The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism

by Richard Wolin

The Nation

[from the June 14, 2004 issue]

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