On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society [Paperback]

Gertrude Himmelfarb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 1995

In these provocative essays, one of our most distinguished historians looks into the abyss of the present. Himmelfarb exposes the intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of some of our most fashionable current ideas--and shows how the vogue for historical structuralism has made it possible to trivialize the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Noted historian Himmelfarb ( Poverty and Compassion ) deems current intellectual fashions arrogant and spiritually bankrupt in these seven invigorating essays expanded from pieces originally published in Commentary , American Scholar , the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. She lambastes deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Hartman, relativist philosopher Richard Rorty, postmodernists and multiculturalists who "pluralize and particularize history to the point where people have no history in common." Many of these trendy academic schools, argues Himmelfarb, trivialize history, as exemplified by their inability to comprehend the full import of the Holocaust. She also blasts apologists for Martin Heidegger, an "outspoken and unrepentant Nazi." Elsewhere she ponders the internal contradictions confronting Western liberal democracies and the "lethal combination of nationalism and religion" sweeping the globe from the Middle East to Yugoslavia.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Critically examining some major trends in contemporary liberal American academic thought, Himmelfarb (history, CUNY) finds arrogance and spiritual impoverishment at the heart of such current academic movements in history, literature, and philosophy as deconstructionism, postmodernism, and the new historicism. She laments that the link between nationalism and religion has been dangerously ignored, particularly since there is a pervasive relationship between what is taught in the universities and what happens in society. Himmelfarb further argues that, with the end of the Cold War, liberalism is its own worst enemy. This is a closely and subtly reasoned analysis, though the dense and complex writing makes for difficult reading. Recommended only for large academic libraries.
- Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 212 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 31, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679759239
• ISBN-13: 978-0679759232
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #960,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, concise essays on culture and the arts, June 29, 1998

By 

Michael J Edelman (Huntington Woods, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: On Looking Into The Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (Hardcover)

Gertrude Himmerfarb has been writing sharp and insightful critiques of history and society for over 50 years, and her more recent books are as good or better than anything she has published in her long career.

In "On Looking Into the Abyss" Himmerfarb demolishes literary deconstruction and exposes its frauds as devistatingly as any critic. Her contrast of the Marxian and Hegelian views show us both the continuing attraction of Marxism as well as its fatal flaws, and make us understand why a 160 year old debate is still relevant.

In an age where discourse is often reduced to televised shouting matches, the half-baked opinions of celebrities and carefully crafted statements matched to opinion poles, read Himmelfarb to re-discover what intelligent argument and essays can and should be.

30 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Acadummies Explained, January 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: On Looking Into The Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (Hardcover)

Himmelfarb's observations on post-modern 'history' are right on target. The apologists for the Holocaust (revisionism is always apologetics) in academia are hideously indifferent to the greatest devastation and assault on humanity ever known. I had to laugh at the post-modern historian's lament about the 'fact fettish' of traditional historians. This book may be considered the starting point in the inquiry on why many students leave academia less able to think critically than when they enter. This is a tragedy, particularly because the 'new' history (or literature or psychology, etc.) is so boring and formula-driven that a daily newspaper is more informative, relevant, and interesting in comparison. This book is an eye-opener for those who wonder why so many college graduates are clueless about where they are in human history and how they got here. Those who have long suspected the intrusion of academic nincompoopery in our universities in recent decades will enjoy this book.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exposing our era's intellectual fraud and spiritual impoverishment, February 6, 2010

By 

Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (Paperback)

With impressive scholarship, keen insight and courteous polemics, Himmelfarb challenges the intellectual deception and spiritual poverty of our era. Most of the essays examine the trash that's become intellectually fashionable since the1980s. The title essay braves the swamps of postmodernism inhabited by the demons of nihilism, irrationality and immorality. She dissects deconstruction and related pseudo-philosophies particularly for their baleful effect upon philosophy, literary criticism and historical studies. In the madhouse of deconstruction, the interpreter takes precedence over the text that is interpreted, with comical or insane results. The objective is to undermine reality by denying that it exists.

She warns of the consequences when we are informed that philosophy has nothing to do with wisdom or virtue, that metaphysics is really linguistics, that morality is a form of aesthetics and that the best approach is not to take philosophy seriously. And about what happens to our sense of the past when we are told there is no past except that which the historian creates, or to our perception of the significance of history when we are assured that it is we who give it meaning, or to that terrifying historical event, the Holocaust, when it can be so easily 'demystified' and 'deconstructed'?

Hegel deified Reason, arguing that every individual could rely on their own reason, accepting as true what seems rational according to individual judgment. Thus a train of thought was set in motion that led to Feuerbach representing religion as the failure of humanity's critical reason and Max Stirner claiming the Ego as the only reality. The destination becomes obvious. Himmelfarb shows up many contradictions in Marx: his habit of portraying his proletarian protagonist in pejorative ways, his counterfactual assertion that the needy would forever become poorer and the sinister sacrificial vision lurking behind his materialist interpretation of history. The author's epitaph for Marx has proved to be far too optimistic: the collectivist serpent returns from Hades again and again.

The essay on Liberty confronts the icon of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill. She convincingly argues that his doctrine of the absolute freedom of the individual inevitably leads to relativism. And if truth can be relativized, morality will follow. She laments our materialist culture that bans unhealthy foods but not sadistic movies and forbids racial segregation but not moral degradation. Absolute liberty tends to subvert the very freedom it seeks to maintain as it grants itself the right to assault the foundations. This was also clearly pointed out by Polanyi in his seminal work Science, Faith and Society.

The Dark and Bloody Crossroads Where Nationalism and Religion Meet includes a comparison between the newer versus the established nation states. As the newer ones become more assertive and brutal, the older nations are becoming spineless and passive, ashamed of affirming the legitimacy of their own benevolent expression of nationalism and afraid of challenging the legitimacy of the oppressive tribal mode. The same can be said for Western standards of decency and what's left of our religion. In this regard, The Return of History and the End of Dreams by Robert Kagan is most relevant.

Himmelfarb believes that the historian should be able to identify heroes and villains in history and judge their behavior. The denial of good and evil trivializes the Shoah/Holocaust and the Gulag. It is incumbent upon us to maintain the reality of the past. She maintains that professionalism in history respects the reader and our ancestors whilst upholding the credibility of the discipline. The practice of professionalism confirms the humility of the serious historian that rejects both the arrogant claim to exactly recapture the past and the ludicrous notion of the past's unreality.

Historians educated in the old school of footnoting is struck by the increasing number of academic publications that have no notes at all and even boasts about their lack of sources. The skeptic Voltaire called historical details "the pests that destroy books." His heirs the postmodernists have taken this disdain for research to extremes by denying truth itself. The fatuousness with which postmodernists proclaim the failure of beauty, truth and value contrasts sharply with the reverence of the modernists who defined it. Chantal Delsol sets out an interesting diagnosis of this affliction in her books Icarus Fallen and The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century.

Himmelfarb explains how postmodernist historians long to be considered creative and imaginative but by rejecting the causal and chronological narrative, they turn history into fiction. Like all honest historians, the modernists were aware that total objectivity is impossible but they still pursued it through the critical evaluation of evidence. They placed a premium on research and primary sources, the authenticity of documents, reliability of witnesses, the need to obtain substantiating and countervailing evidence, the accuracy of quotations and citations and prescribed forms of documentation in footnotes and bibliography.

Postmodernist philosophy holds truth in such contempt that one doubts the jokers themselves believe their assertions. Just like literary critics play with texts by twisting them in a myriad ways, so postmodern historians tell tales aimed at empowering whatever victim group is the flavor of the moment. Himmelfarb's abyss refers to the chasm of meaninglessness and despite her courtesy, at times a tone of exasperation and more rarely of revulsion surfaces in her writing. She takes on both the originators like Nietzsche, Mill, De Mann and Heidegger and their disciples such as inter alia Derrida, Foucault and Rorty.

I also recommend The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics by Mark Lilla, Last Exit to Utopia by Jean-François Revel, Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks, Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom, Experiments Against Reality by Roger Kimball and the same author's Tenured Radicals in the 3rd edition of which he demonstrates how the trends he observed in the early 1990s had taken over the humanities and started to seep into popular culture within the space of a decade.