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April 10, 2004
In an earlier post I mentioned the closure of American liberalism as it is expressed in the New York Review of Books. In this post I want to spell out this sense of closure a bit by picking up on a particular American response to the powerful critique of modernity and liberal democracy by both conservatives and marxists. That critique has been explored on this weblog in terms of a critique of an instrumental economic/technological reason.
Take this review of two books by Richard Wolin and Mark Lilla that address what they define as the perennial conflict between philosophy and political power. Both texts address this conflict in terms of the intersection of philosophy and tyranny through a series of philosophical–biographical sketches of some of the most noteworthy European intellectuals of the past century.
In his book Heidegger’s Children (which I haven't read) Richard Wolin argues that Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse embraced and endorsed tyranny (and rejected liberal democracy) because they all ultimately "accepted . . . [the] series of deep–seated prejudices concerning the nature of political modernity" that they acquired largely from Heidegger.
What are these deep-seated prejudices and how are they different from assumptions or traditions I wondered. Judging from the review these deep seated prejudices appear to be the antiliberal "Zeitgeist of the interwar years" in Germany, an antimodern Catholicism, and being "elitist" and "aristocratic". That appears to be that.
This is pretty thin. It reminds me of this experience. it only gets off the grround when Heidegger's philosophy is taken as bad because it leads to, or causes his fascist politics. You can sense Wolin's closure here with both Bataille and Foucault. These are anti-liberal too and they must be repulsed. There is no need to probe too deeply into their insights into the way power works in liberal society; or their attempts to develop an alternative kind of reason to the instrumental reason of modernity. They are contaminated by their association with tyranny.
In contrast, Mark Lilla in his The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics does mention a number of arguments for the intersection of philosophy and tyranny--what Lilla calls The Lure of Syracuse. In the words of the reviewer:
"Lilla considers, and rejects, a number of different theories that have been proposed as explanations over the years. The philosophical choice for tyranny cannot be traced solely to an overabundance of "rationalism," as Isaiah Berlin and the members of the Frankfurt School have claimed. But neither can simple–minded "irrationalism" of the kind emphasized by Jacob Talmon be blamed. And while Raymond Aron was right to point out the dangers of an excess of "commitment" on the part of French intellectuals, such German scholars as Fritz Stern and Jürgen Habermas have been correct to identify the opposite tendency ("disengagement") as the crucial defect in many others. "
Lilla rejects in favour of psychology of the philotyrannical intellectuals When we do, we find that they have succumbed to the:
"...blissful kind of madness" that love can induce, whether its object is "another human being or . . . an idea . . . [of] eternal truth, justice, beauty, [and] wisdom." When such passions refuse the discipline that "the philosophical life aims to provide," they come to dominate the soul. And when that love is inspired by ideas, the results can be disastrous, especially when the love–struck intellectual attempts to realize his ambitions in politics."
Hence the reckless mind. Lilla's advice is to master the madness that lurks within us is that we need to "master the tyrant within" by practicing self–control and embracing the virtue of moderation.
Presumably liberals engage in daily Stoic practices of self-control and moderation. It is not what I saw in Federal Parliament.
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