Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno

by Geuss

“A history of philosophy in twelve thinkers…The whole performance combines polyglot philological rigor with supple intellectual sympathy, and it is all presented…in a spirit of fun…This bracing and approachable book [shows] that there is life in philosophy yet.”
― Times Literary Supplement

“Exceptionally engaging…Geuss has a remarkable knack for putting even familiar thinkers in a new light.”
― Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

“Geuss is something like the consummate teacher, his analyses navigable and crystal, his guidance on point.”
―Doug Phillips, Key Reporter

Raymond Geuss explores the ideas of twelve philosophers who broke dramatically with prevailing wisdom, from Socrates and Plato in the ancient world to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno. The result is a striking account of some of the most innovative thinkers in Western history and an indirect manifesto for how to pursue philosophy today. Geuss cautions that philosophers’ attempts to break from convention do not necessarily make the world a better place. Montaigne’s ideas may have been benign, but the fate of those of Hobbes, Hegel, and Nietzsche has been more varied. Yet in the act of provoking people to think differently, philosophers remind us that we are not fated to live within the systems of thought we inherit.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Politics

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a delightful little book which twelve brief chapters, each centered on but not restricted to a different philosopher. Although Geuss claims it's written for an introductory audience, the book's merits can only be properly appreciated if you have a decent grasp of the state of contemporary philosophy (although intro readers will probably understand enough to make it worth their while). Freed of having to follow a strict theme by the anthology-like format, and yet not being constrained to discrete essays as in a research paper, Geuss creates an insightful and often funny overall narrative about change and contingency, and how philosophers have tried to grapple with them:

Lots of philosophers have been terrible busybodies, never happier than when sticking their noses into other people's business, reproving them, putting them to rights, correcting them, giving them unsolicited advice. Socrates was clearly able to be agreeable and even very amusing when it suited him, but he was also an exceedingly irritating little twerp, who had more than an occasional whiff of the (highly sophisticated) intellectual bully about him.

His preferred stance, of mildly curious bystander who just happened not to understand what was going on and had a few innocent questions to ask, was a mere pretence, all the more infuriating because it provided no clear focus for negation or resistance. When the prophet shouts 'Smite the Ababelites! Kill their unborn children in the womb!', one can respond 'No, I don't feel like smiting any Ababelites today' or 'Hey, my sister-in-law once had an Ababelite cook and nanny, and she was okay'. This form of resistance won't work when one is confronted with a seemingly polite, even self-deprecating, request for enlightenment: 'Euthyphro, you're a priest, and a great expert in matters of religion; tell me what piety is, won't you? I've never understood that. I need your help.'

Socrates found an absolutely ingenious way to make even asking a simple question an impertinent intervention in others' lives, thus potentially destabilising and disorienting them completely. Alcibiades in Symposium says that Socrates' questioning 'almost' had the effect of making even him, notoriously both unbelievably successful and utterly shameless in his behaviour, ashamed of himself. Socratic irony and the Socratic mode of questioning were monumentally inventive ways of being irritating.

It's not a particularly optimistic narrative, especially since he doesn't think anything particularly new has been produced in the last few decades and since he does not think philosophy is necessarily useful or important. As he points out at the end of the chapter on Nietzsche:

We can come to see through various beliefs as illusions, although that does not make it possible for us to give them up, such as the sun which continues to seem to us to rise each day even after we know it does not. Life is seeing through illusions which we then cannot get rid of. There is no stable point to this process of generation of illusion, seeing through illusion, attempted disillusionment, failure to detach oneself even from illusions one thinks one has seen through, generation of new and 'improved' illusions, and so on. To live is to participate in this process, to continue with it. We are desperate to get out, to stop the wheel, but that is not possible in this life. One of the most difficult lessons we need to learn is that this is the situation in which we as humans find ourselves.

The point of this book and philosophy (especially in the historic vein) then will be muted and modest:

Adorno believes we cannot remedy this situation merely by thinking. We might, then, immediately conclude that thought is futile, and in a sense that is right. However, we can trace the causes of this cataclysm and its effects, and perhaps there is a kind of limited and bitter—even perverse but none the less real—individual happiness to be derived from the success of the project of understanding them. In fact, perhaps one of the few pleasures left is to understand our own unhappiness. So the only sensible course for us is to try to continue to live to the extent to which we can manage it, as 'subjects'—as active centres of feeling, thought, and action rather than merely as cogs turned by other cogs in the social mechanism

For Geuss this seems to be appropriate orientation towards philosophy and life, a view both stripped of illusion and resigned to living with it, where some solace is eked from a patchy understanding of how we got here.

[Nick Bakker · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The person drowning, however, urgently needs a real life jacket, not a picture of a life jacket, not a definition of a life jacket, not even a theory of life jackets. In a society in which humans are constantly confronted in reality with duties which they cannot fulfil except at the cost of thwarting their own vital desires, any 'theoretical solution' to this 'basic problem of ethics' will be at best an elegant diagram of a life jacket".

Very enjoyable collection of essays which are explicitly not organised so as to construct a systematic critique, but which nevertheless show clear traces of and continuity with Guess's well established disdain of the Rawlsian strands of contemporary political philosophizing more structurally summed up in, for instance, Philosophy and Real Politics. I particularly enjoyed the essays on Hegel, Lukàcs (and by extension Marx) and Adorno.

[Cool_guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good introduction to a few of the big names in Western philosophy over the last two thousand years or so. Guys like Heidegger, who I'd heard referenced a whole bunch but had never taken the time to get acquainted with, probably because he was a Nazi. I struggle to grasp philosophical concepts outside of their historical context, which is why I'm more keen on histories of philosophy than the thing itself. Geuss provides just enough to make his chosen philosophers easy to understand.

[Shelby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really my type of book as it's an "intellectually relaxed, essayistic introduction." But I enjoyed the Intro, Conclusion, and the last six chapters. The chapters on Nietzsche, Lukács, and Adorno are excellent introductions.

[Charles Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate and continued to read "theory" as well as philosophy proper as I got advanced degrees in English. I loved this book. It made me nostalgic for the sense of wonder I felt when reading philosophy as a 19-year-old. Often, while reading Geuss, I felt the feelings of urgency that make the life of the mind, in a word, beautiful. ("Oh my God, Hegel has been sitting in the library for 200 years and I haven't read him yet! I must change my life!") Often, I set the book down in the middle of the paragraph to madly take notes on something totally tangential yet unquestionably inspired by Geuss's essayist presentation of key philosophers and their key problems. Having finished the book, I imagine myself writing Geuss and asking him if he takes requests. One more bit of praise: Geuss's chapter on Nietzsche could, in fact, be read as a general preface to this poorly-taught and intellectually-abused figure.

In any case, the work has a considerable flaw, hence my final rating. In the preface, Geuss writes:

"[...] This book is not intended as a contribution to historical...scholarship. It is not addressed to scholars at all. Rather it is intended as an intellectually relaxed, essayistic introduction to some issues that I take to be of interest, by way of a discussion of some historical texts, and its ideal reader would be the intelligent person with no special training in academic philosophy who thinks that philosophers have sometimes raised some interesting questions."

He finishes these remarks by promising "the book presupposes no prior knowledge of philosophy" (xvi). It would be more accurate to say the book presupposes no prior knowledge of philosophy as long as your education involved a solid Great Books program.

The book definitely isn't written for professional philosophers, and would be, indeed, "relaxing" to many a "retired philosophy major" such as it was for me. But no reader who is not "philosophy-proximal" in their academic training will get much out of the book, since it often rests on vague gestures and allusions to the actual ideas of the philosophers in order to make its clever (and, to this philosophy major, valuable) observations. The book could explore its implied polemic further if Geuss allowed himself to turn directly toward the audience he addresses most effectively.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is probably about as good as a popular philosophy book can be. I am happy to note that Geuss’s reading of Hegel is amenable to me, that is, it is correct. From Hegel on, I found the book to be particularly well done, although this is not to say the earlier chapters were bad—Geuss’s expertise simply shines through more later on.

Some interesting exclusions include Kant and Marx whom one would normally think of as rather revolutionary thinkers: the former in a copernican style, the latter in a, you know, literal style. The ending is also a bit dreary: philosophy is a cultural artifact whose time may be nearing its end; philosophy has been stuck in inertia since the 60’s and doesn’t have good prospects, or so Geuss thinks. I, fortunately, have more hope for philosophy: the neo-Hegelians have breathed new life into the subject and provided new ground to be broken, so long as they can break through into the academy which has proved harder than one thinks.

[Chris Via]

Edifying essays on 12 important western philosophers and a nice overall effort to legitimize the work of philosophy in today’s pluralist and neopragmatist society.

[j. · Rating 4 out of 5]

up to his tricks, but tricks performed at a very high level.

[Chris Nagel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The butler did it.

[Will S · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book is objectively better than my ambivalence about it. Part of my negative feeling stems from the enormous esteem I hold Geuss in, especially his knowledge of the history of philosophy. I came into the book expecting fantastic, insightful essays, and thus left disappointed when some of them felt less revelatory than I hoped, and a few felt outright uninspired. I thought there were three groups of essays here.

Group 1 were the essays that met/exceeded my admittedly sky-high expectations for the book. In Group 1 were the essays on Lukacs (who I have not read before, but now find immensely intriguing), Heidegger (who I also have not read), Socrates, and Plato (who I had read much of before). It felt like Geuss' Nietzschean inclinations were best channeled against Plato and Socrates' diametrically opposed conception of philosophy, and I finally found a clear, jargon-free exegesis of Heidegger that does indeed vindicate him as an original, highly intriguing philosopher. The biggest surprise and joy of the whole book was the essay on Lukacs. If Geuss is accurate in attributing the ideas discussed there as original to Lukacs, then I think he is by far the most interesting 20th century Marxist. History and Class Consciousness is now very high on my reading list.

Group 2 were essays that I found fine, but unexceptional. Lucretius, Montaigne, Augustine (I found Geuss' discussion of Augustine in Public Goods, Private Goods much more interesting), and Hegel (whose essays lacked the virtue of Heidegger's in making clear what was so revolutionary about his ideas--I have read Hegel and some secondary literature on him before and so found it frustrating I walked away from Geuss' discussion unclear on this).

Lastly, there were essays I was frustrated with: Hobbes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno. The reading of Hobbes felt incredibly vanilla--I have read some secondary literature on Hobbes and I did not detect anything here that had not been said plenty of times before. Wittgenstein and Nietzsche felt similarly conventional--I simply got nothing from reading them. I was especially crushed about the lack of insight I gleaned from Nietzsche's essay given Geuss' profound admiration for Nietzsche and his consistent invocation of his work throughout his many essays and books (The Idea of a Critical theory, History and Illusion in Politics, A World Without Why, Philosophy and real Politics, Outside Ethics... you get the point). In spite of all that discussion, I found Geuss' reading extremely plain, and I got less out of it than Adrian Moore's in The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. The Adorno essay was also very disappointing given Adorno is the only philosopher Geuss holds in similar esteem to Nietzsche. The essay was not unoriginal, but I walked away not finding Adorno a very interesting or profound thinker, and am now surprised Geuss does.

My last disappointment comes by way of an omission: Thucydides. Geuss has previously praised Thucydides as a profound thinker, the original political realist, and even his favorite philosopher, but he is absent from this collection.

[Hywel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly engaging assessment of Western philosophy via an overview of twelve philosophers. Geuss' writing is consistently clear, which combined with his dry humour and lack of reverence towards the selected theorists makes for an insightful and enjoyable read.

[Justin Hartwig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Talented writer, but probably better for someone with a stronger foundation in philosophical history. Understood the sections of thinkers I was familiar with far better than those I did not.

[Mr T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Idiosyncratic collection

This is an idiosyncratic collection of thinkers. Some major ones are included, like Hegel, whilst others are left out, like Kant.