Customer Reviews

Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy

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This book is a "must read" for anyone interested in the recent history of philosophy in America, or who cares about its future. Wilshire takes sure aim at a philosophy that "mangle[s] the roots of our thinking-feeling-evaluating selves." Analytical philosophy, an approach to consciousness and self that weds philosophy to the style of natural sciences, can disable self-conceptions, leaving us with nihilism. It can all too easily reduce flesh or body to lifeless matter, morph minds and imaginations into chemicals and `wiring,' and deflate sacred ceremony and myth to no more than childish mimicry and fable. Whatever happened to Socratic "care for the soul"? These elegantly crafted essays are a treat to read. Wilshire nurtures an affirmative celebration of the passion of philosophy. No one will want to miss his account -- the best I've seen -- of the battle in the late `70's between mainstream analysts and marginalized American phenomenologists and existentialists for recognition in the American Philosophical Association. Later chapters rethink Native American thought, consider Henry Bugbee, a neglected American "philosopher of intimacy,"and revisit William James' concern for `the spiritual.' Wilshire ends with a elegiac meditation on his daughter's death that bears out his philosophical spirit -- such proof as can be given that nihilism does not speak the final word.

This book gives the impression of a hastily thrown together undergraduate essay, full of incoherent arguments, non-sequiturs, and emotional invective.

Sometimes it even degenerates into flaky "new-age" sounding statements ("the full sustaining and regenerating flow of the universe through our resonating bodies").

This is a shame, because in my opinion the thesis of the book, spelled out somewhat articulately in the preface, seems to me to have some merit. Wilshire's claim is that analytic philosophy, in which the speaking subject is always absent and replaced by an artificial "mood of detachment," tends to "unwittingly impoverish" the philosopher's conception of himself. The resulting arid speculation fails to deal with the real substantive problems of philosophy.

A much better essay, which presents a similar claim, but much more articulately and persuasively, is a paper by Babette Babich titled "On the Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy: Nietzsche's Lying Truth, Heidegger's Speaking Language, and Philosophy," reprinted in C. G. Prado, ed., A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy, Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books. 2003, pp. 63-103.

I found this book of considerable value for understanding the philosophical situation in America today. It demonstrates very convincingly the deep differences between analytical and continental/American approaches to the field, and this is already quite informative. But it goes on from here to show that analytical philosophy is unable to assume the responsibility of pursuing a genuinely humanistic and humane thought -- and thus is unable to address the great issues of our day. At its core, it is a nihilistic enterprise that is absorbed in the play and interplay of linguistic and conceptual systems, thereby sealing itself off from the most profound ethical and political issues of the contemporary world. Despite its remarkable logical power, it becomes a self-inhibiting and self-defeating way of doing philosophy. Something else is called for, and the author points to this other direction -- inspired by American and continental philosophy -- eloquently and forcefully.

Professor Wilshire calls for, and admirably practices, self-reflection, as he critiques the commercialization/professionalization and dehistoricizing trend of analytic philosophy. He celebrates freedom and ecstasy in a spiritual, passionate inquiry committed to pursuing difficult questions, wherever they may lead.

He takes risks, not least of which is deliberately remembering, even that which is most painful.

Someone who has survived academia without being tainted by it,
he is also one of the very few men who can truly appreciate the radical feminist theology/thealogy of Mary Daly.

What's not to love?

Socrates died long ago but his influence continues. Wilshire's Fashionable Nihilism continues his tradition of stinging us into awareness, of stopping us in our sleepwalking and demanding that we wake up and question our benumbing assumptions, of prompting us to inquire whether we are as fully alive as we might be. Wilshire tears into the reigning analytic philosophers absorbed in technical conversations with each other. With philosophical problems nearly consuming us as a nation, Wilshire's book explodes coteries and cliques and directs our attention to the pressing world all around us.

This isn't your typical philosophy book. In fact, part of Wilshire's aim is to help us fathom what's wrong with the typical philosophy book. I think he can succeed for most readers who aren't already too far gone.

Via nine essays covering a range of interrelated topics, Wilshire uses his very personal writing style to try to jar us out of the numbingly austere technical mentality which is endemic to analytic philosophy. The hope is that we will wake up and thereby embrace our actual lived experience more fully, in all its dimensions, depths, and contours. To accomplish this, Wilshire pluralistically draws on pragmatism, phenomenology, existentialism, and Native American worldviews, thereby revealing the fundamental concordance among these worldviews. I think that much of Eastern philosophy also fits in here, but he doesn't really go into that.

The earlier essays tend to be reasonably straightforward, with parts that are even easy and fun. As we progress through the book, the essays become denser and take on an increasingly spiritual bent. In the final essay, Wilshire discusses the life and death of his daughter, and I was moved to tears ...

This is a powerful book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who turns to philosophy to help grapple with difficult and important existential matters, rather than just using philosophy as yet another distraction (albeit a highbrow intellectual one).