Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse [Paperback]

Roger Kimball (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2003

“In the faculty of writing nonsense,” the English critic Walter Bagehot once observed, “stupidity is no match for genius.” In Lives of the Mind, Roger Kimball, one of the best of our cultural critics, offers a lively and penetrating study of genius—and pseudo-genius—at work and investigates the use and abuse of intelligence. When does a love of ideas become a dangerous infatuation? What antidotes are there for the silliness of unanchored intellect? Drawing on figures as various as Plutarch and Hegel, Kierkegaard and P. G. Wodehouse, Elias Canetti and Anthony Trollope, Bagehot and Wittgenstein and Sybille Bedford, Mr. Kimball provides a sharply observed tour of Western intellectual and artistic aspiration. He shows what happens when intellect trumps common sense, and how an affirmation of shared values and ordinary reality can rescue us from the temptations of the higher stupidity. Part cautionary tale, part literary celebration, Lives of the Mind is a witty, deeply engaging guide for the perplexed. The New York Times Book Review has called Mr. Kimball “a scathing critic but one whose tirades are usually justified....His intellectual rigor is refreshing.” And Gertrude Himmelfarb has written: “His essays reflect a steadiness of mind, a coherence, conviction, and passion that make him one of the most candid and perceptive critics of American culture.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kimball, a respected critic and managing editor of the New Criterion, applies the pornography standard to intelligence in this collection of essays about famous men and their smarts: it's hard to define, but he knows it when he sees it. "Intelligence," Kimball writes, "like fire, is a power that is neither good nor bad in itself but rather takes its virtue, its moral coloring, from its application." Among the figures the author identifies as having constructively applied their intelligence are Plutarch (who taught us about character), Kierkegaard ("the supreme anatomist of the aesthetic mode of life"), Wittgenstein (for whom philosophy was an "existential imperative") and, of course, Descartes. (Apparently, real intelligence requires a Y chromosome). Kimball notes that in these studies the heroes "rather outweigh the villains," but a little more abuse might have helped liven things up. The personal bits-Kimball's sickbed discovery of Wodehouse, or Trollope's account of his schoolyard woes-stand out brightly in essays that are earnest and rigorous, if occasionally a bit dry.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

One of the best kinds of writing about writing--criticism, literary history, and all that--is the cultural review article, short enough to be read in a sitting and long enough to educate. Kimball is a master of the genre, as collections of his pieces attest, none more impressively than this set concerned with philosophers, political commentators, two novelists, and one artist--modern, post-Enlightenment figures, most of them; the exceptions are the Greco-Roman biographer Plutarch and that forefather of modern philosophy, Descartes. Kimball customarily begins a piece with some characterizing remarks about the figure at hand, proceeds to a little biography, and then comments on the subject's writings and what others have said and written about him. Kimball likes most of his subjects, and when he doesn't, as in the cases of Hegel and Bertrand Russell, he is fastidious about stating why; not for him the malicious squelch or iron-fisted put-down. As for the leitmotiv of this book, the expression of intelligence, Kimball acknowledges it in all his subjects, but discriminates among them according to his preferences for common sense, custom, traditional religion, the cardinal virtues, and the enjoyment of present pleasures, and against ideology, revolution, materialism, expediency, and utopian promises. His essay on the least-known figure here, Australian philosopher David Stove (1927-94), is not to be missed. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (June 17, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566635241
• ISBN-13: 978-1566635240
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #954,890 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable Essays, April 18, 2003

By 

Steve Jackson "stevejackson100atyahoocom" (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Hardcover)

Roger Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion, a neo-conservative journal of arts and letters. I gather that most of these essays were published as book reviews and essays in that publication. (Strangely, the book nowhere tells you where the essays come from.)

I enjoyed this book a great deal. Kimball is an excellent writer and all of the essays are well written and lively. Because many of the essays are book reviews, the essays actually provide handy introductions to certain thinkers. The essays on Schopenhauer and Descartes are a good mix of biographical background and philosophical explanation. There is also an enjoyable introduction to David Stove, an Australian philosopher that Kimball helped introduce to the American public when he edited a collection of his essays a few years back (called AGAINST THE IDOLS OF THE AGE).

34 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ILLUMINATIONS, November 11, 2002

By 

John N. Frary (Farmington, Maine, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Hardcover)

That Roger Kimball is armed with a formidable erudition has been conceded even by those whose loathing is his highest honor. But an arsenal of erudition is available to anyone with the time, the interest and an IQ slightly above average; it is the deployment of his intellectual armament that distinguishes this author above all but a few others now writing.

All the essays in this volume exhibit identical elements: 1) an elegant, lucid, and vigorous style that carries the reader smoothly into, and through, the subject; 2) command of the writings of the author under consideration; 3) mastery of a wide range of the best biographical and critical material; 4) an extended examination of some recent work; 5) a structure which binds all the elements seamlessly together; 6) evaluations that excite an interest in further exploration OR clarify the reader's predilections OR summarize in a cogent manner the reader's pre-existing distaste OR justify the reader's disinclination to waste his time on some over-rated windsock.

It is my considered judgement--founded upon prayer and long hours of solitary meditation--that any reader who fails to find these essays interesting should consider confining his future intellecutal explorations to the pages of the TV Guide.

22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Conserving our Culture., May 20, 2004

By 

Bernard Chapin "Ora Et Labora!" (CHICAGO! USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Paperback)

I am ecstatic to inform you of the noble presence of Roger Kimball. This man, the Managing Editor of The New Criterion, had made his career a tenacious crusade to save our history and to publicize the great minds and ideas that have made our culture the greatest on this earth.
Kimball is one of the few men who recognized the cultural calamity from its beginnings. His Tenured Radicals was one of the first publications to identify and showcase the current bizarre practices in our universities. It came out over a decade ago and, since that time, he has written numerous books that examine the major figures and trends within literature, art, philosophy, history, and political science. Unlike the rest of us, Kimball has the ability to specialize in the liberal arts on the whole.
Even though it lacks the earth-shattering power of The Long March; Lives of the Mind is an exquisite endeavor.
The book showcases 18 "minds" or intellectuals and its theme is that "intelligence, like fire, is a power that is neither good nor bad in itself but rather takes its virtue, its moral coloring from its application." Although, no chapter is assigned for him in the text, Karl Marx would be the perfect example of the misapplication of intelligence. Hegel and Wittgenstein, who both receive treatment in Lives of the Mind, would be two others.
All of the 18 essays originally appeared in The New Criterion, and, as I have a subscription to the excellent journal, it was my second chance to read many of them. My favorites involved Plutarch, P.G. Wodehouse, and George Santayana. Yet, all of them have value as they inform us of lives and works of writers who are rarely discussed within the current Kultursmog.
Many of his subjects like Descartes, Schopenhauer, Plutarch, and Tocqueville are familiar to most of our readers, but how much time do we have as adults to devote ourselves to their actual achievements? The answer is not much. One of his most enjoyable essays concerns G.C. Lichtenberg, and I can honestly state that I had never even heard his name before I read Kimball's chapter. Lives offers a brief tutorial for those of us who have forgotten about these men or never had a chance to learn about them in the first place.
What makes Kimball so important? Well, first of all, Kimball stands up to phonies and charlatans with a combination of bravery and erudition that few others possess. There appears to be no living person that he is afraid to refute, and he could care less about popular opinion.
This may sound odd but I think that his intelligence is best expressed in the way that he makes his paragraphs accessible to the reader. There's no need for him to hide behind amalgamations of post-modernist verbal diarrhea like other contemporary scholars. Kimball readily reveals his words and analysis to the reader.
Yet, to leave it at intelligence and courage is to sell the writer short. I would be leaving out his wit, which has to be his most endearing characteristic. For a man who is earnestly serious, his very creative sense of humor is integral to his success.
There's no reason to take my word for it. Let's let the author speak for himself. At one point, he labels the leftist obfuscators, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as having crafted a "reader-proof tome." He, later in the text, describes Alcibiades as being "the perfect contemporary hero: rich, handsome, brilliant, amoral: he had it all. He was even bisexual, virtually a prerequisite for appearing well-rounded these days."
This next line, concerning the German poet Schiller, made me laugh aloud: "Schiller once spoke of himself in a letter as an intellectual Zwitterart, a hermaphrodite, a remark that doubtless will form the basis of some Ph.D thesis in `queer theory' before long." Apparently, Kimball has forgotten that Schiller was too white, too male, and too talented to be the focus of modern dissertations.
Lastly, in reference to the moronic quote of one of his subjects ("I think to be born under Bolshevism would not be worse than to be born in Boston"), he sardonically adds, in reference to the Brahmin families of Boston, "Moscow, where Stalins speak only to Lenins, and the Lenins speak only to Marx."
The book is rife with primary source materials and Kimball always uses his subjects' words to enliven his discussion. A good example would be in his essay on Walter Bagehot (one of Kimball's favorites) . He quotes "the greatest Victorian" statement that, "the best institutions will not keep right a nation that will go wrong." Bagehot's analysis proves to be surprising topical considering that he wrote them over a century ago. In this same lively chapter, we read Bagehot's unknowing description of the post-modernist malarkey that suffocates our current university scholarship: "In the faculty of writing non-sense, stupidity is no match for genius." After reading this line, one has the sensation of Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida whisking into the room and clamoring for more flouts of Krug and packs of Sobranies.