The Reckless Mind by Mark Lilla
Mattson, Kevin
BIG BAD IDEAS The Reckless Mind Mark Lilla New York Review Books, $24.95, 216 pp. Kevin Mattson Mark Lilla, who teaches in the University of Chicago's Com-mittee on Social Thought, has written...
...Passion and eros in the realm of political ideas seem almost quaint...
...Lilla asks rhetorically, "If deconstruction throws doubt on every political principle of the Western philosophical tradition...are judgments about political matters still possible...
...Drunk from Nietzsche's critique of "Enlightenment humanism," Foucault threw himself into the maelstrom of Paris 1968 and then endorsed everything from Maoist roving juries to the Iranian revolution...
...Whittaker Cham-bers's self-flagellating tirade against the modern substitution of communism for God...
...As I read Lilla, numerous thinkers and ideas popped into mind: Daniel Bell's tentative celebration of the "end of ideology...
...Lilla draws on James Miller's brilliant biography to discuss Foucaulf's personal forays into drugs and sadomasochistic homosexuality...
...Neither satisfied him...
...What we need is "self-mastery" and a "controlled erotic life that hopes to attain what love unconsciously seeks: eternal truth, justice, beauty, wisdom...
...These questions have been asked and answered before...
...Still, the reader can learn from these intellectual portraits painted with broad and insightful strokes...
...After all, the independent intellectual with big ideas and grand political proclamations seems to have passed away, replaced by the academic careerist with forty-page resumes and obscure jargon-laden articles...
...Christopher Lasch's warning of the "anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals...
...He asks: "But if philosophers take the rule of reason with them" out of the political realm, "what other standards will replace it...
...A question remains though: How not to succumb...
...Schmitt's criticism of the endless debates of "parliamentary democracy" and his theory of "decisionism"- the argument for a strong sovereign to cut to the chase-fit perfectly with fuhrer politics...
...Through Lilla's brief portraits of these thinkers, the reader finds out how some smart people wound up embracing dangerous ideas...
...Maybe we can replace the "reckless mind" with one that is both engaged and responsible at the same time...
...The list goes on...
...In the end, Schmitt's right-wing and Benjamin's left-wing antiliberalism shared more than first appearances may suggest...
...But if Lilla is disgusted with Heidegger (who isn't...
...Kevin Mattson teaches American intellectual history at Ohio University...
...We need a chastened liberalism that refuses to hide in the realm of philosophy and instead embraces the murky world of political compromise...
...To get there, Lilla's story about the reckless mind can serve as a useful reminder of dangerous paths, even if his book doesn't have as many lessons as he thinks or Platonic conclusions that really help...
...Here Lilla cut through the puffed-up punditry's over-reaction to our age and pleaded for some dispassion, all the while preserving liberalism...
...Unfortunately, Lilla probably couldn't come up with a philosopher armed with a sense of truth who stayed in the political realm and prevented tyranny, and I doubt anyone could...
...Heidegger: "Culture doesn't matter...
...Venn State Press...
...He argued that a right-wing reaction against the 1960s (the "cultural revolution") and a left-wing reaction to the 1980s (Rea-ganism) mark American politics...
...More specifically, how to account for twentieth-century writers and thinkers who embraced totalitarianism-what Lilla calls "the philotyrannical intellectual...
...That force is "eros"-a drive to become something more than we presently are...
...Derrida eventually decided to prove his leftist credentials by defending the ideal of justice...
...Need we debate Jaspers's conclusion that a "demon had crept into" Heidegger's mind...
...Who or what will stand against tyranny...
...he isn't satisfied with Arendt's solution...
...Then there's Jacques Derrida, who spent much of his life decentering and deconstructing the rational subject of Western Enlightenment or "logocen-trism...
...the hatchet of deconstruction could not fall so precisely as to leave justice untouched...
...Passion, eros, eternal truth, and a penchant for tyranny-all this leads to a question: Do contemporary intellectuals really have any lessons to learn here...
...What is more surprising, though, is how Walter Benjamin, a man of the left, embraced Schmitt's political philosophy...
...This only makes his story that much more doomed for gloom...
...If Lilla's questions aren't new, neither are his characters...
...Lilla is right to chart this course...
...Unfortunately, he was trapped by his own logic...
...Instead, Lilla reminded his readers of "a small stream of liberal thought" associated with Tocqueville: "What marked this beleaguered liberal tradition was its lucidity in the face of the modern and antimodern political passions arising out of revolution, and its commitment to meliorist politics in a less-than-ideal age...
...After all, postmodernism not only killed universalistic claims about justice, as Lilla rightly states, but also pushed intellectuals (though not those willing to transform themselves into pundits) further into the margins of political life...
...Against Sartre's blind consistency, Foucault's postmodern leftism substituted haphazard shifts, though keeping intact destructive political conclusions...
...I certainly hope we can find a way to balance guiding principles (justice, equality, and democracy) with a sense of political responsibility and reality...
...Lilla shows that Benjamin junked theology for Marxism but preserved, along the way, a messianic utopi-anism...
...Just look at his marvelous hands...
...Dissecting the "place of passion in the life of the mind," Lilla starts, not too surprisingly, with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, examining his friendship with Karl Jaspers, his love affair with Hannah Arendt, and his willful embrace of Nazism...
...Can one still distinguish rights from wrongs, justice from injustice...
...In an essay written for the New York Review of Books (where much of The Reckless Mind appeared), Lilla recently discussed "a tale of two reactions...
...Lilla moves onto the Catholic political theorist Carl Schmitt-another thinker whose connection to Nazism is incontestable...
...Kevin Mattson Mark Lilla, who teaches in the University of Chicago's Com-mittee on Social Thought, has written a small book about a very big question: Why do seemingly smart people develop pernicious ideas...
...Such "self-mastery" presses us to avert our "own tyrannical inclinations...
...Facing the threat of aids, Foucault "laughed at the talk of 'safe sex' and reportedly said, To die for the love of boys: What could be more beautiful?'" Lilla concludes that Foucault reflects what happens when a thinker struggles "with his inner demons," grows "intoxicated by Nietzsche's example," and then "projects" his life onto "a political sphere in which he has no real interest and for which he accepts no real responsibility...
...The answer seems to be no...
...Heidegger's philosophy of "being" and "authenticity" turned into madness...
...Lilla departs Germany for France, where things don't get much better...
...Our political life, let alone our culture, would be vastly improved...
...Jaspers: "How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany...
...That seems utterly sensible...
...Lilla then contrasts Heidegger's politi-cization of philosophy with Arendf s argument that politics and philosophy should be separated and allowed to follow their own "vocabulary and...
...In a closing chapter, Lilla draws on Plato's theory of the soul, asserting that a "psychological force...draws certain men to tyranny...
...What we do need is a sense of justice that doesn't succumb to moral purity or compromise with political power (and today, that means spinmeisters more than the tyrants...
...Sartre's Stalinism is well-known, and Lilla detours through it into Alexandre Kojeve's later life in France, and finally homes in on Michel Foucault...
...The "reckless mind" has become the "timid mind," or at the least the "specialized mind...
...Lilla recounts a terrifying conversation between Jaspers and Heidegger...
...Perhaps I'm not being fair to Lilla here, especially if we turn from Europe to America...
...rules...
...He is the author of Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-70 (Venn State Press...
Vol. 129 • October 2002 • No. 17
