Customer Reviews

The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The reviewers below give a misleading description of this book. At last there is someone who takes on the dark side of the master thinkers celebrated all over the western universities. For 20 years I've read all of the thinkers Wolin discusses - from Jung to Derrida - and I have come to very similar conclusions with some minor differences. That's why I was delighted to read this book, I see it as a brave attempt to reveal and discuss many uncomfortable circumstances that the advocates of these thinkers have always avoided.
Yes, Jung did try to explain nazism in negative terms - after the war. What he did under nazism - an ambiguous matter - is another thing.
And Wolin is no advocate of US imperalism or capitalism, these are not the theme of this book; besides Wolin is clearly in favor of democratic left.
This book is an analysis of the inconsistencies in thinkers like Bataille, Gadamer and Derrida, also of the wily or fierce assaults on democracy in some their texts. It is not very kind to these thinkers, but it doesn't have to be, since there are even more aggressive tones to be find e.g. in Bataille or Derrida.
(And yes, I have read many books of Derrida).
Reason can be a monster too, but in humanities there have been too little of it lately.

The Irish Times

November 6, 2004 Weekend; Book Reviews; Pg. 13

Absolutely entrancing

John Banville

Political philosophy: An attack on European right-wing and 'left fascist' thinkers and their American followers is a kind of philosophical Nuremberg trials.

In Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus there is a character called Breisacher, a Jew, whom Mann describes as a private scholar and polyhistor and "a racial and intellectual type in high, one might almost say reckless development". Although Nietzsche's name is not mentioned - the life and personality of the novel's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, are in large part based on those of the philosopher - Breisacher is the quintessential Nietzschean. His specialty is the philosophy of culture, "but his views were anti-cultural, in so far as he gave out to see in the whole history of culture nothing but a process of decline". He sets J.S. Bach as the central figure in the "progressivist barbarism" that caused the deterioration of music from "the great and only true art of counterpoint" into the "effeminizing and falsification" of the "harmonic romanticism of modulation", a process in which even Palestrina had already played a "shameful part".

When he turns to the Bible and the history of his own race, Breisacher is even more extreme, seeing King David and his successor Solomon - "an aesthete unnerved by erotic excesses" - and "the prophets drivelling about dear God in heaven" as "the already debased representatives of an exploded late theology, which no longer had any idea of the old and genuine Hebraic actuality of Jahve, the Elohim of the people".

For Breisacher, the history of the modern world, and by "modern" he means the period from the pre-Socratics onward, is the history of an inevitable degeneration from the true and authentic primitive into weakness, softness and falsity.

Breisacher is a member of the circle surrounding the creepy Sextus Kridwiss, a collector of primitive art; other savants attending the Kridwiss evenings are Dr Egon Unruhe, a "philosophic palaeozoologist" who works on verifying the essential truths of the ancient Germanic sagas, in which "a sophisticated humanity had long since ceased to believe"; Professor Georg Vogler, a literary historian who has written a much-admired history of German literature from the point of view of racial origins; and the poet Daniel zur Hohe - Mann is always wickedly witty in the matter of names - a high-strung young man whose "dreams dealt with a world subjected by sanguinary campaigns to the pure spirit" and whose only published poetic work, The Proclamations, ends with the line: "Soldiers! I deliver to you to plunder - the World!"

Mann knew his proto-fascists from the inside, having been one himself, as he showed in his anti-democratic, anti-modern Meditations of an Unpolitical Man (1918).

When the phenomenon of Hitler and Nazism demonstrated to him in no uncertain terms how wrong-headed he had been, and how, as Richard Wolin puts it, "the flip side of apoliticism is a potentially lethal dearth of Zivilcourage", he abandoned his homeland for democratic America and dedicated himself to the anti-Nazi cause. The Hohes, the Voglers, the Unruhes, even, to their great cost, some of the Breisachers, remained behind to support the new regime, mostly, as did the real-life philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, by keeping silent and going into "inner emigration", but in some cases, such as that of Heidegger, by a total and extremely noisy identification with the Volk, the Reich, and the Fuhrer.

This trahison des clercs on the part of a considerable number of European philosophers, scholars and academics did not end with the defeat of Nazism, according to Wolin, whose book, the subtitle of which is "The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism", is a vigorous, full-frontal attack on European right-wing and "left fascist" thinkers and theorists and their contemporary followers in American intellectual life, among the latter of whom The Seduction of Unreason has already raised many a hackle.

For its literary and philosophical sympathisers - he lists W.B. Yeats in their number - fascism, Wolin writes, "reintroduces an aesthetic politics" and "allows for the reprise of an ecstatic politics amid the forlorn and disenchanted landscape of political modernity". The European counter-revolutionaries, such as Joseph de Maistre and Arthur de Gobineau

knew what they wanted as a replacement for liberal democracy: the "contrary of revolutions", the restoration of the old regime. Their German heirs - Nietzsche, Spengler, Carl Schmitt, and Heidegger - disillusioned denizens of modern society, knew that one could no longer turn back the clock. Instead, they decided to seize the bull by the horns. They embraced industrial society but only under the proviso that it be governed by a totalitarian dictatorship. Dictatorship was the most efficacious means with which to vanquish the debilities of political liberalism and reestablish the sublimity of "Great Politics" (Nietzsche).

Wolin sees this drive towards dictatorship and the aestheticisation of politics as a process that continues to this day, not only in the demagoguery of the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jorg Haider, but in the writings of such latter-day thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Indeed, The Seduction of Unreason may be taken overall as a tocsin sounded to rally the forces of reaction against European anti-democratic cultural theory in general, and postmodernism in particular. The latter is Wolin's bete noir; he considers it not a philosophical movement at all but a form of frivolous despair encompassing a broad assault on the "epistemological and historiographical presuppositions of modernity: objective truth and historical progress". He cites Jean Baudrillard's definition of the postmodern universe as one in which "there are no definitions possible . . . It has all been done . . . It has destroyed itself. It has deconstructed its entire universe. So all that are left are the pieces. Playing with the pieces - that is postmodern". The postmodernists and their shock-troops the deconstructionists, Wolin writes, "seek refuge in myth, magic, madness, illusion, or intoxication - all seem preferable to what 'civilization' has to offer". They are the direct heirs of Mann's Kridwiss circle who "could scarcely contain their mirth at the desperate campaign waged by reason and criticism against wholly untouchable, wholly invulnerable belief" - irrational belief, that is.

Wolin insists that the postmodernists are now in retreat. What he sees as "the current disaffection with postmodernism" is, he writes,

in no small measure attributable to recent political circumstances. Humanism's return spells postmodernism's demise. Totalitarianism was the twentieth century's defining political experience. Its aftermath has left us with a new categorical imperative: no more Auschwitzes or Gulags. We now know that an ineffaceable difference separates democratic and totalitarian regimes. Despite their manifest empirical failings, democratic polities possess a capacity for internal political change that totalitarian societies do not. A discourse such as postmodernism that celebrates the virtues of cultural relativism and that remains ambivalent, at best, vis-a-vis democratic norms is inadequate to the moral and political demands of the contemporary hour.

To some, perhaps many, readers this will sound suspiciously like a whistle in the dark. Curiously, too, in its rhetorical vigour the passage and others like it echo the pronouncements of the so-called "neo-cons" now running the show in the White House and the Pentagon. Wolin, a tough, old-style liberal democrat, would no doubt be appalled at such a comparison, but then, in a phrase he is fond of using, often in the nexus of politics, philosophy and literature "les extremes se touchent".

The Seduction of Unreason is a kind of philosophical Nuremberg Trials. Wolin puts in the dock not only the obvious miscreants such as Heidegger and Nietzsche -"was it really so far-fetched that such a thinker would become the Nazis' court philosopher?" - but other, less obvious fascist fellow-travellers. He is particularly acute in the cases of Jung - "There are more polite ways of putting it, but Jung was a fraud" - and Gadamer. The latter was a pillar of post-war German philosophy, but Wolin is relentless in following him into his lair to root out the weasel words by which, according to Wolin, he accommodated himself to Hitler's regime; Gadamer in his counter-Enlightenment worldview, Wolin writes, holds that "since human insight is intrinsically untrustworthy, the best course is to limit its use as much as possible. Should a confrontation between authority and reason arise, it is always safer to err on the side of authority".

In a brilliant chapter, 'Maurice Blanchot: The Use and Abuse of Silence', Wolin tackles one of the shadowiest yet also one of the most influential French intellectuals of the 20th century. There is no doubt that Blanchot is a very great thinker in the realm of aesthetics, and a strong influence in the work of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and others, those who engaged and engage in "a generalized assault against the idea of 'representation' - the notion that mind is capable of portraying reality truthfully and objectively". Blanchot, who holds that art is important chiefly as a creator and preserver of silence - in a brief biographical epigraph to The Book to Come he describes his life as "wholly devoted to literature and to the silence unique to it" - is discovered by Wolin writing before the war for "a dizzying array of far-right journals", and calling for a revolution that will be "a series of bloody shocks, a storm that will overwhelm - and thus awaken" the French nation.

Like Paul de Man, who wrote anti-Semitic articles for collaborationist Belgian newspapers and after the war developed an extreme form of deconstructionist criticism which was seen by some - simplistically, surely - as an attempt covertly and symbolically to wipe out his own past, Blanchot in his emphasis on silence and impenetrability might be thought of by those same accusers as seeking quietly to erase past sins. "My supposition," Wolin writes, "is that underlying the theoretical antipathy to 'representation' as a figure for knowledge and truth is a subconscious 'will to nonknowledge': a desire to keep at bay an awareness of unsettling historical complicities, facts, and events."

Is Wolin correct in his views, justified in his judgments? The Seduction of Unreason is a wide-ranging yet subtle consideration of the intellectual's abiding fascination with absolutism, and as such it is a perceptive, compelling and invaluable document. His indignation at the folly and perversity of so many major European thinkers is wholly justified and peculiarly invigorating, and most of his charges against those thinkers seem unanswerable. Yet in his almost triumphalist assertions of "humanism's return" he will seem foolishly overconfident to some, and plain mistaken to others. The opposition to humanism, as contemporary philosophers such as John Gray have shown, is not necessarily a new barbarism, but a new honesty and, dare one say it, a new humility. The Enlightenment brought much darkness; it is possible to see Hitler and Stalin and Mao, with their millennial insistence on human progress and the need for a supra-rational organisation of society, as true sons of le Siecle des Lumieres. On the other hand, it is hard to deny Wolin's contention that "with a self-defeating Nietzschean glibness, postmodernism has burned its bridges to a traditional rhetoric of moral evaluation". But is a "traditional rhetoric" really what we need?

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and his THE SEDUCTION OF UNREASON is a captivating read. Against a historical background, he posits two modern interludes; one on the German New Right and one on its French counterpart. Putting things in perspective, Wolin reflects on the roots of contemporary postmodern, and sometimes reactionary, thinking. In the 1930's the Left began to adopt some of the ideas traditionally associated with the Right. The expression "les extrêmes se touchent" gained credibility, giving room to the oxymoronic terming of Bataille's "Left Fascism." After World War II Nietzsche and Heidegger, with their critique of reason and democracy, became the intellectual idols of the French Left. Wolin dubs this counterintuitive phenomenon "left Heideggerianism." With the collapse of state socialism and the coming down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, yet again voices from the left began to coincide with traditionally reactionary appeals to Nation, "Volk" and Identity. The Enlightenment twin-concept of reason and progress became the punchbag of the day. This book is largely about this "problematic right-left synthesis."
In a critical review, the late Richard Rorty argued that Wolin, although his heart is in the right place, has a hard time separating a philosopher's moral character from his teachings; any thinker who has displayed either hypocrisy or self-deception is unlikely to have any ideas worth adopting. Although Wolin "protests that his book is not an exercise in guilt-by-association", this is according to Rorty actually pretty close to the mark (The Nation 2004). This is, however, not fair. Firstly, what Wolin says appears on p.301 and is a reference to Heidegger's catchphrase "reason is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought" as being a philosophical inspiration for a postmodern worldview. Even if this can lead to conceptual confusion and postmodernists can assume a variety of political hues, "they are hardly `fascists'." Secondly, on page 62 Wolin states that "Nietzsche's status as a prophet of the twentieth century should neither be exaggerated nor sidestepped", and "one can be both a towering writer and thinker a n d a fascist - or, in Nietzsche's case, a protofascist. This lesson challenges our customary notions of intellectual greatness which makes it all the more worth contemplating." Furthermore, in the first sentence of his preface to "The Heidegger Controversy" from 1991, Wolin characterizes Heidegger as "probably the century's greatest philosopher." This conundrum has puzzled philosophers and laypersons alike: how can otherwise brilliant minds be seduced by crude politics?
Rather than "digging up the dirt" on famous European thinkers, Richard Wolin critically addresses the philosophical underpinnings of political thought. As a book reflecting on the political inclinations of a range of thinkers, including Jung, Freud, Schmitt, Blanchot, Derrida, and Habermas, it serves its objective admirably. Written in an engaging style THE SEDUCTION OF UNREASON is a probing foray into a historical landscape which appears to be as yet not fully explored. It depicts with vivacity a division of thought, the repercussions of which are still with us today.

It was very interesting and insightful reading about the intellectual origins of fascism, and how parts of the left have ironically adopted them. I especially found the sections about Bataille and Mussolini fascinating.

Strictly speaking Richard Wolin is not really a philosopher, he is a historian. This partly explains the way he places selective emphasis on key philosophical points from a historical point of view rather than a philosophical one. Simply bringing up a group of philosophers that do not conform to your views and then blaming them for the ills of society is an exercise that quickly becomes boring for the reader. When one reads philosophy one should be inspired by the words that fill the pages. It should represent the writers creative ability to invite the reader to a different way of doing philosophy. Richard Wolin's task seems merely to discredit his opponent and, as such, does not really contribute much to the key questions philosphy has grappled with since the ancient Greeks to today. His manner of scholarship shuts the subjects of his book out of philosophical dialogue rather than draw them in to expand on his ideas, or lack thereof. As an example, to say that Gadamer prefers surrendering to authority instead of trusting in Reason is a gross misunderstanding of his intentions and shows a lack of reading of his texts and work as a whole. This is because Wolin makes no attempt to pick up on the themes of these philosphers and run with them in order to come up with a new philosophical perspective pf his own. In this respect, the book feels dated, it is an anti-anti-reaction to a philosophical fad that never was and, correspondingly, turns philosophy into a mere culture war with opposed sides, both of whom think the other has something to hide. Philosophy should be more enlightening than this. Also, Deleuze is a thinker that I think Wolin has simply lumped in there with all the others for no apparent reason. Read his later work and you will find he was quite fond of American literature, especially Whitman and Melville. His philosophy drove him there. In any case, do not fear these German/French philosophers because of writers like Wolin. Read their work, discuss and revitalise their ideas. You might find that it is not as simple as you first thought, and that neither perspective has authority over the domain of philosophy. If one wants to read a philosopher with similar but better argued ideas, they could do worse than Habermas.

Wolin's masterly monograph "The Seduction of Unreason" constitutes a major contribution to contemporary intellectual history. Wolin's study dissects various political implications and current repercussions of the ideas and modes of thinking of Joseph de Maistre, Johann Gottfried Herder, Arthur de Gobineau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Carl Gustav Jung, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jaques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard. In two "political excursuses," he indicates how the ideas of these and other - partly, highly respected - thinkers who, in one way or another attacked some basic Western values like rationalism and human rights, have via the "Conservative Revolution," and German and French so-called "New Right" gained influence on extremely right-wing parties as well as on mainstream politics. Wolin's usage of the term "fascism" in the book's title, to be sure, could be seen as misleading in so far as only some of the protagonists of his fascinating story were full-blown fascists. Still, his study is a valuable addition not only to the history of ideas, but also to comparative fascist studies in that it presents many illuminating cases illustrating why and how ideas have consequences, in general, and in which way anti-rational and anti-democratic thought can be utilized by fascist movements to justify dictatorship, ethnic cleansing and violence, in particular. The book is thus a valuable addition not only within the fields of cultural studies and history of science, but could also be of use in seminars on extremist politics. It forcefully debunks the idea that the ideational sources of ultra-nationalism and fundamentalism in both the inter- and post-war Europe are solely to be found among marginal scholars and publicists. Wolin's study is eye-opening in that illustrates how some major trends in 20th century mainstream humanities have played the role of, and are, partly, still functioning as, catalysts for the spread and acceptance of radically ascriptive views of human beings, and extremely right-wing ideologies.

Wolin presents a clear view of the political impliations of postmodernism's program.

This is a wonderful book. Anyone appalled by the trendy popularity of postmodernism for a decade or more, and the devastating impact its preposterous claims for difference, identity, etc., has had on social justice movements for equality, liberty, and solidarity, should go right out and get it--whether or not you're suffering in a university or on a department full of left-over postmodernists driving BMWs and wearing Gucci while proudly using unintelligible jibberish to impress undergrads and intimidate grad students, perhaps in order to lure them to the boudoir as is so often the case. Wolin does a systematic job walking through the thick forest of postmodernism, taking it right to its personifications, takes them up philosophically and historically, and tracks the cat right back to fascist theory and practice.

With this firmly supportive evaluation as background, I must say it is a shame Wolin rejects Marx in favor of a slippery case for "democracy," a term losing its meaning as fast as postmodernism is losing its panache. Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, the Ukraine, Russia, and of course the US Supreme Court decision in 2000, the emergence of popular fascism around the world puts a problem in the face of those who abstract democracy and treat it as standing above exploitation.

However, other moderate scholars have taken on postmoderism and people need to know about them. Breisach in "The Future of History," is one, doing an autopsy on postmodernism with great care. Sivanandan, from the left, attacks cultural politics as a mask to reestablish the rule of capital and racism on new grounds.

Wolin's great contribution, read critically, is to bring the critique of irationalism up to date, to disarm the postmodernists of today and expose their fascist underpinnings. This work, however, has been done before, long before. Cornforth, in "Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy," predicted postmodernism, and ripped it up from an unfortunately mechanical stance on Marx.

Better, the great Hungarian philosopher's brilliant, but ponderous and hard to find, "The Destruction of Reason," (which Wolin references)lay the ground for understanding postmodernism before it existed, tied it to the rise of fascism, and summed up with this: "Now irrationalism always begins with this (necessary, irrevocable, but always relative) discrepancy between the intellectual reflection and the objective original. The source of the discrepancy lies in the fact that the tasks directly presented to thought in a given instance, as long as they are still tasks, still unresolved problems, appear in a form which at first gives the impression that thought, the forming of concepts, breaks down in the face of reality, that the reality confronting thought represents and area beyond reason (the rationality of the category system of the conceptual method used so far). Hegel...analyzed a..real road to a resolution of these difficulties... "..What if (however) a virtue is made of ...the inability to comprehend the world intellectually? That if a virtue is made of this necessity and the inability to comprehend the world intellectually is presented as a 'higher perception as faith, intuition, and so on? Clearly this problem will crop up at every stage of knowledge and social development, ie., each time that social evolution and hence science and philosophy are forced to make a leap forward in order to answer the real questions arising. ..It is not
chiefly intellectual and philosophical considerations which decide a thinker's choice between the old and the new, but class allegiance...(which is often) halted at the threshold of knowledge and turned round and fled in the opposite direction".

Georg Lukacs (1952) Destruction of Reason, Humanities Press, New Jersey p100.

Postmodernism is religion in disguise and its hustlers are the priests and cardinals. At base, one cannot grasp how things change in the real world, or why things are as they are, without a study of dialectics and materialism. Here is a small contribution http://www.richgibson.com/diamatoutline.html

In this book New York University Professor Richard Wolin digs up postmodernism in order to kill it yet again. Nicholas Fox demolished it in 1993, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in 1994, and John O'Neill in 1995.

Now Wolin reprises that postmodernism reprised the counter-Enlightenment, concluding banally, "Postmodernism's hostility towards 'reason' and 'truth' is intellectually untenable and politically debilitating."

Postmodernism was just a version of the ancient idealist claim that objective knowledge is impossible. Idealism is a dangerous, reactionary philosophy, whether religious or post-whateverist, because it denies knowledge, reason and truth, and denigrates science, industry, technology, democracy and socialism. It prefers metaphor, myth and magic.

Wolin reminds us that Friedrich Nietzsche was a leading counter-Enlightenment writer, who preached, "The annihilation of the decaying races ... Dominion over the earth as a means of producing a higher type." Naturally, Nietzsche adored the Roman Empire, Alexander the Slayer and Cesare Borgia.

Later, Third Way theorists in the 1930s flirted with fascism. Martin Heidegger was an outright Nazi, and Carl Jung was a Nazi fellow-traveller. After the war, post-structuralists, like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, and postmodernists like Chantal Mouffe were briefly famous. All worshipped Nietzsche.

But why does Wolin bother with these discredited poseurs? They have no influence now - who reads Heidegger? Who, apart from his publisher Verso, has ever heard of Mouffe?

Wolin's attacks on German and French philosophy chime in with the US state's attacks on 'old Europe'. So Wolin plays up the German and French New Rights, just as Labour plays up the BNP. He obediently links Al Qa'ida with Iraq, and sneers at national liberation struggles, absurdly lumping Fidel Castro with Idi Amin, Mobutu and Duvalier.

Wolin reveals his hostility to democracy when he writes of "the regressive social psychological tendencies displayed by the masses." Finally, he praises the USA's "breathtaking social mobility ... in striking contrast with Derrida's tradition-bound, native Europe."

Recent research has proved that the USA has even less social mobility than Europe's nations, but Wolin, in a postmodernist kind of way, doesn't let mere facts get in the way of capitalist dogma!

The theme suggested by the title is fine, but the author does not stick with his agenda. This book is full of erratic observations, not least the notion that Jung was a fellow traveler with the Nazis. Anyone who has read Jung at all well, would know that he devoted considerable energy to the task of trying to understand the 'unreason' which seized hold of the German spirit (Jung actually regarded it as a kind of collective 'posession' by the spirit of Wotan). Unlike Heidegger (and Nietzsche), Jung remained grounded in the positive values of Western civilisation - including democracy. He did not turn his back on 2,500 years of Graeco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture. To allege that he did is sheer nonsense and exceedingly poor scholarship.

Unfortunately, Wolin seems utterly unable to see that there are paradoxes in life - and human reason. In his assessment, America comes out as the exemplary source of 'rational' culture - as against a quirky Europe, prone to unreason and crippling scepticism. But, in its present mode -dominated by Neo-con philosophy, advocating 'full spectrum dominance' ('Amerika uber alles,' we might say) - some scepticism seems needed right now. There is a new 'Macarthyism' at work in the USA - and it is driven by hubris and UNREASON. 'Star wars'is hardly the attribute of a 'rational' culture. America has few friends in the world today - and why? Because its current administration has abdicated from the principles ostensibly lauded in Wolin's book. Quite rightly, that worries many Americans - and platitudes like those served up by Wolin will not make the problem go away.

The zenophobia in Wolin's book is part of the problem - not part of the solution. For Wolin, even Europe is 'alien' - so, how much more so is he likely to find problems relating to other, non-caucasian cultures? In this sense - a fatal flaw runs through Wolin's book. He fears fascism - but advocates an agenda whereby one culture stands in judgement of every other, ready to use force - if needs be, in any corner of the world - to protect and assert its alleged superiority - and that, by definition - is fascism. Paranoia and reason don't make good partners.