba, de helyenként kifejezetten szórakoztatóan rendszerezi annak alapvető kérdéseit.
* Lilla nagyon meggyőzően érvel amellett, hogy Derrida dekonstrukciós elmélete valójában nem filozófia, hanem performance-művészet, értelmiség-triggerelés, öncélú zsonglőrködés a komolynak hangzó filozófiai szakzsargonnal. Konkrétan figyelmeztetnem kellett magam, hogy addig ne fogadjam el a szerző ítéletét, amíg Derridától nem olvastam el valamit. Viszont mivel attól totálisan elment a kedvem, hogy Derridától bármit elolvassák, a kérdés ad acta került.
June 5, 2016
از بزرگان آموختم که همواره باید به «اغراض» مؤلف پی ببریم و در مطالعهٔ اثر و تأمل در ابعاد گوناگون آن این اغراض را پیش چشم داشته باشیم و خود را اسیر ایدئولوژیهای گوناگون «مرگ مؤلف» نکنیم. لیلا این کتاب را ننوشته تا در هر فصلش اندیشهٔ یک متفکر نامبردار قرن بیستمی را معرفی کند؛ کتاب او، که در اصل برای مخاطب آمریکایی نوشته شده، اثری واکنشی است. اما واکنش به چه؟ واکنش به تصویری قبلاً موجود از آن متفکر در نزد جامعهٔ روشنفکری و دانشگاهی آمریکا. بنابراین «روشنفکران و سیاست» لزوماً مدخلی مناسب برای آشنایی خواننده با متفکران مورد بحثش نیست، بلکه نوشته شده تا ابعادی مشخص در تفکر آنان را برای مخاطبش زیر ذرهبین بگذارد. و از آنجا که بیشوکم تمامی این چهرهها در ایران نیز ــ طبعاً با سطحی بسیار نازلتر نسبت به آمریکا ــ با اقبال جامعهٔ روشنفکری مواجه شدهاند، و در ایران نیز سویههای تاریک اندیشهٔ آنان کمتر محل انتقاد بوده، خوانندهٔ ایرانی هم میتواند مخاطبی مطلوب برای کتاب لیلا باشد.
من از پیش با متفکران حاضر بر صحنهٔ فصول این کتاب آشناییهایی داشتم؛ برخی را بیشتر میشناختم و بعضی را کمتر. در مجموع، کتاب اطلاعات دست اول چندانی برایم نداشت اما با این وجود برایم فوقالعاده جذاب و خواندنی بود، و اصلیترین دلیل آن هم نظرگاه نکتهبین و تدوین بسیار جذابی بود که لیلا در پرداخت هر فصل به نمایش گذاشته بود ــ و البته فصل نتیجهگیری و بازگشت تماشایی به افلاطون، که از فراست عمیق مؤلفش حکایت داشت. «روشنفکران و سیاست» یکی از بهترین آثار در نوع خود است، نوعی که مصداقهایش را کمتر به فارسی برگرداندهایم، آثاری که جزء متون دست اول اندیشه یا تفسیرهای بسیار معتبر نیستند، اما نمونههایی روشنفکرانه (اینبار در معنای مثبت کلمه و فاقد بار ایدهئولوژیکِ عمدتاً اروپاییاش) و روشنگرند که در سمت آزادی میایستند.
کتاب لیلا شباهت صوری بسیاری به «آزادی و خیانت به آزادی» آیزایا برلین دارد؛ اگر او متفکرانی از دورهٔ «روشنگری» را برگزیده بود که به اعتقاد خودش در دل روشنگری در برابر آن میایستند، لیلا هم برخوردی مشابه با چند متفکر مشهور قرن بیستمی دارد، و البته به گمان من هم مصداقهایش را بسیار درستتر از برلین برگزیده و هم بصیرت عمیقتری نسبت به سلف خود دارد.
من از پیش با متفکران حاضر بر صحنهٔ فصول این کتاب آشناییهایی داشتم؛ برخی را بیشتر میشناختم و بعضی را کمتر. در مجموع، کتاب اطلاعات دست اول چندانی برایم نداشت اما با این وجود برایم فوقالعاده جذاب و خواندنی بود، و اصلیترین دلیل آن هم نظرگاه نکتهبین و تدوین بسیار جذابی بود که لیلا در پرداخت هر فصل به نمایش گذاشته بود ــ و البته فصل نتیجهگیری و بازگشت تماشایی به افلاطون، که از فراست عمیق مؤلفش حکایت داشت. «روشنفکران و سیاست» یکی از بهترین آثار در نوع خود است، نوعی که مصداقهایش را کمتر به فارسی برگرداندهایم، آثاری که جزء متون دست اول اندیشه یا تفسیرهای بسیار معتبر نیستند، اما نمونههایی روشنفکرانه (اینبار در معنای مثبت کلمه و فاقد بار ایدهئولوژیکِ عمدتاً اروپاییاش) و روشنگرند که در سمت آزادی میایستند.
کتاب لیلا شباهت صوری بسیاری به «آزادی و خیانت به آزادی» آیزایا برلین دارد؛ اگر او متفکرانی از دورهٔ «روشنگری» را برگزیده بود که به اعتقاد خودش در دل روشنگری در برابر آن میایستند، لیلا هم برخوردی مشابه با چند متفکر مشهور قرن بیستمی دارد، و البته به گمان من هم مصداقهایش را بسیار درستتر از برلین برگزیده و هم بصیرت عمیقتری نسبت به سلف خود دارد.
January 14, 2018
Mark Lilla’s books are all polished gems, perfectly and fluidly written, brief yet complete within the ambit Lilla sets for each of his works. This book, "The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics," was written about a decade after the collapse of Communism. From its title, the casual browser might think it was a general attack on intellectuals. It is not that at all—Lilla is nothing if not an intellectual himself, and he sees a lot of merit in the world of ideas, if he also sees its limitations. Rather, this is an examination of why brilliant men and women of the modern world so often willingly dance with tyranny, and an attempt to draw a distinction between mere intellectuals, who often toady to raw power, and true philosophers, who pursue virtue.
Lilla uses Polish writer’s Czeslaw Milosz’s 1953 "The Captive Mind," an examination of archetypal responses to intellectual life under Stalinism, to frame his key question. Although it is relatively easy to understand why intellectuals (or regular people) often responded with cooperation when they actually lived under Communism, “how are we to explain the fact that a chorus for tyranny also existed in countries where intellectuals faced no danger and were free to write as they pleased? What possibly could have induced them to justify the actions of modern tyrants or, as was more common, to deny any essential difference between tyranny and the free societies of the West?” (While the tyrannies of which Lilla speaks include both Communism and Nazism, in practice, though he nowhere adverts to this, his almost sole focus is Communism, for the simple reason that Nazism had few intellectual supporters outside the area of its rule, whereas for Communism it was the opposite, and Communism lasted far longer with far broader appeal to the “philotyrannical” intellectuals on which Lilla focuses.) The book proceeds to examine a series of eight intellectuals, and ends with an outstanding essay, a discussion of Plato’s failed attempt to instruct a tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius the Younger, in the ways of justice and philosophy, where Lilla applies that ancient episode to today.
Lilla begins with the personally linked trio of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Jaspers, all German intellectuals prominent in the middle of the twentieth century. He narrates their intertwined history at some length, with a focus on their shared love of philosophy, turning around the pivot of Heidegger’s period of Nazi participation (most notoriously his year as rector of Freiburg University, in 1933). There are some interesting bits here, including a colloquy between Jaspers and Heidegger, in which Jaspers asked “How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany?”, to which Heidegger responded, “Culture doesn’t matter. Just look at his marvelous hands.” This conjures up shades of the NYT’s house conservative, David Brooks, who similarly narrated his own first encounter with Barack Obama: “I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and [I thought] a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” Peas in a pod, these public intellectuals. Another interesting point, relevant today, especially to those convinced that intellectuals should govern, is Arendt’s belief “that intellectuals generally have trouble thinking clearly about politics, in large part because they see ideas at work in everything.” Whatever some may think, ideas, especially abstract ideas, and most especially new ideas, are not all that important to day-to-day or normal political life, and mostly just cause trouble, as intellectuals try to force the messy and complex real lives of people, driven by their natures and chance, into some clever, new, and usually destructive, framework of ideas.
None of these three are particularly sympathetic (although Arendt comes closest). Heidegger, aside from his time spent with Nazis, maundered on a lot about “authenticity.” I’ve never been able to understand why that should be some sort of important personal goal. Honor, love, hard work, prudence, fortitude, and a zillion other virtues are much more important than eternal naval gazing to satisfy oneself that one is “authentic,” whatever that even means. And what if being “authentic” means you admit you’re a jerk, as it seems to mean for most people obsessed with authenticity? Far better to strive to conform oneself to the correct path than to look inwards for authenticity. That’s the problem with all these people—the pure life of the mind is its own end and reward for them, but it is properly neither end nor reward in the life of man.
But a description of their minds is really all we get about Heidegger, Arendt, and Jaspers. What we don’t get is any linkage of this long essay to the putative theme of Lilla’s book. It is not explained why tyranny attracted these people, because it only attracted Heidegger, and not for long. The only relevant portion, to Lilla’s theme, is Arendt excusing Heidegger on the basis that philosophers have always been attracted to tyranny, which is empirically true enough, but this book is supposed to be telling us why. Not to mention Heidegger lived under Nazism, and thus is not an example of the type of person Lilla is supposedly examining, attracted to tyranny from the outside. This points up the problem with this book—it is a collection of essays not written for this book, shoehorned into a loose group. Lilla says up front his book “is not a systematic treatise,” but it’s not a treatise at all, it’s mostly a collection. Not a bad collection, but not really more than a polished examination of the eight people it profiles.
More interesting is the next essay, on Carl Schmitt. Schmitt achieved a brief moment of American political notability early in 2017, when sometime Republican and former conservative William Kristol compared Michael Anton, reactionary author of the famous “Flight 93” essay and national security functionary in the Trump White House, to Schmitt. It was not a compliment, since to most, Schmitt is seen mostly as a crude Nazi philosopher, the “crown jurist” of the early Nazi period. But Lilla points out that not only is this not really the case, but that elements of both the modern Left and Right both see a lot of interest and value in Schmitt’s thought.
No doubt Schmitt was much more closely tied to Nazism than Heidegger. He was instrumental in the 1930s in providing legal justifications for various Nazi seizures and abuses of power, although he faded from relevance and view before the war. Like Heidegger, he was investigated post-war, but not punished, for his dalliance with tyranny, and also like Heidegger, he viewed himself as on a higher plane than the Nazis. In their world, or at least the mental world they constructed after the war, the superior mind of the philosopher was being used to guide those lower, and to bring them from their rough and brutal ways to a philosophical approach that would raise them up from tyranny to justice and clear thought—not necessarily to liberal, democratic thought, of course, but to a type of thought acceptable to a philosopher in the mold of Plato.
In Lilla’s analysis (I know nothing independently of Schmitt’s thought, but perhaps I should learn), the core of Schmitt’s approach to politics is that all peoples have enemies, and, as Schmitt said, “Tell me who your enemy is and I’ll tell you who you are.” This means that “everything is potentially political because everything—morals, religion, economics, art—can, in extreme cases, become a political issue, an encounter with an enemy, and be transformed into a source of conflict.” (I found this fascinating, because it is also the approach of the modern Left to the world, except that their approach is not confined to “extreme cases,” but to every case—no area of life must be allowed to be free from their insufferable politicization.) The logical conclusion is that “every human grouping requires a sovereign whose job is to decide what to do in the extreme or exceptional case—most important of all, to engage in war or not, with one enemy or another. The state’s sovereign decision is just that: a decision resting on no universal principle, and recognizing no natural bounds.” This philosophy, called today “decisionism,” opposes the liberal state as unnatural and contemptible, and views its supposed focuses such as individualism as fictions. In particular, Schmitt was enamored of the Roman practice of temporary dictators—he viewed the existence of the sovereign decision as what mattered, not its content. Thus, today Schmitt is viewed with favor by certain German conservatives, and, more interesting, by many German leftists, because his “brutal realism can help us today to rediscover ‘the political’ and restore a sense of legitimacy through the popular will. . . . His critique of parliamentarianism and the principle of neutrality can be seen in a left-wing light as unmasking domination in liberal societies; his unabashed defense of the friend-enemy distinction is said to remind us that politics is, above all, struggle.” Thus, the same people who lionized the Cuban “struggle” found a lot to like in Schmitt, because emancipation can be achieved through sovereign action much more easily than through liberal democracy.
Lilla thinks this is, though not wrong, a too-simplistic reading of Schmitt, and that Schmitt was primarily interested in creating an organic society. Citing Schmitt’s interplay with Leo Strauss in the 1930s, and Schmitt’s "Roman Catholicism and Political Form," an obscure work, Lilla says that “Schmitt argued that the Church’s authority is legitimized symbolically through ritual rather than legally through neutral rules; it sees itself as representing the entire body of the faithful, not particular individuals. Schmitt saw the Church’s understanding of the good political order as having come under attack in the modern age, threatened by the idea of political individualism and by a capitalist economy that subordinated social ends to calculating means.” As Lilla points out, much of Schmitt’s thought is not actually compatible with Christianity, and is closer to Gnosticism, but all this is nonetheless interesting, and relevant to today, as liberal democracy dies. In this reading, Schmitt was not Nazi at all; he merely had “a willingness to encourage any force that might do battle against the secularized liberal age. He describes himself repeatedly as a katechon, the Greek term Saint Paul uses when speaking of the force that holds off the Anti-Christ until the Second Coming.” (Again, though, it tells us little about the supposed theme of Lilla’s book.) Lilla does say “But for nearly two centuries now, the advocates of liberal ideas have also found themselves confronted by opponents like Schmitt, who are so convinced that the modern age represents a cosmic mistake that they are willing to consider any extreme, intellectual or political, to correct it. While few of Schmitt’s contemporary promoters may share his peculiar theological vision, many display his violent distaste for liberal society; and like him they long passionately for a new dispensation.” As I say—relevant to today, unlike Heidegger, or, for that matter, anyone else profiled in this book, except perhaps Plato and Dionysius.
Lilla’s next essay, on Walter Benjamin (Lilla has a keen interest in obscure yet fascinating Jewish thinkers, such as his focus on Franz Rosenzweig and his mystic "Star of Redemption" in Lilla’s "The Shipwrecked Mind") is no more successful in fitting into Lilla’s purported theme. Benjamin committed suicide in 1940; before that, he wrote various philosophical works, flirted with Communism, and spent the last decade of his life in an insane project to voluminously record and synthesize life in nineteenth-century Paris. All of modest interest, in particular Lilla’s tying of Benjamin’s occasional Jewish apocalypticism to reactionary thought, but this says nothing of why philosophers not under direct pressure endorse tyranny.
We come closer to the theme in Lilla’s explication of Alexandre Kojève, a Russian émigré whose seminars on Hegel, given in France during the 1930s, were hugely influential. Roger Scruton better summarizes those lectures: “But what impressed Kojève’s audience of spiritually hungry atheists in the 1930s was the vision of radical freedom and the self-created individual. It dawned on them that, by exploring the self and its freedom, it was possible to re-enchant their disenchanted world, and to place the human subject once again at the centre of things.” Unlike all the other philosophers profiled in this book, Kojève turned to actual participation in politics, and entered active service in the French government after World War II, where he worked until his death and ignored philosophy. “When asked for revolutionary advice by the leaders of the Berlin student rebellion in 1967, he replied only, ‘Learn Greek.’ ” Kojève “was convinced that the entire developed world was moving, by fits and starts, toward a rationally organized bureaucratic society without class distinctions. For him it was a mere detail whether that end was to be reached through the industrial capitalism promoted by the United States (which he called the right-Hegelian alternative) or the state socialism of the Soviet Union (the left-Hegelian one).” While this is (internally) reason enough to disregard tyranny, it is mostly an oddball rationale, not generally applicable, and therefore, again, not truly serving Lilla’s theme. And here, as elsewhere, Lilla makes no effort within this essay to tie it to his theme. On the other hand, Lilla does offer a fascinating analysis of Kojève’s dialogue with Leo Strauss, centering on the latter’s On Tyranny, a commentary on Xenophon’s dialogue Hiero (about another tyrant of Syracuse), in which Kojève maintained that modern tyrannies, such as Stalin’s, are qualitatively different, and more moral, than ancient tyrannies, and that philosophers, such as Kojève, are uniquely qualified to help such tyrants “complete the work of history.” Strauss did not think much of this line of thought.
Lilla’s last two profiles are of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. (Lilla loves the French very much, and it’s annoying sometimes, as in his frequent use of untranslated French phrases. He does not seem to know that almost nobody learns French anymore.) Foucault was a more independent thinker than all the other French Communist philosophers, and thus worthy of perhaps more interest. By the same token, though, he’s once again irrelevant to Lilla’s putative theme, and the only truly remarkable point is that Lilla scoffs that "Discipline and Punish," the book which has been “his most influential in America,” was not influential abroad, in part because the near-simultaneous publication of Solzhenitsyn’s "Gulag Archipelago" made it “difficult to maintain that Western classrooms were prisons and still remain within the bounds of good taste.” As far as Derrida, the so-called postmodernist, Lilla mostly uses his essay to criticize supposed academic subjects such as “feminist studies, gay and lesbian studies, science studies, and postcolonial theory” as “ephemeral,” and to lay responsibility for these atrocities at Derrida’s feet. “Postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument. What appears to hold it together is the conviction that promoting these very different thinkers somehow contributes to a shared emancipatory political end, which remains conveniently ill-defined.” At least, though, we are treated to more of Lilla’s sparkling prose: “Socrates equated justice with philosophy, on the grounds that only philosophy could see things as they truly are, and therefore judge truly. Jacques Derrida, mustering all the chutzpah at his disposal, equates justice with deconstruction, on the grounds that only the undoing of rational discourse about justice will prepare the advent of justice as Messiah.”
It is from the joke made at Heidegger’s expense, when he returned from being rector at Freiburg University, that Lilla’s last essay flows. This last essay, “The Lure of Syracuse,” is worth the price of admission, and is among the best things I have ever read. A colleague asked Heidegger, meaning to be nasty, “Back from Syracuse?” The reference was to Plato’s three trips to Syracuse, in the fourth century B.C., at the behest of his friend, a nobleman named Dion, to attempt to teach the new tyrant there, Dionysius the Younger, the value of philosophy, and through philosophy, the need for justice. He failed, miserably. Dionysius had little real interest, and then quickly started to fancy himself an autodidact philosopher who should himself instruct Plato. In the end, Plato barely escaped with his life, and ultimately Dion rebelled (after being exiled) and overthrew Dionysius (and was himself ultimately assassinated). (Dionysius the Younger was also the king who featured, along with the eponymous courtier, in the legend of the Sword of Damocles.) Lilla notes that “The problem of Dionysius is as old as creation. That of his intellectual partisans is new. As continental Europe gave birth to two great tyrannical systems in the twentieth century, communism and fascism, it also gave birth to a new social type, for which we need a new name: the philotyrannical intellectual.”
Lilla then explores a variety of explanations for the rise of this new type of individual, from Isaiah Berlin’s concept that the Enlightenment, with its desperate attachment to hyper-rationality and total rigidity, led to the gulag; to the more common theory that modern tyrannies are substitute religions. Along another axis, Lilla explores the “social history of intellectuals in European political life,” contrasting those who ascribe modern tyranny to too much, or too little, political engagement. Here we begin to actually reach for, if not determine, the answer to Lilla’s question—why do intellectuals often love tyrants?
[Review finishes as first comment.]
Lilla uses Polish writer’s Czeslaw Milosz’s 1953 "The Captive Mind," an examination of archetypal responses to intellectual life under Stalinism, to frame his key question. Although it is relatively easy to understand why intellectuals (or regular people) often responded with cooperation when they actually lived under Communism, “how are we to explain the fact that a chorus for tyranny also existed in countries where intellectuals faced no danger and were free to write as they pleased? What possibly could have induced them to justify the actions of modern tyrants or, as was more common, to deny any essential difference between tyranny and the free societies of the West?” (While the tyrannies of which Lilla speaks include both Communism and Nazism, in practice, though he nowhere adverts to this, his almost sole focus is Communism, for the simple reason that Nazism had few intellectual supporters outside the area of its rule, whereas for Communism it was the opposite, and Communism lasted far longer with far broader appeal to the “philotyrannical” intellectuals on which Lilla focuses.) The book proceeds to examine a series of eight intellectuals, and ends with an outstanding essay, a discussion of Plato’s failed attempt to instruct a tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius the Younger, in the ways of justice and philosophy, where Lilla applies that ancient episode to today.
Lilla begins with the personally linked trio of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Jaspers, all German intellectuals prominent in the middle of the twentieth century. He narrates their intertwined history at some length, with a focus on their shared love of philosophy, turning around the pivot of Heidegger’s period of Nazi participation (most notoriously his year as rector of Freiburg University, in 1933). There are some interesting bits here, including a colloquy between Jaspers and Heidegger, in which Jaspers asked “How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany?”, to which Heidegger responded, “Culture doesn’t matter. Just look at his marvelous hands.” This conjures up shades of the NYT’s house conservative, David Brooks, who similarly narrated his own first encounter with Barack Obama: “I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and [I thought] a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” Peas in a pod, these public intellectuals. Another interesting point, relevant today, especially to those convinced that intellectuals should govern, is Arendt’s belief “that intellectuals generally have trouble thinking clearly about politics, in large part because they see ideas at work in everything.” Whatever some may think, ideas, especially abstract ideas, and most especially new ideas, are not all that important to day-to-day or normal political life, and mostly just cause trouble, as intellectuals try to force the messy and complex real lives of people, driven by their natures and chance, into some clever, new, and usually destructive, framework of ideas.
None of these three are particularly sympathetic (although Arendt comes closest). Heidegger, aside from his time spent with Nazis, maundered on a lot about “authenticity.” I’ve never been able to understand why that should be some sort of important personal goal. Honor, love, hard work, prudence, fortitude, and a zillion other virtues are much more important than eternal naval gazing to satisfy oneself that one is “authentic,” whatever that even means. And what if being “authentic” means you admit you’re a jerk, as it seems to mean for most people obsessed with authenticity? Far better to strive to conform oneself to the correct path than to look inwards for authenticity. That’s the problem with all these people—the pure life of the mind is its own end and reward for them, but it is properly neither end nor reward in the life of man.
But a description of their minds is really all we get about Heidegger, Arendt, and Jaspers. What we don’t get is any linkage of this long essay to the putative theme of Lilla’s book. It is not explained why tyranny attracted these people, because it only attracted Heidegger, and not for long. The only relevant portion, to Lilla’s theme, is Arendt excusing Heidegger on the basis that philosophers have always been attracted to tyranny, which is empirically true enough, but this book is supposed to be telling us why. Not to mention Heidegger lived under Nazism, and thus is not an example of the type of person Lilla is supposedly examining, attracted to tyranny from the outside. This points up the problem with this book—it is a collection of essays not written for this book, shoehorned into a loose group. Lilla says up front his book “is not a systematic treatise,” but it’s not a treatise at all, it’s mostly a collection. Not a bad collection, but not really more than a polished examination of the eight people it profiles.
More interesting is the next essay, on Carl Schmitt. Schmitt achieved a brief moment of American political notability early in 2017, when sometime Republican and former conservative William Kristol compared Michael Anton, reactionary author of the famous “Flight 93” essay and national security functionary in the Trump White House, to Schmitt. It was not a compliment, since to most, Schmitt is seen mostly as a crude Nazi philosopher, the “crown jurist” of the early Nazi period. But Lilla points out that not only is this not really the case, but that elements of both the modern Left and Right both see a lot of interest and value in Schmitt’s thought.
No doubt Schmitt was much more closely tied to Nazism than Heidegger. He was instrumental in the 1930s in providing legal justifications for various Nazi seizures and abuses of power, although he faded from relevance and view before the war. Like Heidegger, he was investigated post-war, but not punished, for his dalliance with tyranny, and also like Heidegger, he viewed himself as on a higher plane than the Nazis. In their world, or at least the mental world they constructed after the war, the superior mind of the philosopher was being used to guide those lower, and to bring them from their rough and brutal ways to a philosophical approach that would raise them up from tyranny to justice and clear thought—not necessarily to liberal, democratic thought, of course, but to a type of thought acceptable to a philosopher in the mold of Plato.
In Lilla’s analysis (I know nothing independently of Schmitt’s thought, but perhaps I should learn), the core of Schmitt’s approach to politics is that all peoples have enemies, and, as Schmitt said, “Tell me who your enemy is and I’ll tell you who you are.” This means that “everything is potentially political because everything—morals, religion, economics, art—can, in extreme cases, become a political issue, an encounter with an enemy, and be transformed into a source of conflict.” (I found this fascinating, because it is also the approach of the modern Left to the world, except that their approach is not confined to “extreme cases,” but to every case—no area of life must be allowed to be free from their insufferable politicization.) The logical conclusion is that “every human grouping requires a sovereign whose job is to decide what to do in the extreme or exceptional case—most important of all, to engage in war or not, with one enemy or another. The state’s sovereign decision is just that: a decision resting on no universal principle, and recognizing no natural bounds.” This philosophy, called today “decisionism,” opposes the liberal state as unnatural and contemptible, and views its supposed focuses such as individualism as fictions. In particular, Schmitt was enamored of the Roman practice of temporary dictators—he viewed the existence of the sovereign decision as what mattered, not its content. Thus, today Schmitt is viewed with favor by certain German conservatives, and, more interesting, by many German leftists, because his “brutal realism can help us today to rediscover ‘the political’ and restore a sense of legitimacy through the popular will. . . . His critique of parliamentarianism and the principle of neutrality can be seen in a left-wing light as unmasking domination in liberal societies; his unabashed defense of the friend-enemy distinction is said to remind us that politics is, above all, struggle.” Thus, the same people who lionized the Cuban “struggle” found a lot to like in Schmitt, because emancipation can be achieved through sovereign action much more easily than through liberal democracy.
Lilla thinks this is, though not wrong, a too-simplistic reading of Schmitt, and that Schmitt was primarily interested in creating an organic society. Citing Schmitt’s interplay with Leo Strauss in the 1930s, and Schmitt’s "Roman Catholicism and Political Form," an obscure work, Lilla says that “Schmitt argued that the Church’s authority is legitimized symbolically through ritual rather than legally through neutral rules; it sees itself as representing the entire body of the faithful, not particular individuals. Schmitt saw the Church’s understanding of the good political order as having come under attack in the modern age, threatened by the idea of political individualism and by a capitalist economy that subordinated social ends to calculating means.” As Lilla points out, much of Schmitt’s thought is not actually compatible with Christianity, and is closer to Gnosticism, but all this is nonetheless interesting, and relevant to today, as liberal democracy dies. In this reading, Schmitt was not Nazi at all; he merely had “a willingness to encourage any force that might do battle against the secularized liberal age. He describes himself repeatedly as a katechon, the Greek term Saint Paul uses when speaking of the force that holds off the Anti-Christ until the Second Coming.” (Again, though, it tells us little about the supposed theme of Lilla’s book.) Lilla does say “But for nearly two centuries now, the advocates of liberal ideas have also found themselves confronted by opponents like Schmitt, who are so convinced that the modern age represents a cosmic mistake that they are willing to consider any extreme, intellectual or political, to correct it. While few of Schmitt’s contemporary promoters may share his peculiar theological vision, many display his violent distaste for liberal society; and like him they long passionately for a new dispensation.” As I say—relevant to today, unlike Heidegger, or, for that matter, anyone else profiled in this book, except perhaps Plato and Dionysius.
Lilla’s next essay, on Walter Benjamin (Lilla has a keen interest in obscure yet fascinating Jewish thinkers, such as his focus on Franz Rosenzweig and his mystic "Star of Redemption" in Lilla’s "The Shipwrecked Mind") is no more successful in fitting into Lilla’s purported theme. Benjamin committed suicide in 1940; before that, he wrote various philosophical works, flirted with Communism, and spent the last decade of his life in an insane project to voluminously record and synthesize life in nineteenth-century Paris. All of modest interest, in particular Lilla’s tying of Benjamin’s occasional Jewish apocalypticism to reactionary thought, but this says nothing of why philosophers not under direct pressure endorse tyranny.
We come closer to the theme in Lilla’s explication of Alexandre Kojève, a Russian émigré whose seminars on Hegel, given in France during the 1930s, were hugely influential. Roger Scruton better summarizes those lectures: “But what impressed Kojève’s audience of spiritually hungry atheists in the 1930s was the vision of radical freedom and the self-created individual. It dawned on them that, by exploring the self and its freedom, it was possible to re-enchant their disenchanted world, and to place the human subject once again at the centre of things.” Unlike all the other philosophers profiled in this book, Kojève turned to actual participation in politics, and entered active service in the French government after World War II, where he worked until his death and ignored philosophy. “When asked for revolutionary advice by the leaders of the Berlin student rebellion in 1967, he replied only, ‘Learn Greek.’ ” Kojève “was convinced that the entire developed world was moving, by fits and starts, toward a rationally organized bureaucratic society without class distinctions. For him it was a mere detail whether that end was to be reached through the industrial capitalism promoted by the United States (which he called the right-Hegelian alternative) or the state socialism of the Soviet Union (the left-Hegelian one).” While this is (internally) reason enough to disregard tyranny, it is mostly an oddball rationale, not generally applicable, and therefore, again, not truly serving Lilla’s theme. And here, as elsewhere, Lilla makes no effort within this essay to tie it to his theme. On the other hand, Lilla does offer a fascinating analysis of Kojève’s dialogue with Leo Strauss, centering on the latter’s On Tyranny, a commentary on Xenophon’s dialogue Hiero (about another tyrant of Syracuse), in which Kojève maintained that modern tyrannies, such as Stalin’s, are qualitatively different, and more moral, than ancient tyrannies, and that philosophers, such as Kojève, are uniquely qualified to help such tyrants “complete the work of history.” Strauss did not think much of this line of thought.
Lilla’s last two profiles are of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. (Lilla loves the French very much, and it’s annoying sometimes, as in his frequent use of untranslated French phrases. He does not seem to know that almost nobody learns French anymore.) Foucault was a more independent thinker than all the other French Communist philosophers, and thus worthy of perhaps more interest. By the same token, though, he’s once again irrelevant to Lilla’s putative theme, and the only truly remarkable point is that Lilla scoffs that "Discipline and Punish," the book which has been “his most influential in America,” was not influential abroad, in part because the near-simultaneous publication of Solzhenitsyn’s "Gulag Archipelago" made it “difficult to maintain that Western classrooms were prisons and still remain within the bounds of good taste.” As far as Derrida, the so-called postmodernist, Lilla mostly uses his essay to criticize supposed academic subjects such as “feminist studies, gay and lesbian studies, science studies, and postcolonial theory” as “ephemeral,” and to lay responsibility for these atrocities at Derrida’s feet. “Postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument. What appears to hold it together is the conviction that promoting these very different thinkers somehow contributes to a shared emancipatory political end, which remains conveniently ill-defined.” At least, though, we are treated to more of Lilla’s sparkling prose: “Socrates equated justice with philosophy, on the grounds that only philosophy could see things as they truly are, and therefore judge truly. Jacques Derrida, mustering all the chutzpah at his disposal, equates justice with deconstruction, on the grounds that only the undoing of rational discourse about justice will prepare the advent of justice as Messiah.”
It is from the joke made at Heidegger’s expense, when he returned from being rector at Freiburg University, that Lilla’s last essay flows. This last essay, “The Lure of Syracuse,” is worth the price of admission, and is among the best things I have ever read. A colleague asked Heidegger, meaning to be nasty, “Back from Syracuse?” The reference was to Plato’s three trips to Syracuse, in the fourth century B.C., at the behest of his friend, a nobleman named Dion, to attempt to teach the new tyrant there, Dionysius the Younger, the value of philosophy, and through philosophy, the need for justice. He failed, miserably. Dionysius had little real interest, and then quickly started to fancy himself an autodidact philosopher who should himself instruct Plato. In the end, Plato barely escaped with his life, and ultimately Dion rebelled (after being exiled) and overthrew Dionysius (and was himself ultimately assassinated). (Dionysius the Younger was also the king who featured, along with the eponymous courtier, in the legend of the Sword of Damocles.) Lilla notes that “The problem of Dionysius is as old as creation. That of his intellectual partisans is new. As continental Europe gave birth to two great tyrannical systems in the twentieth century, communism and fascism, it also gave birth to a new social type, for which we need a new name: the philotyrannical intellectual.”
Lilla then explores a variety of explanations for the rise of this new type of individual, from Isaiah Berlin’s concept that the Enlightenment, with its desperate attachment to hyper-rationality and total rigidity, led to the gulag; to the more common theory that modern tyrannies are substitute religions. Along another axis, Lilla explores the “social history of intellectuals in European political life,” contrasting those who ascribe modern tyranny to too much, or too little, political engagement. Here we begin to actually reach for, if not determine, the answer to Lilla’s question—why do intellectuals often love tyrants?
[Review finishes as first comment.]
December 6, 2012
This book contains brief, almost breezy (and very readable) essays on the philosophies and political implications thereof of Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Kojève, Foucault, and Derrida.
I read the papers on MH, MF, and JD -- and the last two (for those who aren't up to speed on their ideas) are *very* good introductions to their basic thinking. The essay on MH is too superficial to deal with this complex topic.
I have no interst at this point in WB, and have read a lot about CS, and just recently read an entire book on
AK -- so will skip those and move on now to Descombes (who gets a plug, btw, from Lilla).
My guess is that Lilla's other (more sustained) books might disappoint -- and that he is best in the short form -- but that's just a surmise based on nothing....
I read the papers on MH, MF, and JD -- and the last two (for those who aren't up to speed on their ideas) are *very* good introductions to their basic thinking. The essay on MH is too superficial to deal with this complex topic.
I have no interst at this point in WB, and have read a lot about CS, and just recently read an entire book on
AK -- so will skip those and move on now to Descombes (who gets a plug, btw, from Lilla).
My guess is that Lilla's other (more sustained) books might disappoint -- and that he is best in the short form -- but that's just a surmise based on nothing....
April 19, 2017
کتاب بررسی مختصر و کوتاهی از طرز فکر و نحوه نگرش روشنفکران مطرح سده بیستم میلادی دارد.
هایدگر،آرنت، یاسپرس، اشمیت، بنیامین، کوژو، فوکو و دریدا. هریک از این روشنفکران (به غیر از آرنت و یاسپرس) به نوعی فریب جباریت و سبعیت حکومت عصر خویش را خوردند و علاوه بر اینکه در برابر استبداد سکوت پیشه کردند، سعی در توجیه و دفاع از آن را نیز داشتند.
کتاب اطلاعات وسیعی از این روشنفکران به خواننده نمیدهد چه بسا اطلاعاتی در سطح ویکیپدیا! اما نوع نگارش و همینطور ترجمه خوب آن کتاب را در زمره کتاب های جذاب قرار داده است.
پرسش مارک لیلا این است که " چه بر این جماعت گذشت که برخیشان کورکورانه و برخی دیگر کج دار و مریز از سرکوب و اختناق حمایت کردند و بر رنج و محنت مردمان بسیاری مهر تایید زدند؟"
فصل انتهایی کتاب به نام "افسون سیراکوز" نگاهی جالب برای پاسخ به این سوال دارد.
هایدگر،آرنت، یاسپرس، اشمیت، بنیامین، کوژو، فوکو و دریدا. هریک از این روشنفکران (به غیر از آرنت و یاسپرس) به نوعی فریب جباریت و سبعیت حکومت عصر خویش را خوردند و علاوه بر اینکه در برابر استبداد سکوت پیشه کردند، سعی در توجیه و دفاع از آن را نیز داشتند.
کتاب اطلاعات وسیعی از این روشنفکران به خواننده نمیدهد چه بسا اطلاعاتی در سطح ویکیپدیا! اما نوع نگارش و همینطور ترجمه خوب آن کتاب را در زمره کتاب های جذاب قرار داده است.
پرسش مارک لیلا این است که " چه بر این جماعت گذشت که برخیشان کورکورانه و برخی دیگر کج دار و مریز از سرکوب و اختناق حمایت کردند و بر رنج و محنت مردمان بسیاری مهر تایید زدند؟"
فصل انتهایی کتاب به نام "افسون سیراکوز" نگاهی جالب برای پاسخ به این سوال دارد.
February 25, 2018
Another set of Mark Lilla's intellectual biographies, this time focusing on Heidegger, Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt and a few others. I was already generally familiar with the work of most of these thinkers with the exception of Heidegger, but what was novel in these essays was the abundantly critical take that Lilla takes towards these individuals. In particular he examines their countenance or infatuation with forms of political tyranny during their lives. The argument he makes that these thinkers were drawn towards authoritarianism varies in strength, more obviously correct in the cases of Heidegger and Schmitt.
The essays are short and its a relatively breezy read. However to me the entire book seemed a little pointless and indulgent. This is second of Lilla's books of these essays that I've read and for the most point I haven't really gotten the point of either of them, aside from their stirring introductory and closing sections. In anycase the book provides a nice review and a few interesting comments on these important 20th century lives.
The essays are short and its a relatively breezy read. However to me the entire book seemed a little pointless and indulgent. This is second of Lilla's books of these essays that I've read and for the most point I haven't really gotten the point of either of them, aside from their stirring introductory and closing sections. In anycase the book provides a nice review and a few interesting comments on these important 20th century lives.
August 10, 2017
مارک لیلا در این کتاب (که ترجمهی عنوانش چیزی در مایههای "ذهن بیاحتیاط" باید باشد) میخواهد به ما بفهماند که روشنفکران چه بسیار که در بازی سیاست طرف جباریت را گرفتهاند. فارغ از اینکه جز «ایمان و یقین بیخلل لیبرالی» (تعبیر نویسنده در مورد آرون) چیزی در چنتهی لیلا نیست، در اغلب فصول کتاب حتی برای مدعای خودش هم چندان استدلالی ارائه نمیدهد. فصلهای مربوط به دریدا یا فوکو از این منظر در حد فاجعهاند
نهایتا این سبک نقد به روشنفکری، از جانب کسی که جز روایت خنثای اندیشهها جسارت طرح بحث دیگری ندارد، چندان در من اثرگذار نیست
نهایتا این سبک نقد به روشنفکری، از جانب کسی که جز روایت خنثای اندیشهها جسارت طرح بحث دیگری ندارد، چندان در من اثرگذار نیست
October 11, 2016
Originally released a few days before September 11, 2001, Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind was re-released by NYRB roughly corresponding with his new book of essays on reactionary political thinking, The Shipwrecked Mind. In the intervening years, these essays feel both more and less relevant: Foucault has lasted, but the problems of his politics have been explored more completely by the left and the right. Revelations about Heidegger have been made deeper and more notedly “problematic” with the translation of the black notebooks. Derrida, the only living figure in the book when it was released, has passed and his relevance to critical theory waned incredibly quickly. Yet the essays in this collection on Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Kojève, Foucault, and Derrida are still readable and fascinating.
There are, however, some puzzling indictments in this book. Lilla’s essay on the relationship between Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, and Heidegger is clear-eyed in its assignment of Heidegger’s politics, but Heidegger is not the intellectual about the which the essay concerns itself. Are Jaspers and Arendt also guilty of political recklessness? Lilla, despite the very clear-eyed focus of the essay, does not say. Walter Benjamin’s exact offense seems unknown as if Lilla thinks that flirting with Marxism was in and of itself reckless even when distancing from Soviet and Maoist forms. Is it that Benjamin was reckless in his combining messianism and recursion to Frankfurt Marxism? It hardly had political effect and Benjamin never made apologetics for regimes in the way that Schmitt, Heidegger or Foucault had done. Furthermore, while some of the digs at Derrida are apt—particularly Derrida’s highly symbolic and affective reading of Marx—again it is hard to see what the consequences are to these politics. Derrida’s deconstruction seems muddled, but not reckless. It is, now, however, largely irrelevant.
Again one suspects notices that these were essays for Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of books, and are excellent profiles, but the essays connecting the key figures do not thematically relate the figures enough. Lilla’s final essay about Syracuse and the nature of tyrannical philosophers is excellent, but he does not really lay out priorly exactly what was tyrannical about Benjamin. HIs treatment of Kojeve was interesting and clarifying, but the exact nature of the Strauss and Kojeve exchanges needed more development as well. Furthermore, Kojeve’s correspondence has been collected in “On Authority” giving a more complete view of the exchange than when only Strauss’s “On Tyranny” was translated.
In short, this is an insightful but highly frustrating book. Lilla seems more annoyed with the left than the right, even if he thinks the right’s sins are greater. He does not make the digs at Schmitt or even Heidegger that he does Foucault and Derrida. Lilla’s thematic unity is merely interest in alternative and possibly totalitarian worldviews, but any more coherent and cogent theme is resisted beyond that.
There are, however, some puzzling indictments in this book. Lilla’s essay on the relationship between Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, and Heidegger is clear-eyed in its assignment of Heidegger’s politics, but Heidegger is not the intellectual about the which the essay concerns itself. Are Jaspers and Arendt also guilty of political recklessness? Lilla, despite the very clear-eyed focus of the essay, does not say. Walter Benjamin’s exact offense seems unknown as if Lilla thinks that flirting with Marxism was in and of itself reckless even when distancing from Soviet and Maoist forms. Is it that Benjamin was reckless in his combining messianism and recursion to Frankfurt Marxism? It hardly had political effect and Benjamin never made apologetics for regimes in the way that Schmitt, Heidegger or Foucault had done. Furthermore, while some of the digs at Derrida are apt—particularly Derrida’s highly symbolic and affective reading of Marx—again it is hard to see what the consequences are to these politics. Derrida’s deconstruction seems muddled, but not reckless. It is, now, however, largely irrelevant.
Again one suspects notices that these were essays for Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of books, and are excellent profiles, but the essays connecting the key figures do not thematically relate the figures enough. Lilla’s final essay about Syracuse and the nature of tyrannical philosophers is excellent, but he does not really lay out priorly exactly what was tyrannical about Benjamin. HIs treatment of Kojeve was interesting and clarifying, but the exact nature of the Strauss and Kojeve exchanges needed more development as well. Furthermore, Kojeve’s correspondence has been collected in “On Authority” giving a more complete view of the exchange than when only Strauss’s “On Tyranny” was translated.
In short, this is an insightful but highly frustrating book. Lilla seems more annoyed with the left than the right, even if he thinks the right’s sins are greater. He does not make the digs at Schmitt or even Heidegger that he does Foucault and Derrida. Lilla’s thematic unity is merely interest in alternative and possibly totalitarian worldviews, but any more coherent and cogent theme is resisted beyond that.
December 1, 2016
I devoured this one like candy, like "Harry Potter" if those books were about things I care about. As a critic and historian of political ideas, Mark Lilla can't be beat: he has all the clarity and good sense and responsibility that his 20th century European subjects lack. (He's fair, too... Don't let these other Goodreaders fool you. He tells you, as succinctly as a person possibility can, what "deconstruction" appears to mean... And THEN he criticizes its incomprehensibility. Would've loved the Foucault essay in college, where "Discipline and Punish" really IS gospel, as Lilla says.) It was republished in this, the year of Trump, for a reason. It took more than economic uncertainty, paranoia, and racism to set the stage for our idiot President Elect. It required a left wing that has given up on questions of social uplift and the idea of political solutions; an intellectual class that has turned its back on "the liberal democratic establishment." The thinkers profiled in "The Reckless Mind" set their sights on the imaginary demons supposedly embedded in language, politics, history, etc, and so lost track of the real horrible people who really were killing and torturing others. We can't allow ourselves to do the same. Not now!
January 23, 2016
ارتباط عنوان کتاب با برخی فصول آن نامفهوم است ، و بعضی از فصول آن صرفا خلاصه ای از زندگی هشت رو شنفکر یا فیلسوف یاد شده در کتاب است . به غیر فصل اولش که در باب هایدگر، آرنت و یاسپرس است و خیلی از وجوه ناشناخته این سه را برمیشمارد و شاید اندکی فصل دومش در مورد کارل اشمیت، حقوقدان و متفکر سیاسی دست راستی هوادار نازی، بقیه فصول کتاب چندان چنگی به دل نمیزند و حتا برخی جاها مانند مواجهه اش با فوکو، حداقل برای من به شدت یکطرفه و حاشیه ای است، و شاید برای کسی که اولین مواجهه اش با فیلسوف فرانسوی، این کتاب باشد، فوکو را در حد یک خیالباف و روانپریشی همجنس باز می یابد.
فصول مربوط به دریدا و الکساندر کوژو هم برایم اندکی نامفهوم بود و در کل ادعای نویسنده درمقدمه کتاب در خصوص بیطرفی نسبی نوسنده در مورد مواجهه بیطرفانه با متفکران اردوگاه چپ و راست، در بسیاری از صفحات، شبیه گول زدن ساده انگارانه خواننده کتاب است از مواجهه سراپا ستایشگرانه نویسنده با رمون ارن راستگرای فرانسوی تا پایین آوردن اغلب متفکرین چپ، اعم از سارتر، فوکو، دریدا، بنیامین و ... در حد یک مشت پیشواهای پریشان گوی و آشفته.
فصول مربوط به دریدا و الکساندر کوژو هم برایم اندکی نامفهوم بود و در کل ادعای نویسنده درمقدمه کتاب در خصوص بیطرفی نسبی نوسنده در مورد مواجهه بیطرفانه با متفکران اردوگاه چپ و راست، در بسیاری از صفحات، شبیه گول زدن ساده انگارانه خواننده کتاب است از مواجهه سراپا ستایشگرانه نویسنده با رمون ارن راستگرای فرانسوی تا پایین آوردن اغلب متفکرین چپ، اعم از سارتر، فوکو، دریدا، بنیامین و ... در حد یک مشت پیشواهای پریشان گوی و آشفته.
January 14, 2011
I am doing an ILL for this primarily to read about Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
The author thinks he can be better at each of these philosophies than the philosopher who presented it. Each piece is part bio, part summary and part commentary.
I read Heidegger/Arendt/Jaspers, Schmitt, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida. I didn't read Kojeve.
Although I am well read in Heidegger I didn't know that he was so clearly involved with the Nazi's. I don't think his writing reveals anything which leads to the Nazi thought process. I think he wanted to have the approval of the aggressor and therefore went along with the program. I think he was weak in a way that has to do with character. When you have more intellect than character it is easy to value status more than integrity. (IMHO)
Based on Lilla, Schmitt's true colors show up in his antisemitism. Period.
Fortunately for me, I am well read in Foucault. I am also familiar with Foucault's gay sm community. ML is derisive of this community which doesn't actually aid us in understanding MF. Nothing about his intellect is defective because he doesn't embrace the dominant culture's attitude toward vanila sex and personal conformity. IMHO. I didn't know about the facts of his bio, but that doesn't invalidate my appreciation for his new thinking. His view of quality of life might have had something to do with his choices.
from "To Be Read" Book Review Column
John E. (Jack) Becker
http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/resour...
Lilla’s portrait of Michel Foucault, reveals “an essentially private thinker” who made “a foolish and fruitless detour into the politics of his time" and then gave up the illusion of social reform to take refuge in a California homosexual subculture. In the midst of the AIDS crisis he continued to reject the help of established medical power. “His suspicion of the ‘discourses’ of disease. . .had finally rendered him insensible to any distinction between a biological factum and its social interpretation. If one believes that all ‘discourse’ about disease is constructed by social power, and that one can invent any ‘counter-discourse’ aesthetically, it is easy to convince oneself of a certain invincibility. But Foucault was not invincible.” He died of AIDS -- in a hospital.
The strange effort of Jacques Derrida in recent years to deconstruct his cake and bake it too is the subject of Lilla’s penultimate chapter. Deconstruction is the latest form of the intellectual phenomenon that scholastic philosophy called universal skepticism. The scholastic response is still valid: universal skepticism refutes itself.
However, in the 1990s Derrida "changed his mind.... There is a concept -- though only one -- resilient enough to withstand the acids of deconstruction, and that concept is ‘justice.’” Since law, like everything else, is merely a linguistic construct, and language is purely a matter of convention, what, Derrida asks, is the law’s foundation, reason, nature, or something else? Of course both reason and nature are themselves phenomena of language and subject to deconstruction. Yet Derrida has decided that justice is “an infinite idea,” another sort of mysticism, suggests Lilla. Since it is the business of deconstruction to demonstrate that no law can embody absolute justice, to deconstruct the law is to act in the name of justice. In other words deconstruction is justice.
But, says Lilla, deconstruction suspends judgment -- indefinitely. And that leaves politics stripped of judgment and open to pure will. Or to romantic nostalgia. Lilla cites Derrida’s musings about a “spirit” of Marxism and its messianic yearnings: “A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs.”
Lilla concludes: “Derrida is convinced that the only way to extend the democratic values he himself holds is to destroy the language in which the West has always conceived of them, in the mistaken belief that it is language, not reality, that keeps our democracies imperfect.” And so the "democracy we want cannot be described or defended; it can only be treated as an article of irrational faith, a messianic dream."
In his concluding chapter,*** Lilla looks to Plato’s belief that some are drawn to tyranny, others to philosophy, but both are drawn by the mad passion to “beget the beautiful.” Happiness is achieved only if the madness is mastered. Most of us don’t master it -- and lead mediocre lives. Some become slaves to their drives, and emerge as tyrants. The subject of Lilla’s book, however, is that other “class of tyrannical souls...those who enter public life not as rulers, but as teachers, orators, poets -- what today we would call intellectuals.”
Tyrannical intellectuals fail to master their passion for the life of the mind. They dive “headlong into political discussion, writing books, giving speeches, offering advice in a frenzy of activity that barely masks [their] incompetence and irresponsibility. Such men consider themselves to be independent minds, when the truth is that they are a herd driven by their inner demons and thirsty for the approval of a fickle public.”
Such intellectuals play their role in driving democracies toward tyranny by whipping the minds of the young into a frenzy until some of them take the step from thought to action and try to realize their tyrannical ambitions in politics. “Gratified to see their own ideas take effect, these intellectuals become the tyrant’s servile flatterers.”
This is Lilla’s indictment of the reckless mind. The picture rings true. But I would pass another judgment. In his book on Gandhi, Erik Erikson criticized both Gandhi and Western tradition for failing to acknowledge the satyagraha, or truth force, of everyday life. Likewise, the thinkers Lilla considers seem to have been uninspired by the art of the possible in improving the ordinary human lot. Rather, they appear to have been inspired by the desire to transcend, to escape the ordinary, in fact, to destroy it. Yet in the end, the force of truth lies in the ordinary struggles of the individual to live well, and in the formal procedures of government that make it possible for us to live together in peace.
The author thinks he can be better at each of these philosophies than the philosopher who presented it. Each piece is part bio, part summary and part commentary.
I read Heidegger/Arendt/Jaspers, Schmitt, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida. I didn't read Kojeve.
Although I am well read in Heidegger I didn't know that he was so clearly involved with the Nazi's. I don't think his writing reveals anything which leads to the Nazi thought process. I think he wanted to have the approval of the aggressor and therefore went along with the program. I think he was weak in a way that has to do with character. When you have more intellect than character it is easy to value status more than integrity. (IMHO)
Based on Lilla, Schmitt's true colors show up in his antisemitism. Period.
Fortunately for me, I am well read in Foucault. I am also familiar with Foucault's gay sm community. ML is derisive of this community which doesn't actually aid us in understanding MF. Nothing about his intellect is defective because he doesn't embrace the dominant culture's attitude toward vanila sex and personal conformity. IMHO. I didn't know about the facts of his bio, but that doesn't invalidate my appreciation for his new thinking. His view of quality of life might have had something to do with his choices.
from "To Be Read" Book Review Column
John E. (Jack) Becker
http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/resour...
Lilla’s portrait of Michel Foucault, reveals “an essentially private thinker” who made “a foolish and fruitless detour into the politics of his time" and then gave up the illusion of social reform to take refuge in a California homosexual subculture. In the midst of the AIDS crisis he continued to reject the help of established medical power. “His suspicion of the ‘discourses’ of disease. . .had finally rendered him insensible to any distinction between a biological factum and its social interpretation. If one believes that all ‘discourse’ about disease is constructed by social power, and that one can invent any ‘counter-discourse’ aesthetically, it is easy to convince oneself of a certain invincibility. But Foucault was not invincible.” He died of AIDS -- in a hospital.
The strange effort of Jacques Derrida in recent years to deconstruct his cake and bake it too is the subject of Lilla’s penultimate chapter. Deconstruction is the latest form of the intellectual phenomenon that scholastic philosophy called universal skepticism. The scholastic response is still valid: universal skepticism refutes itself.
However, in the 1990s Derrida "changed his mind.... There is a concept -- though only one -- resilient enough to withstand the acids of deconstruction, and that concept is ‘justice.’” Since law, like everything else, is merely a linguistic construct, and language is purely a matter of convention, what, Derrida asks, is the law’s foundation, reason, nature, or something else? Of course both reason and nature are themselves phenomena of language and subject to deconstruction. Yet Derrida has decided that justice is “an infinite idea,” another sort of mysticism, suggests Lilla. Since it is the business of deconstruction to demonstrate that no law can embody absolute justice, to deconstruct the law is to act in the name of justice. In other words deconstruction is justice.
But, says Lilla, deconstruction suspends judgment -- indefinitely. And that leaves politics stripped of judgment and open to pure will. Or to romantic nostalgia. Lilla cites Derrida’s musings about a “spirit” of Marxism and its messianic yearnings: “A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs.”
Lilla concludes: “Derrida is convinced that the only way to extend the democratic values he himself holds is to destroy the language in which the West has always conceived of them, in the mistaken belief that it is language, not reality, that keeps our democracies imperfect.” And so the "democracy we want cannot be described or defended; it can only be treated as an article of irrational faith, a messianic dream."
In his concluding chapter,*** Lilla looks to Plato’s belief that some are drawn to tyranny, others to philosophy, but both are drawn by the mad passion to “beget the beautiful.” Happiness is achieved only if the madness is mastered. Most of us don’t master it -- and lead mediocre lives. Some become slaves to their drives, and emerge as tyrants. The subject of Lilla’s book, however, is that other “class of tyrannical souls...those who enter public life not as rulers, but as teachers, orators, poets -- what today we would call intellectuals.”
Tyrannical intellectuals fail to master their passion for the life of the mind. They dive “headlong into political discussion, writing books, giving speeches, offering advice in a frenzy of activity that barely masks [their] incompetence and irresponsibility. Such men consider themselves to be independent minds, when the truth is that they are a herd driven by their inner demons and thirsty for the approval of a fickle public.”
Such intellectuals play their role in driving democracies toward tyranny by whipping the minds of the young into a frenzy until some of them take the step from thought to action and try to realize their tyrannical ambitions in politics. “Gratified to see their own ideas take effect, these intellectuals become the tyrant’s servile flatterers.”
This is Lilla’s indictment of the reckless mind. The picture rings true. But I would pass another judgment. In his book on Gandhi, Erik Erikson criticized both Gandhi and Western tradition for failing to acknowledge the satyagraha, or truth force, of everyday life. Likewise, the thinkers Lilla considers seem to have been uninspired by the art of the possible in improving the ordinary human lot. Rather, they appear to have been inspired by the desire to transcend, to escape the ordinary, in fact, to destroy it. Yet in the end, the force of truth lies in the ordinary struggles of the individual to live well, and in the formal procedures of government that make it possible for us to live together in peace.
December 16, 2011
One of the stupidest books I've ever read, written by one of the prime representatives of current U.S. thinktank intellectualism.
September 15, 2025
Подкрепата на тиранията - дали към Хитлер, Сталин, или друг - се получава не само от обаятелното желание за физическо или психологическо надмощие, но идва и следствие на натиск, на едно безизходно положение, толкова далеч от нас, че не можем да бъдем съдници. Тази подкрепа може да бъде обяснена, но никога извинена. Страхът идва по-силен от логиката и здравият разум, за жалост; често след сриването на определена политическа система, прегрешилите, вече със свита опашка, гледат да прикрият срамното си минало.
Има и друг тип хора, видни интелектуалци от Европа от времето на и малко преди ВСВ, които не са били застрашавани от нацизма, болшевизма или пр, обаче избират да тръгнат по този път. Хора, популярни и до днес с идеите си точно толкова, колкото и с явната им подкрепа на Хитлер или Сталин, каращи четящите ги да се чудят - защо? Не само политическото време не ги прималява като другите, даже напротив, определената идеология им идва като слънчев лъч, като правилното наименувание на вече породилите се идеи в съзнанието им. Прояви на смяна на идеология, на желание за изкачване по политическата стълбица без никакъв предишен интерес, почти наивно повтаряне на чутото и ожесточено съгласяване с него, нагнетяване на възгледите във всеки аспект от живота им, а ако в някой момент са страдали от въпросната идеология, даже проявяват и нещо като политически Стокхолмски синдром - алчност или желание за надмощие, кое точно кара тези хора да мислят по този начин?
Проучването на Марк Лила разглежда точно това - интелектуалният възход и политическото падение на известни мислители, както и какво може да е причинило тази рязка промяна на тяхната идентичност. Дали е била налична на някакво подсъзнателно, тайно ниво, изявено в минали изказвания или произведения на споменатите интелектуалци; слабост на характера, липса на трезвена преценка или дори и нежелание да се вникне в проблема от политическа гледна точка, а само да се взират през фиктивната призма на философията; "привличане към тиранията", т.е. лека форма на мегаломания и тежка форма на болно его. Произведението на Лила ни дава десетки обяснения за въпрос, който може да остане без точен отговор.
Има и друг тип хора, видни интелектуалци от Европа от времето на и малко преди ВСВ, които не са били застрашавани от нацизма, болшевизма или пр, обаче избират да тръгнат по този път. Хора, популярни и до днес с идеите си точно толкова, колкото и с явната им подкрепа на Хитлер или Сталин, каращи четящите ги да се чудят - защо? Не само политическото време не ги прималява като другите, даже напротив, определената идеология им идва като слънчев лъч, като правилното наименувание на вече породилите се идеи в съзнанието им. Прояви на смяна на идеология, на желание за изкачване по политическата стълбица без никакъв предишен интерес, почти наивно повтаряне на чутото и ожесточено съгласяване с него, нагнетяване на възгледите във всеки аспект от живота им, а ако в някой момент са страдали от въпросната идеология, даже проявяват и нещо като политически Стокхолмски синдром - алчност или желание за надмощие, кое точно кара тези хора да мислят по този начин?
Проучването на Марк Лила разглежда точно това - интелектуалният възход и политическото падение на известни мислители, както и какво може да е причинило тази рязка промяна на тяхната идентичност. Дали е била налична на някакво подсъзнателно, тайно ниво, изявено в минали изказвания или произведения на споменатите интелектуалци; слабост на характера, липса на трезвена преценка или дори и нежелание да се вникне в проблема от политическа гледна точка, а само да се взират през фиктивната призма на философията; "привличане към тиранията", т.е. лека форма на мегаломания и тежка форма на болно его. Произведението на Лила ни дава десетки обяснения за въпрос, който може да остане без точен отговор.
January 2, 2025
The first book from the Internet Archive that I've read non-stop, cover to cover. I absolutely devoured this.
This book is a case study of intellectualism in service to despotism, or in the author's words, of philo-tyranny. The rogues gallery include Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojeve, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, with each entry being a mix between a biography and a review of their work.
It isn't a deep takedown of each thinkers' respective work, but it's clear that Lilla is at least familiar with each of their writings, as he uses them to build up the context upon which their political actions are judged. The focus is less on the books than it is on the authors behind them, and the support (always explicit in every thinker except Derrida) each had towards political regimes, systems, and people that have led to enormous human suffering.
An important read, probably now moreso than ever as the internet makes "intellectuals" out of all of us, out of anyone with a keyboard and the audacity to think that their obscure little ramblings on an obscure little site mean anything; what more if they have an actual audience?
This book is a case study of intellectualism in service to despotism, or in the author's words, of philo-tyranny. The rogues gallery include Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojeve, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, with each entry being a mix between a biography and a review of their work.
It isn't a deep takedown of each thinkers' respective work, but it's clear that Lilla is at least familiar with each of their writings, as he uses them to build up the context upon which their political actions are judged. The focus is less on the books than it is on the authors behind them, and the support (always explicit in every thinker except Derrida) each had towards political regimes, systems, and people that have led to enormous human suffering.
An important read, probably now moreso than ever as the internet makes "intellectuals" out of all of us, out of anyone with a keyboard and the audacity to think that their obscure little ramblings on an obscure little site mean anything; what more if they have an actual audience?
March 16, 2018
Aunque la exposición de Lilla es clara y concisa, se me ha atravesado en lo poco imparcial que es respecto a la ideología de algunos de los autores: me parece una pena que un libro de historia intelectual que en teoría se debería limitar a exponer el pensamiento y las diversas fases de la obra de ciertos autores y su relación con el poder de forma supuestamente objetiva —aunque ya sabemos que ningún texto lo es, pero una puede soñar— se convierta en un instrumento para lanzar una tesis neoliberal que no viene a cuento y, cómo no, muy americana. Por no hablar de lo de equiparar a Benjamin con Heidegger… porque es lo mismo afiliarse al Partido Comunista alemán en la República de Weimar que militar en el Nazi, por supuesto, toda esa parafernalia liberal de que los extremos se tocan y demás. En fin, que he intentado que no me molestara demasiado, pero ha sido superior a mí leer que, según el señor Lilla, el encuentro entre Benjamin y Brecht en 1924 tuvo «desafortunados efectos sobre su escritura». No vaya a ser que el escritor se comprometa, por Dios.
February 6, 2019
O século XX talvez tenha como uma das suas marcas a obsessão de certos intelectuais, de esquerda ou direita, em participar ativamente na arena política. E mais que isso, como essa participação com frequência impressionante se converteu na adesão a regimes políticos tirânicos. Lilla escolheu uma meia dúzia de autores, todos conhecidos, que de alguma forma estiveram de braços dados ou até com mais envolvimento na defesa, justificação ou participação em regimes ditatoriais.
Essa chamada tentação por Siracusa, por lembrar o papel de Platão na ‘educação’ do tirano Dionísio, se mostrou como parte da vida política do século XX. Regimes autoritários se justificavam intelectualmente ou intelectuais buscavam justificar regimes autoritários. Heidegger ou Carl Schmitt a defender o nazismo; outros muitos a defender o socialismo ou outros, ainda, em luta por um pós-modernismo antidemocrático.
Lilla não é defensor que essa tentação seja fruto da vitória do iluminismo racionalista ou, então pelo contrário, do irracionalismo anti-iluminista. Ambos, é verdade, em termos de ideologia lançam algumas luzes sobre o porquê de muitos intelectuais terem aderido ao totalitarismo. Mas são explicações insuficientes.
Lilla recorre aos gregos – Platão, em especial – para encontrar as razões do adesismo. Faz parte, entende ele, de um elemento interior de cada pessoal, a tentação amorosa, em que tanto o ditador quanto o filósofo – também cada um de nós – tem a sua frente. E a adesão aos apelos tirânicos se faz por meio do amor descontrolado, a paixão que domina todos os outros sentimentos e também a razão.
A primeira arma do verdadeiro intelectual não é a adesão, mas sim a contenção das próprias paixões, o que resulta, ou pode resultar, no afastamento da vida política, ou, então, o ceticismo em relação às teses políticas.
Enfim, um grande livro, que esclarece muito a respeito de indivíduos que desempenharam papeis importantes na história intelectual do século XX.
Essa chamada tentação por Siracusa, por lembrar o papel de Platão na ‘educação’ do tirano Dionísio, se mostrou como parte da vida política do século XX. Regimes autoritários se justificavam intelectualmente ou intelectuais buscavam justificar regimes autoritários. Heidegger ou Carl Schmitt a defender o nazismo; outros muitos a defender o socialismo ou outros, ainda, em luta por um pós-modernismo antidemocrático.
Lilla não é defensor que essa tentação seja fruto da vitória do iluminismo racionalista ou, então pelo contrário, do irracionalismo anti-iluminista. Ambos, é verdade, em termos de ideologia lançam algumas luzes sobre o porquê de muitos intelectuais terem aderido ao totalitarismo. Mas são explicações insuficientes.
Lilla recorre aos gregos – Platão, em especial – para encontrar as razões do adesismo. Faz parte, entende ele, de um elemento interior de cada pessoal, a tentação amorosa, em que tanto o ditador quanto o filósofo – também cada um de nós – tem a sua frente. E a adesão aos apelos tirânicos se faz por meio do amor descontrolado, a paixão que domina todos os outros sentimentos e também a razão.
A primeira arma do verdadeiro intelectual não é a adesão, mas sim a contenção das próprias paixões, o que resulta, ou pode resultar, no afastamento da vida política, ou, então, o ceticismo em relação às teses políticas.
Enfim, um grande livro, que esclarece muito a respeito de indivíduos que desempenharam papeis importantes na história intelectual do século XX.
April 2, 2019
Jaspers: “How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany?”
Heidegger: “Culture doesn’t matter. Just look at his marvelous hands.”
Denunciation of the terrible politics of some academic darlings (Heidegger, Foucault, Benjamin, Carl Schmitt). The common theme is that their philosophies so radically distorted their perception, that their interventions in politics were inevitably harmful.
Lilla tries to make the edginess and procrustean attitudes of these men reflect badly on all philosophy, or philosophers in civil society. This doesn't work - think of Smith's influence, or Mill's, or Russell's, or Bentham's - though it might be true of a certain kind of Continental, the kind incentivised to say novel things regardless of their truth or consequences, I don't know.
Possibly I reacted so strongly because this was the first dissent against these great nasty obscurantists I'd seen; other writing by Lilla hasn't impressed me, and though the targets of this book are bipartisan, his agenda is too plain.
Good old Jaspers comes out very well from all this, anyway, an Obi-wan figure:
I beseech you! if ever we shared philosophical impulses, take responsibility for your gifts! Place it in the service of reason, or of the reality of human worth & possibilities, instead of in the service of magic!
October 28, 2017
This brief collection of essays from Mark Lilla attempts to create a series of philo-tyrannical concatenations, presumably as a warning to future philosophers considering an active participation in government and politics.
Because of the brevity a lot of these thinkers are not examined in the requisite amount of detail, rather, just enough to make a quick point as to their link to some sort of tyrannical movement. Particularly gruesome is the well-known case of Martin Heidegger and Lilla's quick synopsis of the bizarre Heidegger-Jaspers-Arendt triangle is at times intriguing yet mostly facile. The essays on Foucault and Derrida are actually more insightful yet at the same time don't quite fit in with what was supposed to be the book's connecting tissue.
However, this is enjoyable and mostly accurate (if mostly skin-deep) examination of the dangers of intellectual philotyranny and Lilla is at his best in the concluding chapters, "The Lure of Syracuse," and, "Sola Fide." An interesting history of what seems to be a bizarre occurrence with otherwise hugely intelligent figures but this is mainly an introduction to the idea, not much more.
Because of the brevity a lot of these thinkers are not examined in the requisite amount of detail, rather, just enough to make a quick point as to their link to some sort of tyrannical movement. Particularly gruesome is the well-known case of Martin Heidegger and Lilla's quick synopsis of the bizarre Heidegger-Jaspers-Arendt triangle is at times intriguing yet mostly facile. The essays on Foucault and Derrida are actually more insightful yet at the same time don't quite fit in with what was supposed to be the book's connecting tissue.
However, this is enjoyable and mostly accurate (if mostly skin-deep) examination of the dangers of intellectual philotyranny and Lilla is at his best in the concluding chapters, "The Lure of Syracuse," and, "Sola Fide." An interesting history of what seems to be a bizarre occurrence with otherwise hugely intelligent figures but this is mainly an introduction to the idea, not much more.
March 20, 2020
One of the best books I’ve read in years. Highly recommended.
November 8, 2018
This was an interesting is slightly too short study of the phenomenon of the philotyrannical intellectual in mid-20th century French and German history. The focus is on philosophers and political thinkers who came to excuse, justify, or even support the actions of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, especially the Nazis and the Soviets. Lilla provides a number of brief biographies of figures like Heidegger, Schmitt, Foucault, and Derrida and then sketches out why this phenomenon occured. He shows that it was neither a product of the left or right, necessarily. Schimtt and Heidegger became enamored of the Nazis, whereas Foucault and Derrida praised Communist and post-colonial tyrannies. He says that to some extent you can trace the roots of philotyrannism back in European intellectual history, especially to some major thinkers of the French Enlightenment and the Revolution, who welcomed revolutionary violence, abhorred tradition, spat on the right of the individual relative to the group, and formed some of the first modern, non-monarchical tyrannies in world history. You could have an equally plausible story, a sort of history written by Dostoevsky or Elias Canetti, that focuses on the "inner demons of our nature:" our tribalism, our hatred, our desire for simplicity and purpose, our anxieties about the homogenized, bureaucratized modern world, our loss of meaning and religion, our anomie, our mass hysteria. Lilla says that the dilemma for the historian is to decide which of these frames to adopt, or how to blend them into a coherent analysis. I think this is a very useful framing/question.
My hunch is to say that all of these thinkers shared one trait: They all believed in some kind of Nietzchean transvaluation of values, a total stripping away of bourgeois ideals and a return to a more raw essence, or the liberation of that essence. For Schmitt, it was about stripping back the liberal niceties of rights, consensus, balance, and procedure and getting down to the raw power and violence that undergirds all politics. For Foucault, it was about freeing the individual from webs of psychic meaning and restriction, even at the linguistic level, so he can live a more authentic, liberated life in all spheres. For Derrida, I have no idea, it was mainly about destroying all objectivity. This intellectual trait, I think, made them susceptible to the heroic political figure who sought revolutionary transformations and great deeds, one who could clear the slate away, and one whom they could whisper sage advice in the ear of, like Plato to Dionysius, and thereby reshape human affairs. Moreover, I think they all despised their domestic political opponents so greatly that they could see the big picture, or wouldn't see that Stalin or Hitler was a monster.
I would have loved to have seen more on the philotyrannical justification of post-colonial tyrannies, which remains influential in the academy and in left wing circles (anyone study Cuba, for instance?). This book is also quite relevant now, as a huge part of the U.S. electorate becomes enamored of an authoritarian style, both here and abroad. Lastly, I'm pretty certain that he's right that the philotyrannism is "a thing," as in it was a systematic re-occurence in mid 20th century life, especially in France and Germany. Understanding how it happened back then is crucial for recognizing and grasping the phenomenon today. Lilla's book leaves a lot of unanswered questions, but it is conceptually fascinating and useful. It is not, however, an introductory read, as he doesn't slow down to explain much of the historical background to this story. He also uses some pretty redonculous vocab words.
My hunch is to say that all of these thinkers shared one trait: They all believed in some kind of Nietzchean transvaluation of values, a total stripping away of bourgeois ideals and a return to a more raw essence, or the liberation of that essence. For Schmitt, it was about stripping back the liberal niceties of rights, consensus, balance, and procedure and getting down to the raw power and violence that undergirds all politics. For Foucault, it was about freeing the individual from webs of psychic meaning and restriction, even at the linguistic level, so he can live a more authentic, liberated life in all spheres. For Derrida, I have no idea, it was mainly about destroying all objectivity. This intellectual trait, I think, made them susceptible to the heroic political figure who sought revolutionary transformations and great deeds, one who could clear the slate away, and one whom they could whisper sage advice in the ear of, like Plato to Dionysius, and thereby reshape human affairs. Moreover, I think they all despised their domestic political opponents so greatly that they could see the big picture, or wouldn't see that Stalin or Hitler was a monster.
I would have loved to have seen more on the philotyrannical justification of post-colonial tyrannies, which remains influential in the academy and in left wing circles (anyone study Cuba, for instance?). This book is also quite relevant now, as a huge part of the U.S. electorate becomes enamored of an authoritarian style, both here and abroad. Lastly, I'm pretty certain that he's right that the philotyrannism is "a thing," as in it was a systematic re-occurence in mid 20th century life, especially in France and Germany. Understanding how it happened back then is crucial for recognizing and grasping the phenomenon today. Lilla's book leaves a lot of unanswered questions, but it is conceptually fascinating and useful. It is not, however, an introductory read, as he doesn't slow down to explain much of the historical background to this story. He also uses some pretty redonculous vocab words.
June 4, 2018
I'm going to do what a good reviewer probably shouldn't do, but life is short and sometimes its good to cut to the nub. Below you'll find the concluding paragraphs of this book by Mark Lilla, and if you read nothing else beyond these paragraphs, you'll have gained a significant value from the book--or at least I did. The topic of the book, generally speaking, is about political thinking by intellectuals in the 20th century, and more specifically, those who in the author's opinion (and mine), took a wrong term. But without further palaver, Lilla's concluding paragraphs:
There is certainly no reason to be nostalgic for the old ideologies and their Jesuits. But that is not to say that the problems they addressed were imaginary or beyond human reckoning. The grand systems were to be resisted because in the end they were inadequate to the task they took up, not because their ambition was wholly misguided. Their failures revealed the need for a more demanding ambition: to understand the present without self-deception. They did not signify the will to make sense of it is futile.
Yet that will has unmistakeably withered since this book was first published [2001]. It has been replaced by a soft dogma for which we have no adequate name. This dogma begins with basic liberal principles like the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, and the distrust of public authority, and advances no further. It is politically democratic but lacks awareness of democracy's weaknesses and how they can provoke hostility and resentment. It promotes economic growth with unreflective faith in the cost-free benefits of free trade, deregulation, and foreign investment. Since it presumes that individuals are all that count, it has next to nothing to say about collectivities and their enterprises, and the duties that come with them. It has a vocabulary for discussing rights and identities and feelings, but not class or other social realities. (The fact that race is now largely conceived as a problem of individual identity and not one of collective destiny requiring sacrifices to reach a common goal, as it was by the American civil rights movement, is significant.)
This dogma is at once anti-political and anti-intellectual. It cultivates no taste for reality, no curiosity about how we got here or where we are going. It has no use for sociology or psychology or history, not to mention political theory, since it has no interest in institutions and has nothing to say about the necessary and productive tension between individual and collective purposes. It is simplicity itself. This explains why people who otherwise share little can subscribe to it yet draw very different conclusions from it. Small-government fundamentalists on the American right and anarchists on the European left, absolutist civil libertarians and neoliberal evangelists of free markets—the differences between them are superficial. What they share is a mentality, a mood, a presumption—what used to be called, nonpejoratively, a prejudice.
Ideologies inspire lies. But what is a lie? It is a pretense to speaking truth about the world—and thus betrays a recognition that people are after it. Dogmas inspire instead ignorance and indifference. They convince people that a single idea or principle is sacred and all they need to know in order to act in the world. Maintaining an ideology requires work because political developments always threaten its plausibility. Theories must be tweaked, revisions must be revised, evidence must be accounted for or explained away. Because ideology makes a claim about the way the world actually works, it invites and resists refutation. A dogma does not. It kills curiosity and intellectual ambition by rendering them pointless. Our unreflective creed is little different from Luther’s sola fide [by faith alone]: give individuals maximum freedom in every aspect of their lives and all will be well. And if not, then pereat mundus [perish the world].
An ideology gives people the illusion of understanding more than they do. Today we seem to have renounced trying to understand as much as we can. We suffer from a new kind of hubris unlike that of the old master thinkers. Our hubris is to think that we no longer have to think hard or pay attention to look for connections, that all we have to do is stick to our “democratic values” and economic models and faith in the individual and all will be well. The end of the cold war destroyed whatever confidence in the great modern ideologies still remained in the West. But it also left us incurious and self-absorbed. We have abdicated.
And so we need reminding, of many things. Reminding that the problems of capitalist democracies today—the hollowing out of the middle class, the erosion of family and community, the rage against the elites, the eclipse of political parties, widespread indifference to the public interest— cannot be grasped or addressed by focusing single-mindedly on individuals and their rights. Reminding that dealing with people outside our enchanted garden requires more than toleration and concerns with individual human rights. Reminding that we need a much deeper understanding of their histories and psychologies, free from idealization and fear and attentive to the explosive political power of pride and resentment. Reminding, finally, that the lure of tyranny is not the only force that pulls intellectuals off course. Self-deception has countless forms. Today, a decade and a half after its publication, my hope is that The Reckless Mind still serves as just such a reminder.
--Paris, June 2016
The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (with a New Afterword) pp. 225-227
Mark Lilla's book is a collection of essays about 20th-century intellectuals who ventured into writing and thinking about politics, often with distressing implications. Each chapter was written as a review of the works of the chapter subjects (the first chapter involves three thinkers, the rest address only a single thinker), but the collection works thematically. In brief, some very prominent European thinkers were either very wrong (or ineffective) about politics. Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt made camp with the Nazis (although Heidegger backed away, he never recanted his venture). Walter Benjamin and Alexandre Kojeve both skirted with radical politics and with unorthodox thinking. Although Kojeve held significant posts in the French government after his time as a lecturer on Hegel, he never acted overtly to implement a particular program consistent with his more radical thinking. Lilla also discusses the work of Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida, neither of whom contributed directly to political theory, although became influential about political thinking indirectly. But both followed the French intellectual fashion of commenting on contemporary politics, with sometimes embarrassing conclusions (the same may be said of Sartre, by the way).
I write none of the above to necessarily denigrate some aspects of the thinkers that Lilla discusses. With all thinkers, one gets both wheat and chaff (although too many are long on the latter). The fact that Hannah Arendt championed Heidegger (even late in life) and Benjamin gives us an indication of the value of their thought even as she would remain hostile to some of their political thought and action.
Lilla's essays provide an effective inoculation against taking in the speculations of philosophers-- especially politically naive philosophers--without a lot of critical judgment. Politics is informed by thought, but it consists of innumerable calculations of interest and belief that will continually defy easy schemes or remedies. As Lilla points out in the quote at the beginning of this review, it's easy to slip into either dogma or ideology when considering politics. I think he would agree with Hannah Arendt (and me) that political thought and action requires thinking--making judgments in the midst of the nitty-gritty stuff of everyday reality as experienced in the public sphere.
An excellent book.
There is certainly no reason to be nostalgic for the old ideologies and their Jesuits. But that is not to say that the problems they addressed were imaginary or beyond human reckoning. The grand systems were to be resisted because in the end they were inadequate to the task they took up, not because their ambition was wholly misguided. Their failures revealed the need for a more demanding ambition: to understand the present without self-deception. They did not signify the will to make sense of it is futile.
Yet that will has unmistakeably withered since this book was first published [2001]. It has been replaced by a soft dogma for which we have no adequate name. This dogma begins with basic liberal principles like the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, and the distrust of public authority, and advances no further. It is politically democratic but lacks awareness of democracy's weaknesses and how they can provoke hostility and resentment. It promotes economic growth with unreflective faith in the cost-free benefits of free trade, deregulation, and foreign investment. Since it presumes that individuals are all that count, it has next to nothing to say about collectivities and their enterprises, and the duties that come with them. It has a vocabulary for discussing rights and identities and feelings, but not class or other social realities. (The fact that race is now largely conceived as a problem of individual identity and not one of collective destiny requiring sacrifices to reach a common goal, as it was by the American civil rights movement, is significant.)
This dogma is at once anti-political and anti-intellectual. It cultivates no taste for reality, no curiosity about how we got here or where we are going. It has no use for sociology or psychology or history, not to mention political theory, since it has no interest in institutions and has nothing to say about the necessary and productive tension between individual and collective purposes. It is simplicity itself. This explains why people who otherwise share little can subscribe to it yet draw very different conclusions from it. Small-government fundamentalists on the American right and anarchists on the European left, absolutist civil libertarians and neoliberal evangelists of free markets—the differences between them are superficial. What they share is a mentality, a mood, a presumption—what used to be called, nonpejoratively, a prejudice.
Ideologies inspire lies. But what is a lie? It is a pretense to speaking truth about the world—and thus betrays a recognition that people are after it. Dogmas inspire instead ignorance and indifference. They convince people that a single idea or principle is sacred and all they need to know in order to act in the world. Maintaining an ideology requires work because political developments always threaten its plausibility. Theories must be tweaked, revisions must be revised, evidence must be accounted for or explained away. Because ideology makes a claim about the way the world actually works, it invites and resists refutation. A dogma does not. It kills curiosity and intellectual ambition by rendering them pointless. Our unreflective creed is little different from Luther’s sola fide [by faith alone]: give individuals maximum freedom in every aspect of their lives and all will be well. And if not, then pereat mundus [perish the world].
An ideology gives people the illusion of understanding more than they do. Today we seem to have renounced trying to understand as much as we can. We suffer from a new kind of hubris unlike that of the old master thinkers. Our hubris is to think that we no longer have to think hard or pay attention to look for connections, that all we have to do is stick to our “democratic values” and economic models and faith in the individual and all will be well. The end of the cold war destroyed whatever confidence in the great modern ideologies still remained in the West. But it also left us incurious and self-absorbed. We have abdicated.
And so we need reminding, of many things. Reminding that the problems of capitalist democracies today—the hollowing out of the middle class, the erosion of family and community, the rage against the elites, the eclipse of political parties, widespread indifference to the public interest— cannot be grasped or addressed by focusing single-mindedly on individuals and their rights. Reminding that dealing with people outside our enchanted garden requires more than toleration and concerns with individual human rights. Reminding that we need a much deeper understanding of their histories and psychologies, free from idealization and fear and attentive to the explosive political power of pride and resentment. Reminding, finally, that the lure of tyranny is not the only force that pulls intellectuals off course. Self-deception has countless forms. Today, a decade and a half after its publication, my hope is that The Reckless Mind still serves as just such a reminder.
--Paris, June 2016
The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (with a New Afterword) pp. 225-227
Mark Lilla's book is a collection of essays about 20th-century intellectuals who ventured into writing and thinking about politics, often with distressing implications. Each chapter was written as a review of the works of the chapter subjects (the first chapter involves three thinkers, the rest address only a single thinker), but the collection works thematically. In brief, some very prominent European thinkers were either very wrong (or ineffective) about politics. Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt made camp with the Nazis (although Heidegger backed away, he never recanted his venture). Walter Benjamin and Alexandre Kojeve both skirted with radical politics and with unorthodox thinking. Although Kojeve held significant posts in the French government after his time as a lecturer on Hegel, he never acted overtly to implement a particular program consistent with his more radical thinking. Lilla also discusses the work of Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida, neither of whom contributed directly to political theory, although became influential about political thinking indirectly. But both followed the French intellectual fashion of commenting on contemporary politics, with sometimes embarrassing conclusions (the same may be said of Sartre, by the way).
I write none of the above to necessarily denigrate some aspects of the thinkers that Lilla discusses. With all thinkers, one gets both wheat and chaff (although too many are long on the latter). The fact that Hannah Arendt championed Heidegger (even late in life) and Benjamin gives us an indication of the value of their thought even as she would remain hostile to some of their political thought and action.
Lilla's essays provide an effective inoculation against taking in the speculations of philosophers-- especially politically naive philosophers--without a lot of critical judgment. Politics is informed by thought, but it consists of innumerable calculations of interest and belief that will continually defy easy schemes or remedies. As Lilla points out in the quote at the beginning of this review, it's easy to slip into either dogma or ideology when considering politics. I think he would agree with Hannah Arendt (and me) that political thought and action requires thinking--making judgments in the midst of the nitty-gritty stuff of everyday reality as experienced in the public sphere.
An excellent book.
April 11, 2018
This was an interesting survey of a few 20th century thinkers (philosophers/intellectuals) who tended to begin in pure, innocent philosophical inquiry and then ended up being swept into this or that political movement. Lilla describes how that entangling of philosophical inquiry and political action ends up either corrupting the original philosophy (as adherents lop off arguments on a Procrustean bed of political ambition) or incriminate the philosopher (as the philosopher espouses various political movements as the manifestation of their line of thought).
The portraits themselves left a little to be desired, but I’m equally as responsible as the reader to have a working knowledge of the topic-at-hand. I was not familiar with the work of Carl Schmitt or Walter Benjamin at all. And I didn’t really have a functional understanding of Derrida or Foucault to work with. This ignorance also stops me from speaking toward Lilla’s understanding and interpretation of those thinkers’ works. Overall though, I feel like I have a better grasp of those lines of thought for which I give Lilla credit.
This book in my opinion is saved by the Afterword at the end. Throughout each profile, I didn’t think Lilla did a very good job explaining how the highlighted thinker interacted with political action with the exception of maybe Derrida and Heidegger. However, the Afterword did respectable job of tying much of the work together. I’d like to remark as well that in the Afterword, Lilla contrasts each of the 20th century thinkers with Plato (and The Republic most notably). I find this to be a profound insight that perhaps we really haven’t made as much “progress” in the course of 2500 or so years. Not to say that thinkers since Plato can be thought of as failures, but rather perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to cast the Ancients out.
I enjoyed this book for the most part and am happy I finally picked it up.
The portraits themselves left a little to be desired, but I’m equally as responsible as the reader to have a working knowledge of the topic-at-hand. I was not familiar with the work of Carl Schmitt or Walter Benjamin at all. And I didn’t really have a functional understanding of Derrida or Foucault to work with. This ignorance also stops me from speaking toward Lilla’s understanding and interpretation of those thinkers’ works. Overall though, I feel like I have a better grasp of those lines of thought for which I give Lilla credit.
This book in my opinion is saved by the Afterword at the end. Throughout each profile, I didn’t think Lilla did a very good job explaining how the highlighted thinker interacted with political action with the exception of maybe Derrida and Heidegger. However, the Afterword did respectable job of tying much of the work together. I’d like to remark as well that in the Afterword, Lilla contrasts each of the 20th century thinkers with Plato (and The Republic most notably). I find this to be a profound insight that perhaps we really haven’t made as much “progress” in the course of 2500 or so years. Not to say that thinkers since Plato can be thought of as failures, but rather perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to cast the Ancients out.
I enjoyed this book for the most part and am happy I finally picked it up.
July 30, 2023
Interessante, por vezes, apressado e sempre “liberalinho”.
Os americanos e a sua segurança boba de que a sua civilização durará para sempre e de que a sua forma de vida burguesa e complacente nunca atrairá a ira de Deus.
A melhor coisa é o posfácio de 2016. Mostra que o Lilla enxergou que a autocontenção dos intelectuais é um handicap da ordem neoliberal. É um consenso artificial e um apagamento cognitivo. A cabeça do avestruz no buraco do fim da história.
Os americanos e a sua segurança boba de que a sua civilização durará para sempre e de que a sua forma de vida burguesa e complacente nunca atrairá a ira de Deus.
A melhor coisa é o posfácio de 2016. Mostra que o Lilla enxergou que a autocontenção dos intelectuais é um handicap da ordem neoliberal. É um consenso artificial e um apagamento cognitivo. A cabeça do avestruz no buraco do fim da história.
December 29, 2017
TL;DR - Essays on how philosophy in practice can go wildly off the rails are pretty good, but you can get the most out of it with just a few choice chapters
Best bits - Preface, Epilogue/Afterword, Heidegger-Arendt-Jaspers, Schmitt, Foucault
Lilla's collection of essays seeks to bookend an era of political engagement that was dominated by ideological dogma and the belief that these ideologies could cogently construe the present as "emerg[ing] from a comprehensible past and [moving] toward an intelligible future." The work's chief interest lies in detailing the theory and thought of several prominent philosophers/political theorists and how these folks descended into the sordid realm of politics in practice, where their actions would often create a discordant clash with their work in more theoretical spaces.
Each essay does a rather good job of distilling the message of the philosopher in question and framing that distillation within the context it was developed. I haven't the foggiest idea if the points that Lilla centers his study around were the most essential thoughts cultivated by the subjects of the essays, but they were valuable in highlighting each subject's particular philosophical bent. Lilla manages to cleanly convey his subjects' core concepts and the stakes of taking that particular approach, which is no small feat!
I have never read the works of any of the philosophers detailed in Lilla's collection, so my recommended chapters might skew towards subjects who aligned themselves with political moments that have the most familiar histories. Benjamin, Kojève, and Derrida had the weakest chapters, as they moved so slowly that I'd put the book down for decently long amounts of time. The latter also demanded the most familiarity with the subject's work, or at least it felt that way, which I believe was in no small part due to how contemporaneous Derrida's work is to Lilla.
The Schmitt and Heidegger essays both are easier to follow, if sadly less affecting in some parts given the past 24 months of politics in the States. Heidegger's essay is especially interesting due to the exploration of the relationship he had with Jaspers/Arendt and their efforts to engage with Heidegger after his sharp turn to Nazism. Schmitt's particular take on political theory was interesting, as was the odd resuscitation of his image
On the whole it's a nifty little collection of essays that I'd recommend to anyone that would like to see what philosophy in action looks like, or who is interested in how the course of thought for some incredibly smart people can get twisted and co-opted into some wild political movements. Also in the era of hot takes and Facebook comments, it's a nice lil reminder that there can be whole bodies of work dedicated to careful thought and criticism that are worth exploring.
Best bits - Preface, Epilogue/Afterword, Heidegger-Arendt-Jaspers, Schmitt, Foucault
Lilla's collection of essays seeks to bookend an era of political engagement that was dominated by ideological dogma and the belief that these ideologies could cogently construe the present as "emerg[ing] from a comprehensible past and [moving] toward an intelligible future." The work's chief interest lies in detailing the theory and thought of several prominent philosophers/political theorists and how these folks descended into the sordid realm of politics in practice, where their actions would often create a discordant clash with their work in more theoretical spaces.
Each essay does a rather good job of distilling the message of the philosopher in question and framing that distillation within the context it was developed. I haven't the foggiest idea if the points that Lilla centers his study around were the most essential thoughts cultivated by the subjects of the essays, but they were valuable in highlighting each subject's particular philosophical bent. Lilla manages to cleanly convey his subjects' core concepts and the stakes of taking that particular approach, which is no small feat!
I have never read the works of any of the philosophers detailed in Lilla's collection, so my recommended chapters might skew towards subjects who aligned themselves with political moments that have the most familiar histories. Benjamin, Kojève, and Derrida had the weakest chapters, as they moved so slowly that I'd put the book down for decently long amounts of time. The latter also demanded the most familiarity with the subject's work, or at least it felt that way, which I believe was in no small part due to how contemporaneous Derrida's work is to Lilla.
The Schmitt and Heidegger essays both are easier to follow, if sadly less affecting in some parts given the past 24 months of politics in the States. Heidegger's essay is especially interesting due to the exploration of the relationship he had with Jaspers/Arendt and their efforts to engage with Heidegger after his sharp turn to Nazism. Schmitt's particular take on political theory was interesting, as was the odd resuscitation of his image
On the whole it's a nifty little collection of essays that I'd recommend to anyone that would like to see what philosophy in action looks like, or who is interested in how the course of thought for some incredibly smart people can get twisted and co-opted into some wild political movements. Also in the era of hot takes and Facebook comments, it's a nice lil reminder that there can be whole bodies of work dedicated to careful thought and criticism that are worth exploring.
May 31, 2021
4.33/5
October 29, 2019
The first half of the twentieth century produced a plethora or Continental European philosophers who openly criticized the de facto bourgeois liberalism of their times. So in this book in which Mark Lilla paints short intellectual vignettes of some of these thinkers, he had no shortage from which to choose. To be more specific, this is a series of portraits of thinkers who flirted with political thought that can sometimes be perceived as dangerous or reactionary. His choices, to me, are pretty standard fare: Heidegger, Arendt, and Jaspers (all considered in the opening chapter), Carl Schmidt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojeve, Foucault, and Derrida.
The popular, though obviously flawed, image of the (public) intellectual would have it that she is a person able to apprise us of dangerous political trends and pitfalls. Their engagement in abstract thinking and liberal ideas of critical inquiry would, many people seem to assume, endow them with the intellectual gifts to serve as cultural haruspices, carefully divining our futures from looking at the shape of the smoke cast off by the fat of a burning bull. We seem disappointed, then, to learn that these intellectuals are really nothing more than human beings, capable – even prone – to the same logical fallacies, groupthink, and ideological myopia that we are.
Many people are probably already familiar with the story of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heiddeger (a love story that has received almost as much attention as the one between Simon de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre), but fewer people may be familiar with the role of Jaspers. Jaspers, himself a philosopher very much worth study in his own right, continually tried to warn Heidegger about his flirtations with Nazism. Jaspers, who had a Jewish wife, had good reason to be disgusted at his friend’s behavior, but Heidegger’s longstanding refusal to apologize for his actions left both him and Arendt to conclude paradoxically conclude that while being a colossus of twentieth-century thought, his ideas about where praxis-driven, where-the-rubber-meets-the-road politics could no longer be taken seriously.
Alexander Kojeve and Carl Schmidt, both of whom had sizeable influence on the course of Western thought but themselves are almost never read anymore, each get their own chapter. Kojeve had an affinity for mysticism and radical politics who, in an important series of lectures given during the 1930s, almost single-handledly reintroduced the intellectual world to Hegel. Among the attendants were the likes of Bataille, Weil (Eric, not Simon), Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Raymond Aron. Schmitt, a vehement critic of the Weimar Republic and an adamant National Socialist, is perhaps best known for being the Nazi’s most recognized jurist and political philosopher.
The saving grace of the book, which otherwise seems little more than a loosely tied together series of lives lived in the liminal spaces of ideology and philosophy, is the final chapter wherein Lilla speculates that intellectuals need to hone the special kind of self-discipline that allows them to recognize and manipulate abstract concepts while at the same time realizing that the world does not always conform to them. He makes an important observation: that many of the people he writes about are tied up with ideas heavily invested in overthrowing what they deem to be a lost, overly materialistic, secular world. Much like religion can serve as an antidote for this kind of nostalgia, so too can radical politics. Drawing upon Plato’s idea of the Philosopher King, Lilla explains that we need to cultivate and balance our lives before we can hope to exert influence on the world. I’m sure Karl Popper would be rolling in his grave at the irony of needing to import Plato into a discussion warning us of the dangers of tyranny.
Lilla’s lack of Socratic irony throughout the book is a little disappointing. He never seems to be able to zoom out with a panoramic view of what he’s doing and realize that he himself is deeply engaged in his own construction of a utopia – one that comes very near to tacitly assuming the inherent truth of Enlightenment-era, democratic, republican political values. Granted this is an admission that takes a lot of intellectual humility, especially appended to a book just spent excoriating intellectuals and their penchant for utopia-building. I would have liked to see a bit more of that here since, at just over 200 pages, there was plenty of room for it.
The popular, though obviously flawed, image of the (public) intellectual would have it that she is a person able to apprise us of dangerous political trends and pitfalls. Their engagement in abstract thinking and liberal ideas of critical inquiry would, many people seem to assume, endow them with the intellectual gifts to serve as cultural haruspices, carefully divining our futures from looking at the shape of the smoke cast off by the fat of a burning bull. We seem disappointed, then, to learn that these intellectuals are really nothing more than human beings, capable – even prone – to the same logical fallacies, groupthink, and ideological myopia that we are.
Many people are probably already familiar with the story of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heiddeger (a love story that has received almost as much attention as the one between Simon de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre), but fewer people may be familiar with the role of Jaspers. Jaspers, himself a philosopher very much worth study in his own right, continually tried to warn Heidegger about his flirtations with Nazism. Jaspers, who had a Jewish wife, had good reason to be disgusted at his friend’s behavior, but Heidegger’s longstanding refusal to apologize for his actions left both him and Arendt to conclude paradoxically conclude that while being a colossus of twentieth-century thought, his ideas about where praxis-driven, where-the-rubber-meets-the-road politics could no longer be taken seriously.
Alexander Kojeve and Carl Schmidt, both of whom had sizeable influence on the course of Western thought but themselves are almost never read anymore, each get their own chapter. Kojeve had an affinity for mysticism and radical politics who, in an important series of lectures given during the 1930s, almost single-handledly reintroduced the intellectual world to Hegel. Among the attendants were the likes of Bataille, Weil (Eric, not Simon), Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Raymond Aron. Schmitt, a vehement critic of the Weimar Republic and an adamant National Socialist, is perhaps best known for being the Nazi’s most recognized jurist and political philosopher.
The saving grace of the book, which otherwise seems little more than a loosely tied together series of lives lived in the liminal spaces of ideology and philosophy, is the final chapter wherein Lilla speculates that intellectuals need to hone the special kind of self-discipline that allows them to recognize and manipulate abstract concepts while at the same time realizing that the world does not always conform to them. He makes an important observation: that many of the people he writes about are tied up with ideas heavily invested in overthrowing what they deem to be a lost, overly materialistic, secular world. Much like religion can serve as an antidote for this kind of nostalgia, so too can radical politics. Drawing upon Plato’s idea of the Philosopher King, Lilla explains that we need to cultivate and balance our lives before we can hope to exert influence on the world. I’m sure Karl Popper would be rolling in his grave at the irony of needing to import Plato into a discussion warning us of the dangers of tyranny.
Lilla’s lack of Socratic irony throughout the book is a little disappointing. He never seems to be able to zoom out with a panoramic view of what he’s doing and realize that he himself is deeply engaged in his own construction of a utopia – one that comes very near to tacitly assuming the inherent truth of Enlightenment-era, democratic, republican political values. Granted this is an admission that takes a lot of intellectual humility, especially appended to a book just spent excoriating intellectuals and their penchant for utopia-building. I would have liked to see a bit more of that here since, at just over 200 pages, there was plenty of room for it.
November 21, 2017
Review of Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics: Revised Edition
The revised edition includes an afterword, Sola Fide, written in Paris, June 2016. This afterword is key to situating Mark Lilla's compelling argument, but compelling to whom is elided perhaps as a matter of self-selection by his readers, in the political engagement of philosophers since Plato in Syracuse, which in the examples of 20th century intellectuals Lilla picked out to illustrate the allure of "Plato in Syracuse", actually brought about a dearth of political philosophy and the schizophrenia of political ideas today.
In the present milieu, this is probably a very strong case to make, a call for nobleness in today's intelligentsia to do as Socrates has done in the midst of a corrupt democracy and also in the corruption of ideals. In the book's retrospection, a retrospection that is also quite recent in memory, it performs a forensics of how giants of 20th century philosophy like Heidegger, Arendt, Jaspers, Foucault, Derrida, Schmitt, Benjamin, Kojeve, among others, have entangled with tyrants and tyrannical systems, without pursuing good and justice. The book also has a prospection: deliberative in its throwing flotsam in the maelstroms of predicable political and intellectual life to predict what will sink and what will rise up from the depths of the spiral, it is simply taken for granted that a postmodernist identity political-intellectual life will be any similar to the grand structuralisms of 20th century modernity. The book does not itself succeed in this deliberativeness.
What we do know however is that two other books by Mark Lilla appear to promise to further explore and discover this particular opening or lacuna. They are 2016's The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, and 2017's The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.
For after all the forensics and the restatement of the Plato in Syracuse manifesto of philosophy, a prophetic guide such as a blind Tiresias, who experiences a sex-change and back, may be who fills the gap, if indeed all it is is a gap, between left politics and right politics.
Yet there are surely elements who find themselves in the realm of public intellectualism, in Canada such a one as professor Jordan Peterson, who take to the allure of Plato in Syracuse and get entangled thereby in a particular forgetfulness or in a wiliness and beguiling without a clear way out of the pitfalls of strict logos and back into the genuine Socratic project of scepticism towards logos. The forgetfulness is about the forgoing of justice for the articulations of logos; and the wiliness and beguiling are about the deployment of such logos in the furthering of even more injustice.
Arguably, those who self-select into the notion of the philosopher-king, be it in matters of environmental or ecological intersections with tyrants of the oil political-industrial complex in the Plato in Syracuse beckoning of actually educating the sector's leaders beyond brokenness of specific approaches to climate change problems, or in matters of technocratic problem-solving of perennials of poverty and inequality, or in direct dealings with arbitrary and capricious and dangerous world leaders on questions of security and liberties, will take a far more perilous path of engagement. The lure of the political overcomes a more in character cynicism towards logos, very nearly wedged into apathy; it is not yet clear however if a distinct lack of apathy in the obverse should actually dictate adherence to particular commitments to logos such that the ratchet effects of the "deliberativeness" of postmodernist politics becomes a species of specious claims of logos and no longer enactments of rhetorical and of perhaps diegetic and mimetic justice. What this book can illustrate is that disengagement from chaos is acknowledgement of enactment's finitude even as the logics of absurdity play out and surpass their own contradictions.
The revised edition includes an afterword, Sola Fide, written in Paris, June 2016. This afterword is key to situating Mark Lilla's compelling argument, but compelling to whom is elided perhaps as a matter of self-selection by his readers, in the political engagement of philosophers since Plato in Syracuse, which in the examples of 20th century intellectuals Lilla picked out to illustrate the allure of "Plato in Syracuse", actually brought about a dearth of political philosophy and the schizophrenia of political ideas today.
In the present milieu, this is probably a very strong case to make, a call for nobleness in today's intelligentsia to do as Socrates has done in the midst of a corrupt democracy and also in the corruption of ideals. In the book's retrospection, a retrospection that is also quite recent in memory, it performs a forensics of how giants of 20th century philosophy like Heidegger, Arendt, Jaspers, Foucault, Derrida, Schmitt, Benjamin, Kojeve, among others, have entangled with tyrants and tyrannical systems, without pursuing good and justice. The book also has a prospection: deliberative in its throwing flotsam in the maelstroms of predicable political and intellectual life to predict what will sink and what will rise up from the depths of the spiral, it is simply taken for granted that a postmodernist identity political-intellectual life will be any similar to the grand structuralisms of 20th century modernity. The book does not itself succeed in this deliberativeness.
What we do know however is that two other books by Mark Lilla appear to promise to further explore and discover this particular opening or lacuna. They are 2016's The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, and 2017's The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.
For after all the forensics and the restatement of the Plato in Syracuse manifesto of philosophy, a prophetic guide such as a blind Tiresias, who experiences a sex-change and back, may be who fills the gap, if indeed all it is is a gap, between left politics and right politics.
Yet there are surely elements who find themselves in the realm of public intellectualism, in Canada such a one as professor Jordan Peterson, who take to the allure of Plato in Syracuse and get entangled thereby in a particular forgetfulness or in a wiliness and beguiling without a clear way out of the pitfalls of strict logos and back into the genuine Socratic project of scepticism towards logos. The forgetfulness is about the forgoing of justice for the articulations of logos; and the wiliness and beguiling are about the deployment of such logos in the furthering of even more injustice.
Arguably, those who self-select into the notion of the philosopher-king, be it in matters of environmental or ecological intersections with tyrants of the oil political-industrial complex in the Plato in Syracuse beckoning of actually educating the sector's leaders beyond brokenness of specific approaches to climate change problems, or in matters of technocratic problem-solving of perennials of poverty and inequality, or in direct dealings with arbitrary and capricious and dangerous world leaders on questions of security and liberties, will take a far more perilous path of engagement. The lure of the political overcomes a more in character cynicism towards logos, very nearly wedged into apathy; it is not yet clear however if a distinct lack of apathy in the obverse should actually dictate adherence to particular commitments to logos such that the ratchet effects of the "deliberativeness" of postmodernist politics becomes a species of specious claims of logos and no longer enactments of rhetorical and of perhaps diegetic and mimetic justice. What this book can illustrate is that disengagement from chaos is acknowledgement of enactment's finitude even as the logics of absurdity play out and surpass their own contradictions.
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