THE SEDUCTION OF UNREASON
THE INTELLECTUAL ROMANCE WITH FASCISM
FROM NIETZSCHE TO POSTMODERNISM
RICHARD WOLIN
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A Review
by RICHARD RORTY
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The Nation
[from the June 14, 2004 issue]
Philosophical Convictions
Philosophers get attention only when they
appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting
the youth, undermining the foundations of
civilization, sneering at all we hold dear.
The rest of the time everybody assumes that
they are hard at work somewhere down in the
sub-basement, keeping those foundations in
good repair. Nobody much cares what brand
of intellectual duct tape is being used.
The public becomes incensed, however, when
rogue philosophers come upstairs, buttonhole
the tenants and tell them that there really
are no foundations--that their industrious
colleagues are just providing "bad reasons
for what we believe upon instinct" (F.
H. Bradley’s description of metaphysics).
Every anti- foundationalist movement within
philosophy produces a spate of books by nonphilosophers
denouncing "the treason of the intellectuals"
(the title of Julien Benda’s 1927 attack
on the pernicious influence of thinkers such
as Henri Bergson and William James).
Books about this sort of treason have proliferated
in the United States and Britain in the past
decade. This is because post-Nietzschean
European philosophy has become increasingly
popular in the English-speaking world. No
graduate student in literature, history or
political theory in an American or British
university can afford to be ignorant of Foucault.
For a time, deconstructing texts--that is,
trying to sound as much like Derrida as possible
while not actually engaging with any philosophical
issues--was all the rage in the literature
departments. Deconstruction is no longer
in fashion, but Derrida is still, deservedly,
admired.
These two original and influential French
thinkers agree that Nietzsche was right to
reject Plato’s attempt to demonstrate rationally
that some moral and political values are
better grounded in the nature of things than
others. When Derrida and Foucault were students,
they assimilated and accepted Martin Heidegger’s
story about how Western philosophy began
with Plato and ended with Nietzsche. They
were convinced by Heidegger’s books that
we should stop trying to "ground"
Western institutions in something august
and ahistorical. They regretted both the
"superman" passages in Nietzsche--the
ones that the Nazis made such good use of--and
Heidegger’s admiration for Hitler. But these
regrets did not diminish their admiration
for the two men’s philosophical achievements.
Richard Wolin thinks that it is not as easy
as all that to separate the conduct of a
philosopher from the utility of his ideas,
or his moral character from his teachings.
A distinguished intellectual historian who
teaches at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, Wolin believes that
the prevalence of "slack postmodernist
relativism" is very dangerous. "The
postmodern left," he says, "risks
depriving democracy of valuable normative
resources at an hour of extreme historical
need." His book seeks to demonstrate
that "at a certain point postmodernism’s
hostility towards ’reason’ and ’truth’ is
intellectually untenable and politically
debilitating." Many of the essays that
make up the book focus on the dubious--and
sometimes appalling--political stances adopted
by eminent post-Nietzschean thinkers. Wolin
argues that their political attitudes are
closely bound up with their anti-foundationalist
philosophical views.
Wolin has an easy time showing that fans
of Nietzsche and Heidegger have said stupid
and irresponsible things about democracy.
But he does not do much to show that the
stupidities follow from their philosophies,
nor that those philosophies are untenable.
To do the latter, he would have to argue
in defense of specific philosophical claims--those
that constitute what he thinks of as democracy’s
"normative resources." He leaves
it pretty vague what a "normative resource"
might be, and how such resources are put
to use in political deliberation.
Postmodernism, Wolin says, is "the rejection
of the intellectual and cultural assumptions
of modernity in the name of ’will to power’
(Nietzsche), ’sovereignty’ (Bataille), an
’other beginning’ (Heidegger), ’différance’
(Derrida) or a ’different economy of bodies
and pleasures’ (Foucault)." So one expects
him to enumerate "the intellectual and
cultural assumptions of modernity" and
show why they should not be rejected. But
Wolin seems to assume that his readers already
know what these assumptions are, and are
disposed to take rejection of them as a reductio
ad absurdum of a philosopher’s outlook.
Sometimes, however, he goes out on a philosophical
limb, as when he says that Derrida’s "criticism
of the modern natural law tradition--the
normative basis of the contemporary democratic
societies"--leaves us with a "’political
existentialism,’ in which, given the ’groundless’
nature of moral and political choice, one
political ’decision’ seems almost as good
as another." In such passages as these,
Wolin endorses the old Platonic argument
to the effect that if there is nothing "out
there" (the Platonic forms, the will
of God, natural law) that makes our moral
judgments true, there is no point in forming
such judgments at all.
Plato argued along the following lines: Truth
is a matter of correspondence to reality.
Propositions are made true by things that
are as they are, independent of human desires
and decisions. This goes for propositions
like "Kindness is better than cruelty"
as much as for those like "Annapurna
is west of Everest." Relations of moral
preferability are no more up to us to decide
than are spatial relations between mountains.
The claim about kindness is as obviously
true as the one about Annapurna, and so there
must be something out there (something metaphysical,
something that philosophers know more about
than most people) that makes it true. If
you deny that there is anything like that,
the Platonist argument goes, you are denying
that there is a rational way to choose between
Athens and Sparta (or, as we moderns would
say, between Social Democrats and Nazis).
To agree with Protagoras and Nietzsche that
"man is the measure of all things"
is, Wolin thinks, to reduce the choice of
democracy over fascism to a matter of taste.
The most dubious premise in this argument
is the one that says that truth is correspondence
to reality. As everybody who has ever taken
a philosophy class knows, it is hard to specify
what the correspondence relation is supposed
to be. What, for example, does "There
are no unicorns" correspond to? What
entities make "There are infinitely
many transfinite cardinal numbers" true?
If you do not believe in the mysterious things
that Plato called "the Forms,"
what exactly is it that you think moral truths
are made true by? And anyway, why are claims
about the existence of truth-makers such
as the Forms, or "natural law,"
supposed to be more evidently true than the
intuitive moral judgments they are used to
ground? Could we ever become more convinced
of the truth of a metaphysical theory than
we already are of the truth of those judgments?
Most students emerge from the philosophy
courses in which such questions as these
are debated with their instinctive Platonism
intact, just as most Christians retain their
religious convictions after having read Hume’s
Dialogues on natural religion. But those
who have been plunged into doubt frequently
turn to Nietzsche or Heidegger, hoping to
find out how things look after you give up
the correspondence theory of truth. They
could accomplish the same purpose by turning
to William James or John Dewey. But the American
pragmatists lack pizazz. Strident and scornful
anti-Platonists like Nietzsche attract more
readers than jocular and easygoing ones like
James. Heidegger’s apocalyptic-sounding announcements
of "the end of philosophy" sound
more impressive than Dewey’s mild- mannered
suggestions that philosophy should be less
ambitious and less pretentious than in the
past.
Nietzsche and Heidegger thought that once
one rejected the Platonic claim to provide
rational foundations for moral truth, all
things would need to be made new. Culture
would have to be reshaped. James and Dewey,
by contrast, did not think that giving up
the correspondence theory of truth was all
that big a deal. They wanted to debunk it,
and so help get rid of Platonist rationalism,
but they did not think that doing so would
make that much difference to our self- image
or to our social practices. The superstructure,
they thought, would still be in good shape
even after we stopped worrying about the
state of the foundations. Democracy could
be adequately defended by empirical, nonmetaphysical
arguments of the sort Churchill offered when
he said that it was "the worst form
of Government except all those other forms
that have been tried from time to time."
It did not need "normative resources."
Wolin does not discuss whether James and
Dewey might have been right when they urged
that democracy and modernity could get along
nicely without any philosophical foundations,
and that the thing to do with metaphysics
was to mock it, rather than refurbish or
refute it. Wolin views Enlightenment politics
as inseparable from Enlightenment rationalism,
whereas James and Dewey did their best to
keep the one while discarding the other.
Wolin is at his best when he deals with the
proponents of anti-foundationalist arguments
rather than with the arguments themselves.
He is more interested in what kinds of people
they were, and in which political movements
made use of them, than in what they said
in defense of their paradoxical-sounding
claims about reason and truth. Much of his
book tell us of the bad behavior of such
men as Carl Jung, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice
Blanchot and Georges Bataille. He frequently
says such things as that "Gadamer’s
wartime conduct cannot help but raise critical
questions about his philosophy and its relationship
to its times." But he rarely follows
through by explaining just why one cannot
peel off a certain philosopher’s conduct
from his opinions. He seems to think that
any thinker who has displayed either hypocrisy
or self-deception is unlikely to have any
ideas worth adopting.
Wolin is very good at digging up the dirt
on famous European thinkers. He does a fine
job of describing how their doctrines were
put to use by different bad guys at different
times--how, for example, "a critique
of reason, democracy and humanism that originated
on the German Right during the 1920s was
internalized by the French Left." That
is an admirable summary of one of the strangest
turns in twentieth-century European intellectual
life. But, though he protests that his book
is "not an exercise in guilt-by-association,"
that description is actually pretty close
to the mark. Wolin neglects the question
of why the figures he discusses held the
views they did in favor of an account of
the uses to which they were put.
Wolin thinks, rightly, that if you understand
the sociopolitical contexts in which a philosophical
view was formulated, and the factors that
account for its reception, you will be in
a better position to decide whether to adopt
it. Still, the best sort of intellectual
history is the kind that pays equal attention
to the company a philosophical doctrine keeps
and to the arguments deployed in its defense.
One book that does just that, and that treats
of the same figures as Wolin’s, is Jürgen
Habermas’s magisterial The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity. Wolin’s polemic against
postmodernism is spirited and informative,
and his heart is in the right place. But
though Habermas shares Wolin’s doubts about
postmodernism and his sympathies with traditional
rationalism, his book does something Wolin’s
does not: It helps one understand why most
of the important philosophers of the twentieth
century grew skeptical about foundation-building
and foundation-repairing projects. Readers
who are stimulated, but puzzled, by Wolin’s
account of the matter would do well to go
on to Habermas’s.
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040614&s=rorty
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