Who Needs a World View?

by Raymond Geuss

One of the world’s most provocative philosophers attacks the obsession with comprehensive intellectual systems—the perceived need for a world view.We live in a unitary cosmos created and cared for in all its details by a benevolent god. That, for centuries, was the starting point for much philosophical and religious thinking in the West. The task was to accommodate ourselves to that view and restrict ourselves to working out how the pieces fit together within a rigidly determined framework. In this collection of essays, one of our most creative contemporary philosophers explores the problems and pathologies of the habit of overly systematic thinking that we have inherited from this past.Raymond Geuss begins by making a general case for flexible and skeptical thinking with room for doubt and unresolved complexity. He examines the ideas of two of his most influential teachers—one systematic, the other pragmatic—in light of Nietzsche’s ideas about appearance and reality. The chapters that follow concern related moral, psychological, and philosophical subjects. These include the idea that one should make one’s life a work of art, the importance of games, the concept of need, and the nature of manifestoes. Along the way, Geuss ranges widely, from ancient philosophy to modern art, with his characteristic combination of clarity, acuity, and wit.Who Needs a World View? is a provocative and enlightening demonstration of what philosophy can achieve when it abandons its ambitions for completeness, consistency, and unity.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

200 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 19, 2020

About the author

Raymond Geuss, Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, is a political philosopher and scholar of 19th and 20th century European philosophy.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a tough book to review. Geuss's arguments are clear and compelling as always. He is a great writer and deftly cuts through the contradictions of liberalism and other modern ideologies. He also comes across as unpleasant. Some of this is due to my politics differing from his, for example, when he compares Brexit supporters to foot fetishists (p. 87). But others examples are more substantive and I think will be more widely agreed on, such as his cutting off his mentor and former friend due to a disagreement over whether to hire someone into their philosophy department.

I do admire his candor, but it doesn't make him any more likable. Ultimately a philosophy as personal as Geuss's is hard to separate from its progenitor. So while I find myself strongly influenced by his views, I also worry that it is lacking something crucial if they can be held be such a repellant person. The interviews I've seen with him only reinforce this impression. Nonetheless, none of this invalidates Geuss critiques of the modern world, which are invaluable in understanding where we are and where we're going. So five stars for the arguments in the book, two for the man, and four overall.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another delightful collection of essays by Geuss, carrying on with the themes he's been engaging with over a lifetime. The essays are on a characteristic range of (all Anglo-American and Germanic) philosophy, art, history and genealogy, politics, religion, literature, and biography.

The last paragraph of the book has a pithy summary of his theoretical (and existential) orientation that you can expect to find argued for, asserted, touched upon, and present at a subliminal level throughout the book:

I am inclined, in retrospect, to see in this early experience the germs of some views that have continued to seem to me to be of central importance. First, meaning (and consequently knowledge) is essentially contextual; second, meaning must be a collective, that is a social phenomenon; third, there is no final all-encompassing framework which puts everything together; finally, the absence of such a framework, and thus of any “final” meaning visibly does not entirely destroy the phenomenon of local meaning. If these views are at all correct, it would seem that asking questions about meaning, success, life as a whole, or one’s real self, require rather a different approach from any of those discussed in this book. The task becomes not one of looking for some single thing, but managing, as Nietzsche suggests, (sometimes) multiple shifting perspectives, and negotiating smooth transitions—transitions that are “as smooth as possible” (whatever that means)—between irreducibly different contexts. If one wants to call this a “world view,” then I have no objection to that. (163)

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ways of thinking about ethics, politics, and religion in the light of Gödel.

[VII · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this style of writing. No universal prescriptions anywhere. Just a guy indirectly describing how he views the world and the people who influenced him, sharing his insights using philosophical issues. The last tiny piece is a great example of what perspectivism is all about. With that said, some of the essays are better than others. The first is probably the more interesting one, while the one about Bruegel’s paintings and the one taking too literally the claim that life is like an artwork the weaker ones. There is also one about Artaud that is intriguing, though probably because I knew almost nothing about him.

[Kars · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the laser blast to the brain stem that Real Politics was for me, but still an interesting exploration of the sense and nonsense of worldviews. I learn so much from seeing how Geuss structures his writing. The clarity of his prose is something to aspire to.