Classroom politics.
Bauerlein, Mark
Mark Lilla The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York Review of Books, 216 pages, $24.95
In 1955, twenty-nine year old Michel Foucault accepted a teaching
post in Uppsala, Sweden. Isolated for three years, he began gathering
strands of medical texts, seventeenth-century philosophy, intellectual
history, and Nietzsche into what would become his first major work,
Madness and Civilization. Sixteen years later, now a famous professor,
Foucault joined Noam Chomsky in a French television studio for a debate
on the upheavals of the day. There, he stated:
When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the
proletariat will exert toward the classes over which it has triumphed a
violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can't see what objection
could possibly be made to this.
This kind of thing happened all too often in the twentieth century,
argues Mark Lilla in his sober profile of six philosophers and their
dabblings in politics. Each chapter selects a figurehead--Heidegger,
Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojeve, Foucault, Derrida--and
recreates two settings. First, we have the mind of the thinker, the
classroom, the friendships, in sum the scholarly world in which the
philosophy evolved and influenced a generation of students. Then, we
have the political climate, events like the rise of Nazism, to which the
thinkers brought their philosophy and, sad to say, voiced some of the
most fatuous, repugnant, and deluded opinions of modern times.
The evidence is plain, and embarrassing to acolytes still peddling
theories and tendencies derived from the thinkers in humanities
departments. These are influential figures in academe, and it is jarring
to watch them go public and, intoxicated by the winds of revolution and
their own eminence, become apologists for tyranny and anarchy, bidding
one Messiah or another to regenerate the times.
Heidegger is the obvious first choice. He rose to prominence in the
university in the 1920s, combining esoteric phenomenological analysis
with an uncompromising pose of intense reflection. His subject was
Being, the most metaphysical and elusive--yet near--of things, summoned
from the portentous sayings of pre-Socratic reverie. As his student and
lover Hannah Arendt remembered, "the name traveled all over Germany
like the rumor of the hidden king.... The rumor about Heidegger put it
quite simply: Thinking has come to life again." With the
publication of Being and Time in 1927, Heidegger stood as the most
renowned mind in Europe, ranked with Descartes and Kant in the history
of philosophy.
Then came the invitation to become rector of Freiburg University.
In 1933 he joined the Nazi Party and toured Germany giving propaganda
lectures punctuated by "Heil Hitler!" After reading
Heidegger's Rectoral Address, Karl Lowith wondered whether "he
was supposed to study the pre-Socratics or march with the storm
troopers." When Lowith met him in Rome in 1936, Lilla reports,
Heidegger was sporting a Nazi lapel pin. After a lecture in Heidelberg,
he warned his friend Karl Jaspers of "a dangerous international
network of Jews."
These facts are widely known in Europe, and Lilla doesn't
belabor the episode. But he does emphasize Heidegger's post-War
outlook and its bizarre visions. After the German surrender, Heidegger
entered a sanatorium, faced a denazification commission, and was banned
from teaching. Trading Fascist enthusiasm for "serene
renunciation," Heidegger converted defeat into an epochal condition. "Now all was lost," Lilla imagines him thinking,
"Being had withdrawn and was nowhere to be found." Surrounded
by mass technology and craven politics, he composed mystical essays
filled with gods, peasants, and poetry, wrote letters to Jaspers
pleading for an "advent" that would revive Germany, and to
Arendt stating that "The world is growing bleaker ... the essence
of history ever more mysterious.... Still despite growing external
threats in everything, I see the arrival of new--or, better yet--old
`secrets.'" He told a Der Spiegel interviewer, "Only a
god can save us now."
These are more than the addled ramblings of a disgraced professor.
They bear the traits of what is common to all Lilla's subjects: a
"reckless mind." The reckless mind has extraordinary powers of
reason, but harbors a love of irrationality. It conceives bewitching critiques of reality and troth, attracting readers and students, but
despises norms of communication. It talks about justice and history and
Man, but from the precipice, ratcheting them up to crisis tensions,
where only the intervention of the genius can handle them. It loathes
average humanity and everyday life, from the "idle talk" of
the "they" to the comforts of "bourgeois normality."
It covets academic prestige, but courts the "limit situation,"
the transgressive thought and act, unmediated contact with the divine or
the anti-divine.
Lilla's figures provide different versions. Lamenting the
spiritual emptiness of modernity, Benjamin pursued the "creative
word of God" and a "higher concept of experience,"
proposing to "behave always radically and never logically when it
came to the most important things." Kojeve found in the
master-slave dialectic of Hegel the key to all history and society, and
he mesmerized Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, and
others with dazzling lectures in Paris in the 1930s. Foucault directed
his studies to breaking down the distinctions of modern society, between
law and crime, sanity and madness, natural and perverse, passing
deviancy off as rebellion. Derrida conceived of deconstruction as a
nonstop critique of "logocentrism," provoking, he claimed,
"a new tremor or new shock of the body that opens a new space of
experience."
In the classroom or the quarterly, reckless minds appear as
renegade heroes, giving students that heady rush of joining a scholarly
vanguard or watching the Establishment fall. But reckless minds have
larger ambitions. Here is what they did: Benjamin became a Marxist in
the mid-Twenties, and though he drifted after traveling to Moscow,
hearing of the show trials, and learning that a former lover had been
shipped to the gulag, he never criticized Stalin publicly. After the
War, Kojeve whimsically called himself the "conscience of
Stalin" and argued that "modern tyranny (he has the Soviet
Union in mind) might advance the work of history and prepare the way for
a better future" (Lilla's words). Foucault relished
late-Sixties radicalism and advocated a "popular justice" that
differed little from mob rule. When the Iranian revolution erupted in
1978, Foucault visited Tehran and extolled the "religion of combat
and sacrifice." After thirty years of apolitical work, Derrida
published six books in the Nineties on political themes. His argument,
in Lilla's words: "the real source of tyranny is not tyrants,
or guns, or wicked institutions. Tyranny begins in the language of
tyranny." Therefore, we fight tyranny with a linguistic
critique--in Derrida's words, "deconstruction is
justice."
Lilla interprets these examples as part of a dismaying trend in
twentieth-century history: "philotyranny." However briefly,
thinkers embraced Hitler, admired Stalin, Mao, and Castro. But to label
their motives "philotyranny" grants them more political
content than they deserve. As Lilla explains, philosophers acted out of
irresponsible, confused impulses. Benjamin never reconciled his
spiritualism and Marxism enough to develop a coherent political outlook.
Kojeve spent twenty years as a French bureaucrat, indifferent to whether
American capitalism or Soviet communism won out. Foucault's
statements are haphazard and provocative, expressions of anarchy and
self-destructiveness, not Fascism. Derrida's remarks on justice
smack more of self-love than tyranny-love.
These pieces on the disparate failings of prized thinkers
don't fit one motive. They were first published in The New York
Review of Books and the TLS, and bear the earmarks of edgy commentary
and selective analysis. Nevertheless, Lilla has isolated a problem with
Continental thinking in the "restless" vein: it yields a
politics that is apocalyptic, disruptive, messianic. Derrida terms
justice "a structural messianism, a messianism without religion,
even a messianic without messianism." No messy worries about local
bosses, property rights, state senators redrawing districts. Reckless
minds want sweeping transformation, not incremental progress. Just as
they cast their philosophy as clearing away metaphysical rubbish,
dismantling the Platonic tradition, and eliminating distinctions of
reason and unreason, so too they foresee a politics of cataclysm.
According to them, it can't be any other way. Derrida again:
For democracy remains to come; this is its essence in so far as it remains;
not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible ... but, belonging to the
time of the promise, it will always remain, in each of its future times, to
come: even when there is democracy, it never exists.
Reading that sentence, one adjusts one's judgment. This and
other "reckless" opinions aren't messianic politics. They
aren't political at all. They're just the flighty outbursts of
thinkers who should stick to the classroom and the archive.
Mark Bauerlein's latest book is Negropbobia: A Race Riot in
Atlanta 1906 (Encounter Books). He teaches at Emory University.
