Review of Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind"

Unless you were attending a university when this book was published, or have a special interest in the general ongoing dialogue we call the culture wars, "The Closing of the American Mind" may not be on your radar. When it first came out in 1987, it caused quite a fracas and became, I'm sure to everyone's (including Allan Bloom’s) surprise, a bestseller. It's difficult for me to imagine a book by an unprepossessing University of Chicago professor on the debilitating effects of Heidegger and Nietzsche on higher education becoming a bestseller today. This may only serve to bolster Bloom's case that the "liberal" attitude of openness has gone a few steps too far.

Or it might be the direct effect of Bloom's "voice" - which is, despite what any of his intellectual confreres say, by turns elitist, rankly unegalitarian, and possibly anti-democratic in content; in tone, he often comes off as the curmudgeonly old grandfather shaking his newspaper at you and telling you to get off of his lawn. I personally have no problem with the elitism or anti-democratic attitudes when it comes to teaching. There are, quite simply, some books that are better than others, and some ideas that are better than others, and having to pretend otherwise is simply to play the ostrich's game of sticking our heads in the sand. The better books should be taught for the moral education of the student body while inferior books should be set aside (surely to be picked up by many people who, after graduating from university and having been introduced to the greats, choose to eschew them and read pulp instead.) I, like Bloom, regret that recent American culture has lost the sense of education as a kind of moral training. Bloom's critics, however, also do him the grave disservice of hitching his tone onto the wagon that is the content of his intellectual argument. Who's going to take this cranky old man seriously - who sees an uncontrollable sexual release in a young teenage boy unashamedly gyrating his hips to rock 'n' roll, who unabashedly and unashamedly blames affirmative action as one of the contributing factors in the decadence of the contemporary American university, and whose explanation of the breakdown of the American family (if there indeed has been such a thing) is, quite charitably, described as "old-fashioned."

Bloom's argument is large and multifaceted; no review of a few hundred words could deal with it in all its complexity. What it claims at its base, though, is that certain attitudes popular in the sixties and seventies - universal acceptance, universal tolerance, the slow erosion of critical faculties - which eventually came to shape the minds of university students and even how university are administered. He claims, after Nietzsche, that we live in a time "beyond good and evil" - that is, where we have ceased not only looking for the differences in good versus bad (he archly points out that we describe nothing as "evil" anymore), but that we don't even know how to discern those differences. For Bloom, the moral education must consist of "a vision of the moral universe, reward for good, punishment for evil, and the drama of moral choices." That is, at the very least, an education in critical moral discernment. He argues that this is all but gone.

He claims - dubiously, I think - that he noticed a steep drop in the number of students who were interested in the "Great Books" from the time when he first started teaching in the United States in the early sixties to the time of writing this book. At many stages in his argument, Bloom seems to have counterfactually reimagined a world in which students walked into the university already well-versed in Plato, Homer, Stendahl, and Hegel, Aristotle, eager to be filled to the brim with The Wisdom Of The Masters. I think everyone was exposed to Homer in high school, but how many of us took it "seriously" - what Bloom would call seriously? Were they familiar with the importance of “xenia” and the “oikos” in Homer? (And no, you don’t get translations of those words.) I can speak from personal experience that many of teachers themselves didn't have the intellectual background to teach Homer this rigorously. 

Richard Heffner, one of Bloom’s interlocutors following the popular press cavalcade after the release of the book, suggested during his interview with the professor that being an elitist might mean “thinking some questions are better answered by Hegel than by Joyce Brothers.” By that measure, I would imagine the vast majority of intelligent people are in fact elitists. Knowledge properly used and appropriately fostered quite simply makes you a better person. I think even the most obnoxious paladins of popular culture would admit that there is intellectual territory that Oprah’s Book Club hasn’t yet broached.

You may vehemently disagree with much of what Bloom has to say, or at least how he says it (it would put you in good company), but this comes highly suggested for anyone who thinks that answers to life’s “higher and deeper” questions deserve our most serious consideration. It serves as an honest refutation against the idea a few easy shibboleths of our times: that all answers are equally good, all educations are equally fulfilling and worthy, and all truths are equally valid.

Review of Amartya Sen's "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny"

This book is interested in the question of human identity, its inherent multiplicity, and the choices that we make in regard to aligning ourselves with certain identities over others. We all have multiple identities, which Sen repeatedly points out. For example, he says of himself that "I can be, at the same time, an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin, and a non-believer in an after-life" (p. 19). To what extent do these identities compete with one another? And in which ways are our senses of self and community vitiated when, instead of recognizing the fullness of all of these aspects, we recognize just one or two (for example, religion or nationality)?

Seeing the world as just sets of different religions imposes a "divisive power of classificatory priority" on the world which distorts and misshapes understanding of the people in it. When we point out that a terrorist is Muslim (or overemphasize that aspect of their identity), we fall into a trap of identify someone by just one identity - often the most inflammatory, controversial one. Suggesting that "not all Muslims are violent," which sounds like a helpful corrective measure, commits the same fallacy of associating one aspect of someone's identity - their religion - with their behavior. This is one of the fundamental mistakes that Samuel Huntingdon makes in his influential book "Clash of Civilizations." In referring to various regions as "the Christian world," "the Muslim world," or "the Hindu world," his conclusions are largely drawn from skewed perceptions of one aspect of a community's identity.

While Sen hardly touches on this explicitly, it is obvious that this can have important consequences for how the media covers news. In a time where even the most important stories get only a few minutes of coverage on a national broadcast, it is easy to see how the complexities of both individuals and communities are ignored. Historical misunderstanding can result just as frequently, as when the tradition of democracy, or religious toleration, is identified solely with Europe or the Occident. Sen discusses some of these just before the book starts to go into an irrelevant tailspin at approximately its halfway point.

These ideas are important. However, there isn't a lot here that most intelligent people who have considered these things couldn't have concluded for themselves. It's already more than a little obvious how detrimental this for people who consume a lot of news - which is what probably spurred many thoughtful people to think about this issue in the first place. Also, this book is about twice as long as it needs to be. The last sections of the book, about globalization and multiculturalism, are tangentially related to the book's thesis but really need another book of their own. Sen said early on in the book that he would emphasize the role of choice-making in the book, so more on social choice theory would have been appreciated, instead of the aimless wandering from topic to topic that is all the second half of the book provides. This would have been a good, if uncontroversial, article aimed at a more scholarly audience. There was no practical use in doubling its length to make a book. Unfortunately, this seems to be a common trait in Norton's "Issues of Our Time" series, as Kwame Anthony Appiah's "Cosmopolitanism" suffers from similar shortcomings.

Review of Jacques Ranciere's "The Emancipated Spectator"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This book is a set of five essays in response to Ranciere’s earlier work “The Ignorant Schoolmaster.” All of these pieces are tied together by Ranciere’s attempt to overcome the dyad so often associated with modernist aesthetics of passive spectator/active seer. The title essay extends the concept set forth in “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” by suggesting that the knowledge gap between the educated teacher and the student should be given up in place for an “equality of knowledge.” The goal of this is not to turn everyone into a scholar, however. As Ranciere says, “It is not the transmission of the artist’s knowledge or inspiration to the spectator. It is the third that is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect” (15). This is by far the most cogent and understandable of the essays in the collection, and it offers an interesting suggestion in rethinking the space between the actor and viewer, teacher and student, or any other relationship. However, it struck me as the kind of idea most at home in the world of theory, one that might not be well-translated into praxis. 

The second essay, “The Misadventures of Critical Thought,” Ranciere criticizes the traditional role of the spectator by claiming that it, even though a mode of criticism itself, it “reproduces its own logic.” He looks at photos from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Vietnam, by Martha Rosler and Josephine Meckseper. Some people do not want to view these graphic photographs, however that very refusal perpetuates and continues the logic of the war in the first place. Therefore, a critical stance toward the image needs to shift away from this approach toward the uncoupling of two logics, “the emancipating logic of capacity and the critical logic of collective inveiglement” (48). 

The last essay, “The Pensive Image,” sustains a further opening up between the formalist opposition of the active and passive. Ranciere argues for a shift – again, what he argues to be an emancipating shift – away from the “unifying logic of action” toward “a new status of the figure” (121). The end of pensiveness (of being, literally, “full of thought”) lies between narration and expression, one the mode of the active artist, the other of the passive spectator who fixes upon the artistic vision in order to impart to it a kind of reality. 

Like a lot of (post)modern Continental writing, Ranciere’s writing can be elliptical, and his arguments somewhat hard to follow, perhaps because they are difficult to sustain, however engaging. I chose this because it was short enough and seemed like a suitable introduction to his body of work. The essays were interesting and provocatively argued, but sometimes they seemed less than original: for example, the title essay really seems to add nothing to the old breaking apart of the bipolar opposition of active and passive in theatre, art, and political conscientiousness; it recapitulates it nicely, but imports nothing new to the conversation. Those looking for ways to re-imagine issues in contemporary aesthetics will find something new here (as well as penetrating discussions of the poetry of Mallarme and the films of Abbas Kiarostami), but it will unnecessarily frustrate the casual reader.

Review of Jean Baudrillard's "The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Jean Baudrillard was probably one of the contemporary French postmodern philosophers and sociologists whose ideas were most accessible (relatively speaking) and well-received in the United States. This was my first time reading Baudrillard first-hand, and some of the ideas were surprising. This book is from the Verso Radical Thinkers imprint, which always has me expecting politically revolutionary ideas, or overt Marxism, neither of which Baudrillard embraces. In fact, he explicitly identifies himself as a post-Marxist.

I sometimes have a problem with shorter pieces (not just in philosophy), and this book can at times seem to be a mile wide and only an inch deep. In only two-hundred pages, there are twenty-two chapters, although there are a few general ideas that he keeps hammering home: he is infatuated with scientific and especially medical metaphors, and continually uses them in trying to diagnose the postmodern society; AIDS, cancer, and computer viruses pop up over and over again throughout the essays. He argues that instead of destroying organisms, these things just change the way they function – AIDS inhibits sexual behavior, cancer is rooted in regular cellular division except that it has gone radically metastatic, et cetera. He also sees all areas of discourse which have previously been separated from one another as bleeding into one another indiscriminately: the aesthetic is now trans-aesthetic, the economic is now trans-economic, any formerly balkanized category can apply to anything else.

I mentioned Baudrillard’s post-Marxism earlier. In fact, he might even describe himself as post-political, since he seems to think that even politics itself has come to an end. Applying his idea of simulacra and simulation to the political sphere, he says “But what can we do? This is the state of simulation, a state in which we are obliged to replay all scenarios precisely because they have taken place already, whether actually or potentially. The state of utopia realized, of all utopias realized, wherein paradoxically we must continue to live as though they had not been. But since they have, and since we can no longer, therefore, nourish the hope of realizing them, we can only ‘hyper-realize’ them through interminable simulation” (p. 4). This almost reads like a conservative kind of cynicism or nihilism, which sort of caught me off guard.

Some of the observations struck me as bizarre and wrong-headed, like what he has to say about AIDS. “AIDS is not the reflection not so much of an excess of sex or sexual pleasure as of sex’s decompensation through its general spread into all areas of life, its venting through all the trivial variants of sexual incantation. The real loss of immunity concerns sex as a whole, with the disappearance of sexual difference and hence of sexuality per se. It is in this diffraction of the sexual reality principle, at the fractal, micrological and non-human level, that the essential confusion of the epidemic takes hold” (p. 9). I’m sorry, but this is simply false. The virus responsible for causing AIDS knows nothing about the “sexuality reality principle,” and even saying something like this sounds silly. 

Sweeping statements like the one on AIDS occasionally stud and inevitably mar the power of any critical philosophy Baudrillard has to offer, if he wants to offer one at all. It makes for wonderfully audacious and exciting theory, but shoddy philosophy. Maybe Baudrillard wouldn’t draw such a definitive line between the two, but I think with the former, metaphorical or analogical thought can help push theory along into unknown realms and aid in understanding things in different ways. Philosophy, being more closely related to logic, has to be more careful. And Baudrillard is working analogically here: saying that X resembles A in some sense and Y resembles A in another sense, therefore X is Y. This opens up new vistas of understanding, but when presented as philosophy can do just as much to obscure as it can to clarify.

These quibbles aside, this is probably one of the better introductions to Baudrillard’s large output. You don’t have to be overly familiar with all of his work to walk away from the essays feeling that you’ve learned something about him. And for those just getting their feet wet, this isn’t full of the obfuscatory prose we’re familiar with from other continental philosophy “Of Grammatology” or “Difference and Repetition,” and for that we can all be grateful.

Review of Michael J. Sandel's "Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I was first introduced to Michael Sandel a couple of years ago on YouTube while I was looking for a productive way to spend my newly free summer days. His course at Harvard called “Justice” is one of the fastest in the entire university to fill up – not something I had to worry about, since I could watch all twelve of the lectures at my leisure. The lectures were filmed in an enormous hall (over 1,000 student register for his class every time it is offered), and are full of students who would never think of necessarily majoring in philosophy, but are still interested in deep, meaningful questions like “What does it mean to be a citizen in a democratic society?” and “How does one pursue the good life in a world of so many competing interests?” This searching quality, and Sandel’s open, interactive maieutic method of engaging his students were some of the best parts of his lectures.

That same Socratic spirit continues within the pages of this book, a series of previously published essays. Sandel’s willingness and insistence on being a knowledgeable cicerone through the history of liberal political theory is a sincere and much-appreciated one. However, some of these pieces are simply too short, both in length and in moral force, to merit inclusion in what otherwise could have been an extremely powerful collection. Most of the short pieces I’m talking about are in Part II, “Moral and Political Arguments.” These are articles (I use this word instead of “essay” because they almost look more like, and it pains me to say it, op-ed pieces than they do well-considered philosophical arguments) discussing the relative positives and negatives of state lotteries, advertising in public classrooms, the morality of buying and selling pollution credits, affirmative action, and the Clinton imbroglio. Some of these sound a little dated, having been written while the public discussions behind these issues was still hot; some of them haven’t been updated, not to mention more fully fleshed out as they should be.

The lengths of the pieces here are pretty proportional to their quality. The opening essay, “America’s Search for a Public Philosophy,” (p. 9-34) nicely sets the tone and informs the body of concerns that resurface throughout the book: our shift away from a kind of communitarian liberalism toward a more rights-based, autonomy-based, voluntarist liberalism in which the state is value-neutral. (This seems to be an essay-long distillation of his book, “Democracy’s Discontent.”) The best essays point out some of the contradictions residing within liberalism (liberalism in the broad philosophical sense, not the narrow sense pundits use the word): for example, is toleration a good in itself if the thing being tolerated is morally dubious, like the neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois? In other words, which is more morally fundamental – the toleration itself, or the inherent goodness or badness of the thing being tolerated? Sandel is right to point out that rudimentary questions like this rarely present themselves in the matter of public discourse.

Two more essays, “Dewey’s Liberalism and Ours” and “Political Liberalism,” a discussion of some of the readings and misreadings Dewey has incurred since his death and a critical discussion of John Rawls respectively, are both equally worthy of attention. In fact, Dewey’s influence on Sandel looms large; both are extremely concerned with the cultivation of a democratic citizenry, and what precisely this would entail. Both are also clearly disenchanted with the rights-based, voluntarist liberalism that has come to be almost unquestioned in the United States over the last century. 

While some of the shorter pieces come to the conclusions that you would expect of someone of a Deweyan, communitarian liberal bent who values goods before rights, the longer pieces that I mention above really are good places to see the various ways in which philosophy dovetails into practical political concerns. They are consistently thought-provoking and critical of the liberal tradition within political philosophy when necessary. The short articles, while not totally worthless, are more cursory and may be of interest to those with a passing or historical interest interest, but they don’t provide the intellectual sustenance found in other parts of the book.

Review of Julia Kristeva's "Hannah Arendt: Life Is A Narrative"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This is a collection of five Alexander lectures that Kristeva delivered at the University of Toronto in 1999. It attempts to delineate certain aspects of Arendt’s political philosophy, including her idea of the political, the vita activa/vita contemplative distinction, and the influences of various thinkers, especially Aristotle and Heidegger on Arendt’s body of work. Kristeva’s main focuses are Arendt’s conceptions of language, the self, “political space,” and the body, addressing all with a particular focus toward their deployment and usage in political life. 

During the first two lectures, Kristeva convincingly makes the case that at the center of Arendt’s political thought rests several distinctions which enable us to live political lives (political in the sense of Aristotle’s famous ζῷον πολιτικόν, the observation that we are by nature social animals, not necessarily party politics). She says that we interpret, understand, and react to our world through and by our unique ability to create narratives. The ability to share life, action, and thought in an interactive human matrix arises from what Nietzsche called the “shaping power” of human memory. Kristeva beautifully sums up her argument in the first part of her book, in my judgment the best, in the following way:

"Throughout the life of narrative seen as a 'quest' for shareable meaning, it is therefore not a total and totalizing work that Arendt seeks. But neither does she seek the creation of a political space that would be in itself a 'work of art.' To see the essence of politics as a welcoming phenomenality, a locus of pure appearance that has been freed from the schema of domination, seems to represent an aestheticization that does not correspond to Arendt's thought. The aestheticizing reification of politics that we can see in National Socialism does not reveal the non-political essence of the political, as was once said, but its death. For Arendt, if political life is separate from its story, which demonstrates to all (dokei moi) its conflicts, it is to the extent that political life resists its own aestheticization, sees itself as an activity (praxis) that cannot be reduced to a simple product (poiesis), and allows itself to be shared by the irreducible plurality of those who are living” (p. 42-43).

The third lecture is a reading of several fiction writers, including Dinesen, Brecht, Sarraute, and Kafka, with emphasis on the implications their work has for political action. While interesting, I didn’t find Arendt’s reading, or Kristeva’s reading of Arendt’s reading, especially compelling. 

In the last two lectures, she mostly discusses the political relevance of forgiveness, memory, and judgment. Kristeva is makes some peculiar statements about Arendt, i.e., like that Arendt wasn’t aware of the large corpus of eighteenth century treatises on aesthetics and taste. I find this highly unlikely, considering Arendt’s near-encyclopedic knowledge of Western philosophical traditions. 

Overall, this book could have been much better if Kristeva herself was a political philosopher, though she does bring interesting points to the issue at hand considering her background in theory and psychoanalysis. It was enjoyable to get to read a synthesis of Arendt’s work from someone whose work epitomizes interdisciplinarity, and does not rest purely within the realm of political science or philosophy. But this is ultimately a double-edged sword for this book. While I always found Kristeva’s arguments thoughtful and well-argued, they always lacked a certain historical force that could have been better lassoed with a “tighter” focus on Arendt’s purely historic-political métier. 

Review of Hilary Putnam's "The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

The first essay establishes that the fact/value distinction (a later incarnation of Hume’s “you cannot derive an “is” from an “ought” thesis) rests on a dubious positivist definition of “fact” that derives from sense impression. In the second, Putnam explains that the values that science assumes aren’t necessarily moral or ethical ones, but epistemic ones. Epistemic values like “coherence” and “simplicity” are assumed in the scientific pursuit, yet science continues to be thought of as wholly objective. John Mackie argued that words like “cruel” and “just” were simply words that described “natural facts,” instead of realizing that they cannot be used intelligibly without employing some kind of evaluative judgment. 

The third essay transposes this debate into the world of classical economic theory. This same debate found itself transposed into the field of economics ensconced within the framework of a Benthamist moral calculus, but were removed by the empiricist is/ought distinction (later, the work of the positivists.) Amartya Sen’s project is to reintroduce ethical concepts and norms (once so lauded by Adam Smith, but since having been forgotten) back into the discourse on classical economics without losing any of its original rigor. Sen realizes that people are motivated by non-self-interested motives, as well. In its place, Sen posits a capabilities approach which emphasizes a plurality of human rights, freedoms, and goals, instead of the poverty of utilitarian ethical monism.

Throughout the three lectures, Putnam carefully picks apart one of the most enduring shibboleths of modern philosophy. Like Rorty, with whom he shares many intellectual affinities, he has an explicit, self-conscious relationship with the analytic tradition. Unlike Rorty, however, he has not wholly eschewed that tradition. While he disagrees with many of its conclusions, he is able to use some of its assumptions and to break outside of the box of morally bankrupt positivism. 

The last part of the book contains five essays of in tangential relation to the three main lectures. “On the Rationality of Preferences,” one of the essays included in the collection, but not one of the three original lectures, is Putnam’s answer to an interlocutor who made a curious criticism of the paper that he presented. Putnam’s presentation considered a person who had two choices before them, A and B, neither of which the chooser preferred. Would it matter, he asks, if, instead of the chooser making the decision simply tosses a coin or gets a random person to make the decision for him? After all, they don’t have a preference, right? Most classically trained economists would assert that it didn’t matter who made the decision. In fact, that’s what the interlocutor pointed out. However, this essay, Putnam’s response, is a brilliant response defending the idea that, even though one might not prefer A to B, the ability to choose one’s own option engenders a kind of “dignity of the self” which economists have heretofore ignored.

Review of Michael Lessnoff's "Ernest Gellner and Modernity"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) was a French-born Czech-Englishman whose interests are as varied as his string of ethnonyms would suggest. In addition to holding well-known chairs in sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, he was also interested in the methodological foundations of science, the political culture of Islamic societies, and dismantling what he considered to be three of the biggest con-games that have taken in intellectuals of the twentieth century: postmodernism, Freudianism, and Marxism. Perhaps his best-known book is “Plough, Sword, and Book.” 

This is an imprint from the University of Wales called “Political Philosophy Now,” and aims to summarize Gellner’s oeuvre. Lessnoff does a competent job at this, even if his approach isn’t nearly as witty and sharp as Gellner’s notoriously was. His delivery is flat and academic, but he’s clearly very familiar with Gellner’s work, and especially the conversations in which Gellner was intellectually engaged. Since I haven’t read any of Gellner’s original work, I can only assume that his interpretation of Gellner is accurate. He’s certainly not an apologist for Gellner, and openly criticizes him when he feels it is necessary.

I won’t discuss all of the topics here, but I thought that some of Gellner’s work deserved particular attention. The best part of the book is the last chapter of the book called “Relativism and Cognitive Ethics.” Cognitive ethics is, as I understand it, essentially Gellner’s way of defining intellectual honesty, and is loosely synonymous with the scientific standards of testability and falsifiability in the Popperian sense. He accuses Freudians and Marxists of lacking this cognitive ethic, because imbedded in these systems are ways of deflecting all criticisms. If you’re not a Freudian, you’re simply in a state of false consciousness (note the similarity to Marxist rhetoric); you’re in denial of Freud’s truth. If you deny Marxism, you’re a useful idiot for the bourgeoisie, blind to the alienating effects of capitalism. Basically, all these systems (he goes on to critique postmodernism along the same lines), have internally coopted all criticisms, and therefore completely protects itself from attack. They’re unfalsifiable, and therefore necessarily unscientific – which is a problem when many of their practitioners wear the cloak of scientific respectability. 

There are also chapters on nationalism, Gellner’s theory of history (as presented in “Plough, Sword, and Book”), politics in modern society, and a blistering attack on the linguistic philosophy popular at Oxford during the middle of the century, especially that of Wittgenstein (found in “Words and Things”). The only chapter that I didn’t find convincing was the one on Islamic society in which he states, quite oddly, that theocracies are particularly adept at conforming to modernist ideals and suggests a distinction between high and low Islam. This was counterintuitive at best.

Lessnoff’s book is a great survey of Gellner’s life’s work. I would certainly suggest this for anyone in reading one of Gellner’s books, which many of which seem difficult but very rewarding.

Review of Martin Jay's "Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations..."

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

The last five hundred years of Western philosophy have been beguiled by the notion of “authentic experience,” and especially how it has been cordoned off from the sensorium of the human mind. In a highly worthy addition to the history of ideas, Martin Jay aims to examine several “modes of experience” – the religious, aesthetic, historical, postmodern among them – so that we might better understand how this precarious category has been understood throughout the history of western thought.

Jay begins immediately by distinguishing between the two large, general types of experience called Erlebnis (which is immediate pre-reflective, and personal) and the Ehfahrung (based on sensual impressions and cognitive judgments). In one of the most interesting parts of the book, Jay details how Michel Montaigne reconfigures experience from a set of powers embodied in the human mind to a set of frailties and weaknesses which delimit those powers, hence his famous quip that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” Montaigne’s subjective interiority of experience was radically changed during the Scientific Revolution in which the scientific method externalized and objectified sensory data, creating a public sphere of inquiry which had never been in place before the seventeenth century. The chapter progresses as a précis of Western philosophical traditions, with everything from Bacon’s emphasis on observation to Kant’s positing of a noumenal world that is the “raw material” for our transcendental faculties to feast upon.

Jay then turns to a chapter about the “Appeal of Religious Experience,” an examination of Schleiermacher, James, Otto, and Buber. He reads Schleiermacher, as most historians have, as a substantive response to Kant, a sort of anti-Enlightenment personalism, which was continued by the likes of Buber and Otto. His readings of these figures, and his knowledge of the secondary material is extensive to such a degree that he can deftly portray the history of ideas not as something that comes down from “on high,” but as a Great Conversation (how old-fashioned is that?) 

“History and Experience” explores some of the more popular trends in nineteenth- and twentieth century historiography, including Dilthey’s distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften (arguably the distinction that launched modern historiographical discourse as we recognize it today), along with the ideas of Collingwood, Joan Wallach Scott, and Franklin Ankersmit. Collingwood’s “The Idea of History” will inevitably be familiar to most, but the Scott and Ankersmit were new to this reader. Scott (coincidently the mother of New York Times film critic A. O. Scott) questions one of the most fundamental assumptions of all historians – the idea of the constituted subject who can entertain historical experience. Instead of taking for granted the idea of the knowing subject upon whom experience impinges itself (as had been done automatically by thinkers from Descartes to Kant), Scott argues the interpretative regimes of the historian are built, a la Foucault, not through a neutral intellective apparatus, but rather are shaped by, and in turn themselves shape, historical events. Franklin Ankersmit offers a subjective historiography of immediacy which blurs the lines between knower and known. 

As the book proceeds into Bataille, Foucault, Adorno, and Benjamin, Jay detects a substantive disappearance of experience (at least experience as we have known it before) largely historically situated in the World War I and the years immediately thereafter. This renders the tone of the final chapters into something of a threnody for something lost.

Review of Robert C. Solomon's "Living with Nietzsche: What the Great 'Immoralist' Has to Teach Us"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I noted in my review of “Twilight of the Ideals” and “The Anti-Christ” how a figure like Nietzsche seems to draw perennial criticism that denies him the charitable, broad reading that he needs to be fully understood. There are apparently those who continue to find some sort of satisfaction in identifying Nietzsche as a moral or ethical nihilist, a prototypical Nazi, or some sort of right-wing monster generally speaking. For those interested in a wonderful, articulate, and fully historicized refutation of these views, I would recommend Walter Kaufmann’s “Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.” Robert Solomon’s “Living with Nietzsche,” while lacking the biographical nature of Kaufmann’s work, also serves as an extended apology for the continued relevance and centrality of Nietzsche’s thought. 

Solomon doesn’t bother with much of the territory that many people might want him to cover: his discontent with Christianity, for example. Instead, he focuses on a small number of issues which run more fully through his thought, including Nietzsche’s defense of the passions, moral perspectivism, and concept of resentment (or, as Nietzsche always says “ressentiment”). There are also incisively funny sections which defend Nietzsche’s penchant for ad hominem attacks, with Solomon suggesting that in some circumstances the ad hominem isn’t at all a logical fallacy. I won’t spell out the details of the argument here, but it’s not wholly unconvincing. Central to Solomon’s arguments throughout the book is that Nietzsche is not in fact a moral nihilist at all, but instead actually rests very closely to Aristotle’s conception of “virtue ethics,” that overused phrase now all too often thrown around in the circles of moral philosophy. In fact, it’s very difficult to imagine Nietzsche’s unabashed elitism without this. 

Solomon does a great job at showing how Nietzsche’s thought works in concert with the history of philosophy. This book would be more appreciated by someone at least passingly familiar with Nietzsche’s work; the topics Solomon chooses will seem somewhat random otherwise, since they aren’t necessarily the ones that are most connected with the name of Nietzsche in the popular imagination. Of course, if you’re already familiar with his work and have given it the charitable reading that I mentioned above, the chances aren’t nearly as high that you will need Solomon’s corrective approach in fully appreciating Nietzsche in the first place. However, judging from some of the kooky things that are still shamelessly said about him, I would recommend this for those who think, as I do, that it’s best to err on the side of caution. Nietzsche, even with all of his rhetorical Sturm und Drang, and perhaps because of it, always repays judicious reading.

Review of Sheldon Wolin's "Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter..."

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Sheldon Wolin begins his book by looking at the effects that September 11, 2001 had on the public, and especially how those effects were refracted though the media. He suggests that the reaction was practically singular and unanimous: popular opinion was consolidated through media apparatus, dissident voices were marginalized or silenced, and fear of a distant, unknown enemy (the ubiquitous “Islamic terrorist”) was encouraged. After 9/11, the miasma of terror created the perfect foil for the construction of a permanent state of fear, which the government used for a reason to use military tribunals, and indefinitely suspend prisoners. All the while the military and its surrogates became increasing privatized by corporate hegemons in the name of “protecting the free market.” Suddenly we had a “global foe, without contours or boundaries, shrouded in secrecy” (p. 40). How did this happen? 

Wolin suggests that, at the heart of American governance, are two countervailing forces. The “constitutional imaginary” (embodied by popular elections, legal authorization, etc.) – so named because it is the predominant logic of the Constitution – “prescribes the means by which power is legitimated, accountable, and constrained. It emphasizes stability and limits” (p. 19). The power imaginary, however, “seeks constantly to expand present capabilities.” Wolin suggests that the power imaginary began with Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, but expanded disproportionately with the inception of the Cold War. The constitutional and power imaginaries may seem mutually exclusive, but they co-exist uneasily within our ersatz American democracy.

Wolin uses these concepts to build an idea that he looks throughout the entire book – that of “inverted totalitarianism,” which is what he claims America is. To understand what he is doing here, it is important to look at how classical totalitarianism (that of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini) functioned. These worked through 

- the subversion and eventual destruction of legislative, governmental, and bureaucratic avenues 

- single-party control of the state through the presence of a charismatic leader

- boasts of its totalitarian character and attempts to actively rally the people behind state propaganda

- excites the populace into a frisson over something (racial superiority, anti-Semitism)

If you turn these on their head, you get what Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism. He defines this as “a new type of political system, seemingly one riven by abstract totalizing powers, not by person rule, one that succeeds by encouraging political disengagement rather than mass mobilization that relies more on private media than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda reinforcing the official version of events.” (p. 44) It has, among others, the following properties:

- instead of subverting traditional democratic channels, it utilizes them to achieve its predetermined ends

- denies its totalitarian nature

- pacifies, stunts, and retards popular mobility

- operates via the impression of a multi-party state (Democratic/Republican) with the illusion of at least two different sets of political ideals with a conspicuous lack of the aforementioned charismatic leader

These are just the barest of bones of Wolin’s argument. He includes a through intellectual genealogy of how he thinks we have placed more and more of an emphasis on the power imaginary, with insightful examinations of Hobbes, Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, and Plato. He also spends a lot of time looking at how the deliberate consolidation of media and corporate power within the United States has made this coup much easier.

I found the idiom of inverted totalitarianism an interesting one for looking at contemporary American democracy, even though it has its weaknesses. It is one of the few books on the subject that I have read that is just as considerate of twenty-first century American history as it is of classical political theory, and it strikes a beautiful balance. This is the best kind of critical theory in that it puts into lucid language what many people have suspected. Sometimes it just takes someone from Princeton to articulate it this well. 

Review of Kelly James Clark's "Return to Reason"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

“Return to Reason” is a valiant effort in trying to hold down the fort for post-Enlightenment, rational belief in a God. For a short book, it covers a lot of territory, including an argument against natural theology, and a critique of foundationalist epistemology (for definitions of these terms, see the second and third paragraphs respectively). It’s a great undergraduate text for what philosophers call “reformed epistemology” (again, see below) and introduces some of the most popular names in this tradition. Unfortunately, I found this book to be tragically flawed in several respects, and in the end, a terrible failure, both of the imagination and of philosophy. 

Clark begins off on a solid footing with a thoroughgoing critique of natural theology – that is, the idea that a belief in God can be derived from logical propositions that all rational beings can agree upon. The most recognizable of these arguments are seen in Aquinas’ five proofs, including the argument from design and the cosmological argument. He rightly argues that different (rational) people can use different standards of evidence and only think these standards apply in certain situations. For example, regarding the argument from design, some people think that the argument from sufficient reason applies to all things within the universe, while others – namely the people who find the design argument convincing – think it can apply to the universe as a whole itself. Some astrophysicists have recently asserted that the Big Bang itself may not have had a cause (I’m thinking here of Lawrence Krauss), which would blow the entire lid off of the cosmological argument as we know it. Because of this, natural theology seems like a failure on all fronts: using only the tool of classical Enlightenment reason, it’s not the case that all people will agree on the positive truth value of God claims. 

Because this relentless need for evidence and reason, which Clark terms “evidentialism,” cannot prove the existence of God, he sees it fit to critique foundationalism, the belief that all inferential beliefs are based on more basic beliefs. Instead, thinking that he’s offering a detailed critique of foundationalist epistemology, he really just goes on to flatly state that when you want to believe in something, you can “just do it.” In fact, in “Faith and Rationality,” Nicholas Wolterstorff states this flatly and unashamedly. “A person is rationally justified in believing a certain proposition when he does believe unless he has adequate reason to cease from believing it. Our beliefs are rational unless we have reason for refraining; they are not non-rational unless we have reason for believing” (Clark, p. 147). I’m sorry, but this simply isn’t the way that rationality works, and it’s relatively easy to see why. Say I want to belief that an Invisible Giant Meatball Sandwich causes things to fall to the ground, not gravity. Try proving me wrong. 

Instead of changing his worldview in the light of insufficient evidence, like most philosophers would do, Clark followed in the footsteps of an unfortunate yet storied philosophical tradition known as reformed epistemology (so named because of its roots in the Protestant Reformation, especially in the theology of John Calvin), but recently revived by the likes of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and William Alston. Reformed epistemology holds that belief in a God is both basic and proper, or what philosophers call “properly basic.” “Basic” here means without recourse to being explained by something else (it’s a primary belief which doesn’t need explanation itself), and “properly” means that a belief is justified. In other words, reform epistemologists believe that God is both something that is justified, but also doesn’t have to be explained. Well, isn’t that just precious – and convenient. It seems obvious to me that reformed epistemology is simply a way of trying to smuggle in the back door what you can’t get in if you actually follow the rules of the game of philosophy: you know, like evidence, reason, and logical methods. Does anyone know of a reformed epistemologist who also happens to be an atheist? 

Crickets. I hear crickets. 

I’m by no means uncritical of the Enlightenment, or the traditions that flow from it. But what I find most dishonest about this book is not that it feels that it can dismiss centuries of philosophical thought in 150 pages, but that it makes the tremendously intellectually dishonest move of trying assert (note that I didn’t say “prove” or “demonstrate”) totally ad hoc a belief that can be introduced by no rational means. I’m also not someone who thinks that philosophy should necessarily in any way resemble science in content or method, but one really is treading ground when you import the word “rationality” here, leading people on to believe that it’s anything like the rationality of science. Clark, Plantinga, Wolterstorff and other reformed epistemologists haven’t really critiqued anything. They’ve skirted the issue, and have thereby created a whole new welter of problems for themselves. I can understand when someone asserts that their belief in God is basic – that it is primary, and can’t be explained by anything else. But saying that it’s properly basic – that these kinds of beliefs are justified – is simply not reasonable or rational. There’s a reason why they call it Calvinism. And it should stay in the sixteenth century where it belongs.

Review of Michael Allen Gillespie's "The Theological Origins of Modernity"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Modernity, broadly understood as a “realm of individualism, of representation of subjectivity, of exploration and discovery, of freedom, rights, toleration, liberalism, and the nation state,” is often assumed to be rooted in a growing hostility toward, or at least indifference to, theological ideas. Michael Allen Gillespie, a professor of political science and philosophy at Duke University, uses this book to argue against this point. Rather than a disengagement from theological discourse, he suggests modernity has actually been a completely different set of answers to questions that we would recognize as explicitly theological.

He begins his discussion by going all the way back to medieval Scholasticism, and in particular looking at the rift between Scholastic realism (or universalism) and nominalism. Scholasticism was dominated by realist thought, which said that everything in the world was merely a kind of Platonic simulacra of the only thing that was real – the perfectly rational, divine mind of God. During the early fourteenth century, William of Ockham became one of the most outspoken opponents against realism and for a position known as nominalism. Nominalism rejected the central position of realism, and suggested that such a divine reason which human beings could access and understand didn’t even exist in the first place. (Ockham was not, for clarity’s sake, proposing atheism. He was instead saying that the mind of God was something so distant from the frailties of the human intellect that we will never understand it – i.e., the deus absconditus of Martin Luther.) This got him into a lot of trouble with Pope John XXII, who eventually excommunicated him. The important thing to take away from Gillespie’s discussion of Ockham is that Scholasticism’s marriage of the human and divine intellect is ruptured by nominalism, which “replaced it with a chaos of radically different beings” and focused on a God of extreme will and omnipotence instead of one whose rational mind was reflected in the perfection of nature.

The rest of the book is taken up with how these ideas have been taken up in subsequent thinkers. The first person Gillespie understands as being in conversation with Ockhamite nominalism is Petrarch, Ockham’s contemporary. Petrarch’s idea of the moral life is one, starkly in contrast with Aristotle’s conception of the zoon politikon, pursued mostly in private conflicts drastically with the Roman authors, especially Cicero, whose lives and works he so cherished and revived. His several books, including “Rerum Memorandum” (“Memorable Things”) and “Africa,” an epic poem presenting the parallel lives of Scipio, Caesar, and Hannibal, serve to detail his ideas in these respects.

Next, Gillespie moves on to give a rather conventional account of Renaissance humanism and some of its major figures, including Machiavelli, Salutati, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Erasmus. He argues, very much in line with mainstream historical understanding, that these humanists placed an emphasis (or, as Gillespie phrases it, “ontic priority”) on human reason and cognitive faculties, rather than a divine being, even though almost none of the memorable humanists concluded anything like atheism. 

Much of the rest of the book discusses two pairs of thinkers, and uses each pair to compare and contrast the influences of nominalism and humanism that each offered. The first of these pairs is Luther and Erasmus. Gillespie never assumes too much of the reader, and therefore spends quite a bit of time giving introductory information about each of these. He suggests that both, but especially Luther, were influenced by nominalism and therefore God’s radical separation from man. He sums up the differences and similarities between the two thus: “…modernity proper was born out of and in reaction to this conflict [the debate between Luther and Erasmus], as an effort to find a new approach to the world that was not entangled in the contradictions of humanism and the Reformation. To this end, thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes sought a new beginning that gave priority not to man or to God but to nature, that sought to understand the world not as a product of a Promethean human freedom or of a radically omnipotent divine will but of the mechanical motion of matter. Modernity in this sense was the result of an ontic revolution within metaphysics that accepted the ontological ground that nominalism established but that saw the other realms of being through this new naturalistic lens” (p. 132). Gillespie then goes on to discuss the second pair, Descartes and Hobbes, and their relative understanding of physics, human psychology, and epistemology. He gives a heavily historical account of their thought refracted through personal and biographical experiences. 

Gillespie’s last chapter discusses some more ideas of modernity, including those of Kant (“Sapere aude!”), Hegel, and the German Romantics. One of the most interesting ideas he talks about here is how Heidegger formulated this problem, namely not one as a de-theologizing or secularization, but as God becoming increasing “concealed” or “withdrawn” from public discourse. I’ve always found Heidegger an enigmatic, but fully rigorous thinker and thought that this was an interesting way to resituate an extraordinarily complex historical question.

There are a couple of critical things I have to offer about the book. I find it perhaps not flatly wrong, but at least odd, to suggest that much of the above thought is explicitly answering theological questions. To say that “The Enlightenment was all about theology, because many of its thinkers disavowed theism” seems to be self-consciously defining a movement negatively, instead of taking its real, central concerns to heart. Could one not just as easily write a book called “The Platonic Origins of Modernity,” arguing how all of modernity was a response to the Platonic forms? 

This shouldn’t detract someone from the book, though, especially if they’re interested in a great synthetic treatment of all these thinkers backed up by solid historical and philosophical understanding. I may not have agreed with all of Gillespie’s conclusions, but this book offers up a lot of questions for anyone with a soft spot for intellectual history.